Book Review: Thomas Cahill

Posted by Paula Stiles Nov 14, 2006

Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995) is obviously not the deepest of books. It's also not the most honest of books nor the best organized of books, nor, indeed, the most tolerant of books. For example, it's not really about how the Irish saved, or even preserved, Roman civilization. A more accurate title would be: "How the English Converted the Irish to Christianity and in Naive Gratitude, the Irish Saved Roman Christian Civilization". Becket, the subject of this week's film review, would have approved.

Cahill wants us to believe that Irish monks, and only Irish monks, saved ancient written Greek and Roman works from obscurity and destruction. This was actually a team effort headed by the Byzantines and Arabs, as well as the Benedictine monks in Italy and Gaul (now France). The Irish certainly contributed, but Cahill's assumption that only a very few people immediately after the fall of Rome cared about preserving Roman civilization is false. Quite a few people cared, since Rome was considered to be the pinnacle of Mediterranean civilization at the time.

And the Irish did quite a bit more than "merely" preserve and copy older works. They were, for example, heavily involved in the seventh century third phase of the theological "Easter Controversy" between the British Church and pretty much everyone else over when to place Easter in the calendar.

Cahill's book glorifies the early British Church, namely the insular culture in the British Isles from the 5th to 8th centuries that culminated in masterpieces of illustrated book art like the Book of Kells (c. 800) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 698). As far as Cahill is concerned, only ancient Roman literate culture (Christianized and suitably denuded of any questionable sexual content) counts as "civilization". This probably helps to cover the fact that he knows very little about his subject. He ignores, for example, both the Byzantines and the Benedictines. He also treats the pre-Christian Irish and the Germanic tribes in northern Europe with equal derision, ignoring the combination of Roman law and Germanic custom that is now accepted as legal code in the West.

Some have cited Cahill's breezy tone and highlighting of Early Irish literature as a recommendation for using him as an introduction to the subject. But life is short and there are better introductions to this period out there. Try them.