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STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXXII

Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019 Edited by MARKUS VINZENT Volume 19:

Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism and its Sources in Patristic and Ancient Philosophy Edited by ILARIA L.E. RAMELLI

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2021

STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXXII

STUDIA PATRISTICA Editor: Markus VINZENT, King’s College London, UK and Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt, Germany

Board of Directors (2019): Carol HARRISON, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Mark EDWARDS, Professor of Early Christian Studies, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Neil MCLYNN, University Lecturer in Later Roman History, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, UK Philip BOOTH, A.G. Leventis Associate Professor in Eastern Christianity, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, UK Sophie LUNN-ROCKLIFFE, Lecturer in Patristics, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK Morwenna LUDLOW, Professor, Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, UK Ioannis PAPADOGIANNAKIS, Senior Lecturer in Patristics, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, UK Markus VINZENT, Professor of the History of Theology, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, UK Josef LÖSSL, Professor of Historical Theology and Intellectual History, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University, UK Lewis AYRES, Professor of Catholic and Historical Theology, Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, UK John BEHR, Regius Chair in Humanity, The School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History, University of Aberdeen, UK Anthony DUPONT, Research Professor in Christian Antiquity, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium Patricia CINER (as president of AIEP), Professor, Universidad de San Juan-Universidad Católica de Cuyo, Argentina Clayton JEFFORD (as president of NAPS), Professor of Scripture, Seminary and School of Theology, Saint Meinrad, IN, USA

STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXXII

Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019 Edited by MARKUS VINZENT Volume 19:

Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism and its Sources in Patristic and Ancient Philosophy Edited by ILARIA L.E. RAMELLI

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2021

© Peeters Publishers — Louvain — Belgium 2021 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form. D/2021/0602/156 ISBN: 978-90-429-4772-6 eISBN: 978-90-429-4773-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in Belgium by Peeters, Leuven

Table of Contents Ilaria L.E. RAMELLI Introduction: The Importance of the Theme and of the Contributions

1

FIRST PART: GOD Andrew LOUTH Eriugena and Maximos on Divisions of Beings .................................

25

Stephen R.L. CLARK Plotinus, Eriugena and the Uncreated Image......................................

33

VAN GEEST Augustine and Eriugena on God’s Being. Differences in their Apophatic Approach to God ......................................................................

51

Deirdre CARABINE The Transcendence and Alterity of God in Eriugena and his Patristic Sources.................................................................................................

63

Dermot MORAN Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources ...........................................................................................

73

Paul

GOD AND THE COSMOS: CONNECTING CHAPTER Ilaria L.E. RAMELLI From God to God: Eriugena’s Protology and Eschatology against the Backdrop of his Patristic Sources .................................................

99

SECOND PART: COSMOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND ETHICS Willemien OTTEN Eriugena as the Last Patristic Cosmologist ........................................ 127 Theo KOBUSCH Creation out of Nothing – Creation out of God: Eriugena’s Philosophy as the Origin of Idealism..................................................................... 143

VI

Table of Contents

Dominic J. O’MEARA Traces of Ancient Virtue in Eriugena?............................................... 153 John GAVIN Betrayal and Contemplation: Judas and the Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena .................................................................................. 161 Adrian MIHAI Universal Salvation and the Completeness of Heaven in Eriugena ... 175 Isidoros C. KATSOS Eriugena’s Theory of Light and its Hexaemeral Sources: Rethinking Eriugena’s Knowledge of the Greek Patristic Corpus........................ 183 Agnieszka KIJEWSKA Eriugena is Reading St Augustine ...................................................... 193 Ernesto Sergio MAINOLDI Eriugena’s reditus vs Neoplatonic epistrophé: Tracing Paradigmatic Divergences ......................................................................................... 213 Alexander R. TITUS Some Dionysian Influences on John Scottus Eriugena’s On Predestination................................................................................................. 227 Adrian N. GUIU Philosophical Dialogue and Contemplation of the Cosmos in Augustine, Boethius, and Eriugena ............................................................... 239 RESPONSES Willemien OTTEN Response .............................................................................................. 265 Deirdre CARABINE Response .............................................................................................. 273

Abbreviations AA.SS AAWG.PH AB AC ACL ACO ACW AHDLMA AJAH AJP AKK AKPAW ALMA ALW AnalBoll ANCL ANF ANRW AnSt AnThA APOT AR ARW ASS AThANT Aug AugSt AW AZ BA BAC BASOR BDAG BEHE BETL BGL BHG BHL

see ASS. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen Philologisch-historische Klasse, Göttingen. Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels. Antike und Christentum, ed. F.J. Dölger, Münster. Antiquité classique, Louvain. Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz, Berlin. Ancient Christian Writers, ed. J. Quasten and J.C. Plumpe, Westminster (Md.)/London. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, Paris. American Journal of Ancient History, Cambridge, Mass. American Journal of Philology, Baltimore. Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht, Mainz. Abhandlungen der königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin du Cange), Paris/Brussels. Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, Regensburg. Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Edinburgh. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Buffalo/New York. Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, ed H. Temporini et al., Berlin. Anatolian Studies, London. Année théologique augustinienne, Paris. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, ed. R.E. Charles, Oxford. Archivum Romanicum, Florence. Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Berlin/Leipzig. Acta Sanctorum, ed. the Bollandists, Brussels. Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Zürich. Augustinianum, Rome. Augustinian Studies, Villanova (USA). Athanasius Werke, ed. H.-G. Opitz et al., Berlin. Archäologische Zeitung, Berlin. Bibliothèque augustinienne, Paris. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, New Haven, Conn. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd edn F.W. Danker, Chicago. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Paris. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, Louvain. Benediktinisches Geistesleben, St. Ottilien. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, Brussels. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiquae et Mediae Aetatis, Brussels.

VIII BHO BHTh BJ BJRULM BKV BKV2 BKV3 BLE BoJ BS BSL BWAT Byz BZ BZNW CAr CBQ CChr.CM CChr.SA CChr.SG CChr.SL CH CIL CP(h) CPG CPL CQ CR CSCO

CSEL CSHB CTh CUF CW DAC

Abbreviations

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis, Brussels. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, Tübingen. Bursians Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Leipzig. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, ed. F.X. Reithmayr and V. Thalhofer, Kempten. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, ed. O. Bardenhewer, Th. Schermann, and C. Weyman, Kempten/Munich. Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Zweite Reihe, ed. O. Bardenhewer, J. Zellinger, and J. Martin, Munich. Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, Toulouse. Bonner Jahrbücher, Bonn. Bibliotheca sacra, London. Bolletino di studi latini, Naples. Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament, Leipzig/Stuttgart. Byzantion, Leuven. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Leipzig. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, Berlin. Cahiers Archéologique, Paris. Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Washington. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, Turnhout/Paris. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout/Paris. Church History, Chicago. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Berlin. Classical Philology, Chicago. Clavis Patrum Graecorum, ed. M. Geerard, vols. I-VI, Turnhout. Clavis Patrum Latinorum (SE 3), ed. E. Dekkers and A. Gaar, Turnhout. Classical Quarterly, London/Oxford. The Classical Review, London/Oxford. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Louvain. Aeth = Scriptores Aethiopici Ar = Scriptores Arabici Arm = Scriptores Armeniaci Copt = Scriptores Coptici Iber = Scriptores Iberici Syr = Scriptores Syri Subs = Subsidia Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Bonn. Collectanea Theologica, Lvov. Collection des Universités de France publiée sous le patronage de l’Association Guillaume Budé, Paris. Catholic World, New York. Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, ed. J. Hastings, Edinburgh.

Abbreviations

DACL DAL DB DBS DCB DHGE Did DOP DOS DR DS DSp DTC EA ECatt ECQ EE EECh EKK EH EO EtByz ETL EWNT ExpT FC FGH FKDG FRL FS FThSt FTS FZThPh GCS GDV GLNT GNO GRBS

IX

see DAL Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol, H. Leclercq, Paris. Dictionnaire de la Bible, Paris. Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplément, Paris. Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects, and Doctrines, ed. W. Smith and H. Wace, 4 vols, London. Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, ed. A. Baudrillart, Paris. Didaskalia, Lisbon. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Cambridge, Mass., subsequently Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks Studies, Cambridge, Mass., subsequently Washington, D.C. Downside Review, Stratton on the Fosse, Bath. H.J. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer, ed., Enchiridion Symbolorum, Barcelona/Freiburg i.B./Rome. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, ed. M. Viller, S.J., and others, Paris. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, Paris. Études augustiniennes, Paris. Enciclopedia Cattolica, Rome. Eastern Churches Quarterly, Ramsgate. Estudios eclesiasticos, Madrid. Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. A. Di Berardino, Cambridge. Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, Neukirchen. Enchiridion Fontium Historiae Ecclesiasticae Antiquae, ed. Ueding-Kirch, 6th ed., Barcelona. Échos d’Orient, Paris. Études Byzantines, Paris. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, Louvain. Exegetisches Wörterbuch zum NT, ed. H.R. Balz et al., Stuttgart. The Expository Times, Edinburgh. The Fathers of the Church, New York. Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Berlin. Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Göttingen. Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Göttingen. Festschrift. Freiburger theologische Studien, Freiburg i.B. Frankfurter theologische Studien, Frankfurt a.M. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie, Freiburg/Switzerland. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller, Leipzig/Berlin. Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, Stuttgart. Grande Lessico del Nuovo Testamento, Genoa. Gregorii Nysseni Opera, Leiden. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, Mass.

X GWV HbNT HDR HJG HKG HNT HO HSCP HTR HTS HZ ICC ILCV ILS J(b)AC JBL JdI JECS JEH JJS JLH JPTh JQR JRS JSJ JSOR JTS KAV KeTh KJ(b) LCL LNPF L(O)F LSJ LThK LXX MA MAMA Mansi MBTh

Abbreviations

Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Offenburg. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament. Tübingen. Harvard Dissertations in Religion, Missoula. Historisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft, successively Munich, Cologne and Munich/Freiburg i.B. Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Tübingen. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Tübingen. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Leiden. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Theological Review, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Theological Studies, Cambridge, Mass. Historische Zeitschrift, Munich/Berlin. The International Critical Commentary of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, Edinburgh. Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, ed. E. Diehl, Berlin. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, ed. H. Dessau, Berlin. Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Münster. Journal of Biblical Literature, Philadelphia, Pa., then various places. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Berlin. Journal of Early Christian Studies, Baltimore. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, London. Journal of Jewish Studies, London. Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie, Kassel. Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie, Leipzig/Freiburg i.B. Jewish Quarterly Review, Philadelphia. Journal of Roman Studies, London. Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period, Leiden. Journal of the Society of Oriental Research, Chicago. Journal of Theological Studies, Oxford. Kommentar zu den apostolischen Vätern, Göttingen. Kerk en Theologie, ’s Gravenhage. Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Gütersloh. The Loeb Classical Library, London/Cambridge, Mass. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, Buffalo/New York. Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Oxford. H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, new (9th) edn H.S. Jones, Oxford. Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Freiburg i.B. Septuagint. Moyen-Âge, Brussels. Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua, London. J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, Florence, 1759-1798. Reprint and continuation: Paris/Leipzig, 1901-1927. Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie, Münster.

Abbreviations

MCom MGH ML MPG MSR MThZ Mus NA28 NGWG NH(M)S NIV NKJV NovTest NPNF NRSV NRTh NTA NT.S NTS NTTSD OBO OCA OCP OECS OLA OLP Or OrChr OrSyr PG PGL PL PLRE PLS PO PRE PS PTA PThR PTS PW QLP QuLi RAC RACh

XI

Miscelanea Comillas, Comillas/Santander. Monumenta germaniae historica. Hanover/Berlin. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Louvain. See PG. Mélanges de science religieuse, Lille. Münchener theologische Zeitschrift, Munich. Le Muséon, Louvain. Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition, Stuttgart. Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Nag Hammadi (and Manichaean) Studies, Leiden. New International Version. New King James Version. Novum Testamentum, Leiden. See LNPF. New Revised Standard Version. Nouvelle Revue Théologique, Tournai/Louvain/Paris. Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen, Münster. Novum Testamentum Supplements, Leiden. New Testament Studies, Cambridge/Washington. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents, Leiden/Boston. Orbis biblicus et orientalis, Freiburg, Switz., then Louvain. Orientalia Christiana Analecta, Rome. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, Rome. Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, Louvain. Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, Louvain. Orientalia. Commentarii editi a Pontificio Instituto Biblico, Rome. Oriens Christianus, Leipzig, then Wiesbaden. L’Orient Syrien, Paris. Migne, Patrologia, series graeca. A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G.L. Lampe, Oxford. Migne, Patrologia, series latina. The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A.H.M. Jones et al., Cambridge. Migne, Patrologia, series latina. Supplementum ed. A. Hamman. Patrologia Orientalis, Paris. Paulys Realenzyklopädie der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Stuttgart. Patrologia Syriaca, Paris. Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen, Bonn. Princeton Theological Review, Princeton. Patristische Texte und Studien, Berlin. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. G. Wissowa, Stuttgart. Questions liturgiques et paroissiales, Louvain. Questions liturgiques, Louvain. Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, Rome. Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, Stuttgart.

XII RAM RAug RBen RB(ibl) RE

Abbreviations

Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, Paris. Recherches Augustiniennes, Paris. Revue Bénédictine, Maredsous. Revue biblique, Paris. Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, founded by J.J. Herzog, 3e ed. A. Hauck, Leipzig. REA(ug) Revue des études Augustiniennes, Paris. REB Revue des études byzantines, Paris. RED Rerum ecclesiasticarum documenta, Rome. RÉL Revue des études latines, Paris. REG Revue des études grecques, Paris. RevSR Revue des sciences religieuses, Strasbourg. RevThom Revue thomiste, Toulouse. RFIC Rivista di filologia e d’istruzione classica, Turin. RGG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Gunkel-Zscharnack, Tübingen RHE Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, Louvain. RhMus Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Bonn. RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions, Paris. RHT Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Paris. RMAL Revue du Moyen-Âge Latin, Paris. ROC Revue de l’Orient chrétien, Paris. RPh Revue de philologie, Paris. RQ Römische Quartalschrift, Freiburg i.B. RQH Revue des questions historiques, Paris. RSLR Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, Florence. RSPT, RSPh Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, Paris. RSR Recherches de science religieuse, Paris. RTAM Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, Louvain. RthL Revue théologique de Louvain, Louvain. RTM Rivista di teologia morale, Bologna. Sal Salesianum, Roma. SBA Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, Basel. SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien, Stuttgart. ScEc Sciences ecclésiastiques, Bruges. SCh, SC Sources chrétiennes, Paris. SD Studies and Documents, ed. K. Lake and S. Lake. London/Philadelphia. SE Sacris Erudiri, Bruges. SDHI Studia et documenta historiae et iuris, Roma. SH Subsidia Hagiographica, Brussels. SHA Scriptores Historiae Augustae. SJMS Speculum. Journal of Mediaeval Studies, Cambridge, Mass. SM Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige, Munich. SO Symbolae Osloenses, Oslo. SP Studia Patristica, successively Berlin, Kalamazoo, Leuven. SPM Stromata Patristica et Mediaevalia, ed. C. Mohrmann and J. Quasten, Utrecht.

Abbreviations

SQ SQAW SSL StudMed SVigChr SVF TDNT TE ThGl ThJ ThLZ ThPh ThQ ThR ThWAT ThWNT ThZ TLG TP TRE TS TThZ TU USQR VC VetChr VT WBC WUNT WZKM YUP ZAC ZAM ZAW ZDPV ZKG ZKTh ZNW ZRG ZThK

XIII

Sammlung ausgewählter Quellenschriften zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Tübingen. Schriften und Quellen der Alten Welt, Berlin. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, Louvain. Studi Medievali, Turin. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, Leiden. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. J. von Arnim, Leipzig. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich. Teologia espiritual, Valencia. Theologie und Glaube, Paderborn. Theologische Jahrbücher, Leipzig. Theologische Literaturzeitung, Leipzig. Theologie und Philosophie, Freiburg i.B. Theologische Quartalschrift, Tübingen. Theologische Rundschau, Tübingen. Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, Stuttgart. Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Stuttgart. Theologische Zeitschrift, Basel. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Lancaster, Pa. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Berlin. Theological Studies, New York and various places; now Washington, DC. Trierer theologische Zeitschrift, Trier. Texte und Untersuchungen, Leipzig/Berlin. Union Seminary Quarterly Review, New York. Vigiliae Christianae, Amsterdam. Vetera Christianorum, Bari (Italy). Vetus Testamentum, Leiden. Word Biblical Commentary, Waco. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, Tübingen. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vienna. Yale University Press, New Haven. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, Berlin. Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik, Innsbruck, then Würzburg. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Giessen, then Berlin. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, Leipzig. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Gotha, then Stuttgart. Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, Vienna. Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche, Giessen, then Berlin. Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Weimar. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Tübingen.

Introduction: The Importance of the Theme and of the Contributions Ilaria L.E. RAMELLI, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

This volume of Studia Patristica collects the revised lectures offered at the Workshop on Eriugena’s Christian Platonism and Its Sources in Ancient and Patristic Philosophy, which I organised and which was held at the 2019 Oxford Patristics Conference. It also includes some essays that could not be delivered in Oxford, such as those by Stephen Clark and Adrian Guiu. The speakers could not be present, but they worked on their articles for the publication. This collection of essays analyses Eriugena’s Christian Platonic ideas on theology, cosmology, anthropology, epistemology, and ethics, and their sources in Patristic philosophical theology and ancient philosophy. ‘It is a recognized feature of Eriugena’s reasoning that he quotes his sources profusely and even puts whole chunks of them on the page, thereby transforming them into powerful evidence to reckon with. His long quotations in Periphyseon IV from Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio, which he had translated into Latin as Sermo de Imagine’ are an example.1 We can surely add the long quotations of Origen, cited as an authoritative source, ‘the great Origen’, magnum Origenem.2 The first part of the workshop, and therefore of this volume, is devoted to Eriugena’s theology: thus, it focusses on God from a variety of perspectives, some of them also comparative in their nature. The first contribution, by Andrew Louth, is indeed comparative and very interestingly reflects on ‘Eriugena and Maximos on Divisions of Beings’, which is based on Eriugena’s subtitle of his Periphyseon: De divisione naturae. Such a division of natures (quae creat et non creatur, quae et creatur et creat, quae creatur et non creat, quae nec creat nec creatur), which in the final version of Periphyseon is not a logical partition, but a metaphysical one, finds an important antecedent in a Greek source of Eriugena, whose Ambigua he translated into Latin: Maximus the Confessor, ‘the central genius of the Byzantine theological synthesis’, and particularly Maximus’ own metaphysic ‘division of natures’ in Amb. 41 (and Mystagogia), which follows Gregory of Nyssa. It begins with the uncreated–created division, 1

See Willemien Otten in her response to the first section of essays, in this volume, p. 265-72. Periph. 5.929A. The main Origenian quotes are analysed in my The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena, Vigiliae Christianae Supplement 120 (Leiden, 2013), including the long quotation from Princ. 3.6.5, cited ad verbum in Periph. 5.100.3165-80 Jeauneau, which I quote and discuss thoroughly on 797-8. 2

Studia Patristica CXXII, 1-21. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

I.L.E. RAMELLI

2

then divides created into the intelligible and the sensible, the sensible into heaven and earth, earth into paradise and the inhabited world, in which there was finally a distinction between male and female among its inhabitants. Eriugena knew this series of divisions, as it is part of Maximus’ early Ambigua, which, as mentioned, he translated into Latin. The divisions of nature in Maximus and Eriugena are different, but both of them explicate an understanding of the created order as constituting a movement of procession and return. Eriugena quotes it at the beginning of the second Book of Periphyseon. Louth points out how Eriugena radically re-thought Maximus’ division of natures, within a different metaphysical system, which famously included God, in two different aspects, within the ‘natures’. Maximus, instead, distinguished God from nature. I suspect that Eriugena was not using Maximus against Maximus, but was simply employing his thought in the service of his own (also Christian Platonic) metaphysics. On the other hand, Louth’s note on Eriugena’s use of Augustine against Augustine himself deserves to be pointed out: I note that this use is especially true in the realm of soteriology and eschatology, as I have argued elsewhere.3 Dermot Moran also focuses on Eriugena’s division and offers a comparison with Maximus, from a different perspective. His ‘Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources’ concentrates on Eriugena’s quinque modi or ‘five modes’ of being and non-being as outlined in his Periphyseon, especially in Book 1, and to which he returns in Book 3. Moran considers the first division of nature in the Periphyseon, a twofold one into being and non-being, of which Eriugena gives a fivefold interpretation after he has laid out the fourfold division. Moran evaluates the current research concerning the sources and originality of Eriugena’s division. Eriugena’s direct Latin sources are individuated, already in previous scholarship, as Augustine and Marius Victorinus. Victorinus also has four levels of non-being, to which Eriugena may have alluded. Eriugena may have known his Ad Candidum and thus also Victorinus’ four levels. But Eriugena was also deeply influenced by passages in the Greek Christian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus, particularly on God as nonbeing. This is a heritage of Greek Patristic apophaticism – which, I note, was present also in ‘pagan’ Platonism, not only in Christian Platonism4 – on Eriugena. The Godhead, indeed, according to Eriugena, is nihilum.5 Moran proposes that Maximus may well have suggested the idea of a fivefold interpretation in Eriugena’s first division. With reason Moran reads Eriugena as proposing a ‘meontology’, a study of the meanings 3

The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013), 779-80. My ‘The Divine as Inaccessible Object of Knowledge in Ancient Platonism: A Common Philosophical Pattern across Religious Traditions’, Journal of the History of Ideas 75 (2014), 167-88. 5 ‘Neither this nor that nor anything’, Periph. 1.510C. 4

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of non-being, in particular the so-called tractatus de nihilo in Book 3 of Periphyseon 634A-690B. According to Werner Beierwaltes’ perspective of duplex theoria in Eriugena, in the case of nihilum, this can mean both nihil per privationem and nihil per excellentiam, which is the exclusive prerogative of God. Eriugena, according to Moran, seems to have a penchant for the latter, probably also because he was inspired by Ps.-Dionysius’ apophaticism. Paul van Geest focuses on Augustine’s and Eriugena’s views of God’s being and delineates some variants in their apophatic approach to God. He outlines both parallels and differences in the ways in which Augustine and Eriugena prove themselves to be real ‘negative theologians’. From Eriugena’s Periphyseon it seems that the author, through his translation and study of the work of Ps.-Dionysius, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, became devoted to their way of apophatic speaking about God. Augustine had also come to the understanding that one could not describe God in human terms. But there are important differences in the way in which Augustine and Eriugena develop the via negativa, especially (1) in the negative-theological statements in their interpretation of God as Creator; (2) concerning the incarnation of God in relation to the via negativa; and (3) in their negative anthropologies. Van Geest endeavours to trace the differences in the apophatic speaking of Augustine and Eriugena back to their respective sources and their processing of these sources. Both Augustine and Eriugena are negative theologians, although the effects of the Pelagian controversy obscured this aspect of Augustine’s thought. Indeed, I add that such a controversy also changed Augustine’s attitude towards Origen and his theology of sin and grace: in general, controversies seem to have shaped Augustine’s thought a great deal, in many respects.6 Deirdre Carabine also focusses on apophaticism in Eriugena and his Patristic sources, not only the Latin but also the Greek ones. She reflects on ‘The Transcendence and Alterity of God in Eriugena and his Patristic Sources’ and critically presents Eriugena’s negative theology and the theme of the transcendence of God. Carabine discusses the Greek and Latin influences on Eriugena’s presentation of the transcendence and otherness of God, notably by Ps.-Dionysius, but also Gregory of Nyssa. She concentrates on the apophatic statement of Periph. 3.633AB (‘the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated’) and in his Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John, which emphasises the role of Christ in the relation of humans to God and, ultimately, the ascent to God. Carabine shows how Eriugena’s negative ontology substantiates (1) his understanding of revelation and creation (God becoming not-God), and (2) his conception of the final calling of all manifestation and multiplicity into unity (not-God becoming God / not-God). These two formulas can be read along with the title of Ramelli’s 6 Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘Origen in Augustine: A Paradoxical Reception’, Numen 60 (2013), 280-307; further work is needed and in preparation in this regard.

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essay in this instalment, ‘From God to God’, which traces a theological, metaphysical, cosmological and even gnoseological trajectory (as explained in that essay). The former formula individuated by Carabine, (1), can be considered the heritage of Christian and ‘pagan’ Platonism on creation and emanation (two concepts that in Patristic Platonism, I find, show surprising elements on interconnection and reciprocal influence, starting from the notion of the Logos– creator in Clement and Origen).7 The latter, (2) is the heritage of the Patristic doctrine of apokatastasis, which Eriugena, I think, developed in connection with the Platonic movement of reditus–ἐπιστροφή (through the primordial causes) in a both radical and problematic way.8 Carabine rightly points out the importance of Eriugena’s use of his patristic sources in relation to the great theme of divine transcendence. Stephen Clark in ‘Plotinus, Eriugena, and the Uncreated Image’ reflects on the link between Eriugena and Plotinus, well known to the Patristic sources of Eriugena such as Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Ps.-Dionysius, and Maximus. It cannot be proved that Eriugena had read Plotinus’ collected works as edited by Porphyry in the Enneads, but Plotinus’ doctrines could well reach him through Christian patristic texts. Clark suggests that Plotinus and Eriugena were closer in their thought about God, humanity and creation, and in their practice, than is usually assumed. As Clark notes, Plotinus and Eriugena seem to agree both that the goal of all things lies beyond being and intellect, and that there is in intellect an uncreated image of that goal which is also the template for all created things. Eriugena’s notion of ‘emanation’ has been deemed non-Christian, but Clark disagrees and I note that this is how, through the notion of the LogosWisdom-Creator, already Bardaisan, Clement and Origen thought about creation (as noted above, in the previous paragraph). In Clark’s interpretation, this world here is at once an expectable revelation of the divine generosity and a place where souls rashly pursue their imagined independence. A further congruence between Plotinus and Eriugena lies in the 7 Some suggestions in this sense in my ‘Atticus and Origen on the Soul of God the Creator: From the “Pagan” to the Christian Side of “Middle Platonism”’, Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie 10 (2011), 13-35, and ‘The Logos/Nous One-Many between “Pagan” and Christian Platonism: Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Plotinus, and Gregory of Nyssa’, SP 102 (2021), 11-44. On creation in Patristic thought, see Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy. Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford, 2012). 8 The universality of apokatastasis is proclaimed in several points, especially here, where universal restoration is made directly dependent on Christ’s ‘in-humanation’: Per inhumanationem Filii Dei omnis creatura, in caelo et in terra, salua facta est (Periph. 5.24). What is problematic is that apokatastasis for Eriugena will be universal, but it is uncertain whether deification (θέωσις) will be so. Discussion in my The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013), 773-815; ‘The Reception of Origen’s Ideas in Western Theological and Philosophical Traditions’, main lecture at Origeniana Undecima: Origen and Origenism in the History of Western Thought, Aarhus University, August 2013, ed. Anders-Christian Jacobsen, BETL 279 (Leuven, 2016), 443-67. Further in Ramelli’s and Mainoldi’s contributions to this volume; see resp. p. 99-123 and 213-25.

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idea that every fallen soul has still an unfallen element, in the divine, and that we can be recalled to that identity (Plotinus famously introduced his theory of the ‘unfallen soul’ as highly controversial). There is even some ambiguity in the status of that unfallen template, at once permanently enclosed in the divine Word and something ‘created’. So, the present world both derives from God and is the theatre in which rational creatures pursue their self-determination. Its origin is both in Nothing and in the One: in Plotinus’ work, as Clark notes, there is an unresolved resemblance between ‘matter’ bound in golden chains, and the One behind a golden veil, neither of which are comprehensible. Eriugena boldly proposes that there is no objective difference, but rather that they are twin ways for us partly to conceptualise the Mystery. According to Clark, Plotinus would not have rejected Christian metaphysical thought – I am reminded of Porphyry, who, in a famous fragment preserved by Eusebius, notwithstanding his dismissal of Origen’s Christianity, still appreciated very much Origen’s metaphysics.9 Clark does well to emphasise that Maximus and Eriugena entertain the notion of return. Eriugena did so more explicitly than Maximus, to the point of supporting universal apokatastasis and dovetailing it to reditus, but I agree that Maximus also supported this idea, although with circumspection, indirectly, and with significant allusions to silence.10 In her response to the essays in the first part, Willemien Otten makes a final remark and suggestion, with which I completely agree: ‘As Eriugena-scholarship moves forward, it may be worthwhile to deal more directly and in-depth with Eriugena’s Christology in order to see whether it is indeed a salient feature of his thought per se or a feature that requires us to give it more profile when Eriugena’s Christian thought is compared to that of his non-Christian philosophical sources’. Indeed, this is the same big problem that we encounter with another great Christian Platonist, with whose thought Eriugena was well acquainted: Ps.Dionysius. Some in fact deny that he had a Christian doctrine of Christ or Christology, but I rather suspect that his is a Christian Platonist Christology. The same seems to be the case with Eriugena, who, in his Platonism, which is Christian Platonism, even posited the incarnation (or better, ‘in-humanation’ in his words: inhumanatio, a translation of Greek ἐνανθρώπησις) of the Son of God as the pivotal factor of the universal apokatastasis, the salvation of all and the reditus of all creatures to God through their primordial causes. This is explored in the following essay.

9 Analysis in my ‘Origen, Patristic Philosophy, and Christian Platonism: Re-Thinking the Christianisation of Hellenism’, VC 63 (2009), 217-63; further reflections in ‘Autobiographical Self-Fashioning in Origen’, in Maren Niehoff and Joshua Levinson (eds), Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity: New Perspectives (Tübingen, 2019), 273-92. Further work is ongoing. 10 As I argued in The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013), 738-57.

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God and the Cosmos: Connecting Chapter The essay by Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘From God to God: Eriugena’s Protology and Eschatology against the Backdrop of his Patristic Sources’, connects the two halves of the seminar and of the instalment, that on God and that on cosmology, since it focuses on the notion of the return of creation to God and of the relation between this return and protology, within the three Neoplatonic movements of monē, proodos, and epistrophē, which Eriugena Christianised. In ‘pagan’ Neoplatonism, ἐπιστροφή is the third movement after (im)manence and procession; Eriugena, qua Christian Platonist, changed the order: in Eriugena μονή does not only designate an initial status, prior to πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή, but also indicates the final state of rest, on the basis of Biblical exegesis, particularly of John 14:2 (which is here examined for its use of μονή and the latter’s ‘pagan’ Neoplatonic and Christian meanings). Eriugena felt allowed to change the order, because he supported a Christian notion of reversion and restoration, which, unlike the recurrent cycles of ‘pagan’ Neoplatonism, coincides with the ultimate telos. Then, all rational creatures will enter divine eternity, being subsumed into their logoi or intermediate causes: their logoi will return to God. So, faithful to his movement ‘from God to God’, Eriugena posited μονή after apokatastasis in the very telos, as repose in God, reminiscent of Maximus’ ἀεικίνητος στάσις. Ramelli explores Eriugena’s notion of the return to God – the beginning and the end of all – and the heritage of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (and Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor) in this respect. Ramelli investigates the reception of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic theories of apokatastasis and the latter’s important but problematic link to ἐπιστροφή: both terminologies, of ἐπιστροφή and ἀποκατάστασις, are interrelated in late (‘pagan’ and Christian) Platonists. Often, ἀποκατάστασις and ἐπιστροφή dovetail, especially in Ps.Dionysius, Proclus, Damascius, and Eriugena himself. Eriugena followed Ps.Dionysius, who overtly described ἀποκατάστασις as ἐπιστροφή in passages which Ramelli points out and examines. She suggests that Dionysius seems aware that this line came from Origen. Thus, Ramelli offers an examination of the terminology of ἐπιστροφή and apokatastasis in Origen, based on Scriptural exegesis. Eriugena rendered ἐπιστροφή with conuersio, ἐπιστρέφεσθαι with conuerti and redire, and suggests a convergence between conuersio, reditus, and apokatastasis, all being universal in Eriugena’s perspective. In Eriugena, as is detailed, restauratio, restauro, and restituo correspond to ἀποκατάστασις and ἀποκαθίστημι; reversio and (mostly) reditus render ἐπιστροφή. On the basis of the direct knowledge that Eriugena had at least of Origen’s Περὶ ἀρχῶν, the important impact of Origen on Eriugena is pointed out in many respects, from the general inspiration of Periphyseon, structural and in its title, to the importance of the liberal arts, the doctrine of the paradigmatic logoi (already received by Maximus), the eternity of God alone, the rejection of annihilationism, and

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the doctrine of apokatastasis and its relation to deification. Like Origen, Eriugena posited not only creation (through the Mind of God as noetic cosmos) but also apokatastasis as depending on Christ. His cosmology and eschatology are Christocentric. Eriugena’s quotation of a long passage from Origen’s Περὶ Ἀρχῶν 3, commenting on 1Cor. 15:26-8, is explored in detail, and the concepts of apokatastasis, otherworldly purification, silence for the telos, and the restoration even of the devil are examined with special attention to the sources: not only Origen, but also Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. The relation between reditus and protology in Eriugena is explored in the essay, in the identification of the primordial state with the Divinity itself: primordialis conditio: ipse Deus. This is why this essay is entitled ‘From God to God’, pointing to the return to the original cause, through intermediate causes (this notion is arguably another Origenian heritage in Eriugena, passing through Maximus). The process of knowledge itself is examined as relating humans, the logoi, and God. This is a line that runs from Origen to Maximus to Eriugena. In the footsteps of Origen and Evagrius, the role of knowledge and the relation between ontological and gnoseological plane in understanding Eriugena’s grand movement ‘from God to God’ is paramount. The infinity of God, apophaticism and theophanies in Eriugena are traced back to their patristic sources: Gregory of Nyssa and Ps.Dionysius. In Periph. 1.486B-487B, Eriugena maintains that only the divinity knows the creatures by contemplating them in the perfection of the primordial causes in which all things subsist in a perfect act. Ramelli explains how the reditus of all things to their causes and thence to God is the same process that human minds accomplish in knowledge, and calls attention to the role of (Platonic) dialectica therein. She articulates the way in which, in Eriugena, the human being is the pivot of universal reditus, because Eriugena identifies the intelligible world not only with Christ-Logos but with the human being, qua image of God in its intellectual soul: the human intellect reflects God’s intellect and coincides with the intelligible world (which Origen identified with Christ, the Mind of God). It is pointed out how in Eriugena, also on the basis of Plotinus’ noetic knowledge and its impact on Eriugena’s theory of sent-thinking, the process of knowledge becomes creative and restorative and merges with ontology. In noetic knowledge, there is a circle of identification, between knower and known, as in divine knowledge – like in Eriugena’s cosmologico-soteriological circle ‘from God to God’, from creation to apokatastasis, from πρόοδος to ἐπιστροφή. A close analysis of the thorny issue of the relation between restauratio and deificatio in Eriugena is offered by Ramelli, with attention paid to the scriptural authorities he cites. Ramelli shows how Eriugena took over Origen’s exegesis, which was followed by the Dialogue of Adamantius and Gregory of Nyssa. Eriugena interestingly describes in the same way, in terns of peace, rest and contemplation, both deificatio and the return of all creatures to their primordial

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causes and thence to God. Might the distinction between salvation and deification represent a conflict between Eriugena’s doctrine of apokatastasis and that of reditus? Or is this a sign that restoration and deification ultimately converge in the theory of Eriugena, as they did converge in that of Origen? Eriugena, as is pointed out, quotes with approval a passage from the third book of Origen’s Commentary on Romans, which supports this convergence.11 Eriugena remarks that restauratio is a fact of nature and deificatio an effect of grace, but he himself insists that restauratio itself can be achieved only thanks to Christ’s ‘in-humanation’. Thus, the factor of grace is present there as well. The allegory of the Temple, which Eriugena may well have taken over from Gregory of Nyssa’s De anima et resurrectione, if read chronologically, would also suggest the same eventual convergence between restauratio and deificatio (in Gregory the chronological reading is explicit). Eriugena himself suggests a process of sanctification inside the Temple, which would allow for such a convergence: ‘sanctified in Christ, they will enter the inner parts’. For Christ, as Eriugena maintains, effects the ‘salvation, purification, illumination, and perfection’ of all humanity. More clearly, he omnia … perficit deificatione: ‘perfects all by means of deification’.12 The tension between the distinction of apokatastasis and theosis and the affirmation of universal deification seems to depend on how much apokatastasis is conceived as universal reversion. Eriugena himself applies the reditus to Christ, equating it with all humanity’s theosis or deification: Christ’s πρόοδος (exitus) in his ‘in-humanation’; his ἐπιστροφή (reditus) to God is the deification of all humanity. Eriugena cites Nyssen in support of the eventual universal deification. And Eriugena’s five theoriae, possibly based on Evagrius’ five successive θεωρίαι, delineate a parabola ‘from God to God’ and indicate again that deification itself will be ultimately universal, like restoration. If one followed Origen, this conclusion was obvious; if one followed (at least the anti-Pelagian) Augustine, one could not accept even universal restoration – but the anti-Manichaean Augustine accepted it. Second Part: Cosmology, Anthropology, and Ethics In the article that opens the second section on cosmology, ‘Eriugena as the Last Patristic Cosmologist’, Willemien Otten, already in her title, points to the importance of Patristic thought in the shaping of Eriugena’s Christian Platonism – especially Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor ground Eriugena’s cosmology. This heritage, in her view, explains the reason why Benedict XVI expressed sympathy towards Eriugena, notwithstanding the Mediaeval condemnation by the Church. In spite of his early Mediaeval times, Eriugena is a Patristic author according to Otten. This can be understood on the 11 12

Periph. 5.922CD. Periph. 5.984B.

