At Pentecost of 597, just days before the mighty Columcille breathed his last in his island monastery of Iona, an English king was baptized in his capital of Canterbury by a timid Roman librarian, whom Gregory the Great had sent to evangelize the English.*Though Patrick had brought the Gospel to the Irish more than a century and a half earlier and Columcille had departed to the Scots forty years previously, this is the first instance of a papal mission to the pagans. Thus begins a new chapter in the story of Britain, whose first Christian inhabitants—the Celtic Britons of Patrick’s day—had been gradually pushed westward by those marauding pagan adventurers, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who had at length settled down to call east Britain their own. By the time of Columcille’s death, these Germanic settlers were long established in southern Britain, which they now Called England, and had given their home territories new names, like Kent, Essex (East Saxony), Wessex (West Saxony), and Sussex (South Saxony). They continued to push the Celtic Britons ever westward—onto the Cornish peninsula and past the river Severn into Wales. In the far north they pressed beyond Hadrian’s Wall and as far as the river Tweed, the border of present-day Scotland, where they established the kingdom of Northumbria. Their relentless pressure was the central fact of life for their victims, the old Britons, who were both Celtic and Christian and who despised their pagan foe. The last thing these British Celts would have considered was to bring the Gospel to such beasts.
The Irish Celts, who had not suffered at Anglo-Saxon hands, had no such inhibitions. Just as the new English invaded the old Celtic territories, the Irish monks launched a spiritual invasion of England from their island monastery of Lindisfarne in the northeast corner of Northumbria, establishing new monasteries in brisk succession. On account of this activity, Aidan, Columcille’s beloved disciple and first abbot of Lindisfarne, has far better claim than Augustine of Canterbury to the title Apostle of England, for, as the Scottish historian James Bulloch has remarked, “All England north of the Thames was indebted to the Celtic mission for its conversion.” Nor was Lindisfarne the only launching pad for the Irish monks: they were on good terms with the British Celts and began to set up bases in the western territories as well.
But the stricter Roman Christianity of Augustine’s Canterbury was also slowly spreading north and west through the English territories, and was bound eventually to meet Celtic Christianity, marching in the opposite direction. A clash of custom and sensibility was as unavoidable as it had been between Columbanus and the Burgundian bishops. It came to a head at a synod, held in 664 at the Abbey of Whitby in Northumbria, at which the Northumbrian king ruled in favor of the “Roman” party—that is, the party who were heirs to Augustine’s papal mission.
The main issue—as had also, by the way, been the case in the Burgundian synod—was the correct date for celebrating Easter. The Roman party thought the Celtic calculation, which differed from their own by a few days (or, in some years, weeks), tantamount to heresy. In the church’s early centuries, dominated by the subtleties of Greek thought, one needed to misunderstand the exact relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures or assert that he had more than one persona or something equally obscure in order to qualify as a proper heretic. The early Christian fathers could not have been bothered with anything as mundane as calendrical calculations. It is a mark of how simpleminded and inflexible the thought of the age had become that the issue of a calendar could have come so close to precipitating schism.
As it happened, the Irish party gave in—with a few holdouts who came over in time. They agreed, however reluctantly, that their father in God, Columcille, whose name was invoked in all their customs, took second place to Peter, the prince of the Lord’s apostles, in whose name the Roman party made its argument. The solution, like the problem, was a simpleminded one: our relics—the bones of our founder—are holier than yours, so Rome is greater than Iona, and thus we’ve got right on our side.
The scene at Whitby has been used repeatedly, by both Anglicans and Roman Catholics, to defend their positions against each other, and it is almost impossible to read any historian of this period without getting a whiff of partisanship. For Anglicans, the clash proves that there was an indigenous “British” church that preceded Roman interference. For Catholics, the Celtic acquiescence is proof that, once the Celtic Christians thought things through, they saw that Rome was the necessary norm of orthodoxy. Far too much, I suspect, has been made of this clash—as much as anything because our source, Bede (a monk-historian in the early eighth century at the Northumbrian abbey of Jarrow, a satellite of Lindisfarne), makes so much of it. A man of his time (and a most seductive storyteller), Bede was, though a great admirer of Irish spirituality and learning, painfully impressed by the importance of uniformity. A more balanced perspective is suggested by Cummian, an Irish abbot who helped bring the Celtic party over to the Roman observance by humorously deprecating the Celtic argument: “What thing more perverse can be felt of our church than if we say, ‘Rome is wrong, Jerusalem is wrong, Antioch is wrong, the whole world is wrong: only the Irish and the Britons know what is right, these peoples who are almost at the ends of the earth, and, you might say, a pimple on the chin of the world?’” In other words, universal opinion, not some arbitrary Roman rule, should induce the Celts to change their mind.
