Midlife Irish (19 page)

If Patrick was the man, it means, of course, that the pagan’s scriptures were right. So the pagan scriptures correctly forecast
the coming of a man who would prove the falseness of pagan scriptures. The story of Saint Patrick combines the pagan and the
Christian traditions in a remarkable way. When Patrick battles the magical forces of paganism he uses the magical powers of
Christianity. Patrick wins, but the pagans put up a creditable fight. They go down swinging. Saint Patrick doesn’t say the
pagan ways were all bad. They were the old way; I’ll give you the new way.

The most crucial thing that Christianity brought to Ireland was the written word. During the “Dark Ages” that followed Patrick,
when Western civilization was in chaos, Irish monks kept the most profound ideas and values, the things that continue to be
the bedrock of all civilization, alive and well. The
fall of Rome brought on massive destruction. Irish monks were one of the few sources of classical learning.

The old Celtic civilization was actively hostile to the idea of writing. Things were learned by memory, and they were transmitted,
to a select few, orally. There is an ancient Irish written language called Ogham, but it was very limited and could never
be used to transmit anything complex. Christianity brought literacy.

Saint Patrick has such a strong hold on the Irish spirit that the Irish tend to forget all the other missionaries who aided
in bringing Christianity to Ireland. A reasonable argument can be made that Christianity had a foothold in Ireland
before
Patrick’s return. And things were not so clean-cut. The conversion was very gradual. A lot of people held to their old pagan
ideas and more than a few seem to have put up a lot of resistance. People being the way people are, some people probably died
heroically in the cause of the old pagan way. But pagans were illiterate. Unlike their Christian counterparts, the pagans
had nobody recording tragic stories of pagans dying for their faith.

One of the most amazing things about Patrick was the way he converted the noblemen of Ireland to Christianity. The peasants
were becoming Christians all over Europe at this time. Peasants’ lives were so difficult that they were very receptive to
the message of Christianity and its promise of a new, better life after death. But the Irish nobleman’s status, power, and
influence were tied to his position as a high priest of paganism. Even the “disinterested lawyers,” the Brehons, were threatened
by Christianity because the religion brought its own sense of morality. In practice, Christian morality often undermined the
Brehons’ supposedly objective judgment. Once one side has God’s favor, it’s hard to win an argument. Most important, no Christian
can ever be totally “disinterested.” For the people of influence in Ireland’s system, Christianity was a huge threat.

Despite this, Patrick was able to convert the very people
Christianity threatened. I asked an Irish priest about the mystery of Patrick’s conversions. How did he manage to convert
people to Catholicism when Catholicism itself lessened their power, prestige, and money?

“God,” he said. Good answer.

Whatever happened, Ireland was largely Catholic just thirty years after Patrick’s return. Patrick established monasteries
and schools, and the faith and a high degree of classical learning now walked hand in hand. During this period, Ireland was
truly the intellectual center of the Western world. Thomas Cahill’s wonderful book,
How the Irish Saved Civilization,
is not misleadingly titled. If you equate civilization with classical learning, Ireland
did
save civilization in the Western world. Without the work of the Irish monks, the work of Plato and Aristotle (along with
many more ancient Greeks and Romans) would have been lost. It would have been a devastating blow to Western civilization.

Although Patrick himself wasn’t a great scholar (his Latin, for instance, was very shaky), he completely changed the way learning
took place in Ireland. In changing a pagan oral tradition into a Christian written tradition, Ireland became, as the nuns
told us, “The Land of Saints and Scholars.”

Saint Patrick is certainly the main figure in the weaving together of pagan and Christian Ireland, but there was also another
huge figure who is rarely mentioned, Saint Columba, the “Dove of the Church.” Saint Columba, like Saint Patrick, was a real
historical figure and we know quite a bit about his life. His biographer, Adamnan, depicts him as a man passionately dedicated
to both learning and religion. Columba had a privileged background. Unlike Patrick (to the horror of every Hibernian, Patrick
was a Briton), Columba was a native of Ireland. He was actually born as someone eligible to become the king at Tara, but amazingly
he gave that up and pursued a religious life.

