SOURCE: Duclow, Donald F. “Nature as Speech and Book in John Scotus Eriugena.” Mediaevalia: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 3 (1977): 131-40.

[In the following essay, Duclow examines Eriugena's use of the book as metaphor in his attempt to describe nature and divine creativity.]

In “The Book as Symbol,”¹ E. R. Curtius outlines the history of book symbolism with emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. His remarks on “the book of nature”² are especially suggestive, because this metaphor witnesses to the astonishing depth and scope of book symbolism: the world itself comes to be seen as a book. This essay will explore this metaphor in the work of John Scotus Eriugena, the Irish philosopher and theologian of the mid-ninth century. This focus on John the Scot will supplement Curtius' essay in two ways. First, Curtius' survey of medieval book symbolism omits John the Scot. Secondly and more significantly, whereas Curtius isolates book symbolism as an independent trope, this study will integrate John the Scot's metaphoric use of written language with metaphors of sounding speech in order to render his book symbolism fully consistent and intelligible.

We may begin by defining “nature” as John uses the term, and by placing nature as book and speech within his overall speculative scheme. Nature and its divisions are a principal theme of John the Scot, whose major work is entitled Periphyseon, On Natures, or in its Latinized form, De divisione naturae, On the Division of Nature. For John the term “natura” is all-encompassing. In addition to the created, sensible world, nature includes both the uncreated God Trinity and the primordial causes, which are created and subsist eternally in the Word of God. However, the metaphor of nature as a book limits our focus to created, visible nature and the creative activity within which it originates. This restricted focus also allows us to concentrate on the proper sense of “nature.” For, distinguishing between nature and the incorruptible, intelligible sphere of essence, John states that “Physis or ‘nature’ is properly predicated of the generation of essence in places and times in some manner which can be corrupted, increased, diminished, and affected by various accidents.”³ Therefore, strictly speaking nature is the richly textured, sensible universe, subject to generation, change and corruption.

Further, by limiting our consideration of God to the creative activity which produces nature thus defined, we shall set aside John's negative theology and its attempt to approach the divine essence in its purity, apart from creation. We shall rather concentrate on his affirmative theology, which proceeds metaphorically; that is, it predicates created perfections and attributes to God. In this way, metaphor is essential to explanation of the relation between created nature and God. But even this affirmative theology remains too broad for our purposes here, since it “predicates of It [the divine essence] everything which has being, i.e., which can be spoken and understood.”⁴ In developing this way of affirmation, John can use an extraordinary range of metaphors and concepts.

We shall discuss one particularly vivid pair of metaphors: the creative act as speech, and the created, visible universe as a book. These metaphors occupy a privileged position in John's thought,⁵ since the theme of creative speech touches the nerve of John's metaphysic of the divine Word, and is grounded in the auctoritas of the Johannine Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word. …” Indeed, John the Scot's Homily and Commentary on this Gospel contain his most forceful statements of both these metaphors. Further, the theme of the visible world as a book expresses the revelatory power of created nature as a “text” parallel to sacred scripture. Finally, we shall suggest that, in “reading” these parallel texts, science and exegesis converge in John's unusual doctrine on the liberal arts.

To develop the theme of creative speech, we must begin with John's analogy between the act of speaking and the Trinity. In a passage which echoes Augustine, John states that “Just as one who speaks, in the word (verbum) that he speaks, necessarily blows forth a breath (spiritus), thus God the Father at one and the same time begets his Son and brings forth his Spirit through the begotten Son.”⁶ Here John's verbal symbolism describes the interior life of the Trinity, as he metaphorically links each person with a distinct moment in the unitary act of speaking. In particular, the Son of God “is the Father's speech, word and discourse.”⁷ The act of speaking which constitutes the life of the Trinity also carries within itself an impulse towards creation. For John repeatedly argues that the generation of the divine Word already contains the whole of creation in unity, just as the monad contains all number and the center contains all the radii of a circle.⁸ Hence, commenting on the Gospel of John (1:3), Eriugena asks:

What is it [to say] “All things were made by him [the Word],” if not: When he was born from the Father before all things, all things were made with and by him? For his generation from the Father is the creation of all causes, and the effective production of all the things which proceed from the causes into genera and species. … The Father speaks his Word … and all things come to be.⁹

