Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (32 page)

Jesus the Jewish man was abandoned. In his place was created the risen Christ, the god divorced from Judaism and made palatable even to the mouths of anti-Semites. The separation of the cloth of Christianity from the fabric of Judaism was done by a succession of tailors, some infinitely skilled, others who understood little more than hacking and tearing. Paul, Christ’s own disciple, made the first cut, many others would follow until the Christian would scorn the idea that Judaism was his rightful mother. Centuries later under the hand of pale-faced fanatics, named Cromwell and Luther, Christianity would move back again toward the aesthetics and stricture of Jewish law and call itself Protestantism.

The fervor and ardency of early Christianity was based in large part on the certainty of Christ’s return. The spirit must be made pure and quickly so that it might dwell in Paradise with its maker. Centuries though, ticked over, faded and were gone, a tracery of breath in a universe of fog and still the Prince did not return to the castle. Even the millennium, numbered by the event of his birth, could not lure him back to earth.

In the meantime, though it took three centuries to happen, Rome the Great Whore of Babylon, the Mother who took from the cradle of Greece the infant of Western civilization and nurtured it to young adulthood, was dying. But with her last breath, she gave her maternal blood to the Church, leaving it what strength she might. It was a generous legacy.

In the Church, Caesar and Christ blended and became one, the fiery passion of the Jewish intellect, the love and vision of one solitary man combined with the law and order, discipline and unity of the Roman Empire. Christ died to save all mankind, Rome, to give life to the Church. It was a case of the old making way for the brash newcomer. Birth and death would remain the two great mysteries of the Church and of humankind itself.

The Church would always maintain Rome as its seat, building upon the three pillars of sacrament, mediation and communion, but its supplicants and true believers would take all roads leading from Rome, dispersing upon the winds and taking God with them to every corner and every human being they crossed along the way. Warriors who would both wound and heal as they traveled the rocky road to the Holy City, Jerusalem. Fevered blackbirds from Spain and Portugal who would fly across the water to the New World, under the banner of ‘Ad majorem dei Gloriem.’ Anything and all for the greater glory of God. Many would give their lives; some would even give their souls trying to convert a race of people who did not want a white God, descending from a white Paradise.

In Ireland it was less Caesar, more Christ. Before Patrick, he who banished snakes and brought God, the Irish had a highly developed society. Nonetheless history, written in part by Rome, would remember them as barbarians, savage Celts, naked and hairy, having barely crawled from the cave. They had an alphabet, extensive literature, poetry and legend, passed down in the oral tradition round fires under star-strained skies. Their art took form in the molds of clay, bronze and gold. They worshipped nature, the sun, stars and moon and populated their land with countless fairies, demons and pointy-eared elves. Their priests were white-robed druids who ruled through magic and controlled the movement of sun and moon, rain and fire, using wands and wheels. They foretold the future, counseled kings, educated the young, formulated law, studied astronomy and faded into extinction with the coming of the other priests, the black-robed ones who would hold sway over the hearts and minds of the Irish for centuries to come.

Perhaps it was inevitable, being bound by water on all sides, to believe that heaven lay across its fluid surface, in the mists. A land where there was nothing of harshness, nothing of pain or treachery, but only music and fairness. The Avalon of the Celts.

But then Patrick came and brought with him a soul divided from nature and the pure longing for another world and a man whose absence seemed the root of all human sorrow. Born in England of a Roman citizen he was christened Patricius, moderately educated, but nevertheless so well versed in his Bible that he could quote it in its entirety. Captured at sixteen by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland, he was to spend the next six years as a pig herder. It was there in the lonely hills that he found God in all His consuming glory. He was devoted, rising each day at dawn to pray in snow, rain or hail, finding in the discomfort some echo of his master’s voice.

