Heinrich Joseph Floss

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Heinrich Joseph Floss (1819–1881) was a German Catholic theologian and church historian whose name survives chiefly on a title page: the collected edition of John Scotus Eriugena that he prepared for Migne’s Patrologia Latina, published in 1853 as volume 122 of that series. For more than a century afterward, anyone who read the ninth century’s boldest Neoplatonist read him through Floss’s text. The Latin he set in type carried the running head of the Fathers, and the column numbers he imposed became the address by which the Periphyseon is still cited — so that a name almost unknown outside the specialist literature is, in practice, written into the footnotes of everyone who quotes Eriugena.

John Scotus Eriugena depicted in a manuscript of the Clavis physicae of Honorius Augustodunensis (Paris, BN Lat. 6734, fol. 3v); the ninth-century author whose collected works Floss edited as volume 122 of the Patrologia Latina — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

A Rhineland church historian

Floss was a man of the Rhineland from first to last. He was born on 29 July 1819 at Wormersdorf, a village near Rheinbach in the Cologne district, took his schooling at the Gymnasium in Münstereifel, and went up to the University of Bonn to read Catholic theology and history — the two disciplines that would remain fused in his work. He earned the doctorate in philosophy in 1841 and was ordained priest in 1842, serving as a chaplain at Bilk near Düsseldorf before a period of study in Rome. By 1846 he was back in Bonn as a tutor in the theological seminary, and in November 1847 he habilitated as a private lecturer in church history and New Testament exegesis on the Catholic theological faculty. The promotions followed in the slow rhythm of a German faculty: extraordinary professor of church history in 1854, ordinary professor of moral theology in 1858, a chair he held — while continuing to teach church history — until his death at Bonn on 4 May 1881.

His scholarship was, in the ordinary run of it, local and documentary. He wrote on the religious past of the Rhineland and the old archdiocese of Cologne: Geschichtliche Nachrichten über die Aachener Heiligthümer (1855), a study of the relics and treasures of the Aachen minster; a register of the bishops, archbishops, suffragans, and papal nuncios of Cologne, prepared for the archdiocesan handbook; a Kölnische Chronik edited from the sources; a monograph on the convent of Rolandswerth on its Rhine island near Bonn. He was among the founders, in 1854, of the Historical Society for the Lower Rhine, and from 1870 served as its vice-president, editing and contributing to its Annalen. This is the customary profile of a nineteenth-century diocesan historian: archives, charters, local saints, the patient reconstruction of a region’s ecclesiastical record. None of it would have lifted his name out of the regional learned societies.

Aachen Cathedral, whose relics and treasures Floss surveyed in his 1855 study of the Aachener Heiligthümer — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A task of a different order

The Eriugena edition was a task of a different order, and it came to Floss through the most industrious publishing enterprise of the age. The Patrologia Latina was Jacques-Paul Migne’s vast undertaking to reprint, in hundreds of uniform volumes, the whole of Latin Christian writing from Tertullian to Innocent III — a series assembled in a press at Petit-Montrouge outside Paris with a speed and scale that made it, for working scholars, the single most convenient body of texts ever put between covers. Migne needed editors who could supply ready Latin; he was rarely a critical editor himself. For volume 122 he turned to Floss, and the title page records exactly what the Bonn professor did to earn his place on it: the works of John the Scot, it says, partim primus edidit, partim recognovit Henricus Josephus Floss — in part first edited, in part re-examined. Some pieces he printed for the first time; others he revised against the manuscripts and earlier printings. The volume appeared in 1853.

Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–1875), whose Patrologia Latina commissioned Floss to edit Eriugena for volume 122 — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

What lay between its covers was not the safe patrimony of a Doctor of the Church. Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De divisione naturae, was a system in which all things proceed from God and return to God, built from Greek sources the Latin West had largely lost and pressed to conclusions that its own age had not been able to hold. The full architecture of that system — the fourfold division of nature, the doctrine of theophany, the human creature as the officina omnium through whom the cosmos returns — belongs to Eriugena himself; what concerns Floss is that this was the corpus he chose to gather and stabilize. Its Neoplatonism, reaching him through the Greek Fathers rather than from Plotinus or Proclus directly, gave the medieval West its boldest essay in a metaphysics of emanation recast in a Christian key, and its apophatic insistence that God is beyond being had carried, ever since the thirteenth century, the standing charge of pantheism.

