monastic schools. Since so much early Irish material is monastery related, there is a tendency to see monastic learning as covering all we know of learning in the period. We should note that there was a definite academic agenda at work in western monasteries, from the outset, as places where men dedicated themselves to the praise of God and the pursuit of wisdom. As a place of wisdom, the monastery had to assist its monks to grow in the ‘fear and knowledge of God’ by understanding his ‘mighty acts’. In this study, scripture had a central role. But this was accessed through language, so grammar was seen as the portico to wisdom—and to the extent that
Latin was, as in Ireland, a foreign language, its importance increased. In turn, the monks were expected to master the classical quadrivium as a tool of theological discovery in making the scriptures clearer to them.
This agenda presupposed that the monastery was a place were students came to learn, so teaching was a central activity. This accounts for the enormous amount of teaching materials which survives from these monasteries. It is against this background that we should view Irish monastic learning. Its apparently disparate products—
biblical exegesis, grammar, and computistics are the topics often listed as characteristically Irish—actually form an intellectual unity. Moreover, the forms that are found in Irish materials can be seen as linked to their intellectual agenda. Thus they provided many works on grammar intended for those for whom Latin was a second language. Likewise, their exegesis was usually reworkings of patristic materials in the forms of epitomes and collections (e.g. the Irish epitome of Augustine on Genesis, or Laidcenn's
Ecloga of Gregory on Job). Similarly, they produced works in Latin and Irish where complex patristic discussions were turned into simple question‐and‐answer dialogues (e.g. the Old Irish treatise on the Psalms). Manuals and textbooks on specific topics—and several of the most interesting examples from the period before 800 come from Ireland (e.g. the pseudo‐Isidorian
De ordine creaturarum, one of the earliest works of formal systematic theology,
Adomnán's
De locis sanctis, or the anonymous
De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae)—reveal the desire for texts for the average student, as well as the belief that they were the followers of earlier ‘illustrious writers’. It was this adherence to the monastic ideal as set out by Cassian and Cassiodorus, rather than isolated feats of intellectual genius, that gained Irish monks their medieval reputation for learning, and enabled them to take an important part in the intellectual build‐up to the Carolingian renaissance. While the position of the monastery within the society changed, especially after the arrival of the
Vikings, this aspect of Irish monasticism continued, and this early pattern probably survived longer in Ireland (well into the 12th century) than elsewhere.
Bibliography
Hughes, K. , Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources (1972)
O'Loughlin, T. , Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings (2000)
Thomas O'Loughlin
