I think we can recognise here, under a not too thick disguise of churchly phraseology, the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita. Again: 

“Do you not see how the creator of the universality of things hold the first rank in the divisions of Nature?  Not without reason, indeed; since he is the basic principle of all things, and is inseparable from all the diversity which he created, without which he could not exist as creator.  In him, indeed, immutably and essentially, all things are; he is in himself division and collection, the genus and the species, the whole and the part of the created universe.”

“What is a pure idea?  It is, in proper terms, a theophany:  that is to say, a manifestator of God in the human soul.”

You would be mildly surprised, to say the least of it, to hear at the present day a native, say in Abyssinia, rise to talk in terms like these:  it is no whit less surprising to hear a man doing so in ninth-century Europe.  But an Irishman in Europe in those days was much the same thing as an Oxford professor in the wilds of Abyssinia would be now;—­with this difference:  that Ireland is a part of Europe, and affected by the general European cycles (we must suppose).  Europe then was in thick pralaya (as Abyssinia is now); but in the midst of it all there was Ireland, with her native contrariness, behaving better than most people do in high manvantara.

The impulse that made that age great for her never came far enough down to awaken great creation in the plastic arts; but it touched the fringes of them, and produced marvelous designing, in jewel-work, and it the illumination of manuscripts.  Concerning the latter, I will quote this from Joyce’s Short History of Ireland; it may be of interest:—­

“Its most marked characteristic is interlaced work formed by bands, ribbons and cords, which are curved and twisted and interwoven in the most intricate way, something like basket work infinitely varied in pattern.  These are intermingled and alternated with zigzags, waves, spirals, and lozenges; while here and there among the curves are seen the faces or forms of dragons, serpents, or other strange-looking animals, their tails or ears or tongues elongated and woven till they become merged or lost in the general design. . . .  The pattern is so minute and complicated as to require the aid of a magnifying glass to examine it. . . .  Miss Stokes, who has examined the Book of Kells, says of it:  ’No effort hitherto made to transcribe any one page of it has the perfection of execution and rich harmony of color which belongs to this wonderful book.  It is no exaggeration to say that, as with the microscopic works of Nature, the stronger the magnifying power brought to bear on it, the more is this perfection seen.  No single false interlacement or uneven curve in the spirals, no faint tiace of a trembling hand or wandering thought can be detected.’”

The same author tells us that someone took the trouble to count, through a magnifying glass, in the Book of Armagh, in a “small space scarcely three quarters of an inch in length by less than half an inch in width, no less than one hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines edged with black ones.”—­One of these manuscripts, sometimes, would be given as a king’s ransom.