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basis of his sources, which shaped his thought. This is why in my monograph on the Patristic doctrine of apokatastasis, I introduced Eriugena’s figure with the caption, ‘Shift to the West but on Patristic Grounds’.13 Otten observes that, standing in the cosmological tradition, Eriugena displays more affinity with Eastern than with Western authors, since the cosmology of Augustine and Ambrose is more wrapped up with their biblical hermeneutics as known from their commentaries on Genesis and the Hexaëmeron. Augustine wrote a book on the self (Confessiones) and on God (De Trinitate), but not on nature: this is why Otten thinks that Eriugena’s Periphyseon is in fact the natural theology that Augustine could have written but never did write. I strongly agree with Otten’s argument that Eriugena’s hexaëmeral exegesis is deeply interrelated with his concept of reditus. Indeed, I find, the movement of Eriugena’s cosmology is a movement ‘from God to God’, in which hexaëmeral exegesis starts from God as creator and moves back to God as the telos of all in the universal return or reditus. According to Otten, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, which means On Natures, is a cosmological work, in that it concerns all natures: human, divine, animal; created and uncreated. I find that this approach can also be placed in the tradition of Patristic thought: that of cosmology, natural philosophy, or φυσιολογία. The importance of the study of nature was emphasised by Clement of Alexandria, who calls it φυσιολογία,14 like Philo and Josephus before him,15 and later by Evagrius, who calls it ‘natural contemplation’,16 and was influenced by Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, in addition to Nazianzen. In H.Gen. 14.3, Origen admits that ‘the learned of this world [sapientes saeculi] thanks to the study of philosophy [per eruditionem philosophiae] were able to grasp many truths [multa ex ueritate] … Moral philosophy and natural philosophy in almost all regards [paene omnis] teaches the same as Christianity. It only disagrees when it claims that matter is coeternal with God’, etc. In the Neoplatonic tradition, 13

I.L.E. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013), 773. In the sense of philosophy of nature and contemplation of nature as creation, used by Clement when he spoke of ‘truly Gnostic physiology’ (Strom. 4.1.3.1): see Laura Rizzerio, Clemente di Alessandria e la fisiologia veramente gnostica (Leuven, 1992). The same sense in the Physiologus, on which see Christus in natura: Quellen, Hermeneutik und Rezeption des Physiologus, ed. Zbyněk Kindschi Garský and Rainer Hirsch-Luipold (Berlin, 2020). Alan Scott, ‘The Date of the Physiologus’, VC 52 (1998), 430-41, even hypothesised that the Physiologus drew on Origen. Both surely applied allegory, Origen to Scripture, and the Physiologus to nature: and I note that both Scripture and Nature, for Origen, are ‘bodies’ of Christ. 15 Josephus, AI 1.18, observes that Moses in the Pentateuch included philosophy of nature (φυσιολογία) to a great degree. On Philo: Steven di Mattei, ‘Moses’ ΦΥCΙΟΛΟΓΙΑ and the meaning and use of ΦΥCΙΚΩC in Philo of Alexandria’s Exegetical Method’, Studia Philonica Annual 18 (2006), 1-30. 16 KG 1.13; 2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 2.13; 2.20; 3.55; 3.61; 3.67; 3.84; 3.86; 4.6. See my Evagrius’ Kephalaia Gnostika, monographic essay (vii-lxxxiv), new readings from the ms., translation, and full commentary (Leiden, Atlanta, 2015), the introduction and the commentary on the kephalaia mentioned in this note. 14

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especially Proclus, a good knower of Origen, in the prologue to his Commentary on the Timaeus aimed at demonstrating that philosophy of nature (φυσιολογία) is a science and deemed the Timaeus a hymn to the Demiurge.17 At the beginning of his commentary, Proclus argues that the theme of the Timaeus is a specifically Platonic form of φυσιολογία, which goes beyond the mere study of matter and material causes and beyond the study of form immanent in matter. ‘Clearly, φυσιολογία is a kind of theology [θεολογία], because nature has, to some extent, a divine existence, insofar as it is produced by the gods’ (C.Tim. 1.217.25-7). The Stoics also identified theology with the study of nature, but within an immanentistic framework: the gods are material like the cosmos and are coextensive with nature.18 While the Stoics reduced theology to the level of physics, Proclus, on the contrary, elevates the study of nature to the level of theology. This is also what I think that Eriugena did, on the side of Christian Neoplatonism. Theo Kobusch explores the notion of creation in Eriugena and the relation between creation ex nihilo and creation ex Deo in ‘Creation out of Nothing – Creation out of God: Eriugena’s Philosophy as the Origin of Idealism’. In this essay, with good arguments, he traces back to Eriugena the roots of the philosophical movement of idealism. One of the philosophical pioneering feats in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, Kobusch observes, consists in giving a whole new meaning to the traditional concept of ‘creation out of nothing’. ‘Nothing’ is no longer understood as ‘privative nothing’ (nihil privativum, in which Augustine saw the cause of all nothingness). In Eriugena, instead, it stands for the richness of all reality in the Neoplatonic sense, namely the ‘superessential’ or eminent sense of the οὐδὲν πάντων according to Plotinus: that from which everything created originates. According to Kobusch, and convincingly, creation is seen by Eriugena as a form of condescendence by God (another one is the Incarnation – for Eriugena, ‘In-humanation’, inhumanatio translates, as seen, Greek ἐνανθρώπησις – but this is not ruled out by the notion of creation as condescendence). Notably, condescendence is a central category for the understanding of God in Origen, which he stresses in his Homilies on Jeremiah and elsewhere, and which was emphasised by Philo beforehand, a source of Origen, and later by John Chrysostom.19 Motion in Eriugena’s Peripyseon is the motion of creation, in which 17 Marije Martijns, Proclus on Nature. Philosophy of Nature and Its Methods in Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Leiden, 2010). 18 See my ‘Stoic Cosmo-Theology Disguised as Zoroastrianism in Dio’s Borystheniticus? The Philosophical Role of Allegoresis as a Mediator between Physikē and Theologia’, Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie 12 (2013), 9-26. 19 See my ‘Origen’s Exegesis of Jeremiah: Resurrection Announced throughout the Bible and its Twofold Conception’, Augustinianum 48 (2008), 59-78; Chrysostom, H.Io. 27.1: God’s συγκατάβασις is due to our frailness. Philo, Imm. 63-4 (cf. 52) preceded Origen when stating that, by condescension, in Scripture God ‘tells beneficial lies for the slower and the dull’.

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God is condescending to the limit, creating himself by returning to himself in everything created. Kobusch points out intriguingly that this is precisely the basic model of idealism. This is why Eriugena was rediscovered by nineteenthcentury Schellingians, by F.A. Staudenmaier, and other intellectuals. In his name Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel rejected the traditional understanding of creation out of nothing. ‘Condescendence’ is a concept that, as seen, can be applied to creation according to Eriugena, but it is an ethical concept, not a cosmological one. Ethical theories from ancient philosophy, besides ancient and patristic philosophical theories of creation, are very important to be explored as a source or antecedent of Eriugena’s thought. Such an exploration, in a comparative perspective, is contributed by Dominic O’Meara, ‘Traces of Ancient Virtue in Eriugena?’ As he remarks, Plotinus developed a theory of virtue in Enn. 1.2, which was elaborated further by Porphyry in Sent. 32. This can be found to some degree in Augustine and in some detail in Macrobius. O’Meara, who points to three different uses of virtus in Eriugena, endeavours to verify to what an extent this theory of virtue may be present in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, and how it might relate to other Patristic sources. Such sources, belonging to Patristic philosophical theology, are Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, besides Augustine and Macrobius: they may have inspired Eriugena’s theory of virtue in the Periphyseon and have conveyed Plotinus’ and Porphyry’s ideas to Eriugena. Eriugena’s theory of virtue, I note, must be inscribed in his exitusreditus scheme: in his view, as results from the analysis of O’Meara, virtues are part of the original human nature created by God in God’s own image (the ‘theology of the image’, inherited from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa). This view – which, as O’Meara notes, diverges from the Aristotelian theory of natural virtue – may have been influenced by Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio (and Origen himself). Passions and vices were added to human nature as a result of the Fall, qua accretions, as Origen, Nyssen and Eriugena all maintained on the basis of Platonic imagery,20 and can be eventually eliminated because they are not part of the original creation ‘in the image of God’. I find that this is a pivotal aspect of the theory of apokatastasis for all of them: Origen, Nyssen, and Eriugena. Eriugena was very likely influenced by the first two. He was, indeed, charged with Origenism already by Prudentius of Troyes (Adv. Io. 5; 10-2; 17-9). I also note that in his definition of virtue in Book 1 of his Periphyseon, with the unity of virtue and intellect (mind), Eriugena appears to follow the long 20 According to Nyssen, the soul’s ‘accretions’, coming after the Fall, are to be shed (An. 52-6; 64). He uses an image stemming from Plato, Resp. 10.611D: ‘barnacles, seaweed, and stones’, which encrust the soul. These are also Plotinus’ ‘additions’ (προσθῆκαι, Enn. 4.7.10; 5.5.2), which do not enrich, but impoverish the soul (Enn. 6.5.12), and earlier Numenius’ προσφυόμενα/ προστιθέντα (F34; 43.8DP) and Basilides’ προσαρτήματα (ap. Clement, Strom. 2.20.113).

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tradition of ethical intellectualism, a characteristic of Plato’s Socrates and the Socratic schools, especially Stoicism (including Roman Stoicism, particularly Musonius Rufus), and Platonism. This was inherited by Patristic philosophers whom Eriugena knew, such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa.21 Besides metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics, Biblical exegesis is an important aspect of the influence of Patristic philosophical theology on Eriugena’s philosophical theology. It is actually related to all of his thought, just as the Patristic sources are. In a study on exegesis and ethics which is connected with O’Meara’s chapter, and which I have therefore moved here in the publication, John Gavin points precisely to Scriptural exegesis as a significant Patristic source of Eriugena’s thought. I find this to be in complete agreement with the methodology of Eriugena’s Patristic sources as well, from Origen to Augustine, from Gregory of Nyssa to Dionysius: they all used Biblical exegesis in the service of their philosophical theology.22 In ‘Betrayal and Contemplation: Judas and the Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena’, Gavin focusses on Judas, contrasted with with Christ, within an analysis of the Last Supper in Book 5 of Periphyseon, and investigates how Neoplatonism, ‘pagan’ (Proclus) and Christian, shaped Eriugena’s hermeneutics. Gavin considers especially Proclus’ portrayal of the traitor Alcibiades and Ps.Dionysius’s depiction of Judas. I note that Origen already reflected on Judas’s treachery, insisting that it was not predetermined, but surely foreseen, by Christ; Judas saw the body of Jesus and remained at the material level, without elevating himself higher (H.Luc. 3.4). Origen also reflected on Judas’ death (C.Matt. 35). As Gavin points out, in Book 5 of Periphyseon, Eriugena offers a reflection on the different approaches to Christ by Judas and Peter in the Last Supper: Judas, who remains at the level of the material (as Origen, I observe, had remarked), becomes the betrayer of Christ’s flesh; Peter, who ascends through the material to contemplation, comes to know (cognoscere) and love Christ’s mind. This passage is complemented by Eriugena’s treatment of the Eucharist in his Expositiones in Hierarchiam Coelestem, in which he discusses the movement from the material perception of the sensible elements to the immaterial understanding (intellegere) of Christ. The major themes in these passages – material reality as both deceptive and anagogical; contemplation as an ascent to participatory understanding – come from the Christian Neoplatonism that Eriugena inherited from Ps.-Dionysius and other Patristic thinkers. Gavin examines the roots of Eriugena’s appropriation of these themes in his interpretation of the Last Supper, as well as his adaptation and application of these ideas in his approach to Christian philosophy. 21 For their support of ethical intellectualism and its philosophical background, see my ‘Nous and Will: Ethical Intellectualism and the Birth of the Original Sin’, seminar, Loyola Marymount University, November 2019, forthcoming. 22 As I argued in ‘The Relevance of Patristic Exegesis to Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics’, Religion and Theology 22 (2015), 100-32.

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Gavin’s focus is also on ethics and Eriugena’s ideal of assimilation or likeness to God (ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ)23 and unification – an element that, I would like to remark, Origen already highlighted, on the basis of both Scripture (Gen. 1:26) and Plato (Theaet. 176AC). The idea of ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ was received by Aristotle (EN 10.7.1177b), Antiochus of Ascalon (ap. Cicero, Leg. 1.8.25), Philo (Opif. 142-4), and Middle Platonists24: for Origen, this was a further proof that Plato was inspired either by Scripture or by the same Logos who is ‘incarnate’ in Scripture.25 Indeed, in Princ. 3.6.1 Origen states that Theaet. 176B expresses the same ideal as Gen. 1:26 also expresses: that of assimilation to God. Also Tübingen Theosophy 1.40 recognised that not only ‘pagans’, but also Moses upheld this ideal.26 The basis is the ‘affinity’ between human nous and God, who is nous (Princ. 1.1.7; the same was maintained by Clement27). Clement Strom. 2.100.1-101.1 praised Plato’s ideal of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ as eudaemonistic (‘Plato, the philosopher who posited happiness as the highest goal,28 claims that this is assimilation to God as much as possible’29), and equated the Platonic ideal of assimilation to God and the Stoic one of living according to nature, τὸ ἀκολούθως τῇ φύσει ζῆν, with the Biblical tenet of assimilation to God (Gen. 1:26, in Strom. 5.94-5). Thus, with the doctrine of assimilation to God, Eriugena focussed on a both Biblical and Platonic tenet, and by linking it to

23 See also Phdr. 248A; 253B; Rep. 10.613A; Tim. 47C; Leg. 4.716B-717B; Hubert Merki, Ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ (Freiburg, 1952); in Plato: David Sedley, ‘The Ideal of Godlikeness’, in Gail Fine (ed.), Plato (Oxford, 1999), 309-28; Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics (Ithaca, 1999), 52-77; J. Armstrong, ‘After the Ascent: Plato on Becoming like God’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 26 (2004), 171-83; Salvatore Lavecchia, ‘Die Ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ in Platons Philosophie’, in Wiebke Schrader (ed.), Perspektiven der Philosophie (Amsterdam, 2005), 321-94. 24 Eudorus, F1 Mazzarelli: ‘for Socrates, Plato and Pythagoras the telos is ὁμοίωσις Θεῷ’; Albinus, Isag. 6.4; Alcinous, Didask. 28.1; 2.2; Anonymous, C.Theaet. 7.18. 25 Another of many convergences that Origen found between Plato and Scripture: Jesus says the spouses ‘are no longer two, but one person’; Plato, Symp. 192E: ‘from two’, the lovers ‘become one person’. 26 Anonymi Monophysitae Theosophia, ed. PierFranco Beatrice (Leiden, 2001), 21. This text also describes the Son-Logos as homoousios with the Father (1.45, 23 Beatrice). On the Theosophy see now Aude Busine, ‘The Theosophy of Tübingen’, in Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, ed. Richard Goulet (Paris, 2016); Die Tübinger Theosophie, eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert von Laura Carrara and Irmgard Männlein-Robert (Stuttgart, 2018). 27 Strom. 4.25.155: νοῦς δὲ ὁ θεός. Examined in my ‘The Logos/Nous One-Many’ (2021). 28 This claim was shared by the imperial Platonist Plutarch. He thought that Platonists and Stoics supported the self-sufficiency of virtue for happiness. Plutarch rather disagreed on Stoic materialism (Jan Opsomer, ‘Is Plutarch Really Hostile to the Stoics?’, in Troels Engberg-Pedersen [ed.], From Stoicism to Platonism: The Development of Philosophy, 100 BCE-100 CE [Cambridge, 2017], 296-321) – like Platonists Justin, Clement and Origen. 29 See Kathleen Gibbons, ‘Moses, Statesman and Philosopher’, VC 69 (2015), 157-85 on ὁμοίωσις θεῷ in Clement. Katja Vogt, Desiring the Good: Ancient Proposals and Contemporary Theory (Oxford, 2017), ch. 2, translates εὐδαιμονία not as ‘happiness’, since it is not a mood, but as ‘one’s life going well’.

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unity he followed Origen’s path to apokatastasis: from assimilation to God to unity in the telos.30 The papers by Adrian Mihai and Ernesto Mainoldi concentrate on a pivotal aspect of Eriugena’s cosmology (as well as theology and metaphysics): that of the return of creatures to God. Mihai studies a particular facet thereof in ‘Universal Salvation and the Completeness of Heaven in Eriugena’. He notes that, in Eriugena’s theory, humanity acts as a replacement for the fallen angels in the completeness of Heaven, a topic that Eriugena seems to have taken from Augustine (while the general theme of the return of all rational creatures, and all creatures, to God, I think, comes straight from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa). Mihai concentrates on the Biblical buttresses of which Eriugena avails himself to support his theory of universal salvation and (partial?) deification: Exodus 14 on the crossing of the Red Sea, Isaiah 9 on the birth of a salvific Child, Ezekiel 16, Leviticus 25, on the Sabbatical year, the parables in Luke 15 on the lost sheep, the lost drachma, and the prodigal son, and finally the parable of the ten virgins. I note that Origen used these Biblical passages, besides others, to confirm his theory of universal restoration. I suspect that Eriugena was inspired, in at least several cases, by him, since he read, at the very least, his Peri arkhōn (which also worked as a model for his Periphyseon). He also availed himself of the deployment of some of these Biblical loci by Gregory of Nyssa, equally in support of apokatastasis. Moreover, the passage on which Mihai focusses, that of the lost sheep, was not only interpreted by Origen, but also used in the Dialogue of Adamantius (which arguably reproduces Origen’s ideas and demonstrations31). For Adamantius in the Dialogue, the 99 good sheep of the parable, who do not need to be brought back, are angels, and the lost sheep is humanity. This is exactly Origen’s interpretation of the parable in Cels. 4.17: ‘God made one special descent in order to convert those whom the divine scriptures mystically calls the lost sheep of the house of Israel, which had strayed down from the mountains. In certain parables the shepherd is said to have come down to them, leaving on the mountains those which had not gone astray’ (trans. Chadwick). Macarius of Magnesia, who shows many points of contact with both Origen and Nyssen, has exactly the same exegesis in Apocr. 4.18. Moreover, like Origen, he indicates sloth and negligence as the cause of the primordial fall (ibid.). Not only Macarius, but also Hilary, who knew Origen, displays the same exegesis of this parable. Hilary admired Origen, and even translated nearly 40,000 lines from his Greek works into Latin, if we credit Jerome (Apol. 30 See Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘Harmony between arkhē and telos in Patristic Platonism and the Imagery of Astronomical Harmony Applied to the Apokatastasis Theory’, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7 (2013), 1-49. 31 ‘The Dialogue of Adamantius: A Document of Origen’s Thought?’, SP 52 (2012), 71-98, and SP 54 (2013), 227-73; ‘The Dialogue of Adamantius: Preparing the Critical Edition and a Reappraisal’, RhMus 163 (2020), 40-68. A translation and a monograph are in preparation.

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adv. Ruf. 1). It is therefore not surprising to find that he took over Origen’s interpretation of God’s actions of destruction as remedial. Commenting on Psalm 2:8-9, he observes that God will bruise and break the nations “in order to reform them.” Sinners are slain by God when they die to vices and sins, and are redeemed (Tract. in Ps. 139.19). Very interestingly, Hilary’s interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep – identifying the lost sheep with all of humanity that is to be restored – coincides exactly with that offered by Adamantius (Origen’s byname) in the Dialogue of Adamantius, in Rufinus’ Latin translation. It is telling that this passage was dropped by an act of censorship – due to its reference to apokatastasis – in the extant Greek redaction, which postdates Justinian’s so-called ‘condemnation of Origen’, but Rufinus reflects the original Greek Vorlage. This was also the text with which the Cappadocians were well acquainted: they identified Adamantius with Origen. It is probable that this Dialogue’s original redaction is rather early and reflects Origen’s authentic ideas. The presence of exactly the same exegesis, with reference to apokatastasis, in both Hilary and the Dialogue and Macarius makes it probable that they all depend on Origen’s exegesis. Hilary, referring to Luke 15:4, explains: ‘This one sheep is the human being, and by one human being the whole race is to be understood … the ninety-nine are the heavenly angels … and by us (humans), who are all one, the number of the heavenly church is to be filled up. This is why every creature awaits the revelation of the children of God’ (Comm. in Matth. 18). Now, it seems clear to me that Eriugena’s own interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep lies in Origen’s line. According to Eriugena, the completeness of heaven consists in the 100 sheep, including the one sheep that was lost and recovered, namely the human race, as in Origen and in the Origenian Dialogue of Adamantius. Another important, general element of continuity between Origen and Eriugena with respect to apokatastasis is the absence of any pantheistic conception of apokatastasis. In Arfé’s words, cited by Mihai: ‘Eriugena’s apokatastasis, like Origen’s, is not pantheistic’. This is indeed different from the pantheistic apokatastasis in Stephen Bar Sudhaili, and is also different from the perceived doctrine of Eriugena, as condemned later, long after his death.32 Ernesto Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s reditus vs Neoplatonic epistrophé: Tracing Paradigmatic Divergences’ focusses on Eriugena’s reception and elaboration of the Neoplatonic triadic model of procession-manence-return. It contributes to shading light on the ways in which Eriugena elaborated a synthesis between ‘pagan’ Neoplatonism, Christian-Platonic, and Christian-orthodox speculations. In Eriugena, as Mainoldi suggests, the above-mentioned Neoplatonic triad cannot really be an expression of Neoplatonic thought, since the context to which it is applied does not depend on a Neoplatonic worldview. Indeed, as we can put it, in Eriugena this is a Christian Neoplatonist triad, not a ‘pagan’ Neoplatonic 32

See I.L.E. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013), 774-5.

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triad. We must remember that Eriugena’s main authority – as it was the case already with Origen – is Scripture, not, say, Plotinus or Proclus. This is why, as Mainoldi rightly indicates, Eriugena’s three movements reveal the economy of Salvation as expressed in the Bible, and the return of humanity is that ‘to its primordial condition, which was lost on account of sin’. This, I note, is exactly what Origen also theorised. If they were Platonists, they were Christian Platonists. Thus, Mainoldi is right to surmise that Eriugena would have styled himself as ‘more than a Neoplatonist’ (plus quam Neoplatonicus) – precisely because, I think, he was a Christian Platonist. Isidoros Charalampos Katsos, ‘Eriugena’s Theory of Light and its Hexaemeral Sources’, compares Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaëmeron and Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology for this work by his brother. In the hexaemeral part of the Periphyseon, Eriugena reports two hermeneutical traditions on the first light of creation. According to the first tradition, attributed to Basil, primordial light is corporeal and of fiery nature. According to the second tradition, attributed to Augustine, primordial light is of intelligible, angelic nature. Based on this report and other passages, contemporary scholarship assumes a close acquaintance of Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaëmeron. Katsos suggests that Eriugena was relying on other sources, especially Nyssen’s Apology. Katsos’ comparison between Eriugena’s report and Basil’s own theory of light in the Hexaëmeron shows that the corporeal theory of light described in the Periphyseon deviates from Basil’s own theory. Katsos investigates whether Eriugena’s report is mediated through other sources (Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa and a hexaemeral source available to John Damascene). As far as the interpretation of primordial light is concerned, Eriugena did not have direct access to Basil’s own theory (if he did, he understood very little of it). If Katsos is correct, Gregory’s influence on Eriugena was not limited to the De hominis opificio, which Eriugena translated and refers to as De imagine, but it also comprised Nyssen’s cosmology, especially the Apology, although Eriugena never cites it as his source. This hypothesis sits very well, I find, with Eriugena’s dependence on Nyssen’s cosmology and doctrine of apokatastasis, which are closely related, just as they were related in Origen (given that Eriugena traces a movement ‘from God to God’: see Ramelli’s paper in this volume). As suggested by Ramelli in her own essay, Eriugena likely knew De anima et resurrectione as well, since she could find many reminiscences of this dialogue in Periphyseon, including the all-important allegory of the Temple. From a different angle, Ramelli also suggests in ‘From God to God’ that Eriugena may have known precisely Gregory’s Apology (Apologia in Hexaëmeron), given his conception of matter in full continuity with that of Gregory; Nyssen influenced not only Evagrius far more than had been thought,33 but also Eriugena more 33 As I argued in ‘Evagrius and Gregory: Nazianzen or Nyssen? A Remarkable Issue that Bears on the Cappadocian (and Origenian) Influence on Evagrius’, GRBS 53 (2013), 117-37, and,

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than previously assumed. Therefore, Nyssen’s impact on two of the main supporters of the patristic doctrine of apokatastasis (Evagrius, Eriugena), as has been recently surmised by careful scholarship, must be considered and be further developed by future scholarship. From the Greek sources of Eriugena we turn to the Latin sources with two papers, by Adrian Guiu and by Agnieszka Kijewska – especially Augustine, but also Boethius and Martianus Capella. Adrian Guiu in ‘Philosophical Dialogue and Contemplation of the Cosmos in Augustine, Boethius, and Eriugena’ discusses the Periphyseon according to its genre, as a philosophical dialogue, comparing it with two earlier, Christian philosophical dialogues: Augustine’s De Ordine and Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae. Guiu aims at discerning both common elements and differences, always viewing ancient philosophy through its characterisation of exercise of the soul (according to Pierre Hadot’s line). This, I note, also applies to patristic philosophical theology – an exercise for the soul that aims at the elevation to God and the return to God. This is Eriugena’s own goal, as his doctrine of universal apokatastasis shows. Concentrating on Augustine’s De ordine, Guiu notes one of its main points: ‘It is through the training of the sciences and especially of dialectic that one observes the harmony of all the parts and one can contemplate divine providence; this in fact is the answer of the dialogue to the question of evil’. Now, it seems to me significant that Eriugena will precisely continue along these lines and maintain that through the training of sciences one arrives at theology; vice-versa, without the encyclical disciplines before it, one can be grossly mistaken in philosophy and its peak: theology.34 This line begins with Plato and is supported by Origen. Origen in his Letter to Gregory/Theodore even used Plato’s own terminology (Resp. 7.533D; Leg. 899D) when stating that the liberal arts are the assistants or fellow-workers (συνέριθοι) of philosophy, and that the latter is the συνέριθος of Christian theology. As philosophy is the pinnacle of paideia, so is theology the pinnacle of philosophy. It is not accidental, I think, that Eriugena commented on Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,35 a real synthesis of the liberal arts, before working on his Periphyseon, and that important themes, including philosophical ones, are already present in his glossae on Martianus and will be expanded and deepened in his Periphyseon.36 on theological aspects: ‘Gregory Nyssen’s and Evagrius’s Biographical and Theological Relations: Origen’s Heritage and Neoplatonism’, SP 84 (2017), 165-231. 34 See Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘Eriugena’s Commentary on Martianus in the Framework of his Thought and the Philosophical Debate of his Time’, in Sinead O’Sullivan and Mariken Teeuwen (eds), Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella (Turnhout, 2012), 245-72. 35 In my Tutti i commenti a Marziano Capella: Scoto Eriugena, Remigio di Auxerre, Bernardo Silvestre e anonimi, essays, improved editions, translations, commentaries, appendixes, bibliography (Milan, 2006); ‘The Debate on Apokatastasis in “Pagan” and Christian Platonists (Martianus, Macrobius, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine)’, Illinois Classical Studies 33-34 (2008-9), 201-34. 36 A specific study is needed and will be devoted to this.

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In De Ordine 2.12-5, and 2.5.14, written in 386/87, Augustine argues that the liberal arts can become a basis for philosophy and theology. This is the same position as Origen’s. Exactly like Origen, in Ord. 2.5.16 Augustine prescribes that, if one is too dull, one should not study these arts and philosophy as a basis for theology, but simply stick to faith. Many years later, in De doctrina Christiana 2.144, Augustine, like Origen (and Justin, Clement, and Basil) acknowledges that there is truth in the liberal arts and philosophy, and truth belongs to God, even if it is found in ‘pagan’ works, especially in the books of the Neoplatonists. Guiu notes that the scope of the dialogue Periphyseon is to perform an exercise of dialectic by dividing and then reassembling the divisions of natura, the greatest genus. However, what starts as a simple exercise of dialectic will meander into unexpected rivers and will attempt to encompass the entire scope of creation. This move can be explained through the status of the human being as officina omnium. Indeed, I note that for Eriugena, in God, knowledge and ontology are one and the same thing, because ‘to know and to make are one in the Godhead, since by knowing it makes, and by making it knows’.37 This structural correspondence between the ontological and the logical plane will be declared at more length by Eriugena in his Periphyseon.38 Within this demonstration, Eriugena argues that the exercise of dialectica leads to truth, because this discipline itself (called here by its Greek name) was not invented by humans, but was created by God, who is presented as the author of all the liberal arts in Periph. 4.749A.39 Human mind, thanks to the seeds of the liberal arts that are embedded in it, also becomes creative: human nature, which is ‘that in which everything could be found [inerat]’, becomes ‘that in which everything is/was created [condita est]’.40 The abstractive process of knowledge is creative, and the eternal liberal arts, innate in human intellect, come to be actualised by the exercise of knowing. As the intelligent disciple states, the objects of knowledge are ‘in a way created in me’. For, ‘when I imprint their phantasms in my memory, and when I treat these things within myself, I divide, I compare, and, as it were, I collect them into a certain unity, I perceive a certain knowledge of the things which are external to me being created within me’.41 The genre of Periphyseon as a dialogue and thereby as an exercise in dialectics is central to Guiu’s exploration. The minds of the readers, he remarks, are 37

Periph. 2.559B. E.g. in 2.559B and, on the basis of Ps.-Dionysius, in 4.749AC: Intellectus enim rerum veraciter ipsae res sunt, dicente sancto Dionysio: “Cognitio eorum quae sunt, ea quae sunt est” […] cognitio intellectualis animae praecedit omnia quae cognoscit et omnia quae praecognoscit, ut in divino intellectu omnia causaliter, in humana vero cognitione effectualiter subsistant. 39 Periph. 4.749A: Διαλεκτική […] non ab humanis machinationibus sit facta, sed in natura rerum, ab auctore omnium artium, quae vere artes sunt, condita. 40 Periph. 4.807A. 41 Periph. 4.765C; version V. 38

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also drawn into the transformative process of the dialogue. Eriugena observes: ‘For when we enter upon a discussion together, the same thing happens: each of us is created in the other:42 for when I understand what you understand, I am made your understanding, and in a certain way that cannot be described, I am created in you. In the same way, when you clearly understand what I clearly understand, you are made my understanding and two understandings are made one, formed from that which we both clearly and without doubt understand’.43 In the light of Guiu’s and my observations, one can share his conclusions, which are in a way provocative, just as Eriugena is: The ultimate goal of the dialogical banquet of the Periphyseon is that it finally joins the intelligible, banquet of knowledge where Christ himself is the true contemplation of those who attend. The dialogue as a performative exercise helps us better understand the scope and character of the Periphyseon: the Nutritor and the Alumnus do not just expound the exitus and reditus of creation by way of the division and analysis of the genus natura, but attempt to perform it. Thus, for Eriugena, as for Augustine and Boethius, the dialogue is much more than a genre: it is a method: a way and pursuit to return to God. Guiu’s essay is part of a larger project that endeavours to retrieve the philosophical dialogue tradition. Indeed, I see that there are already important studies available, but these must be completed and complemented.44 Agnieszka Kijewska, ‘Eriugena is Reading St Augustine’, argues that, particularly in his De praedestinatione, Eriugena very often refers to the works of Augustine. Of course, the whole debate over predestination was triggered by Gottschalk and arose from his interpretation of the Augustinian doctrine. Eriugena criticised his doctrine of double predestination, opposing to this one single predestination to salvation for all (which also based his doctrine of apokatastasis or universal salvation). Kijewska examines the ways in which Eriugena uses Augustine’s doctrine in De praedestinatione. She shows that Eriugena reads Augustine’s teaching in the context of Boethius’ methodology (his division of knowledge and his approach to science). The primary characteristic of Boethian 42 Note the correspondence with the previous quotation, about things external ‘created within me’ (I italicised both in the quotations). 43 Periph. 4.780BC. 44 Manfred Hoffmann, Der Dialog bei den christlichen Schriftstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte (Heidelberg, 1966); B.R. Voss, Der Dialog in der frühchristlichen Literatur (München, 1970), continued by the handbook by Alberto Rigolio, Christians in Conversation: A Guide to Late Antique Dialogues in Greek and Syriac (Oxford, 2019); The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge, 2008); T. Uhle, ‘Philosophisches Argument und literarische Form in Augustins Soliloquia’, in Michael Erler (ed.), Argument und literarische Form in antiker Philosophie. Akten des 3. Kongresses der Gesellschaft für antike Philosophie 2010 (Berlin, 2013), 541-63; B. Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue. The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2010); id., ‘The Soliloquy.Transformations of an Ancient Philosophical Technique’, in Isabelle Bochet (ed.), Augustin philosophe et prédicateur. Hommage à G. Madec. Actes du colloque international organisé à Paris les 8 et 9 septembre 2011 (Paris, 2012), 315-47.

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method is starting with analysis and clarification of common notions, then introducing distinctions, for instance between predestination and foreknowledge, and then proceeding on the way of reasoning (argumentum necessitatis). Eriugena also uses linguistic analyses. Such procedures lead to the main purpose: the use of the semina rationum found in Augustine. Eriugena operates within the limits of Augustine’s concept of the relationship between faith and reason. When Eriugena seeks the origin of the problem of predestination, he finds it in Isidore of Sevilla’s formula about the double predestination (predestinatio est gemina), which refers to Augustine, through his disciples, such as Fulgentius of Ruspe. In his De praedestinatione Eriugena profusely refers to Augustine’s philosophical dialogues, mainly to his De libero arbitrio. Here, Augustine emphasises the freedom of human will, especially against the background of anti-Manichean polemics. Eriugena explicitly refers to Augustine’s anti-Manichaean works, which contrasted Manichean dualism. The anti-Pelagian works by Augustine, chronologically later than the anti-Manichaean ones, are sparsely present in De praedestinatione. It seems to me very interesting that, as I argued elsewhere,45 Augustine’s anti-Manichaean works are also those in which he was using Origen’s arguments against dualism and predestinationism (Origen used them against Gnosticism and Marcionism, Augustine used his arguments against the Manichaeans). Kijewska notes that Eriugena’s debate with Gottschalk on predestination turns out to be a confrontation of two different visions of the world, but also displays different approaches to the issue of knowledge and interpretation of the text. This seems to me to be correct and significant, in that both identified Scripture as the textual authority for the construction of theology (as it was the case with Origen and Patristic philosophical theology): thus, textual exegesis, applied to the Bible, was indispensable for the building up of their thought. More generally, as Kijewska rightly underlines, Eriugena supports the noncontradiction between reason and authority (Scripture and the Fathers), since ‘both flow from the same source, the Wisdom of God’,46 and thinks that reason has a ‘natural’ priority over authority, because reason was created by God along with time and the nature of things. This was already Origen’s perspective: indeed, Eriugena used both Origen and Augustine methodologically, not only as conveyers of content. Both methodological elements and elements of content point to the central argument of Alexander Titus in his ‘Some Dionysian Influences on John Scottus Eriugena’s On Predestination’, namely that Eriugena knew Ps.-Dionysius already when he was writing De praedestinatione. The focus is again on the Patristic sources of Eriugena. His Periphyseon makes extensive use of Greek patristic materials, whereas his earlier De praedestinatione contains only explicit 45 46

‘Origen in Augustine’ (2013), 280-307. A full work is in preparation. Periph. 511B, 108 Jeauneau.