He escaped to the sea, was picked up by sailors and taken to Gaul. He worked his way back to England and his parents and stayed with them for a few years. But Ireland was in his blood, she called across the sea to him, she came to him in dreams and he knew his return was inevitable. He studied for the priesthood, was ordained and when the Bishop of Ireland, a man by the name of Palladius, died, Patrick was made Bishop and took up the ecclesiastical sword for the church.

A pagan still sat on the throne of Ireland and though Patrick failed to convert him, he was granted permission to establish his mission.

Over the next thirty years of his sojourn in Ireland he would be credited with many miracles, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, cleansing lepers, casting out demons, raising the dead, but perhaps the real miracle was the conversion of an entire nation from paganism to Christianity. Patrick, former slave and a man who had always been a misfit in the Roman world, brought Christ to Ireland and put Ireland into Christ. Separating the Church from Rome and all the sociopolitical baggage that came with that august city-state. In Ireland the Church would gain a new face and become irrevocably Irish, giving a sly wink to held over pagan festivities, keeping custom with May Day and All Hallow’s Eve but casting away the harsher elements, the ritual sacrifice, the bonds of slavery, the swords of battle.

British Christianity did not recognize the Irish as Christian because they were not Roman. The British believed that the terms Christianity and Roman were one and the same. If you weren’t one you couldn’t possibly be the other. Patrick’s cry to heaven may have been the first Irish cry to God for the implacability of the British heart but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

‘Can it be that they do not believe that we have received one baptism or that we have one God and Father? Is it a shameful thing in their eyes that we have been born in Ireland?’ The answer may well have been yes, both then and fifteen centuries later.

Even the British could not alter Patrick’s legacy to the Irish and Irish Catholicism would always retain some traces of paganism and be, at its heart, inherently Irish. Patrick, for his own part, established monasteries and nunneries, ordained priests, built churches and left his children well-guarded spiritually from the older order and religion, which had begun its death throes when Patrick first alit on the shores of the island. He died in 461 AD , an Irishman on Irish soil.

Two offshoots of Patrick’s legacy were literacy and the formation of the Church in Ireland around the central hub of monasteries. Monks, seeking non-violent martyrdom, would seek out a remote spot beyond the pale of tribal boundaries. There in huts of daub and wattle, shaped like beehives, they sought solitude, shared only with the Lord. But martyrs inevitably attract their like and soon small communities of beehive abodes would spring up around these men, forming communities, which in turn threw out their own tendrils of succor attracting even more people. These monasteries would often become centers of learning and one of these would even become a university of sorts, attracting students from all parts of Ireland, Britain and Europe.

Never literary snobs, the monks filled their libraries with every book that came to hand. All of Christian doctrine devoured and copied, they did not shirk from the delights of Greek and Latin pagan literature. Words were of value merely for being words, no language too far above or below their interest to be of merit. Much of the literature that survived the dark ages that were devouring Europe was owed to the long, candlelit nights of patient Irish monks, copying millions of words and giving all of humanity a priceless gift.

There would be saints to follow Patrick, Columcille who would go to war over a book and be exiled from the land he loved for taking up arms. He would suffer the same fate as millions of his countrymen would centuries later, banished to another land, fated to die on foreign soil and never to cease dreaming of Ireland. Brigid, well believed to be the saint most influential after Patrick. A rebellious noblewoman, cast away from her family for her love of the poor and afflicted, she was to rule as High Abbess over a double monastery, an institution that admitted and housed novitiates of both genders. She was the center of her own city, a city of supreme beauty and countless wonders, where the treasure of kings was guarded well and numberless crowds came to festivals, came to watch, came to worship, came for safety and sanctuary.

In the meantime, continental Europe had fallen into a darkness it would not emerge from for centuries. In the first decade of the fifth century, a horde of barbarians crossed the frozen Rhine and broke what had once seemed unbreakable, the line of Roman defense and the backbone of the Empire. Rome fell under the onslaught of illiterate barbarians, crumbling into the dustpile of history, while Christianity clung to life on barren rocks in the Atlantic Ocean. The Germanic hordes, who, in seeking Rome destroyed it, warmed their hands over the blaze of libraries, burning thousands of years of history without a qualm, unable to read, they neither understood nor cared for the power of books.