The trivial nature of the clash may be seen especially in the other item on Whitby’s agenda—the Irish tonsure, which unlike the Roman shaved circlet at the crown of the head was achieved by shaving the front of the head from ear to ear and letting the hair in back grow long. Even to our eyes, the Irish tonsure would have a ludicrous appearance, but to the Romans it was proof of barbarian status. How could people who looked so ridiculous mean to suggest that this absurd tonsure was a sign of consecration?
What is far more impressive about the period as a whole—and perhaps even about what actually happened at Whitby—is the close fraternal cooperation between the Irish and the English. The Christian Saxons at all times received the Irish warmly as elder brothers and sisters in Christ, and borrowed generously from these generous elders. If Christians of different tribes had in all ages cooperated with one another as did these men and women, the world would be a very different place.
The Saxon monasteries, often founded by Irish monks, learned from them the scribal arts and reverence for the written word. The Lindisfarne Gospels, as consummate an example of Irish scribal art as the Book of Kells, is the work of Eadfrith, successor to Aidan as abbot of Lindisfarne, the same Eadfrith to whom Aldhelm of Malmesbury had written when he was an English student in Ireland, warning him about Irish laxity in regard to pagan literature. Though the Lindisfarne Gospels, almost the only codex for which we have a scribe’s name, is the work of an Englishman, it is utterly Irish in spirit. The Saxons also absorbed the Celtic piety toward their ancestral past, and continued to tell stories of their ancient heroes. Just as the Irish did, they often reimagined these tales and gave them a Christian spin. Beowulf, the great Germano-English hero, is a pagan warrior, sure enough, but he is presented as a model of Saxon manhood—loyal, courageous, generous; and as the poet told the tale, the English Christian audience would have picked up the hints, concealed within the poet’s text, that Beowulf grappling with the monsters was a type of Christ grappling with Satan. Both the Celtic and the Saxon myths and legends were becoming, in fact, secular Old Testaments, histories that lacked the direct revelations of Abraham and Moses, but symbolic salvation histories nonetheless, where one could read of a people journeying, by trial and error, prophecy and instinct, toward the truth, propelled forward through darkness and death by their own innate goodness.
The Greek approach to thought was now almost completely lost. Baptism, though it had connected the Irish to a larger world, had hardly made them Athenians. And though the Irish—and now the Saxons—succeeded in transcribing the works of ancient philosophers, they could not really understand them—nor for that matter could the few remaining Romans of the west, like Gregory the Great. The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but of images.
Even the “Romans” at Whitby presented their point of view in the new way. They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind—one set of bones versus another. Indeed, the Northumbrian king, who ruled in favor of the Roman party, did so because he imagined that Peter, Rome’s supposed first bishop, to whom Jesus had, in a metaphorical phrase, given “the keys to the kingdom of heaven,” would use those keys to lock the king out of heaven if he ruled against Rome.
Nor did the “Romans” even trouble to draw up an extended list of charges, as would once have been the case in the church’s great councils. After all, the Irish had many peculiar customs, encouraged diversity, enjoyed pagan literature far more than was good for them, were unconcerned about uniformity of monastic rule, and, perhaps worst of all, sometimes allowed a woman to rule over them. But the synod was held at Whitby, a double monastery of the Celtic style, dependent on Lindisfarne and ruled by the great abbess Hilda! The Roman party wisely confined its objections to the two matters it found most irksome because they were most visible. By the mid-seventh century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.
Another reason that these provincial practitioners of Romanità were far more circumspect than they might once have been was that the collapse of the empire and the rise of the barbarian fiefdoms had slowed communication considerably. Without the efficient communications system of the Roman Imperium, uniformity was necessarily in peril. For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been, so far as we can tell, no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there ever been any between Rome and Ireland—which is why the Celts were still keeping Easter according to calculations that had been twice superseded at Rome. On these marginal islands, who could know for sure what was in, what was out in Rome, let alone in the other ancient centers of Christianity? It was a great moment for diversity, and the Irish continued to thrive.
