Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, talks to Patricia Harty.
Thomas Cahill was born one of six children to a middleclass Irish family in the Bronx. He grew up in Queens, New York, attended a Jesuit high school on Long Island, and later became a Jesuit seminarian earning a pontifical and becoming proficient in Latin and Greek – language skills which were essential for his research on the ancient manuscripts that would become the basis for his best-selling book `How the Irish Saved Civilization.’ In his compelling narrative Cahill tells how St. Patrick created the conditions that allowed Ireland to become “the isle of saints and scholars” and thus preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization – copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost; these same Irish monks, with their carefully copied books hanging from their belts, set out with great missionary zeal to relaunch civilization in the Europe of the Dark Ages and brought their uniquely Irish worldview to the task. With good reviews in the `New York Times’ and great word-of-mouth advertising, the book has done amazingly well – it is now in its 12th printing, with over 100,000 hardback copies sold, and a first print run of 60,000 paperbacks ready to hit the stands for St. Patrick’s Day. The success of the book, in fact, has enabled Cahill to leave his job as religious editor at Doubleday to concentrate on his writing. ‘How the Irish Saved Civilization’ is the first in a series of seven books entitled `Hinges of History’ that Cahill plans to write. He is currently working on his history of the Jews. Cahill, who is also the author of `Jesus’ Little Instruction Book,’ credits his friends at Doubleday, including the late Jackie Onassis, who read parts of his manuscripts and was “very helpful,” and his publisher Nan Ahearn Talese, whose “incredible willpower” saw the work through to fruition, for his success. He lives in the Bronx, and he and his wife Susie have two children: Kristen, aged 21, and Joey, aged 19. Editor-in-Chief Patricia Harty spoke to Thomas Cahill over dinner in Langan’s Restaurant in New York City.
Irish America: Apart from everything else, your book is a king of everything you wanted to know about St. Patrick and were afraid to ask.”
Thomas Cahill: I didn’t know anything about St. Patrick before I started doing the research for the book, but I now believe Patrick is one of the great figures of Western history, someone who has been completely overlooked, and he has been honored for all the wrong things. We think of him as sort of this sterm-looking bishop with a miter on his head, and he was nothing like that. He’s an extraordinary character! There is no one in that period who speaks in a language that is so down to earth and so accessible as Patrick is in those two documents that he authored.
I read them over and over again in Latin and tried to translate them properly for myself. They’re very strange documents. Especially in his autobiography, Patrick is hard to follow. You have to imagine trying to translate something from fifteen hundred years ago that to begin with wasn’t really completely in the language that it was written in. Patrick spent all of his life speaking Irish, not Latin. So he’s going back to a language that at this point is no longer his language, and trying to write in it. In other parts, just because he is not used to writing, he doesn’t organize it very well, and you say to yourself, well, what year are we in now? Is he looking back? Is he looking forward?
He’s much better in the letter to Coroticus because he has an issue there. A raiding party captured some of his followers and he is trying to get them back. That focus organizes everything in the letter. He’s in a rage, you can tell, he’s so mad. And that rage is the only rage we have from him, because his autobiography is so very humble.
IA: Why is he writing in Latin?
TC: Because he was writing to the literate British public to try to convince them, in the case of the letter to British Christians, to shun Coroticus and to excommunicate him unless he returns the slaves. In the case of the
autobiography, it’s to convince people that he was not up to something in Ireland that was wrong, because there was some sort of suspicion that he was getting money from the Irish, which is insane because the Irish didn’t have anything to give him.
IA: Ireland was the only country that became Christianized without bloodshed. Was this because St. Patrick understood the Irish?
TC: He let them continue to be themselves. Instead of repressing what was there, he took it and blessed it. Patrick didn’t apply Roman norms – he only applied Gospel norms. He let the Irish be who they were. He was extraordinary in two senses: the greatness of his heart and the insight that he has into the psychology of an alien race.
IA: In Patrick’s autobiography he speaks of his sin. What sin do you think he was guilty of?
TC: In those days for a Roman to kill one of his slaves because they annoyed him, meant nothing. And basically, Patrick at 15, the age he committed the sin, was a Roman, a 15-year-old Roman. I don’t believe, given the personality of the man, it could have been a sexual sin.
IA: Where is Patrick buried?
TC: Nobody knows where Patrick is buried. There is this silence in the records between his own period and the seventh century. In the seventh century, all of these different places wanted to be the top dog in Ireland, so they were all writing against one another. You had the Colmcille people, the Brigid people and the Patrick people and a whole bunch of others who were all writing biographies of their founders, trying to prove that their saint was the most important.
IA: Was there something in the Irish nature that provided that missionary zeal?
TC: The Irish in that period were very big on penitential practices. They were big on anything that seemed heroic. They loved the idea of heroism – that was the culture they had come out of. To do some great splendid thing and die was the best thing they could imagine. Which is where the impulse to go into barbaric Europe comes from – to do something really horrible – exciting but also something that could kill you very easily. They didn’t get on tourist buses and go around Gaul [laughs]. They had to fend for themselves, and I’m sure a lot of them met their grief.
