How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. “Without this Service of the Scribes,” writes Cahill, “everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Over the following few centuries, these monks would take up “the great labor of copying all of western literature – everything they could lay their hands on” and then, banished themselves from their island to the continent by Viking invaders, would serve as “conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures would be transmitted to the tribes of Europe.” After all, the uneducated invaders of Rome weren’t interested in science and art – but rather in gold, food and women.įortunately, as these “unwashed barbarians” were looting artifacts and burning books in Italy and Southern Europe, a Romano-British Christian missionary was training a group of monks to read and write on an island at the northern edges of the continent, one seemingly stuck in prehistory for millennia.

Its demise, many feared, threatened to trigger the death of Western civilization itself, putting an end to 11 centuries of literacy, poetry and philosophy. Ancient Rome – an empire once housing roughly one-fifth of the world’s population and the most advanced society the world had ever seen up to that point – was suddenly no more. Beginning sometime around 376, the process culminated exactly one century later, when the barbarian King Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last ruler of the Western Roman Empire. Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, many of the territories ruled by the Roman Empire in Western Europe and northwestern Africa fell to various invading or indigenous tribes of Germanic peoples: Visigoths, Angles, Saxons, Huns, Ostrogoths. Get ready to discover more about this thought-provoking connection! An overview: on the hinges of history And yet, as historian Thomas Cahill captivatingly argues in his exquisite book “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” if it wasn’t for a few medieval Irish monks, the sentiments of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – which, ironically, Ireland never got to experience itself – would have never taken the continent by storm, and our world would have been decidedly different from the one we currently inhabit. Hardly anyone has ever dared to mention the Irish in the same breath. When we think of ancient civilizations and (especially) civilizers, we think of the Greeks and the Egyptians, the Romans and the French, the Chinese and the Jews.

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill