Thomas Cahill: Great Historian

We have lost a great historian with the death of Thomas Cahill.  We discuss his books and why his work was so compelling.  

Transcript

Thomas Cahill: Great Historian

November 2022

I learned last week that Thomas Cahill passed away at the age of 82. When a movie star or rock singer passes, there usually is much commentary around the passing. I even got on the bandwagon of writing a piece about Meat Loaf’s death in this podcast entitled Americans, Meat Loaf, Maturation and Mortality, and available for download on this platform. :https://www.buzzsprout.com/1048399/9984951. That is why 2022 was doubly interesting and sad for the passing of not one but two prominent historians, and both received write-ups akin to celebrities. 

I always think there are two fascinating things about Thomas Cahill, a great historian. 

The first was the style of his “Hinges of History” series, and the second was that Cahill toiled in relative obscurity until the publication, in 1995, of the How The Irish Saved Civilization, published when he was 55 years old. I get that the title is a little hyperbolic, and I did not even buy his whole premise. The Byzantines were still around in 500 CE, and they knew a little something about civilization. But it was still an interesting take, and the writing style was marvelously engaging.

I will get the critical stuff out of the way. One academic critic sniffed at his work, calling it pop history. But was Cahill’s research fundamentally flawed? His craft is that of a poser. Or was he just good at telling a non-fictional story? A classical composer can snub Bruce Springsteen, but it does not change the power or majesty of Darkness on the Edge of Town or Thunder Road. And the ever-reliable New York Times said of Cahill, “Cahill is no historian, but he doesn’t pretend to be. You don’t get any ground-breaking scholarship (and if more recent examples of such scholarship are typical, you don’t miss it, either). What you do get in his books is a guided trek around the standard texts, and we should be grateful to anyone willing to demonstrate that the study of history actually is a bit interesting.” 

No historian? If a historian’s research, analyze, interpret, and write about the past by studying historical documents and sources, then that is precisely what he was doing. However, some of these thoughts tell more about the sources, in this case, the times, than they do about the subject.

More accurate was the Jewish Bulletin, “Thomas Cahill looks at history with the rigor of a scholar but explains it simply, with the skill of a gifted teacher...He conveys with a fresh lens a legacy ‘so much a part of us that we scarcely recognize it.”

Born in New York City to Irish-American parents and raised in Queens and the Bronx, Cahill was educated by Jesuits and studied ancient Greek and Latin. He continued his study of Greek and Latin literature, as well as medieval philosophy, scripture, and theology, at Fordham University, where he completed a B.A. in classical literature and philosophy in 1964 and a pontifical degree in philosophy in 1965. He completed his M.F.A. in film and dramatic literature at Columbia University in 1968.

I love the off-hand note. Here we have a trained classicist who studied medieval philosophy and knew film work. It gets worse. 

In anticipation of writing his work The Gifts of the Jews, Cahill studied scripture at Union Theological Seminary in New York and spent two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he studied Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible. 

Oh, He also reads French and Italian. In 1999, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Alfred University in New York. Sometimes God bestows too many gifts on single individuals, and Cahill was one of those recipients. I am no Marxist, but a slight redistribution of such talent, like to me, would have been nice. But I digress.  

Of the work that brought him fame, Cahill wrote within, “Wherever they went, the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies heads. Where they went, they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.” His work was full of interesting insights and nuggets, such as that Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. 

What Cahill did was hard. The easiest of history is the biography because it provides an excellent map to follow, where to look, and what to prepare. If I were to do epic work on the French Revolution, I would almost have to possess a working knowledge of French and a deep understanding of late 18th and early 19th-century French history and culture. And where do I start? With Louis XIV, who spent all of the money? With the enlightenment or Rosseau? With the storming of the Bastille?    

One of the reasons journalists turn historians so often do both biographies, and American ones at that, is because it is so much simpler to access the necessary primary and secondary sources and have a clear direction for the book. Of course, many of these folk do not do their research and writing, they source it out, but at least at a high level, they need to know something about their subject.  

Cahill did not farm out the work. No telltale “with” on his book covers. Just take his first Hinges of History book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. First, he needed detailed research on the Irish of St. Patrick’s day and their culture both before and after his arrival in 5th century Ireland, as well as all of the missionaries and their work after Patrick’s death. Then, because Cahill compares Patrick to Augustine of Hippo, he needed to know about late Imperial Rome and Augustine himself. Finally, he had to compare the two in both good (in Cahill’s estimation, mostly Patrick) and bad (Cahill was not a fan of Augustine).  

Then Cahill did something even more extraordinary. A historian is much like a filmmaker who, it is said, a 10-hour day yields about 8-10 minutes of the film. Less if they are shooting an action scene. Think of all that film on the “cutting room floor,” as they say. A historian is similar in that we spend hours and hours researching to find nuggets of information that will prove helpful. For example, I am working on a piece for late 19th America on the election of 1894. A key figure at that time was Congressman Richard “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri. There is very little about him online, so I need to sift through volumes of works on late 19th century America to find nuggets about his life and, furthermore, about his belief in a silver-based currency. And this is just one of the figures I am working with others, including Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. I also need to know about the so-called Gilded Age and the Panic of 1893. But my material is in English, and a lot of it is accessible in places like Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana.  

Cahill followed up his work on the Irish in the 5th century C.E. by going back to the beginning of history itself with the Sumerians of the 27th century B.C.E., a slight difference of, oh, about 32 hundred years. This was in service to his book Gifts of the Jews, my favorite of his collection. So now Cahill was mining through old Sumerian texts and trying to learn about the fictional Gilgamesh and the real-life Hammurabi. Then for comparison, he moves to the Bible and teaches about Abraham or Avram.  