IA: The Irish monks such as Columbanus, who set out to re-civilize Europe, come across as rather colorful characters.
TC: I love Columbanus, he’s so goofy.
IA: He seems like some Irish guy you’d meet in a pub …
TC: Exactly! He has this big fight with the best guy he’s got, and he leaves him behind, and at the end of his life he sends back his staff to him because he’s dying. All of that seems to me to be so Irish. Also, his daring to write those letters to the Pope. Though the Pope didn’t have the utter sanctity that surrounds him today, he was still a very, very important figure. And to write in this familiar way to the Pope was unthinkable. It’s such an Irish thing to do, to cut someone down to size. It has a wonderful Irish feel to it.
IA: It would seem that the innate nature of the Irish hasn’t changed that much down through the centuries.
TC: When I first read the Tain many years ago I felt was seeing the prototypes of Irish personalities. This is a document that in its oral state goes back to the time of Christ or a hundred years later. It’s a long time ago, and it’s pagan, and yet all the characters seemed to me to be like Irish people I had known, both Irish Americans and people in Ireland. Not that there aren’t differences as the centuries go on and the Irish are truly beaten down, which is one of the things that does happen.
IA: That negative self-image?
TC: There’s a lot of, I think sadly, negative self-images, to use modern jargon, amongst the Irish. They internalize what the British thought of them. It look a long time. It didn’t happen immediately. And I think without the Famine it might never have happened. It took the disaster of the Famine for those negative self-images to really take hold. And when they took hold, they took hold in the English language because really the Irish then had a self-description of themselves that had been created by the English, not by the Irish, because they had taken over another language and they took over the values. It’s not as if they took over Chaucer’s English or Shakespeare’s English, they took over Victoria’s English. They took over 19th-century English, which really had no room for them. And I try to point that out in the beginning of the book with that quote from Disraeli [” … This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their deal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry … “] and Charles Kingsley, the historian who talks about having seen the white chimpanzees [“I an daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” ] It’s horrible, and he [Kingsley] was a famous man, a novelist whom everyone read, a historian, a clergyman of the Church of England.
So the Irish took over someone else’s description of them and made it their own description in many ways. But underneath the surface there is still all this bubbling and boiling. I think what you find in late 19th-and early 20th-century Ireland is the Medbs and Cuchulainns repressed.
IA: Do you think that in reading your book people were surprised at how powerful the women were back then – Modb and even Brigid?
TC: I think it’s a great surprise to Catholics in this country that there was ever a Catholic culture in which women played such a large role – which didn’t go back to Christian roots but went back to Irish roots. It wasn’t that women had equality in Irish culture – no one had equality in Irish culture – it wasn’t a democratic culture, it was an aristocratic culture – but women didn’t have the same dependence on men that they had in classical culture.
There’s no figure in ancient literature like Medb. The Tain can be boring – as can the Iliad – you know, battle after battle. But whenever she comes on the scene the whole thing become marvelous. She is the most interesting character in the Tain, much more interesting than Cuchulainn, who was basically a predictable heroic figure.
IA: Even Cuchulainn was trained in battlecraft by three women.
TC: Many women were pleasantly surprised at that because it gives another model of culture.
IA: The great argument in the Church right now is over sexual issues, whether it’s women priests, which really is a sexual issue, or celibacy …
TC: I’m not interested in starting a row with Rome, but the Church is desperately in need of checks and balances, because all authority resides in Rome, which has nothing to do with the Gospels or early Christianity. It was simply something that Rome claimed for itself, and to know that there was once not a heretical society but a really Catholic society that was completely different, should give many people hope that it can be changed. And I think it will be changed. We cannot go on this way.
IA: How do you see the Church in Ireland today?
TC: I think it’s changed tremendously, and not merely become modern, which I suppose you could think it had become. This may seem like a peculiar example, but when I first went to Ireland, you could not find anywhere what would seem to me to be beautiful literature in a church. Priests were brusque and seemed to feel that anything beautiful was wrong or bad. There was a kind of embarrassment at the sheer grace of the Roman literature. But now you have a place like Glenstal Abbey [Co. Limerick] in which they are not just reproducing the Roman liturgy, but they are actually reconnecting the Catholic liturgical tradition with the Irish past. That couldn’t have happened in 1963. Thirty years ago it was impossible to imagine that you would have something like Riverdance where you have dancers and musicians and stage managers and God knows how many different kind of people who come together to do something like that, which is a statement for the contemporary world, but a statement that comes out of Irish sources. It’s not just imitating Broadway, Hollywood, or the West End.
IA: I think the Irish American element is really important. In Riverdance, for instance you had Jean Butler and Michael Flatley, both Irish Americans, taking Irish dance back to Ireland.
TC: The truth is that any culture that does not receive things from the outside finally becomes sterile. It’s like the China of the great emperors – after a while, they just kept doing the same things over and over again, or the late Roman Empire where there’s nothing going on, and the last thing they want is anything new. To try to make a culture pure is probably the worst thing you could do to it. But to open the door to everything, which is what the Irish did in the first place [the monks were copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian], made them far richer than they had ever been.
