Articles
How the Irish Saved Civilization
a book by Thomas Cahill
My Mother and books
One of the greatest blessings of my life (as well as my two sisters and brother) was being born to my Mother who provided a sea of books in our home. When we were too young to read on our own, she spent many hours reading to us. I was introduced to philosophy (ethics branch) before I could even read through the stories of Dr. Suess (actual name of Theodor Seuss Geisel). I still remember the first time that the East-going Zax and the West-going Zax met, directly in their tracks. Both were very stubborn and refused to take a step to the north or south so they could both pass. There they stood, the two Zaxs, dead in their tracks, refusing to budge, while the rest of the world went on and eventually built a freeway overpass over them. Then there was the story about the Sneeches with stars and those Sneeches without stars. When an opportunist came on the scene with a method to tattoo stars onto the star-less Sneeches, the star-less Sneeches all got stars. The original Sneeches with stars wanted to maintain the division of their society so they paid the opportunist to have their stars removed thus leaving the privileged group the now starless Sneeches. This went back and forth so many times that no Sneech could tell all those who were originally with stars nor all those who were originally without stars. The class distinction dissolved among the Sneeches and the opportunist left town a very rich man.
As I got older and reading on my own, there were age-appropriate books available to me. The Time (or maybe the Life) series on science for youth stands out in my memory. The models were crude as that of electricity as a bunch of stick-figure little men with spherical heads with a minus sign on them running single file in a wire. But as I got older these earlier crude models were replaced with more realistic models. I learned enough about real electricity that when I was 13 I passed my license examination to become a Novice Class Amateur Radio operator. My call sign was WN8RAU. Or course I had also passed my Morse Code examination for sending and receiving (very easy as it was only 5 words per minute).
This book
About fifteen years ago, soon after this book was published and before my LASIK surgery vastly diminished my reading time, I noticed a new addition to my Mother's library. After reading the title, "How the Irish Saved Civilization", I thought to myself "How the who did what?" I read the back cover, the preface and perused the table of contents. When I asked my Mom if she had read it yet she told me she had and that it was a very good book. So she allowed me to barrow it.
First I will tell you what the author means by "...Save Civilization". He means the ancient Greco-Roman literature, what we call the Classics. Even if the Irish had not saved this, if we assume they did, there is no doubt the West would still have recivilized though probably in a significantly different manner and rate. And there were advanced civilizations around the world that developed independently of most if not all Western thought. Certainly the Byzantine Empire carried on with its Greeco-Roman roots. The Moors in the Iberian peninsula were so advanced that in the 10th Century, Cordoba rivaled Constantinople in size, wealth and degree of civilization and even had some street lighting (most likely oil but not from whales). There were remnants of the Persian empire, parts of India and parts of China that also had degrees of civilization too. Even some of Japan was civilized in not entirely unified. While the Germanic hoards where destroying the great structures of the previous Roman empire to quarry the stones for their own small dwellings, the Incas on the other side of the world built Machu Picchu without the use of mortar. Although they lacked the wheel, except possibly in a child's pull toy found there, they certainly must have used tree trunks as rolling pins to be able to transport those huge stones cut to a precision that still remains a mystery to us today. Machu Picchu is even grander than we originally though as it has been found that part we see is only about 40% with the other 60% as a substructure to manage drainage and prevent corrosion. I hope to post the Nova episode "The Ghosts of Machu Picchu" in the near future.
This book is concerned only with Western civilization from the centuries long decline of Rome, Rome's fall and the Middle Ages starting with the Dark Ages which are aptly named. Cahill goes into great detail about all the important factors of this story, unknown to the vast majority of us. Many of these same kinds of factors exist in different form today. When the Romans finally started to realize that their way of life was actually in danger of perishing, it was too late to stop it.
