John Scotus Eriugena
"Deus enim omnia in omnibus erit, et omnis creatura obumbrabitur, in Deum videlicet conversa, sicut astra sole oriente." ("God will be all in all, and every creature, converted as it were into God, will become shadow, like stars at sunrise.")
One of the brightest and most original minds of the ninth century -- or of any century -- the philosopher John Scotus Eriugena's work has been severely understudied and underappreciated. He has been called the greatest Celtic philosopher of the Middle Ages, as well as the last great ancient philosopher. A native of Ireland, John "Scotus" (="the Irishman") Eriugena (="born in Ireland"), was attracted to the great centers of learning on the Continent that were supported by the Carolingian monarchs. By the 840s he found himself safely ensconced at Laon and working under the patronage (and protection) of King Charles the Bald.
In Laon, Eriugena was at the intellectual center of the Carolingian world. He seems to have initially established his reputation as a talented translator of Greek, producing Latin versions of some of the works of the early Greek Church Fathers, including St. Maximus the Confessor and, most importantly, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Working closely with the writings of these Greek theologians, as well as with Calcidius' commentary on Plato's Timaeus, injected into Eriugena's thought a thorough understanding of Christian Neoplatonism as well as a lively interest in the possibilities of theosis and negative theology. (Negative theology is the idea that God is ultimately unknowable and that all human attempts to describe him are necessarily limited.)
The Greek Fathers thus paved the way for, though by no means overdetermined, the theological ideas that Eriugena sets forth in his masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae (On the Division of Nature). The "Nature" of the book's title refers to the entire universe, all of existence, and the "Divisions" he discusses reflect his reading in Neoplatonism. Eriugena posits that the universe can be analyzed into four basic components: 1. that which is uncreated but creates (God), 2. that which is created and creates (the principles or Ideas in the mind of God), 3. that which is created and does not create (the phenomenal universe as we know it, including the Earth and human beings), and 4. that which is uncreated and does not create (God as the telos, or endpoint, of all things). On the one hand, Eriugena's fourfold schema reiterates older Neoplatic ideas about emanation from the One (see, for example, Plotinus). On the other hand, Eriugena's emphasis on the immanence of God in the world and on the human potential for theosis, along with his de-emphasis of a chronological understanding of God's creation of the world presents us with an understanding of the universe as endlessly fecund, constantly generative of new creation. The poetic imagery with which he girds this exciting new vision of Nature lends it a uniquely compelling hold on the reader's imagination.
Eriugena's work was popular in his lifetime, even though so much of it ran against more conservative interpretations of the Bible. Later in the Middle Ages, his works, especially the De Divisione Naturae found their way on and off lists of condemned books. Nonetheless, he seems to have influenced many of the twelfth-century humanist cosmographers, including Bernardus Silvestris and Alain de Lille, and Thomas Aquinas knew Eriugena's work well enough to refute it respectfully. Perhaps even more telling is the way his philosophy anticipates trends and patterns in twentieth-century phenomenology, in the late Heidegger, in ecophilosophy, and, most recently, in Object-Oriented Ontology.
Further Reading
In Laon, Eriugena was at the intellectual center of the Carolingian world. He seems to have initially established his reputation as a talented translator of Greek, producing Latin versions of some of the works of the early Greek Church Fathers, including St. Maximus the Confessor and, most importantly, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Working closely with the writings of these Greek theologians, as well as with Calcidius' commentary on Plato's Timaeus, injected into Eriugena's thought a thorough understanding of Christian Neoplatonism as well as a lively interest in the possibilities of theosis and negative theology. (Negative theology is the idea that God is ultimately unknowable and that all human attempts to describe him are necessarily limited.)
The Greek Fathers thus paved the way for, though by no means overdetermined, the theological ideas that Eriugena sets forth in his masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae (On the Division of Nature). The "Nature" of the book's title refers to the entire universe, all of existence, and the "Divisions" he discusses reflect his reading in Neoplatonism. Eriugena posits that the universe can be analyzed into four basic components: 1. that which is uncreated but creates (God), 2. that which is created and creates (the principles or Ideas in the mind of God), 3. that which is created and does not create (the phenomenal universe as we know it, including the Earth and human beings), and 4. that which is uncreated and does not create (God as the telos, or endpoint, of all things). On the one hand, Eriugena's fourfold schema reiterates older Neoplatic ideas about emanation from the One (see, for example, Plotinus). On the other hand, Eriugena's emphasis on the immanence of God in the world and on the human potential for theosis, along with his de-emphasis of a chronological understanding of God's creation of the world presents us with an understanding of the universe as endlessly fecund, constantly generative of new creation. The poetic imagery with which he girds this exciting new vision of Nature lends it a uniquely compelling hold on the reader's imagination.
Eriugena's work was popular in his lifetime, even though so much of it ran against more conservative interpretations of the Bible. Later in the Middle Ages, his works, especially the De Divisione Naturae found their way on and off lists of condemned books. Nonetheless, he seems to have influenced many of the twelfth-century humanist cosmographers, including Bernardus Silvestris and Alain de Lille, and Thomas Aquinas knew Eriugena's work well enough to refute it respectfully. Perhaps even more telling is the way his philosophy anticipates trends and patterns in twentieth-century phenomenology, in the late Heidegger, in ecophilosophy, and, most recently, in Object-Oriented Ontology.
Further Reading
- Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena (Oxford University Press, 2000)
- Peter Dronke, The Spell of Calcidius: Platonic Concepts and Images in the Medieval West (Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008)
- Alfred K. Siewers, Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)