Columba was a quintessential Irish type, a holy man who would, after spiritual musings, punch you in the mouth if he felt
you needed it. His prayer book is titled
Fighting One
. He
was a great appreciator of the “old ways.” The Irish, even though they became overwhelmingly Catholic, hung on to a lot of
old traditional, “pagan” things. Columba, although a devout Catholic, seems to have been very sympathetic to certain aspects
of pagan life. Although Ireland was by then an essentially Christian land, there were a great number of vestiges of the old
pagan ways that were still part of the culture. “Fili,” pagan poets whose role was, for the Irish language–loving people,
spiritual, coexisted with the new church in Ireland, and Columba, despite Rome’s ever-present authority, didn’t see anything
wrong with it. If the Irish want a little paganism with their Christianity, so be it.

Like Patrick, Columba knew the old ways very well. He was educated in a bardic school, and he stayed on friendly terms with
poets his whole life, and when he died, a poet, not a bishop, composed his eulogy. Ireland had presented him a great opportunity
to be an “Exile for Christ,” a holy man who lives among “strangers” because he has abandoned his past life, a life among his
peers, in his journey toward Christ.

In the Irish countryside one can still find the little solitary cells that men like Saint Columba inhabited. Holy men, men
who removed themselves from the world and helped establish the Catholic Church in Ireland, lived in these cells. They were
called “exiles for Christ.”

If you walk into one of these today, it is easy to imagine what men like Patrick and Columba felt. They had chosen to spend
their whole lives in these little cells, isolated from friends, family, the world. Considering these men, I had an overpowering
feeling of the transitory, brief nature of human life. Ireland was becoming, for me, a sort of “God’s waiting
room.” I wasn’t hurrying death, but I was aware of it as I had never been. I thought of some lines I hadn’t thought about
since college, from Yeats:

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all

In Ireland the spiritual always seemed very close. I realized that I hadn’t thought anything about my own death since I was
a kid. Ireland didn’t take me away somewhere; it just brought me home. I seemed to be unable to think without thinking of
“the big picture.” I was now thinking Irish.

For the Irish, literacy was almost equivalent to religion. From the beginning, the idea of learning was completely intertwined
with religion in Ireland. The leading intellectuals were all monks, and the advanced schools shared their names with monasteries.
On the surface Ireland’s collective consciousness was now Christian. But a little bit of the “old ways” still hung on. The
Catholic Church as an institution was, of course, centered in Rome. But you never get a sense that the early Roman Church
somehow interposed itself in Ireland. Despite the formalities and dogma and rituals of a very organized hierarchical Catholic
Church, Christianity in Ireland was a quite distinct thing. No one would have a hard time distinguishing between “Irish Catholicism”
and “Roman Catholicism.” In Columba’s life and writings, you can see that calling the Catholic Church in Ireland “the Irish
Church” was not a big stretch.

But the Church in Ireland was still the same Latin-based religion with precise strictures, and the Irish bishops kept the
“Roman rules” in a hard-nosed fashion. The ritual and dogma stayed almost precisely the same as in Rome. The dates for feast
days were slightly different (owing to the Irish adherence to tradition and a spirited defense of “the Irish
Way” by Irish bishops, notably Columbanus, who butted heads, quite successfully, with Pope Gregory the Great).

In the early Catholic Church, there was a real fear of classical learning. The entire liturgy was written in Latin, the language
of Nero and Commodus, and there is, throughout the Irish clerical writing of the era, an oft-stated warning, a great fear
of somehow being swayed toward pagan ways. Since the early Irish Church hung on to a lot of pagan trappings, maybe the fear
was well founded.

You find writings warning of “the temptation of grammar and the lure of Apollo.” But in Ireland, the monks seem to have taken
to Latin in a very serendipitous way. They played around with it. Latin was a language and the Irish have always seen words
as playthings. Many see in the work of the early Irish monks the characteristic “Irish” quality. Even in a very solemn context,
the monks found it hard to pass up an opportunity for a little laugh, a little wordplay.

