How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

Between the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 CE and the last Western emperor’s murder in 476 CE, the Roman Empire’s instability increased due to rising brigandry and frequent raids that ravaged lands, devastated property, and destroyed written records. Although the invaders spared Romans' lives, “sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, property, way of life, learning—especially learning” (35). Imperial collapse is not conducive to manuscript preservation or institutional learning’s survival. The empire shrank as Roman troops retreated from the frontiers, leaving former provinces easily overwhelmed by Germanic peoples like the Angles and the Saxons, among others. Free Romans, including the Romano-British Christian Patricius (Patrick), were subjected to enslavement.

St. Augustine of Hippo’s life serves as an example of what the world lost when the Roman Empire collapsed. Cahill claims that Augustine was the first writer with a self-awareness that made him “the father not only of autobiography but of the modern novel” (41). Classical literature such as the Roman epic poem the Aeneid inspired Augustine, who “vernacularized” Latin, previewing the “people’s” Latin of the Middle Ages (46). The Roman rhetorician Cicero also inspired Augustine, and he employed Cicero’s methods to promote the Christian religion. Augustine was born a pagan and struggled to find meaning and fulfillment in life; this led him to study the Greek philosopher Plato. Augustine noticed similarities between Plato’s teaching and the epistles of the apostle Paul of Tarsus that prompted his conversion and inspired his religious vocation.

In Cahill's view, the Roman Empire provided stability, which inspires human “confidence” (59). With the empire’s fall, that confidence disintegrated, and the world that gave birth to Platonic thought, the Aeneid, and Cicero’s art of persuasion vanished. Laying the groundwork for his argument, Cahill writes that “the works themselves will miraculously escape destruction” (59), although book ownership became foreign to most medieval people. Roman civilization disappeared “to be reassembled and assessed by scholars of later ages from the texts miraculously preserved in the pages of its books” (60). Roman law, however, carried on, but not through Roman rulers. Rather, clerics became responsible for teaching the legal and governmental system to their superiors; it was "the task of the bishop—often the only man who still had any books of any kind and, save for his scribes, the only man who could read and write—to 'civilize' the ruler" (62).

Augustine was one such bishop. Rome’s pillaging at the hands of the Visigoths in 410 CE inspired his treatise The City of God, in which he saw Rome “doomed to perish” (64). In his later years, Augustine persecuted Christian heretics, setting a precedent for the late medieval era's Inquisition and political persecutions, and becoming an "evil cleric, full of mercy for those who fear him, full of seething contempt for those who dare oppose him […]” (67).