By the second half of the seventh century the Irish missionary impulse was at high tide, supplemented in its force by fresh waves of English missionaries, who in imitation of their elder brothers burst upon the Germanic lands whence their ancestors had once come. Wilfrid, the leader of the winning party at Whitby, turned his zeal on Frisia. Willibrord founded the monastery of Echternach in Luxembourg (whence the Echternach Gospels, spectacular companion to the Lindisfarne Gospels, would spring), and he and Boniface established sees at Utrecht, Würzburg, Erfurt, Eichstadt, and Passau. Boniface founded the great abbey at Fulda, established other monasteries at Disbodenburg, Amoenaburg, Fritzlar, Buraburg, and Heidenheim, and restored the see of Mainz, of which Boniface became archbishop. By the middle of the eighth century most of Frisia, Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, and part of Denmark had received the Gospel.
To many of these new foundations came the books of the insular scribes. Boniface and Alcuin (the Northumbrian monk at Charlemagne’s court who in 782 took over direction of the Palatine School, which would one day turn into the University of Paris) could never find the books they needed on the continent and were always sending urgent requests to British foundations for basic works. In truth, the art of the scriptorium was virtually unknown in the indigenous monasteries of Italy and Gaul. Monastic manuscript art had traveled from the workshops of Syria and Egypt by way of Ireland and Britain and, at last, to the continent of Europe. But now, the depleted store of continental codices rose steadily. By the middle of the eighth century, Fulda, for instance, was employing forty full-time scribes.
The Irish connections of these English monks were not incidental. Besides having profited substantially from the intellectual atmosphere that the Irish foundations had established in Britain, many had studied in Ireland (Willibrord had spent twelve years there) or were assisted in their labors by Irish monks (such as Kilian and his eleven companions, who evangelized Franconia and Thuringia). Alcuin’s first master, Colgu, had been Irish, as was his best friend, Joseph, who accompanied him to France and died beside him; and he was succeeded at the court school by the Irish scholar Clement Scotus.
With the advent of Charlemagne as king of the Franks and (after his surprise coronation by the pope on Christmas Day 800) Holy Roman Emperor, we can begin to speak of France, in preference to Gaul. Charlemagne presided over medieval Europe’s first Renaissance, a short-lived cultural flowering that barely outlasted his reign. His enduring influence lay in the gradual revival of literacy, for he repeatedly urged (and supported) the raising of standards in the few poor continental schools that remained. That he himself was an illiterate, who late in life laboriously learned to decipher some simple texts but could never get the hang of writing, is proof enough of the standards of the age. Without the previous (and continuing) influx of Irish codices, the Carolingian Renaissance would have been impossible. For this reason, as Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard tells us, Charlemagne “amabat peregrinos” (“loved the wandering monks”).
They seemed, indeed, to be everywhere. When Charlemagne found himself puzzling over what a solar eclipse might be, Dungal, an Irish recluse at Saint Denis, was invited to instruct the king in these abstruse matters, which he did in a letter we still possess. Another resident at the Frankish court was the Irishman Dicuil, the first medieval geographer, whose cold-eyed skepticism and wry asides in his Measurement of the Globe still make entertaining reading. Yet another Irish courtier was Sedulius Scotus, a diverting Ciceronian who advised the emperor on statecraft and whose verses the Empress Ermingarde worked as samplers. Sedulius copied out three manuscripts that we still possess: a Greek psalter in the Arsenal Library at Paris, an interlinear Greek/Latin version of the Gospels at Saint Gall, and the Codex Boernerianus at Dresden, which is an interlinear version of Paul’s Epistles—and which contains the little Irish poem about the unprofitability of pilgrimage to Rome, written obviously by Sedulius himself. In addition to these, either Sedulius or someone of his circle is responsible for the Saint Gall Priscian, authored by the Latin grammarian and full of juicy Irish glosses, and the Codex Bernensis, containing Horace’s Odes, Servius’s commentary on Virgil, and some of Augustine’s early “how-to” books, written for his rhetoric students.
The most splendid blossom of this continental spring was an Irishman, John Scotus Eriugena, born about 810, who crossed to France in his early thirties and took a position at the Palatine School, then under the patronage of Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald. John Scotus, who was probably a layman, is the first philosopher of the Middle Ages, the first truly Christian philosopher since the death of Augustine in 430, the first European philosopher since the execution of Boethius in 524, the first man in three hundred years who was able to think. He also had a vicious sense of humor, penning this two-liner on the death of the anti-Irish Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims:
Hic jacet Hincmarus, cleptes vehementer avarus,
Hoc solum gessit nobile: quod periit.
