SOURCE: Hanson, W. G. “John Scotus Erigena.” In The Early Monastic Schools of Ireland: Their Missionaries, Saints, and Scholars, pp. 111-26. Cambridge, England: W. Heffer & Sons Limited, 1927.

[In the following essay, Hanson provides an overview of Eriugena's work, reputation, and influence.]

It is the dictum of Mr. W. B. Yeats that “Ireland has produced but two men of religious genius: Johannes Scotus Erigena, who lived a long time ago, and Bishop Berkeley, who kept his Plato by his Bible; and Ireland has forgotten both.”¹

If by “religious genius” Mr. Yeats means speculative genius, I would agree; but religion owes more to St. Columba and St. Columban than to Erigena or Berkeley, and those apostolic men were not inferior in genius to their philosophic compatriots.

Johannes Scotus Erigena, or, more properly, Eriugena,² whom Professor Henry Bett styles “the loneliest figure in the history of European thought,” was born somewhere in Ireland between 800 and 815 a.d. At that time the Eastern and Western Churches were drifting apart. Erigena was the one great thinker of the West in that dreary epoch, and all his sympathies, as of so many of his countrymen at that time, were with the East. He was a Hellenist, and his affinities were with the Neo-Platonists, and, curiously enough, with the modern idealists like Hegel. We know nothing of his early life, but we find him at the Court of Charles the Bald in Paris, before 847, and we know that he became a teacher and probably regent of the Palace School. We also know that he was in early life the friend of Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes, and that he was called in by Hincmar of Rheims to confute Gottscalc in the Predestinarian controversy. Professor W. P. Ker says:

They wanted a skilled apologist; they found one whose help, like that of the magic sword in certain fairy tales, might be dangerous for the side that used it. They asked him to oppose the excessive cruelties of predestination, as maintained by Gottscalc. But he would not be limited to the requisite amount of controversy, and before the Irish philosopher could be checked, he had refuted Sin and Hell.³

The same authority says also:

His translation of Dionysius on The Celestial Hierarchy, besides its importance for theology, had a large imaginative influence, culminating long afterwards in Dante's Paradiso. His great work on The Division of Nature has been appreciated as the one purely philosophical argument of the Middle Ages … Neo-Platonist he is called, but in his case the name does not stand for eclectic oriental work; his mind is as clear as Berkeley's, with a vastly greater and more articulate system to explain and develop. For literature, the merit of his writing is that it expresses his meaning without hurry or confusion, and that his meaning, whatever its philosophical value, is certainly no weak repetition of commonplaces. It is to be noted that he takes a different view of Dialectic from what sufficed the ordinary professors. Dialectic is not a human contrivance. Dialectic is concealed in Nature by the Author of all the Arts, and discovered by those who look for it wisely. The proper study of Dialectic is the study of Reality. Erigena is discontented with abstractions. The current formulas of the schools are not enough for him, in his Platonic quest for the Real. On the other hand, he saves himself from the more dangerous temptation of mysticism; he is not swallowed up in blind ecstasy. The world in its fulness is not dismissed as a shadow. He is rational, logical, though with a livelier and more imaginative logic than the common. If, like the mystics, he speaks of the ineffable Unity, he has also, like Lucretius, an exultation is the welling energy of the world and its innumerable variety … Although he makes little show of it, he was touched in imagination by the old poetic faith in the Soul of the World. He quotes, after a passage from the Timaeus, the famous lines from the Æneid—‘Spiritus intus alit’—which were taxed by Gibbon for their too close resemblance to ‘the impious Spinoza,’ and Erigena certainly cannot escape the same condemnation.⁴

Erigena is not, in fact, content to be a realist; he is that to excess, like Spinoza. After having affirmed the substantial unity of all beings, he reconnises that they differ in some things, but he goes on to declare that all difference is simply superficial. Nevertheless he is not a pagan. With Christians he proclaims the sole Author of all creatures, personified under three separate hypostases. He holds Catholic doctrine as a symbolic approximation to truth, but he emphasises the super-essential reality of the unknowable God, the eternity of the process of creation, and the non-existence of evil in the true Neo-Platonic fashion. Plato is one of his masters, and he interprets him in such a way as to make one believe that he has had more than one conversation with him under the Academic shades. He knows Greek, and, as M. Hauréau points out, he does not know it after the same fashion as Bede, Alcuin, Heiric, Remi of Auxerre, and many other apprentice Hellenists of the Latin schools, who, because they have learnt some Greek words in intercourse with Irish teachers, make great parade of them, and afterwards betray by the most foolish errors the imperfection of their knowledge. He knows Greek as well as a learned man of the sixteenth century, and his translation of the works of the pseudo-Dionysius is still to-day available to us.⁵

