merytsobek

Somewhere I hang out on the internet, someone linked to entertaining post from some obscure imageboard, where the poster was attempting to make the case that the Irish saved Western Civilization after the fall of the Western Roman empire. This claim is based on factual knowledge of Irish Christian monks playing a very strong role in spreading Christian monasticism throughout Western Europe and preserving classical knowledge in literary in a world that was quickly going dark, so to speak.

The poster was obviously (to me) being comedic, or "memeing," as the kids today like to say. I do think there is something to this topic though. Very curiously, Ireland quickly converted to Christianity during the 5th-6th centuries and it seemed like it was done in a rather bloodless manner. But this raises an interesting question: where did all these super-literate Irish monks suddenly come from? Ireland had theretofore been a remote Island distant from the civilized world of Rome's expansive empire; in fact the Romans never conquered it or even bothered to try. So why were the Irish so eager and willing to take on the roles of preservers of classical civilization and spreaders of Christian monasticism?

My pet theory is that the remaining Druids of Ireland (or some faction or subset of them) saw the writing on the wall and preemptively converted to Christianity. These Druids became Christian monks and attempted to makeover Christianity in their own image, thus creating "Celtic Christianity" (which has mostly been memory-holed), which lasted awhile before eventually having to conform to the Roman model as institutional church infrastructure became more established throughout the British Isles.

I think this trend first started in Britain actually, circa the 4th century AD, where some learned Celtic Britons still had residual traces of Druidism in their culture and converted to Christianity with that mentality shaping their interpretation. See the Christian theologian Pelagius, who stressed the concept of free will and totally denied original sin. Augustine of Hippo was of course his archenemy because of that and everything we know today of "Pelagianism" is mostly Augustine's strawman version of whatever it was Pelagius actually taught.

In short, the Druids ended up making a brief comeback as the intellectual/spiritual class of Western Europe, this time in Christian monastic robes. The carried many of their old Druidic habits into the new faith they adopted. Being voracious lovers of knowledge, diligent preservers of culture, and charismatic poets and storytellers, were things that came as second nature to the Druids. So in my estimation, Druidry never really died out completely, but it sure did change form quite a lot as the classical world fell into ruins and gave way to the world of medieval European Christendom. Going from scrawling ogham fews on rocks to writing and copying alphabetic manuscripts is probably not as wide as a leap as it might seem.