Many other tributes to Irish monastic scholarship might be quoted. We have selected but two of these partly because of the weight of authority rightly associated with the author’s name in each case and partly because they summarise the detailed evidence we have presented during the course of our study.
Turner says: “The Irish teachers left a lasting impression on their own and succeeding generations. Not only were they the chief teachers of grammar, poetry, astronomy, music, and geography when these branches had no other, or scarcely any other, representative on the continent of Europe, but they also profoundly influenced the course of mediæval thought in matters of philosophy and theology. Their elucidation of the Gospel of St. John and their commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul formed a new school of exegesis.... They introduced the Neo-Platonic point of view in metaphysical speculation and carried the art of dialectic to a higher point than it ever before attained. It is no exaggeration to say that they were the founders of scholasticism and that Ireland is the Ionia of mediæval philosophy.”[538]
Zimmer too shows that the Irish missionaries were not merely the representatives of Christianity: “they were instructors in every branch of science and learning of the time, possessors and bearers of a higher culture than was at that time to be found anywhere on the Continent, and can surely claim to have been the pioneers,—to have laid the corner stone of western culture on the Continent.”[539]
We have reached the end of our study. We have traced the rise, growth, and influence of the Irish monastic schools during the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. Their work and influence lasted for several centuries after the ninth, but during the period which we have investigated their influence was a dominant one in the history of European education. In the later centuries other factors contributed to the advancement of learning in Western Europe and while the Irish contribution was by no means negligible it was less distinctive, less significant, than during the period ending with the ninth century. If, then, we would form a correct idea of the position that Irish monastic schools occupy in the history of western culture, we have but to contrast the actual state of contemporary learning in the rest of Western Europe with that available in these schools; or to recall their large number and wide distribution, noting the liberal nature of the course of studies pursued therein and the generosity with which that learning was extended to all irrespective of race or social position. In either case we are driven to the conclusion that these schools were indeed the greatest educational factor of early mediæval times, that they were, in reality, the universities of the West, the lights that illumined the (so-called) Dark Ages.