(810–877). Little is known about the life of this Irish scholar who taught the liberal arts at the court of Charles the Bald in and around Laon in northern France. Although the earlier view of Eriugena as a lonely genius in a barren period has recently been modified, the wealth of his erudition and his remarkable knowledge of Greek make him stand out among his Carolingian contemporaries.
Eriugena first emerges as a participant in the controversy surrounding predestination in 850–51. In his campaign against the monk Gottschalk of Orbais, archbishop Hincmar of Reims asked Eriugena to refute Gottschalk’s doctrine of double predestination (to eternal life and to eternal death), which the latter claimed to be the true Augustinian teaching. Eriugena, who is not known to have been a monk or priest, wrote De divina praedestinatione in compliance with Hincmar’s request. Instead of advocating Hincmar’s view of a single predestination, however, Eriugena argues that predestination is nothing more than God’s eternal knowledge, and that humans have freedom of choice even after the Fall. After the condemnation of his views at the councils of Valence (855) and Langres (859), Eriugena never returned to the arena of ecclesiastical politics.
For Eriugena’s next assignment, Charles the Bald ordered a new translation be made of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Greek texts of this 6th-century Syrian mystic, who was identified with St. Denis, patron of the Franks, had become available through a codex donated by the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer to Louis the Pious in 827. Through his reading and translation of Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena was introduced to certain features of Greek theology, such as the unfolding of the universe according to procession and return and the methods of negative and affirmative theology, which he subsequently incorporated into his own thinking. He also translated Maximus the Confessor’s Quaestiones ad Thalassium and Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio.
Eriugena’s major intellectual achievement was the Periphyseon, or On the Division of Nature. This work, written ca. 864–66, is the mature product of his reflections on Greek theology as well as on the western tradition of Augustine and Boethius. Its most impressive feature is its scope: an inclusive treatment of all of nature, under which he classifies both God and creation. Structuring the universe along the lines of procession and return, Eriugena discusses all major theological and philosophical issues of his time in a dialectical fashion. The discussion of nature ranges from God (nature that creates but is not created) through a treatment of the divine ideas (nature that is created and creates) and of spatiotemporal creations (nature that is created and does not create) back to God (nature that does not create and is not created). In addition, his Expositiones in ierarchiam coelestem (on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy) and his homily Vox spiritualis aquilae have become famous.
Due to the later association of Eriugena with the heresy of Amalric of Bène, Pope Honorius III in 1225 ordered that all extant copies of the Periphyseon be burned. Yet, through direct and indirect influence, Eriugena’s voice continued to be heard in the medieval Christian-Platonic tradition. In connection with idealist philosophy and process theology, Eriugena’s ideas also stimulate modern thinking.
——. Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), ed. I.P.Sheldon-Williams and Ludwig Bieler. 3 vols. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968–81.
——. Periphyseon=On the Division of Nature, trans. Myra I.Uhlfelder with summaries by Jean A.Potter. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
Marenbon, John. From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Moran, Dermot. The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
O’Meara, John J., and Ludwig Bieler, eds. The Mind of Eriugena. Dublin: Irish University Press, 1973.
Otten, Willemien. The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena. Leiden: Brill, 1991.
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