How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

Though the papacy sent Roman missionaries to England, St. Aidan of Lindisfarne is the true “Apostle of England” (200), because the Irish converted most of Northern England. As Irish Christianity spread southward from Iona and Lindisfarne, it confronted the Roman mission that was heading north. Competition and divisions between the two forms of Christianity resulted in the Synod of Whitby, which was held at a double monastery in Northumbria in 664 CE and over which the Northumbrian king presided. The major issue to be decided was the method for calculating the date of Easter. The Roman church viewed the Irish method as unacceptable. The Northumbrian king decided in favor of the Roman Christians, while the Irish monastics conceded that Columba did not hold primacy over the apostle Peter or, by extension, over Rome.

The “fraternal cooperation” between the Irish and the English is more significant, however, than the “trivial” matters debated at Whitby (202-03). Irish monks who founded monasteries for the English instructed them in “scribal arts and reverence for the written word” (203), as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells demonstrate. Significantly, “The Saxons also absorbed the Celtic piety toward their ancestral past, and continued to tell stories of their ancient heroes. Just as the Irish did, they often reimagined these tales and gave them Christian spin” (203). The Old English epic Beowulf is the most well-known example.

English missionaries traveled to the Continent to make converts, just as the Irish did. Indeed, many of these missionaries owed their education to Ireland, and they took Insular manuscripts inspired by the Irish with them. Charlemagne’s Carolingian Renaissance would not have occurred without access to these Irish contributions.

Those Cahill describes as Viking “terrorists” eventually sacked Irish monasteries and destroyed manuscripts. Surviving Irish verse describes the fear that consumed monastics during this age. In the late eighth century, Lindisfarne fell victim to the raids, so that the monks eventually had to abandon the site and smuggled the Book of Kells to Ireland. Iona was also raided, and Kildare and Armagh were pillaged. Irish farmers today occasionally unearth buried medieval treasures that were saved from Viking pillaging. The Viking raids were destructive, but medieval Irish Christianity has a powerful legacy. Though the Irish later faced Norman invasion, the Elizabethan plantation, discriminatory penal laws, and the deadly potato famine, the Irish spirit of determination that fueled these earlier missions persisted.

Cahill ends the book with an extended metaphor of 20^th-century culture in which he describes “the people of the First World […]” as contemporary Romans (213), pointing out that as in the case of the Roman Empire, excess and power will not offer salvation. Rather, he finds hope in those outsiders who continue the legacy of the Irish and demonstrate the virtues of Christian charity.