NEW YORK (AP)—Thomas Cahill, a scholar of ancient languages and belief systems with a knack for popular storytelling who engaged history readers with such bestsellers as “How the Irish Saved Civilization” and “Desire of the Everlasting Hills,” has died at age 82.
Travis Loller, a family friend and Associated Press author, says that Cahill died in his sleep Oct. 18 at his apartment in Manhattan. The explanation for death was not immediately known.
A native of Latest York City, Cahill attended Jesuit school in his early years and have become a dedicated student of Latin and ancient Greek, together with the Bible, philosophy and classical literature. He wrote two books together with his wife, Susan Cahill, within the early Nineteen Seventies. But he gained a large audience within the mid-Nineteen Nineties with the million-selling “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” by which he cited Ireland’s crucial—and unappreciated—preservation of classical texts after the autumn of the Roman Empire.
“Mr. Cahill is a person of learning himself, and his writing is in the nice Irish tradition he describes: lyrical, playful, penetrating and serious, but never too serious,” Latest York Times critic Richard Bernstein wrote in 1995. “And even when his conclusions should not entirely persuasive—they do in places hang on fairly slender reeds of evidence—they’re at all times plausible and positively interesting.”
Cahill’s approach to his books was shaped partially by his Jesuit background, and he would later resolve to combined scholarly discipline and a conversational tone.
His book on Ireland formed a part of what he called his “Hinges of History” series, a broad and idiosyncratic review of Western civilization and moments he believed were turning points, “a narration of how we became the people who we’re,” as he told the AP in a 2006 interview. “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” focused on the Latest Testament and the lifetime of Jesus, and “Sailing the Wine Dark Sea” celebrated the traditional Greeks. In “Mysteries of the Middle Ages,” he countered popular beliefs that the Middle Ages was merely a time of superstition.
“In fact, there was loads of ignorance, as there may be in all ages,” he told the AP in 2006. “However the advances we associate with the Renaissance in the humanities, sciences, education, scholarship, linguistics and even political experimentation all got under way within the Middle Ages.”
Besides writing history, Cahill was an education correspondent for the Times of London and a contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He taught at Queens College, Fordham University, and Seton Hall University, and served for several years as director of spiritual publishing at Doubleday, which released much of his work, most recently the 2013 book “Heretics and Heroes.”
Cahill majored in classical literature and medieval philosophy at Fordham University, and received a master’s degree in film and dramatic literature from Columbia University. But his approach to his books was shaped partially by his Jesuit background, by the depth of his learning and the dullness of how he learned it. He would later resolve to combined scholarly discipline and a conversational tone.
“What academic writers forget is that everybody on Earth buys books for diversion, or entertainment,” he said in 2006. “Yes, they wish to learn things, but in addition they don’t wish to be fed up while they learn those things.”