Here lies Hincmar, crook. But savage greed aside,
He did one truly noble thing: he died.
His wine-soaked dinners with the emperor were full of parrying wit. “Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?” (“What separates a fool from an Irishman?”) asked the emperor playfully.
“Tabula tantum” (“Only the table”), came Eriugena’s reply. No wonder there is a legend that his students finally stabbed him to death with their pens.
In his day, he was one of only two residents of western Europe known to be fluent in Greek. The other, the papal librarian Anastasius, was incredulous that “a barbarian” like Scotus Eriugena should know so much Greek. But know it he did. To read his De Divisione Naturae (The Division of Nature) after immersion in the folk literature we have been reading is a shocking experience: one is back in the world of Plato. Here is a mind that could grasp the most rarefied distinctions of the Greek philosophical tradition and, far more important, could elaborate a new system of thought, one that is balanced and internally consistent. It has more than a soupçon of Celticity in it, however, for John Scotus’s favorite word is Nature, a word beloved of the Irish but one that never failed to raise the hackles of both Platonists and Roman Christians. In John Scotus’s system Nature is a virtual synonym for Reality—all of reality, our natural world as well as the reality of God. In Scotus there is no useful distinction between natural and supernatural. Though the system is both subtle and elaborate, one sees immediately his debt to Patrick’s simple worldview. Reality is a continuum, and all God’s creatures are theophanies of God himself, for God speaks in them and through them.
To readers of a later, more punitive age, this would sound suspiciously like pantheism, the heresy that God is not just in all things but is all things—that is, that there is no distinction between God and creation. The further they read, the more unorthodox this Irishman’s philosophy would appear. He boldly opposed reason to authority: “Every authority that is not confirmed by true reason seems to be weak, whereas true reason does not need to be supported by any authority.” And this bit of sententiousness he dared apply to the fathers of the church! More than this, he took the perfectly orthodox statement of Paul that in the end “God will be all in all” and used it not only to prop up his pantheism but to suggest that at the end of time everyone—even the devils—will be saved! In 1225, almost four centuries after it was written, Pope Honorius III ordered all copies of De Divisione Naturae to be burned. Some, obviously, escaped the bonfire.
But in the age of John Scotus Eriugena, Christian churchmen did not burn books. Only barbarians did that.
Even as John Scotus was crossing to the continent from Ireland, Ireland was under siege. The Viking terrorists had discovered its peaceful monasteries, now rich in precious objects. The monks built round towers without ground-floor entrances and hauled their plate up rope ladders, which they then pulled up after themselves. But such towers were no match for Vikings, nor were the monks, by this time growing sleek and tame. Nor apparently were the warriors, many of whom had turned into relatively peaceful, even erudite, laymen. The illiterate Vikings often destroyed books by ripping off bejeweled covers for booty. The constant fear of the monks is well illustrated in this four-line gloss:
Bitter is the wind this night
Which tosses up the ocean’s hair so white.
Merciless men I need not fear
Who cross from Lothland on an ocean clear.
The merciless men from Lothland—Norway—could not land in a storm, which soon became the only protection left to the coastal monks of Ireland and Britain. Attacks on magical Lindisfarne, which had become the constant source of the most exquisite of the insular codices, began in the last decade of the eighth century, as we read in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793: “On the sixth of the Ides of June the ravaging of the heathen men lamentably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.” Monks were stripped and tortured; and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire, in 806 to kill scores of monks, in 867 to burn the rebuilt abbey. In 875 the harried survivors left Lindisfarne for good. In the first decade of the ninth century came the turn of Columcille’s Iona, where “a great number of layfolks and clerics were massacred” in repeated raids. The great foundation had at last to be abandoned. Inis Murray was destroyed in 802, never to rise again. Even remote Skellig Michael was raided repeatedly, its harmless abbot Etgal carried off for ransom but dying “of hunger on their hands,” as we read in The Annals of Inis-fallen. Glendalough was pillaged on countless occasions and, between 775 and 1071, destroyed by fire at least nine times. Bangor, Moville, Clonfert, Clonmacnois, Brigid’s Kildare—each was laid waste in turn. In 840, even the extensive buildings of Patrick’s Armagh were burned to their foundations.