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references to Latin sources, especially Augustine. This is why scholars have often concluded that the Corpus Dionysiacum began to influence Eriugena only well after De praedestinatione. Therefore, elaborating on his previous thesis, through a close examination of Eriugena’s historical context and an exploration into the primary texts of both De praedestinatione and the writings of Ps.-Dionysius, Titus suggests that Eriugena’s familiarity with Ps.-Dionysius had already begun to inform his thought much earlier than has commonly been assumed. Titus’ contribution, thus, aims to demonstrate some of these textual dependencies, in terms of both theological content and method, within the framework of the theological issue of divine predestination. Already in De praedestinatione, Eriugena represents an attempt to move ‘beyond the Augustinian synthesis’ (in Jaroslav Pelikan’s words) and draw on the broader tradition of Eastern Patristic thought. What Titus surmises here is very interesting and worthy of further discussion. *** Warm thanks are due to many Colleagues: to the Directors of the Conference, in particular to those who took care of the evaluation, selection and timetable of the Workshops, and to the Director of Studia Patristica, Markus Vinzent, as well as to all the brilliant speakers in the Eriugena sessions, the two insightful respondents, and the numerous and engaged public at all sessions. It is to be hoped that this scholarly contribution will complement and advance major studies on Eriugena and his sources in ancient philosophy and patristic philosophical theology. Last but not least, I, and all of us, should express our profound gratitude to Eriugena himself, one of the most towering Christian Platonists, who is a bridge between ancient and Patristic philosophy, on the one side, and mediaeval philosophy on the other. Moreover, he joined the Greek and the Latin tradition: after Boethius, he brought Greek Platonism back to the Latin West and offered a synthesis of Greek and Latin Christian Platonism. On the basis of Origen and Augustine, Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor within Patristic thought, Eriugena, as Werner Beierwaltes observed,47 elaborated the the most systematic form of Christian Neoplatonism in the Latin West before Meister Eckhart.

47

Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, Hermathena 149 (1990), 53-72.

FIRST PART: GOD

Eriugena and Maximos on Divisions of Beings Andrew LOUTH, FBA, Durham, UK

ABSTRACT Eriugena’s principal work, Periphyseon, has as its subtitle: De divisione naturae. It is generally agreed that, in its first draft, Periphyseon, introduced two fundamental distinctions – uncreated and created, and creating and not creating – which produced a fourfold division: quae creat et non creatur, quae et creatur et creat, quae creatur et non creat, quae nec creat nec creatur. Originally this distinction prefaced a discussion of the categories, but in the final version of Periphyseon what had originally been a logical division became a metaphysical one. The reason is not far to seek, for Maximos, following Gregory of Nyssa, had made a metaphysical ‘division of natures’ (Amb. 41, also in his Mystagogia), beginning with uncreated–created, then dividing created into the intelligible and the sensible, the sensible into heaven and earth, earth into paradise and the inhabited world, in which there was finally a distinction between male and female among its inhabitants. Eriugena certainly knew this series of divisions, as it is part of Maximos’ early Ambigua, which he translated into Latin. The divisions of nature in Maximos and Eriugena are very different, though both of them serve to explicate an understanding of the created order as constituting a movement of procession and return. This article will explore Eriugena’s radical rethinking of Maximos’ division of natures, which entails a very different metaphysical system.

John the Irishman, Scottus, or Eriugena, ‘Son of Erin – Ireland’, as he called himself in his translations of Dionysios the Areopagite, might well be called a ‘lonely meteorite’ in the night sky of the Carolingian renaissance – to adapt the description applied by Jean Vanneste to Dionysios himself. Though caught up in the theological debates of the ninth-century Carolingian court – over predestination or the eucharistic presence, for example – and though profoundly formed by the liberal arts as interpreted by Augustine, Martianus Cappella, Boethius, and Cassiodorus – he wrote commentaries that survive on Martianus and Boethius – he seems in many ways distanced from the learned world that he adorned. There seems little doubt that the principal reason for this sense of distance and isolation was his knowledge of Greek. He was not alone in such knowledge; rather, his knowledge of Greek links him to other Irishmen among his contemporaries such as Sedulius Scottus and Martin the Irishman, both of whom knew Greek, too. It would seem, then, that he learned Greek back in Ireland, before making his way to the Carolingian court in the mid-ninth century. However, he did not simply know some Greek, he embarked on the arduous

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task of translation, and it is what he learnt through his translation of the Greeks that underlies his whole theological vision. For the very process of translation – trying to negotiate the frontier between two languages and transfer a vision and meaning from one linguistic world to another – can, and in this case did, produce what one might call a unique configuration in Eriugena’s Latin mindset. It is important, it seems to me, to acknowledge Eriugena’s Latin training. This might seem obvious, but many, if not most, of us come to Eriugena from a predominantly Greek background – either from the Greek Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysios, and Maximos, like me, or from the Greek Neoplatonic tradition – but it needs to be recognized that, however important this Greek background was for Eriugena, and it unquestionably was, he thought all this through in Latin: how he received, and rethought his Greek material is the crucial question (as Michael McCormick put it unforgettably in his contribution to the McGinn-Otten book on Eriugena).1 The translations are dated to the 860s, but in the controversy over predestination, which belongs to the 850s, and in that over the Eucharistic presence, which is more difficult to date, Eriugena already strikes a note that might be regarded as distinctly Eastern, or Byzantine. In his work against Gottschalk, written at the behest of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, Eriugena not only disposed of Gottschalk’s offensive doctrine of double predestination – that is predestination both to election and to reprobation – but, as the great medieval scholar, W.P. Ker put it, ‘before the Irish philosopher could be checked, he had refuted Sin and Hell’, something that seems part of a larger whole in the context of current scholarly debate.2 For Eriugena, God’s predestinating will could not be divided, it could only be single: a single will of predestination to salvation, which respected human freedom. On these terms the logic of predestination could not get under way at all.3 Such an attitude is characteristic of the Greek Fathers, especially those to whom Eriugena was attracted. Similarly over the Eucharistic controversy, although Eriugena’s own contribution is lost, we know from other sources that he warned against the idea that ‘the visible Eucharist signifies nothing but itself’, thus placing himself this time alongside Gottschalk (and Ratramnus), but distanced himself from all parties in the West with his emphasis on the identity of the eucharistic sacrifice with the heavenly sacrifice of Christ, in contrast to his Western contemporaries who were primarily concerned with the relationship between the eucharistic sacrifice and Christ’s sacrifice on

1 Michael McCormick, ‘Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium down to the Accession of Charles the Bald’, in Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (eds), Eriugena East and West (Notre Dame, IN, 1994), 15-48, esp. 19-20. 2 W.P. Ker, The Dark Ages (London, 1904), 162 (quoted by Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars [London, 1927], 56). 3 For a brief discussion of Eriugena on predestination, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology, 600–1300 (Chicago, 1978), 96-9.

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the Cross.4 Again, Eriugena strikes a note that is more familiar in the Byzantine world than the ninth-century Carolingian world. Although it is clear that it was his knowledge of Greek that provided Eriugena with access to the thoughtworld of Byzantium, it is likely, too, that we are here dealing with an ‘elective affinity’, and not just a matter of influence. These introductory remarks have perhaps gone too deeply, too quickly, into the nature of Eriugena’s relationship to the Greek East, but let us now, at any rate, lay out very briefly what we know about Eriugena’s œuvre. First, his translations, which belong, as already noted, to the 860s. To begin with, there is his translation of the Corpus Areopagiticum; this was the second translation into Latin, commissioned by the Emperor Charles the Bald, and seems to have occupied the early and late years of the 860s (860-862, 865-870). This commission led Eriugena to explore other realms of Greek theology. His next task seems to have been to translate St Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis (‘On the making of human kind’), which he called De imagine, ‘On the Image’; dated to 862-864. The notion of human kind in the image of God is central to Gregory’s treatise, so it is not an unreasonable title, but the notion of image is central, too, to the Dionysian vision, and it may be this that led Eriugena to Gregory. At any rate, while Gregory led Eriugena into the background of Dionysios, his final work of translation led him forward into the development of the Dionysian vision in the works of St Maximos the Confessor, whom Eriugena in one of his verses calls, Maximus Graiugena.5 Eriugena translated his two major works, the Ambigua ad Ioannem and his Quaestiones ad Thalasssium. The Ambigua ad Ioannem, is prefaced in most of the Greek MSS by a shorter collection of five later Ambigua addressed to a certain Thomas – a conflation that seems to go back to Maximos’ own time, who knows the numeration of the combined Ambigua, though curiously, in the ninth century, while Eriugena seems to have known only the Ambigua ad Ioannem, his Byzantine contemporary, Patriarch Photios, only seems to have known the Ambigua ad Thomam! The Ambigua ad Ioannem are all concerned with puzzling passages in the sermons of St Gregory the Theologian; the Questions to Thalassius with difficult passages in the Scriptures. They contain the heart of St Maximos’ vision, the fruit of his wrestling with his primary scriptural and patristic sources, and are much more difficult of access than his Centuries, Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer and a dialogue called the Ascetic Life, but it is to the heart of Maximos’ works that Eriugena goes. If one steps back and looks at what Eriugena chose, or was led, to translate, one can only be amazed. Eriugena has gone for the very core of the Byzantine theological vision, the works central to the Maximian synthesis that was to have 4

See my Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071 (Crestwood, NY, 2007), 148; also J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology, 600–1300 (1978), 96. 5 See the verses that preface Eriugena’s translation of the Ambigua ad Ioannem (CChr.SG 18, 14).

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such a profound influence in Orthodox theology – in the hesychast controversy, for instance, of the fourteenth century, and in the twentieth-century revival of Orthodox theology. Why these? Why not more obvious sources such as the Cappadocian Fathers or St John Chrysostom, St Athanasios or St Cyril of Alexandria? The question is the more pressing, because Eriugena seems to have gone for the most difficult Greek texts he could find: Chrysostom, Basil the Great or even Gregory the Theologian would have been much less demanding. The only answers that occur to me are these: Eriugena’s own bent was fundamentally speculative, which would explain his choice of Gregory of Nyssa (a father not well known in the West, constantly confused, even by Eriugena,6 with the Theologian; in contrast, in the East, at the Seventh Œcumenical Synod in 787, he was called the ‘Father of the Fathers’, though in the East we still find confusion between the two Gregories), and in line with that, to us at any rate, it seems to have been the Byzantine theological synthesis that drew him, and that means Maximos, and precisely the Maximos of the Ambigua and the Quaestiones ad Thalassium: in them Eriugena would find endless reflection on the patristic tradition, and especially the theology of St Gregory, the ‘Theologian’, and these treatises, too, would lead him back to his initial inspiration in the works of the Areopagite, and to the cosmic anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa, that form the burning centre of Maximos’ theology. So, in an amazing way, Eriugena seems to have been drawn unerringly to the central genius of the Byzantine theological synthesis. Although Eriugena’s encounter with Byzantine theology through his labour of translation is perhaps the most important thing about his intellectual formation, it is important not to exaggerate it. He was, as already mentioned, deeply familiar with Latin reflection on the liberal arts, and, as the late Goulven Madec demonstrated many years ago, in his De praedestinatione, he manifests a profound knowledge of the works of St Augustine, so much so that it would not be inaccurate to say that his mind is soaked in the writings and arguments of the great African doctor.7 Having said that, his reading of Augustine is often utterly original; in his work against Gottschalk, Eriugena uses Augustine himself to close off avenues of speculation that Gottschalk had explored – in particular about ‘double predestination’ – but despite this it can hardly be denied that it was Augustine himself who had opened up these avenues.8 But we are concerned in this paper with Eriugena’s notion of the divisions of nature, the subtitle of the first to survive of his works, in which he puts forward his own theological–philosophical vision, the Periphyseon, which was 6

John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford, 1988), 71, n. 46 with references. Goulven Madec, Jean Scot et ses auteurs: annotations érigéniennes (Paris, 1988), and in his edition of De praedestinatione, CChr.CM 50 (Turnhout, 1978). 8 For example, in De civitate Dei XXII 24. 5, in an entirely unpolemical context, Augustine refers to and distinguishes eis quos praedestinavit ad vitam and eis quos praedestinavit ad mortem. 7

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being written alongside his great labour of translation in the 860s. In origin this seems to have been an essay on dialectic, drawing exclusively on Latin authors, and it may well be that this original core belongs to a still earlier stage in Eriugena’s life. This early draft introduces the fourfold division of nature, multiplying, as it were, two fundamental polarities – between uncreated and created, and between creating and not creating – to give a fourfold division between uncreated and creating, created and creating, created and not creating, uncreated and not creating, before moving on to a discussion of the categories. This pairing is something Eriugena was familiar with from various contexts; for instance, the way in which the four elements – fire, earth, air, water – were regularly seen as combinations of two fundamental oppositions in the natural world of hot-cold, wet-dry: fire being dry and hot, earth being cold and dry, air being wet and dry, water being wet and cold, so that the elements could be seen as embracing two oppositions – fire-water, air-earth, and also forming a cycle. The same pattern is found in consideration of the humours. However, in the version as we have it now, this division of nature has moved beyond a dialectical exercise, and become part of a much larger whole, which is not at all Latin in its inspiration and its sources. This larger whole seems to make what was a primarily logical division of nature something more fundamentally metaphysical, and does this by linking it to a notion of the division of nature derived from St Maximos’ Amb. 41 (and behind that from Gregory of Nyssa), and rehearsed at the beginning of Book II of Periphyseon, where the beginning of that Ambiguum is quoted. Maximos’ division starts from the division between uncreated and created, then divides the created into invisible and visible, the visible into heaven and earth, earth into paradise and the inhabited world, and within the inhabited world finds a final division between male and female: five divisions, διαίρεσεις, divisiones.9 In the Ambiguum, Maximos sees this sequence of divisions as a movement of procession, terminating in the Fall, which turns the divisions of nature into cosmic fault-lines. Originally the divisions should have converged in the human, as microcosm and bond of creation, in which the extremities of the divisions are held together. As a result of the Fall, however, the only solution is the Incarnation of the Word of God which recapitulates the divisions of nature, and re-establishes the cosmos. Eriugena’s division of nature is now made to incorporate Maximos’ division, and produce a cosmic cycle, or round dance. The four categories are more than merely logical categories, but set out a metaphysical understanding of the cosmos, the four categories corresponding to God the creator, the primordial causes (more or less equivalent to the Platonic forms), the material world, and then God as the final cause, at rest, uncreated and uncreating. This last division is much For the origin of these divisions in Gregory of Nyssa, see D.L. Balás, Μετουσία Θεοῦ: Man’s Participation in God’s Perfections according to Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Studia Anselmiana 55 (Rome, 1966), 34-53. 9

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more problematic that the first three, and of this Eriugena is well aware: when he introduces quarta [differentia] quae nec creat nec creatur, he goes on to say that it is ‘classed among the impossibles, for it is of its essence that it cannot be’.10 Alumnus finds the first three divisions clear, but says he is ‘much perplexed by the fourth species’, and, as Sheldon-Williams puts it, ‘he is put off with a digression that lasts of the rest of the book’.11 The next book, book II, begins, we have seen, with the crucial citation of Maximos’ Amb. 41 – a quotation that is glossed by Eriugena and only includes what Eriugena himself sees important. Right at the beginning there is, it seems to me, a notable omission. Of the first divisio (as Eriugena now calls it, rather than the first differentia of the divisio naturae), he quotes Maximos as saying, ‘Of these the first, they [that is, the saints who have received the divine mysteries, whose view Maximos is setting down] declare to be that which divides from the uncreated nature created nature in general, which receives being through generation. For they say that God by his goodness made the clear disposition of all existing things at one and the same time’ (II 17). This omits a remark of Maximos’, admittedly puzzling, but nonetheless important, which follows on from what Eriugena has quoted: ‘it is not immediately self-evident to this orderly arrangement who or what God is, and they call “division” the ignorance of what it is that distinguishes creation from God’.12 I am using Fr Maximos’ translation of the Greek; I am not clear that Eriugena gets the first part, but the second bit is what matters: this division is called ἄγνοια, ignorantia, something that Eriugena clearly understands in his translation of the whole of what he called Amb. 37 (= 41). This seems to me probably very important. For what Maximos is asserting is that there is no overriding category that embraces both God and the created order, nature, if you like. The ‘division’ between God and nature is incomprehensible and is certainly utterly distinct from the other divisions that Maximos is going on the list in the Ambiguum: it is called ἄγνοια, ignorantia, unknowing. Eriugena’s omission here seems to me to gloss over this distinction; in Maximos there is a clear distinction between God and nature, in Eriugena we seem to be dealing with something more like deus sive natura. Both Maximos’ set of divisions of nature and Eriugena’s are of Neoplatonic origin: in both we find the familiar Neoplatonic triad: rest – procession – return. But with Maximos the divisions spell out the way in which the manifold nature of the created order is constituted; the Fall, as I have already suggested, 10 Periphyseon I proem., in Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), 4 vol. (vol. 5 never published), ed. I.P. Sheldon-Williams (Dublin, 1968), I 37. 11 Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1970), 523. 12 Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, 2 vol., ed. and trans. Nicholas Constans [aka. Fr Maximos Simonopetrides], Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28-9 (Cambridge, MA, 2014), II 103.

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turns the divisions of nature into cosmic fault-lines. What God intended was that the manifold, manifested in the divisions, would be held together by the human, created in God’s image, so that the manifold splendour of God’s creation would be evident as theophany. In its original conception, procession through the divisions would be constituted by the return of the human to God; owing to the Fall, this can only be attained through the Incarnation of the Word, reconstituting, recapitulating the human in God’s image. In Eriugena’s divisions of nature, something much closer to a circular process of rest-procession-returnrest seems to me to be envisaged. Although Maximos is cited to effect the transition from a rhetorical exercise to a fundamentally metaphysical vision, it seems to me that Eriugena is not really developing Maximian perspectives, but using them as a catalyst to develop his own fundamental metaphysical understanding of deus–natura in terms of his polarities of uncreated-created/creatingnot creating. So I leave with a puzzle that I hope others will be able to elucidate.

Plotinus, Eriugena and the Uncreated Image Stephen R.L. CLARK, University of Bristol, Bristol; University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

ABSTRACT Plotinus and Eriugena seem to agree both that the origin and goal of all things lies beyond being and intellect, and that there is in intellect an uncreated image of that goal which is also the template for all created things. Some commentators have been confused about the notion of ‘emanation’, as if this compromised the absolute Otherness and freedom of the One: but both Christian and ‘pagan’ Platonist understood the mixture of necessity and contingency in Being – the divine intellect, or word, is, as it were, ‘begotten and not made’, but all things else display their lesser being by not being necessary. There is a further congruence between Plotinus and Eriugena in the thought that every fallen soul has still an unfallen element, in the divine, and that we can be recalled to that identity. There is even some ambiguity in the status of that unfallen template, at once permanently enclosed in the divine Word and something ‘created’. So this world here is at once an expectable revelation of the divine generosity and a place where souls rashly pursue their imagined independence. Its origin is both in Nothing and in the One: in Plotinus’ work there is an unresolved resemblance between ‘matter’ bound in golden chains, and the One behind a golden veil, neither of which are comprehensible. Eriugena boldly proposes that there is no objective difference, but rather that they are twin ways for us partly to conceptualize the Mystery. That Eriugena had read, or needed to read, Plotinus’s collected works as edited by Porphyry (The Enneads), is unlikely, but neither is there any need to suppose that Plotinus’s doctrines had been radically changed in their transmission through Christian patristic texts (chiefly Augustine, Ps-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus). Plotinus and Eriugena, I shall suggest, were closer in their thought (about God, humanity and creation) and practice than is usually proposed.

The Origins of All Things The third century Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (204-270) and the ninth century Irish theologian John Scottus Eriugena (815-877) share the twin beliefs that the goal and origin of all things lies beyond Being and Intellect, and yet that there is in Nous (variously translated Intellect or Spirit) an uncreated image of that goal which is also the template for all created things. Eriugena learnt the doctrine from Maximus the Confessor (580-662), with embellishments from the author now known as Pseudo-Dionysius (late 5th to early 6th centuries) who

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was in Maximus’ and Eriugena’s day identified with a first century associate of Paul (Acts 17:43) and so had almost apostolic status. Augustine (354-430) and Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) were probably Eriugena’s first introduction to Neo-Platonic ideas, even though Eriugena preferred to cite Dionysius.1 Augustine in turn had read some selected essays of Plotinus. Gregory may have read rather more.2 Eriugena almost certainly had not.3 The ideas and attitudes that the pagan Plotinus and the Christian Eriugena share were disseminated through many channels, and made all the firmer for being, in their proper context, clearly rational solutions to endemic problems. So also the shared metaphors: circle, radii and circumference; odours; flowing water. Those ideas and attitudes were manifest both in Eriugena’s translations of Maximus, Dionysius and Gregory and in his massive work Periphyseon.4 The origin and goal of all things visible and invisible, existent or non-existent, can be indicated but not comprehended, and all that we can say of it is strictly false or at least misleading. It is not simply one being among many, even a ‘supreme’ being with all possible or compossible perfections. It is certainly none of the things of which it is origin; it is of such a kind, though nothing can be predicated of it, not being, not substance, not life, as to be above all of these things. But if you grasp it by taking away being from it, you will be filled with wonder. And throwing yourself upon it and coming to rest within it, understand it more and more intimately, knowing it by intuition and seeing its greatness by the things which exist after it and through it.5

In Eriugena’s account it is the uncreated creator, to be distinguished from what is created and also creating (the fundamental principles united in the divine Logos), created and uncreating (the familiar phenomenal or physical

1

See Henry Bett, Johannes Scotus Eriugena: A Study in Mediaeval Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014 [1925]), 162-4. 2 See Deirdre Carabine, ‘The Mystical Journeys of Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa’, in John J. Cleary (ed.), The Perennial Tradition of Neoplatonism (Leuven, 1997), 188-204. Carabine emphasises Plotinus’ preference for the metaphor of ‘light’ to signify the incomprehensible being or un-being of the One, and Gregory’s for ‘darkness’, but this does not touch the underlying identity of their paths. 3 Though see Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 105-7: ‘The extent of Eriugena’s contact with pagan Platonists in general is less easy to describe with any certainty … It is of course notoriously difficult to pinpoint the sources of Eriugena’s many Neoplatonic beliefs, just as it is exceedingly difficult to say with precision whether it was Plotinus or Porphyry or some handbook of philosophical ideas which first influenced the views of Augustine’. 4 John the Scot, Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature, ed. Myra L. Uhlfelder, with summaries by Jean A. Potter (Indianapolis, 1976). This is not a complete version. I have not had access to the larger translation by I.-P. Sheldon-Williams and John J.O’Meara (Montreal, Paris, 1987). 5 Ennead III 8 [30].10, 28-35, Plotinus: Enneads, tr. A.H. Armstrong, LCL (Cambridge, MA, 1966-1988) III 397. All Plotinian quotations are taken from Armstrong’s translation.

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realities), and finally what is neither created nor creative6. This orderly exposition only concerns our own conceptions of reality: there are no such divisions in God, who is at once entirely other than anything we can conceive or ordinarily encounter and the sustaining reality of all that we conceive and encounter. ‘He cannot be spoken of or understood; and no name or word is proper to Him’.7 Hidden in this fourfold scheme is the triadic scheme of emanation from, and return to, an unchanging One. Thus in Book II [of Periphyseon] Eriugena explains how the four divisions of nature may be understood as three: God in His aspects of Beginning, Middle, and End (II 5 2 7 b; see also I 45rd-452a, 453b; III 62Id, 675a, 688b). The four divisions of God are really only God: God is the genus of which the forms of nature are species.8

Christian commentators have often been averse to what they consider the ‘pantheistic’ implications of this account, and have also tended to distinguish what they regard as a merely ‘pagan’ claim that the created world is derived, of necessity, from the uncreated, and the supposedly Abrahamic assertion that creation is a matter for God’s will rather than a divine necessity. The word that Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, most often conjoins with ‘Neo-Platonist’ is ‘pantheist’,9 and the charge against both pagan and Christian heretics is that they failed to understand the gulf that separates creature and creator: both the relative autonomy of creatures, and their inescapable subordination.10 The idea that the worlds exist as successive ‘emanations’ from the One, Balthasar supposes, amounts to a denial of that dichotomy. At the same time the rather different thought is attributed to Origen and to his pagan teachers11 that the material creation is a consequence of a primordial Fall into multiplicity, a Fall perennially repeated in an endless cycle of exile and return. Multiplicity, individuality, creatureliness is a mistake, or even a mistaken view of what is really and eternally 6

John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 2 [1.1]. John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 88 [1.65]. 8 Dermot Moran, Philosophy of Eriugena (1989), 255. 9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: the Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, tr. Brian E. Daley S.J., 3rd ed. (San Francisco, 2003; 1st published 1988). I criticised Balthasar’s work on Maximus at somewhat greater length in a paper presented at the Norwegian Institute in Athens in December 2008, and subsequently made available at https://www.academia.edu/176773/ Maximus_the_Confessor_Logos_and_Logoi. 10 The same charge is made by Elizabeth Theokritoff in ‘Creator and Creation’, in Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (eds), Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge, 2008), 63-77. 11 The Christian theologian Origen may or may not be identical with Plotinus’ friend and fellow-pupil, but both Origens (if they are distinct) were students of Ammonius Saccas, who may or may not have retained his parents’ Christian faith. Porphyry (Eusebius, History of the Church, trans. G.A. Williamson, ed. Andrew Louth [London, 1989], 158-60 [6.19.6-7]) identifies the Christian as a mere akroates of Ammonius, while the one who turned up in Rome (Life of Plotinus 14.21-5) was a member of the inner circle, a zelotes. See Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford, 2012), 36-7. 7

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at One. God is the only reality, whether this is taken to mean that creatures are hardly more than figments or that they are inextricably part of the divine. But what does that mean, and does it really mark a clear disagreement between Christian and pagan schools? According to Gregory Nazianzen we are ‘a part of God (moiran theou), and slipped down from above (anothen rheusanta)’12, using almost exactly the same phrase as Plotinus (moiras ekeithen ousas) 13. ‘We are and we are said to be a portion of God because of the logoi of our being which preexist in God; and again we are said to be slipped from above because we have not been moved according to the logos forebeing in God, according to which we came to be.’14 And Plotinus, conversely, was clear that providence, so to speak, could not be in complete control of everything – there would then be nothing for providence to be concerned about!15 Created and Uncreated Images Some commentators have been confused about the notion of ‘emanation’, as if this compromised the absolute Otherness and freedom of the One: but both Christian and ‘pagan’ Platonist understood the mixture of necessity and contingency in Being – the divine intellect, or word, is, as it were, ‘begotten and not made’, but all things else display their lesser being by not being necessary. On the one hand Plotinus points out that the Creator could not create, for example, a horse without already having the notion of a horse.16 On the other (or identically), Plotinus speaks of creation – the creation of the lesser realities – as something, as it were, ‘freely willed’, and the One as something more like (though also very unlike) a person than a thing: ‘he himself is primarily his will’.17 The one Logos containing the templates of all things visible and invisible is, as it were, generated. The partial expression of that Logos in phenomenal and physical reality is, as it were, created. And perhaps there are also non-phenomenal expressions of the many logoi which can be said to be created, along with angels – indeed such intelligible creations are themselves angels. This creation may indeed be, as it were, an expectable effect of the One’s generosity,18 which is in mirrored in the way everything real extends its 12 Gregory Nazianzen, De fuga 2.17, cited by Polycarp Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and his Refutation of Origenism (Rome, 1955), 22 with reference to Maximus’ discussion of the passage at Ambigua 7, PG 91, 1068D; see also Torstein T. Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor (New York, 2008), 71. 13 Plotinus, Ennead V 1 [10].1 14 Maximus, Ambigua 7, PG 91, 1081C7-11, cited by Polycarp Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua (1955), 173. 15 Plotinus, Ennead III 2 [47].9, 1-3. 16 Plotinus, Ennead VI 7 [38].8.6-7. 17 Plotinus, Ennead VI 8 [39].21, 16. 18 Plotinus, Ennead V 4 [7].1, 34-6.

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being,19 but this does not make it an impersonal, ‘mindless’ consequence. The One is ‘the power of all things’,20 and so also the power that all things manifest in their turn. As Lloyd Gerson has pointed out,21 the mere fact that Plotinus uses metaphors of sunlight or overflowing fountains – as Christian theologians have also done, including Eriugena22 – does not imply that he supposed that the One is subject to necessity. As Tollefsen correctly observes, ‘Plotinus’s philosophical teaching is more like a doctrine of creation than a doctrine of emanation’.23 Of course it is also true that the One doesn’t need, as it were, to make up its mind or choose between a succession of tempting options, any more, on Maximus’s account, than Christ’s human will is a gnomic will, one dependent on unreliable judgment and careful deliberation!24 The thought is congruent with mainstream Christian theology: generation is a work of the divine nature but creation is a work of the divine will.25 The Word (the second person of the Divine Trinity) cannot be created by God’s will and reason, since it is itself God’s Will and Reason: ‘how can the Logos, being the Counsel and Will of the Father, come into being Himself by an act of will and purpose?’26 Similarly, the One did not want the Intellect to come into being, for there can be no intermediary between the One and its expressive image.27 Insofar as there is will and reason in the divine, it is the Soul and Intellect that are that will and reason. And they that bring life to everything else. There was an identical dispute in Islam about the createdness or otherwise of the Koran:28 19 ‘Now when anything else comes to perfection we see that it produces, and does not endure to remain by itself, but makes something else’: Plotinus, Ennead V 4 [7].1, 27-8. 20 Plotinus, Ennead III 8 [30].10. 21 Lloyd P. Gerson, ‘Plotinus’s Metaphysics: Emanation or Creation?’, The Review of Metaphysics 46 (1993), 559-74. 22 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 139 [3.3]: ‘Divine Goodness, Essence, Life, Wisdom and all things which are in the Source of all things, first flow down into the primordial causes and give them being; then, in some ineffable way, they course down through the primordial causes into their effects through the appropriate order of the universe, always flowing down through the higher to the lower; and, through hidden natural passages by a carefully concealed path, they return to their source’. 23 Torstein Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology (2008), 62. 24 See Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (Oxford, 1996), 61. 25 Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, ed. Robert E. Sinkewicz (Toronto, 1988), 143: after John Damascene, Expositio fidei 8.67-70. Though this simple dichotomy is perhaps misleading: the One Father Almighty does not have any natural constraint. 26 Athanasius, Against the Arians 3.64: G.L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London, 1952), 151. 27 Ennead V 3 [49].12, 28-34. See also John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 109 [2.36]: ‘They themselves [the primordial causes] are participations in the single Cause of universal creation, viz., the sublime and holy Trinity; and they said to have being in themselves because no creature mediates between them and the single Cause of all things’. 28 See a brief discussion by Shari L. Lowin and Nevin Reda, ‘Scripture and Exegesis; Torah and Qu’ran in historical perspective’, in Josef W. Meri (ed.), Routledge Handbook of MuslimJewish Relations (London, 2016), 57-76, 61. In both spheres, the notion that it was ‘created’ was preferred by rulers, as it suggested both that the Word as it had been previously declared might

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the Abbasid caliphs, like some Byzantine emperors, preferred to believe that the Logos – and so the Law – was itself a created thing, and therefore might be malleable to suit political convenience. Mainstream Muslims disagreed. So also in Judaism: In human practice, when a mortal king builds a palace, he builds it not with his own skills, but with those of an architect. Moreover, the architect does not build it out of his head, but employs plans and diagrams to know how to arrange the chambers and the wicket doors. Thus God consulted the Torah and created the world, while the Torah declares, ‘In the beginning God created’ (Genesis 1:1), ‘beginning’ referring to the Torah, as in the verse, ‘The Lord made me as the beginning of His way’ (Prov. 8:22).29

The Book of Proverbs speaks of Wisdom as the first thing that God made, before the foundation of the world, to be everlasting rather than eternal – but the logic of the story must be that it is rather uncreated: how, save by Wisdom herself, could He have made Wisdom? The surprising notion that defines the Christian branch of Abrahamic tradition – and of Platonism – is that this Word ‘became flesh and dwelt among us’, not simply as a fixed, authoritative text but as a ‘person’, a human animal, subject to the same laws as ourselves (though by His will rather than any other’s). That particular Galilean rabbi is the true ‘image and likeness’ of God, with whom we can, perhaps, be united, ‘through the breaking of bread’. He is also the representative, and template, of all created being. But even this bold doctrine is not without its cognate notions in other branches: Joseph Ashkenazi of Safed (1525-72) similarly wrote ‘that when the midrash puts human beings at the center, it is because we include within us, and stand for, all the creatures of the universe, who are altogether called “Adam”’30. Chesterton gave the story his own twist: We stand as chiefs and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose cognisance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic chivalry of the dog, the

turn out to be obsolete, and – by analogy – that their own arbitrary commands were valid: see Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam (New York, 1982), 51; Hugh Kennedy, The Caliphate (London, 2016), 114-6. This does not seem, as far as I can tell, to be raised as an issue in Jewish thought. 29 Bereisheet Rabbah [ca. 500 AD] 1:10: cited by Yakov Z. Meyer, ‘Parashat Teruma: the primordial Torah’: Haaretz 30 January 2014: http://bit.ly/2CG5cCt: ‘In the way of the world, a king of flesh and blood who builds a castle does not do so from his own knowledge, but rather from the knowledge of an architect, and the architect does not build it from his own knowledge, but rather he has scrolls and books in order to know how to make rooms and doorways. So too Hashem gazed into the Torah and created the world. Similarly the Torah says, “Through the reishis Hashem created [the heavens and the earth]”, and reishis means Torah, as in “Hashem made me [the Torah] the beginning (reishis) of His way” (Mishlei [Proverbs] 8:22)’: https://www.sefaria. org/Bereishit_Rabbah.1.1?lang=bi (accessed 19/09/2019). 30 David M. Seidenberg, ‘Being Here Now: This Creation is the Divine Image’, Tikkun 132 (2017), 62-4, 63.