Scholars of all description and denominations fled to Ireland, a land out beyond the recollection of the Empire, a green and quiet oasis in a world gone mad. Bone-thin Egyptian aesthetics carrying Coptic script, cloth-bound Armenians with the gleam of fanaticism in their eyes, olive-skinned Syrians still smelling of sand and the scorch of desert sun, all fleeing the wrath of hairy, smelly barbarians who would usher in the Middle Ages, a time of illiterates ruling illiterates, when Christianity would be narrowed down to something hard and mean that Christ had certainly never intended.

Ireland at peace, housed the monks who copied the books that were left in the world, they living in their bee-loud glade were the last literary culture as the Roman eagle vanished from the skies and human memory. Only one thing stood between Ireland and Europe and that was England. Columcille, leaving Ireland, crossed that divide. Following him were monks who wandered Europe trading books, small pockets of light in a continent of darkness. Most of them would never see the shores of their mother country again. With them went the institution of the Irish monastery, the seeds of which would begin to spring up all over Europe. ‘They changed their skies but not their souls.’ And saved civilization as we know it.

But as was inevitable the world found them out and the Vikings found them sleeping the sleep of those too long used to peace. The tall red men came in off Northern seas to pillage, rape, torture and destroy all that lay in their path. For some three hundred years, fires would blaze across Ireland burning monasteries and the communities they were the center of, again and again.

There would never really be peace again for Ireland, for not far behind the Vikings came the Normans. And though the Normans became as it was said ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’ those who followed would not show the same inclination to blend in with the local culture. The Elizabethans would come and plunder the forests in an attempt to flush out the natives who had already learned that they could not meet the British on their ground and trust them and so took to the forests and fought them guerrilla style. The British would also contemplate the complete annihilation of the Irish people but would save that task for Cromwell who would come a century later and almost achieve the task of genocide. It was Cromwell who would pass law forbidding Catholics to own land anywhere but in the westernmost and least fertile portion of Ireland, known as Connacht.

Ireland had been held by the British since 1171 under the excuse that the island could be used by France or Spain as a base of attacks, but it had never really been conquered and, as the British would learn to their own sorrow, the Irish never would be conquered. This knowledge, however, did not stop the British from trying. Elizabeth I saw a Catholic Ireland as a dire threat to Protestant England and to that end ordered an enforcement of Protestantism throughout the island. Mass was outlawed, monasteries closed down, priests survived only by going into hiding, able to administer to a scant few. Irish society, deprived of its moral underpinning, descended into chaos. Murder, rape and theft abounded. The Irish leaders appealed to the Pope for help and he in turn sent an Irish blackbird, a devoted and courageous man, a Jesuit, home. His name was David Wolfe and he, in establishing forbidden missions and secretly bringing in other Jesuits to administer to the people, gave the people back some glimmer of hope.

Under Elizabeth’s iron fist, the Irish, never a people to take no for an answer, continued to rise again and again, fighting recklessly and bravely. Elizabeth would respond with massacres in which men, women and children were all put to the sword. Famine left some counties almost entirely bereft of their native people. Peace, bought with blood and souls, came in the form of desolation. The seeds of it scattered with a bountiful hand by the English would sow a hatred so entrenched that it would divide Ireland from England forever.

After Cromwell and his pogroms came the Penal Laws, denuding Catholics of the most basic of human rights. The light of Ireland began to seek warmer shores, she would lose her great minds to countries that could feed and nurture them. Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, all of one nation, divided and sundered before God.

Catholic resistance to English rule, borne of dread desperation, was sporadic and ineffectual. The leaders of uprisings inevitably found their end on the scaffold, many barely past boyhood, still with the flush of youth on their cheek.