''Apart from the extremely painful fact that St Patrick was an Englishman'' says the mischievous English narrator. The English were only just coming to Britain at the time the Romanised Briton Patrick was going to Ireland. In other words there was no England at this time or even an English people. There were Angle, Saxon and Jute invaders, though and Patrick was not one of them.
Eriugena, or John the Scot, is indeed an astonishing thinker, but Bertrand Russell's reading of Eriugena is actually very poor. Eriugena was orthodox and was not a pantheist. One has be very selective in the quotations used to describe him as a pantheist.