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humour and perversity of cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion.31

And this may indicate a further feature of the uncreated Horse (as Plotinus considered it): we need not suppose that this elemental part of the eternal Logos is exactly quadrupedal. The template to which phenomenal horses, as it were, aspire, is rather their moral or symbolic value, their mirroring of one aspect of the transcendent One, and their embodiment is contingent on all the circumstances of phenomenal or physical reality. This may help to solve an ambiguity in Eriugena’s thought, which he explored at length in the third book of his Periphyseon. In a certain sense the primordial causes are coeternal with the maker – they cannot be ‘accidental’ to God, since this would complicate divine simplicity. Yet the priority of the Maker means that causes can never be coeternal with God in the truest sense. The Alumnus says: ‘For we certainly believe that the Son is coeternal with the Father and those things which the Father made in the Son are coeternal with the Son, but not, however, entirely coeternal. For they are coeternal because the Son was never without the primordial causes of natures made in him. But these causes are not entirely coeternal with him in whom they are made. For it is not possible for made things to be coeternal with the Maker. For the Maker precedes that which he makes’.32

Eriugena found this doctrine in Maximus as well as in Augustine: Centrally, there is the one Logos and the many logoi: the one Logos, who is the Son of the Father, and the many logoi that form the deep structures of the created order, and are in some way identical with the one Logos. For ‘the one Logos is the many logoi, and the many are one’,

as he affirms repeatedly in Ambigua 7.16.33 These logoi (and the Logos Himself) are not to be understood as propositions, but rather as living realities, images or aspects of the One Good above all. Despite some Christian misunderstandings,34 Plotinus was not simply devising a 31

G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (London, 1910), 264. John F. Gavin, A Celtic Christology: The Incarnation according to John Scottus Eriugena (Eugene, OR, 2014), 86, drawing on Periphuseon II 48, 116-22. This is perhaps not exactly right: as aspects of God’s eternal Word they are indeed eternal. That they are also ‘made’ is because they are also made available to reason and to sense. Eriugena paraphrases Augustine (De Genesi ad litteram 2.6) as follows: ‘It is as though he were openly saying: “They are under It in one way when, made by genreration, they become visibly manifest through matter in genera, species, places, and times. They are in it another way when they are understood eternally in the primordial causes of things, which not only are in God but actually are God”’ (John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 149 [3.8]). 33 Andrew Louth, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel Haynes (ed.), A Saint for East and West (Eugene, OR, 2019), xix-xxv, xxiv. 34 For example, by Sergei N. Sushkov, Being and Creation in the Theology of John Scottus Eriugena: An Approach to a New Way of Thinking (Eugene, OR, 2017), who proposes that ‘no matter how attractive a metaphysical schematism might seem to be, it is in fact utterly irrelevant 32

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metaphysical system, a connected series of propositions to be deduced from prior principles and acknowledged without any emotional force, but rather seeking to direct his own and his followers’ attention, to awaken an imaginative and spiritual sense of being which was to transcend all ordinarily ‘intellectual’ claims. One must not then suppose that the gods and the ‘exceedingly blessed spectators’ in the higher world contemplate propositions (axiomata), but all the Forms we speak about are beautiful images in that world, of the kind which someone imagined to exist in the soul of the wise man, images not painted but real. This is why the ancients said that the Ideas were realities and substances. The wise men of Egypt, I think, also understood this, either by scientific (akribes) or innate (sumphute) knowledge, and when they wished to signify something wisely, did not use the forms of letters which follow the order of words and propositions (logoi and protaseis) and imitate sounds and the enunciations of philosophical statements (prophoras axiomaton), but by drawing images and inscribing in their temples one particular image of each particular thing, they manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world, that is, that every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom and is a subject of statements, all together in one, and not discourse (dianoesis) or deliberation (bouleusis).35

There is certainly an important role for argumentative discussion to uncover error and point in roughly the right direction, but Eriugena, as Moran observes, ‘would have agreed with Plotinus’s account of dialectic in Ennead I 3 [20].4’, leaving ‘what is called logical activity, about propositions and syllogisms, to another art’. What matters is the intellectual grasp of reality, not merely talking about it. Eriugena reinforces the possibility gleaned from Augustine’s text by adducing a citation from Pseudo-Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy: ‘For the understanding is what things really are, in the words of St Dionysius: “The knowledge of the things that are, is the things that are”.’ This equivalence between intellectual knowledge and the true being of things is more than a marginal observation but constitutes the methodological premise of the Periphyseon.36

So also Plotinus, ‘Being and Intellect are therefore one nature; so therefore are the real beings and the active actuality of being and Intellect of this kind; to a dialectically coherent way of thinking of the living whole, and for this reason can hardly be imposed upon Eriugena’s discourse. Indeed, to the extent the triadic “rhythm of the whole,” as the Neoplatonic metaphysics suggests, is thought of in terms of temporality (so that processio and reversio are understood to follow one another), this scheme of succession proves to be inapplicable to the dialectic of unity developed by Eriugena’ (ibid. 5-6). The suggestion that the procession and reversion are understood by Neoplatonists to succeed each other in a temporal order is also unfounded: to speak in this way is only ‘a manner of speaking’. In fairness to Sushkov, he is seeking to exonerate Eriugena from a supposedly ‘slavish’ adherence to Neoplatonic tropes which conflict with the Gospel: my own response is rather to exonerate those tropes. 35 Plotinus, Ennead V 8 [31].5-6, citing Plato, Symposium 215b; see also IV 3 [27].11. 36 Adrian Guia, ‘Eriugena’s Appropriation of Maximus Confessor’s Anthropology’, in Daniel Haynes (ed.), Saint for East and West (2019), 3-30, 9, citing Periphyseon II 45, 1058-9, Augustine, De vera religione 55, 113, and Ps-Dionysius, De ecclesiastica hierarchia I 3.

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and the thoughts of this kind are the form and shape of being and its active actuality’.37 But there is still a distinction between the eternal logoi, contained within the one Logos, and their created counterparts, between Eriugena’s ‘uncreated creator’ and his ‘created creators’. According to von Balthasar,38 Maximus also distinguished the divine ideas, ‘the basic outlines, in God, of his plans for the world, the preliminary sketch of the creature within the Spirit of God’, from the ‘created “universals”’ that are the immanent principles of created being. ‘The concentration of the ideas of the world in the Creator does not mean the dissolution of the world into God’.39 Eriugena is not entirely clear in this: for him, ‘all things which are seen to arise in the order of times and places through generation were made eternally at once and together in God’s Word. For we must not believe that they have just begun to be made at a time when they are seen arising in the world’.40 The very same things are to be found in God’s eternal Word and in the worlds of reason and sense: the latter are not just copies. Nor does God know those first principles as we – or angels – might: they are no more than His intentions for the world. ‘God knows the very things which are, as His own wills, because He has created all by will’.41 As Kallistos Ware has put it, each thing’s logos is ‘God’s intention for that thing, its inner essence, that which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it toward the divine realm’.42 The Word made Flesh It is in the transition from the cosmos as it is understood through intellect to the phenomenal world experienced, exactly, through animal senses that there may be a distinction between Christian and pagan theory. Tollefsen at any rate has suggested that: for the pagan Neo-Platonist all the ideas contained in the divine Intellect, and so available to angelic intellects, are mirrored in phenomenal reality (though not necessarily all at the same time, nor in the same region). For the Christian only some are realized here, the ones somehow selected to be 37

Plotinus, Ennead V 9 [5].8, 17-20. H.U. von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy (2003), 116-8. 39 Ibid. 119. 40 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 185 [3.14]. 41 Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, tr. Lars Thunberg and A.M. Allchin (Lund, 1965), 68, after Maximus, Ambiguorum Liber 7, PG 91, 1085B. 42 Kallistos Ware, ‘God Immanent yet Transcendent: The Divine Energies according to St. Gregory Palamas’, in Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (eds), In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids, 2004), 157-68, 160, cited by Christopher C. Knight, ‘Divine Action: a Neo-Byzantine Model’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58 (2005), 181-99, 183. 38

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companions and associates of the Incarnate Logos.43 Maybe so, though it does not seem that there are explicit statements of either possibility in the available texts.44 My question is: would Plotinus have definitely rejected the thought attributed to Christian metaphysicians? And my answer is that he would not. To put the point another way: there is no reason for Plotinus to suppose that all the souls who dance their god-inspired dance around the One45 (so to speak) have descended into phenomena to assist in the grand creative act that mirrors the divine. Nor does he have to suppose that all have fallen far. The phenomenal world is only a partial mirror, a partial selection from the infinite, and there is no need to suppose that every Idea is imitated here. Certainly there are those who ‘still lie hidden’, who do not (yet) have being.46 So maybe there is an interesting change between the pagan and the Christian thought. This world here is a selection – but for that very reason, so the pagan may suppose, it is an incomplete, an imperfect copy; those Ideas, those souls, that have not entered here are immeasurably our superiors. Zeus is the one of Kronos’s children who lives outside his Father, for a good purpose (so that there might be ‘a beautiful image of beauty and reality’), but bound to be surpassed by those offspring that have stayed ‘within’, the worlds that have not (yet) had temporal expression.47 But if the Christians are correct, it is rather the other way round: it is we who have somehow dared to enter, dared to have been born, who are to be the true companions of the Logos.48 It is the Incarnate Logos – incarnate by Maximus’s account in the ‘natural order’, in Scripture and finally as the man Jesus49 – which is to be the focus of all endeavour, not simply a God with whom we are to be acquainted just by intellect. Animals are superior to angels, and the angels’ fall, so tradition tells us, began in Satan’s outrage that he could be expected to bow down before an animal!50 43

T. Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology (2008), 88-91 Plotinus, Ennead V 9 [5].13 raises the question whether only the forms of things in the sense-world also exist There, in eternity, but does not, as far as I can see, answer his own question. 45 Plotinus, Ennead VI 9 [9].8, 38-42. 46 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 5 [1.5]. Whether there ‘are’ any who will never ‘have being’, never visibly appear, or even appear to angelic reason, is not clearly stated here at least, but Tollefson’s suggestion is better informed than I, and is worth endorsing. It is true that not all the beings in the Logos have yet emerged. Whether there are any that never will, and that exist only as imagined possibilities seems hard to establish (though we could all be grateful that it was true). 47 Plotinus, Ennead V 8 [31].12-3. 48 ‘The mere fact that we exist proves His infinite and eternal love, for from all eternity He chose us from among an infinite number of possible beings’: Ernesto Cardenal, Love, tr. D. Livingstone (London, 1974), 40. 49 Paul M. Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium (Notre Dame, IN, 1991), 119 on ‘three incarnations of the Logos: in the principles of creation, in the words of scripture, and in the person of Jesus Christ’ (Ambigua 33), after Origen. 50 ‘We created you and then formed you and then We said to the Angels, “Prostrate before Adam” and they prostrated except for Iblis. He was not among those who prostrated. God said, “What prevented you from prostrating when I commanded you?” He (Iblis) replied, “I am better 44

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And which animal would that be? For Christians it is the Galilean rabbi that embodies the true meaning and significance of all things. How are we to conceive this? The obvious answer, available to any late antique philosopher, was that any ‘wise man’ would be the equal of God himself, as having the very same right reason as God.51 Anyone could in principle be of one mind with the divine reason: ‘when I understand what you understand, I become your understanding, and in some ineffable way I am made in you’.52 Do crownings, clothings Make that Creator which was creature? Multiply gifts upon his head, And what, when all’s done, shall be said But – the more gifted he, I ween! That one’s made Christ, this other’s Pilate, And This might be all That has been.53

There are possible worlds, that is, where it is Pilate who had the mind of God, and Jesus was an atheistical jobbing carpenter. The orthodox answer, as of course it was Eriugena’s answer, is that there is no such possibility: it is the single entity called Jesus who is simultaneously man and God, one entity with two wills and natures. What he is as divine Intellect is necessary and eternal. What he is as human is contingent and historical. But there is only one entity involved, and – like God – he exists in all possible worlds. He is not merely wise, but Wisdom itself.54 Does it follow that he is incarnate in all possible worlds (not necessarily with the same human features), or is his incarnation itself only an occasional possibility? Eriugena’s mentor Maximus seems to have answered that ‘ultimate unification of the world in itself and with God is the ultimate motivating cause for the Incarnation and as such the first idea of the Creator, existing in advance of all creation’.55 That is, the Incarnation is not simply a response to human sin, but the original point and centre of the created universe. There is no actual phenomenal cosmos that does not have Jesus as its centre. He occupies the role assigned in Rabbinic thought to Zion.56 than him. You created me from fire and You created him from clay”. God said, “Descend from heaven. It is not for you to be arrogant in it. So get out! You are one of the abased”’ (Koran Surah 7 (al-Aꜥraf), 11-3). See also Life of Adam and Eve aka Apocalypse of Moses, ch. 13-4. 51 ‘Zeus does not exceed Dion in virtue, and Zeus and Dion, given that they are wise, are benefited alike by each other’ (Chrysippus, according to Plutarch ‘On common conceptions’ 1076A: SVF 3.246): The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley (Cambridge, 1987), I 380 [61J]. 52 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 255 [4.9]. 53 Robert Browning, ‘Christmas Eve’ $16 (1850), in Collected Poems (London, 1912), 51. 54 Polycarp Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua (1955), 173, after Maximus, Ambigua 7, PG 91, 1081C11-5. 55 H.U. von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy (2003), 272. 56 Midrash Tanhuma, ed. Felix Singermann (Berlin, 1926): ‘Solomon was wise, and knew the ultimate foundation (‫ )והחשם‬of the world. “From where? From Zion, perfect (‫ )ללבס‬in beauty God appeared” (Psalm 50:2). From Zion the whole earth was founded (‫)[ללבחש‬. Why was it

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Does this help us? The main disagreement between Plotinus and most of his pagan successors was that he proposed that each of us had some ‘unfallen’ part still dedicated to our proper goal, that (as it were) we were each eternal in the divine Nous. Iamblichus and others doubted this, and reckoned we needed help ‘from above’ if we were ever to ‘return’. The dispute is not altogether clear: Plotinus too insisted that we needed to be ‘converted’, as if by Athena tugging on Achilles’ hair.57 And Iamblichus’ theurgical enterprise at least assumed that we could, of our own current will, solicit aid. Some Christian Platonists – apparently like Origen – were willing to consider that we existed as individual souls before our descent into this phenomenal world, so that our rescue would indeed be a return. Mainstream Christian thought abandoned and abused the notion, supposing rather that we were each created de novo at conception, quickening or birth. But even this distinction left imaginative space, exactly, for the notion that we – humanity - might indeed return, after long exile, from Babylon to Jerusalem, our real humanity renewed in Christ.58 The primordial causes of our being are eternally resident in God, and so therefore are we. There all men are one, that one, of course, who was made in God’s image and in whom all men were created. Just as all species contained in one genus are not subject to intellect or sense by means of differentiae and properties, but subsist as a kind of undivided unity until each of them intelligibly or sensibly receives its property and differentia in its individual species, so each one in the community of human nature fails to distinguish himself or others of the same substance by proper knowledge before he proceeds into this world at his own time, according to what was established in the eternal reasons.59

This phenomenal world may be, in some sense, obviously fallen, but it is not wholly corrupt, nor does it have any other origin than the One. So also Eriugena: ‘everything created naturally in man necessarily remains eternally whole and uncorrupted’.60 Plotinus is especially outraged or amused by the ‘Gnostic’ idea that this world here was created by a fallen god: if he was fallen how had called the ‘foundation stone’ (‫ ?)בא] היחש‬From it the world was founded (‫’”)החשה‬, in J. Rubenstein, ‘From Mythic Motifs to Sustained Myth: The Revision of Rabbinic Traditions in Medieval Midrashim’, Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996), 131-59. See also Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New Jersey, 2005 [1954]), 16. 57 Plotinus, Ennead VI 5 [23].7, 11-7, after Iliad 1.199-200. The reference is to an episode in Homer’s Iliad (I.197-8), in which Athena (the goddess of good sense) recalls Achilles from a murderous rage. Note also Porphyry’s testimony: ‘it seems that the gods often set [Plotinus] straight when he was going on a crooked course “sending down a solid shaft of light”, which means that he wrote what he wrote under their inspection and supervision’ (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 23). 58 Nostrum est interim mentem erigere et totis patriam votis appetere, et ad Ierusalem a Babylonia post long regredi tandem exilia, Peter Abelard (1079-1142), ‘O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata’, in William Vail Wilson Davis and Raymond Calkins (eds), Hymns of the Church: New and Old (New York, 1912), 47. 59 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 251 [4.9]. 60 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 229 [4.5]. So also ‘the interior [that is, the spiritual] body always remains and is established without change (incommutabiliter) in its reasons, according to

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he access to the divine template he was set to imitate? If he had access to it, how was he fallen? This world here is laid out in the first instance – though we are not to understand that this is a chronological or historical account – by the world-soul’s imaging of the divine intellect. What exists in the divine intellect as an unbroken and simultaneous whole exists in the soul in the mode we experience as time and space: other, lesser souls take their place here-now and are mostly so entranced as to forget their real home, and to imagine that they are really and truly divorced from each other and the Intellect. Our return depends on our learning to turn round again and look towards the One, by which and in which all things exist, and which is reflected in a fragmentary, successive way in this world-here. We do not thereby surrender our real self, but find it, when, as it were, a god tugs us by the hair and turns us round. Thus restored to our right minds we may dance our god-inspired dance around our leader.61 What do we change from the merely pagan philosophical version by seeing or saying that it is Christ who plays in everything? To be is always to be, or to be beginning to be, something, in virtue of some single call to being. And being something is always, for us, to be a member of the whole: failing in that, we fail in being at all. But where are we to look? In the pagan cosmos we can be guided only by memories and imagination, looking towards the ordered beauty of the stars, or mathematics, or such images of virtues as we can internalize. But perhaps there is a problem: on the one hand, there is nowhere short of the whole world to serve as a guiding image for each and all of us, but on the other, that whole world, though we speak of it as if it were wholly unified, a single beautiful cosmos, does not in fact exist save in the fragmented, barely sociable mirror of the many souls seemingly caught up in it. Without soul there is only darkness.62 If we are to believe that there is indeed a single, unified cosmos, it must be that this cosmos is contained in a single soul. If there is to be a way of seeing things right, there must be an Intellect indeed that contains and decrees right answers,63 but if there is no equivalent single Soul then the phenomenal world is always far astray. Our experience is always delusory by comparison, and delusory in multiple, transient ways. If we are to believe not only that there are right answers, but that we can discover them, it must at least be possible for Zeus himself to be incarnate,64 for there to be someone, somewhere, which with the soul, and in the soul, and for the soul, and because of the soul, it is created’, in Periphyseon 4.85-6, cited by J. Gavin, Celtic Christology (2014), 26. 61 Plotinus, Ennead VI 9 [9].8, 38-42. It is important to note that ‘koruphaion’ does not, as Armstrong and Stephen McKenna both suppose, mean ‘conductor’, but either the lead dancer or the musician sitting in the middle of the dance: see my Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (Chicago, 2016), 118-9. 62 See Ennead V 1 [10].2, 26-8. 63 See my ‘A Plotinian Account of Intellect’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997), 421-32. 64 See Enneads V 8 [31].1.

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who has not only the Mind of God, but His actual life. For Plotinus, that incarnation was in the World Soul herself: at once our elder sister and the fullest possible expression of Soul Herself.65 But maybe there has to be a more particularized embodiment, and one that can be grasped from within the pagan synthesis. That man – each man – is a microcosm of the larger cosmos is not to be understood as saying that the cosmos has arms or legs or eyes. What good would such limbs or organs be? The point is rather that for each of us there is an experienced world, our world, our being, that is a copy or mirror image of Reality. But how could we ever know that any of these copies were even partially correct unless there was someone, somewhere, whose experienced world just was the real world, whose experience and not just his intellectual insight, provided the model for us all, someone who is indeed the centre? And the orthodox Christian claim, turning from all the easy answers, has been that there is such a one. The template for human, and indeed for all animate life, is the man Jesus: it is his life that provides the model, and the power, for us to live by, not because he was moulded to resemble the One’s life (that would merely reintroduce the problem) and might, as before, have lived as an atheistical, jobbing carpenter, but because the One’s productive power took shape, ‘from the beginning’ (not a temporal beginning), as that very individual. Nor is it that the eternal Word took on a pre-existent human or animal nature, as a cloak on its identity: to be human, to be alive at all, is to be a little like that actual, historical individual – or like enough, at any rate, to be able to join, as it were, his party. It is in Jesus that God invented human nature! It is there, in Christ’s world, so Maximus and Eriugena tell us, that all divisions and differences are overcome.66 It is a notion endorsed elsewhere in the Orthodox tradition, and largely – though not entirely – forgotten in ‘the West’. So perhaps there is a real novelty in the Christian Gospel? The phenomenal world is not merely as good an image of the eternal as could be wished, as Plotinus insisted.67 It is 65 As Augustine responded to squeamish pagans who denied that the divine could ever be associated with corporeal messes: ‘You (sc. Porphyry) who say that all body must be avoided, kill the universe! You are saying that I should escape from my flesh: let your Jupiter [taking Jupiter here to be the World Soul] escape from heaven and earth!’ (Augustine, Sermon 241.7: Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind [London, 1987], 67). 66 Eriugena adopted the strange notion that human sexual differentiation was a consequence of the Fall, and that it would be overcome in our redemption (John the Scot, Periphyseon [1976], 30 [1.16]: 116 [2.5], 229 [4.5]). The risen Christ only showed Himself as male to permit His disciples to recognize him: in Himself He transcended sex and gender (Periphyseon 2.19, cited by J. Gavin, Celtic Christology [2014], 129). There are traces of the idea in earlier texts: for example, according to the Gospel of Thomas (22.4-5) we shall enter the kingdom ‘when [we] make the two into one, and when [we] make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below: that is, to make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female will not be female’. See also Paul, Galatians 3:28-9. What Plotinus would have thought of this we cannot tell. 67 Plotinus, Ennead II 9 [33].4, 26-32.

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itself taken up into the eternal, and we achieve our proper union not, after all, by looking away from things here but by seeing them more clearly. And yet this too is something that Plotinus actually endorsed: Let us fly to our dear country. What then is our way of escape, and how are we to find it? We shall put out to sea, as Odysseus did, from the witch Circe or Calypso – as the poet says (I think with a hidden meaning) – and was not content to stay though he had delights of the eyes and lived among much beauty of sense. Our country from which we came is There, our Father is There. How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.68

Our home is not after all in ‘another country’, but right here. The Uncreated Nothing Eriugena’s fourfold division of ‘nature’ is confessedly, as I observed before, a concession to our own limited natures. ‘The four divisions of God are really only God: God is the genus of which the forms of nature are species’.69 And God is therefore at once the One beyond all concepts, the Intellect that contains all that can be conceived, and even the phenomenal or physical array in which some at least of God’s intentions are realized in detail. What of the final, strange division: what is neither created nor creating? In Eriugena’s exegesis this is the final state to which all things tend, the time when God is all in all, as He is in the Stoic conflagration.70 As those who, filled with virtue and knowledge, die in mind alone while still in this life, so the whole world will die when it is brought to an end. It will return to Him who is called Nothing because of the superessentiality of His nature.71

It is also at least reminiscent of ‘matter’, metaphysically conceived, something so close to nothing whatsoever as to be intuited, as Plotinus said after Plato, only by a sort of ‘bastard reasoning’.72 Eriugena conceives this Nothing from which the worlds are made as, effectively, equivalent to God Himself (who is not a thing), and Abrahamic commentators have sometimes supposed that it is this ‘creation from nothing’ 68

Plotinus, Ennead I 6 [1].8, 16-28. D. Moran, Philosophy of Eriugena (1989), 255. 70 See for example Seneca, Letters 9.16, describing the life of Zeus ‘at a time when the world is dissolved and the gods have been blended together into one, when nature comes to a stop for a while’: A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers (1987), I 277 [46O]. 71 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 301 [5.21]. 72 Plotinus, Ennead II 4 [12].10, after Plato, Timaeus 52b2. 69

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which is a novel thought, replacing the seemingly easier suggestion that the cosmos is formed from a pre-existent, independent, ‘formless’ stuff. Platonists at least must disagree: ‘pure matter’ is no more than a metaphor, drawn from the ordinary experience of formed matter, the last flicker of existence before everything is dissolved, the darkness ‘that the gods hate’.73 The strange identity of undifferentiated Nothing, Matter, and God Himself is indicated in one of Augustine’s borrowings from Plotinus. The passage in the Enneads to which I have referred asks us to conceive ‘heaven at rest’: ‘let not only [the soul’s] encompassing body and the body’s raging sea be quiet, but all its environment: the earth quiet, and the sea and air quiet, and the heaven itself at peace’.74 Plotinus intends here to show how it is the soul that brings light and life into the world: ‘before soul it was a dead body … what the gods hate’. Augustine recalls the image in a more positive light, as the silence in which God is manifest.75 Even in Plotinus there is at least some strange equivalence. If we strip away all perceptible properties there is nothing left.76 Matter itself can never be encountered, but is present everywhere in ‘golden chains’.77 Just so the One holds a golden veil or barrier before itself, the contents and companions of the divine Logos.78 The top and bottom of the hierarchy are indistinguishable. Does this present us with Hume’s problem? How do ‘mystics, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who assert, that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible?’79 If there is an answer it lies in the appreciation and worship of a boundless mystery. Even right reason is to be swallowed up in what others might consider its negation. Intellect … has one power for thinking, by which it looks at the things in itself, and one by which it looks at what transcends it by a direct awareness and reception, by which also before it saw only, and by seeing acquired intellect and is one. And that first one is the contemplation of Intellect in its right mind, and the other is Intellect in love, when it goes out of its mind ‘drunk with the nectar’; then it falls in love, simplified into happiness (haplotheis eis eupatheian) by having its fill, and it is better for it to be drunk with a drunkenness like this than to be more respectably sober.80 73

Plotinus, Ennead V 1 [10].2, 27-8. Plotinus, Ennead V 1 [10].2, 14-8. 75 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1992), 171-2 (9.10 [25]). 76 John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 78 [1.60]: ‘Body cannot subsist by itself when its accidents are withdrawn, because it is supported by no substance. For if you remove quantity from body, it will not be body … Similarly if you remove quality from it … Whatever cannot subsist by itself without accidents must be understood as simply the coming together of those same accidents’. 77 Plotinus, Ennead I 8 [51].15. 78 Plotinus, Ennead I 6 [1].9. 79 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1779], and The Natural History of Religion [1777], ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (New York, 1993), 60 (Cleanthes speaks). 80 Plotinus, Ennead VI 7 [38].35. 74

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This is not simply a poetic evocation of an experience ‘outside’ the body and ordinary phenomenal reality, a ‘being caught up into the third heaven’.81 In our hoped-for ascent ‘to the Superessential Radiance of Divine Shadows’82 we are not expecting to abandon this world here, but rather to rediscover its original, undamaged reality. Eriugena concludes his Periphyseon with the suggestion that most even of the redeemed will be content with ‘natural goods’: only some will be invited further up and inwards into full companionship – as full at least as finite beings can manage – with the divine, so as to ‘become gods’.83 What Eriugena offered as prophecy, Plotinus records as reminiscence: Even before this coming to be we were there, men [anthropoi] who were different, and some of us even gods, pure souls and intellect united with the whole of reality; we were parts of the intelligible, not marked off or cut off but belonging to the whole; and we are not cut off even now.84

It is not an idea suited to our egalitarian sympathies, but both philosopher and theologian were persuaded that there were proper forms of hierarchy, amongst angels (daimones) as well as animals like ourselves. Neither Plotinus nor Eriugena, we may assume, would have claimed the higher status for themselves. Porphyry at least was comforted by the Delphic Oracle’s judgement that Plotinus had indeed joined the dance of immortal love.85 We may hope that he and Eriugena could shake hands.

81 82 83 84 85

2Cor. 12:2-4. John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 228, after Ps-Dionysius, Symbolic Theology. John the Scot, Periphyseon (1976), 351-5. Plotinus, Ennead VI 4 [22].14, 18-20. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 22.10-64.

Augustine and Eriugena on God’s Being. Differences in their Apophatic Approach to God Paul

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GEEST, Tilburg, The Netherlands / Leuven, Belgium

ABSTRACT The apophatic discourse of both Augustine and Eriugena has been in the spotlight of scholars for the past two decades. The aim of this article is to show the differences and similarities in their apophatic approach to God. Eriugena’s reflections about God’s ousia and hyper-ousia; essentia and super-essentia in his Periphyseon are explained in the light of how Augustine speaks about the translation of ousia in connection with that of hypostasis in De Trinitate. It is shown that in the reflections on these terms by both of these Church Fathers, the Aristotelian categories are inappropriate to define or conceptualize God. By translating ousia as essentia and hypostasis as persona, Augustine sharpens the contrast between God’s incomprehensibility on the one hand and God’s proximity on the other – being persona and becoming human to manifest himself as medicus humilis for a humanity in need of healing. By translating hypostasis as persona and ousia as essentia, Augustine, more so than Eriugena, creates a tension between the mystery that God is and which is emphasized in essentia, and the closeness of God as persona in Christ. On this basis, he also, to a greater degree than Eriugena, develops the idea that God Himself cares for humankind and, through his humility, provides it with the medicamenta needed to heal its pride, in a salvific and therapeutic sense. Eriugena’s approach is less mystagogical. Eriugena expresses his preference for apophatic speech by losing himself in a stream of superlatives about God as extremes that touch each other. And much more so than Augustine, he reflects on the essence of God as nihil and nihilum. Nonetheless, both authors are pioneers of negative theology.

1. Introduction The apophatic discourse of both Augustine and Eriugena has been in the spotlight for the past two decades. Quite recently, for example, Susannah Ticciati made an original and challenging attempt to understand apophatic theology by investigating Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana using semiotic analysis, and his late, anti-Pelagian work using insights from speech-act theory and the study of indexicals.1 In her study, she argues that the inscrutable nature of God’s 1

S. Ticciati, A New Apophaticism. Augustine and the Redemption of Signs, Studies in Systematic Theology 14 (Leiden, Boston, 2013). M. Higton has noted in his ‘Apophaticism transformed’, Modern Theology 31 (2015), 511-6, esp. 516, that Ticciati did not sufficiently elaborate on the

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activity in apophatic speech should not be emphasized as if it were ‘a rigid doctrine’. Instead, she regards words that can be interpreted as apophatic as words that carry a transformative and redemptive power that turns people themselves into signs of God, who represent God: ‘The divine difference becomes manifest in the transformation of creaturely semiosis’.2 And in my The Incomprehensibility of God. Augustine as a Negative Theologian, I carried out a close reading of Augustine’s work in chronological order that showed that this Church Father throughout his life moved on the intersection between affirmative and negative talk about God and always made apophatic qualifications of his affirmations about God.3 Certainly, whenever he thought that ‘orthodoxy’ was in danger, he used predominantly affirmative language. But it is undeniable that he interwove apophatic comments, considerations and remarks into his polemic even in his works against the Pelagians, and this not as a topos modestiae. But he did this, brilliantly, without weakening his position.4 For anyone who is willing to read Augustine without forcing him onto the Procrustean bed of their own presuppositions, and to take into account the actual dynamics in his texts, he will be not only a doctor gratiae, but also a doctor viae negationis. Other studies on Augustine as a negative theologian have followed.5 As far as I am aware, there have been no recent monographs on Eriugena as a negative theologian. But recent contributions about such topics as Eriugena’s indebtedness to Pseudo-Dionysius, Basil, or Gregory of Nyssa, or about the influence of his ideas in the work of philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger, have addressed his negative theology.6 Moreover, there have been a number of Christological dimension of this transformative salvation. Ticciati has adequately responded to this in ‘Response to Mike Higton’, Modern Theology 31 (2015), 517-22. 2 S. Ticciati, A New Apophaticism (2013), 16 and passim. 3 P. van Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God. Augustine as a Negative Theologian, Late Antique History and Religion 4 (Leuven, 2010), 7-15. Translations: La incomprehensibilidad de Dios. Agustín como teólogo negativo. Traducción al castellano Enrique A. Eguiarte Bendímez. Presentación Luis F. Ladaria (Bogota, 2014); Stellig maar onzeker. Augustinus’ benadering van God (Budel, 2011) (tweede druk). 4 P. van Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God (2010), 193-210. 5 Worth mentioning in this context is the dissertation of Guido Jacobs, Metaphor, history and the ineffability of God, Theologische Perspectieven Supplement Series 13 [dissertation Utrecht] (Bergambacht, 2018), 11-2, 20-5. This sheds light on the relation between Augustine’s apophatic speaking and his use of metaphors, especially in his comments on the Book of Genesis. See also D. Finn, ‘Expressing the Inexpressibility of God: A Trinitarian-Ecclesiological Reading of Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus’, Augustiniana 66 (2016), 85-134. 6 See for instance A.T. Peperzak, ‘Between John from Ireland and Hegel from Berlin’, in W. Otten and M.I. Allen (eds), Eriugena and Creation: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Eriugenian Studies, held in honor of Edouard Jeauneau, Chicago, 9-12 November 2011 (Turnhout, 2014), 539-57, especially 546-7; S. Gersh, ‘En-countering Periphyseon: an essay in reading Heidegger and Eriugena’, in ibid. 559-99, especially 580-1; D. Moran, ‘Christian Neoplatonism and the phenomenological tradition: the hidden influence of John Scottus Eriugena’, in ibid. 601-36.

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studies in which Augustine and Eriugena are examined together. Jean-Luc Marion published an interesting article in 1983 in which, also on the basis of close reading, he substantiates with theological and epistemological arguments why Eriugena shows a tendency toward the apophatic tradition in the Periphyseon.7 Since then, Marion has mainly taken Augustine’s Confessions as objectum materiale, for instance to collapse the question that human beings are to themselves into the mystery of God, thus questioning the cataphatic, affirmative late-medieval ontology, and indeed modern ontology, as well as counteracting the current objectivization of human life.8 But his familiarity with Eriugena’s negative theology is still perceptible here. In a seminal article on the negative theology and negative anthropology of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Eriugena, Willemien Otten in 1999 convincingly demonstrated why modern philosophers such as Marion prefer PseudoDionysius’s negative theology. Unlike Augustine and Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius emphasizes the negation of knowing who God is and does not reduce the unknowability of God to the difference between humankind and the incarnate God; a difference that is related to the sinful state of human being and God’s sinlessness. This difference is less appealing for modern man.9 And in Deirdre Carabine’s fine synthesis of the apophatic tradition of the ancient philosophers and early Christian authors, The Unknown God, she also shows very clearly that Augustine did not systematically develop the path of negation, but was very eager to retain awareness of God’s unknowability.10 With regard to Eriugena, Carabine also observed that, in his Periphyseon, he methodically rejected the Aristotelian categories as a way to acquire a certain understanding of God as uncreated ‘nature’. Eriugena must be seen as the pioneer of the via eminentiae and of hyperphatic theology.11 In the light of these studies, my paper is intended to make just a minor contribution to the question. I will endeavor to explain Eriugena’s reflections on God’s ousia and hyper-ousia; essentia and super-essentia in his Periphyseon in the light of how Augustine speaks about the translation of ousia in connection with that of hypostasis in De Trinitate. The aim of my article is to show the differences and similarities in their apophatic approach to God. 7 J.-L. Marion, ‘Veluti ex nihilo in aliquid. Remarks on Eriugena’s path from apophasis to diuina philosophia’, in ibid. 657-79. See also D. O’Meara, ‘The Problem of Speaking about God in John Scottus Eriugena’, in U.-R. Blumenthal (ed.), Carolingian Essays. Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Early Christian Studies (Washington, 1983), 151-67. 8 J.L. Marion, ‘Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing’, Journal of Religion 85 (2005), 1-24. 9 W. Otten, ‘In the Shadow of the Divine: Negative Theology and Negative Anthropology in Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena’, Heythrop Journal 40 (1999), 438-55. 10 Cf. D. Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs 19 (Leuven, 1995), 259-77; see also D. Carabine, ‘Negative Theology in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 59 (1992), 5-22. 11 D. Carabine, The Unknown God (1995), 303-6, 312, 314, referring to Periphyseon 459D-460A.

