How the Irish Saved Civilization

How the Irish Saved Civilization
By Thomas Cahill
Published in March 1995
246 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

This book is entertaining but stupid.

I enjoyed reading it. Something about the writing style is amusing. The historical anecdotes are entertaining. However, based on everything that I know about history, this book gets a lot of stuff wrong.

The big picture is correct - there were some Irish monks in the early Middle Ages who played a key role in the preservation and transmission of ancient literature to the present. These Irish monks travelled across Europe, founding dozens of monasteries, including (weirdly enough) in St. Gallen Switzerland, where I used to live.

However, the detailed step by step narrative made me cringe. At some points I laughed.

My favorite stupid claim is when the author goes on a very long diatribe about how St. Augustine was the first person to write a first person narrative autobiography. He acknowledges that while St. Augustine isn’t the first person to use the word “I” ; he is the first to write about his own psychology and feelings.

This is a stupid claim. Some of the oldest pieces of writing we have are written in the first person. Shocker: as soon as people can write, they write about themselves. We have some fragmentary tablets from Sumeria dated to 3400 BC called the Kushim tablets which contain some accounts of people talking about doing business. The first detailed autobiography is the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin written in 1900 BC. By the time of classical Greece, there are countless autobiographies. The favorite that I have read is Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Although I haven’t read them fully, I have listened to clips on YouTube from Herodotus’ History and Xenophon’s Anabasis. These are all autobiographies with deep psychological self reflections.

Some Roman autobiographies - such as Cesar - did use the third person, but likely out of respect. Cesar was dictating to a scribe, and the scribe didn’t want to claim glory for Cesar’s acts so the scribe wrote “Cesar crossed the Rubicon” etc…

That being said, only about 40 Roman books have survived in full, and about 150 in fragmentary form. So if you narrow the category of book arbitrarily to “fully intact autobiography written in the first person with deep psychological reflections about spiritual themes that don’t primarily seek to give advice to others” then St. Augustine might be a first.

This book is full of weird bold claims like that which completely fall apart under scrutiny.

There are sweeping claims about the role of women in Ireland and the rest of Europe. The author makes the claim that women in Ireland had many rights while they were enslaved in Europe. Once again, some context is needed. That may be true to an extent, but the Irish practiced sex slavery. On the other hand, there were many great women in antiquity. On the political side, women like Livia (the wife of Augustus) and Theodora (the wife of Justinian) essentially governed many aspects of the Roman state. On the scientific side, there are thinkers like the mathematician Hypatia or Plato’s female student Diotima. Although much has been lost, we have some fragments of many great female scholars in antiquity - there is an early chemist called Cleopatra (not to be confused with the Egyptian queen), a grammarian and historian called Agallis, and a philosopher and mathematician called Aesara. Just as today some women in some places live horrible lives, and others live good lives.

To me the hallmark of bad history is when authors make very bold sweeping claims about “the first” or “there were no cases before” which can very easily be contested after about 15 minutes on Google. Good history might instead say “a remarkably early example” or “one of the earliest.” I find that a lot of popular history books tend to fall into this trap.

Although I don’t know much about Irish history, there are enough mistakes in the parts of the book that I do know about that it casts a shadow of doubt on the rest.

That being said, the book is very well written. At the time, in 1995, it was a best seller. The writing was so engaging that I finished it, and was able to chuckle and overlook the many mistakes or inaccuracies.

I wouldn’t recommend this book. It will be boring for historians because its very basic. As for non-historians, the book is dangerous because it is well written but full of mistakes. If you want to read it, be sure to do so with a very skeptical mindset.

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