Are you disowning your "foundations" claim?

Who Saved Civilization? The Irish, That's Who!
HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION
The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe
By Thomas Cahill


The Ireland of the early fifth century was a brooding, dank island whose inhabitants, while carefree and warlike on the outside, lived in "quaking fear" within, their terror of shape-changing monsters, of sudden death and the insubstantiality of their world so acute that they drank themselves into an insensate stupor in order to sleep.

Patrick, however, provided "a living alternative." He was a serene man who slept well without drink, a man "in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away." The Christianity he proposed to the Irish succeeded because it took away the dread from the magical world that was Ireland. And once they were Christianized, the Irish founded the monastic movement, copying the books being destroyed elsewhere by Germanic invaders, eventually bringing them back to the places from which the books had come.

"And that," Mr. Cahill concludes with typically wry unabashedness, "is how the Irish saved civilization."

The founder of the Cahill & Company Catalogue and the director of religious publishing at Doubleday, Mr. Cahill is a man of learning himself, and his writing is in the great Irish tradition he describes: lyrical, playful, penetrating and serious, but never too serious. And even when his conclusions are not entirely persuasive -- they do in places hang on rather slender reeds of evidence -- they are always plausible and certainly interesting.

"How the Irish Saved Civilization" begins with a mission: to correct the standard history of European civilization, which, Mr. Cahill says, has unfairly portrayed the Irish as wild, not civilized. Along his often picaresque route, Mr. Cahill provides a personal and selective appreciation of the great events and the dramatis personae of the period when the Roman Empire ended and the Dark Ages began, beginning with an account of the reasons for the fall of Rome itself. While far from Gibbonesque in scope or tone, Mr. Cahill's book strikes some Gibbonesque themes, especially that of spiritual decay, the gradual loss of vigor, the onset of a static, effete, imitative and self-satisfied Roman world.

Mr. Cahill's technique in this is to focus on some figure who marks the era. The poet and professor Ausonius, who lived in Bordeaux in the fourth century, is his representative of Rome's slide into emptiness and decay. Contrasting with him is Augustine of Hippo, the St. Augustine of history, whose remarkable codification of the early Christian orthodoxy made him "almost the last great classical man -- and very nearly the first medieval man."

Mr. Cahill uses Augustine as a lens for viewing the great question he poses early on: "What was lost when the Roman Empire fell?" Augustine was a man whose blood boiled, who felt life in a way utterly foreign to the calculating Ausonius. But in the end, he settled on a rigid doctrine. "Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition," Mr. Cahill writes. With his triumph in the Roman world, the spirit of classical civilization was defeated, and would have been defeated forever, Mr. Cahill argues, had it not been for those wild men in a faraway land that had never fallen under Roman rule and had never heard of Augustine: Ireland.

There are other characters in Mr. Cahill's history, the most important of them clearly being Patrick, one of his heroes, a man of less intellectual refinement than Augustine but of greater humanity. Mr. Cahill credits him with being "the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery." There are several swashbuckling men and women of pre-Christian Ireland, like the sexually frank Queen Medb and her rival, the warrior Cuchulainn, both representatives of Irish "barbaric splendor." And there are the monkish scribes and the founders of monasteries, like the sixth-century Columcille, responsible, in Mr. Cahill's theory, for making possible a European world of books.

Is Mr. Cahill's theory correct? One senses a touch of hyperbole when he says that the Irish "singlehandedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent." There is a good deal of speculation in much of this. How, for example, do we really know if Patrick slept well or badly, especially since, as Mr. Cahill notes, we know very little about Patrick at all? There is also a certain vagueness about the central assertion Mr. Cahill makes about the extent of the Irish contribution.

