How the Irish Saved Civilization

Rating:
Summary: Good Try
Review: Mr. Cahill is an entertaining writer but he appears all too blatantly biased with his material. The Irish did not single handedly save civilization anymore than did Christianity destroy it, although it is largely the Christian bias that he suffers from. At the end of the book he says: "---if we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints." If it were not for the Romans there would not have been any civilization for the Irish to save in the first place. Mr. Cahill as well treats his idea as though it were unknown before him, when any student of European history is quite well aware of the contributions of the monastery system of the British Isles in helping to reorganize the west. As Cahill is an Irish name I wonder that anyone should be surprised by his views.

Rating:
Summary: Patriotic Myth
Review: The Irish have been claiming for a long time that they "saved civilization." But this is pure myth, and Cahill's entertaining and seemingly erudite book does little but perpetrate this myth. Let the reader beware: Roman and Greek texts were not preserved primarily by Irish monestaries--indeed Irish monestaries were always hard up for texts, and those that did circulate were primarily post-classical Christian works. The story of Irish Christianity is fascinating and of the highest historical importance, but it is not to be found in Cahill's somewhat silly book. I recommend instead The Rise of Western Christendom by Peter Brown, which contains a very illuminating discussion of the Celtic Christianity that arose around the great monestaries of Ireland and Northumbria.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: This secular and obviously slanted account of how the Irish monastic movement saved many Latin works is an amazing testimony of God's providence. It chronicles the life and work of St. Patrick and the resulting renaissance in Ireland as the rest of Europe entered the Dark Ages.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: Don't waste your time on this book. Its inaccuracies are too vast to list here but only those who know little about this period can praise it. Cahill has no clue about his sources - as someone else has pointed out. The struggle in Ireland was not between pagan and Christian - it was between monasteries. Cahill has his head stuck in the twentieth century vision of ascetic Christianity and fails totally to understand the real medieval world of Ireland which was a lot more interesting than he describes! I would not recommend this book to anyone who wants to seriously learn about early Ireland. Its a fable, not a legitimate history.

Rating:
Summary: Irritation for Secular Historians
Review: There is no doubt that this book is heavily biased. Cahill's introduction takes up the theme of "the ever sufferin' Irish" and the rest of his work goes on to illustrate an important role that the Irish, and in particular, Irish Monastics played in a sort of "Classical Evangilization" of Europe.

Cahill's point is well taken. The reality of the preservation of ancient text and knowledge within the confines of monastic libraries is indisputable. Of course, there was a similar preservation of greco-roman knowledge among the Muslims, but the Irish redistribution of such learning is markedly different from the humanist extractions of the renaissance.

It comes as no surprise that this book is denigrated as being "illegitimate history." Secular historians (an overwhelming majority) are entirely too dismissive of their own biases. They prefer to construct dinosaurs from toe-nails and read volumes into single letters - anything to prove their "Post-Christian" street-cred.

As such, they no doubt see any posthumous biography of St. Patrick as propoganda, and see Cahill's dependence on such sources as flawed - preferring to deconstruct Patrick into multiple people, change him into a woman, or ascribe to him all of the perceived ills of superstition and opression.

Whether or not Cahill tells "the whole story," he certainly tells a side of it that you will not get from your palsied post-modernist, anglophile deconstructionist history professor.

And that's a good thing.

Rating:
Summary: A history book this is not
Review: Unfortunately for the average reader this book reads like a history book but equally unfortunately it is not. It is everything that people say it is in the way of being an entertaining read, an interesting read etc. etc. but Cahill knows very little about his source material. As someone else pointed out his descriptions of pre-Christian Ireland are not accurate. His opinions are based on pro-Christian texts written in later times to denigrate the pagan Irish. The information he gives on St. Patrick is based on later myth and not historical texts of which there are very little dating from fifth century Ireland. As a history teacher I do not recommend this book to students expect as a form of fiction. It should not be read too closely and serious readers who really want to learn about this time in Ireland should go elsewhere for more accurate knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent history of the Irish.
Review: That is an excellent book about Irish history in particular, and the dark ages in general. If it was not for the Irish thirst for knowledge, a lot of key documents, and books would have been lost forever.