I remember the first time I read anything “religious.” It was the Baltimore Catechism. Almost immediately, I remember making
up sacriligious jokes, trying to get a laugh out of the girl next to me. I hadn’t realized that I was just doing what comes
naturally to an Irish person.

During Columba’s era in Western culture, when the barbarians went inside the gate, made themselves at home, and redecorated,
Ireland became, for a while, the intellectual center of the Western world. In Ireland there was an oasis, a place where words
mattered. A place where words were loved and coddled and cherished and fooled around with.

Because Ireland was the center of learning, students from all over Europe went to school there. The Irish monasteries also
sent traveling scholars all over Europe. By the ninth century Irish scholars were famous throughout the Western world. Many
countries had an Irish “visiting intellect” in their government.

For a while their great kings were saying, “Wait a minute. Let me ask the Irish guy.”

Back home in Ireland the Roman Catholic Church started to have problems. The system was very detail-oriented, and this was
impossible in Ireland, a land of very “creative” Catholics. Also, the Roman Catholic Church sent out trained bishops and assigned
them to be the absolute religious power in that particular area.

The Roman system really had no chance of success in Ireland. Since people lived miles apart, the idea of a local bishop in
charge of a particular area could never possibly work. If the ultimate arbiter is fifty miles away you don’t consult the ultimate
arbiter if you need a fast answer. You get creative.

So the monasteries became little self-contained areas, little cities, in a way. This is amazing when you consider that people
who had the original impulse to completely remove themselves from society started these minisocieties.

The seed of these monasteries was always one Irishman who, driven by a spiritual impulse, completely removed himself from
society because of a spiritual impulse. Such men were called “white martyrs.” They were still alive, but they were “dead”
to society. They had chosen to live, and die, completely alone. Now they found themselves surrounded by people who had similar
ideas.

So these solitary cells all over the countryside often became monasteries. There might be one single hermit to join the original
exile. Then two other guys who rejected secular life would join. Then a dozen. Pretty soon large groups started to live the
solitary life. Paradoxically, hermits lived together.

This wasn’t just an Irish phenomenon. The pattern was repeated all over Western Europe, but it seems particularly prevalent
in Ireland. Oddly, Ireland started to become a powerful force in many other areas after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Militarily, as well as intellectually, Ireland was a power. For a while, Ireland actually colonized parts of England. These
isolated colonies were mostly in Wales and Cornwall. Cormac, an Irish scholar/bishop, wrote of this era:
“The power of the Irish over the Britons was great, and they had divided Britain between them into estates…and they were in
that control for a long time.”

I, along with a lot of Irish people, like hearing that.

By the 800s Irish learning was well-established and respected and admired throughout Europe. This might have continued, but
the Irish were actually riding a streak of what was for them phenomenally good luck. They hadn’t been invaded in centuries,
and the “invasions” often resembled unwelcome weekend visitors, more than the massive carnage usually associated with the
word “invaded.” Some call this Ireland’s “Golden Age.”

It changed, of course.

The first invaders were Vikings, and they did the usual sacking, pillaging, and raping. Although the Vikings never really
succeeded in “conquering” Ireland, they did destroy a great deal of the carefully preserved writing of Ireland’s great period.
The nonmilitaristic (compared to the Vikings!), poorly organized Irish didn’t have a chance against the invaders, and the
Vikings pretty much did what they wanted to do. They slaughtered the Irish and destroyed their homes and public buildings.
What they didn’t destroy, they took back to Scandinavia. Today, historians have to rely on non-Irish sources to piece together
a picture of what is left of “the Golden Age.”

Vikings certainly killed a lot of Irish people and destroyed invaluable writings. Viking raids went on until 842, when the
Irish and Vikings made an uneasy alliance. This didn’t last long. The tenth century in Ireland was basically one big raid
by the Norsemen, who looked on treaties as “suggestions.”