It was Charles the Bald who ordered Erigena to translate the works of “Dionysius the Areopagite.” Paris was in close proximity to the Abbey of St. Denis, whose fame had attracted thither the dying Pepin; and it was this that gave Erigena the first opportunity for making his great gifts known. The belief that the foundation dated from the Areopagite, one of the few converts made by St. Paul at Athens, was then universally held, and when writings attributed to him were brought thither, their contents aroused curiosity, and Erigena was the translator who was chosen to reveal them. The translation may or may not have satisfied the Abbot and the royal patron, but the influence of the books on the mind of the translator was enormous. The works ascribed to Dionysius placed him in possession of a metaphysical system ostensibly founded on works of Plato which were unknown to Western Christendom, and whose speculative fearlessness was equally foreign to its spirit.

Erigena also translated the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, the secretary of the Emperor Heraclius who became Abbot of Chrysopolis, which work is a commentary on Dionysius and Gregory Nazianzen. He also wrote a life of Boethius. His theological views were condemned at the Synod of Valence in 855,⁶ and at the Synod of Langres in 859.

After the battle of Ethandun in 878, when Alfred decisively beat the Danes, Erigena came to England, and taught at the Abbey of Malmesbury, where he is believed to have been stabbed to death by his pupils with their pens, “a pueris quos docebat graphiis perfossus;”—a melancholy end for so great a man.

His character is indicated in a letter of Anastasius the Papal Librarian: “Ioannem … Scotigenam, virum quem auditu comperi per omnia sanctum.”⁷

Prudentius of Troyes describes him as “nullis ecclesiasticae dignitatis gradibus insignitum.”⁸ He is described by William of Malmesbury as “perexilis corporis” and “ira praeproperus.”⁹

In his admirable monograph: Johannes Scotus Erigena: a Study in Medieval Philosophy, Professor Bett discusses in detail the authorities which Erigena used, and comes to the conclusion that the two most important were Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine; indeed, he maintains that he “got all the Neo-platonist substance of his philosophy out of Augustine.”¹⁰ Much of the substance of his thought, however, was derived from the pseudo-Dionysius, though he was a Neo-Platonist before he knew anything about the Areopagite.¹¹ Many of the characteristic features of his teaching can be traced back to the influence of Proclus, and in some respects his thought more resembles Origen than Augustine. His theory of the restitution of all things is almost entirely from Origen. Mr. Bett agrees with Mr. R. L. Poole that Erigena's knowledge of the Timaeus, the only dialogue of Plato with which he was directly acquainted, came to him through the Latin version of Chalcidius.¹²

Erigena's influence is to be recognised later in some of the more obscure and extreme heresies which were denounced by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. He and his master, Dionysius, may also be the source from which the great Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck, the German mystics Eckhart and Tauler, and the authors of the Theologia Germanica drank of the great stream of Neo-Platonism. If so, it was through them that he influenced Boehme, and possibly Hegel.

The De Divisione Naturae, which was dedicated to Wulfadus, tutor of Charles the Bald's son Carloman, Canon of Rheims, and later Archbishop of Bourges, forms a complete philosophy of existence, and it professes to be a Christian philosophy. He says:

Philosophy, the study of wisdom, is not one thing and religion another. What is it to treat of philosophy, if it is not to expound the precepts of true religion, according to which we humbly adore, and we pursue from mystery to mystery, the Sovereign and First Cause of all things, God! Whence it follows that the true philosophy is the true religion, and, reciprocally, that the true religion is the true philosophy.¹³

He says elsewhere:

Authority proceeds from correct reason, and in no wise reason from authority. But all authority of which the decrees are not approved by the reason is an authority without value; while correct reason, established as an impregnable fortress behind the rampart of its own forces, has no need to be protected by the support of any authority.¹⁴

He continues:

I am not greatly terrified by authority. I do not fear so much the fury of unintelligent minds that I hesitate to proclaim on the housetops that which my reason unfolds clearly and demonstrates with certitude.¹⁵

The freedom of these declarations is surprising. Erigena has more right to the title of the first Protestant than Shaw's St. Joan. These utterances are, according to the Roman Church, so many blasphemies. To hear them repeated, it is necessary to go down the ladder of the centuries, and to travel as far as the Philosopher of Malmesbury, Thomas Hobbes.

