How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

Paul, here referred to as a 'wiry bald-headed Jew') The waves of matted barbarians would have extinguished learning, except that in a remote outpost of Europe,unholy Ireland, a vaUant and semi-Uterate figure brought the love of letters and the Christian god. (Augustine, by the way, drew heavUy on St.

It is an essentiaUy Gibbon-esque view of the shift to the Middle Ages, as CahUl himself proudly admits, with aU the decay of poUte culture and good living that the paradigm LmpUes.We completely lost the complex world of Augustine, a vibrant inteUect inspired by 'the riotous blood of his homeland' (p. According to Cahill, catastrophe came with the faU of Rome, when convulsive waves ofbarbarians (always 'matted' to CahiU) sweUed against the Roman frontiers much as non-Americans push our southwestern borders today f. CahUl's purpose is to explain how Patrick saved the Irish and the Irish then saved classical culture. CahiU purposely distances his legend of the Irish past from more serious works which, he purports, focus on one historical period or another rather than the transition between periods, and which tend to leave out aU that is 'Celtic and CathoUc' (p. $22.95.) Why has this book been so popular?Why have readers been buying this book rather than more scholarly and more accurate histories of early medieval Ireland ? Mr. _ Jo Ann Kay McNamara Hunter College and the Graduate Center City University ofNew York How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story ofIreland's Heroic Role from the Fall ofRome to the Rise ofMedieval Europe. 65): 'Francis' disciples drew the best of aU practices, virtues and ideals from the movement into an institutional form of Ufe that was but the logical culmination of the monastic reform movement begun at Cluny.'This is, alas, the sort of statement that will inevitably draw out students' highlighters and appear on their final examinations. There also appears to be basic confusion between apostoUc and contemplative religion which ultimately produces the conclusion (p. Brevity and haste unfortunately lead to confusion, such as attributing the 'new orders' of the twelfth century to the decision to mstitutionaUze eremitic groups that flourished principaUy m England. The idiosyncratic apportionment of references between notes and bibUography obscures their value in compUing a good Ust for future reading.There remains Ranft's initial aim of providing an accessible survey. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īOOK REVIEWS299 the presentation disaUows any attempt to come to grip with the arguments of modern scholars, which embrace a broader range of categories.

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill