On a theological level, the most important contribution of the Irish church was its penitential practice. But on a cultural level, a holdover from Celtic paganism led them to make a far more wide ranging contribution to western history.

Irish Paganism

We don’t know much about Irish paganism, or for that matter any Celtic pagan religion. The reason is simple: they never wrote anything down. Like many native American tribes, they believed that important things had to be kept in memory for them to remain alive. And so they never wrote down anything about their beliefs or rituals. In fact, they only had a rudimentary writing system (the Ogham alphabet, pronounced ōm) that was made for putting inscriptions on standing stones.

We do know that they practiced human sacrifice—we’ve found the bodies.

We also know that Celtic priests, known as Druids, were repositories of cultural knowledge. Along with the things you might expect such as religion, mythology, ritual, and magic, Druids also had to know oratory, poetry, music, law, history, and a host of other subjects, all learned orally. Candidates were first trained as a filid, or bard, and then, after literally decades of study and practice, they could eventually become a Druid.

Patrick’s Mission

When Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, many of his first converts were Druids. Patrick’s time as a slave in Ireland gave him insight into the culture which enabled him to present the Gospel in a form the Irish could understand and relate to. His message seems to have focused on Christ as the pantokrator, the all-powerful ruler of heaven and earth.

I can’t prove this, but I suspect Patrick may have told them that their gods demanded that they sacrifice their children for them; the true God sacrificed his Son for us, and that by so doing he triumphed over all the other gods and received all authority in heaven and earth. This is a message that Druids would understand.

From Druids to Monks

Since Irish pagan holy men had a comprehensive knowledge of the culture, Irish Christians naturally assumed their clergy would similarly need a deep knowledge of Christianity. And so they set out to study the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, philosophy, and anything else connected to Christian culture.

Literacy

But there was a problem: the Irish were illiterate. On top of that, they had never been conquered by Rome, so they did not know Latin. And to make things even more difficult, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were all written as an unbroken string of letters without spaces between words, capitalization, or punctuation. That made their task even more difficult.

To make things easier, the Irish introduced word spaces and rudimentary punctuation. This changed reading from a secondary means of learning—traditionally, people learned things orally and used the texts as reminders—into a primary means of learning. In the process, they also changed forever how texts are written and essentially invented modern reading.

With the spread of literacy in the monasteries, Irish monks became supremely well educated. The result was that Ireland became “the island of saints and scholars.” In contrast, on the continent, Roman education had fallen by the wayside in the stresses caused by the collapse of the western half of the Empire. By the seventh and eighth century, if you ran into someone in western Europe who knew Latin and Greek (and maybe Hebrew), that person was inevitably an Irish monk.

Irish Missionaries on the Continent

Through the practice of peregrinatio (pilgrimage, a topic we’ll return to in a later post), Irish monks reintroduced education to the continent. The most important example of this was Columbanus, who founded monasteries in Burgundy at Annegray, Fontaines, and Luxeuil, and in Italy at Bobbio. Luxeuil and its daughter monastery at Corbie trained scribes that wrote or copied many of the documents that survive from eighth century Europe.

Alcuin of York

But there were other ways that the Irish emphasis on learning shaped continental scholarship and education. The church in York, England, was founded by Celtic missionaries. Its schoolmaster Alcuin, who may have been trained at Clonmacnoise in Ireland, introduced the late Roman liberal arts curriculum in the school. When Charlemagne wanted to set up an educational system for the continent, he asked York to send Alcuin as the best scholar in Europe to come to direct the program. Through Alcuin, the liberal arts became the foundation for European education.

Alcuin was also responsible for standardizing the texts used in the Empire and for copying any manuscripts from the classical world that they had access to. Many of our earliest manuscripts of classical literature were produced during this period. Without Alcuin’s program, we would have lost these works.

To copy these manuscripts, Alcuin had his scribes trained in a style of handwriting that we call Carolingian minuscules. This was based on Irish uncial and half uncial scripts and was a very clear and elegant hand. This style of writing was revived in the Italian Renaissance under the mistaken impression that it was from ancient Rome. It then became known as italic script, which forms the basis for our lettering styles today.

Impact

The pagan Irish tradition of education for their holy men, translated into Christianity, had a tremendous impact on western European culture in the Middle Ages. Literacy, education, the preservation of classical literature, how we read and write, all were a result of cultural expectations among the Irish when they received Christianity. These developments continue to shape our society today.