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2. Augustine about the translation of ousia One of the most striking constants in De Trinitate is that Augustine often emphasizes that God cannot be qualified as substantia. He implies that the Aristotelian categories are wholly irrelevant when it comes to speaking about God’s being.12 Less emphatically, but nonetheless explicitly, he is concerned about the translation of hypostasis as substantia. Augustine acknowledges that he may not fully understand the nuances of Greek philosophical terminology.13 He says that he does not know what the Greeks mean or intend when they distinguish between ousia and hypostasis.14 Nevertheless, in De Trinitate 5.9.10-7.9.10 he acknowledges that substantia is a more adequate translation of hypostasis than persona, but he still prefers persona. His motive appears to be, first, to avoid the danger that substantia could lead to tritheism (the three divine ‘substances’ are three distinct Gods), or, secondly, to a modalist conception of God. The Dogmengeschichte of the second century shows that this modalist approach led to the obliteration of the distinction between God the Father and the Son: the divine energy worked almost equally in the Father and the Son; one divine essence was shared by three modes of the same being. Thirdly, the translation substantia could give rise to a materialistic conception of God, or, fourthly, to the notion of God as a concrete ‘something’. It was primarily due to his familiarity with the Manicheans’ immaterial image of God, and subsequently also with neo-Platonism, that Augustine always cultivated a deep resentment toward an image of God in which God is regarded as something material.15 In the seventh book of De Trinitate, too, Augustine underlines that it is wrong to call God substantia. Referring to Ex. 3:14, he says that it is better only to call God essentia. For God, ‘being’ is the same as ‘being’ in se, independent being. This is an incomprehensible ‘being’ for humans, because this ‘being’ is incomparable with the ‘being’ of things and living creatures in time and space. This is how Augustine tries to show that apophasis must necessarily mark any attempt to talk about essentia in respect of God. However, a few lines further, he states that if the Trinity is one essence, it is also one substance. As substantia, as a synonym for essentia, is ineffective in 12 Augustine, De Trinitate 1.6.9 (CChr.SL 50, 37-9); 5.2.3 (CChr.SL 50, 207-8); 5.5.6 (CChr. SL 50, 210); 5.6.7 (CChr.SL 50, 211); 5.7.8 (CChr.SL 50, 213-4); 5.8.9 (CChr.SL 50, 215-6); 5.9.10 (CChr.SL 50, 216-7); 7.1.2 (CChr.SL 50, 245-7); 7.4.7 (CChr.SL 50, 255-7); 7.4.9 (CChr.SL 50, 259-60), 7.5.10-6.11 (CChr.SL 50, 260-4); 9.4.6 (CChr.SL 50, 298-300); 10.11.18 (CChr.SL 50, 330-1). Edition used: Augustinus, De Trinitate. Ed. W.J. Mountain, F. Glorie, CChr. SL 50 (Turnhout, 1968). 13 Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate 3.1.1 (CChr.SL 50, 210). 14 Augustine, De Trinitate 5.8.10 (CChr.SL 50, 216-7): Dicunt quidem et illi ὑπόστασις, sed nescio quid volunt interesse inter οὐσία et ὑπόστασις ita ut plerique nostri qui haec graeco tractant eloquio dicere consuerint μίαν οὐσίαν, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις quod est latine: unam essentiam, tres substantias. 15 P. van Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God (2010), 42-50.

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safeguarding what must be safeguarded, namely the belief that Father, Son and Spirit are distinguished by their relationship, Augustine again suggests that it is more accurate to speak of three persons than of three substances.16 When he translates mia ousia treis upostaseis as una essentia tres substantiae, Augustine expressly prefers the word persona to substantia, although the former may not be the most literal translation of hypostasis. He has a reason for this preference. Substantia does not guarantee what the Greek source text does guarantee: the belief that Father, Son and Spirit are distinguished by their relationship. To translate hypostasis as substantia – if substantia is regarded as synonymous with essentia – would have been to lose the intention of his Greek predecessors to confess God as mystery and relationship at the same time.17 So when he translates ousia as essentia and hypostasis as persona, Augustine focuses sharply on two issues. Essentia expresses the incomprehensibility of God, God’s not-being as living beings are. Apophatic reasoning is to the fore here. However, by translating hypostasis as persona, Augustine allows himself, rather cataphatically, to make the three – one God – conceivable as a relationship. Moreover: when, in his statements on or explanation of the Trinity, he speaks of persona, he states, especially in the seventh book of De Trinitate, that their individuality is inherent to each of the divinae personae. The proprium (uniqueness, specificity) of the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit is expressed in the concept of persona.18 This specificity does not coincide with the substantia dei, although they are each substantia. Drobner’s study of the concept of persona in the works of Augustine shows that Augustine’s use of the concept of persona was based on the concept of persona as he knew it from his knowledge of grammar and exegesis, and that he therefore defines it as a ‘subsistentes Einzelwesen’. A real, existing individual, and not a dramatis persona like in the theater, where the mask, and not the individual who wears it, is the decisive feature of the persona.19 16 Cf. especially R. Dodaro, ‘Quid deceat videre (Cicero, Orator 70). Literary propriety and doctrinal orthodoxy in Augustine of Hippo’, in S. Elm, E. Rébillard and A. Romano (eds), Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire – Orthodoxy, Christianity, History, Collection de l’école francaise de Rome 270 (Rome, 2000), 57-81, esp. 69. 17 Augustine, De Trinitate 5.9.10 (CChr.SL 50, 217): Sed quia nostra loquendi consuetudo iam obtinuit ut hoc intellegatur cum dicimus essentiam quod intellegitur cum dicimus substantiam, non audemus dicere unam essentiam, tres substantias, sed unam essentiam, vel substantiam, tres autem personas; multi Latini ista tractantes et digni auctoritate dixerunt, cum alium modum aptiorem non invenirent quo enuntiarent verbis quod sine verbis intellegebant. Most Latin writers translate treis upostaseis by tres personae. Cf. Chr. Markschies, Ambrosius von Mailand und die Trinitätstheologie (Tübingen, 1995), 12-31. On the blurring of the meaningful distinction between essentia and substantia, see p. 20-1 18 Augustine, De Trinitate 7.6.11 (CChr.SL 50, 261-2): Namque et in personis eadem ratio est; non enim aliud est deum esse, aliud personam esse, sed omnino idem. Nam si esse ad se dicitur, persona uero relatiue. 19 H.R. Drobner, Person-exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus (Leiden, 1986), 81. Augustine did something similar before in Confessiones. There he compares the trinity and unity of God

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By translating hypostasis as persona, Augustine also lays the foundation for his explanation of the Christian belief that the Son, ‘subsistentes Einzelwesen’, can really become man. This would have been more difficult if he had translated hypostasis as substantia as a synonym for the apophatic concept of essentia. In that case, it would have been impossible to create a tension between the mystery that God is, which is emphasized in essentia, and the proximity of God as a person in Christ. And by choosing persona, Augustine paves the way for a further step that he takes not only in De Trinitate but also in several sermons: the conviction that God himself cares about the fate of humankind, and that it is for this reason that he became man. Unlike the Gnostics or modalists, his preference for persona is due to his desire to emphasize, like Melito or Irenaeus for instance, that God, in the Son, has assumed that which he was able to redeem by assuming it: human nature.20 He therefore sees the incarnation as an expression of humility. Salvation history and therapy seem to be intertwined and explain each other in mutual connection when Augustine says that God’s humility – which he regards as a mystery in De Trinitate – caused God to be born of a woman, and also to be put to death to provide humankind with the medicines (medicamenta) required for the tumor of our pride.21 But he hastens to underline that the Word remained itself unchanged. One in essence with the Father, it did not change in nature. Divinity and humanity remain in persona Christi like body and soul are one in human beings. In short: by translating ousia as essentia and hypostasis as persona, Augustine sharpens the contrast between God’s incomprehensibility on the one hand, as being outside time and space, and God’s proximity on the other – as persona and as becoming human in order to be the medicus humilis that humanity needs to cure its illness.22 Human beings can become receptive to the mystery by becoming humble like God.23 It should be noted, however, that Augustine’s justification of his translation is accompanied by an ‘apophatic disclaimer’. In De Trinitate 5.9.10 and 7.4.7, 7.6.11 he repeatedly emphasizes that there is no verbum proprium to refer to the res of the Trinity.24 He writes: to the unity and diversity of the esse, nosse, and velle in the human mind. Cf. M. Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinitätslehre des hl. Augustinus, Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie 11 (Münster, 1927). But he also presupposes that the distance between God and humankind is immense. See Confessiones 13.11.12; 13.22.32. 20 Melito, Peri Pascha 46, 56. 21 Augustine, De Trinitate 8.4.7 (CChr.SL 50, 275-6), 8.5.7 (CChr.SL 50, 276-7). 22 Cf. Augustine, Sermo 117.10.17. 23 Cf. Augustine, Confessiones 7.20.26 and Sermo 142.6. 24 Augustine, De Trinitate 5.9.10 (CChr.SL 50, 216-7): … non ut illud diceretur, … ne taceretur; De Trinitate 7.6.11 (CChr.SL 50, 260-1): Cur ergo … dicimus tres Personas, cum tres deos aut tres essentias non dicamus, nisi quia volumus vel unum aliquod vocabulum servire huic significationi qua intellegitur Trinitas, ne omnino taceremus interrogati quid tres, cum tres esse fateremur?

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And so, for the sake of talking about inexpressible terms, that we may somehow express what we are completely unable to express, our Greek colleagues talk about one being, three substances, while we Latins talk of one being or substance, three persons…25

Problems with the translation of crucial words therefore also gave rise to insistence on Augustine’s part that God could not be conceived in any other way than as the inconceivable One, who transcends both what we are able to think and what we are unable to think. The translation of the formula itself thus already contains the denial that God can be grasped or comprehended. 3. Eriugena about God without being (ousia) Any beginner in the field of Eriugena studies who searches for studies on Eriugena’s negative theology or his interpretation of ousia will soon realize that the research field is very fragmented. Landmark studies include the book by D. Moran, who clearly explains the meaning of not-being in Eriugena’s work.26 There is also a number of interesting recent studies, such as that by Paige E. Hochschild. She explains Eriugena’s understanding of ousia in light of his crucial source, Categoriae decem – a Latin summary of the Categories of Aristotle – and concludes that Eriugena’s understanding is compatible with Aristotle’s theory of categories.27 It is true that she observes that Eriugena understands God at the top of the Aristotelian hierarchy of being, as more than ousia (genus generalissum).28 But in her explanation of the epistemological and metaphysical priority of ousia as secondary substance, and, conversely, in the process of abstraction of accidents to detect ousia in the primary substance that can be 25 Augustine, De Trinitate 7.4.7. Translation taken from: Augustine, The Trinity. Introduction, translation and notes by Edmund Hill, O.P., The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century. Pt I, vol. 5 (New York, 1991), 224; Augustine, De Trinitate 7.4.9 (CChr.SL 50, 258-9). 26 See footnote 7-11 and D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 58-81, 191-4, 212-40, for ousia see: 44, 57, 82, 94, 100-8, 140-51; for apophasis: 75, 119, 160. See also D. Moran, ‘Eriugena’s theory of language in the Periphyseon: explorations in the Neoplatonic tradition’, in Ní Chatháin Próinséas and Michael Richter (eds), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur / Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: learning and literature (Stuttgart, 1996), 240-60; V. Giraud, ‘Being as sign: note on the Eriugenian ontology’, in W. Otten and M.I. Allen (eds), Eriugena and Creation (2014), 223-34; worth mentioning is also W. Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Studies in Intellectual History 20 (Leiden, 1991). 27 P.E. Hochschild, ‘Ousia in the Categoriae Decem and the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena’, in W. Otten, W. Hannam and M. Treschow (eds), Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 151 (Leiden, 2007), 213-22, esp. 222. 28 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I, 1701 (482B, CChr.CM 161, 56). Edition used: Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, ed. É. Jeauneau, CChr.CM 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 (Turnhout, 1996-2003).

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perceived by the senses, she pays little attention to Eriugena’s apophathic Godtalk.29 Nor does she raise Eriugena’s preference for apophasis when it comes to speaking about ousia in her presentation of Eriugena’s model of participation, in which the individual or atoma is not separated from the higher, eternal, and inviolable ousia in which all people participate, or in her representation of his model of emanation, in which all genera result from ousia and return to it.30 To observe this is not to criticize Hochschild, as these issues did not fall within the purview of her article. But it does point to the need for further inquiry on this point. The lack of attention for apophasis in Eriugena’s work is understandable but unfortunate. As has been seen, studies of Eriugena’s sources and development have established, unmistakably if often incidentally, that Eriugena was very aware of the danger that suggesting that God’s incomparable transcendence is absorbed by any totality or universe runs of neglecting God’s exceptional ‘mode of being’ or ‘super being’ (super-ousia). Marion’s proposition that Eriugena preferred negation over affirmation seems right to me, on the basis of the Periphyseon. Eriugena’s words about ousia appear to reinforce this opinion. There are four points that can, I believe, at first sight be distinguished in Eriugena’s comments on ousia. I will present these points briefly and immediately attempt a comparison with Augustine’s apophatic language about essentia. First of all, Eriugena appears to follow Augustine in his conviction that the Aristotelian categories are wholly irrelevant when it comes to the Divine Essence: … I clearly see that the categories can in no way be properly predicated of the Ineffable Nature … Therefore no category can properly signify God.31

Like Augustine, Eriugena assumes that God cannot even be qualified as substantia. But he is more explicit in the way he argues his case. First of all, it is impossible for human beings to imagine substantia without accident. And secondly, God cannot be reduced to being, which is known through categorial predication; this excludes God not only from the field of categorial discourse, but moreover, from being as such.32 God transcends being not as highest being, but being as such.33 God is in no being.34 He is beyond all that is and is not.35 Even if it is predicated in relation to God, this does not mean that being includes or explicates God. Eriugena’s thoughts are possibly a development of Augustine’s 29

Cf. John Scotus Eriugena, Categoriae decem 6.134.22-4. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 506C-D (CChr.CM 161, 74) (participation); Periphyseon I 492C-494B (CChr.CM 161, 72) (emanation). 31 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 463B-C (CChr.CM 161, 33). 32 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 482A-B (CChr.CM 161, 56). 33 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon II 589B (CChr.CM 162, 87). 34 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon IIl 681C (in nulla essentia). 35 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon IIl 681C (ultra omnia quae sunt et quae non sunt). 30

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views. Augustine elaborates on the meaning of non-being and is hesitant as to whether it signifies something or nothing, or refers to something, because every name signifies something. He seems to presuppose that nothing does not signify an objective reality.36 But Augustine is not very explicit on this issue.37 For Eriugena, the inadequacy of the Aristotelian categories is therefore related to the ontic, ontological difference between God and creature, i.e. the human being. Jean-Luc Marion has pointed out that Eriugena also motivates God’s unknowability epistemologically. Being infinite, God’s (ousia) is not a quidditas, which can be named, defined, and conceptualized as is the case with other quidditates.38 Therefore, God cannot be understood by the intellect, just as the smallest of his creatures or any human being created in God’s image are unknowable because they reflect God’s incomprehensibility. Human beings know that they are; human beings do not know, ontologically, what they are. Or, as Augustine expresses it more existentially: humankind is a major question to itself.39 In Eriugena’s case, a distinction can even be made between not knowing God with ‘Dei’ understood as genitivus objectivus on the one hand and as genitivus subjectivus on the other, in which the non-knowing of God by God Himself has been expressed through or thanks to the things that are.40 That God is best known by human beings in the awareness that God is unknowable, is an insight that Augustine already expressed in De Ordine. But Augustine places less emphasis on the fact that God ‘understands’ himself above and beyond what people call ‘thinking’ than Eriugena does. Thirdly: to a greater degree than Augustine, Eriugena connects the via negativa with the via eminentiae: the way of speaking about God in every possible superlative. The negation of knowing who God is that is so strongly present in his Periphyseon, the confession of the incomprehensibility of God as essentia, is paradoxically expressed in superlatives of superlatives. God is called essence, but actually God is not essence, because being is opposed by not-being. Therefore God is confessed as a hyperousios;41 hyperagathos, more-than-good; hypertheos, more-than-God; hyperalathas and hyperalatheia, more-than-true 36 Augustine, De magistro VII.19 (CChr.SL 29, 177-8). See also Augustine, De magistro I.2 (CChr.SL 29, 158-9) and D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), 10, 212-40 (the meaning of non-being), esp. 212-4 (Augustine as a source for Eriugena’s speculations on non-being ‘although he needed to turn to the Greeks for the hermeneutical principles he required in order to read these Augustinian passages in the light of his own philosophical interest in developing a comprehensive meontology’ [214]). 37 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 487B (CChr.CM 161, 671). 38 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon II 590C-D (CChr.CM 162, 668). 39 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 487A (CChr.CM 161, 63); Periphyseon II 585B (CChr.CM 162, 81); Periphyseon IV 771B-772A (CChr.CM 164, 300-2). 40 Cf. Marion, ‘Veluti ex nihilo in aliquid’ (2014), 669; John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon II 597D-598A (CChr.CM 162, 99). 41 See John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 459C (CChr.CM 161, 28); Periphyseon I 462B-D (CChr.CM 161, 31-2); Periphyseon I 522B (CChr.CM 161, 109).

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and (more than-)truth; hyperaionios and hyperaionia, more-than-eternal and more-than-eternity; and as hypersophos, which is more-than-wise. Almost as in a fugue, Eriugena confesses in a way that is later called the via eminentiae, that God transcends being (plus quam esse est), and that all being can be reduced to God without being, who is nevertheless involved in all things.42 Thus, much more so than Augustine in De Trinitate, Eriugena develops the via negativa by denying the usefulness of the Aristotelian categories, and the via eminentiae by losing himself in a stream of superlatives as extremes that touch each other. Fourthly: the strategy of enunciating extremes that touch each other, are even synonymous with each other, is also discernible on the conceptual level in Eriugena’s Periphyseon. If God is hyper-ousios, because God is outside ‘being’, God is not only ‘not’, but God is – in contrast to all esse – at the same time ‘nothing’ and ‘nihil per excellentiam’.43 God is therefore unknowable for us in se. Apart from nihil, for Eriugena God is also nihilum: a non-being, an incomprehensibility that appears as ‘nothing’, nihilum, on account of the fact that God manifests himself in the world of time and space by means of a theophany through which creatures can grasp God, or by means of a real kenosis, condescensio in assuming the flesh.44 Like Augustine, Eriugena emphasizes that God does not coincide with God’s theophanies. This also shows his preference for apophasis. Theophanies are a partial revelation; after all, Eriugena’s idea of reditus implies that every sense must be abandoned. The difference between created nature and the uncreated non-reality and non-being of God is radical in Eriugena’s thinking. God as hyperousios and nihil means that, even if his being nihilum is manifested in creation, in a theophania or in the theophaniarum theophaniae – in becoming human – the awareness of God’s unknowability paradoxically becomes even more harrowing or acutely distressing.45 Following Ambrose’s thoughts on this in the Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, Augustine also writes to the widow Paulina that theophanies do not contradict the conviction of John and Paul, who say that God has never been perceived and nobody has ever seen God.46 God appeared to the patriarchs in the Old Testament, but God’s being remained

42 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon I 487B (CChr.CM 161, 63); Periphyseon V 952A (CChr.CM 165, 128). 43 John Scotus Eriugena, Expositiones in hierarchiam caelestem IV, 72-82 (CChr.CM 31, 67). See also Periphyseon III 684D-685A; Periphyseon V 897D. 44 Cf. J.-L. Marion, ‘Veluti ex nihilo in aliquid’ (2014), 672; Peri physeon III 681A-C (CChr.CM 163, 88-9). 45 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon III 631D-632A (CChr.CM 163, 20). 46 Augustine, Epistula 147.18. For the context of and developments in fourth-century Christologies and the role of the theophany exegesis in these, see B. Studer, Zur Theophanie-Exegese Augustins. Untersuchung zu einem Ambrosius-Zitat in der Schrift De videndo Deo (ep. 147), Studia Anselmiana 59 (Roma, 1971). See also Ep. 147.13; cf. 1Jn. 3:2; 1Jn. 4:12; Jn. 1:18; cf. 1Tim. 6:16.

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unknowable because God ‘only’ appeared in a form that God considered appropriate and worthy, but that certainly did not coincide with God’s being.47 Also, in De Trinitate he denies that God was seen immediately and substantially, as Moses was told that nobody could survive the vision of God on earth.48 In sum, Eriugena’s tendency to speak in superlatives on the one hand and in denials on the other intensifies the awareness that God’s being is unknowable on ontological, epistemological, conceptual and phenomenological grounds; and that language is insufficient to express thinking about God, which in itself is already similarly inadequate.

Epilogue Augustine and Eriugena completely agree that they would rather remain silent before God than talk about God, because even speaking about God means doing God injustice. But they also both state that they cannot remain silent because, if they do, heretics would have free rein.49 Their speaking does not lessen their awareness that God is known to the extent that God’s unknowability is taken into account in thinking about God. For both, the Aristotelian categories are inappropriate to define or conceptualize God. By translating ousia as essentia and hypostasis as persona, Augustine sharpens the contrast between God’s incomprehensibility on the one hand and God’s proximity on the other – being persona and becoming human so as to manifest himself as medicus humilis for diseased humanity. Eriugena expresses his preference for apophatic speech by denying the usefulness of the Aristotelian categories on the one hand and by losing himself in a stream of superlatives on the other, as extremes that touch each other. By speaking both in superlatives and in denials – two linguistic expressions that he develops as complementary forms much more systematically than Augustine does – he tries to intensify the awareness that God’s being is unknowable on ontological, epistemological and conceptual grounds. Whether God is described as hyperousia, as nihil or as nihilum: the contradictions, which are in fact also synonyms, paradoxically make the awareness of God’s unknowability, God’s not-being, all the more harrowing. Both Augustine and Eriugena clarify that in theophanies and even in God’s incarnation, God makes himself known and even approachable, while also remaining unknowable. Both see the incarnation as kenosis. But by translating 47 Cf. Augustine, Ep. 148.18-20: apparet ea specie, quam uoluntas elegerit, etiam latente natura. Cf. K. Kloos, ‘Seeing the Invisible God: Augustine’s Reconfiguration of Theophany Narrative Exegesis’, Augustinian Studies 36 (2005), 397-420, esp. 411-5. 48 See Augustine, Ep. 147.13; 147.20; 147.22; 147.31; 147.32. 49 Augustine, De Trinitate 5.9.10; P.E. Hochschild, ‘Ousia in the Categoriae Decem and the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena’ (2007), passim.

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hypostasis as persona and ousia as essentia, Augustine, to a greater degree than Eriugena, creates a tension between the mystery that God is and which is emphasized in ‘essentia’, and the closeness of God as persona in Christ. On this basis, he also to a greater degree than Eriugena develops the idea that God Himself cares about humankind and through his humility provides humanity with medicamenta so as to cure human beings of their pride, in a salvific and therapeutic sense. Eriugena is less of a mystagogue. But Augustine has much less to say about the essence of God as nihil and nihilum. Despite these differences, both men can be called pioneers of negative theology. Of course, it was due to his polemics in the Pelagian controversy that Augustine was pronounced doctor gratiae and was regarded by orthodox theologians as the cataphatic theologian par excellence. Therefore, in the fourteenth century, when the metaphysical turn in scholastic theology took place and affirmations dominated negations in theology, his work was one of the most important sources from which answers were drawn to questions that he never asked himself. The tension that Augustine created between God as mystery and God as relationship has, unfortunately, been eliminated in affirmative theology. It remains interesting to examine the reasons why Eriugena and Augustine preferred to remain silent.

The Transcendence and Alterity of God in Eriugena and his Patristic Sources Deirdre CARABINE, Kampala, Uganda

ABSTRACT In this article, I survey two of Eriugena’s most important sources: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Nyssa, and attempt a critical presentation of the theme of transcendence, and the concomitant negative theology, showing how Eriugena’s reading of Greek texts, together with his extensive reading of the Fathers of the West, culminate in a rich tapestry of thought that has compelling relevance twelve centuries after his death. In explicating the concepts of the transcendence and otherness of God, I hope to show how Eriugena’s negative ontology ultimately forms the core of his understanding of, on the one hand, revelation and creation (God becoming not-God), and, on the other: the final calling of all manifestation and multiplicity into unity (not-God becoming God / not-God). In this article I acknowledge my indebtedness to Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s re-reading of Gregory of Nyssa in The Beauty of the Infinite. In attempting a re-evaluation of the importance of Eriugena’s use of his patristic sources in relation to divine transcendence, my ultimate conclusion is that for Eriugena, God is always God-in-otherness, despite post-modernity’s attempt to transcend the Transcendent.

In this article on the transcendence and alterity of God, I limit my remarks to two of the most important influences on Eriugena: Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius (Eriugena translated works of both), and I want to put forward a slightly different understanding of divine transcendence, inspired by the creative and challenging interpretation of Gregory of Nyssa by orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart.1 We can be thankful that the long shadows of the Fathers of both east and west fell evenly on Eriugena, as we see him enchanted by Ambrose, Augustine, Evagrius, Basil, the Gregorys, Maximus, and Dionysius, and use their ideas, together with his extensive reading of the Fathers of the West, to forge a fresh understanding of human and divine reality. In this article I am not so much concerned with the method of negative theology as a device to point up divine transcendence, but with how, in the light of contemporary understandings of 1 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Cambridge, 2003).

Studia Patristica CXXII, 63-71. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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God’s alterity, both Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius can be re-read, with Eriugena, to claim back, as it were, the transcendent-immanent as a central truth in Christianity. In a scholarly world of post-, hyper-, or super-transcendence – spurred on initially by Jean-Luc Marion’s efforts to preserve God from the bogeyman of being (Dieu sans l’être2) – we appear to be playing a constant game of tag with a distant God, the back of whom we may perceive only dimly as ‘… God perpetually withdrawing into an infinite distance…’.3 Richard Kearney’s anatheism, a more recent instance of the attempt to talk of and relate to ‘God after God’, is a poetic, almost romantic, account of humanity’s struggle to live with a ‘may-be’ God purged of all tradition, ritual, belief, and dogma.4 The God of metaphysics is not transcendent enough, is too dogmatic, and not relevant enough to sustain belief in the light of recent history’s events, and at any rate, the absolutes of metaphysics are not allowed about the Absolute.5 While this grappling with the concept of transcendence in the attempt to sever the ontological moorings of divine reality makes for interesting reading, it appears that some contemporary thinkers are fashioning their god to suit their own needs.6 In Silence and the Word, Davies and Turner make the following pertinent comment: ‘… negative theology resonates positively with a deeply rooted trend in contemporary religiosity towards the privatisation and internalisation of religion, whereby faith is translated into transcendence or “religious experience” which is indifferent or even hostile to traditional religious beliefs and practices’.7 But we don’t have to re-invent the wheel: the wheel functions well enough for those with eyes to see. My starting point is not a ‘may-be God’ about whom we can make wagers, nor a supremely absent God, but a God who was always there through the build ups of beliefs, dogma, and tradition: the God of the Fathers, the God of Gregory, Dionysius, and Eriugena. What surprises, then, might these thinkers hold in store for us who appear to be much wearied by the spiritual mores of the past?

2 Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans l’être (Paris, 1982); English translation by Thomas A. Carlson, God Without Being (Chicago, London, 1995). 3 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 205. 4 Richard Karney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York, 2010). 5 See Anné H. Verhoef, ‘Transcendence and Anatheism’, in D.P. Veldsman and Y. Steenkamp (eds), Debating Otherness with Richard Kearney: Perspectives from South Africa, AOSIS, (Cape Town, 2018), 97-111, at: https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2018.BK94.04, accessed 8 January 2020. 6 A good survey of the direction of contemporary thought on transcendence can be found in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), Religion and Postmodernism: Transcendence and Beyond (Bloomington, IN, 2007); see also Rodolphe Calin et al., Die Tradition der negativen Theologie in der deutschen und französischen Philosophie (Heidelberg, 2018). 7 Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (eds), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge, 2002), 2.

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If we forego a dialectical understanding of transcendence and immanence, and the idea of God as Wholly Other / toute autre in absolute alterity, while we (who are not God and Not-God) stand in opposition to our creator, we might see a different understanding begin to emerge. When we read Gregory, Dionysius, and Eriugena we see no opposition in God, no God-in-otherness, for ultimately, there is only God: no creator, no creation, just God. The familiar dichotomies we read in Eriugena and Dionysius: transcendent immanent, unknown known, invisible visible, are not descriptive of two different realms, but of one only: a transcendent God who remains hidden even in manifestation. While the dialectical approach of a duplex theoria has much to commend it, it remains dualistic and can foster polarization where none exists. According to Eriugena’s understanding of theophany – which owes much to Neoplatonism and Dionysius – in the creative love-fuelled, ecstatic outpouring or kenosis of God, things begin to be,8 and we can understand creation as Godself manifest; Eriugena’s thought lends itself to this way of thinking. But we may often underplay the full force of a theophanic understanding of creation. The creative utterances of the God of Genesis (‘let there be…’) are not only the means by which all good things are created to reveal Godself in a sense (which is why we can speak licitly about God in and through the world), they are also the means whereby God is hidden once again, this time under the veil of being: the invisible God blanketed in the secret folds of nature. Like a Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, God is discernible as God moves into all created effects – we see that, not what God is – a distinctly Plotinian idea (Ennead VI 8,11,1-3 and III 8,10,32-5). As Hart puts it: ‘… it is the differences of creation … that – as differences – declare God’.9 However, we can mistake movement under the invisibility cloak for separate realities. Knowing that God is, not what God is (also a strong thematic in Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa), means that God can be partly discerned in God’s ‘operations’ (those vague, almost unseen ripples of Harry’s cloak that Professor Severus Snape glimpses out of the corner of his eye). In Book III of the Periphyseon (634-688) Eriugena embarks on a remarkable, Dionysian-inspired discussion of nihil.10 This is what he says: Therefore descending first from the super-essentiality of His Nature, in which He is said not to be, He is created by Himself in the primordial causes and becomes the beginning of all essence, of all life, of all intelligence … and thus going forth into all things 8

‘… beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself’ (Divine Names 4,13,712A-B; translation from Colm Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works (New York, Mahwah, 1987), 82. 9 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 238. 10 Required reading here for the nuances of the argument is Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, London, 1992), especially 34-62.

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in order He makes all things and is made in all things … and returns into Himself, calling all things back into Himself… (Periphyeson III 683A-B).11

He continues: ‘It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature’ (III 678C). A non-substantalist understanding of the divine reality that creates from itself is, of course, found in both Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius. And Eriugena sums it up: ‘Outside itself there is nothing … for it alone truly is (III 633A). And if there is nothing outside God, there is no otherness because God does not admit of duality. If we understand the utterance of creation as God’s transcendence being set ‘at a distance’,12 we are forced to reject a dialectical understanding of transcendence – immanence: there is only God. As Plotinus put it: multiplicity is a ‘One everywhere’ (Ennead V 3,15,20-2). God remains hidden even in ‘immanence’. And despite protests from the student, the teacher pushes forward with his argument: ‘… invisible it is seen, and while it is being seen it is invisible’ (III 633C). ‘God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvelous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature, the invisible making Himself visible and the incomprehensible comprehensible and the hidden revealed and the unknown known…’ (III 678C). For Eriugena the act of creation is the ineffable descent of the Good so that all things can be (III 678D). As the late Werner Beierwaltes put it: ‘The unfolding of the absolute divine Nothingness onto itself … emerges as world …’13 God becomes not God; God sets God’s beauty at a distance and so it is created.14 Then, once more relying on Dionysius, Eriugena makes a particularly startling assertion: God makes all things and is made in all things (III 633A): facit omnia et fit in omnibus et omnia est (III 634A). Everything is ‘God stuff’, which ultimately renders the ousia of all things unknowable. ‘For if the understanding of all things is all things and It alone understands all things, then It alone is all things … For It encircles all things and there is nothing within It but what, in so far as it is, is not Itself, for It alone truly is’ (III 632D-633A). Creation, therefore, does not refer to the making of things that exist outside of God, but the exteriorization of God’s spoken thought: God’s Word. Willemien Otten has this to say: ‘Instead of God creating the world in his capacity of being its eternal 11 The translations from the Periphyseon in this article are from Iohannes Scotti Eriugenae, Periphyseon, edited by Inglis Patrick Sheldon-Williams, Ludwig Bieler, Édouard Jeauneau, Mark Allen Zier (Dublin, 1968-1995), volumes VII, IX, XI, XIII in the Scriptores Latini Hiberniae series. 12 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 210. 13 Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, Hermathena 149 (1990), 53-72, 61. 14 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 201-10.

