Johannes Scotus Eriugena

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Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 800 – c. 877) was an Irish scholar, translator, and philosopher who taught at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald, and the most original speculative thinker of the early medieval Latin West. His two names both mean the same thing — Scotus and Eriugena alike marking him as an Irishman, “born in Ireland” — a redundancy that has survived because so little else about his life is fixed. Where he was trained, when he crossed to Francia, where and how he died: none of it is securely known.

What is known is the work. Sometime around 860 he was asked to produce a Latin translation of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite — the anonymous Greek author, now placed around 500, who had fused Christian theology with the Neoplatonism of Proclus. Eriugena was almost alone in his era in reading Greek, and the commission gave the Latin world its access to a body of mystical thought it could not otherwise have used. He went on to translate Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, absorbing from all three a metaphysics of procession and return that became the frame of his own thinking.

That thinking took shape in the Periphyseon, or On the Division of Nature, a long dialogue completed in the 860s. Its governing idea is a fourfold division of “nature,” understood as the totality of what is and is not: nature that creates and is not created (God as source), nature created that also creates (the primordial causes or divine ideas), nature created that does not create (the world of particular things), and nature that neither creates nor is created (God as the end to which all returns). The scheme describes a single circuit — all things flow out from God and are drawn back into God — and Eriugena pressed it to conclusions that later readers found vertiginous: that God, strictly speaking, is beyond being and cannot be said to “exist” as creatures do, and that even the divine self-knowledge is a kind of unknowing.

The Church’s verdict was harsh and slow. The Periphyseon read, to critics, as collapsing the distance between creator and creation; it was condemned in the thirteenth century and again in 1685, and copies were ordered burned. Yet the book never quite disappeared. Its negative theology and its language of return reached the later medieval mystics, and Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century read it closely. Modern scholarship treats Eriugena less as a heretic than as the point where Greek Christian Neoplatonism entered Latin thought whole — the rigor of his system, and its strangeness, belonging to a mind working largely without precedent in its own language.

→ In the library: Pseudo-Dionysius — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Nicholas Of Cusa · Emanation · Augustine Of Hippo · Middle Ages