By the time Christianity arrived in Ireland, assuming it had a strong foothold by the later fifth century, it had a firm self-perception (1) as a teaching religion with a body of doctrine to be transmitted and understood, and (2) that it demanded an ethical and religious discipline (but which varied with the different kinds of Christians: laypeople, clerics, monks, nuns). Thus a major part of the church’s concerns, and a key part of ecclesiastical organization, was concerned with teaching that doctrine and discipline. We see this concern with instruction in a number of ways, but most obviously in saints’ lives where part of the pattern of most lives is to portray their subject as one who was "illustrious" as a teacher and whose lifestyle was an example of discipline to others. We can also observe the importance attached to teaching in canon law: the Collectio canonum hibernensis, for instance, assumes that teaching is one of the duties attached to the senior grades of cleric (deacon, presbyter, and bishop), and has a special section devoted to teachers (De doctori-bus: book 38); while the Collectio itself is a major repository of the various demands of the Christian life. However, most of our knowledge of moral and religious instruction must be derived from their extant writings, which can be grouped under four broad headings: biblical exegesis being the most important. Moreover, we must not expect the modern distinction between "moral" and "religious" texts to be always clearly made: for instance, a biblical commentary may be primarily doctrinal in its interests, but distinguish several kinds of exegesis in the same text and label one kind "spiritual" (roughly equivalent to "religious" meaning), and another kind "moral" in which case it is usually the shortest section; likewise, a homily may be devoted to a doctrinal subject, such as the Nicene Creed, but contain much instruction on how Christians should live.
Biblical Exegesis
By the fifth century, Christianity’s approach to scripture, both in content and form, were already fixed. The Latin West, found in the fourth and fifth century writers such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, masters it could revere and whose books would be the basis of all they wrote. Seeing themselves as disciples of these great "fathers," they believed it was their task to repeat this material, organize it systematically, and make it as accessible as possible to students. Hence their emphasis on the repetition of patristic themes, staccato questions and answers, the production of collections of facts, and manuals that survey complex questions through a series of quotes from authorities. The aim of all Irish exegesis was to provide textbooks and syntheses within an established intellectual paradigm. These scholastic repetitions were original works, and their innovation lay in the way they systematized the inherited tradition.
Irish exegesis has to be examined against this background for it is similar in content and quality with the work from Italy, Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul, and, slightly later, the Anglo-Saxon and the Carolingian writers. However, it does present some striking qualities of its own. The productivity of Europe in the period between 500 and 800 is meager when compared with the ninth century, but in the earlier period the work of Irish scholars, in Ireland and abroad, is significant disproportionally to the country’s size or background. Hence we can assert that there was a significant Irish input into the exegesis and theological life of the period, and we must view scholars such as Eriugena (John Scottus)—who saw himself as engaged in exegesis—not as a lone phenomenon, but as the most famous expression of a well-established exeget-ical culture.
One peculiarity of Irish exegesis is how much of it is anonymous or pseudonymous, for we have only a handful of names: Adomnan, Aileran, and Laidcenn. While works of major importance such as the De mira-bilibus sacrae scripturae presents itself as Augustine’s, the De ordine creaturarum is attributed to Isidore, and Cummian’s (?) Commentarius in Marcum to Jerome; and most of the exegetical material bears no name and is attributed to Irish writers only on the basis of modern comparative research. This has raised the question of "an Irish school" of exegesis, and has promoted the search for telltale "Irish symptoms" in such works. While there are features that figure prominently in Irish works, such as interest in grammar or computistics questions in the midst of exegesis, these cannot settle the question of origins as such features are not exclusively Irish. The presence of even several "characteristics" in a single work cannot be decisive, and must be viewed only as increasing the probability of Irish origins.
At present we are still in the period of discovery: finding the texts, providing editions, and making preliminary studies of their contents. Only when this process is complete, and the material compared with that from Gaul and Spain, will the true character of the Irish group emerge. Only then will the attribution of works to places of origin be possible on a secure footing and allow considered answers to be given to questions such as why so much Irish writing is anonymous.
Manuals
While many manuals produced in Ireland are linked to exegesis, as a form of instruction they deserve special attention; and because they were often works produced by teachers responding to their local situation they exhibit regional differences not found in works aimed at the larger church. These manuals range form single pages (e.g., the plan of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Armagh), to works to be committed to memory (e.g., Aileran’s Kanon evangeliorum), to textbooks that distill many of the major problems of Latin theology into a user-friendly system (e.g., the De ordine creaturarum). The notion of such manuals was seen as being sanctioned by their authorities, the task being to go through the materials they had in their libraries, abstract the relevant bits, and present it in an easily taught format. Adomnan’s De locis sanctis is an example of this process where, on the basis of what could be found in his library, he produced the manual Augustine had said would be so useful for teachers— and the work was found useful throughout Europe. In a similar spirit, glossaries of Hebrew and Greek words were produced, synopses of major texts (e.g., of Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram), and key references assembled in convenient packets (e.g., the Liber ex lege Moysi). Lastly, some large gospel books may have been specially prepared with intention that they would be reference resources (e.g., the complexity of the marginal apparatus in the Book of Durrow, or the amount of material relating to text-division found in the Book of Armagh).
Monastic Instruction
Life-long instruction of the monks/nuns in a monastery is part of the very reason for the monastery’s existence; and we know that in the West, and nowhere more than in Ireland, the writings of John Cassian not only formed the basis of instruction, but provided the theoretical basis for all on-going formation. This instruction took several forms, penitentials and rules (there was no dominant Western monastic rule before the ninth century) being the most obvious, and examples survive from Ireland in both Latin and Irish. It also took narrative forms—inspired by Gregory the Great’s Dialogi—whereby an ideal monk is praised for his holy life (e.g., Adomnan’s Vita Columbae) or an ideal monastery is envisaged (e.g., the Navigatio sancti Brendani). However, it also took the form of the "conference" (a lecture or sermon to the community), the outstanding example of which is the collection of Instructiones by Columbanus (whose authenticity was often doubted prior to 1997).
Sermons
Sermons were, in all likelihood, the means by which most instruction was delivered, and certainly the activity of preaching is one that is praised formally and offered as good example in our sources. However, sermons, as such, do not survive. So when we have a sermon text we are already removed from the actual instruction and seeing something that was either a model of a good sermon (does this mean that without such models the preaching was inept or simply that these were what an individual teacher thought a sermon should be?) or a skeleton around which an actual sermon could be composed: in either case the sort of person who would compose such a sermon is different from the average cleric delivering the sermon. We have extant examples of both full sermons and skeleton sermons in both Latin and Irish; and, on the whole, they are remarkably similar to sermons from the same period from elsewhere in the Latin world. With regard to this particular literary genre, we should note that while some texts are obviously sermons (e.g., the "Cambrai Homily"), and texts found in homily collections are equally obviously so (e.g., the so-called Catechesis Celtica), there are many other sermon texts that have been cataloged under other headings (e.g., Christmas sermons which contain apocryphal themes and so are studied under the heading "apocrypha" rather than as instructional materials), and a full listing of all such texts is desirable as a benchmark in advancing our understanding of preaching in medieval Ireland.