As one by one the great monastic civitates fell before the implacable Vikings, precious books and metalware were buried in haste or sent inland to some place thought to be—temporarily, at least—more secure. In this way, the greatest of all surviving Gospel codices, the Book of Kells, is thought to have been brought from imperiled Lindisfarne to the inland foundation of Kells. In modern times, and still today, a farmer’s spade will occasionally uncover some lost treasure, like the Ardagh Chalice; or some noble family, reduced even to peasant status by Ireland’s subsequent woeful history, will be found to have preserved through all the centuries a weathered codex as fantastic as the Cathach of Columcille.*
To Irish eyes, the Vikings had little to recommend them. They did establish Ireland’s first genuine cities, places like Limerick, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin. But they interrupted something that could never be resumed. When the Vikings were vanquished in the early eleventh century, Irish society recovered, in the sense that the normal business of life sprang back in expectable patterns. But Ireland would never recover its cultural leadership of European civilization. It had been marginalized once more. Nevertheless, the Irish way had already become the leaven of medieval civilization, the unidentified ingredient that suffused the bread of Europe, enabling it to breathe and grow—and escape the humorless confines of Roman uniformity and classical pessimism.
Ireland’s next invasion—by Normans in the twelfth century—changed little, for the Irish Normans adopted Irish customs far more eagerly than the English Normans married with indigenous Saxon culture. The Normans became, in the famous phrase, “Hibernis Hiberniores,” “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Subsequent invaders were not so appreciative. In the sixteenth century, the colonizing Elizabethans cut down the Irish forests (to get at the impenitent dispossessed, who harried them guerrilla-style) and contemplated genocide, after the gentle recommendation of the poet Spenser. In the seventeenth century, the Calvinist Cromwellians came close to implementing this poetic recommendation. In the eighteenth century, the spirit-crushing Penal Laws denied Catholics the rights of citizens. But it took the famines of the nineteenth century—the Great Hunger—to finish the Irish off. Nearly one million Irish people died of hunger and its consequences between 1845 and 1851, while her majesty’s government sat on its hands, and another million and a half emigrated during the same period, many of these dying during the difficult passage to North America or Australia. By 1914 an additional four million had emigrated, reducing Ireland’s population of 1845 by a third—to less than four and a half million. That such a fertile land should have become incapable of nourishing its beloved children is indication of the economic rape it had suffered for so many centuries. For by this time, Ireland had long been England’s first colony, a Third World country at the edge of Europe. It would take the Irish cultural and political movements of the twentieth century to give back to this devastated population a semblance of its self-respect.*
If the Vikings lost Ireland its leadership role, the Penal Laws very nearly destroyed its identity. These crushing, anti-Catholic statutes ensured that virtually all the remaining native nobility would flee their ancestral land. By the end of the eighteenth century, the flight was complete. Art O’Leary was one of the last noblemen to continue to maintain a home in Ireland—and we saw in Chapter 3 what happened to him. Ireland’s loss was other nations’ gain: names like Hennessy (the cognac people), Lally, MacMahon, and Walsh in France; Murphy, Kindelan, Mahoney, and O’Brien in Spain; Taafe and Hegerty in Austria; O’Neill in Portugal; O’Rorke in Russia; O’Higgins in Chile; and O’Farrill and Quinn in Mexico give some indication of where these Wild Geese (as they were called) fled. For the impoverished peasants who remained behind, the ruined woods and despoiled castles of Ireland were elegiac reminders of a glorious past, now peopled by aristocratic ghosts, as in the anonymous “Kilcash”:
What shall we do for timber?
The last of the woods is down.
Kilcash and the house of its glory
And the bell of the house are gone,
The spot where that lady waited
Who shamed all women for grace
When earls came sailing to greet her
And Mass was said in the place.
My grief and my affliction
Your gates are taken away,
Your avenue needs attention,
Goats in the garden stray.
The courtyard’s filled with water
And the great earls where are they?
The earls, the lady, the people
Beaten into the clay.
But we cannot leave the Irish beaten into the clay. In all disasters, Patrick would insist, there is ground for hope. Kilcash, whose ruined tower still stands against the Tipperary sky, was a castle of the Anglo-Norman Butler family, whose descendant William Butler Yeats would one day bring such honor to Ireland as the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Our greatest novelist, James Joyce, was reared in Dublin, Viking stronghold and provincial British capital.
Even at their lowest point, the Irish kept the candle of hope burning. In 1843, just before the famines began, a smug German traveler was startled to find evidence of learning in peasant Ireland:
I have already mentioned the somewhat antiquated learning, even of the lower classes of the people of Kerry; and now I met with a remarkable instance of it. In the bow of the boat sat a Kerryman, reading an old manuscript, which was written in the Irish language, and in the Celtic character….