In a nutshell here is what happened. The Roman Republic supported itself on conquest in order to gain the land to farm to feed ever greater numbers of people. When hunter-gatherers and other nomadic people become agrarians there is the inevitable population explosion. When the Republic was replaced by the Empire, merit was increasingly replaced by privilege with the haves supported by subjugating the have-nots. Escalating rates of taxation were required to support this trend. During the time of the expansion of the Empire, the conquered peoples were gradually Romanized. And many people outside the Empire desired to move into it where life was far better. The geographical barriers at the furthest extent of the Empire were the Rhine River to the north (for the most part very wide) and Danube River to the East.
In the last day of 408 AD the Rhine froze. Vast numbers of Germanic tribes used this opportunity to cross into the Empire. In 410, the Germanic hoards actually reached as far south as city of Rome itself which they overtook and pillaged. The city recovered to a vastly reduced extant and still controlled some lands in Gaul and North Africa. In 476 Rome was finally defeated for good. What was remaining of the Empire was now in the sole control of Constantinople.
The barbarians were of many groups and disorganized. They destroyed the buildings and monuments to cannibalize the stones for their own modest dwellings. And what they could not use nor understand, the books and manuscripts, they burned.
During this 5th Century, an island, so wild and barbaric that the Romans had no desire to even conquer it started to become Christianized. For centuries before this, the nearby lands of Briton were frequently invaded by war parties of Irish who pillaged and kidnapped children in order to enslave them back home. During the 5th Century, Rome had sent a Bishop and a few other missionaries to Ireland. But that only Christianized (partially civilized) tiny locals and small numbers of people. During the first years of the 6th Century, a boy living in Roman Britain, about sixteen years old, was captured by one of these Irish raiding parties and brought back as a slave. Although he was a Roman Christian from Briton with a father who was a deacon and his grandfather who was a priest, his spiritual zeal was about the same as it was for other boys his age, not very much.
This boy's name was Patrick and the six years of his enslavement were very arduous. Even after his enslavement he had no protection and may have come very close to being executed at one point. Patrick's experiences transformed him spiritually as a young man. His followers were likewise transformed and transformed others in Ireland. Soon they traveled to Briton where their effect was the development of even more Christian missionaries. As these missionaries, including Patrick himself, penetrated and spread through the Continent of Europe, they saved, copied and sent back to Ireland any of the books and manuscripts that had survived the first decades of the Dark Ages. 6th Century Ireland had become much more peaceful while the Continent had become as wild and dangerous as Ireland had been in the previous centuries. Even though the power of Rome was dead forever, the new Power of the Christian Church was asserting itself slowly, over centuries, in Europe.
Just in the nick of time too as in the 10th Century Ireland was savaged by the Viking raids. By then, though, the Irish had saved most of what we know about the Classics and had reintroduced them back into the Continent in hundreds of monasteries. In Cahill's words, the Irish had saved Civilization.
As is so often when reading history, this book opens up far more questions than it sets to rest. Was the Church of the Byzantium Empire so stultified that it could not have performed this role which the Irish played? We already know that Constantinople made little attempt at missionary work, preferring to practice in the comfort of urban areas. Why did they not make copies of the Classical literature? Did they lack a significant number of scribes to do this and if so why? It seems that there may have been more copies of Aristotle, Plato, Demosthenes, Plutarch, and even Europedies extant in the Muslim lands than even in Europe during the early Dark Ages. Many words in English begin with "al" and are actually derived from Arabic words. The word "Algebra" is one of these words. The Arabs also traded with India during their golden age and our Dark Ages. It was from India that the Arab mathematicians got one of the most famous inventions of all, the number (and concept of) zero. Medical science was also much more advanced and advancing than in Europe at this time.
Mea culpa
My fault(s)
I am not a scholar. In history I am not even a layman expert as I am in the realm of music. The reason I spent so much time summarizing this book with all my attendant inaccuracies and cumbersome style is to tell enough of this unknown story that maybe one out of a hundred of you will actually invest the time to read the book because you may, now, be too curious not to. The rest of my remarks are geared only to those of you who have decided or may decide to spend the hours required because you think it worth the time.
