To go to Rome
Is little profit, endless pain;
The master that you seek in Rome,
You find a home or seek in vain.
~ Early Irish Christian Proverb
Saint Patrick's day in the present time has become something of a parody, one would even tempt the term mockery of its original significance. Today we wear garish costumes, march in chintzy parades, get raving drunk, and dye rivers green to celebrate the conversion of the Irish pagans to Christianity. "Everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day!" "Kiss me, I'm Irish!" I often wonder what the point is of all this display. Other than, like Cinco De Mayo, yet another excuse to get drunk. Somewhere in all the kitsch is the point of the holiday, to celebrate the Irish people's conversion to Christianity. Why is this important? Because if a bunch of barely literate pagans had not come to Christ and taught themselves to read and write, Western Civilization might have been lost.
Let us back up to the so-called "Fall of Rome" really more of a Subsidence of Rome or The Same Rome under New Management. I say this for two reasons. One, Rome did not fall as say, Carthage or Babylon fell. Those civilizations were destroyed outright, Rome was not. Yes, some "barbarians" sacked the city of Rome a few times, mostly because they wanted what Rome had and I don't just mean money. They wanted the technology and the culture too. The Visigoths caused the Sack of Rome (the most famous one that caused St. Augustine to write his "City of God") on August 24, A.D. 410. After that, Rome formed a partnership with these Germanic peoples, who would later help them fight of Attila the Hun. The Vandals and Ostrogoths would come later and, with the help of the Visigoths, would completely take over the City and put Rome under new management, i.e themselves. By then, the seat of the Roman Empire had already been moved to Constantinople as of A.D. 333. So the Roman Empire proper did not fall until Constantinople was taken by Muslim Turks in 1453. Sultan Mehmed II, who took over the city once conquered, also referred to himself as "Caesar of Rome". Side note: The German title "Kaiser" which is what Germans called their kings until Germany didn't have kings anymore is the German word for "Caesar" as is the Russian title "Tsar".
Friends, I must pause here a moment. I received a minor epiphany a few weeks ago and intend to explore it further with you. I was presented with the theory that German Barbarians did not cause the Fall of Rome. Neither did wantonness or Christianity or something strange in the water that made everyone suddenly stupid, but by Islam. Islam took out Rome and almost took away Western Civilization entirely. This certainly makes more sense than most of the other theories posited over the past 1400 years, and I have no reason to doubt the information. But I do need to investigate further. I am starting a new column in this blog about Islam and its 1400 year war on Western Civilization. This is the first installment.
Back to Ireland. Meanwhile, up north there's an island that the Romans called Hibernia. It would later be called Ireland. They didn't really bother much with it, Britannia itself was almost too much for them to handle (see: Hadrian's Wall). Hibernia was peopled with unshaven, unwashed, savages. Rome left them alone and when they moved out of Britannia, due to trouble back home, the Romanized Celtic peoples they left behind were at the mercy of said savages. These Scotti, as they were known, liked to raid the coasts of Britain and take slaves. A sixteen year-old boy named Patricius was one of these. Patricius, raised in the civilization and comfort of Roman Britain, found himself a slave, a sheep herder to his barbarian master in Hibernia. The man who would become known as Patrick was a man of few words, and doesn't tell us much about his early life, save that he spent six years hungry and cold tending sheep. He only found consolation in one thing, God. Patrick would pray night and day, that was his only consolation. One day a vision prompted him to escape.
He eventually made his way home, to Britain, but he did not stay. Patrick could not get his former masters out of his mind. Another vision prompted him to be ordained as a priest and bishop, and then head back to Ireland to bring the love of Christ to the dark world he had once escaped. That one spark of light would catch the whole island on fire. In the thirty years from Patrick's return until his death in A.D. 461, Ireland was transformed from a completely pagan to a wholly Christian land. The Irish have never done anything halfway, and their new found faith was no exception. They made literacy the central act of their new religion. In a land that was previously illiterate and in darkness, the written word now became their light. With civilization crumbling to the south, these monks took every book and manuscript they could find, many of them brought back from pilgrimages to Rome. Hebrew scripture, Greek commentary, Greek and Roman classics, Church fathers, their own myths and legends and preserved them. Everything they found was copied, re-copied, translated, copied again. They even invented languages and wrote in those. As their ancestors would collect the heads of their enemies as trophies, now they collected books.
And it did not stop there, the Irish now had to share their new found faith with the world. Among the first was one Columba, who crossed the sea to former Britannia, now taken over by the Anglo-Saxons, and began to teach them about Christ, and how to read. The rest would fan out across Europe, shining light into the fast-darkening world. Charlemagne, who himself could barely write his name, gathered a whole group of Irish monks to educate his children. Many of these Irish missionaries would go on to found monasteries that would later become cities: Liege, Salzburg, Vienna, and Rheinhau. When the Vikings arrived in Iceland in A.D. 870, they found Irish monks. Whether or not they made it all the way to North America is still in debate, but it is possible.
Where they went is less important than what they did. Wherever they went, these Irish brought their books, everything that had been salvaged from the collapsing culture that was Rome. Had they not...well I won't say Western Civilization would have completely disappeared, it probably would have restarted itself somehow. But undoubtedly it would have taken much, much longer.
