How the Irish Saved Civilization

Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming—and, of course, copying. ...a little hut for each monk... a refectory and kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of barns; a modest church—and they were in business.

Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan.

For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland...

This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness.

Latin literature would almost certainly have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of the Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down.

If we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.

More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine.

More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.

A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.

The Irish... developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. In the ancient church, confession of one's sins—and the subsequent penance... had always been public. ...one did not necessarily choose one's "priest" from among ordained professionals: the act of confession was too personal and too important for such a limitation. One looked for an anmchara, a soul-friend, someone to be trusted over a whole lifetime.

The Irish of the late fifth and early sixth centuries soon found a solution... the Green Martyrdom, opposing it to the conventional Red Martyrdom of blood. The Green Martyrs... retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island... there to study the scriptures and commune with God.

Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.

The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts.

Lacking cities, Ireland didn't quite see the point of bishops, and gradually these were replaced in importance by abbots and—in a development that would make any self-respecting Roman's blood run cold—abbesses.

Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas. ...they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on. ...Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome... they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way.

Patrick... understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.

Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still too childlike and playful to find any value in snobbery.

The high abbesses... had the power to heal, ...almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.