Robaird O’Cearbhaill
Hong Kong Correspondent
From the 6th century AD until the 12th century, Irish monks’ missions were a dedicated and skilled educative force that evangelized the Germanic nomadic tribes that invaded Western Europe and destroyed much of the old Roman infrastructure.
This was a crucial moderating evangelization and with that came farming culture new to the nomads. The monks also re-evangelized lapsed Catholics in the continental Church that was fragile and reintroduced the classic Roman and Greek books, the core of traditional education. The Irish-founded monasteries were just the only places to get education and religious life and culture. They attracted craftsmen and trade, eventually forming new towns, some of which became cities. Universities emerged from the monasteries and cathedral schools. For example The University of Paris began originally as an Irish foundation school.
As the Irish monk scholars excelled in science, monastery building, philosophy, astrology and maths, the foundations for the later Middle Ages’ growth in knowledge were taking place.
Since this strong culture was so beneficial, why did it not keep maintaining and expanding its position? And why has there been little attention given to the long period of growth that saved civilization and the Church?
The European continental Church had been strengthened by the Irish monasteries and their scholarship. But repeated violent pillaging attacks in Ireland by the illiterate pagan Vikings damaged religious communities, where missionaries came from. There was also competition from improved French, German and Italian religious orders.
From Denmark and Norway the Vikings robbed and burned down monasteries and abbeys and killed the residents. Books were sought after, because they were so expensive before printing was invented, that they sometimes had jewels in the covers then the books were often burnt. Among weakened religious orders, monasteries and abbeys had to rebuild and rebuild again.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793 illustrates how the great centers of learning were destroyed (the wonderful Lindisfarne, founded by Irish monks in Northern England). “On the sixth of the Ides (mid -month) of June the ravaging of the heathen men lamentably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.”
As Thomas Cahill’s history of those times explained: “Monks were stripped and tortured; and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire, in 806 to kill scores of monks, in 867 to burn the rebuilt abbey. In 875 harried survivors left Lindisfarne for good.” In the first decade of the ninth century came the turn of the famous abbey that christianized Scotland Columcille’s Iona, where “a great number of lay folks and clerics were massacred” in repeated raids. The great foundation had at last to be abandoned.
But over time the Vikings became more ordered as they settled and locally intermarried, both in Britain and Ireland. Some became Catholics but the bases for the Irish missions to Europe had been much destroyed. As Cahill wrote, “Ireland would never recover its cultural leadership of European civilization. Nevertheless the Irish way had already become the leaven of medieval civilization, the unidentified ingredient that suffused the bread of Europe, enabling it to breathe and grow.”
Despite the savage setbacks, one soaring Irish intellectual, born in 810, went to France over thirty years later and became highly regarded. The first European philosopher for 300 years since Boethius, executed in 524, was John Scotus or Johannes Scotus Eriugena. (Photo: The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, from Wikipedia)
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