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cause, it is God who becomes created through his effects. Eriugena thus appears completely to overturn the logical order of events as he comes to make creation almost responsible for God’s unfolding as its cause’.15 And that is why revelation is concealment and concealment revelation.16 As Otten puts it, theophany sets in motion ‘a kind of reverse divine striptease: an unveiling of the divine which results not in its undressing but in its redressing, as the divine bareness becomes more and more hidden’.17 David Bentley Hart tweaks this idea and calls it a ‘second order of divine hiddenness’ where God’s transcendence allows God to be simultaneously inapprehensible and yet present to the soul within its being.18 Dieu sans l’être then is only half the story: in Gregory, Dionysius, and Eriugena, God’s not-God, God’s alterity seeks out the creature and there becomes in its hidden recesses. The ontic ecstasy of creation ex nihilo penetrates and differentiates – as Dionysius puts it: ‘Beguiled by goodness’ (DN 4,13,712B) Godself is poured into creation; love drives God into otherness. In the view of Charles Stang: ‘God, who is ultimately other, is most “godlike” when God crosses the chasm between creator and creature, beyond being and being … and resides in the receiving self of an ecstatic subject’.19 The ineffable processio into creation means that creation is the appearance of God as other-than-God, the ‘becoming’ of God, while at the same time, God remains other than not-God – Dionysus echoes the familiar Neoplatonic foundation: always proceeding, always remaining, always being restored to itself. The alterity that divine creation causes is, therefore, both itself and something else (if we need to put it like that), and the alterity of creation to the creator and the alterity of the creator to creation are the whole of reality. Here Werner Beierwaltes’s insightful comments on Eriugena and Cusanus are most helpful.20 The journey of God’s becoming is, in Eriugena’s famous words: ‘The apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible … the understanding of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the superessential, the form of the formless…’ (III 633A-B). Thus God becomes, as it were, through 15

The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, 1991), 71. As Philipp W. Rosemann says in his fine essay: ‘The interplay of revelation and concealment stands at the core of reality’; see ‘Causality as Concealing Revelation in Eriugena: A Heideggerian Interpretation’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2005), 653-71, 654; Rosemann puts it succinctly when he notes: ‘God strikes himself out, as it were, in order to be himself’, ibid. 659. 17 Willemien Otten, ‘In the Shadow of the Divine: Negative Theology and Negative Anthropology in Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena’, Heythrop Journal 40 (1999), 438-55, 443. 18 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 203. 19 ‘Negative Theology from Gregory of Nyssa to Denys the Areopagite’, in Julia A. Lamm (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (Chichester, 2012), 161-76, 173. 20 Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Cusanus and Eriugena’, Dionysius 13 (1989), 115-52 and id., Der verborgene Gott: Cusanus und Dionysius (Trier, 1997); see also Vojtěch Hladký, ‘The Concept non aliud in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa’, Acta Comeniana 30 (LIV) (2016), 9-61. 16

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continuous kenosis that lets differences be, that does not ever collapse difference, because God’s becoming is infinite Incarnation.21 God creates Godself, appears in theophanies, emerging from ‘the most hidden recesses of its nature in which it is unknown even to itself, that is, it knows itself in nothing because it is infinite and super-natural and superessential and beyond everything that can and cannot be understood; but descending into the principles of things and, as it were, creating itself, it begins to know itself in something…’ (III 689B). And so God becomes a ‘that’ becomes ‘known’ as it were, by hiding in plain sight, by becoming all things. The eschatological implication here is that the return, when God shall be all in all, occurs, not only as Ambrose and the others would have it at the end of the drama of creation, but also in the eternal moment of God’s theophanies, when we can ‘see’ God in God’s not-otherness. David Hart again: ‘… it is precisely creation’s departure from God that approximates God, its setting forth as that which is not God, that is, its return to God…’22 This bottom-line ontological truth means that apophasis is not just God talk, rather, it is God reality. Gregory of Nyssa would say that God pervades all things, that God’s image is stamped on all things (a most Augustinian idea23); he would never say God is all things. But it is because of Gregory’s unrelenting stress on infinite divine unknowability that he must forge a link between the visible and invisible; and he finds it: humanity is created in imago dei (In cant. 2, 68, 4-10), as the image of uncreated beauty. But because God’s infinity prevents knowing, uncovering the image of the transcendent (aphele panta) becomes an infinite act inspired by St Paul (Phil. 3:13, epektasis – Contra Eun. I 29124). The search is tireless, and the soul, in its ‘faithful incomprehension’ will never be satisfied,25 will never know God.26 As noted, this dynamic aspect of Gregory’s eternal striving provides a contrast to the more Plotinian character of Eriugena’s thought when all things will finally be at rest in the Uncreated Uncreating like the mighty Alone of the Enneads. For Gregory (in the words of David Hart), ‘the always remaining infinity is not simply the interval between created and the divine natures … but is the ever new infinity of the ever present God in distance’.27

21

D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 248. Ibid. 183. 23 See Augustine’s commentaries on Psalms: 134 (6), 144 (9), 148 (10), 145 (12); also De lib. arb. II 16 and De trin. III 4 (10) and XV 2 (3). 24 Jean Daniélou’s exegesis of this thematic in Gregory still merits reading: Platonisme et théologie mystique. Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse (Paris, 1944), especially 309-33. 25 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 197. 26 Some interesting comments on this thematic can be found in Ivana Noble, ‘The Apophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa’, in Petr Pokorný and Jan Roskovec (eds), Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis (Tübingen, 2002), 323-39. 27 D.B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), 210. 22

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And yet … distinct from the knowledge the creature might obtain of transcendent reality through creation, there is another way of ‘knowing’ Alterity that is not dependent on veiled reality. In chapter 1 of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology (taken almost verbatim from Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses 163) the bishop moves behind the iconostasis to the place where God is and all else is silenced; there unknowingly, the hierarch may be raised to unity with God in unknowing knowing. We can (as many have) extrapolate from the original liturgical meaning of this text.28 The unveiled (aperikaluptos) ‘knowing’ in Gregory and Dionysius (MTh 1,3 and In cant. 12, 369-70) must necessarily be unknowing if we are to be rigorous in our theology. Eriugena also makes reference to the deification of the elect being unknowingly united or raised into God (V 904A-B, not by nature but by grace III 683C). But it is in the Homilia on the Prologue of John’s Gospel that we find Eriugena explicate the cosmic exitus and reditus in a christological framework. Here, John the Evangelist becomes the model for the deification of the soul whereby: ‘ … the creature ascends by God into God’.29 ‘John the Theologian – surpasses every visible and invisible creature, transcends all understanding, and deified, enters into God who deifies him’.30 As Giltner says: ‘Thus, John has fully reached what is intended for all humans: to become God. He is “not just a man, but more than a man […] for he could not otherwise ascend to God, without first becoming God […]”’.31 For Eriugena: just as the Word was made flesh, so the flesh is made Word.32 It is precisely here that we see remoteness of alterity, the transcendent Other become the nearness that deifies, that brings all things into itself. It is also here that we see the Fathers and Eriugena stress the central tenet of revelation: human becomes God, creature closes the gap, as it were, through divine grace. One related Nyssean / Dionysian theme that is, however, largely absent in Eriugena’s thought is a follow through from divine transcendence and unknowability: that we be ‘beside ourselves’ (Gal. 2:20) to be in the place where God 28

See Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London, 1989), especially chapter 2. See T. Alexander Giltner, ‘Intimae Theologiae: The Christocentric Cosmology of John Scottus Eriugena in The Homilia Super “In Principio Erat Verbum”’, AHDLMA 83 (2016), 7-32, 12. 30 See Anne-Marie Mooney’s comments on this theme: Theophany. The Appearing of God According to the Writings of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 146 (Tübingen, 2009), especially 156-62. 31 See T.A. Giltner, ‘Intimae Theologiae’ (2016), 18; see also John Gavin, A Celtic Christology: The Incarnation according to John Scottus Eriugena (Eugene, OR, 2014) and Agnieszka Kijewska, ‘The Eriugenian Concept of Theology: John the Evangelist as Model Theologian’, in Gerd van Riel, Carlos Steel and James McEvoy (eds), Iohannes Scottus Eriugena. The Bible and Hermeneutics, Proceedings of the IXth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies held at Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, June 7-10, 1995 (Leuven, 1996), 173-95. 32 See John Gavin, ‘John Scottus Eriugena’s Christological Ascent’, in Adrian Guiu (ed.), A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, Boston, 2020), 134-53, 146. 29

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is (both Moses and Paul are biblical inspirations here).33 In general, for Gregory the secret chamber where the transcendent God is can be reached through aphairesis so that the purified, the soul can ‘slip in’ where God is (Vita Mos. 169). For Dionysius, it is through negations that we come to stand outside ourselves and to be ‘of God’ (DN 7,1,865D and DN 13,3,981B).34 And if we understand the not-Other as the negation of alterity, and God is both Other and not-Other, it seems natural that to get to God we go by the way of not-Other (negation); there is no other way. In this sense the apophatic becomes the basis for the mystical. If we initially conceived of creation as God at a distance, then the adunatio could be described as closing the distance between Other and not-Other. But the idea in the mind of God that was articulated to become a wonderful diversity of differentiation ends its visibility not any longer in alterity and otherness for there is no longer an other to be referent. In Eriugena, the end of the journey of God into the otherness of particularity back to a transcendent Godself is not a flight back to transcendence alone, because all things, becoming undifferentiated once more, return to the alterity of God through their causes. As Eriugena puts it in the Homilia (21): ‘He descended alone, he ascends with many’. Everything is restored to its rightful place in God, when the will be no Other or notOther, but simply, as it always was, just God. If it can be said that Dionysius conceived of God as above or beyond being, it could be construed that Eriugena conceived of God as without being. And yet, neither view is entirely accurate. The inadequacy of language, its approximations and concomitant spatial connotations, dooms Dionysian negative theology under the scrutiny of Jacques Derrida’s postmodern eye.35 Under the influence of David Bentley Hart’s exegesis of Gregory of Nyssa and some key texts in Dionysius, together with the Periphyseon, we can say that God is not entirely without being; God does, in a sense, come into being in creation, although we cannot say what that ‘being’ is because it is cloaked in the otherness of creation, rippling under a sea of invisibility. Do any of these musings help us understand God? Of course not! But there are diverse riches in all three of the theologians I have examined, albeit fleetingly. Although none of them tells us what God is, they point in the same direction. 33 An interesting perspective on this aspect of Dionysian thought can be found in Charles Stang, ‘Being Neither Oneself nor Someone Else: The Apophatic Anthropology of Dionysius the Areopagite’, in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds), Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (Fordham, 2009), 59-75. Through aphairesis Moses becomes neither himself nor someone else. Dionysius comments on 2Cor. 5:13 in chapter four of the Divine Names (4,13,712A) re Paul’s ekstasis. 34 See A. Louth, Denys the Areopagite (1989), 103. 35 Denys Turner consistently argues that Derrida reads Dionysius out of context and in patches; see ‘How to Read the pseudo-Denys Today’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), 428-40.

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Postmodernity’s attempt to unclog the ways to God by (to put it in the words of one contemporary writer) giving atheism lodgings in the soul in the hope that it will lay a clutch of cuckoos’ eggs that will be stronger than its siblings, appears indeterminately flaky.36 Being ‘beached on the solitude of a godless shore’37 holds no terror, existential or otherwise, for one who believes, as Dionysius did, in the goodness of a generous love-struck Creator. New brooms in every era will surely sweep clean but the broom must be up for the task. Denys Turner captures the mood and method of some contemporary thinking well: A recycling today of the classical, late antique and medieval vocabularies of the apophatic, but uprooted from their soil in a metaphysics, leaves that vocabulary suspended in a vacuum of rhetorics, a displaced, residually Christian semiotics, retaining the illusion of a force from the metaphysics it has abandoned as no longer possible – even if, for sure, half-remembered traces of what it was once able to signify preserve the illusion of life, as a wrung chicken struggles and kicks for a while after death.38

In contrast, Eriugena’s understanding of divine transcendence, rooted as it is in the reality of continuous Incarnation, is an intriguing account (if account can indeed be made) of the nature of all things that are shrouded, necessarily, in the cloak of godly invisibility.

36

William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford, 2008), xi. Ibid. 19. 38 ‘Atheism, Apophaticism, and “Difference”’, in Marco M. Olivetti (ed.), Théologie négative (Padova, 2002), 225-41, 241; see also Lieven Boeve, ‘The Rediscovery of Negative Theology Today’, in ibid. 443-59, 453. 37

Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources Dermot MORAN, Boston College and University College Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT In this article I examine the ‘five modes’ (quinque modi) of being and non-being of the ninth-century Irish Carolingian philosopher, Johannes Eriugena, as outlined in his dialogue, Periphyseon, especially in Books One and Three. Eriugena’s immediate Latin sources have been suggested as Augustine, Marius Victorinus, and Fredigedus, but he was also deeply influenced by passages in the Greek Christian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus, particularly on God as ‘beyond being’, or as ‘non-being’, or ‘nothingness’ (nihilum). In this essay, I will review Eriugena’s bold and paradoxical claims about the non-being of the divine being and I shall evaluate the current research concerning its sources and its originality, and make the claim that the divine nothingness is Eriugena’s original contribution in the Periphyseon.

Introduction: Original Themes in Eriugena There are many themes that are original with Johannes Eriugena (ca. 800 – ca. 877 CE), the ninth-century Irish philosopher who taught at the court of Charles the Bald, most famously his ‘fourfold division of nature’ (quadriformis divisio, Peri. II 524D; quadripertita totius naturae discretio, Peri. III 668A; universalis naturae universalis diuisio, Peri. II 523D), that opens the Periphyseon1 and has no exact counterpart in any classical author. Other concepts original to Eriugena include: his concept of God’s own self-creation in his 1

The traditional edition of Eriugena’s Periphyseon was the Patrologia Latina edition by H.-J. Floss, Johannis Scoti Opera quae supersunt Omnia, Patrologia Latina (hereafter ‘PL’) Vol. 122 (Paris, 1853). The current critical edition is Édouard Jeauneau, Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon curavit Eduardus A. Jeauneau, 5 vol., Corpus Christianorum Continuation Mediaevalis (= CChr.CM) nos. 161, 162, 163, 164, and 165 (Turnhout, 1996-2003). The Periphyseon (hereafter ‘Peri.’) is cited according to the following translations: I.P. Sheldon-Williams (ed.), Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae) Book One (Dublin, 1968); Book Two (Dublin, 1970); Book Three, with John O’Meara (Dublin, 1981); Book Four, ed. E. Jeauneau (Dublin, 1995). There is a complete English translation by I.P. Sheldon-Williams and J. J. O’Meara, published in John J. O’Meara (ed.), Eriugena. Periphyseon (Dumbarton Oaks, Montréal, 1987). For more on Eriugena’s life and writings, see Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, New York, 1989) and the classic study by Dom Maïul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Erigène: sa vie, son œuvre, sa pensée (Louvain, Paris, 1933).

Studia Patristica CXXII, 73-95. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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movement from darkness to light; his concept of divine self-ignorance;2 and his conception of creation as divine self-manifestation. In this paper, I will focus on another original claim, namely, that God may be considered ‘non-being’; that ‘non-being’ is one of the divine names. In his discussion of the divine transcendence and non-being, Eriugena navigates between and synthesizes harmoniously Greek Eastern Christian authorities (chiefly Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus Confessor), on the one hand, and Latin Roman Christian sources, especially Augustine, on the other (possibly Alcuin or Fredegisus).3 But, going well beyond his sources, it is my contention that Eriugena developed, to borrow a term from Schelling, a most radical and complex meontology, i.e. a discussion of the various meanings of ‘non-being’. Eriugena’s metaphysical and meontological abilities soared way above his contemporaries and he offers the most extensive discussion of the relation between being and nonbeing in early medieval Latin philosophy, far outstripping what was available from Augustine, Boethius, Fredigesus and Alcuin, and his conception of divine nothingness had a powerful impact on later figures such as Meister Eckhart and Nicolas of Cusa. Indeed, Eriugena’s complex dialectical metaphysics offers a sophisticated way of talking about the divine that has continued relevance in contemporary theology. God as Nothingness In Book Three of his famous dialogue Periphyseon, which offers an entire cosmology of ‘universal nature’, Eriugena makes the radical and shocking claim that God can be understood as ‘Not-being’ (Nihilum, glossing the Greek οὐδέν).4 Indeed, there is a chapter title, ‘de nihilo’, in Periphyseon III 634A, according to Versions One and Two (the titles were added in the hand of i2 [Jeauneau think i1 is Eriugena’s own hand] and it becomes ‘de quali nihilo fecit deus omnia’ (‘concerning the kind of nothing from which God made all things’ in Version Three (Rheims Ms. 875 is the basis for Version Two, to be found in Jeauneau’s edition, CChr.CM 163, 244, l. 1135). 2 Donald F. Duclow, ‘Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation in John Scotus Eriugena’, The Journal of Religion 57 (1977), 109-23. See also B.J. McGinn, ‘Negative Theology in John the Scot’, SP 13 (1975), 232-8. 3 See Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena (Louvain, 1995), and the classic study by Joseph Koch, ‘Augustinischer und Dionysischer Neuplatonismus und das Mittelalter’, Kantstudien 48 (1956-1957), 117-33, reprinted in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Platonismus in der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Darmstadt, 1969), 317-42. 4 Eriugena is translating the neuter pronoun and adverb οὐδέν (ouden) meaning ‘in no way’, ‘not at all’, or ‘nothing’ as nihil. Forms of οὐδέν appear in the New Testament 85 times (in the 4 Gospels), so Eriugena has some scriptural basis but of course he exaggerates it to suit his own needs.

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Later, in Periphyseon Book Five, Eriugena, in his discussion of the cosmic return, says he is inspired by Dionysius’ Divine Names to name God as nonbeing (Peri. V 897D): ‘for it shall return into Him, who, because He transcends being, is called Not-Being’ (In ipsum enim, qui propter superessentialitatem suae naturae nihil dicitur, reversus est, Peri. V 897D). God is ‘above being’ (super esse, superessentialis, Peri. V 898B-C). In fact, Dionysius does not exactly say that God may be called ‘non-being’. This is Eriugena’s own radical interpretation. For Eriugena, this infinite divine non-being is the ultimate stage of the cosmic odyssey, a Godhead contemplated outside of its relation to created being (from which every ontological concept of being is derived). God is the Good that is ‘beyond being’, the ‘superessential Supreme Good’ (summum bonum superessentiale, Peri. III 650B) as he puts it in Book Three. God is ‘beyond all that is and is not’ (ultra omnia quae sunt et quae non sunt, Peri. III 681C). Especially in Periphyseon Book Three (III 634A-690B), Eriugena discusses various ways in which being and non-being can be understood in what amounts to what I.-P. Sheldon-Williams, following Gustavo Piemonte, calls a ‘little treatise’ on the quaestio de nihilo (Peri. III, p. 5 n. 1).5 Similarly the late Édouard Jeauneau, in his Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CChr.CM) edition of Periphyseon Book Three, singles out Eriugena’s concept of ‘le Néant divin’ (CChr.CM 163, ix).6 Eriugena’s discussion is complex and many-sided. In an interesting article, for instance, Marcia Colish has claimed the main function of Eriugena’s discussion here is to distinguish two concepts of the monad: the Neo-Pythagorean (monad is the principle of all numbers, from which they emanate and to which they return) and the Neoplatonic (the Monad is to be identified with the deity).7 According to Colish, Eriugena affirms the NeoPythagorean approach (found in Martianus Capella and Boethius) and rejects the Neoplatonic account. Colish also says that Eriugena is refuting the interpretation of nihil as the privation of being (absence of species, accidents, habitus). There is a nothingness prior to creation which cannot be understood in terms of privation. But the nothingness before creation also cannot be identified with the monad. The monad is created and eternal and hence is a Primary Cause. But Eriugena’s account of ‘nothingness’ is a much richer theme and runs through the whole dialogue. Eriugena will go so far as to argue that all things can be thought of as ‘nothingness’ in one form or another: God, the Primordial Causes (causae primordiales), created entities, corporeal things, unformed matter (materia informis). Eriugena’s 5 Gustavo Piemonte, ‘Notas sobre la Creatio de Nihilo en Juan Escoto Eriúgena’, Sapientia 23 (87) (1968), 37-58. 6 See also Édouard Jeauneau, ‘Néant divin et théophanie’, in Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet, ed. Alain de Libera et al. (Paris, 1997), 331-7. 7 Marcia Colish, ‘Mathematics, the Monad, and John the Scot’s Conception of Nihil’, in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the 8th International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (Helsinki, 1990), II 445-67.

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great innovation, besides his transmission of the Dionysian negative theology into Latin, was his application of the Dionysian Neoplatonic understanding of the divine as ‘beyond being and non-being’ to interpret the meaning of the ‘nothing’ from which all things are created (first found in 2Maccabees 7:28: ‘Consider everything you see there, and realize that God made it all from nothing, just as he made the human race’).8 Eriugena’s discussion of nothing is subtle and many-sided. He himself – right at the outset of Periphyseon Book One – offers a complex hermeneutics of how we should talk about nothing. There are different approaches – he speaks of two and even five ways of understanding nothing – in his ‘duplex theoria’ and in his ‘five modes of interpretation’ (quinque modi interpretationis) of the opposition between being and non-being. But first let us recall where Eriugena describes God as ‘nihilum’. I do not believe commentators have taken these five modes of interpretation seriously enough. The outcome is that ontology, the claim about what is really being, is relativized to one’s outlook or contemplation. Being in some respect is dependent on being known, and for this reason, I interpret Eriugena as belonging to the idealist tradition.9

Eriugena Claims that God is Named ‘Nihil’ in the Scriptures Eriugena frequently calls God by the name ‘Nihil’. In the Periphyseon the question is posed: ‘Cur Nihil Vocatur?’, ‘Why is [God] called by the name of nothingness or not-being?’. Eriugena makes clear what ‘nothingness’ he is talking about, in Periphyseon Book Three: By saying these things we are not refuting the interpretation of those who think that it was from the nothing by which is meant the privation of all possession [de nihilo quo totius habitudinis priuatio significatur] that God made all things, and not from the Nothing [de nihilo] by which is meant by the theologians the Superessentiality and Supernaturality of the Divine Goodness [superessentialitas et supernaturalitas diuinae bonitatis]. For according to the rules of theology the power of negation is stronger than that of affirmation [plus negationis quam affirmationis uirtus ualet] for investigating the sublimity and incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature; and anyone who looks into it closely will not be surprised that often [saepe] in the Scriptures [in scripturis] God Himself is called by the name Nothing [eo uocabulo, quod est nihilum, saepe in scripturis ipsum deum uocari]. (Peri. III 684D-685A; Jeauneau, CChr.CM 163, 93, ll. 2716-20). 8 É. Jeauneau, ‘Néant divin et théophanie’ (1997), 331-7, see especially 332: ‘Mais Erigène innove, quand il applique cette notion du Néant divin à la doctrine de la création ex nihilo’. 9 See D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989); and id., ‘Idealism in Medieval Philosophy: The Case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8 (1999), 53-82.

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Note that Eriugena thinks that the Scriptures ‘often’ (saepe) call God ‘not being’ (Peri. III 684D-685A) and the ‘theologians’ gloss this as meaning ‘beyond being’ or ‘more-than-being’ (‘hyper ousia’ or ‘hyper-on’, superessentia). He does not name these theologians but he usually means Dionysius, Gregory, Maximus or Augustine, although as we shall see Marius Victorinus has also been proposed. Later in Periphyseon Book Five, Eriugena says again: ‘according to the superessentiality of His nature, He [God] is called “nothing”’ (propter superessentialitatem suae naturae nihil dicitur, Peri. V 897D). Likewise, in his Expositiones, – his commentary on Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy – Eriugena expresses very clearly that ex nihilo means ex deo: We believe that God made all from nothing [de nihilo]. What must be understood by this, if not perhaps that this nothing is He Who, being exalted as superessential above all things and glorified beyond every word and every thought, is called, not without reason, nothing through excellence [nihil per excellentiam] since He cannot be in any way any one of the things in the category of the things that are? … (Expositiones in Hierarchiam caelestem IV, 72-82; CChr.CM 31, p. 67; my translation)

This is a constant refrain of Eriugena. Thus, in Periphyseon Book One, God’s superessentiality is understood as the ‘negation of essence’ (negatio essentiae): For when it is said: ‘It is superessential’, this can be understood by me as nothing other but a negation of essence (Nam cum dicitur: Superessentialis est, nil aliud mihi datur intelligi quam negatio essentiae, Peri. I 462B).

God then is the negation of ‘being’ (essentia, οὐσία, ousia). God is not a being, an aliquid, not a something or other. Thus, in a manner that will be taken up later by Meister Eckhart, Eriugena says that God is ‘not this nor that nor anything’ (nec hoc nec illud nec ullum ille est, Peri. I 510C). The Viewpoint Approach: Eriugena’s ‘Duplex Theoria’ Eriugena builds his cosmological and ontological framework on this potent idea that the same ‘entity’ can be understood in different ways depending on how it is viewed. This is Eriugena’s ‘duplex theoria’ – which, of course, is also operative for understanding the quadriformis divisio of nature. As Werner Beierwaltes has shown, Eriugena frequently speaks more generally of ‘duplex theoria’, a two-fold way of viewing.10 Eriugena believes we can think about nothingness from different standpoints (‘theoriai’ or ‘contemplationes’). Eriugena usually takes a two-fold dialectical approach to the meaning of nothing: Nihil means either nihil per privationem or nihil per excellentiam. Eriugena 10

Werner Beierwaltes, ‘“Duplex Theoria”: Zu einer Denkform Eriugenas’, in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Begriff und Metapher: VII. Internationales Eriugena-Colloquium, Sitzungsbericht der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg, 1990), 37-64.

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often contrasts the understanding of something per privationem with per excellentiam (see Peri. I 500A-B; I 502A; III 634A-B; III 663C; III 667A; IV 825C; V 966B; Versio Dionysii Praefatio PL 122, 1035A-1036A). At Book Two he speaks of the ‘duplex intentio’ of the human mind that separates the First and Fourth division which are one in God (Peri. II 527B): In God, therefore, the first form is not distinct from the fourth. For in Him they are not two things but one; in our contemplation [in nostra uero theoria], however, since we form one concept of God from consideration of Him as Beginning and another concept when contemplating Him as End, they appear to be as it were two forms, formed from one and the same simplicity of the Divine Nature as a consequence of the double direction of our contemplation [propter duplicem nostrae contemplationis intentionem] (Peri. II 527B)

But the double contemplation is actually a shorthand for an even more layered approach. Right from the opening of his Periphyseon, ‘nature’ (physis, universalis natura) – the subject of the dialogue – is defined as ‘the general name for those things that are and are not’ (generale nomen … omnium quae sunt et quae non sunt, Peri. I 441A), leading Eriugena immediately to a discussion of the meaning of being and non-being in relation to what he explicitly calls ‘five modes of interpretation’ (quinque modi interpretationis, Peri. I 443A), to which we shall return. Eriugena often returns to discuss the various ways under which things can be approached and interpreted – various ‘theoriae’ or ‘contemplationes’ or ‘considerationes’. Of course, St Paul and St Augustine are Eriugena’s sources for this twofold mode of viewing. For Paul, we can approach matters carnaliter and spiritualiter (Rom. 8:6) as the homo inferior or as homo superior. And Eriugena, in Periphyseon III 688B-C, cites Augustine’s De Civitate Dei Book Eight (VIII.3) as stating that only purified minds – and not minds tarnished by earthly desires – could grasp the ‘causes of all things’. To be able to grasp the way things truly are, the true ontology, one needs a spiritual or intellectual mind, one released from carnal imagination. Again, in Periphyseon Book Three, Eriugena says the intellect is moved in one way when it contemplates God as beginning and in another way when it sees God as medium and in another way as end (Peri. III 688B; II 527B). Similarly, the second and third divisions of nature imply that we can contemplate things in their Causes or in their Effects. This ‘modes of viewing’ approach, of course is exemplified most especially in the fourfold division of nature into that which creates and is not created; that which is created and created; that which is created and does not create; and, finally, that which neither creates nor is created. The one God is all of these divisions or ‘forms’ or ‘species’ and He is each one depending on how He is approached – as Creator, as Incarnate in the Son, as Spirit in the universe, or as transcendent hiddenness and darkness outside of all reference to creation. The divine Godhead is all of those things. Eriugena applies the ‘two-fold intellection’ (duplex theoria, contemplatio) to understanding the divine ‘nothingness’ several times (duplex intentio nostrae

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contemplationis, Peri. II 527B; duplex consideratio, Peri. II 527D). God can be thought of as Beginning or as End; as Cause or as Effect. For instance, in Periphyseon Book Three, Alumnus asks at the beginning of the ‘treatise on nothing’ (the chapter entitled ‘de quali nihilio fecit deus omnia’): Alumnus: But when I hear or say that the Divine Goodness [diuinam bonitatem] created all things out of nothing [omnia de nihilo creasse] I do not understand what is signified by that name, ‘Nothing’ [eo nomine, quod est nihil], whether the privation of all essence [priuatio totius essentiae uel substantia] or substance or accident, or the excellence of the divine superessentiality [diuinae superessentialitatis excellentia]. (Peri. III 634A-B; CChr.CM 163, 244, ll. 115-21)

Nutritor says that he does not easily concede the God is called ‘nothing’ by privation but that God is legitimately called ‘nothing’ because He is ‘more than being’ (plus quam esse, Peri. III 634B). God’s ‘ineffabile excellence and incomprehensive infinity’ (Peri. III 634B) means that He can be said not to be, but it does not follow that he is ‘nothing at all’ or ‘mere nothing’ (omnino nihil), nothing understood through the stripping away of all predicates (qualities, essence). God is not omnino nihil or nihil per privationem, but nihil per excellentiam. Obviously, this two-fold viewing approach has a long history in philosophy since Plato’s Parmenides and the Enneads of Plotinus. The opposition between absolute non-being and relative non-being can be found in Plato’s Sophist 236C-D and in Aristotle’s Physics I 3.18. But Eriugena is a philosopher who thinks of all reality (both being and non-being) – to which he gives the name ‘nature’ is being many layered and as capable of being apprehended in different ways from different points of view. God is both form and formlessness: For every formed thing seeks Him while in Himself He is infinite and more than infinite, for He is the Infinity of all infinities [infinitas omnium infinitatum]. Therefore, not being defined or constricted by any form, since He is unknowable to every intellect, He is more reasonably called formless than form [informe quam forma], for, as has often been said, we can speak more truly about God by negation than by affirmation… Peri. II 525A.

The Fives Modes as ‘Contemplations’ of Nature At the outset of Periphyseon Book One, Eriugena claims there are at least five ways of understanding the contrast between being and non-being. In Periphyseon Book One, when he introduces the five modes, Eriugena says ‘keener reasoning’ (indagatior ratio, Peri. I 446A) can discover other modes besides these. In other words, although he initially outlines five (quinque) modes, others could be found with deeper research (Peri. I 446A). Indeed, the word quinque is an addition or emendation to the Rheims 875 manuscript, possibly

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in Eriugena’s hand.11 It is entered into the main text in subsequent manuscripts (e.g. Bamberg and Paris 12555). The exact number of modes is not especially significant, according to my analysis; it can ultimately be reduced to two, according to the duplex theoria. Indeed, the first mode has priority – all things comprehended by sense or mind are and therefore what exceeds them are not. It can also be expanded to be a multiplex theoria. There are as many theophanies as there are radii of a circle – actually an infinite number of ‘contemplations’. The claim that there are at least five modes of interpretation is novel to Eriugena (perhaps there is a foreshadowing in Marius Victorinus who has four different levels). Of course, Eriugena found the concept of five levels or stages of the cosmic return in Maximus Confessor. Eriugena is well aware of Maximus’ progression whereby male and female will be reunited, then body will be drawn back into mind, earth into paradise, and the temporal world can be enfolded in eternity (Eriugena regularly invokes Maximus’s I Ambigua xxxvii on the return, see Peri. II 532A-536B). In Book Five Eriugena refers to five stages of the return of human nature from Maximus’s I Ambigua xxviii (body dissolves into 4 elements in death, they are reunited in the resurrection, body is transmuted into soul, soul reverts to its Primary Cause, and finally the Causes are absorbed into God, as ‘air into light’ [Peri. V 876A-B]). Eriugena’s key idea is that God reveals Himself in his theophanies and these infinite theophanies are a kind of ladder that the mind can ascend contemplatively to return to God. At each level, the ontological landscape will appear differently until all becomes One in the divine darkness. The Fundamental Distinction: The Things that Are and Are Not As is well known, the Periphyseon begins with a radical claim (Periphyseon I 441A): Nature can be defined to include ‘all things that are’ (ea quae sunt) and ‘all things that are not’ (ea quae non sunt). The phrase ea quae sunt et ea quae non sunt appeared earlier in Marius Victorinus, but the expressions ‘ea quae sunt and ea quae non sunt’ or ‘omnia quae sunt et quae non sunt’ appear so regularly in Eriugena, it can serve as an identifying marker for his work. The phrase appears already in Eriugena’s first work, De diuina Praedestinatione12 11 Jeauneau calls this manuscript Version Two and identifies the hand as i1, CChr.CM 161, p. xxiii. See also É. Jeauneau and Paul Dutton, The Autograph of Eriugena (Turnhout, 1996). 12 See Goulven Madec (ed.), Iohannis Scotti de divina praedestinatione, CChr.CM 50 (Turnhout, 1978). The De praedestinatione has been re-edited and commented by Ernesto Mainoldi, who puts particular emphasis on the book as an exercise in dialectic, see E. Mainoldi (ed.), Giovanni Scoto Eriugena, De praedestinatione liber: Dialettica e teologia al apogeo dell rinascenza carolingia (edizione critica, traduzione e commento) (Florence, 2003). The English translation is by Mary Brennan, John Scottus Eriugena. Treatise on Divine Predestination, with an Introduction by Avital Wohlman (Notre Dame, 1998).

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(Praef. 60-5, PL 122, 327D); in his Homilia (I 6; I 8-12; VIII 12-4)13; in the Expositiones IV 78-9;14 and in his Preface to the translation of Maximus’s Ambigua,15 where he uses a mixture of Latin and Greek: ‘On quod, quod non On, denegat omne simul’; and, occasionally, the phrase occurs even in his poems, Carmina.16 Thus, in the Homilia, Eriugena speaks of the eagle flying above ‘omnia quae sunt et quae non sunt’ (Hom. I 5, 283B, Jeauneau, p. 202). Jeauneau (Homélie, p. 204 n. 1) notes that Eriugena admits, in his Preface to his translation of Dionysius (Versio Operum S. Dionysii Areopagitae Praefatio), that he is inspired by Dionysius’s Divine Names (PL 122, 1035A-1036A) to appreciate the ‘multiplex theophania’ according to which those things that are not (not by privation but by the excellence of nature) are ‘more similar and nearer’ (plus similia esse et appropinquare) to God than those things that are. In fact, Dionysius actually says that God is be “neither of the non beings nor of the beings” (oude ti ton ouk onton, oude ti ton onton estin, Mystical Theology 5, PG 3, 1048A).17 For Dionysius God cannot be identified with being or any being; whereas, for Eriugena, God may indeed be identified with non-being, if we contemplate ‘non-being’ in the right manner. Eriugena struggles with those who interpret St. Paul as saying that the elect will see God ‘face to face’ (facie ad faciem, 1Cor. 13:12; Peri. I 447B) meaning directly, without meditation. For Eriugena, God’s essence is ‘unknown’ and ‘incomprehensible’ to all – not just to created beings but to God since God as infinite cannot ‘comprehend’ or ‘circumscribe’ or ‘define Himself. Therefore, ‘face to face’, for Eriugena, means ‘in the highest theophanies’. God can only be contemplated through ‘theophanies’. Theophanies are God’s faces. In God’s house, moreover there are many mansions, and ‘mansions’ here means ‘theophanies’ (Peri. I 448C-D). Eriugena draws on Maximus’s I Ambigua (PG 91, 1084C), for his treatment of ‘theophanies’ – these come directly from God (Peri. I 449A-B) and are emanations or ‘willings’ (diuinae uoluntates, theia telemata) of the divine.

13 Jean Scot: L’Homélie sur le Prologue de Jean, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, SC 151 (Paris, 1969). Jeauneau discusses the circulation of the Homilia under the name of Origin in his article, ‘From Origen’s Periarchon to Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, in Eriugena and Creation, Proceedings of a Conference to Honor Edouard Jeauneau, XI International Eriugena Conference, 9-12 November 2011, ed. Willemien Otten and Michael Allen (Turnhout, 2014), 139-82, see especially 180-1. 14 See Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae Expositiones in Ierarchiam coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CChr.CM 21 (Turnhout, 1975). 15 See Iohannes Eriugena, Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem, CChr.SG 18 (Turnhout, Leuven, 1988). 16 For a full list, see Gustavo Piemonte, ‘L’expression quae sunt et quae non sunt: Jean Scot et Marius Victorinus’, in Jean Scot écrivain, ed. G.-H. Allard (Paris, Montreal, 1986), 81-113, especially 82 n. 1. 17 I.-P. Sheldon-Williams, ‘Eriugena’s Greek Sources’, in John O’Meara (ed.), The Mind of Eriugena (Dublin, 1970) has shown that this is not actually found in Dionysius.

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Sources of Being and non-Being in Eriugena The concept of ‘nothingness’ has a long and still under-explored history in Western philosophy beginning with Parmenides and reaching a high point in Greek-Roman philosophy with Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. The study of ‘nothing’ received a boost from Christian philosophy seeking to accommodate the notion of creation from ‘nothing’ and repudiate the Manichees and others who maintained that creation took place from a pre-existent matter. Augustine and others sought to distinguish ‘nihil’, ‘tenebrae’ (darkness), and materia informis. Eriugena inherits this discussion – extended in Carolingian times by Fredigesus and others. But the relatively Aristotelian categorial and grammatical context (materia informis) is completely disrupted by Eriugena’s discovery of Dionysius, with his concept of the superessential divinity, who is ‘beyond being’, who dwells in inaccessible darkness. We shall now review Eriugena’s sources. (a) St Augustine on Nothing Eriugena first discussed ‘non-being’ in his De praedestinatione (395A ff.), where he argued that evil is to be understood as non-being and therefore it is neither created by God nor known to Him. He develops this argument further in the Periphyseon at II 596A-B, for example, where he argues that God’s nature is simple and does not know evil; or at Periphyseon V 926A, where he says that God cannot be said to know the wickedness of angels or men. Of course, the Latin source of this assessment of evil is undoubtedly Augustinian. Eriugena treats ‘nothing’ here in the Latin sense as privation – death is a privation of life, evil is a privation of goodness, suffering is the privation of happiness. In all cases, what is deprived does not exist. Eriugena asks: ‘Does “nothing” signify anything other than the thinker’s conception of the absence of essence’ (Nunquid aliud significat nihil nisi notionem cogitantis defectum essentiae, De praed. Ch. 15. 9, 197-8, Brennan, p. 98). As Eriugena argues in De Praedestinatione: God cannot be both the highest essence and not be the cause of those things only that derive from him. But God is the highest essence. He is therefore the cause of those things only which derive from him. Sin, death, unhappiness are not from God. Therefore God is not the cause of them. The same syllogism can be put this way: God cannot be both the cause of those things that are and the cause of those things that are nothing. But God is the cause of those things that are. Therefore he is not the cause of those things that are not. Sin and its effect, death, to which unhappiness is conjoined are not. (De praed. Ch. 3. 3, Brennan, p. 19).

Eriugena then is following a typically Augustinian line in De praedestinatione in order to refute Gottschalk.