John the Scot maintains this position on the twofold basis of authority and the human experience of language. All things come to be within the generation of the Word, because the Gospel declares that nothing is made outside of the Word. Further, as in human experience language contains meaning and expresses it in speech, the divine Word encompasses (ambit) all things in its unity and is the condition for their subsequent articulation in multiplicity and differentiation in genera and species. Or again, as man's act of speaking both establishes community among persons and generates the human world of culture, divine speech both establishes the intersubjective life of the Trinity and constitutes the origin of created nature. Therefore, it is language as a personal, expressive and world-forming power that leads John to elaborate this speculative metaphor for divine life and creativity.

We may now ask what form of language John has in mind when he focuses on the word in this radical fashion. It is the primary act of speaking, the sounding human voice, that provides the matrix for Eriugena's metaphor of creative speech. Thus, when he explains why the Genesis creation narrative repeats the phrase “Dixit deus” (“God said”), John writes that

By the name “deus” we understand the Father, but “dixit” signifies the Word of God. And thus the Word of God cries out in the most remote solitude of the divine goodness. And his cry is the creation of all natures … because through him God the Father has created everything that he wanted to come to be. He has cried out invisibly, before the world was created, for the world to be created. He has cried out, coming visibly into the world, for the world to be saved. First he cried out eternally by his divinity alone before his incarnation; he cried out afterwards through his flesh.¹⁰

John the Scot's verbal metaphor here connects creation and the Incarnation. For the divine Word's first cry calls all created natures into being, while the second cry occurs in the Incarnation. This twofold cry emphasizes the oral character of John's sense of language. He does not conceive the creative act as the shaping of something already given, as in the constructive activity of Plato's primordial craftsman, the demiurge.¹¹ Creativity is rather imagined as sustained and free self-expression, as an enduring cry which constitutes the very being of its created artifact. John remarks, “Just as when one who is speaking ceases to speak, his voice ceases and dies away, in the same way if the Father of heaven should cease to speak his Word, the created universe would not subsist.”¹² Created nature is therefore the speech of God, whose Word is expressed through the primordial causes and their effects, the entire visible universe. For John the Scot, God is as constitutively present throughout created nature as the speaker is in his speech, or the singer in his song.

With the oral meaning of creative speech in mind, we may now turn to John's second metaphor: the visible world as book. John elaborates a parallel between visible nature and sacred scripture, both of which “incarnate” the divine act of speech. Commenting on the Johannine Gospel, Eriugena confronts the claim that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). While Christology is central in John's thought, here we shall concentrate on his metaphoric extension of incarnation to the revelations of scripture and visible nature. As he remarks,

The commentators … introduce the incarnation of the Word of God in a twofold way. One teaches his incarnation from the virgin, by which he has joined human nature to himself in a unity of substance. The other declares that the same Word is, as it were, incarnate—that is, made thick (incrassatum)—in letters and also in the forms and ordered ranks of visible things.¹³

Here John employs a complex metaphor: first, both scripture and created nature are incarnations of the Word; and secondly, both scripture and nature form parallel “texts” through which the divine Word addresses man.

To appreciate this complex metaphor, we should recall that John is writing in the midst of the rich manuscript culture of the Carolingian renaissance.¹⁴ As translator of Greek texts, grammarian, exegete, and author of poetry and philosophical dialogue, John is keenly aware of the transformation of living speech into written script. Writing objectifies the sounding word, makes it visible, and gives it a stability that speech cannot achieve.¹⁵ Because of this transformation, John views scripture as an objective, visible self-revelation of the divine Word. Analogously, John consistently views created nature as “theophany,” that is, the visible self-manifestation of God under the conditions of multiplicity, space and time. Both scripture and creation incarnate the cry of the divine Word, which thereby takes on material and visible thickness (incrassatio). Following Maximus the Confessor, John sees created nature as a book in which creatures are the letters and syllables, and he also interprets scripture as an intelligible world: “Scripture is ‘created’ by God, like the world, and in return the world is ‘written’ by Him, like a book.”¹⁶

As the twofold self-expression of God, scripture and created nature form the “first stage”¹⁷ and primary vehicle for knowledge of God. John elaborates a consistent parallel between understanding scripture and contemplating nature (physica theoria):