M. Degérando says:

It is very curious to see, in the midst of that general ignorance, at a time when the sphere of learning was so narrow, a man, a single man, suddenly bursting into the highest region of abstract speculation; it is curious to see the philosophy of the Middle Age begin with an enterprise so daring and an array of such singular conceptions. … The appearance of such a man, at such an epoch, is, at all events, an extraordinary phenomenon; one would as soon expect to come across a monument of art standing up in the midst of the desert sands.¹⁶

Professor Bett boldly takes up the cudgels in defence of Erigena. He says:

If there is to be a complete Christian Philosophy at all it must be monistic … It must give some rationale of the beginning of evil and the end of it; of the first and final relation to God of all existence; of the creation and consummation of all things.¹⁷

That Erigena attempts to do, but not with entire success. The charge of pantheism has been brought against him. M. Hauréau says:

Sa doctrine est prècisément le dernier mot de l'audace antique. Ce n'est pas la doctrine d'Aristote; il la méprise; ni même celle de Platon; il va bien au delà. C'est à la lettre celle de Proclus, le panthéisme arrogant, sans mesure et sans frein.¹⁸

But, as Mr. Bett points out, a philosophic attempt to reduce the universe to one, and to conceive of God as all in all, must

at least look pantheistic; it must seem at first sight to abolish evil, to imperil personality, and to volatilise the world. How could it be otherwise?¹⁹

If Erigena's system implies pantheism, he goes on to say, it is pantheism

of an entirely distinct and peculiar type. For while it holds that God is in the world and in all that exists, it also holds that He is above all and beyond all. And, if it teaches that God is wholly present to His creation, in its totality and in its parts, it also teaches that nevertheless He abides wholly in Himself.²⁰

The treatise On the Division of Nature, consists of five books in the form of a dialogue between Master and Pupil. The first book deals with God as the Source of all, creating and not created; the second the Primordial Causes intermediary between God and His creation, created and creating; the third with the Nature of the Universe, created and not creating; and the fourth and fifth books with the Return of all things to God, as the End of all.

Erigena surveys the universe sub specie æternitas as the timeless process of the self evolution of the Divine Trinity, which in creating all things is in itself marvellously created. The created universe is thus an eternal moment in the Divine life, and creation is the unfolding through the operation of the Holy Spirit of the “Primordial Causes,” the Divine Ideas, whose unity is the Logos, the Eternal Son, as in Clement of Alexandria. The creation is thus in a sense co-essential and co-eternal with God. The primordial causes, of which the Logos is the unity and aggregate, are a kind of medium between God and the creature. The Father creates all things in the Son and perfects all things by the Spirit. The Father is the Source of the Son and of the Spirit; the Son is the Cause of the archetypal causes which were created in Him by the Father; the Spirit is the Cause of the distribution of the causes created by the Father in the Son.

God, whose nature is incomprehensible, and Who is only known by Theophany, is the Beginning, Middle and End of all things, for all things have Being only by participation in His essence. Goodness is not an attribute of Being, but Being of Goodness. If the Good were wholly abstracted from existence, existence would cease; nothing would remain. Good is essentially creative; evil is essentially destructive. Evil corrupts the things that exist and seeks to destroy them. If it were possible for evil to triumph, all would perish.

The central point of the created universe is man, who is truly a microcosm, for in man all elements, spiritual, mental and physical are combined, so that he is rightly called “creaturarum omnia officina.” He knows as an angel, reasons as a man, feels as an animal, lives as a plant. He is the workshop of creation and the image of the Divine Trinity, who by his thinking creates effectualiter what the Divine thought creates causaliter. For to be and to be thought are one. But the perfection of the image has been marred by sin. At the moment of his creation, even before he was tempted of the Devil, man turned aside from God, and in sinning became involved in the illusions of the physical body. Losing his integrity, he suffered the severance into sexes which is characteristic of irrational animals. He was thus debarred from the original purpose of his creation, the bringing back of all things into their primordial causes. Hence the significance of the Incarnation, in which the Logos becoming flesh begins the restoration of human nature. The distinction between Nature and Grace is a distinction between the “datum” and the “donum” of the Divine Goodness (cf. James i., 17). Of Nature we must say “datur”; of Grace, “donatur.” Nature brings the non-existent into existence. Grace brings some of the existent beyond all existence, into union with God. It is the “datum” which gives the substantial existence of all creatures; it is the “donum” which gives the final beatification of the elect.