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Eriugena will not continue to claim that God is not the cause of things that are not, once he had been exposed to Dionysius. Eriugena was awoken from his dogmatic Augustinian slumbers by reading the Corpus Dionysii. His encounter with Dionysius transformed his life and gave him a passion for negative theology framed around the idea of the not-being of the divine. But it also allows him to interpret his Latin sources in a new light. For instance, Eriugena, unusually for his day, interprets Augustine as a negative theologian. He loves to cite Augustine’s line that God is better known by not knowing (melius scitur nesciendo, see Peri. I 510B).18 He often quotes Augustine’s De ordine where Augustine praises the liberal arts for helping theology understand such issues as ‘nothingness’ and ‘formless matter’: … yet, if he does not know what nothingness is, what formless matter is [quid sit nihil, quid informis materia], what an inanimate unformed being is, what a body is, what species in a body is, what place and time are, … and what are beyond time and forever, anyone ignorant of these matters who nonetheless seeks to inquire and to dispute concerning his own soul, not to speak of that supreme God Who is better known by not knowing [qui scitur melius nesciendo], he indeed will fall into error, to the greatest extent that error is possible. (De ordine 2.16.44. ed. W.M. Green, CChr.SL, p. 131)

As Marcia Colish has pointed out, in this passage, Augustine is distinguishing between nihil and materia informis.19 Eriugena will also distinguish between formless matter and nothing in the sense of complete absence. Zum Brunn says that the examination of ‘nothingness’ allows Augustine to understand the nature of evil and move away from the Manichean position that it was something existent. Certainly, Eriugena is alert to Augustine’s discussions of nothingness. In the Confessions, Augustine states that created being, in their being as creatures, are mere nothingness apart from God, and later Eckhart will take the same view. Eriugena concurs. Thus, in Periphyseon III 646B, he says that every creature considered in and through itself is nothing, and he cites a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions (Book VII 11.17) which states that creatures are neither entirely being (nec omnino esse) nor entirely non-being (nec omnino non esse) (Peri. III 646B). In general, Augustine sees the corruptibility of all creatures as due to their genesis from nothing, and he believes all creatures have an innate ‘desire’ to return to nothing, unless they are sustained by their Creator. Thus, in the Confessions XII 11.14, he says that bodies may get small but will never fall away into nothingness, on their own. In his De immortalitate animae VII 12, Augustine says that every defect is a tendency towards nothing. 18 Eriugena is quoting Augustine’s De ordine XVI 44 (Deus qui melius scitur nesciendo). See De ordine, in Œuvres de saint Augustin. Première série. Opuscules Vol. IV. Dialogues philosophiques, ed. R. Jolivet (Paris, 1948), 438. 19 Emilie Zum Brunn, Le dilemme de l’être et du néant chez saint Augustin des premiers dialogues aux ‘Confessions’ (Paris, 1969), 27.

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It is not hard to find other discussions of non-being in Augustine. For example, in De magistro, Chapter 7, Augustine discusses the meaning of nihil and is uncertain as to whether it signifies something or nothing. He wants to say that all signs signify objective realities, but that nothing does not signify an objective reality. Eriugena is an astute reader of Augustine and in particular takes from him many of the distinctions he will employ in parsing the relations between being and non-being. (b) Dionysius on Divine Transcendence above Being and Non-being Dionysius woke Eriugena to both negative theology and mystical theology. Eriugena finds the ideas of the divine nothingness, and transcendence above all that is and is not, primarily in Dionysius, although Dionysius strictly speaking does not call God ‘nothing’. But as we have seen in his interpretation of Augustine, Eriugena also finds the thread of mystical theology already latent in the Latin Christian tradition of Augustine. Eriugena is presumably inspired by his reading of Dionysius to reinterpret Augustine in a more via negativa manner. Very early in the Periphyseon, at I 443B, Eriugena quotes Dionysius Celestial Hierarchy20 iv.1 (PG 3, 177D1-2; Heil-Ritter [Berlin, 1991], p. 20 ll. 16-7): For, he says, the being of all things is the Divinity Who is above being. (‘Esse enim, inquit, omnium est super esse diuinitas’, Peri. I 443B; Jeauneau, CChr.CM 161, p. 5, l. 61)

Eriugena will repeat this at Peri. I 516C; III 664B and V 903C; as well as in the Vox spiritualis (Homilia). As He is in Himself, God is comprehended by no intellect. He is equally incomprehensible from the point of view of the creature that subsists in Him (Peri. I 443B-C). In Periphyseon Book Three Eriugena quotes a long section in his own translation from Dionysius’ Divine Names (De divinis nominibus)21 Book Five Chapters 4-5 (PG 3, 817C-820A; Suchla, p. 182, l. 17 – p. 183, l. 17) and Chapter 8 (V 8. 821D-824B; Suchla, p. 182, l. 14 – p. 187 l. 12), where Dionysius speaks about ‘being’ and describes God as ON (ων) and also as the ‘pre-being (‘ante ων’, Peri. III 682B) or the ‘pre-existent’ (ante existens). Eriugena translates Dionysius as saying: ‘He is before all things and has constituted all things in himself’ (… ipse est ante omnia et omnia in se constituit, Peri. III 682C). Eriugena goes on to quote Dionysius, whom, he notes, identifies ON with God 20 Corpus Dionysiacum II (CH, EH, MT, Letters), ed. G. Heil and A.M. Ritter (Berlin, 1991); Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. Über die himmlische Hierarchie. Über die Kirchliche Hierarchie, trans. G. Heil (Stuttgart, 1986). Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CChr.CM 31 (Turnhout, 1975). 21 Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, De divinis nominibus, ed. Beate Regina Suchla, Patristische Texte und Studien 33 (Berlin, 1990).

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(sic enim uocat deum, Peri. III 682A, l. 2596 or so ‘Dionysius calls God’, Sheldon-Williams’ translation). The passage from Dionysius reads22: But being itself [Esse autem ipsum] is never bereft [deseritur] of all things that exist [existentibus omnibus]. Being itself, indeed, is from the Pre-Existent [ex ante-existente]; and from it is being [ab ipso est esse]; and ων (is) the beginning and measure before essence [ante essentiam] and is not itself being [et non ipsum esse]; and being possesses it; and ων is the substantiating beginning and middle and end both of that which exists and of age and all things; and therefore by the Oracles [ab eloquiis] He Who is in truth Pre-ων [ante- ων] is multiplied in every notion [intelligentiam] of the things that exist, and in Him is properly celebrated what was and what is and what shall be and what has become and what becomes and what shall become. (Peri. III 682C-D, translating Divine Names V 8. 821D-824B; Suchla, p. 182, l. 14 – p. 187 l. 12).

We have a sense of a divine being whose ineffable, infinite nature transcends all things and is in some sense ontologically ‘prior to’ or ‘before’ (ante) all things. I could say ‘me-ontologically prior’. Eriugena finds a Scriptural basis in what he calls the ‘sacred oracles’ (sacra eloquii) or ‘sacred theology’ for his application of the term ‘non-being’ to God. The theologians that Eriugena is invoking are Dionysus, Gregory and Maximus – the Greek Christian authorities, whom Eriugena usually prefers. In Book Three 680C-D, Eriugena says that God is called Nihilum in the Bible. Alumnus asks Nutritor at Book III 680C: ‘But I beg you to explain what Holy Theology means by that name of “Nothing”’ (Quid autem eo nomine quod est nihilum sancta significat theologia explanari a te peto). He frequently quotes ‘the Apostle’ St Paul Romans 4:17, for example, at Peri. I 445C, and later, in his Commentarius on Saint John at 304D: ‘he calls the things that are not as the things that are’ (Et uocat ea quae non sunt tanquam quae sunt).23 The passage in St Paul is said about God ‘the father of many nations’ who gives life to the dead and can make the things that are not into the things that are. Later at Book One I 481C, Eriugena cites ‘Gregory the theologian’ (Gregorius theologus) and Maximus Confessor’s I Ambigua vi. 38 (PG 91, 1180B8-13) 22

The translation by Colm Lúibhéid reads: ‘But beings are never without being which, in turn, comes from the Preexistent. He is not a facet of being. Rather, being is a facet of him. He is not contained in being, but being is contained in him. He does not possesses being, but being possesses him. He is the eternity of being, the source and the measure of being. He precedes essence, being, and eternity. He is the creative source, middle and end of all things. That is why scripture applies to the truly Pre-Existent the numerous attributes associated with every kind of being. To him is properly attributed past, present and future, came to be, coming to be, will come to be’. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Lúibhéid (New York, 1987), 101. 23 See G. Piemonte, ‘L’expression quae sunt et quae non sunt: Jean Scot et Marius Victorinus’, in Jean Scot Ecrivain, ed. G.-H. Allard (Paris, Montréal, 1986), 81-113. See also Marcia Colish, ‘Mathematics, the Monad, and John Scottus’ concept of Nihil’, in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy (Helsinki, 1990), II 445-67.

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as saying that ‘God alone properly subsists above being itself’ (qui solus super ipsum esse proprie subsistit) – everything else is located in time and space or can be circumscribed within the categories.24 Elsewhere Eriugena also credits Maximus (PL 122, 1196A-B), who frequently contrasts ‘beings’, ta onta, with ‘non-beings’, ta me onta).25 John O’Meara and Gustavo Piemonte have suggested the possible influence of Marius Victorinus in this regard.26 The original source is obviously Augustinian – especially in the De praedestinatione. There God is ‘prima atque summa essentia’. (c) Marius Victorinus’s Four Levels of Non-Being Marius Victorinus’ theological works (especially Ad Candidum Arrianum and Adversus Arium) were known in the Carolingian era and are referenced by Alcuin, for instance, and by Eriugena’s supporter, Bishop Hincmar of Reims.27 Eriugena himself never specifically names Marius Victorinus, but at least one scholar, Gustavo Piemonte, based on textual comparison, is convinced that Eriugena has access to Marius Victorinus’s Ad Candidum. Marius has a similar set of distinctions concerning being and non-being. God is ON and the cause of being (esse) and non-being (non esse). In Ad Candidum, he says that God is ‘above all things, all existents and all non-existents’ (Ad Cand. 3.1. Clark, p. 61) and invokes the Greek phrase to me on super to on (Ad Cand. 14). At Ad Candidum 3.2.4 Marius lists four modes of non-existence. Victorinus claims that ‘non-being’ or ‘that which is not’ [id quod non est] can be divided according to four modes: ● ‘according to negation’ (iuxta negationem), ● ‘according to being other than another nature’ (iuxta alterius ad aliud natu-

ram), ● ‘according which is not yet, what is futural and can be’ (iuxta nondum esse,

quod futurum est et potest esse), and ● ‘according to that which is above all the things that are’ (iuxta quod supra

omnia quae sunt, est esse, Ad Candidum, 3, 1-2, Clark p. 63-4; 4, 1-5; CSEL 83 [Vienna, 1971]).28

24 See also Maximus, Scholia in librum de divinis nominibus, PG 4, 185C-188A, 244C, 253D256A. 25 See also Maximus, Scholia in librum de divinis nominibus, PG 4, 185C-188A, 244C, 253D256A. 26 See G. Piemonte, ‘L’expression quae sunt et quae non sunt: Jean Scot et Marius Victorinus’ (1986), 89 n. 38. 27 Pierre Hadot, ‘Marius Victorinus et Alcuin’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Âge 21 (1954), 5-19. 28 Trans. from the French of Pierre Hadot, Marius Victorinus, Traités théologiques sur la Trinité, 2 vol. (Paris, 1960).

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Piemonte sees these four divisions of Marius Victorinus as strongly reminiscent of the first three of Eriugena’s quinque modi,29 albeit with the fourth and fifth modes missing. Marius’ fourth distinction is akin to Eriugena’s first mode (where God is said not to be because is above all the things that are and are not). Piemonte even presents a table of the wordings of Eriugena and Marius Victorinus.30 Victorinus, moreover, uses the same argument as Eriugena that privation indicates a prior possession and rejects the view that the privation of all being could be the cause of being. These are indeed remarkable textual parallels but there are also some significant differences. Chiefly, as Piemonte notes, Marius does not use the Eriugenian formulation ‘per excellentiam’;31 rather he uses ‘per praelationem et per eminentiam’ (Adv. Ar. IV 19, 11). Marius’ idea of the non-being above being (‘me on super to on’) has its source in Porphyry. Marius Victorinus operates with a fourfold division of being (also replicated in Augustine’s Confessions) between quae vere sunt (ontos onta), quae sunt (onta), quae non vere non sunt (me ontos me onta) and quae non sunt (me onta) (Ad Cand., 5 6-7). Marius declares: ‘Habes igitur quattuor: quae vere· sunt, quae sunt, quae non vere non sunt, quae non sunt’ (Ad Cand., 11, 1026B). There is one passage in Periphyseon Three (III 634B-C) where Eriugena debates whether God can be called ‘non esse’ as some theologians do – and he says he will not allow that God can be called non-being on the basis of a privation; God is plus quam esse – possibly, Piemonte believes, the theologian to whom Eriugena is referring here is Marius Victorinus.32 (d) Carolingian Discussions of Non-Being: Fredigesus It is clear from this text from Alcuin’s Circle that the problem of non-being was a living issue in Carolingian philosophical and theological debates. With regard to Carolingian authors, it is possible that Eriugena knew the ninth-century Latin work of Fredegisus (Fridugisus, also known as Fredegisus or Fredegis of Tours, was born in England towards the end of the eighth century and died in Tours, ca. 834 CE). Fredegisus was a monk, a disciple of Alcuin, and a member of the Carolingian court, holding a high rank, being tutor to Charlemagne’s sister and he may have been Alcuin’s successor in the palace school. His Epistola de nihilo et tenebris [Letter concerning nothing and darkness] argued that the term “nothing” must actually stand for something, since all meaningful terms signify some thing, as we know Augustine also believed.33 In his letter, 29 G. Piemonte, ‘L’expression quae sunt et quae non sunt: Jean Scot et Marius Victorinus’ (1986), 92. 30 Ibid. 95. 31 Ibid. 106. 32 Ibid. 108. 33 Colish writes: Concettina Gennaro, Fridugiso di Tours e il “De substantia nihili et tenebrarum”: Edizione critica e studio introduttivo, Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto universario di magistero di Catania,

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he asked a basic question: ‘Whether nothing is anything, or not? (Nihilne aliquid sit, an non?). What kind of ‘thing’ is nihil? Is it a ‘something’? He begins with an argument drawn from grammar. Fredegisus argues that all ‘finite’ nouns signify something (and nihil, for him, is a finite noun). Therefore nihil must signify something, e.g. a man, a stone, a tree (Omne nomen finitum aliquid significat, ut ‘homo’, ‘lapis’, ‘lignum’) signifies something. Therefore, it is something. Colish points out the leap involved here (Nihil autem aliquid significat. Igitur nihil eius significatio est quod est, id est rei existentis).34 Fredegisus then turns to Scripture and creation ex nihilo. Nihil is not materia informis, he says; rather nothing must be something great (magnum quiddam ac praeclarum). Fredigesus then turns to discuss ‘tenebrae’ – the darkness over the waters in Genesis. This is something created. Again, if the words ‘day’ (dies) and ‘light’ (lux) signify something then so must nox and tenebrae. Furthermore, God knows the nature of this nihil even if humans do not. Since all created things are said to be made from nothing, Fredegisus argues, nothing must signify something great indeed. Fredegisus concludes his letter without actually identifying this ‘great’ non-being with God Himself, as Eriugena will explicitly do, but there is no doubt that Fredegisus’work is pointing in the direction of Eriugena’s conclusion concerning the nature of nihil per excellentiam.

Eriugena’s Five Modes of Being and Non-Being in the Periphyseon Having reviewed Eriugena’s sources, let us now return to the five modes that are introduced in Periphyseon Book One. Eriugena introduces the five modes immediately after his great fourfold division of nature. Throughout the dialogue he will invoke one or other mode (usally the first, third or fourth) but he will never return again to a systematic discussion of these modes. Nevertheless, I believe that these modes always inform Eriugena’s thinking about the nature of being and non-being and when we read an ontological statement in Eriugena we should always ask – what is the mode of being that is being applied here. (a) The First Mode At the outset of Periphyseon Book One, for Nutritor and Alumnus, the fundamental or more primary (primordialis) ‘division’ (diuisio, I 443A) or ‘difference’ (differentia, I 443A) is between being and non-being. Alumnus says that serie filosofica, saggi e monografie 46 (Padua, 1963), discusses the previous editions and the manuscripts on which they and her edition are based, 5-54, the various titles of the work, 55-6, and gives a good if not exhaustive review of the commentary it has received, 101-13. 34 Marcia L. Colish, ‘Carolingian Debates over Nihil and Tenebrae: A Study in Theological Method’, Speculum 59 (1984), 757-95.

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the first division is not just first but it is also more obscure than the others (I 443A): Alumnus: For I see no other beginning [ex alio primordio] from which reasoning [I] ought to start, and this not only because this difference [differentia] is the first of all, but because both in appearance and in fact it is more obscure [obscurior] than the others. (Peri. I 443 ll. 14-6)

The first mode is given special priority by Eriugena; he specifically calls it ‘first and highest’ (primus ac summus, Peri. I 443C). It is perhaps the most commonly invoked mode in the Periphyseon. This mode separates things which are comprehensible to sense and intellect from those which are beyond all human understanding and elude the grasp of the mind. As Eriugena writes in Book One: Of these modes the first seems to be that by means of which reason convinces us that all things which fall within the perception of bodily sense or (within the grasp of) intelligence are truly and reasonably said to be, but that those which, because of the excellence [per excellentiam] of their nature, elude not only all sense but also all intellect and reason rightly seem not to be. (Peri. I 443A; Sheldon-Williams’s translation)

Eriugena is here giving ontological primacy to that which is grasped by the human or angelic mind. Note that Eriugena claims that those things, which in this classification are called non-being, are in fact higher than being, by reason of the excellence of their nature (per excellentiam suae naturae, Peri. I 443A). God is said to be unintelligible in itself and also in its creatures. Thus, God and the reasons and essences of all things are among the non-beings.35 In fact, in this first division, Eriugena quotes Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy IV 1 (PG 3, 177D)36 on the superessential nature of God, to gar einai panton estin he hyper to einai theotes). This is a favourite phrase of Eriugena’s, which he translates as, ‘the being of all things is the divinity above being’ (esse enim omnium est superesse divinitas, Peri. I 443B). He excludes ‘simple nonbeing’ (haplos me on) from the division of things in this mode: ‘For how can that which absolutely is not, and cannot be [nam quod penitus non est necesse potest], and which does not surpass the intellect because of the pre-eminence of its existence be included in the division of things’ (Peri. I 443C; Sheldon-Williams’ translation; Jeauneau, CChr.CM 161, 5-6 ll. 77-9). According to this first mode, God is not any of the things that are. The things that are, are graspable by the mind or the senses; God is not intelligible to the 35 To this list is added ‘and matter’ (materiaque) by a later scribe in the Paris manuscript 12964, see I.-P. Sheldon-Williams, Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae Periphyseon vol. 1, p. 41 n. 14 at p. 223. Matter, of course, is not non-being because of the excellence of its nature. 36 Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. Über die himmlische Hierarchie. Über die Kirchliche Hierarchie, trans. G. Heil (1986); translated in Com Luibheid and P. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (1987).

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mind and hence ‘is not’. We are here dealing with God understood as nihil per excellentiam, but Eriugena has some things to say about privation in this mode also. It is notable – and Eriugena will return to this in Book Three – that, according to this mode, the primordial causes also escape the grasp of the mind. According to the First Mode, the Primordial Causes are among the things that are not. This is also the case for the Third Mode, since in that version, the actualized effects are, and their causes are not. According to the Fourth Mode, however, the Primary Causes can be said to be because they are eternal, immutable and intelligible (and also intellectual since they are one in the Logos). (b) The Second Mode (for created beings only) The second mode of being and non-being is seen, Eriugena says, ‘in the orders and differences of created natures’ (Peri. I 444A), from the intellectual powers or angels down to the lowest level of the irrational creature, whereby if a level is said to be, then the levels above and below it are said not to be: For an affirmation concerning the lower (order) is a negation concerning the higher, and so too a negation concerning the lower (order) is an affirmation concerning the higher. … This however terminates [in] the highest negation [upward]; for its negation confirms the existence of no higher creature. … Downward on the other hand, the last (order) merely [denies or confirms the one above it, because it has nothing below it which it might either take away or establish] since it is preceded by all the orders higher than itself but precedes none that is lower than itself. (Peri. I 444A-C)

This second mode of speaking of being and non-being applies only to the created order and not to God. Omnino nihil, mere nothingness, as the lowest level is also excluded from this mode. The second mode applies exclusively to the relations between the levels in the hierarchy of created beings. The hierarchy of being and non-being, then, is not a straightforward chain of being from higher to lower, but actually is a dialectic of affirmation and negation. Eriugena’s dialectical second mode stands in contrast to the more usual Neoplatonic hierarchy, where each level ‘contains’ and also ‘produces’ the level that is below it, in a manner which need not be strictly causal. Dionysius, for example, uses the term hypostates (in the sense of ‘that which gives rise to’ or, more literally, ‘that which is placed below’; Eriugena translates this as subsistentia) for the level which is higher, but certainly the higher is somehow responsible for the lower. But in Eriugena’s version, when the lower world is affirmed, the higher world is negated. It is according to this mode that Eriugena can say that if we assert that human nature is, then angelic nature is not, and vice versa; and similarly for ‘human’ and ‘animal’ nature. As Eriugena writes in Book One: Thus the affirmation of ‘human’ (I mean human while still in its mortal state) is the negation of ‘angel’, while the negation of ‘human’ is the affirmation of ‘animal’ (and vice versa). For if the human being is a rational, mortal, risible animal, then an angel

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is certainly neither a rational animal nor mortal nor risible: likewise, if an angel is an essential intellectual motion about God and the causes of things, then the human is certainly not an essential intellectual motion about God and the causes of things. (Peri. I 444B; Sheldon-Williams’ translation, translation modified by Dermot Moran)

This is a strong statement of the perspectival approach to being and non-being and in fact places at risk the affirmative definition of man as an intellectual idea in the mind of God, which we have already discussed in detail in the preceding chapter. It is clear that this definition is now seen to need a negative counterbalancing statement, which denies the whole truth of the affirmative claim. As Eriugena says: It is also on these grounds that every order of intellectual creature is said to be and not to be: it is in so far as it is known by the orders above it and by itself; but it is not in so far as it does not permit itself to be comprehended by the orders that are below it. (Peri. I 444C)

As in Mode One, being is relative to being known; ontology is made to depend on the epistemological framework. Each level knows or recognizes entities at the level below it or at the same level as having being but does not recognize entities above itself as having being. In many ways, this is a very revolutionary claim – but it fits with the overall idea of the duplex theoria – that being is relative to being known. (c) The Third Mode Eriugena’s third mode contrasts actual from potential things. Things that are in ‘the secret folds of nature’ (in secretis sinibus naturae) are said not to be, while those things which exist are said to be. Eriugena writes: Thus, since God in that first and one man whom He made in His image established [constituerit] all men at the same time, yet did not bring them all at the same time into this visible world, those who already {are becoming or} have become visibly manifest in the world are said to be, while those who are as yet hidden, though destined to be, are said not to be. (Peri. I 445A)

According to this mode, things which have their essences in the Primary Causes can be said not to be, whereas things that have continued to their effects can be said to be (i.e. the created things in this world exist). (d) The Fourth Mode This division, according to Eriugena, is found among the ‘philosophers’ (philosophi): The fourth mode is that which, not improbably according to the philosophers, declares that only those things which are contemplated by the intellect alone truly are, while

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those things which in generation through the expansion and contraction of matter, and the intervals of places and the motions of times, are changed, brought together or dissolved, are said not to be truly, as is the case with all bodies which can come into being and can pass away. (Peri. I 445B-C)

This is the classic contrast between eternity and the domain of coming-to-be and passing-away.37 Platonists have always distinguished between these domains and Eriugena emphasizes that the world of genesis is the world accessible to the senses, to aisthesis, whereas the eternal, intelligible world is grasped by nous or intellectus. (e) The Fifth Mode For Eriugena the fifth mode of being and non-being applies only to human being. Eriugena can find a scriptural basis for this mode: The fifth mode is that which reason observes only in human nature, which, when through sin it renounced the honor of the divine image in which it was properly substantiated [substetit], deservedly lost its being and therefore is said not to be; but when, restored [restaurata] by the grace of the only-begotten Son of God, it is brought back [reducitur] to the former condition of its substance [ad pristinum suae substantiae statum] in which it was made after the image of God, it begins to be, and in him who has been made in the image of God begins to live. It is to this mode, it seems, that the Apostle’s saying refers: “and He calls the things that are not as the things that are.” [Et uocat ea quae non sunt tanquam quae sunt, Rom. 4:17] (Peri. I 445C-D; Sheldon-Williams’ translation)

The quotation from St Paul confirms here that Eriugena is thinking about non-being and being in terms of the difference between the life of sin and the life of grace. The fallen human is non-being and the resurrected human is being. Tractatus de Nihilo in Book Three Eriugena operates with different modes of division between being and non-being throughout the Periphyseon, but he does make one major attempt to clear up the confusion of meanings of the term ‘nothing’ (nihil) in a treatise on nothing in Book III.38 Book Three as a whole is meant to focus on the third division of nature, namely, that which is created and does not create (Peri. III 619D-620A). In this Treatise on Nothing, Eriugena first considers the traditional 37 I.-P. Sheldon-Williams, quite reasonably, references Plato’s Timaeus 27d, 28a and 48ff., which Eriugena had available in the Latin translation of Calcidius. See Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, edited and translated by John Magee (Cambridge, 2016). 38 See G. Piemonte, ‘Notas sobre la Creatio de Nihilo en Juan Escoto Eriúgena’, Sapientia 23 (87) (1968), 37-58.

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view that God is not being but the privation of created being – the absolute privation of all being (Peri. III 634C). Alumnus states: By the name ‘nothing’ [nomine quod est nihilum], then, is meant the negation and absence [atque absentia] of all essence or substance, indeed of all things that are created in nature [in natura rerum creata]. (Peri. III 635A)39

Nutritor agrees – saying almost all the commentators on Holy Scripture agree on this. God made everything not out of something but out of nothing at all (non de aliquo set de omnino nihil, Peri. III 635A). However, Alumnus expresses worries – he is surrounded by ‘dark clouds’ (nebulis tenebrosis, Peri. l. 1180). Alumnus is concerned about the status of the Primordial Causes (causae primordiales, Peri. III 635C). It had earlier been agreed that these had been made in the Word by the Father, in His Wisdom, all gathered together as one. The concept of the artificer precedes the concept of his art and so the causes come from the source which is God. Alumnus asks: For if all things that are, are eternal in the Creative Wisdom, how are they made out of nothing [quomodo de nihilo sunt facta]? (Peri. III 636A)

There is a general principle involved: The artist [Artifex] makes things out of his own art [ars] and that art precedes the things that are made in it (Peri. III 636A).

Nutritor is really at a loss to explain why people think the world was made from unformed matter or from nothing understood as privation. He writes: But concerning those who think that the world was made from that nothing which means the privation or absence of the whole of essence [de eo nihilo quod totius essentiae priuationem significat] I do not know what to say. For I do not see why they do not bethink them of the nature of opposites [oppositorum naturam]. For it is impossible that there should be privation where there is not possession of essence. For privation is the privation of possession and therefore where possession does not precede privation does not follow. How, then, do they say that the world was made from privation? (Peri. III 686A)

Eriugena thinks the only answer (if one does not accept privation or absence) is to recognize this nothing as God: But if one should say that neither deprivation of possession nor the absence of some presence is meant by the name ‘Nothing’ [nihili nomine significari], but the total negation of possession and essence or of substance or of accident or, in a word, of all things that can be said or understood, the conclusion will be this: So that is the name by which it is necessary to call God, Who alone is what is properly meant by the negation of all the things that are, because He is exalted above everything that is said or understood, Who is none of the things that are and are not [qui nullum eorum quae sunt et 39 The word ‘absence’ [absentia] is added in the text of Rheims and is marked in bold in the Jeauneau edition, CChr.CM 163, 248, ll. 1169-73.

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quae non sunt], Who by not knowing is the better known [qui melius nesciendo scitur]. (Peri. III 686C-687A).

Note that again Eriugena invokes Augustine’s De ordine II 44. Eriugena writes in Book Two: For what the Holy Fathers, I mean Augustine and Dionysius, most truly say about God – Augustine says that He is better known by not knowing [qui melius nesciendo scitur], Dionysius that His ignorance is true wisdom [cuius ignorantia uera est sapientia] – should, in my opinion, be understood not only of the intellects which reverently and seriously seek Him, but also of Himself. For as those who pursue their investigations along the right path of reasoning are able to understand that He transcends them all, and therefore their ignorance is true wisdom, and by not knowing Him in the things that are they know Him the better above all things that are and are not; so also it is not unreasonably said of (God) Himself that to the extent that He does not understand Himself to subsist in the things which He has made, to that extent does He understand that He transcends them all, and therefore His ignorance is true understanding; and to the extent that He does not know Himself to be comprehended in the things that are, to that extent does He know Himself to be exalted above them all, and so by not knowing Himself He is the better known by Himself. For it is better that He should know that He is apart from all things than that He should know that He is set in the number of all things. (Peri. II 597D-598A)

This is extraordinary – the divine ignorance is not just our limitation, our limited intellect’s failure to comprehend the divine infinity, the divine ignorance pertains to God itself. God does not know what He is. His unlimited knowledge is that he is apart from and transcends all things. In Book Three 688A, Eriugena offers a ‘recapitulation’ (recapitulatio, Ἀνακεφαλαίωσις, anakephalaiosis) as to why the four-fold division (quadripertita totius naturae discretio) applies to God. Eriugena thinks that all things shall be unified in God (in deum uidilicet conuersa) – just as the stars are converted into light when the sun rises (sicut astra sol oriente, Peri. III 689A). Eriugena places an enormous emphasis on a cosmic unity which dissolves all apparent differences. Eriugena’s Prayer in Book Three In a magnificent ‘prayer’ (oratio) – he calls it such – in Book III 650B, Deus nostra salus atque redemptio, Eriugena calls on God who has given nature to us to bestow also grace to rescue us from our ignorance and errors and, in the elegant translation of Sheldon-Williams, ‘shatter the clouds of empty phantasies (nubes vanarum phantasiarum) which prevent the glance of the mind (acies mentis) from beholding you in the way in which Thou grantest Thine invisible self to be seen by those who desire to look on Thy face, their resting place, their end beyond which they seek nothing for there is nothing beyond, their superessential Supreme Good’ (summum bonum superessentiale, Peri. III 650B).

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Conclusion John Scottus Eriugena’s Periphyseon is an original and radical exploration of the consequences of considering the divine as ‘non-being’ understood in different ways but primarily as pure ‘transcendence’ above ‘all that is and is not’. Eriugena goes beyond all his sources including Augustine and Dionysius to make an even more radical claim: the true God is unknown and unknowable even to itself. It is first and foremost that ‘which is neither created nor creates’ – the fourth level of the division of nature to which all things must return. Yet this divine superessential darkness also manifests himself in theophanies which also may be called God: For it is not only the divine essence [essential diuina] that is indicated by the word ‘God’, but also that mode by which God reveals Himself in a certain way to the intellectual and rational creature, according to the capacity of each, is often called ‘God’ in Holy Scripture. This mode the Greeks are accustomed to call theophany, that is, selfmanifestation of God [hoc est dei apparitio]. (Peri. I 446C-D).

Eriugena’s conception of the divine nothingness is his way (following the Neoplatonists) of doing justice to the infinity, incircumscribability and unknowability of the divine unity – to which even the names One and Being or Goodness are not fully appropriate. Eriugena proposes always that we need to condition and qualify our affirmations by negations and his different modes of being and non-being are a further effort to allow us to train our minds to appreciate the divine in a new and fulfilling way.

GOD AND THE COSMOS: CONNECTING CHAPTER

From God to God: Eriugena’s Protology and Eschatology against the Backdrop of his Patristic Sources Ilaria L.E. RAMELLI, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT I shall explore Eriugena’s notion of the return to God (the beginning and the end of all) and the heritage of Origen and Nyssen (and Dionysius and Maximus) in this respect. I shall investigate the reception of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic theories of apokatastasis – and the latter’s important but problematic link to epistrophē – and their relation to protology, in the identification of the primordial state with the Divinity itself: primordialis conditio: ipse Deus. This is why I entitled my essay ‘From God to God’, pointing to the return to the original cause, through intermediate causes (the notion of which is arguably another Origenian heritage in Eriugena). This investigation thus relates the two main sections of the Oxford seminar on Eriugena’s patristic sources (and of this instalment): that on God and that on cosmology, since it focuses on the notion of the return of creation to God and its relation to protology, within the three Neoplatonic movements of monē, proodos, and epistrophē, which Eriugena Christianised.

I set out to investigate the reception of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic theories of apokatastasis in Eriugena, the link between apokatastasis and epistrophē (both conceived as universal by him), and their relation to protology in the identification of the primordial state with the Divinity itself: primordialis conditio: ipse Deus. ‘From God to God’ points to the return of all to the original cause. This investigation will thus relate Eriugena’s theology and his cosmology, since, as his Periphyseon, it focuses on the notion of protology, creation (the Periphyseon is a hexaëmeral commentary),1 and the return of creation to God through intermediate causes, within the Neoplatonic movements of μονή, πρόοδος, and ἐπιστροφή, Eriugena’s exitus–reditus scheme. The use and function of ἐπιστροφή in later Neoplatonism, ‘pagan’2 and Christian alike, must be considered in this connection, down to Proclus and 1 See Bernard McGinn, ‘The Periphyseon as Hexaemeral Commentary’, in Adrian Guiu (ed.), A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, 2019), 154-88. 2 On the three movements in late Platonism, Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius, see Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena (Leiden, 1978), new edition Da Giamblico a Eriugena (Bari, 2009), 61-75; 268-80. On ἐπιστροφή in late Platonism, Iamblichus, Syrianus,

Studia Patristica CXXII, 99-123. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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Damascius, Ps.Dionysius and Eriugena himself. Both terminologies, of ἐπιστροφή and ἀποκατάστασις, are interrelated in late (‘pagan’ and Christian) Platonists. Often, ἀποκατάστασις and ἐπιστροφή dovetail, especially in Dionysius, Proclus, Damascius,3 and Eriugena, ἐπιστροφή being the third movement after (im)manence and procession (although we shall see that Eriugena, qua Christian Platonist, changed the order). Ἐπιστροφή is the reversion–return to one’s source, and apokatastasis the restoration to one’s original state (or an improvement of that state) and one’s source.4 Among the most interesting examples of this dovetailing is Dionysius; he followed authors he knew, such as Clement, Origen, Nyssen, Evagrius, and Neoplatonism, from which he inherited the μονή-πρόοδος-ἐπιστροφή scheme.5 Dionysius sometimes overtly describes apokatastasis as ἐπιστροφή, the return of all beings to their Cause, God. Many loci confirm this. For instance, in EH 82.17 and 83.7, the terminologies of apokatastasis and ἐπιστροφή even merge. The movement of the priest from the altar to the extremities of the church and back is assimilated to the divine movements of πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή, but for this movement of reversion, the terminology of apokatastasis is deliberately used: πάλιν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ τελειωτικῶς ἀποκαθιστάμενον, in reference to the priest’s return to the altar (82.17), and εἰς τὴν οἰκείαν ἀρχὴν ἀμειώτως ἀποκαθίσταται, for the spiritual interpretation of this return (83.7). Apokatastasis is the return to the Monad and unification, intended as reversion, ἐπιστροφή. My suspicion is confirmed by DN 4.14 (160.15): here, the metaphysical movement of ἐπιστροφή (εἰς τ᾽ἀγαθὸν ἐπιστρεφομένην) is directly identified with ἀποκατάστασις. The terminology of apokatastasis is employed for ἐπιστροφή outright: God’s love forms a circle that proceeds from the Good – God being ‘Beauty and Good itself’ – and returns to the Good; it ‘always proceeds, remains, and returns to the same’ Good (κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ προϊὼν ἀεὶ καὶ μένων καὶ ἀποκαθιστάμενος).6 The two terminologies of apokatastasis and ἐπιστροφή converge. Dionysius seems aware that this line comes from Origen: for he ascribes this teaching to his master Hierotheus, who developed it in his Ἐρωτικοὶ ὕμνοι. Now, the inspired exegete that Hierotheus represents Proclus, and Damascius, ibid. 158-70. A study on ἐπιστροφή and ἀποκατάστασις in Greek philosophy down to late Neoplatonism is in the works. 3 Damascius described the three movements in Dub. sol. 1.169.24-7; 1.24.12. Proclus posited conversion/reversal for all spiritual or self-constituted principles (ET 44); Syrianus had described the Forms as ‘divine essences, not divided into parts, which revert [ἐστραμμέναι] to themselves’ (In Metaph. 23.14-5). 4 Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the NT to Eriugena (Leiden, 2013); A Larger Hope? I, pref. Richard Bauckham (Eugene, 2019). 5 See my ‘“Pagan” and Christian Platonism in Dionysius: The Double-Reference Scheme and Its Meaning’, in Byzantine Platonists 284-1453 (Steubenville, 2021). 6 On this circle I.L.E. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013), 703-4. On Eriugena’s circulus intelligibilis, see Veronika Limberger, Eriugenas Hypertheologie (Berlin, 2015), 191-7.

