Thomas Cahill inaugurated his “Hinges of History” with the popular How The Irish Saved Civilization in 1996. I am unsure if the author at the time had envisioned a series with this volume, but it did provide him an excellent jumping off point for the consideration of Western Civilization from the vantage point of a positive, consensus building progress as opposed to a negative, destructive devolution.
Cahill’s approach provides an increasingly secular culture an intelligently distilled story of how Judeo-Christian Religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular has made Western Civilization what it is today. So often the two “histories” are told independently of one another, when in fact they are inseparable. How The Irish Saved Civilization tells the story of how Irish Monks preserved many writings of the Classic age of Rome and Greece that would have otherwise been lost in the Barbarian onslaught at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
The author uses the juxtaposition of Sts. Patrick and Augustine to illustrate the practical versus the pedantic application of religion, philosophy, spirituality and theology. In The Gifts of the Jews (1999), the author brings Abraham and Sarah to life, in situ, exposing Abraham as the politically powerful individual he was and how he molded a community out of nothing to ultimately become the most potent thought direction in history.
Desire of the Everlasting Hills (2001) tells the story of the world before and after Jesus Christ. Like he did in The Gifts of the Jews, Cahill sympathetically breathes life into those who came before Jesus, those who knew Him best and those who carried His message. Of note is Cahill’s powerful support of the Gospel of Luke and his near-dismissal of John’s account. Cahill’s introduction to the evangelist St. Paul is a revelation, shining a warm bright light on this important and often misunderstood figure.
Cahill addresses the importance of the Greeks in Sailing the Wine Dark Sea (2004). The title is derived from Homer’s Iliad, one of the two large figures looming in the book. The second is the short-lived specter of Alexander the Great and his tremendous impact on the formation of Western Europe.
These books comprise the series “Introduction” and “The Making of the Ancient World,” respectively. Cahill’s newest book, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006) represents the first of three volumes to address “The Making of the Modern World.”
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