Some, the man told me, he had added himself; some he had inherited from his father and grandfather; and some had, in all probability, been in his family long before then. I asked him what were its contents. “They are,” he answered, “the most beautiful old Irish poems, histories of wonderful events, and treatises of antiquity; for instance, the translation of a treatise by Aristotle on some subject of natural history.”
I don’t know what it does to you, dear Reader, but the unlikely survival of an Irish codex in the gnarled hands of a Kerry farmer sends shivers up my spine.
As we, the people of the First World, the Romans of the twentieth century, look out across our Earth, we see some signs for hope, many more for despair. Technology proceeds apace, delivering the marvels that knit our world together—the conquering of diseases that plagued every age but ours and the consequent lowering of mortality rates, revolutions in crop yields that continue to feed expanding populations, the contemplated “information highway” that will soon enable all of us to retrieve information and communicate with one another in ways so instant and complete that they would dazzle those who built the Roman roads, the first great information system.
But that road system became impassable rubble, as the empire was overwhelmed by population explosions beyond its borders. So will ours. Rome’s demise instructs us in what inevitably happens when impoverished and rapidly expanding populations, whose ways and values are only dimly understood, press up against a rich and ordered society. 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. If the world’s population, which has doubled in our lifetime, doubles again by the middle of the next century, how could anyone hope to escape the catastrophic consequences—the wrath to come? But we turn our backs on such unpleasantness and contemplate the happier prospects of our technological dreams.
What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other—a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easygoing French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York prison—in some unheralded corner where a greathearted human being is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.
Perhaps history is always divided into Romans and Catholics—or, better, catholics. The Romans are the rich and powerful who run things their way and must always accrue more because they instinctively believe that there will never be enough to go around; the catholics, as their name implies, are universalists who instinctively believe that all humanity makes one family, that every human being is an equal child of God, and that God will provide. The twenty-first century, prophesied Malraux, will be spiritual or it will not be. If our civilization is to be saved—forget about our civilization, which, as Patrick would say, may pass “in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind”—if we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.
* The casual Roman attitude toward slavery, in contradistinction to Patrick’s, is well illustrated by the famous anecdote about Pope Gregory the Great’s first encounter with Englishmen. He notices them on sale while passing through the Roman market and, taken by their blond beauty, asks what manner of men they are.
“Angli” (Angles or Englishmen), comes the reply. Witty Gregory indulges himself in a pun, saying they are aptly named for they look like angeli, angels. He goes on to make two more puns and resolves to see that the English are evangelized. But he leaves the captives to be sold.
Johannes Scotus, or John the Irishman; but since in this period many Scoti were born in Irish settlements outside Ireland, his name is qualified by Eriugena, or Irish-born. He is not to be confused with Duns Scotus, a Scottish theologian of a later period.
* The Ardagh Chalice was discovered in 1868 (along with four brooches and a bronze cup by a Limerick boy digging potatoes in the rath, or prehistoric fort, of Ardagh. The objects had been concealed under a stone slab within the roots of a thorn bush. We cannot know whether these were hidden during the Viking invasions or during Penal times, when liturgical vessels were outlawed by the British. The Cathach of Columcille was kept in the O’Donnell family, brought to France after the Treaty of Limerick by a fleeing O’Donnell, and returned to Ireland in the nineteenth century. Though the O’Donnells never descended to peasant status, other books were certainly preserved in such families, who sometimes valued them more for their supposed curative properties than for their antiquarian importance. One seventeenth-century traveler reports staring in horror as the priceless Book of Durrow was dipped in water by farmers who used it, as needed, to flavor a tonic for sick cows.
* The Irish have been called “Queen Victoria’s most loyal subjects,” because in modern times they have sometimes been—paradoxically, given their earlier history—associated with prudishness and sexual repression. This new behavior grew, I think, from the understandable anxiety of dispossessed peasants for respectability, an anxiety that surfaced, according to Frank O’Connor, “the moment English became the accepted language.” Languages bring values with them, and the English that the Irish finally learned was the little queen’s. But, says O’Connor, wherever the Irish language held strong, both men and women continued to regard “sexual relations as the most entertaining subject for general conversation.” (The fertility festival, for instance, which was mentioned in Chapter 6, continued to be held throughout Victoria’s reign in Irish-speaking Kilorglin, County Kerry.) Anyone who has visited Ireland in recent years will have noticed that the Irish are reverting to their ancient ways.