It also described St. Patrick as a titan of Irish history. I thought he was just an excuse for all the Irish (and others) to get loaded once a year. After reading this book, you will be awed by this man's life. He brought culture, thirst of knowledge, and christian religion to the Irish. At the time, the Irish were a rather wild bunch not prone to civilized orderly domestic lives. They also had the strangest set of beliefs in the supernatural. St. Patrick changed all that, but not the way you would expect it. It was not through authority, damnation, instilling fear, or other common strategy of religious convertors. It was through an amazing dedication to education, love of learning, respect for others lifestyle. In other words, he made no effort in changing the rather wild Irish temperament. He practiced a style of tolerant and open Christianity that is far more modern than what is practiced today. If there were more St. Patrick(s) today, the Church would not be undergoing these multifaceted scandals and crisis as it is now.

Rating:
Summary: An illuminating document...
Review: Thomas Cahill has undertaken the project of identifying what he considers to be 'hinge civilisations' or 'hinge event' -- he is planning a series of seven books that focus on relatively obscure contributions to civilisation and history without which everything would be vastly different.

This book details an Irish contribution, largely during the Dark Ages spanning forward through the Carolingian renaissance (yes, Virginia, there was a renaissance before the Italian one, under the leadership of the possibly-illiterate Charlemagne) and still further into the broader re-awakening in western Europe. This was largely achieved because the Irish monastic communities had taken up the task of being the librarians for the world; while most of the west slipped into the Dark Ages and the eastern Empire became less interested in the Europe which was being overrun by barbarians, the Irish, from their position of relative safety on the far coast of Europe, were able to maintain an ordered and stable society which was to keep alive much of the scholarship and learning from the Roman Empire. From the secure island these celtic Christian scholars set forth all over Western Europe to bring learning and knowledge back to the people.

Entertaining, easily readable, full of facts that are often overlooked in more traditional histories which are more concerned with battles and politics than with the history of the preservation of knowledge and learning, this book is a welcome addition to a field in which the lesser known but crucial elements of historical development are beginning to re-emerge. Like all of history, it is not complete -- stay tuned, as they say.

Rating:
Summary: Great title but little else to recommend it
Review: For anyone who knows anything about early Ireland this book is not an accurate telling of the history. Cahill unfortunately takes early Irish texts as being legitimate historical sources. They are not. He apparently knows nothing of recent Irish archeological research and he knows nothing of how to interpret the early texts. They are myth, not history. Pre-Christian Ireland was nothing like the way he describes it. He also takes texts on Patrick and treats them like actual source material. They are not. The texts on Patrick that he cites were ... exercises written hundreds of years after Patrick lived.
The Irish have a great history, a noble history long before Christianity came along. Cahill misses this completely. It is an inaccurate knowledge to claim that Christianity came and 'civilized' the Irish. He is correct in saying that the Irish traveled abroad and brought knowledge to Europe but he fails to describe those Irish monasteries in their real form. Irish monasteries were nothing like he describes - the monks were not celibate, for example.

This book may be an easy read with a great title but has little else to recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Historical / Entertaining
Review: Having read "Desire of the Everlasting Hills," I was drawn into Cahill's other published works, starting with this book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization." This book is solid, historical, and a very interesting 'peek' into the history of Ireland and its people. This book did not grab me like the aforementioned text, but it did a good job of laying out how important the Irish, and the monastic movement was to the culture and education of medieval Europe. The time devoted to St. Patrick was very helpful, as there is so much myth associated with St. Patrick, it is nice to have a more accurate view of his contribution to Irish Christianity, and Christianity as a whole. This book was a solid B, and I would recommend it to others.

Joseph Dworak