St. Patrick

His experience as a slave made him a holy man, a mystic and  the first person in the history of the world to denounce slavery unequivocally.    For that alone, he would be revered.    But his influence in Ireland may well have saved Western Civilization at an earlier time when it was in mortal peril.

And so it was that a young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick, and neither Ireland nor Christianity was ever quite the same. By the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, the Irish stopped slave trading and never took it up again. Human sacrifice had become unthinkable. His countrymen never stopped making war on one another, but war became much more confined and limited by what we now call the rules of warfare. In the modern classic How the Irish Saved Civilization, it is said that Patrick's conversion of Ireland made possible the preservation of Western thought through the early Dark Ages by means of the monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out all over Europe, a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit by Patrick.

The light of a candle can be blown out, die out or used to light another candle.

After the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians, back in the fifth century, Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization

... to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius, retire to one's villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it, by men so strange they lived in little huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, "Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time--almost a hundred years--western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea."
--
as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature--everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one--a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

It's fitting that St. Patrick's Day is the First Green of the Spring.    Drink up.