At the Synod of Whitby, A. D. 664, the Irish Church stubbornly resisted conformity on such points as the date of Easter, the mode of the tonsure, unconditional celibacy, etc. Because Patrick had given Ireland the Jewish way of reckoning time, the Irish Church was in danger of being deemed Jewish until it yielded on its calendar in the beginning of the eighth century. This was not the first conflict with Rome.

But it is not in ecclesiastical history that one finds the blossoming of the Gaelic period. It is in the founding of schools and colleges, the building of stone churches, the illumination of beautiful missals, and the exquisite enamel and metal handicraft of the monasteries, the teaching of Greek and Latin, of history and geography and mathematics and philosophy and natural science, the enlistment of the bards, and the conversion of kings.

5

Patrick's seminary at Armagh had in it the seed of a great scholastic activity. Three hundred and fifty bishops, "mostly Franks, Romans and Britons, but with some Irish," compose Patrick's first order in Irish ecclesiastical reckoning. The second order, to which St. Columcille belonged, are the men who founded those

schools of which the Irish manuscripts give so radiant an account.

The school of St. Enda drew to the Isle of Aran Mor such saints as Finnian of Moville, Ciaran of Clonmacnois, Jarlath of Tuam, Carthach of Lismore, Keevin of Glendalough. Clonard, near the Boyne, had three thousand students around it. Founded in 520, it flourished until the vikings raided it scores of times in the bloody ninth century. Clonfert on the Shannon, founded by Brendan in 556, had at its head the man who wrote "Navigatio Brendani." It lasted until ravaged in the twelfth century. Clonmacnois, founded in 544, became the proudest university of this period. Today, as Dr. Douglas Hyde records, "its church-yard possesses a greater variety of sculptured and decorated stones than perhaps all the rest of Ireland put together." The kings of Connacht, the O'Conors, had their own church there. So had the Ui Neill of the South. The MacCarthys of Munster, the MacDermots of Moyburg, the O'Kellys of Hy Maine, had their own mortuary chapels. Alcuin, "the most learned man at the French court," was educated there, as a grateful letter of his testifies. On ten occasions the Northmen penetrated to Clonmacnois and commenced the work of destruction which the English of Athlone completed.

At Bangor, on Belfast Lough, a school was founded in 550, described by St. Bernard as "a noble institution, which was inhabited by many thousands of monks." From Bangor came Columbanus, the evangelist of Burgundy and Lombardy; St. Gall, who preached in Switzerland; and Dungal, the astronomer, who founded the University of Pavia. The fate of Bangor was more dreadful than that of the other colleges, nine hundred monks being slain by the raiding Norse.

Dr. Hyde enumerates Lismore, attended by Gauls, Teutons, Swiss, and Italians in 700; Moville, whose founder became Frigidius of Lucca in Switzerland; Clonenagh near Maryborough; and the famous and beautiful Glendalough. Of these Glendalough was sacked by the Danes. Strongbow's son began in 1174 the harrying of Lismore, which, after a Norman was killed near-by, ended in its complete obliteration as a "reprisal" in 1207. Cork, Ross, Innisfallen, Iniscaltra, are other schools on which Douglas Hyde dilates in his admirable "Literary History of Ireland.”

6

The degree of learning attained in these Irish schools is the subject of present discussion. The free creative mind, certainly, was not the object of medieval system.

These schools had closed minds. But if no such fresh fountain gushed forth as distinguished the Age of Pericles, the actual service to scholarship must not be

minimized. Cummian's famous letter, says Professor Stokes, proves "that in the first half of the seventh century there was a wide range of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, but chronological, astronomical, and philosophical, away at Durrow in the very center

of the Bog of Allen." "The classic tradition," says Darmesteter, "to all appearances dead in Europe, burst out into full flower in the Isle of Saints, and the Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before it was known in Italy. During three centuries Ireland was the asylum of the higher learning which took sanctuary there from the uncultured states of Europe. At one time Armagh, the religious capital of Christian Ireland, was the metropolis of civilization." "Ireland," Zimmer puts it, "can indeed lay claim to a great past; she cannot only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries, at a time when the Roman Empire was being undermined by the alliances and inroads of German tribes, which threatened to sink the whole Continent into barbarism, but also of having made strenuous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual foundation of our present Continental civilization."

These are big words. Professor Eoin MacNeill, who does not deal in words of this size, believes that Archbishop Theodore, who taught Greek at Canterbury from 664 till 690, was the man who gave Greek its currency in Irish schools. "During the sixth, seventh,