Reflections After Re-reading How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
“Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”—John 1:46
“We thought that we were totally unique animals. I mean, there was no one like us. And then we heard there was a group from . . . Liverpool—”—Mick Jagger, with good-natured, but infinite sarcasm, inducting The Beatles into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame
“There is perhaps no law written more conspicuously in the teachings of history than that nations who are ruled by priests drawing their authority from supernatural sanctions are, just in the measure that they are so ruled, incapable of true national progress. The free, healthy current of secular life and thought is, in the very nature of things, incompatible with priestly rule. Be the creed what it may, Druidism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or fetichism, a priestly cast claiming authority in temporal affairs by virtue of extra-temporal sanctions is inevitably the enemy of that spirit of criticism, of that influx of new ideas, of that growth of secular thought, of human and rational authority, which are the elementary conditions of national development.”—T. W. Rolleston, Celtic Legends and Myths
Being of mostly Scots-Irish descent, I’ve always felt an intuitive partiality for the Irish. Like Americans of African descent, the Irish come from a history of condescension and exploitation at the hands of Saxons, for which they have borne not only the brunt but the blame.
I’m from Alabama: collective sneer from everyone north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the better part of those below it.
Having someone to look down on is a social necessity, and a perk of belonging to the preferred mob.
The English, in general, are quite in agreement that there is something sub-human about the Irish. I remember an English acquaintance from years past dismissing Dublin as a “dump”—a synecdoche, really, for all of Ireland. Cromwell showed up in Ireland in 1649, and set about butchering the Irish. When his forces got to the Burren in County Clare, one of Cromwell’s officers reportedly complained of the rocky terrain: “There isn’t a tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man.” I love Virginia Woolf and can only forgive her for her early assessment of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?”
The Anglo-Normans stole huge swaths of Ireland for the English crown in the late 12th century, and a couple of hundred years later Gaelic chiefs won most of it back. Then the Tudors came grabbing again in the 16th century and awarding English settlers with the spoils and banning Catholicism. James I oversaw the foundation of the Ulster Plantation after a half century of rebellion and war, the entrenchment of British dominance, and the Flight of the Earls in 1607, ending the ancient Gaelic order.
The Irish rebels who would become the Irish Catholic Confederates staged a rebellion in 1641 which started the Eleven Years’ War involving most of the British Isles. In Ireland, this was basically a Catholic vs. Protestant conflict, with land ownership and governance of course at stake. The Irish Catholics massacred Protestant settlers in Ulster in 1641, and then the English Civil War broke out in 1642. After Royalist defeat in 1648, and the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the creation of the Commonwealth, Cromwell finished off Irish Catholic resistance in 1650, persecuting them into oblivion and doling out their land to fox-hunting English snobs.
“The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”—Oscar Wilde
For the Irish, things continued to go downhill from there.
The Battle of the Boyne in 1690 brought William and his wife/cousin/co-monarch Mary to the English throne and locked in Protestantism in Ireland. Much of the defeated Jacobite army defected to the continent (Flight of the Wild Geese), and the draconian Penal Laws that followed were an attempt, successful for a while, to completely disenfranchise and break the spirit of Irish Catholics. In the 18th century Anglo-Irish compassionate conservative Edmund Burke warned of the danger of their severity. You have to squint to see his like in America today, and it is impossible to see his like surviving politically. The harshness did relax somewhat in the 18th century, but the writings of Jonathan Swift tell the true tale. Daniel O’Connell’s efforts led to the Emancipation Act of 1829, which liberated the Irish from many of their anti-Catholic repressions. The Famine in the mid 19th century killed a million and put a quarter of the population in flight. The English stood by and watched, and the Irish hatred of the English deepened. At last, the Easter Rising (1919) led to the Irish War of Independence (1921) that created the Republic of Ireland.
