How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

Though the papacy sent Roman missionaries to England, St. Aidan of Lindisfarne is the true “Apostle of England” (200), because the Irish converted most of Northern England. As Irish Christianity spread southward from Iona and Lindisfarne, it confronted the Roman mission that was heading north. Competition and divisions between the two forms of Christianity resulted in the Synod of Whitby, which was held at a double monastery in Northumbria in 664 CE and over which the Northumbrian king presided. The major issue to be decided was the method for calculating the date of Easter. The Roman church viewed the Irish method as unacceptable. The Northumbrian king decided in favor of the Roman Christians, while the Irish monastics conceded that Columba did not hold primacy over the apostle Peter or, by extension, over Rome.

The “fraternal cooperation” between the Irish and the English is more significant, however, than the “trivial” matters debated at Whitby (202-03). Irish monks who founded monasteries for the English instructed them in “scribal arts and reverence for the written word” (203), as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells demonstrate. Significantly, “The Saxons also absorbed the Celtic piety toward their ancestral past, and continued to tell stories of their ancient heroes.