My remit in these columns was and remains to write about my favorite books. Period. Not necessarily favorite books about economics, finance or the capital markets – I’d have run out of those a while ago – just: my favorite books.
And since this is the month we celebrate the feast day of the patron saint of my ancestors’ emerald isle, I offer one of my favorite books of all time on any subject, Thomas Cahill’s delightful, insightful 1995 classic, How the Irish Saved Civilization.
St. Patrick (a) did not drive the snakes out of Ireland, (b) did not, so far as anyone knows, preach the mystery of the Blessed Trinity using the shamrock as a prop, and (c) wasn’t Irish. He was a Romanized Briton from a fine middle class family, taken into slavery in an Irish raid at age sixteen, most probably in 407 – the same year the barbarians finally crossed the Danube and the Rhine, and began extinguishing western civilization. They were sacking Rome by 410.
But during his six miserable years as a slave, Patricius – for that was his name – found God, and in time returned home by divine guidance. Twenty years on, God requested the return of the favor: in a dream, Patricius, by now a bishop, was commanded to go back to Ireland, and to evangelize that wild country of raiding, rustling and warring pagans. He succeeded beyond measure.
Ireland, Mr. Cahill reminds us, is the only country ever converted to Christianity without bloodshed; there are no early Irish martyrs. The entire culture took to the Gospel – and its humanizing, civilizing influences – joyously, completely, and all but instantly. Monasteries bloomed everywhere, and in those cloistered spaces scribes set to work copying down the canon of western literature.
And not just holy writ, but every text they could lay hands on. Not for them the scruples of St. Jerome, first translator of the Bible into Latin, who feared he might burn in hell if he read Cicero. The Irish monks were models of – there is no other word for it – catholicity. They preserved not just western Christianity but western civilization itself. “Like the Jews before them,” Mr. Cahill contends, “the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.”
And just in the nick of time. For as wave after wave of illiterate barbarian hordes surged back and forth across Europe, the cultural legacy of Greece and Rome simply ceased to exist. Thus for a hundred years and more – from the middle of the fifth century until late in the sixth – the western canon survived only in the Irish monasteries. (The first installment in Kenneth Clark’s Civilization TV series, titled “The Skin of Our Teeth,” documents this miracle on film.)
The time-constrained financial professional should perhaps be warned that it takes Mr. Cahill a good long while to get to the meat of this story. He or she may therefore, without missing too much that is essential, enter the book at its fourth chapter, “Good news from far off: the first missionary” (page 101 in the paperback). That caveat aside, you certainly don’t have to be Irish to love How the Irish Saved Civilization.
© 2018 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings for advisors in his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. His most recent book is Around the Year with Nick Murray: Daily Readings for Financial Advisors, now available in hardcover or as a password-protected eBook.