But let’s back up. The self-liberated Roman/Briton slave Patricius returned to the land of his captivity, Ireland, in 432, and over the next 29 years established his brand of Christianity over most of the island. Monasteries he established kept Western culture alive through advanced scholarship and manuscript production following the fall of the western Roman Empire in 475/6, and the ensuing chaos and devastation of barbarians as the continent languished in the Dark Ages. In the 6th century, the monasteries (most famously Lindisfarne) instigated a missionary movement, mirroring the Commission of the twelve apostles, that brought Celtic/Gaelic Christianity to the pagans of Britain and continental Europe. Famed missionaries (now saints) Columcille and Columbanus are the most renowned.
During the 7th century, Celtic Christianity was running into conflict with the Roman version—in Britain and ultimately on the continent. In 664, at the Synod of Whitby, King Oswiu of Northumbria sided with the Roman faction over the issues of the correct way to calculate the date of Easter, and the correct style of monastic tonsure—fierce conflicts, both. The result was the establishment of Roman Christianity in Northumbria, and the transfer of the political seat from Lindisfarne to York. The main advocate for the Roman side, Wilfrid, of course became Bishop of Northumbria. The Celtic vs. Roman conflict is perhaps overstressed, since most of Ireland was using the Roman Easter calculation already. But the symbolism is clear.
With the 8th century came the Vikings, who ravaged Ireland for over two hundred years, leaving the monasteries pillaged and in ruins. They were at last defeated in 1014, but mostly just settled down, with their Old Norse words, as they did in England. When the Normans, who had come to France as Vikings themselves, arrived in Ireland in the late 12th century, they managed to get along pretty well with the Irish, which led to a feudal aristocracy of Hiberno-Normans in the Middle Ages.
In 1171, King Henry II brought an army to Ireland to rein in the Irish and the Anglo-Normans. Pope Gregory sanctioned this brutal subjugation of the people and emasculation of their religion—in the ongoing papal campaign of imposing Roman hegemony on western Christendom, along with the revenue source it created.
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As Gaelic Christianity clashed with the Roman version in Britain and on the continent, it enjoyed at the outset a greater appeal to the pagan mentality. For one thing, the Celtic ethic, embodied in and bequeathed by Patrick, was more earthy than the bureaucratic Roman variety. It was a Christianity that recognized and didn’t suppress the experience of being a flesh and blood creature instead of an unnatural and impossible abstraction. Gaelic Christianity valued life, natural beauty, minimized sexual transgression, and offered a more meaningful life for the average person. The missionaries themselves, committed, braving endless hardships, bringing with them a love of learning and a new vision, were charismatic and inspiring.
Constantine’s motives in christianizing the Roman Empire are debated, but I think were primarily political: it was the best available organ for an ideology to unify and control his empire. The later appeal of Celtic Christianity to the pagan mind also had a political side. When one considers the ancient world in general, up to the era of the disintegration and collapse of the Roman Empire, it seems a tale of endless warfare. Christianity became the ideology that could enable the cultural shift from a constantly warring culture with warrior gods (“Only one side can win”—Justice Alito) into what you get when you stop fighting all the time: scholarship, education, personal and social progress, a far more humane belief system with a revolutionary vision of the individual human spirit. Christianity reinstated a goddess and offered a credible alternative.
The contention between the pagan-inflected Celtic Christianity, and the Roman, ended of course in a W for Rome, with all its institutional entrenchment and its incomparable legacy of social engineering. That victory is obvious to anyone who looks around at the modern world. The Celtic mentality didn’t exactly lose, but like colonized and dehumanized indigenous people everywhere, got marginalized. One might wish there had been some Christian Gaelic King to serve instead of the Pope, but one still hears the term “Hiberno-Roman.” Once the heroes are out of the way, the bureaucrats and priests come in—but the heroes are remembered, and their spirit still lives among us. As the modern world suffocates in the waste products of its progress, that spirit begins to re-assert its old appeal.
I once read someone’s description of Joyce as “that delightfully mad Irishman.” I think that sums up the man pretty well. He chewed up the English culture and language and spat it on the Saxon doorstep.
The hope of the human race lies in the margins.
July 19, 2024