Whatever may be the difference of opinion as to his place in a particular school or system of philosophy there can be but one as to his abilities as a scholar and an original thinker. According to De Wülf, “he must be regarded as one of the most striking personalities in the world of culture and learning in the early Middle Ages. He was far in advance of his time. While his contemporaries were only lisping in philosophy and his successors for centuries did little more than discuss a small number of disconnected philosophical questions, Eriugena in the ninth century worked out a complete philosophical synthesis.... He was at once a scholar and a man of genius. What was altogether unique in the ninth century, he knew Greek, of which Alcuin scarcely knew the alphabet.”[527] Turner while wishing to give a fair estimate of his place in history, warns us “not to let his brilliant qualities blind us to the enormity of his errors,”[528] but the same writer acknowledges that “he was without doubt the most learned man in his century, he was the first of the representatives of the new learning to attempt a system of constructive thought and he brought to his task a truly Celtic wealth of imagination and a spiritual force which lifted him above the plane of his contemporaries—mere epitomisers and commentators. His philosophy has all the charm which pantheism always possesses for a certain class of minds. It is subtle, vague, and poetic. When we come to examine its contents and method we find it dominated with the spirit of Neo-Platonism. Through the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and of Maximus, Eriugena made acquaintance with the teaching of Plotinus and Proculus; and when he came to construct his own system of thought he reproduced the essential traits of Neo-Platonic philosophy—pantheism, the doctrine of intuition, and universal redemption.”