On Dec. 31, 406, the river Rhine froze solid, and hundreds of thousands of barbarian Goths crossed over the ice and down into Italy; and one morning, the city of Rome awoke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoth, and all his forces parked at their gates, and great was the fall of the Roman Empire.
It was also a great fall for human civilization, for the barbarians did a splendid job of destroying, burning, and virtually eliminating Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian literature and culture, and thereby the literacy and future of the then-known world. From this point in history began The Dark Ages which would last 1000 years.
In the decade that the Goths crossed the frozen Rhine, Patrick was born a Roman on the west coast of Britain. At the age of 16 he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and carried to Ireland.
For six years, utterly isolated in a bitter cold climate, Patrick was forced to labor as a shepherd-slave. The pain of hunger and agony of solitude were his companions. His greatest resource — Patrick was literate.
One night, at age 22, Patrick heard a voice: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home. Look, your ship is ready.” Patrick walked 200 miles and gained passage on a ship. Arriving on the Continent, he found nothing but the desolation left by the Goths.
Patrick at last makes it home to Britain. No longer is he a carefree teenager, but a visionary. And soon he receives another vision of a man he once knew in Ireland. In the vision the man hands him a letter that reads: “The voice of the Irish. We beg you to come and walk among us once more.” Patrick, the escaped slave, is about to be drafted once more as Saint Patrick, apostle to the Irish nation. It was to a people that had enslaved him and stolen his childhood that Patrick returned with Christ—and literacy!
There is much we do not know about the Irish who came to Europe. But what they knew—the Bible and the literatures of Greece, Rome and Ireland—we know, because Irish monks and religious scholars passed these things on to us. More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen. As late as 870 Heiric of Auzerre can still exclaim in his Life of Saint Germanus: “Almost all of Ireland, despising the sea, is migrating to our shore with a herd of philosophers.”
As the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe barbarians looted and burned books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature.
Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. Beyond that, there would have perished in the West not only literacy but all the habits of mind that encourage thought. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
An overlooked detail of history is this: It was Saint Patrick who redeemed and re-created Ireland and who set the stage for the Irish development of Christianity, the establishment of Irish monasteries, and thereby the centers of scholarship that kept and copied all the literature of the West. It could therefore be said, it was Patrick who saved civilization. Thomas Cahill concludes his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, “If our civilization is to be saved—if we are to be saved, it will not be by the rich and powerful, the Romans, but by saints.”
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