HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, by Thomas Cahill

1996. Rating: 8

Despite a couple of flaws that I'll mention, this has always been one of my favorite works of history for any time period, and my recent reading of this was actually just the latest in many re-readings.

In AD 476, the last emperor of Rome was quietly replaced by a Germanic king, and the Roman Empire--along with the civilization it brought to the world, for good or ill--came to an end. Before this happened, however, Rome was forced to suffer deprivation after deprivation, from the barbarian invasions that ate away the Empire piece by piece, to the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric the Goth, in which he carried away everything of value from the city--including thousands of Roman citizens. Along with other events, this spelled the end not only of the Empire, but it also marked the downfall in western Europe of the classical Greco-Roman civilization that had lasted for one-thousand years.

Following that were the centuries we call the Middle Ages, and then the Renaissance that helped build the world as we know it today. But few people know that the Renaissance came about very much through the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature; fewer still know how close we came to losing all of it.

The calamaties of the last days of Rome weren't just felt in bloodshed and starvation. Literature, art, history, and science all crumbled in the western world too, and libraries were burned or left to rot. Into this dark age entered an unlikely group of literary saviors: the Christian monks of Ireland, which was then a wild and inhospitable place. How the Irish Saved Civilization is a broad chronicle of how these tenacious, isolated men rescued manuscript after manuscript from continental Europe and preserved them through copying them by hand, from the years after Rome's fall to the next wave of book burnings during the Viking invasions. In a very real way, Western Civilization hung by a thread on, as the book puts it, a rocky outcropping on the edge of the world that most people thought was inhabited by wild men.

My only problem with the book is that it fails to mention that the Irish monks weren't the only ones preserving books and classical civilization through what later came to be called the Dark Ages. The city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for over a millennium, possessed massive libraries until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The Arabs received surviving manuscripts from the burned Library of Alexandria, primarily science and philosophy, which found their way back to Europe during the 12th century. And while the Irish Christians were busy saving civilization, many Roman Christians were busy burning books and even entire libraries (including the aforementioned Library of Alexandria).

But on the whole the book is an excellent read, and it makes our not-so-distant past breathe again--showing us how strong the connections are between us and a heritage we very nearly lost. It shows how easily our world could have become a much different place, and how the institutions we take for granted-- from democracy to philosophy to novels to scientific inquiry--could have been obliterated in the "blood and smoke of the sixth century." And the book poses a disturbing question at the end: Should our own modern world go the way of Rome, in what odd corner of the world might the civilization we take for granted end up being preserved, if at all?

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