IA: What about American Catholicism?
TC: American Catholicism is much more Protestant – and it’s a particular form of Protestantism which we call Puritanism. We know, for instance, that in Dublin and Cork contingents of gays march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade without incident. Now are they less Irish? Less Catholic than Irish Americans? Is that what we’re supposed to understand? Of course not. It’s that we are more puritanical.
IA: To get back to your book, if indeed the Irish did save civilization, why haven’t we gotten any recognition for it? Does it have something, as you say in the book, to do with not taking overselves seriously?
TC: It’s partially that, I think it’s also partly that even within politically correct America, certain stereotypes are allowed. You may not speak of blacks as people once did. You may not speak of Hispanics as you did before – you may not do that in polite company. But you can still make jokes about the Irish, Poles, the Italians, the Greeks. What I think of as Catholic and Orthodox ethnics are still fair game among politically correct people. The Irish and other groups in this country miss out on being an oppressed minority. They went from being actually oppressed, but nobody ever talked about it that way, to being part of the mainstream but not quite Wasps, never quite making that status, so that they continue to have the status of a joke, when people wouldn’t dare joke about certain other groups.
I don’t know what I’m in favor of when it comes to that. In a way I think we’d be better off if we could all joke about one another a little bit.
I don’t know what I’m in favor of when it comes to that. In a way I think we’d be better off if we could all joke about one another a little bit.
IA: The story comes to an end with the Viking invasions. One has to feel as a reader, that we Irish were all in our monasteries copying books when the Vikings just walked in.
TC: Medb and Cuchulainn would have rolled over those Vikings.
IA: How did you come up with the title?
TC: I was sitting at my computer and typing out this proposal, and put down “How the Irish Save Civilization.” I don’t know how that came to me prior to that. It was when I finally felt, alright, I have a book, that just seemed the perfect title. In early stages, Doubleday wanted to change the title, and I remember saying no, you cannot change the title.
IA: It’s a great title. But it’s on the verge of tending towards not being serious.
TC: Right, exactly. To a non-Irishman, who’s not used to that king of banter, he doesn’t know what to think. What is this? Is it serious or isn’t it serious? And the answer to that is, well, it is and it isn’t. I really tried to tell it as an Irish story. There’s no point in telling Irish history as if you were a German or a Russian. It seems to me you should tell the story of the people in their own way, or else you haven’t really got it.
To me the great fun in the whole thing was all these characters, whether it was Queen Medb or Columbanus – they were such great characters.
IA: Did you have a problem recreating them?
TC: No. I each case I would try to find the person, but everywhere I looked there was this wonderful material. There were these great anecdotes, and various incidents that just kept happening. The wonderful story of Brigid and her father – he’s had enough of her because she’s become a Christian and is giving away all of his money. So he decides to sell her to the King of Leinster to grind his corn. He goes in to see the King and he leaves his sword in the chariot with Brigid because you can’t wear a sword in the presence of the King. And the minute he’s gone, a beggar comes along and begs for something from Brigid and she immediately gives away her father’s sword, which is of course the most precious thing that he owns. So he comes back and his sword is gone and he starts to beat her and the Kind is behind him and says, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” And she says to the King, “If I had it in my power I would give away everything you own to the brothers and sisters of Christ.” And he says to her father, “Well, thank you very much, but I think that your daughter is too good for me,” and goes back into his enclosure and leaves them standing there.
It’s a wonderful story, the way it all goes along, the way it works out, the drama of it. In a funny way, it’s such an Irish scene, and it’s written down in the seventh century. It’s all there.
IA: Then there’s Saint Columcille the aristocrat.
TC: He was something else. He really was a bloodthirsty man who I think learned to be gentle by degrees but never really lost his ability to command other men. He’s a more aristocratic character then Columbanus, but he’s not genteel, he’s fierce. He has the fierceness of all that early Irish history. So you have this very funny combination of these extremely fierce people becoming Christian.
IA: And they in turn leave their mark on Europe.
TC: Yes. Much of what we associated with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland, and this is from an historian’s point of view which I think is important. When you look at the Roman Empire you see a certain sensibility, and then you look at the Middle Ages and you see a completely different sensibility and the new ingredient is the Irish. They are the ones who really formed medieval civilization.
IA: So what is your next project?
TC: I’m going to leave the Irish for the Jews. How the Irish Saved Civilization will be volume one of a seven volume series called the Hinges of History. I want to write a history of the evolution of human sensibility in the western world and I want moments when in effect things changed overnight, and on the rise of this new sensibility and its permanent effect on us. I started in the middle with the Irish, and I’m going to write three volumes before and after. The Irish are sort of the key, the way into the whole thing. Now I’m going back to the beginning and the second book will be called The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. It will be about the change from fertility religion, earth mother religion to monotheism. The third volume in this series will be called Desire of the Everlasting Hills and it will be about the actual personality of Jesus of Nazereth, and what it would have been like to encounter him in his own time.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March/April 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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