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The Stream of Civilization
and Egypt the schools of Antioch, of Gandispora, of
Nisibus and other centers formed a garland that bloomed
with a luster almost comparable for a time with the
splendor of the great establishments in Ireland. But
their course, outside of Constantinople, was uncertain and
the culture transmitted by them was communicable westward
only over the area of Greek speech. In the lands,
formerly included in the western Roman Empire, where
Latin was the medium of Christianity and education,
there hardly existed a school in the full meaning of the
term, save such as had already been established, directly
or indirectly, by Irish hands.
It was during this period of transition and under these
conditions that the work of what has at times been called
the "Irish Mission" got under way. The counterpart to
Greek and Saracen culture in the East, Irish culture in
the West showed a missionary instinct almost unknown
to the Byzantine and known to the Saracen only in the
lust of military conquest. Then began that dispersal,
which, in its dimensions, its passion and its potency, has
since stood forth as one of the great enigmas of history.
Pelagius the Heresiarch and Sedulius the Poet have perhaps
been rightly acclaimed as the first in point of time
of that streaming Irish host that was to continue to flow
for nearly a thousand years. Harbingers and precursors
of the great army that was to follow Columbanus in the
next century, both of them probably from the Irish colony
in what is now Wales, they gave the first proofs in the
Roman theater of the mettle of the Irish intellect then
in process of being Christianized. Following immedi-
ately on Pelagius and Sedulius the stream is not readily
discernible, but it is there, and it continues to increase in
volume. In the sixth century it bears with it the founders
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