The Irish monks as the saviors of ancient libraries.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, any form of sophisticated culture that previously existed disasppeared in Western Europe. The Roman Empire of the East survived to the fall of Rome, but it was far too remote to make a difference. The barbarians took over, destroyed, pillaged and ransacked. The libraries, the repositories of all the ancient knowledge, disappeared:

The western empire was scarcely a memory now. The last Latin emperor had fallen just a few years after Patrick died. And though there was still a Greek emperor in the east at Constantinople, where a small, defensible state was long established on the Bosporus, he might as well have been at Timbuktu for all his law was known in western lands. All the great continental libraries had vanished; even memory of them had been erased from the minds of those who lived in the emerging feudal societies of medieval Europe.

(Cahill: p. 181)

To Cahill, it was the Irish monks who saved that very same ancient civilization that had otherwise disappeared:

Ireland, at peace and furiosuly copying, thus stood in the position of becoming Europe's publisher. But the pagan Saxon settlements of southern England had cut Ireland off from easy commerce with the continent. While Rome and its ancient empire faded from memory and a new, iliterate Europe rose on its ruins, a vibrant, literary culture was blooming in secret along its Celtic fringe. It needed only one step more to close the circle, which would reconnect Europe to its own past by way of scribal Ireland. (...) Columcille provided that step.

(Cahill: p. 183)

I'd say he is partially right. Yes, the Irish monks did salvage plenty of ancient books and, together with them, a good part of the old knowledge. However, we shouldn't forget the important role that Bizantium and, later on, the Arabs played in this story. It is to them that we owe the most important works from the Greek masters that survived throughout these difficult times. It would be a disservice to the historical truth to emphasize only the role of the Irish because they are "Western like us" and downplay the importance of the Greeks and, above all, the Arabs, who contributed their fair share to human knowledge during a few centuries before the Renaissance took off.

But there is one more fact that I consider of the utmost importance and that Cahill never seems to consider at all: human knowledge tends to flourish whenever there is a high density of population (which tends to be associated to urban settlements) and, above all, a high density of cultural exchanges (i.e., a rich flow of information). Neither of those things happened during the Middle Ages, a dark time when the rural lifestyle supplanted the cities and people lived in isolated communities. This wouldn't change until trade increased sometime in the 15th and 16th centuries and urban spots became important again. This is something to keep in mind at times like ours, when some people start hearing the beautiful chants of the rural life once again.

City versus countryside.

The civilization of classical Antiquity (both Greek and Roman) cannot be understood without the idea of polis, urbs or city:

To Roman citizens, the place to be was a Roman city or villa. The pagus, the uncultivated countryside, inevitably suggested discomfort and hardship. The inhabitants of the pagus —pagani, or pagans— were country bumpkins, rustic, unrealiable, threatening. Roman Christians assumed this prejudice without examing it.

(Cahill: p. 107)

Now, this is something we may be at risk of forgetting in certain societies these days. Thanks in part to the environmentalist movement, anything rural is in. Some young people's dream is to move to a small property in the countryside and live there, surrounded by a calm life and closer to nature. Even more people's idea of a better life is to live somewhere in the suburbs, away from the stress and pollution of city life, and yet close enough to benefit from it services. One way or another, the idea has been gaining ground in the last couple of decades or so.

To a great extent, the movement that proclaims the need to return to the countryside is guided by an utopian view of what life there means. Simply put, those who were born and grew in the city are so used to certain perks that they take them for granted. However, the reality still is that, in spite of all the advances experienced in the last twenty or thirty years, life in the countryside is hard, especially if one has to live from nature's own fruits. And let's not even talk about the lack of dynamism of the economy in the country, which makes it far more difficult to find a decent job. It shouldn't surprise no one, then, that a significant amount of those who fled the city to go live in the countryside are actually professionals who saved enough and can afford some decent living there. In other words, hardly the majority of the population.

In any case, I find it important to emphasize that the city, with all its problems (yes, the pollution, criminality and high density) has given us so much: laws, political institutions, democracy, universities, technology, science, places to debate, to meet, to enjoy the diversity that can only be seen in the large cities. What sort of society would we live in without our cities? What would be the effect of large sums of people fleeing to live in the countryside? Yes, something tells me that it would be akin to a return to the Dark Age, something not so different from what happened in the Mediterranean region back then.

Augustine's "Confessions" and the beginning of self-consciousness.

As Cahill points out, Augustine of Hippo represents the first instance where self-conscience takes shape in Western literature:

If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward —and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man —Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction.

(Cahill: p. 41)

Sure, before Augustine there were other instances of people writing about their experiences. However, the key was always the experiences themselves, the outside, the events. With Augustine, for the first time, it's the individual's concept of self, his own internal struggles and doubts, that is reflected on the page. Now, this would be a trivial issue if it weren't because the idea of individual is key to our civilization. Most people would agree that Western civilization is sustained on four legs: classical Antiquity (i.e., the Greek and Roman cultures), the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Age of Enlightenment and, finally, although directly linked to the previous one, modern Science. Well, in Augustine we find the first clear indication of the idea of individual, developed by the confluence between the classical civilization and both Judaism and Christianity. Neither the contemporary notion of human rights nor the idea of modern democracy would be possible without this accomplishment.

An empire that turned its back on the outside.

In page 12, Cahill shares a thought about the natural inward-looking approach of the Romans that should serve as a caution to us in the present too:

For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the ricky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-nea —the Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.

(Cahill: p. 12)

Great empires and large countries always tend to ignore what lies beyond their borders, considering it worthless or, at least, of less value, inferior to their own clearly superior ways and manners. This is a permanent danger in History, something that afflicted Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and it may afflict the United States now. We should be careful here though. This is not a Western defect only, as many multiculturalists would have it nowadays. The old Chinese Empire also viewed itself as the center of the world, to the point that it referred to itself as the Empire of the Middle, and something similar can be said of the Japanese. Quite to the contrary, this is a very human fault, something intrinsic to human nature and not to this or that particular nationality or culture.

On how the Irish monks preserved Western civilization.

Thomas Cahill soon describes the core argument of this volume at the beginning of the book:

The word Irish is seldom coupled with the word civilization. (...) And yet... Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment —in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture— had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature -everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribed of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one —a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

(Thomas Cahill: pp. 3-4)

We'll see later to what extent he manages to come up with clear evidence to back up these statements. However, it's true that until Cahill published this book the importance of the Irish contribution to Western civilization had not been stressed enough. Sure, there had been mentions here and there (Kenneth Clark's seminal work, Civilisation: A Personal View, deserves a special mention in this sense), but they had been ignored for the most part in favor of more familiar (and larger) countries. It is, unfortunately, a frequent bias in the study of History.

How the Irish Saved the World.

Part of a wider project that the author calls The Hinges of History, where he sets to study and "retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West" (a project that, in principle, also includes a second volume titled The Gifts of the Jews), this book tells us the story of how the Irish monks managed to keep the heritage of Western civilization (i.e., the Greek and Roman classics, as well as the Jewish and early Christian works) to pass it to posterity.

Technical description:
Title: How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.
Author: Thomas Cahill.
Publisher: Doubleday
Edition: First paperback edition, New York (USA), March 1996.
Pages: 249 pages, including index and illustrations.
ISBN: 0-385-41849-3