Erigena adopts the doctrine of the ἀποκατάστασιs, Adunatio, the Return to God and the Restitution of all things, and the deification of humanity, from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. The final consummation began with the Resurrection of Christ, and will end with the final assumption of human nature into God, and the reinvolution of all things into their primordial causes, so that God may be all in all. Every division of humanity disappears in the Risen Christ, not only of sex and race, but the divisions of the sensible and the intelligible, the created and the uncreated are also resolved in Him. To this same unity and glory He will bring His elect after the General Resurrection, when they will be one with Him and in Him. All is God and all is Man in the Risen Christ, and all is freed from the bonds of space and time. The restoration of humanity in Christ is twofold. All humanity is restored in Him to its pristine Paradisal condition, but for the elect there is also beatitude and deification.

But the doctrine of Eternal Punishment raises difficulties. True to his Platonic realism, Erigena will not admit that men and women can be everlastingly punished, for humanity is one and indivisible. It is only the accidents, the perverse and evil wills of the wicked, which will suffer, not by crude bodily torments, but by their eternal frustration. The evil desire remains, without the possibility of what it desires; and so the flame of concupiscence cannot burn in anything but itself. There is no other seat of punishment, as there is no other seat of corruption, than the perverse motion of the will, which is neither from God nor from created Nature. Punishment, like sin, is not of the nature, but of the will. The illicit will of evil men is tormented in their memories, because what they desired in this life, and wished in the future, they will not find. Their punishment is by way of phantasies, images in the memory, perverted thoughts and desires. For evil has no real being. It is an abuse of good: it is a good used wrongly. Evil cannot be perpetual, but must, in the nature of things, come to an end. For if the Divine Goodness is infinite and eternal, evil, which is its contrary, must be finite and temporary. Evil will be confined and finally abolished by the abundance of the Eternal Goodness. Eventually every perverse will will be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

Here we touch upon the great weakness of Erigena's system, as of so many mystical philosophies and theologies from Plotinus to T. H. Green, from Eckhart to William Law. As Dr. W. T. Davison says, in a review of Mr. Bett's book:

The apparent lack of perception of the real evil of evil,—so characteristic of many philosophers,—of man's clamant need of Redemption, his dependence on Divine grace, on the redeeming work of Christ and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit, is a deep and pervasive flaw in Erigena's system if he is claimed as a representative Christian teacher. Whatever his merits as a philosopher, it is the virtual absence of the above elements which constitute such a marked contrast between the earlier teacher's De Divisione and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. One is an Eastern and a Neo-Platonist; the other is Aristotelian and Western. A somewhat similar contrast was presented when a later mystic, Meister Eckhart, was (perhaps unfairly) accused of Pantheism, but was with justice contrasted unfavourably with Tauler and some other ‘Friends of God’.

In the first years of the thirteenth century the Church sought, in order to deliver them to the avenging flames, all the writings which had contributed to the birth of the heresies which bore the names of Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant.²¹ The treatise De Divisione Naturae was noted as the real source of the errors, and it was therefore solemnly condemned, a bull of Honorius III in 1225 enjoining a strict search for all copies of the book or any parts thereof, and ordering them to be sent to Rome to be burnt, anyone knowingly keeping back a copy being declared to be in danger of excommunication on the ground of heretical depravity.

Mr. R. L. Poole says Erigena's own views were “buried with his writings”; but the appearance of these heresies 350 years after his death, and the fact that the De Divisione Naturae was found in wide circulation at that time among the Albigenses in the South of France, proves that this conclusion is unwarranted.²²

But at that period the schools of Ireland were no longer such as I have tried to describe. Subjected in their turn to the Roman unity, they had left the side of Plato and Proclus in order to adopt St. Augustine and St. Gregory. The most brilliant, as it seems to me, of all the Irish teachers, John Scotus Erigena, is the last representative of their traditional insubordination and independence. With him Irish Hellenism is vanquished and proscribed; and henceforth the Palace School offers no more chairs to other Erigenas. After him the principle of liberty becomes weakened, the principle of authority begins to prevail, and the Platonising philosophers give place to the orthodox theologians.

