By Father Geoffrey Ready
Introduction
He makes a pathetic and not undignified figure, this eager, slightly-built Irishman,
with his subtle mind, his studious habits, his deeply reverent spirit,
his almost fanatical devotion to the wise men of former days,
Pagan or Christian, who had lived in the light of a wider civilisation:
called upon to fight the battles of the West with arms forged in the East,
and reprimanded even in the hour of conquest for having transgressed the rules of the field.
Alice Gardner, Studies in John the Scot.
He deviated from the path of the Latins
while he kept his eyes intently fixed on the Greeks;
wherefore he was reputed an heretic.
William of Malmesbury, de Pontificibus.
John Scotus Eriugena stands as a remarkable figure in the spiritual history of the Christian West. His native Ireland was insula sanctorum — the "Isle of the Saints," where Orthodox Christianity, planted by Saint Pádraig in the fifth century, had taken such root that it had created an entire monastic culture and produced countless thousands of glorified saints. By the ninth century, however, the Apostolic and Patristic Tradition of glorification which had transformed Ireland was coming under an attack which would ultimately prove more devastating than those of the Vikings who were by now violently raiding monastic settlements along the Irish coasts.
