A Teacher
John Scotus Eriugena
Reality as a single unfolding of God, known best through what cannot be said of it.
The transmission
John Scotus Eriugena (c.810-877) was an Irish scholar who crossed to the Frankish court of Charles the Bald and became the boldest speculative mind of the Carolingian renaissance.
Fluent in Greek at a time when the Latin West had largely lost it, he translated the mystical corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, along with works of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa, and in doing so carried the whole current of Greek apophatic and Neoplatonic theology into the medieval Western tradition.
His masterwork, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature, c.867), is a vast five-book dialogue that organises all of reality into a fourfold scheme of ‘nature’: that which creates and is not created (God as source), that which creates and is created (the primordial causes or divine ideas), that which is created and does not create (the visible world), and that which neither creates nor is created (God as final end).
The system is at once a cosmology and a circle: all things flow out from God and return to God, so that creation is understood as theophany, the self-manifestation of the divine. Pressing apophatic logic to its limit, Eriugena held that God transcends even being, and so may fittingly be called ‘nothing’ by excess rather than by lack.
This audacious, quasi-panentheist vision drew charges of pantheism and later condemnation, yet it seeded a lineage of mystical thought reaching to Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.
What they gave
The fourfold division of nature: a single scheme joining God, the divine ideas, the created world, and God-as-end into one outflowing-and-returning whole.
- Radical apophaticism: pushing negative theology so far that God, transcending being itself, is named ‘nothing’ (nihil per excellentiam) by excess, not by deficiency.
- Translating and transmitting Pseudo-Dionysius: rendering the Greek mystical corpus into Latin and carrying Eastern apophatic Neoplatonism into the medieval West.
- Creation as theophany: framing the created order as the divine self-manifestation, so that the world is God appearing rather than a thing set apart from God.
In their words
For authority proceeds from true reason, but reason certainly does not proceed from authority.
There is a general division of Nature into that which creates and is not created, that which is created and creates, that which is created and does not create, and that which neither creates nor is created.
Every authority which is not upheld by true reason is seen to be weak, whereas true reason, since it rests upon its own strength, needs no reinforcement by the assent of any authority.
The line they stand in
Eriugena drew directly on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whom he translated, and on the Greek Fathers Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa, blending their apophatic and Neoplatonic theology with the Latin Augustine.
Largely neglected and formally suspect for centuries, his fusion of negative theology with a returning cosmos nonetheless flowed downstream into later apophatic and mystical thought, shaping Meister Eckhart and, still more explicitly, Nicholas of Cusa’s learned ignorance and coincidence of opposites.
Essential Works
- Periphyseon (The Division of Nature)867
- De divina praedestinatione (On Divine Predestination)851
- Homilia in prologum Sancti Evangelii secundum Joannem (Homily on the Prologue of John)860