Ireland meanwhile was the heart of a regular circulation of culture.  Students poured in from abroad, drawn by the fame of her learning; we have a poem in praise of generous Ireland from an Anglo-Saxon prince who spent his exile there in study.  Irish teachers were at the court of Charlemagne; Irish teachers missionarized Austria and Germany.  When the Norsemen discovered Iceland, they found Irish books there; probably Irish scholars as well, for it has been noted (by Matthew Arnold) that the Icelandic sagas, unlike any other Pre-Christian Teutonic literature, bear strong traces of the Celtic quality of Style.  They had their schools everywhere.  You hear of an Irish bishop of Tarentum in the latter part of the seventh century; and a hundred years later, of an Irish bishop of Salzburg in Austria.  This was Virgil—­in Irish, Fergil, I imagine a native name of Salzburg:  a really noteworthy man.  He taught, at that time, that the world is a globe, and with people living at the antipodes; for which teaching he was called to order by the Pope:  but we do not hear of his retracting.  Last and greatest of them all was Johannes Scotus Erigena, who died in 882:  a very bright particular star, and perhaps the one of the largest magnitude between the Neo-Platonists and the great mystics of later times, who came long after the new manvantara had dawned.  He is not to be classed with the Scholastics; he never subordinated his philosophy to theology; but approached the problems of existence from a high, sane, and Theosophic standpoint:  an independent and illuminated thinker.  He taught at the court of Charles the Bald of France; and was invited to Oxford by Alfred in 877, and died abbot of Malmesbury five years later,—­having in his time propounded many tough nuts of propositions for churchmen to crack and digest if they could.  As, that authority should be derived from reason, and not, as they thought, vice versa; and that “damnation was simply the consciousness of having failed to fulfill the divine purpose,”—­ and not, as their pet theory was, a matter of high temperature of eternal duration.  The following are quotations from his work De Divisione Naturae; I take them from M. de Jubainville’s Irish Mythological Cycle, where they are given as summing up Erigena’s philosophy,—­and as an indication of the vigorous Pantheism of Pre-christian Irish thought.

“We are informed by all the means of knowledge that beneath the apparent diversity of beings subsists the One Being which is their common foundation.”

“When we are told that God makes all things, we are to understand that God is in all things, that he is the substantial essence of all things.  For He alone possesses in himself all that which may be truly said to exist.  For nothing which is, is truly of itself, but God alone; who alone exists per se, spreading himself over all things, and communicating to them all that which in them truly corresponds to the notion of being.”