Written by Thomas Cahill. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 246 pages, illustrated, $22.50.
Newspaper clipping submitted by Cara Carlsdottir
"Patrick slept soundly and soberly," says Thomas Cahill in this charming and poetic disquisition, which describes what he calls Ireland's "one moment of unblemished glory" when, according to our author, the Irish saved classical civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The phrase, wry and pithy at the same time, is as good a way as any of suggesting Cahill's thesis.
The Patrick in question was a former Celtic slave brought to Ireland from Roman-era Britain. His name was originally Patricius, but he came to be known to later generations as St. Patrick. Cahill's theory about him goes something like this:
The Ireland of the early fifth century was a brooding, dank island whose inhabitants, while carefree and war-like on the outside, lived in "quaking fear" within, their terror of shape-changing monsters, of sudden death and the insubstantiality of their world so acute that they drank themselves into an insensate stupor in order to sleep.
Patrick, however, provided "a living alternative." He was a serene man who slept well without drink, a man "in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away."
The Christianity he proposed to the Irish succeeded because it took away the dread from the magical world that was Ireland. And once they were Christianized, the Irish founded the monastic movement, copying the books being destroyed elsewhere by Germanic invaders, eventually brining them back to the places from which the books had come. "And that," Cahill concludes with unabashedness, "is how the Irish saved civilization."
Cahill's technique is to focus on some figure who marks the era. The poet and professor Ausonius, who lived in Bordeaux in the fourth century, is his representative of Rome's slide into emptiness and decay.
Contrasting with him is Augustine of Hippo, the St. Augustine of history, whose remarkable codification of the early Christian orthodoxy made him "almost the last great classical man — and very nearly the first medieval man."
"Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition," Cahill writes. With his triumph in the Roman world, the spirit of classical civilization was defeated, and would have been defeated forever, Cahill argues, had it not been for those wild men in a faraway land that had never fallen under Roman rule and had never heard of Augustine: Ireland.
Whatever the claims, Cahill's book is an entirely engaging, delectable voyage into the distant past, a small treasure.