It is here, therefore, that our lectures on the schools of Ireland come to an end. As they had abdicated their traditional personality, they lost their proper name, and became absorbed into the other Latin schools, and the knowledge of Greek died out in the Western Church until the Renaissance. Yet, perhaps, the real cause of their decline is to be sought deeper. After the end of the eighth century they seem to have thrown away the evangelist's staff and kept only the professor's cloak; but, as Dr. Rendel Harris says, “No one can sing, ‘How sweet the name of Logos sounds’,” and St. Bernard did not write “Verbum, dulcis memoria.” The faith of the Irish schools in Greek philosophy stood in their way, daring and splendid as their scholars were. Reflection must be based on experience, and the Cross is central to Christian experience. The great hymns of the Medieval Church—“Dic tropæum passionis, dic triumphalem Crucem,” “Vexilla Regis prodeunt,” and “Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis,”—acknowledge this. There we touch Reality.

On the eucharistic wafer used in the Greek Church there is stamped a cross, and in the four angles of the cross are the letters ΙΣ, KΣ, NΙ, ΚΑ, “Jesus Christ conquers.” The secret of power is not to be learned from Plato, but from Jesus Christ, “qui dilexit nos, et lavit nos a peccatis nostris in sanguine suo, et fecit nos regnum, et sacerdotes Deo et Patri suo: IPSI GLORIA ET IMPERIUM IN SÆCULA SÆCULORUM: AMEN.”

Notes

1. The Dial, February 1926.

2. He was known to his contemporaries as Ioannes Scottus, Scotus, or Scotigena; but in his translation of Dionysius he designates himself Ioannes Ierugena. The derivation is probably from Eriu, Erin or Ierne. There are also contemporary references to him as Ioannes Sophista and Ioannes Sapiens.

3. The Dark Ages, W. P. Ker, p. 162. See also R. L. Poole, Medieval Thought and Learning, pp. 46, 47.

4. The Dark Ages, pp. 161-3.

5. Singularités Historiques et Littéraires, p. 31.

6. The Bull issued by this council contemptuously describes his arguments as “ineptas quaestiunculas et aniles pene fabulas, Scotorumque pultes” (Scots' porridge). Cap. vi, Mansi, conc. 15. 6D.

7. Ussher, Epist. Sylloge 65.

8. De Praedestinatione, c. 3.

9. Gesta Pontificum and Ep. ad Petrum.

10. Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 160.

11. Ibid, p. 159.

12. Ibid, p. 166.

13. De Divina Praedestinatione, c. i.

14. De Divisione Naturae, book i, c. 71.

15. Ibid, book i, p. 39.

16. Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, t. iv, p. 353.

17. Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 89.

18. Singularités historiques et littéraires, p. 34.

19. Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 89.

20. Ibid. p. 90. See also Huber: Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 171.

21. These two heresies were not quite the same. Amalric, who taught in the University of Paris, was expelled in 1204, and appealed to Pope Innocent III, who confirmed the decision of the University. In 1207 he returned to Paris and recanted. Some of his disciples were burnt at the stake at Champeaux in 1210, and others at Amiens in 1211. Amalric's doctrine was a recapitulation of Erigena's system, without any perversion or development. His disciples were mystics rather than philosophers. David's doctrine, however, was a reckless development of Erigena's teaching, a grossly materialistic Pantheism, which resulted in Antinomianism. At any rate, a charge of immorality was brought against his followers, which was not brought against the disciples of Amalric. M. Hauréau says: “Le caractère particulier de David, c'est, comme on l'a vu, d'être un philosophe qui semble ignorer tous les dogmes, tous les mystères de l'orthodoxie chrétienne.” (Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, II (i), p. 86.)

22. Bien que la philosophie de Jean Scot semble avoir été incomprise de ses contemporains, elle exerça sur le développement de la pensée du moyen âge occidental une influence considérable, dont on poursuit l'action jusqu'au XIIIe siècle … On trouve l'influence de Scot dans toutes les déformations populaires de la mystique.

    Ja es hat den Ausschein, dass die Schriften des Erigena geradezu als Quelle benützt wurden, obwohl sein Name nicht genannt wird

    —W.

    In any case, it is certain that Eckhart, the father of all the German mystics, was well acquainted with the doctrines of the Scot. … It was only seventy years or so after the stir made by Amalric of Bena that the young Dominican was at the University of Paris. There can be no question as to the reality of Erigena's influence upon Eckhart's thought. The slightest summary of the great mystic's teaching will make it clear. … It is equally certain both that Nicholas of Cusa was profoundly influenced by Eckhart, and that he was a direct disciple of Erigena.

    —Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena, pp. 190-2.