The centre of learning, however, was the ology, which comprised of course the study of the Holy Scripture, the Fathers and the lives , pf saints, especially of Saint Martin of Tours. Never have the sacred books been regarded with greater affection nor their meaning more , searchingly studied. Skilful and learned sdsobars commented upon them, at home and abroad, wherever they founded schools, the Irish scholars drew from them their inspiration and laid in them the foundation of all learning. The so-called (Vetus 'tale was the version of the Bible in use in early Ireland, and the favor ite Gospel seems to have been that of Saint John. The Book of Psalms in particular was the vade-mecutn of praise and prayer. It was the first reader put into the hands of an Irish schoolboy, and many of the Irish saints were said to have learned the entire psalter by heart and recited the •"Three Fifties,* as they called' the 150 psalms, daily. They were also sung antiphonally, when traveling. A number of anecdotes are told in the lives of the Irish saints to ,show the affection with which they regarded the Bible and their zeal in transcribing it. Of Columcille it is told that on the last day of• his life he Occupied himself copying part of the psalter, till, having shed a page in the mid-• dle of the thirty-third Psalm, he dropped his ' pen and said, "Let Baithen write the remainder.' The Manuscripts which were most profusely ornamented were those containing The Holy' Scriptures; such for example as the Book of Kills, "the most beautiful book in the worlds and special shrines wrought in precious metal were made to hold them. In library catalogues, the Bible always came first, and the oldest glosses in the Irish language are to biblical texts.
Irish no doubt was the language in which instruction was given, but there is abundant proof that the native scholars were equally at home with Latin. This is shown for example by the large number of treatises on Latin gram-' Mar glossed in Irish. Latin was studied chiefly with a view to the understanding of the Bible and the Church Fathers, and as a preparation for those who contemplated entering Holy Orders. Irish Latin is not always in the best taste, being often marred by affectation, a bom bastic style, abuse of antithesis and exaggera tion, but these were largely the faults of the period. Columbanus was by far the best Latin writer of his century, and the ease with which the Irish scholars wrote Latin shows that it must have been a living speech to them.
It is not quite certain how widely a knowl-, edge of Greek was diffused in the schools of early Ireland. There has been much exagger ation on the subject. Some writers pretend that all the monks who accompanied Columbanus to the Continent had a fair knowledge of Greek, could transcribe Greek manuscripts and read the Gospels in that language. Some Irish au thors of the 7th century quote such as Philo, Eusebius and Origen, but there is no serious proof that they knew them in the orig. inals. Columbanus himself' clearly knew Greek.' His biographer states that he was a "man of, three tongues," by which was meant that he added a knowledge of Latin and Greek (or perhaps Greek and Hebrew) to his own Ian-, guage, If he knew any Hebrew, which in his letter to Pope Boniface he says he did, it must have been very limited. He uses Greek
words and evidently knew Aristotle in the original. When we come to the 9th century, however, there is an abundance of proof some Irishinci, hoth in Ireland and on the co.n7, .
tinent, knew considerable Greek They May have acquired it in the course of their travels, especially in France, and more particularly at Narbonne, where some Irish students had set tled down and where Greek was spoken as a living language from early times. But that assumption is. not necessary, for it is known that during the 6dt and the three following centuries there was an influx into Ireland of Greek-speaking merchant, from Bordpaux and other cities in the south 01: France. In an old Irish poem ou the Fair Carman, we find mention of 'the great market of the foreign Greeks, where gold and noble clothes were wont to be.' Many Greek ecclesiastics also had taken refuge in Ireland at the time of the barbarian conquest of Gaul, and as late as the 17th cen tury there was a church at Trim which still kept the name of "the Greek church,' or, ac cording to another authority, °the school of the Greeks.' In a letter of Saint Cummian of Clonfert and Durrow, written in the year 634 to the Abbot of Iona, are found quotations from Greek writers like Origen, Cyril, and Da masons, which shows that the range of read ing in Greek was wide and not ecclesiastical merely but chronological, astronomical and philosophical. A collection of sayings called (Proverbia Grecorum,i which was circulated in Ireland in the 8th and 9th centuries, was trans lated from Greek into Latin by some Irish scholar in Ireland before the 7th century. 4 manuscript at Wfirzburg, containing a copy of Saint Matthew's Gospel and dating from the 8th century, contains a curious entry to the effect that Sillan, a scribe and abbot of Bangor in the early part of the 7th century and called in the Antiphonary of Bangor "Famosus Mundi Magister," was the first Irishman to learn by heart a computus which he had got from a cer, Min Greek. The Greek probably taught the Irishman other things also. In the Irish glosses on Priscian in a Saint Gall manuscript and in the 'Divinae Institutiones) of Lactan tius several Greek words are explained, and in other Irish works such as Cormac's Glossary (9th century) and the (Coir Anmann) (The Fitness of Names), are found Greek paradigms, declensions, and derivations, all of which give evidence of a certain knowledge of the lan Greek words also occur in an alphaJ tTgal hymn on Saint Comgillus, beginning •Audite pantes to ergo,* and in a hymn in honor of Saint Patrick and Saint Brigit. In a mane script at Leon is a Greek fragment of the Gos pel of Saint John transcribed in Latin letters by Irishman of the 8th or 9th century, which is proof that from very early Christian times there was at least a copy of the Greek text of the Gospel of Saint John, and perhaps of the entire New Testament, current in Ireland.