The shadow on the corpus

That charge had a documentary history, and Floss knew it intimately, because the proof of it lay in the very book he was editing. The Periphyseon had been implicated in the early thirteenth century through the pantheist circle of Amalric of Bène, and in 1225 Pope Honorius III confirmed its condemnation in the bull Inimicus homo, ordering copies hunted down and burned — and copies were in fact consigned to the fire. The Latin of that bull, in which the book is described as swarming with the worms of heretical perversity, survives because Floss reprinted it in his own preface to the volume: the editor placed the sentence of burning at the head of the text he was returning to print, the condemnation and the rescue bound together. After Thomas Gale brought out the first printed edition at Oxford in 1681, Rome placed the Periphyseon on the Index of Prohibited Books, where it stayed until the Index itself was abolished in 1966.

So the situation in 1853 had a particular edge to it. A professor of Catholic theology, holding a chair in moral theology on a faculty under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Cologne, gathered a corpus that the papacy had ordered burned and then placed on its Index, and printed it not as a curiosity but bound like the Fathers, in the standard patrology, with the full apparatus of a learned edition. The system that had twice been driven out of circulation re-entered it wearing the livery of orthodox tradition. The Patrologia Latina did not certify a text as sound; it made it available, permanent, and findable. For Eriugena that was decisive. A work whose surviving manuscripts were few and scattered, whose printed history ran through a single seventeenth-century Oxford edition and a partial Münster edition of 1838, became, overnight, a fixed and citable thing in every theological library that took Migne — and one of the most demanding speculative systems the Middle Ages had produced was again open on the desk of anyone who wished to weigh it.

What the volume held

Volume 122 held far more than the Periphyseon. Floss collected the whole of Eriugena’s surviving output, and the contents map the full reach of the man. There was the homily on the prologue of John’s Gospel and the longer commentary on John; the poems; the early treatise De divina praedestinatione, the forensic work of 851 that had first brought Eriugena to grief with two provincial councils. And there were the translations — the part of the corpus that mattered most for the later history of Christian mysticism. Eriugena’s Latin version of the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, made around 860 at the commission of Charles the Bald, was the channel through which the negative theology of that Greek corpus reached the Latin schools: the Celestial Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the Divine Names, the Mystical Theology, and the letters, with Eriugena’s own Expositiones on the celestial hierarchy. Floss printed alongside them Eriugena’s Latin rendering of the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, the Greek monk through whom much of this Eastern metaphysics had passed.

To gather these texts in one volume was to make visible, on a single shelf, the great act of transmission that had carried Greek Christian Neoplatonism into the Latin West. The medieval reception of the Dionysian corpus — Hugh of Saint-Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, the Rhineland mystics, the Renaissance Platonists — had run in the first instance through Eriugena’s Latin; and the convenient working text of that Latin, for the century after 1853, was Floss’s. A reader who wanted to see how the apophatic theology of the Christian East had entered the medieval schools could now find the conduit itself, the Versio Dionysii, printed beside the cosmology it had helped generate.

The timing of the edition

The timing mattered as much as the contents. The middle of the nineteenth century was rediscovering Eriugena, and arguing fiercely over what he was. A line of German scholarship — Franz Anton Staudenmaier’s monograph of 1834, the Münster edition of the Periphyseon prepared by Christoph Bernhard Schlüter in 1838, Theodor Christlieb’s study of 1860, Johannes Huber’s of 1861 — was trying to take the measure of a thinker who fit none of the available categories. Was he a pantheist before his time, the medieval ancestor of Spinoza? A forerunner of German idealism, a man who had thought the procession and return of all things from the Absolute a thousand years before Schelling and the post-Kantians? Or an orthodox Christian mystic, misread by his thirteenth-century condemners through the distorting lens of the Amalrician heresy?

The question was not idle, and it was not only antiquarian. The same decades that read Eriugena were reading Hegel, who in his lectures on the history of philosophy had dated the beginning of genuine medieval philosophy to Eriugena — adding the caution, repeated ever since, that he must not be confused with the later John Duns Scotus — and judged that with him true philosophy first begins. To a generation steeped in Hegelianism, a ninth-century dialectic of the outgoing and homecoming of all things looked uncannily like a prefiguration of their own. Whether Eriugena was the property of the idealists or of the mystics, of the heresiologists or of the orthodox, the debate could only be conducted on a complete and reliable text. Floss’s edition gave that argument the text it needed to stand on, whichever way it was read — and on the particular question of pantheism, twentieth-century scholarship, working from Floss’s pages, would largely conclude that the charge was imprecise, that Eriugena was better described as a panentheist for whom every assertion of divine immanence was balanced by one of transcendence.