In a later work, he goes Northeast for a brilliant book on the Greeks, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea. Finally, for his book about Jesus called The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Cahill returns to Palestine but is now dealing with Aramaic and featuring figures such as Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John, and most of all, Saul of Tarsus or later St. Paul. This book breaks down his thoughts on who these men were, and his comments on Luke, the gentile in his mind, especially reveal the nature of Christianity, or at least the nature according to Luke and Cahill. 

Cahill’s journeys then lead him to monasteries for his book on medieval Europe, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, and finally to Italy, where he expounds on art for the Renaissance in his Heretics and Heroes. Incredible. It is not just the depth and breadth of Cahill’s writing between these books but within them as well. And yet, through it all, he presents himself as the following the best path for historians, going out and finding the facts, then assembling them to create a narrative and not the other way round.

And Cahill, like myself, delights in the anomalous. One example from Sailing the Wine Dark Sea comes from Homer’s Iliad, showing us a scene with Trojan Prince Hector and his family. 

Hector’s son does something amusing, and the Trojan hero and his wife laugh. It is one of the only examples showing family life in ancient times and the only example in the literature up until the 18th century. 

Another is the observation that crucifixion was such a horrible punishment that contemporaries who had seen one never depicted it in terms of Jesus’ death. It was not until the 500s C.E., after the fall of the Roman West and the end of this terrible infliction, that medieval artist started to depict Jesus on the cross. Perhaps Cahill learned these things from other historians. But, for me, it is of no matter. I learned all of this, and much more, from him.  

One of the tricks so-called popular historians do is to keep their works centered on a specific group of people or even a specific time. Remember all that research? It can be stored for later use in a later book. I love Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, but instead of venturing to other times or topics, he does biographies on prominent figures in that original work. This is not a criticism. Ellis is a great historian and strong writer, but instead, this is a comparison demonstrating the monumental nature of the Hinges of History.  

Here are some examples of his work.  

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

“Human beings never know more than a part, as “through a glass darkly”; all knowledge comes to us in pieces. Like fish who do not know they swim in the water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out, almost as if that were its most obvious quality...”

In the commentary, we hear from the historian himself. “For me, the historian’s principal task should be to raise the dead to life. Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind. The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C...the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.” That last one is typical of Cahill in making these wonderful comparisons and providing us with the insight we hitherto lacked.

More from Sailing the Wine Dark Sea:

“Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there would be no Greek reading public till we reached the fifth century B.C...There was, instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests. Human beings never know more than a part, as “through a glass darkly,”; all knowledge comes to us in pieces.”

Here are some passages from The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, published in 1999. Cahill, partially trained by Jesuits, understood the nature of his subject, “Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another.” There is that fun scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (well, at least not fun for the millionaire guy) where it is shown that the cup of Christ is just a simple drinking vessel. Cahill understood that Jesus was not wealthy nor a trained priest, and he brings the historical Jesus to life in a way that no Catholic priest ever has, at least not for me.

As I noted, Cahill loved comparisons with Patrick and Augustine; Here, he compares Alexander to Plato. “Alexander was, therefore, “the Great,” the greatest man who had ever lived. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of the man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napoleon enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and commandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race.” It is another of those wonderful comparisons that Cahill notes that if Alexander is the superman, what does a man of peace look like in Ancient Times? Jesus was an original in his time and still in ours.  

My favorite is the one that, though written after the Irish book, chronologically comes before all the other books. Here is a quote from Gifts of the Jews, published in 1998, “Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible, and an individual life can have value.” And “Development” and “evolution”—words of such importance to us—would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where everything that was—their city, their fields, their herds, their plows—had always been.” Here Cahill leads us to the center of the values and cultures we hold dear today. The worth of an individual, the concept of being more than was intended, that life has worth beyond the cycle or the wheel. Even capitalism is inherent in these gifts. One of the central tenets of Gifts of the Jews is the rejection of the circular, cyclical world that produced Abraham, which he, in his belief in God, rejected for a linear, always progressing worldview. 

All ancient civilizations from those along the Yellow, Indus, Euphrates, or Nile rivers saw their world and their lives as a wheel. Always turning, birth, life, death, and repeat for every new generation. But the Old Testament, as Professor Cahill notes, is a progression from Tribe to Clan to Nation. From Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, all in the Covenant with God, a small, hardy, obstinate, and monotheistic chosen people. Without the concept of progress, our world loses its meaning.  

After discussing Gilgamesh and their rather humanly frail pantheon of gods, Cahill describes the nature of the Jewish God. “This is God’s self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to the end, patient, with all our failings however dismaying.”

Cahill talks of the scripture, “It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God—the Real God, the One God—was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him. “YHWH, YHWH,” he thunders at Moshe, the man alone on the Mountain: “God, showing-mercy, showing-favor, long-suffering in anger, abundant in loyalty and faithfulness, keeping loyalty to the thousandth (generation), bearing iniquity, rebellion, and sin.”

If some of his last two books, the Mysteries of the Middle Ages and Heretics and Heroes about the Renaissance, seem to be narrower than the scope of his earlier works, it is because, like the Jews, once on the journey, they cannot stop until they got to the Holy Land or in Cahill’s case, the present day. I felt his book on the middle ages needed the editing that tends to come with less.

But this is like condemning Spielberg’s Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List because he also made 1941. Not one, not two but a whole collection of books, Cahill brought us to different times and places and introduced far away, sometimes carved in granite, folks like Augustine, Pericles, and Jesus and made them flesh and blood and more interesting for the effort. In his book on Jesus, Cahill writes, “What especially makes the Gospels -- from a literary point of view -- works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable.” It is rare to find a historian who thoroughly knows their subject but can also convey that subject in such a way as to appeal to a large audience to make it memorable, as the writer states. Rarer still to do it over a 4,000-year arc. I am quite saddened by his passing but grateful for his works.