Tips for getting the most out of the written book and/or audio book
The literal form is preferred for obvious reasons. For one thing it is quicker to absorb the ideas from the literal form than the verbal form. I am an unbeliever in "speed reading" though. Reading should be active, as opposed to passive. That means not only taking the time to input, but also process (think) about what one is reading while actually reading. And thought requires at least one dimension of Minkowsky space-time, that of time.
Another reason to prefer the literal over the verbal form is the presence of homonyms. Normally the actual word is resolved by the context with in which it occurs. Gaul is a geographical region centered about current day France. Gall (a homonym to Gaul) is a person rather than a place.
But sometimes the homonyms are both nouns for both people, both places, or both things such as in Christopher Marlowe's "Romeo and Juliet" which, like all of Marlowe's work after he faked his death and probably sought refuge in northern Italy, is falsely attributed to William Shakespeare, the words "canker" and "kanker" appear in different parts of the play. It is easy to tell canker when Friar Laurence is looking at plant leaves and comparing a the canker of a plant to something in a human situation. But I had to look up kanker in Wictionary to learn its meaning. I plan a future posting about Shakespeare and the true authorship of works attributed to him featuring the PBS Frontline episode aptly titled "Much Ado about Something".
Another very good reason to read rather than listen is so that you can easily copy/paste a word into Wikipedia or Wiktionary, the greatest tools of scholarship since the invention of the encyclopedia almost 2,000 years ago, far before Diderot. This is especially helpful when an artistic object is described. It is worth seeing a photo of the object in addition to the reading the description of the object so that you know what to look for. Most of us have seen photos of the Book of Kells or Skellig Michael. No amount of words can come close to actually viewing the image of it. But you should have the descriptions as well, to aid you in looking.
The audio book also lacks many parts in the PDF book.
- Parts in the book not in the audio book
- footnotes
- Pronunciation Guide to Key Irish Words
- Bibliographical Sources
- Chronology
- Acknowledgments
- Index
So you may be wondering why I bothered to even include the audio book here. I certainly hope you do not listen to the audio book while driving unless you are out of the city where it might be safe enough to listen actively while driving safely. Listening is every bit as active as reading and it takes more time to backtrack the audio than reread a portion. Some of you who are are used to reading for hour upon hour know that the eyes tire quicker than the mind. For those, like me, who's LASIK surgery made the task of reading so much more difficult, you will appreciate the audio book although it is far easier just to expand the text size of a PDF file using Adobe Reader to make reading easy.
If you decide to listen to the audio book on your portable MP3 player, you can may be able to play it back at fast speed. The nice thing about digital audio is that increasing the speed does not also lift higher the pitch. The leisurely pace of this audio book is such that it can comfortably be listened to at double speed and still have enough time to think about what you are hearing. On my Sansa MP3 player I choose fast, rather than normal speed setting. However, if I have a moment of absent mindedness, I can not back up the playback so I split the MP3 files into 10-minute parts. Playing the MP3s on the VLC media player allows for a wide range of various speeds and easy backtracks.
Cahill cites the actual Latin words many times throughout this book. Each time, save one, he includes the translation to English right after.
Mea culpa - part 2
Normally in extensive postings such as this I pay my friend Charlotte (zzsmile here at Multiply) to edit my material. Not only is she a good friend of mine, but, more importantly for the purposes of my postings, a great editor with a command of grammar, usage and style. She also knows quite a bit of Latin. She is currently busy with her own studies so I will release this devoid of her expert guidance.
Links to the actual book and audio book
Right-click the following links and choose Save target as... to save them to your hard drive.
Link to the book as a PDF file: Cahill How The Irish Saved Civilization.pdf
Link to the audio book: How The Irish Saved Civilization audio book.ZIP
Other Books I Plan to Post
I plan to post the last novel I read, "Bonfire of the Vanities" by Thomas Wolf. And with the movie so you can see that the book is far better than the movie.
I also plan to post "Goedel, Escher, Bach - The Eternal Golden Braid. This is a work of non-fiction that won the Pulitzer Prize in this catagory.
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