An editor among editors

It is worth being exact about what kind of figure Floss was, because the single most common error in the reference literature concerns precisely this. He is sometimes said to have edited the works of John Duns Scotus — the slip that conflates the two medieval Scots, the ninth-century Irishman and the thirteenth-century Franciscan, against which Hegel had warned. Floss edited the ninth-century Scot: Eriugena, the Carolingian. The error is itself a small monument to how completely the edition swallowed the editor’s name into the author’s.

Floss stood at the end of a short chain of editors who had kept the Periphyseon alive on the page. Behind him lay Gale’s Oxford editio princeps of 1681 and Schlüter’s Münster edition of 1838; the burning ordered in 1225 had nearly closed the line, and the Index had kept it suspect. Carolingian learning had its own custodians — the schoolmen around Alcuin who, two generations before Eriugena, had labored to keep the Latin inheritance from being lost — but Eriugena himself was a singular case, a Greek-reading mind without precedent in his own language, and his fate had been editorial neglect punctuated by condemnation. What Floss did was the unglamorous, decisive work of the nineteenth-century critical editor: he gathered the dispersed witnesses, set the text in a uniform and permanent series, supplied the apparatus, and reprinted the documents — including the very bull that had ordered the burning — that fixed the work in its history.

The edition and its scholarship

The volume itself can still be read in full as Floss left it. The Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitized the whole of Patrologiae cursus completus, tomus 122, its title page naming the contents as Joannis Scoti Opera quae supersunt omnia and crediting Floss with having partim primus edidit, partim recognovit — the 1853 Petit-Montrouge printing, all 1324 columns, with the letters of Pope Hadrian II appended at the end (gallica.bnf.fr). It is the document on which a century of Eriugena scholarship was built, and it remains the convenient working text for the Dionysian and Maximian translations even where the Periphyseon itself is now read in a newer edition.

Floss the man is harder to find than Floss the title page. The fullest account of his life is the notice in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (de.wikisource.org), which records the Bonn chairs, the priesthood, the Aachen and Cologne studies, and the work for the Historical Society for the Lower Rhine — the ordinary career of a Rhineland church historian, behind the one extraordinary book. The nineteenth-century debate his edition served is documented in its own monographs: Franz Anton Staudenmaier’s Johannes Scotus Erigena (1834), Johannes Huber’s study of 1861, Theodor Christlieb’s of 1860, each working toward a verdict on a thinker the available categories could not hold. The twentieth-century reassessment runs through Dermot Moran’s The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (Cambridge, 1989), which reads him as a proto-idealist, and the critical editions of I. P. Sheldon-Williams and Édouard Jeauneau that re-founded the text on principles Floss’s age had not developed — yet all of them measure their distance from PL 122, and none has displaced its column-numbering.

The pagination that outlived the edition

Scholarship has since moved past the edition without discarding it. The twentieth century produced critical editions of the Periphyseon on principles Floss could not have applied — the Dublin facing-Latin-and-English edition of I. P. Sheldon-Williams, Ludwig Bieler, and John J. O’Meara, and above all Édouard Jeauneau’s five-volume Corpus Christianorum edition of 1996 to 2003, which reconstructed the layered authorial recensions of the dialogue and superseded the older composite Latin text. By the standards of modern textual criticism, Floss’s text is a period instrument.

And yet Eriugena is still cited by the column numbers of Patrologia Latina 122. The most precise modern study, working from Jeauneau’s reconstruction, will give a reader the Migne column in the margin, because that is the address every earlier reader has used and the one that ties the whole literature together — PL 122, with its column figure, locating a passage in a system the ninth century thought through and the thirteenth ordered burned. Floss’s pagination is carried, accordingly, in the margins of the very editions that replaced his: the editor’s numbering outliving the editor’s text, the most durable thing he made.

→ In the library: Dionysius the Areopagite — Works (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation · Middle Ages · Johannes Scotus Eriugena · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Apophatic Theology · Pantheism · Maximus The Confessor · Proclus · Plotinus · Augustine Of Hippo · G W F Hegel · F W J Schelling · Hegelianism · Alcuin