THE thread of learning at times runs as thin as gossamer, as taut as a gibbet rope sometimes it has seemed that the scholarship of the ancients has been lost, only for it to surface in some unconsidered spot like Glendalough.
The duties of a civilised person must sometimes be observed with silent diligence or else face obliteration in the Third Reich or within the Soviet Empire in the past, or in Burma or Myanmar as it is called in Year Zero new speak or Algeria today.
And the threat to enlightenment need not come from just totalitarian zealots it can come from cultural brutishness, from prim and self righteous intolerance, from moral superiority buttressed by philistine state laws. That being so, how close did Ireland come to being an outright enemy of civilised values during the 1950s?
I am prompted to ask this by the latest and I presume the last collection of essays by Hubert Butler, In the Land of Nod, from Lilliput Press, which published the three previous volumes of his works.
Time of adversity
It is nice and easy to applaud Hubert Butler in this pluralist time, but when he was alive and writing in times of adversity, who was prepared to stand up and permit him air his views?
In Kilkenny he tended his flickering flame, that one day it might warm the land but for his vigilance, and of those like him throughout Europe, the western tradition of inquiry this century might well have been extinguished.
Ireland in the 1940s was a bleak place to talk as Hubert Butler did. His solitude was all but complete. Young inquiring minds were fleeing, with their genes and their questions. He stuck it out and was anathematised by the Catholic Church for doing so. He spoke out for unpopular, marginal groups, and spoke alone, for none would stand by his shoulder.
When the Yugoslavs put Jehovah's Witnesses surely the most innocent and blamelessly apolitical religious sect of all on trial, the most bizarre alliance was achieved between the Catholic Church and the Communist state.
The intellectual inconsistency of the authoritarian mind set was required at its most agile here for, as Hubert Butler notes in his prescient essay on Yugoslavia written in 1947 and published for the first time here the Irish press was full of the horrors of Communism when the Jehovah's Witnesses of Yugoslavia were being tried for their pacifism.
"At the time of the most intense work for their country, they preached utter passivity," said the trial indictment. "Their pacifism benefits international reactionaries whose agents they are."
Bizarre indictment
Has there ever been a more bizarre indictment than that? Unsurprisingly, the trial received enormous publicity in Ireland as evidence of Soviet brutality. Shortly afterwards, Jehovah's Witnesses came to Ireland and, as Hubert recollected, the tables were promptly turned. They were accused of being communists by the Catholic Church and were denounced by the Catholic bishop of Cork, who even suggested that the police take action against them.
Hubert sent a letter to The Irish Times, then a Protestant newspaper, explaining the nature of the prosecution in Zagreb. In The Land of Nod Hubert wrote. "The Irish Times refused to print this, nor have the Protestant Churches of Ireland done anything to protect this small Protestant sect against obviously sectarian slander."
And then he comes to an observation which I believe to be a truth, but which is repeatedly rejected by those who deny the intolerance and bigotry of the State which was caused to come into existence by militant Irish nationalism.
"The friendship of Protestant and Catholic in southern Ireland is highly precarious and it may have appeared that it would be unwise to endanger it by telling the truth about an unimportant bodies like the Witnesses.
Is it any wonder that Hubert Butler made so many people nervous and intolerant? The sentiments today could cause warm dispute but back then, half a century ago, they must have outraged triumphalist and alike. And he was punished he was driven from public life in Kilkenny and yet continued his solitary scribbling behind his old stone walls.
The scribbling continued until 1990, when he wrote the last work to be published, A Three Day Nation, a delightful and elegiac rumination upon the plight of a people who have utterly vanished from popular ken, the Carpatho Russians, whose uncomfortable address rendered them liable to rule successively by Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and, after 1945, by the Soviet Union.
Admirer of small nations
Hubert was an admirer of small nations and small nationalisms, though not small minded ones as an Irish nationalist himself, he was drawn to the odd entity of Carpatho Russia. And upon reflection, he seems to have found himself admiring Austria Hungary, the empire brought to ruin by the Great War.
That empire, he said, was like a well organised household. The Austrians had been the land lords the Hungarians the stewards the Czechs the butlers and housekeepers the Croats, Romanians, Serbs and Wallachians were the outdoor staff. But the Carpatho Russians appeared to have no role at all.
The grasp of the complexity of people's plights, of the peculiarity of different cultures, was Hubert's great gift what might be an odd, even bizarre identity to some people, for him was a real and tangible thing, a power which possessed people's lives and gave them meaning and purpose.
And so he was able to write about the Carpatho Russians with delicate and scholarly enthusiasm of their dialects Lemkovsky or Boekovsky of their religion, which was Orthodox, and under the protection of Belgrade of their holy city, Ize.
The man from Kilkenny never abandoned Kilkenny, no matter his travels. He was an ornament to our civilisation and the watcher of its flame. We should guard his words and his courage as fiercely as we do the Book of Kells.