Quotes from Thomas Cahill

There is within this worldview a terrifying personal implication: that I myself have no fixed identity but am, like the rest of reality, essentially fluid—essentially inessential.

the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en

For the great Gaels of Ireland," wrote G. K. Chesterton, Are the men that God made mad. For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.

Development" and "evolution"—words of such importance to us—would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where everything that was—their city, their fields, their herds, their plows—had always been.

Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion).

If there are no books. There is no civilization.

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)

They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions.

The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.)

Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure—the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.

The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as "glamour." In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.

I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there.

We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.

This was why sudden death was so feared: it did not give you time to put your spiritual house in order. You might have meant to repent but hadn't quite got round to it. Too bad. Down you go. All the way.

Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value.

Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.