Alex Wright


How the Irish Saved Civilization

December 24, 2003

With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe lost more than just its imperial government; it also lost thousands of manuscripts - Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil - the intellectual foundation of the Pax Romana.

In
How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill tells the long-overlooked story of how the fifth century Irish - a Stone Age people, only recently exposed to Christianity and alphabetic literacy – managed in the short span of less than a century to preserve Western civilization from almost certain oblivion.

The Irish scribes, literally insulated from the continental ravages of Goths and Vandals, not only preserved the classical texts, but also recorded their own indigenous Celtic mythologies, folklore - whatever they could write down. But the scribes were more than just transcriptionists; Cahill challenges the stereotypical historical view of the scribe as human Xerox machine:

[The scribes] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual – glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him. The Irish monks not only preserved countless important texts, but in the centuries that ensued they also propagated those texts back to a continental Europe that had descended into near-barbarism. Without the Irish contribution, Cahill theorizes, Europe might have lacked the intellectual fortitude to withstand the expansion of Islam in the early Middle Ages.

Cahill also captures the distinctive spirit of the early Celtic Church: non-hierarchical, community-minded, gender-equal, geared towards individual contemplation rather than the institutional dogmatism of the Roman church that would later supplant it. Some writers have even compared early Celtic Christianity to Buddhism (there are even some out-there theories about the Druids having been taught by Buddhist missionaries).

The roots of Western hierarchical systems lie deep in the imperial structuralism of the Roman church. Could the early Celtic Church - with its anti-hierarchical, individualist emphasis - serve as a useful reference point in our current era of disintegrating institutions and emergent self-organizing systems. And in the archetype of the Irish scribe - the original literary intertwingler - can we recognize a distant ancestor of today's blogger?


File under: Books

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