For divine knowlege is renewed in us only by the letters of scripture and the appearance of the creature. Learn the divine declarations (eloquia), and in your mind take hold of their meaning, in which you will recognize the Word. With your bodily senses look at the forms and beauties of visible things, and in these you will understand the Word of God.¹⁸

Expressing this parallel metaphorically, John states that scripture and created nature are the two garments of the divine Word, or the two sandals in which Christ has impressed his footprints.¹⁹ To unstrap these sandals or see through these garments, John posits a radical convergence of exegesis and the knowledge of nature. For as revelations of the one uncreated Word, scripture and creation disclose an identity of structure which requires common rules for its interpretation.

In this context, let us examine another of John's analogies:

Holy scripture is a certain intelligible world, constituted by four parts, as by the four elements. History is its earth, as if in the middle and indeed like its center, around which—in the likeness of the waters—is poured the sea of moral understanding, which the Greeks are accustomed to call ethike. Around these—I mean, history and moral [understanding]—as around the lower parts of the aforesaid world, flies the air of natural science: what I name natural science, the Greeks call physike. And outside and beyond all these is formed the sphere of the ethereal and fiery brightness of empyrean heaven, i.e., of the high contemplation of the divine nature, which the Greeks call theology.²⁰

Several features distinguish this unusual analogy. First, since scripture constitutes an “intelligible world,” John here presents the reverse image of the world as book, namely, the book as world. Secondly, the “physical” details of the analogy reinforce this reverse image of scripture as world; the four elements equal the four senses of scripture. Finally, the entire metaphor is rooted in the more basic metaphor of the creative act as speech. Because both nature and scripture are concrete expressions of the divine Word, they mirror each other and the four elements parallel the four parts of scripture.

With these metaphors before us, one further question remains. How are we to “read” the language of scripture and created nature? In the tradition of Augustine, John responds that the liberal arts lead us to a unified understanding of both creation and scripture.²¹ The doctrine of the liberal arts in John's thought is complex, and here we can only sketch this doctrine in relation to his verbal metaphors. Eriugena sees the liberal arts not as arbitrary human constructs, but as bound to the very being of the soul and embedded in nature itself. He claims that these “arts are eternal and always cling to the soul without change.”²² With particular reference to the verbal arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic), we may say that the liberal arts express the “deep structure” of human consciousness. Further, in glossing Genesis John argues that dialectic articulates the pattern of creation itself: “The art of dialectic, which divides genera into species and resolves species into genera, was not fashioned by human devices, but created in the nature of things by the Author of all arts that are truly arts; and discovered by wise men and, by skillful research, adapted to use.”²³ Why else, John asks, would the creation of the animals proceed from the production of “a living soul in its genus” to “cattle, reptiles, and beasts according to their species” (Gen 1:24)?

This exaltation of the liberal arts might appear naive or arbitrary outside the context of John's verbal metaphors. But if the creative act is speech and nature a book, then the liberal arts can be “discovered” as the rules which govern their language from within. In this way, dialectic discloses the intelligible structure of the creative act of speech and its objectification in the “written” book of nature. Dialectic and the other arts are not simply heuristic devices for reading the language of creation and scripture. Rather, these arts are “created in the nature of things.” Their explanatory power is rooted in the verbal character of both divine creativity and created nature.

To sum up the argument, we have been tracing a logic of symbols which leads from the oral symbolism of creative speech to the visual symbolism of the book of nature. For John the Scot, divine creativity is speech, which cries out within the interior life of the Trinity, and created nature incarnates this speech in space and time. John's metaphoric parallel between created nature and scripture thus marks a shift from the creative act of oral speech to the written book of nature. As book, the created universe simultaneously conditions and requires the liberal arts for its interpretation. We use the liberal arts to read the visible language of created nature, and are thereby led to hear the sounding cry of the creative Word.

