While not a book about theology, it is a really interesting part of church history. The Germanic people who had adapted the Roman agriculture had a population explosion because of it. In 406, they crossed the Danube and the Rhine into Rome for the first time and 476 saw the death of the last Roman Emprorer and the fall of the Roman Empire. Cahill then states that Augustine is the "last classical man" and the first "Medieval man". After the fifth century, the law was mostly carried out by the church. Meanwhile during all this time, the dominant culture in Ireland was the Spanish Celts, who entered in the 4th century BC and were an illiterate, semi-nomadic, Iron Age warrior culture, that advanced little. Their economy was based on property such as animals and slaves. Patrick was a Roman Briton taken to Ireland as a slave at the age of about 15, in 400. He escaped 7 years later and returned 25 years after that to be a missionary for the last 30 years of his life.
The Irish, whose culture was big on sacrifices, adopted "green martyrdom", which was moving to remote locations and subsistence living, while devoting oneself to learning and to God. This quickly led to the monastic tradition. They brought in and copied as many books as they could, learning all they could, amassing vast libraries (the largest in the world). The burning of the Library in Alexandria, was really a series of destruction from an attack by Aurelian in 270s, the decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391, ten years after the First Council of Constantinople, and the decree of the second caliph Omar ibn Al-khattab in 640.
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| The Rise and Fall of Rome |
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