English Church of the seventh and eighth centuries betrays no knowledge. There are others, now to be noticed, for example, the Book of Enoch, of which this cannot be said. A non-Irish insular manuscript of the eighth century has preserved a fragment of a Latin version of Enoch. In Ireland we find, in the Saltair na Rann, a number of names of angels which are pretty certainly derived from the same book. There, too, are episodes taken from a Life of Adam, but whether they are to be traced to a Western or to an Eastern text has not as vet been made clear. In the "Gelasian" list of apocryphal books the Testament of Job is mentioned, which probably implies the existence of a Latin version. An unpleasing trait which occurs in this Testament is adopted in the Life of St Mochua. It would not be difficult to shew by examples from the Irish Lives of Saints that the legends of the Infancy of our Lord were familiar in the country; but these were so widely diffused that the demonstration would add nothing to our present purpose. Let it be recorded, lastly, that the Reichenau manuscript cited above shews, in one of the fragmentary Homilies which it contains, undoubted knowledge of the obscure Apocalypse of Thomas[1], and that a fragment of an Irish service-book in the Vatican Library presents us with a Lection from a Gospel attributed to James the Less. Both Apocalypse and Gospel are condemned in the "Gelasian" decree.
It has seemed worth while to set forth this class of evidence in some detail. Without detail, indeed, its force is inappreciable. The upshot of it is that the Eastern legendary literature was domiciled in Ireland to such an extent that it coloured the imaginations and contributed to the stock-in-trade of hagiologists and seers; and this familiarity with a branch of Eastern literature is not negligible as a confirmation of other indications that in the sixth and seventh centuries a knowledge of Greek was far from uncommon in Ireland.
Apart from Greek, which after all must be regarded as the fine flower of their learning, what did the normal culture of Irish scholars amount to? The scanty list of their Latin writers between the end of the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century – between Columba († 597) and Adamnan († 704) – includes besides penitentials, lives of saints, and hymns of no very marked excellence, several writings which are without rival in their time. The Altus prosător, Columba's great alphabetic hymn, and the playful poem in short Adonic lines by Columban, cannot fail to impress the reader, the former in virtue of its achievement, the latter by the background of learning which it implies. The Altus has something of the learnedness and intricacy of Celtic decorative art: Columban's poem, with its allusions to Sappho and Danaë, is the work of a man who merits the name of scholar. The
- ↑ This is true also of the Anglo-Saxon Homilists. What is practically a version of the Apocalypse is contained in the Vercelli Book; and two other Homilies, in a Blickling and a Hatton MS. respectively, make copious use of it.