In conclusion, John the Scot's verbal metaphors remind us that the creativity of language is manifest first and foremost in the act of speaking, and only derivatively in its written forms. John also leads us to examine the complex relations between spoken and written language and the world. Our entire essay presupposes that speech and writing not only contain symbols but themselves become symbols, since they provide John the Scot with a paradigm for interpreting both nature and divine creativity. This interpretation discloses a radical convergence of language and the human world. For when John speaks of nature as speech and book, the limits of human discourse become co-extensive with the boundaries of the meaningful world and of what can be said of God in the way of affirmation. To move beyond these boundaries would require that we recall the metaphoric, and hence limited, character of John's verbal symbolism and of our inquiry. Here we stand at the threshold between the ways of metaphoric affirmation and of negation, beyond which lies the silence of mystical theology. As we confront this silence, it may be well for us to fall silent.

Notes

1. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask (New York, 1963), pp. 302-47.

2. Ibid., pp. 319-26.

3. John the Scot, Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature, ed. and trans. Myra L. Uhlfelder, with introduction and summaries by Jean A. Potter (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 279 (PL 122, 867A-B). The appropriate columns in the Floss edition of Eriugena's works (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 122) will be given in parentheses following all direct citations, and will be used as a key to all references.

4. Ibid. p. 22 (458A-C).

5. Concerning the pivotal role of John's metaphor of creative speech, see D. F. Duclow, “Divine Nothingness and Self-creation in John Scotus Eriugena,” Journal of Religion, 57 (April, 1977), especially pp. 119-23.

6. John the Scot, Homélie sur la Prologue de Jean, ed. and French trans. Edouard Jeauneau (Paris, 1969), p. 242 (288A-B). For a concise summary of John's Trinitarian theology, see Periphyseon 609B-610B.

7. Periphyseon, p. 151 (642B).

8. See Periphyseon 621C, 625A-D; Homélie, p. 250 (289A).

9. Homélie, pp. 230-32 (287A-B).

10. John the Scot, Commentaire sur l'Evangile de Jean, ed. and French trans. Edouard Jeauneau (Paris, 1972), p. 142 (304D-305A). This and similar passages in Eriugena are among the exceptions to Walter Ong's generalization concerning “how much of the literature concerned with the Word as the Person of Jesus … has veered away from considering the Word in terms of sound to consider the Word in terms of knowledge-by-vision” (The Presence of the Word [New York, 1970], p. 180).

11. Plato, Timaeus 30a-41d.

12. Homélie, p. 288 (293C). John captures the Hebraic sense of the word as power and sustaining action. For a comparison of the Hebraic and the Greek sense of language, see Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 58-69.

13. Commentaire p. 156 (307B). For a related interpretation linking the divine Word to the universe as book, see Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York, 1941), especially pp. 122-24.

14. For a brief survey of Carolingian scriptoria and libraries, see M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe A.D. 500 to 900 (Ithaca, 1966), pp. 225-37. A number of the most spectacularly illuminated manuscripts of the period were closely associated with the court of Eriugena's patron, Charles the Bald: e.g., the Bible of Count Vivian, the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, the Coronation Sacramentary of Charles the Bald; see inter alia, John Beckwith, Early Medieval Art (New York, 1964), pp. 52-74.

15. See Ong, pp. 35-61. Ong's account of language as primarily sound, and of its subsequent transformations, provides a useful contemporary context for interpreting John's verbal symbolism.

16. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale (Paris, 1959), part I, vol. i, p. 124.

17. Commentaire, p. 338 (342B).

18. Homélie p. 254 (289C); Expositiones super Ierarchiam caelestem 138C-139A. Concerning “physica theoria,” see Homélie, p. 250 (288C).

19. Commentaire, p. 154 (307A); regarding clothing symbolism, see Periphyseon 723D.

20. Homélie, pp. 270-72 (291 B-C); see Jeauneau's commentary, pp. 327-28.

21. Expositiones super Ierarchiam caelestem, 139C-140A.

22. Periphyseon, p. 57 (486C).

23. Ibid. p. 215 (748D-749A). In a similar vein, Galileo sees nature as a book which “cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures” (“The Assayer,” in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. and trans. S. Drake [Garden City, 1957], pp. 237-38). In light of this passage, one way of discussing the transition from medieval to modern science may be the following: for John the Scot the principal liberal art for reading the book of nature is dialectic, while Galileo sees nature as a text in arithmetica and geometria. Within the symbolism of the book of nature, we thus confront a different emphasis upon which of the liberal arts most accurately interprets the language of the world.