Irish Americans love to talk about St. Patrick. Aside from inventing green beer, he's the guy who -- according to historian Thomas Cahill -- helped save Western civilization. How so?

As the story goes, Patrick was captured in Roman Britain at age 16 by Irish raiders. For six years, they kept him as a slave.

Years later, in the 400s, Patrick had the chutzpah (there's really no better word for it) to go back into the pagan nation of his former captors as a missionary.

At first, it didn't go so well. He was beaten and robbed. At one point, he was left in chains awaiting execution. The kings didn't like him, because they couldn't buy his loyalties with gifts. The people didn't like him because he didn't share their faith.

So what did he do? He got started anyway. Not by cooking up some master plan, or by making sure he had enough Franklin Day Planner pages to book half-hour slots for all those conversions... but by just getting started, in the only way he could imagine how.

He taught the Irish common folk to read.

See, back then, most Europeans were illiterate. The decline of Rome and rise of barbarian hordes made that even more so. Books, on the continent, were used as little more than kindling.

The greatest store of knowledge up to that point, the writings of Ancient Greece and Rome, were literally going up in smoke.

Patrick didn't set out to save the classics. He just set out to civilize the people. There is no civilization, Cahill observes, without books.

Just like schoolchildren, Patrick's pupils went to work. First they learned the alphabet. Then they practiced their writing by copying out the only texts available, those same ancient texts, word for word.

Plato, Aristotle, Euripedes, Homer, and more... they all survived, thanks to those efforts. Had it not been for Patrick's decision to "just do it" those works might have disappeared forever.