Mr. Cahill does in the end allow, for example, that Greek literature might have been preserved elsewhere even without the Irish, which makes their achievement seem less single-handed than Mr. Cahill elsewhere claimed it to be. The Hebrew and Greek Bibles survived independently of them. "Latin literature," he concludes, "would almost surely have been lost without the Irish," and he further asserts, but without much argument, that the national literatures of Europe might not have emerged had the Irish not forged the first great vernacular literature of Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/irish.html

I also recommend Cahill's The Gift of the Jews.
Reviewed in First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/article/1998/11/002-cahills-gift an in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/15/daily/jews-book-review.html

polite_gandalf wrote on Feb 11^th, 2015 at 11:31am:


I did not misquote you. I quoted exactly what you said. Furthermore you did not merely note a coincidence without attributing it to anything. Again, this is what you said:

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Again I ask, is the Caliphate as a conduit for the knowledge of other civilisations the extent of this "foundation"? What exactly are these foundations?

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So when you cite the Caliphate not capturing Italy's wealth as the reason why it could not do what ancient Rome did, what you really meant is that the Caliphate destroyed that wealth?

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Where did I say this?

polite_gandalf wrote on Feb 13^th, 2015 at 7:48pm:


That says nothing about "dark ages because of Islam".

American social theorist Camille Paglia once remarked that Western society would enter its “late decadent phase” when the ruling hierarchy consisted of the “senile and the adolescent”.

Joe Biden’s age and incoherence should be seen as the personification of the accelerating decline of the West – marked by the growing arrogance, self-interest and hubris of its ruling elites – that has drastically eroded the quality of our governance with devastating implications.

In a paper titled Is Society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modelling Societal Demise and Its Reversal, published last year, Ioannidis and Dutch academics Michaela Schippers and Matthias Luijks find two standout characteristics of civilisations on the brink of collapse: extraordinary levels of inequality combined with ever scarcer resources. The obsession with phasing out energy-rich fossil fuels at whatever the cost to ordinary people’s living standards guarantees the latter for years, while the relentless creation of trillions of units of new fiat currency, pushing up assets’ values to enrich those who have them, ensures the former.

“Societies fall apart and societal dysfunction rises when an ever increasing group of have-nots are unable to sustain themselves, let alone earn the money and produce the food to sustain the rich, and the difference between the elite and masses have become too big to bridge,” Ioannidis writes.

At the same time voters demand cuts to immigration, governments have deliberately flooded their countries with millions of unwanted new immigrants, legal and illegal.

“In the United States, real (inflation-adjusted) incomes at the bottom and the middle of the distribution have hardly increased since 1980, and elected politicians have done little about it,” Acemoglu writes. It’s a statistic that must shock those who express surprise at the growing embrace of radical political movements. And all this is before artificial intelligence wipes out hundreds of millions of low-skilled jobs in coming years.

Nothing confirms the collapse in governing wisdom so much as the destructive response to Covid-19, when across a few years almost all advanced governments crushed their citizens’ living standards, rights and educational outcomes over a new virus whose fatality rate was known among experts from early 2020 to be less than 0.05 per cent.

Last year the Israeli government conceded it couldn’t find a single person under 50 who died from what was ridiculously sold as a “great plague” without serious pre-existing medical conditions.

Such policies pushed 150 million people into extreme poverty and boosted the wealth of the billionaire and centimillionaire class by more than 70 per cent between 2020 and 2021, Ioannidis notes. The further 20 per cent-plus inflation since then added insult to injury as governments forced novel, rushed vaccines on millions of people who didn’t need them and didn’t want them – coincidentally enriching some of the most influential corporations in the world that largely funded the pharmaceutical regulators.

The signs of this growing institutional stupidity or malevolence were already clear during and after the global financial crisis, when gigantic state-backed banks were allowed, indeed encouraged, to leverage themselves to absurd levels, practically inviting the economic collapse.

Paglia’s “adolescent” prognosis is in no short supply either, well evidenced our hysterical and outright dangerous approach to international relations.

Each side of the Israel-Gaza war, for instance, denounces the other as the incarnation of evil when the tragic events of the Middle East are born of a complex history that should, and once did, rule out simplistic moralising.

Similarly, it was once an article of faith by US presidents, leading diplomats and scholars that insisting on NATO troops in Ukraine would be provocative madness. Now, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead, and US foreign policy is pushing the world into two gigantic nuclear armed blocks that hate each other.

Individuals can do little to affect the arc of history, but greater recognition of the growing recklessness, corruption and childishness of our governance may help arrest the devastating trends around us.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/joe-bidens-decline-is-a-perfect-mirr...