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is probably Origen, especially in his Commentary on Canticles, as I argued elsewhere7 (possibly with a double reference pointing also to Proclus, the author of Hymns8): The only one who is Beauty and Good per se is the manifestation, so to say, of itself through itself, the good procession of the transcendent unity, and simple movement of love, self-moving, self-operating, proceeding in the Good and gushing out from the Good to the beings and reverting to the Good [ἐπιστρεφομένην]. In this the divine love exceptionally clearly shows its own lack of an end and beginning, like a kind of infinite and absolutely eternal circle through the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and toward the Good, proceeding around in an introversive non-wandering spiral, always proceeding, remaining, and reverting in the same movement and the same way. These truths were also explained, in his divinely inspired exegesis, by my illustrious and holy initiator in his Hymns on Love. It will be particularly appropriate to quote from these Hymns and thus provide my own discourse on love with a sacred introduction, as it were: ‘Love, be it divine or angelic or intellectual or psychic/animal or physical, should be understood as a unitive force that gathers together…’

The last sentence paraphrases the beginning of Origen’s Commentary on Canticles. Eriugena was familiar with Dionysius and Origen, and read and translated Greek.9 He rendered ἐπιστροφή with conuersio, ἐπιστρέφεσθαι with conuerti and redire, and suggests a convergence between conuersio, reditus, and apokatastasis, all being universal in his view (as well as in Origen’s and Nyssen’s).10 This integration between apokatastasis and ἐπιστροφή was already performed by Dionysius. This convergence goes back to Origen, well known and praised by Eriugena.11 The author of the Hexapla, Origen used the lexicon of ἐπιστροφή and apokatastasis in connection with both Platonism and the occurrences of this terminology in Scripture (one of the many striking parallels he found between Scripture and Plato/Platonism). Psalm 21:28-30 prophesies that ‘all the boundaries of the earth will (re)turn/revert [ἐπιστραφήσονται] to the Lord’. Origen found the ἐπιστροφή–apokatastasis connection in Scripture: the Hebrew verb šub–yšb, meaning the reestablishment of a former relationship or a return, is rendered by both terminologies in Greek (ἐπιστρέφω and ἀποκαθίστημι). For instance, in Isa. 23:17, yšb is translated ἀποκαθίστημι in the LXX. Sometimes, 7 Argument in my ‘Origen, Evagrios, and Dionysios’, in Oxford Handbook to Dionysius the Areopagite (Oxford, forthcoming), Ch. 5. 8 ‘Double-Reference’ (2021). 9 I.L.E. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013); Joel Barstad, ‘Eriugena as Translator and Interpreter of the Greek Fathers’, in Companion to Eriugena (2019), 267-95. 10 The latter point is also noted by S. Gersh, Da Giamblico (2009), 278, who rightly takes both conuerti and redire as technical terminology in Eriugena’s language. 11 Analysis in my ‘The Reception of Origen’s Ideas in Western Theological and Philosophical Traditions’, main lecture at Origeniana Undecima: Origen and Origenism in the History of Western Thought, Aarhus University, August 2013, ed. Anders Jacobsen (Leuven, 2016), 443-67.

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even in the same passage, the same verb, šub–yšb, is rendered in the LXX with both ἀποκαθίστημι (restore, re-establish)12 and ἐπιστρέφω (convert, return, revert), e.g. in Jer. 15:19. In other passages, Origen found the verb šub–yšb translated with ἀποκαθίστημι alone, e.g. in Jer. 16:15; 23:8 and 27:19, in which God is said to restore Israel. Likewise, in the Latin versions of the Bible, also known to Eriugena,13 the same verb renders both ἐπιστρέφω and ἀποκαθίστημι. In Jer. 15:19, ἐπιστρέφω and ἀποκαθίστημι are rendered by conuerto: si conuerteris, convertam te. In the NT, instead, in the Vulgate, all occurrences of ἀποκαθίστημι, in its therapeutic and its eschatological sense of restoration, are rendered by restituo – used by Eriugena for apokatastasis – and in Acts 3:21 the corresponding noun, ἀποκατάστασις, is translated restitutio. Both Latin verbs are used by Rufinus, Jerome, and others to convey the meaning of apokatastasis and that of conversion and return to God.14 Origen’s usage was taken over by Dionysius and Eriugena, Nyssen,15 Didymus, Eusebius, Evagrius,16 and others. As Didymus puts it, God ‘calls us to salvation. The verb “they will return/revert” [ἐπιστραφήσονται] indicates that nobody is evil by essence, by nature, but rather by free choice. If evil had the power to push the (human) free choice toward something else, something alien, the Good will have the power to call it back to its original condition [τὴν προτέραν κατάστασιν]’.17 The terminologies of ἐπιστροφή and apokatastasis dovetail, as in Evagrius (ἀποκαθίστημι, ἐπιστρέφω). Dionysius and Eriugena linked ἐπιστροφή to apokatastasis, often explicitly; the roots are in Origen.18 Remarkably, in Eriugena μονή does not only designate an initial status, prior to πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή, but also indicates the final state of rest, I suspect because Eriugena supported a Christian notion of reversion and restoration, which, unlike the recurrent cycles of ‘pagan’ Neoplatonism, coincides with the The verb ἀποκαθίστημι/ἀποκαθιστάνω, which in the LXX almost always translates the verb yšb when it does not simply mean ‘to constitute’, but ‘to reconstitute, to re-establish, to restore’, and in the NT is widely used, in Greek essentially means ‘to restore, re-establish, reconstitute’. 13 On which see my ‘Making the Bible World Literature: The Vulgate and Ancient Versions’, in Wiebke Denecke and Ilaria Ramelli (eds), Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature I (Oxford, 2020), 267-79. 14 See I.L.E. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013), sections on Scripture, Rufinus, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, etc.; further in Hope? (2019). 15 Ilaria Ramelli, ‘Christian Soteriology and Christian Platonism’, VC 61 (2007), 313-56; ead., ‘Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul (and the Restoration): From Plato to Origen’, in Anna Marmodoro and Neil McLynn (eds), Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford, 2018), 110-41. 16 See my ‘Origen to Evagrius’, in Harold Tarrant et al. (eds), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity (Leiden, 2018), 271-91. 17 InPs. 20-1, col. 54.20. 18 Analysis in my ‘The Question of Origen’s Conversion and His Philosophico-Theological Lexicon of Epistrophē’, in Greek and Byzantine Philosophical Exegesis (Leiden, 2021). 12

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ultimate telos.19 Then, all rational creatures will enter divine eternity, being subsumed into their logoi or intermediate causes: their logoi will return to God. So, faithful to his movement ‘from God to God’, Eriugena posited μονή after apokatastasis in the very telos, as repose in God,20 reminiscent of Maximus’ ἀεικίνητος στάσις. This transformation owes much to Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism also from the Biblical viewpoint: John 14:2 is the reference Eriugena mentions in Periph. 5.984B, interpreting mansio as the final state promised to the blessed. At the same time, mansio translates the Neoplatonically connoted noun μονή, with the double-reference scheme found already in Dionysius.21 Not only Dionysius, but also Augustine and Boethius influenced Eriugena’s thought on procession and reversion22 – and Augustine, in his anti-Manichaean phase, adhered to the doctrine of apokatastasis.23 Indeed, in Periphyseon Eriugena developed the most systematic form of Christian Neoplatonism in the West before Eckhart,24 offering, after Boethius, a synthesis of Greek (Origen, the Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus) and Latin (especially Ambrose, Augustine, Boethius) Christian Platonism. He was also indebted to ‘pagan’ Neoplatonism.25 Even his poetry reflects his philosophico-theological ideas.26 Eriugena’s Patristic sources are significant in relation to apokatastasis and its link with ἐπιστροφή. Eriugena knew Nyssen’s works and translated his De hominis opificio, calling it De imagine, in which the doctrine of apokatastasis emerged, especially in the sense of the restoration of God’s image in humans.27 In the only MS in which Eriugena’s version is preserved,28 the only chapter that dropped in the MS tradition included a reference to apokatastasis.29 This is the only work by Nyssen cited by Eriugena, but he likely knew De anima et resurrectione 19 Distinction examined in my ‘Proclus of Constantinople and Apokatastasis’, in David Butorac and Danielle Layne (eds), Proclus and His Legacy (Berlin, 2017), 95-122. 20 See, e.g., Periph. 5.984B. 21 ‘Double-Reference’ (2021). 22 Willemien Otten, ‘Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, Its Theoretical and Theological Appeal’, Numen 63 (2016), 245-70. 23 Demonstration in my ‘Origen in Augustine: A Paradoxical Reception’, Numen 60 (2013), 280-307. 24 See Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, Hermathena 149 (1990), 53-72. 25 Besides Gersh, see Michael Harrington, ‘Eriugena and the Neoplatonic Tradition’, in A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena (2019), 64-92. 26 See Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Carmina, ed. Michael Herren, CChr.CM 167 (Turnhout, 2019). 27 Ed. Maieul Cappuyns, “Le De imagine de Grégoire de Nysse traduit par Jean Scot Erigène,” RTAM 32 (1965), 205-62. 28 Bamberg B.IV.13. 29 Sancti Gregorii episcopi Niseni [sic]. Peracta quidem hominum genitura eius quae termino conterminari tempus, et sic omnium adunari, et humanum a corruptibili ac terreno ad impassibile et sempiternum, hoc mihi videtur. Beatus apostolus considerans predicare, per epistolam ad Corintheos [sic], propter repentium temporis statum, et iterum in unam futuram moventium resolutionem… Eriugena translated this passage, as proved by an anthology in which it is preserved and from which I quote it.

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too, many reminiscences of which I could discern in Periphyseon. Maximus probably was another supporter of apokatastasis:30 Eriugena translated his Ambigua. Dionysius overtly spoke of apokatastasis and had its lexicon converge with that of reversion, as seen: Eriugena commented on his works31 and in Periphyseon offered a ‘meontology’ that Dermot Moran defined ‘the most detailed analysis of non-being since Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides’ – the latter being a dialogue, I note, well known to Origen, who built upon it.32 And Eriugena’s Patristic sources were deeply influenced by Origen: Ambrose, the Cappadocians, Maximus, and Dionysius. Eriugena declared Maximus ‘wisest’ and the best exegete of Dionysius in his letter to Charles the Bald (ca. 850): he ‘explained wonderfully the most obscure sayings of the holiest Dionysius’; his interpretation is ‘most brilliant’. Eriugena knew first-hand the work of Origen, a major supporter of apokatastasis who, as seen, already dovetailed it with reversion. He quotes extensively Περὶ ἀρχῶν in Latin, besides absorbing Origen’s ideas through Nyssen, Maximus and Dionysius. The overall structure of Periphyseon corresponds to that of Origen’s Περὶ ἀρχῶν. Eriugena’s title is Greek, like Origen’s, although the treatise is Latin;33 Eriugena cites Origen’s title in Greek, not in a Latin translation: Audi magnum Origenem … in tertio libro Περὶ ἀρχῶν.34 Origen’s Περὶ ἀρχῶν was the only monumental synthesis of Christian philosophy before Eriugena’s Periphyseon.35 Both are Christian systematisations of the knowable, begin with a treatment of God as universal cause and end with the universal return to God: ‘from God to God’. Also, the argumentative method in Periphyseon is the same as in Περὶ ἀρχῶν: philosophical demonstrations and biblical (and Patristic) quotations. Eriugena employs this method and often refers to it.36 Like Origen, Eriugena regarded philosophy as the culmination of liberal arts, and theology of philosophy. For example, the incapacity for sound argument in matter of predestination also depends on ignorance of the liberal arts and Graecae litterae.37 Eriugena was familiar with Greek and with works on the 30

I. Ramelli, Apokatastasis (2013), 738-57. Expositiones in Hierarchiam coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CChr.CM 31 (Turnhout, 1975). 32 Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (Cambridge, 1989), XIII-XIV; for the presence in Origen, my ‘The reception of Plato’s Parmenides in Origen of Alexandria’, lecture, International Plato Society, Paris 15-20 July 2019, forthcoming. 33 That the title Periphyseon is modelled on Περὶ ἀρχῶν was argued by Robert Crouse, ‘Origen in the Philosophical Tradition of the Latin West’, in Robert Daly (ed.), Origeniana Quinta (Leuven, 1992), 565-9. 34 Periph. 5.929A. 35 See my ‘Origen, Patristic Philosophy, and Christian Platonism’, VC 63 (2009), 217-63. Winfrid Löhr rightly noticed that after Origen ‘the more ambitious project of coherently interpreting Christianity as a philosophy had … been abandoned’ (‘Christianity and Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives of an Ancient Intellectual Project’, VC 64 [2010], 160-88, 187). This project was resumed, I think, by Eriugena. 36 E.g. Periph. 5.938B. 37 Praed. 18.1.430CD. 31

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liberal arts such as those by Boethius and Martianus, which he commented on,38 and throughout his commentary on Martianus – especially the first two books – he exalts the role of the liberal arts in the process of knowledge. In his view, studium rationis is the substance of the liberal arts and of φιλοσοφία, the search for wisdom.39 Studium rationis is always accompanied by virtue, both are acquired through philosophy, and philosophy leads to deification:40 Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam.41 At the beginning of Praed. 1.1, his parallel statement, Veram esse philosophiam veram religionem, conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam, was in line with Origen’s Christian Platonism. The tension of Periphyseon towards eschatology assimilates it to Origen’s thought, all oriented to the telos, the return to God and the tension towards God.42 Moreover, Origen’s ‘zetetic’ method, at its best in his philosophical masterpiece, reappears in the heuristic format of Eriugena’s Periphyseon, emphasised by the teacher–disciple dialogue, and by the successive improvements introduced by Eriugena himself. He projected a four-book work, like Περὶ ἀρχῶν; later, he expanded it into five books. Scriptural allegoresis is discussed in the last book, followed by exegetical examples:43 likewise, Origen devoted a part of the last book of Περὶ ἀρχῶν to a treatment of scriptural allegoresis, with exegetical examples. Not accidentally, Eriugena’s homily on John’s Prologue, Vox spiritualis aquilae, was transmitted in many MSS and cited by numerous authors under Origen’s name44 (only the Homily is finished; the relevant Commentary is unfinished45). The Periphyseon often expresses admiration for Origen, calling him beatus Origenes,46 ‘the most sublime’, ‘the greatest interpreter of the holy Scripture’ (summum sanctae scripturae expositorem, Origenem dico, 4.818B) and ‘the 38 See my Tutti i commenti a Marziano (Milan, 2006) and ‘Eriugena’s Commentary on Martianus in the Framework of his Thought and the Philosophical Debate of his Time’, in Sinéad O’Sullivan and Mariken Teeuwen (eds), Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella (Turnhout, 2012), 245-72; John Contreni, ‘John Scottus, Nutritor, and the Liberal Arts’, in A Companion to Eriugena (2019), 31-63. On Boethius and Martianus, my ‘Secular and Christian Commentaries in Late Antiquity’, in The Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature (forthcoming). 39 Adn. Marc. 17.7, ed. Ramelli, Commenti (2006), 135. 40 Rationis studium a virtute neque virtus a rationis studio segregari potest, quippe sibi invicem connexim semper adiunguntur (Adn. Marc. 17.5, ed. Ramelli, Commenti [2006], 135). 41 Adn. Marc. 57.15, ed. Ramelli, Commenti (2006), 207. 42 See my ‘Apokatastasis and Epektasis in Cant.’, in Gregory of Nyssa: In Canticum Canticorum, ed. Giulio Maspero et al. (Leiden, 2018), 312-39. 43 Starting from Periph. 5.1008C. On Biblical citations in Periphyseon: Tom O’Loughlin, Early Medieval Exegesis in the Latin West (Aldershot, 2013), 103-26. 44 E.g. Aquinas, STh 1 q. 42.2.4, who also in his Catena quotes passages from this homily as: Origenes in Homilia. 45 Ed. Édouard Jeauneau, Homilia super In principio erat Verbum et Commentarium in Evangelium Ioannis, CChr.CM 166; tr. Giovanni Mandolino, Giovanni Scoto Eriugena: Omelia e Commento sul Vangelo di Giovanni (Turnhout, 2018). 46 Periph. 5.922C.

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great Origen, most careful and laborious investigator of reality’ (magnum Origenem, diligentissimum rerum inquisitorem, 5.929A). Like Origen, as mentioned, Eriugena supported apokatastasis. The substance of sinners, created by God, will live eternally, while the malitia of their perverted will shall perish in aeternum.47 The irrational movements of a perverted will, not created by God, shall be punished.48 This is consistent with Origen’s tenet that God will not destroy any of his creatures, which would be a defeat of the Creator, and with Origen’s, Nyssen’s, and Evagrius’ idea of a complete vanishing of evil in the end. Eriugena thinks that the sinners’ evilness will be annihilated: what will remain of them will be their substance, restored into God in the end: their will shall be finally free from evilness, by means of suffering, which is God’s occultissima operatio (Praed. 2.5), a mysterious operation of divine providence, enabling the final reditus of sinners to God – ‘from God to God’: from God the Creator to God the telos. Demons will also be eventually restored, when creation will coincide with its eternal model, the product of God’s creative knowledge, in which all realities subsist from eternity. All creatures will experience their reditus to God:49 from God to God. Eriugena conceives apokatastasis as ἐπιστροφή (reditus), the third Neoplatonic movement after μονή (manentia) and πρόοδος (processio). This convergence between apokatastasis as ἐπιστροφή, as I mentioned, was anticipated by Dionysius,50 with whom Eriugena was well acquainted. The movement depicted in Periphyseon is analogous to that described by Origen in Περὶ ἀρχῶν51 and elsewhere: from the initial unity to the present division (now free wills do not converge on the Good, but are dispersed in a multiplicity of volitions toward apparent goods) and back to unity in the end (universal apokatastasis, expounded in Book 5, devoted to the return of every creature to ‘the Nature that is not created and does not create’):52 a movement ‘from God to God’. The return to God passes through humanity, the unifying factor between cosmology and theology.53 This unification will begin with the undoing of the 47 Periph. 5.931A: In ipsis substantia a Deo facta semper permansura, malitia uero, peruersa illorum uoluntate reperta, in aeternum peritura. 48 Deum nullam naturam quam fecit punire, nec in humana nec in daemonum substantia, sed quod non fecit in omnibus punit, hoc est irrationabiles peruersae uoluntatis motus (Periph. 5.927C, ibid. 5.950D). Suus conditor omne quod in ea [sc. humanitate] fecit exornat et nullo modo punit; omne autem quod in ea non fecit … impunitum fieri non permittit. 49 On Eriugena’s idea of reditus or reversio see Willemien Otten, ‘The Dialectic of the Return in Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, HTR 84 (1991), 399-421. 50 Argument in ‘Origen, Evagrios, and Dionysios’ (forthcoming). 51 E.g., Princ. 1.6.2. For the initial and final unity as a unity of will, see my ‘Origen and Apokatastasis: A Reassessment’. 52 See Ilaria Ramelli, ‘Harmony between ἀρχή and τέλος in Patristic Platonism’, IJPT 7 (2013), 1-49. 53 Periph. 5.8.876AB.

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man–woman differentiation (introduced by sin and abolished in Christ),54 ‘when human nature will be restored to its original condition’, in pristinum restaurabitur statum. The expression restauratio in pristinum statum, corresponding to ἡ εἰς τὸ ἀρχαῖον ἀποκατάστασις, is typical of Origen, Nyssen, and other supporters of apokatastasis. Like Nyssen, Eriugena assimilates resurrection and restoration/reversion: Non enim aliud resurgere, aliud redire (Periph. 5.979CD). The idea that human nature is one and originally undivided, and the primary human, ‘in the image of God’, is neither male nor female, is a tenet of Origen’s and Nyssen’s anthropology,55 which in turn depended on Philo on this score. Eriugena often insists on it. Only the secondary, moulded human being was divided by God in two genera, in prevision of its sin, but this division will not endure in the end. After the reunification of the two human genera, earth and paradise too – which were divided by sin – will be unified again. All this will happen thanks to Christ, who unified man and woman at his resurrection, given that he rose, not as a man or a woman, but as a human being.56 The whole of humanity, in body and spirit, will be one with Christ, in whom the unification of natures takes place: adunatio naturarum in Christo.57 Eriugena defines the human being as notio quaedam intellectualis in mente diuina aeternaliter facta, as Origen and Nyssen thought of God’s idea or logos of humanity, and announces its restoration to its original integrity: ad pristinam integritatem restituatur.58 Such restoration is explained in Periphyseon, Books 4-5. Eriugena describes the stages of apokatastasis in 5.8.876AB: (1) the dissolution of the body and its return to the four elements; (2) the resurrection of this same body (this sameness was a point already stressed by Origen59); (3) its transformation into a spiritual body, as Origen and Evagrius thought;60 (4) the return of the whole human nature to its primordial causes, God’s Ideas/Forms/logoi; (5) the return 54

Gal. 3:28. See my ‘Gal 3:28 and Aristotelian (and Jewish) Categories of Inferiority’, Eirene 55 (2019), 275-310. 55 See, e.g., Nyssen, Opif. 16; my ‘Body’, forthcoming in BEEC. 56 Primo igitur Dominum Iesum diuisionem naturae, id est masculum et feminam, in seipso adunasse edocet. Non enim in sexu corporeo, sed in homine tantum surrexit ex mortuis: in ipso enim nec masculus nec femina est (2.10). 57 Periph. 2.11-2. Likewise Eriugena, commenting on the Prologue of John (1.21.298A), observes that the Logos, by becoming flesh, caused the human flesh to become God, thus reconstituting the bond, broken by sin, between the perfection of divine nature and creatures. In Periphyseon, too, Eriugena foresees human nature’s deificatio. 58 Periph. 4.7: Omnium uera cognitio humanae naturae insita est, quamuis adhuc inesse ei lateat seipsam, donec ad pristinam integritatem restituatur, in qua magnitudinem et pulchritudinem imaginis in se conditae purissime intellectura est. For the gnoseological framework of this assertion see my ‘Eriugena’s Commentary’ (2012), 245-72. 59 Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘Origen on the Unity of Soul and Body in the Earthly life and Afterwards’, in The Unity of Soul and Body in the Earthly Life and After (Leiden, 2020). 60 ‘Gregory Nyssen’s and Evagrius’s Biographical and Theological Relations: Origen’s Heritage and Neoplatonism’, in Ilaria Ramelli (ed.), in collaboration with Kevin Corrigan, Giulio Maspero,

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of the whole nature, together with its primordial causes, to God, that God may be ‘all in all’:61 1Cor. 15:28 was already the favourite passage of Origen and Nyssen in support of apokatastasis.62 Inferior realities will be subsumed into the superior ones: genders into the human being, because they are inferior to the human being (inferior est sexus homine, Periph. 5.893D; homo melior est quam sexus, Periph. 2.534A); the earth into Paradise,63 earthly bodies into heavenly bodies; sense-perceptible creatures into intelligible ones, so that the whole of creation will become intelligible. And the intelligible creation will be united to its Creator and will be one and the same thing in It and with It. This adunatio of all64 will mark the end of the path ‘from God to God’. All creatures will return to their exemplary causes and be restored. These causes are the logoi of all things that dwell in God’s Logos and contain all substances and their properties.65 These logoi are not creatures, since creatures exist as substances, while the logoi are their paradigmatic causes.66 Origen posited logoi or paradigms of all beings in God’s Logos/Wisdom from eternity, before being created as substances:67 Eriugena follows suit. His patristic sources here are indeed Origen68 and Maximus, who was inspired by Origen. The presence of all Ideas as primordial exemplary causes (paradigmata) in the Logos, who proceeded to the creation of substances, was expressed by Eriugena and Monica Tobon, Evagrius between Origen, the Cappadocians, and Neoplatonism, Studia Patristica 84 (Leuven, 2017), 165-231. 61 Prima igitur humanae naturae reuersio est, quando corpus soluitur et in quattuor elementa sensibilis mundi, ex quibus compositum est, reuocatur. Secunda in resurrectione implebitur, quando unusquisque suum proprium corpus ex communione quattuor elementorum recipiet. Tertia, quando corpus in spiritum mutabitur. Quarta, quando spiritus et, ut apertius dicam, tota hominis natura in primordiales causas reuertetur, quae sunt semper et incommutabiliter in Deo. Quinta, quando ipsa natura cum suis causis mouebitur in Deum, sicut aer mouetur in lucem. Erit enim “Deus omnia in omnibus”, quando nihil erit nisi solus Deus. 62 See ‘Christian Soteriology’ (2007) and ‘In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius… (1Cor. 15:27-28): Gregory of Nyssa’s Exegesis, Its Derivations from Origen, and Early Patristic Interpretations Related to Origen’s’, SP 44 (2010), 259-74. 63 ‘Paradise’ means the restoration of human nature to its original condition, which is realised thanks to the assumption of humanity by Christ (in ipso humana natura restaurata est); it is the uncorrupted, original state of human nature, such as it was in God’s plan: humanae naturae integritas. 64 Postremo uniuersalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Et hic est finis omnium uisibilium et inuisibilium, quoniam omnia uisibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione. 65 Periph. 5.887AC. The link between human and cosmic nature in Eriugena is examined by Willemien Otten, ‘Suspended between Cosmology and Anthropology’, in A Companion to Eriugena (2019), 189-212. 66 Periph. 5.888A. 67 Prin 1.4.5; 1.2.2. See my ‘The Logos/Nous One-Many between ‘Pagan’ and Christian Platonism’, SP 102 (2021), 11-44. 68 See my ‘Logos/Nous’ (2021), 11-44.

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in his homily on the Johannine Prologue as well (esp. 7-10): all realities, even the inanimate, ‘live in the Logos’ (10). In the same work he speaks of human nature’s ‘restoration’ and ‘deification’ by grace (13). Eriugena, like Origen and Nyssen, posited not only creation (through the Mind of God as noetic cosmos) but also apokatastasis as depending on Christ, who has assumed every creature. When God’s Logos assumed humanity, it assumed every creature (omnem creaturam); therefore, all humanity’s salvation and restoration (saluauit et restaurauit) implies the restoration (restaurauit) of the whole creation.69 Here, restauratio, restauro, and restituo, which repeatedly appear, correspond to ἀποκατάστασις and ἀποκαθίστημι, while reversio and (mostly) reditus render ἐπιστροφή. Eriugena quotes70 a long passage from Περὶ Ἀρχῶν 3, commenting on 1Cor. 15:26-8. Origen is speaking of the telos, de consummatione mundi, when God will be ‘all in all’: the outcome Eriugena envisaged for his movement ‘from God to God’. God will be all goods for every single creature, once they are purified from their vices: rationabilis mens expurgata ab omni uitiorum faece. Given this purification, Origen can say that evil will remain nowhere, as God has no evil: nusquam malum. Omnia enim et Deus est, cui iam non adiacet malum. This will be the restoration of the original state of humanity: rerum exitus collatus initiis restituet illum statum. Origen, followed by Eriugena, stresses that God will be not only in few or in many, but in all, once evil and death have vanished: Et non in paucis aliquibus, uel pluribus, sed ut in omnibus ipse sit omnia, cum … nusquam omnino malum. Tunc uere Deus omnia in omnibus erit. Harmony and unity will reign, without disagreement (ibid. 930C).71 The devil will not perish in his substance, which is good since he is a creature of God; only his perverse will shall vanish: Propterea nanque [sic] etiam nouissimus inimicus diabolus, qui mors appellatur, destrui dicitur, ut neque ultra triste sit aliquid, ubi mors non est, neque diuersum sit, ubi non est inimicus. Destrui sane nouissimus inimicus ita intelligendus est, non ut substantia eius, quae a Deo facta est, pereat, sed ut propositum et uoluntas inimica, quae non a Deo sed ab ipso processit, intereat. Destruetur ergo, non ut non sit, sed ut inimicus et mors non sit. Nihil enim omnipotenti impossibile est, nec insanabile est aliquid factori suo. 69 Totus itaque mundus in Uerbo Dei unigenito, incarnato, inhumanato adhuc specialiter restitutus est, in fine uero mundi generaliter et universaliter in eodem restaurabitur. Quod enim specialiter in seipso perfecit, generaliter in omnibus perficiet. Non dico in omnibus hominibus solummodo, sed in omni sensibili creatura. Ipsum siquidem Dei Uerbum, quando accepit humanam naturam, nullam creatam substantiam praetermisit, quam non acceperit. Accipiens igitur humanam naturam, omnem creaturam accepit. Ac per hoc, si humanam naturam, quam accepit, saluauit et restaurauit, omnem profecto creaturam uisibilem et inuisibilem restaurauit. 70 Periph. 5.929A-930D. 71 Ut sint omnes unum, sicut et Pater cum Filio unum … ubi omnes unum sunt, iam diuersitas non erit.

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Eriugena cites Origen, who in the last sentence, as I argued, ‘corrected’ Plato who deemed some people ἀνίατοι and non-saveable.72 Origen linked creation (factori suo) to restoration (nec insanabile) as Eriugena does: the nature of sinners, created by God, will be saved and happy; their evil will, not created by God, will perish. Both remembered Matt. 15:13: ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted’: what was not created by God will be destroyed. Hence the movement ‘from God to God’; from God the Creator to God the Saviour and telos of all. The names of the demons and the devil, such as ‘enemy’ and ‘death’, denote, not their nature, but their perverse will;73 Eriugena also adduces Dionysius in support of the thesis that demons are not evil by nature.74 Demons are evil on account of their weakness, instability, and neglectfulness75 (the last, a serious fault for Origen too). As Ambrose stated, not even the evilness of the demons is eternal: daemonum autem malitiam non esse perpetuam beatus Ambrosius in expositione in Lucam apertissime docet (Periph. 5.928B). Otherworldly torments will affect the perverse will of the wicked and demons, which will be unable to be satisfied or to harm: this will eliminate their evilness and impiety.76 God punishes sin, which he did not create, but does not condemn his own creatures: Eriugena repeatedly insists on this distinction in Periphyseon,77 especially in 5.923CD.78 Rational creatures will thus be purified and restored to God, who, liberans ex delicto separansque quod fecit, … puniri sinit quod non fecit. … causa totius peccati est, siue in angelo siue in homine, propria peruersaque uoluntas. … Est autem intimae uirtutis defectus … Punitur itaque irrationabilis motus peruersae uoluntatis in 72 See my ‘The Philosophical Stance of Allegory in Stoicism and its Reception in Platonism, “Pagan” and Christian: Origen in Dialogue with the Stoics and Plato’, IJCT 18 (2011), 335-71. 73 Periph. 5.930D-931A. 74 Periph. 5.931A-935B. In a probable reminiscence of Maximus the Confessor, who wanted to honour with silence the doctrine of apokatastasis, Eriugena invites readers to honour with silence (silentio honorifica) the eschatological mysteries (951C). 75 Periph. 5.934BC: Docet [Dionysius] etiam daemones non secundum quod sunt malos esse, sed secundum quod non sunt, mali dicuntur. Et quid in eis malum dicitur? Aperte declarat, infirmitatem uidelicet eorum, qua seruare suum nolunt principium (summum scilicet bonum ex quo sunt), neglegentiam quoque eorum. 76 De diabolicarum uero peruersarum uoluntatum supplicio quid aliud intelligendum, praeter illarum aeternam refrenationem suaeque impietatis aeternum interitum? (Periph. 5.937B). 77 Periph. 5.923CD; 927BC; 943D-944A; 950CD; 955D; 960. 78 Si Dei Uerbum humanitatem accepit, non partem eius, quae nulla est, sed uniuersaliter totam accepit. Et si totam accepit, totam in se ipso restituit, quoniam in ipso restaurata sunt omnia et nihil humanitatis, quam totam accepit, perpetuis poenis insolubilibusque malitiae (quam tormentorum calamitas sequitur) nexibus obnoxium reliquit. In nullo enim damnat Deus quod fecit, sed quod non fecit punit. Nam et praeuaricantium angelorum natura non punit nec puniturus est, illorum uero malitiam et impietatem nociuamque potentiam, quemadmodum et malorum hominum eis adhaerentium, extinguet. Et fortassis illorum erit aeterna damnatio suae malitiae impietatisque uniuersalis abolitio.

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natura rationabili, ipsa natura … bona, salua, integra, illaesa, incontaminata, incorruptibilis, impassibilis, immutabilis, participatione summi boni permanente, ubique beata gloriosissimaque in electis, in quibus deificatur, optima in reprobis quos continet, ne illorum substantialis proprietas in nihilum redigatur, hoc est, ne naturalium bonorum … patiatur interitum. Gaudet [sc. natura rationabilis] contemplatione ueritatis in his qui perfectam beatitudinem possident, gaudet administratione substantialitatis in his qui suorum delictorum poenas soluunt, in omnibus tota perfecta, suo similis creatori. Cunctis uitiorum sordibus … purgata, in pristinum conditionis suae statum restituta reuertetur, redemptoris et susceptoris sui gratia reuocata. … Nulla malitia, nulla mors, nulla miseria … relinquetur. Omnia quippe uisibilia et inuisibilia in suis causis quiescent. Sola uero illicita uoluntas malorum hominum et angelorum, sauciata prauorum sui morum, in se ipsa torquebitur. … salua et integra et incontaminata omnique contraria passione libera erit et semper erit humana natura.79

In Christ, human nature is renovated, unified, spiritualised, and restored (Periph. 990AB; 1007C). Christ, by receiving humanity, healed it: eam totam accepit totamque sanauit.80 Eriugena, like Origen, grounded his argument in a strong ontological monism, the same that Augustine arguably picked up from Origen in his anti-Manichaean polemic:81 evil (evilness) cannot be coeternal with the Good, because the Good is God, and only God/Good is ontologically subsistent, whereas evil is a privation of Good and being. The argument from the infinity of the Good and the finitude of evil was employed by Nyssen,82 and Eriugena resumes it: if God is the Good and is infinite and evil is finite, evil cannot subsist eternally (Periph. 924B): ‘for goodness circumscribes evilness and consumes it, as life death, happiness misery, virtue vices and their causes’, in Daniel’s prophecy (here applied to apokatastasis), ‘that transgression may be consumed, sin may come to an end, iniquity may be abolished, and eternal justice may be established’. Eriugena often adduces as argument for the final vanishing of evil its ontological non-subsistence, a metaphysical pillar for the apokatastasis doctrine in Origen, Nyssen, Evagrius, and Dionysius. Evilness is not a substance, accident, or power (neque substantia est, neque naturale accidens, neque uirtus), but a privation (per priuationem): it its nothingness (nihil est, Periph. 5.946C). God does not even know evil,83 as Origen already taught. 79 Periph. 5.944A-946A. See also 5.973B: the eventual restoration rules out the permanence of evilness. 80 Periph. 1002A. In. 5.1001D-1002A, the fact that the whole people of Israel was liberated from the Egyptian captivity (omnes unanimiter … fugisse et nemine excepto de manibus crudelissimae potestatis liberatos fuisse) is taken as the symbol of the liberation of all humanity from evil and its restoration, totius humanitatis reditus ad pristinum naturae statum. 81 Argument in my ‘Origen in Augustine: A Paradoxical Reception’, Numen 60 (2013), 280-307. 82 Sources and discussion in my ‘Epektasis’ (2018). 83 Diuinus itaque animus nullum malum nullamque malitiam nouit. Nam si nosset, substantialiter extitissent … iam uero et causa carent ac per hoc in numero conditarum naturarum essentialiter non sunt. … Illorum substantias omneque quod in eis fecit et in ipso subsistit, nouit [sc.

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Eriugena distinguishes two stages in the restoration of humanity: the first is the ‘restoration [restauratio] of the whole human nature in Christ’, its return into Paradise; the other is the beatitudo and deificatio of those who will ascend to God: the latter is described as eternal peace in the contemplation of truth.84 However, the return of all creatures to their primordial causes and thence to God is also described as peace and rest in Periph. 5.991C.85 All human nature, saved in Christ, will return to the original condition of its creation, ‘to the dignity of the divine image’ (Periph. 5.948D): apokatastasis will indeed be the restoration of the divine image (as Origen and Nyssen described it).86 The blessed will cross the boundaries of nature ‘in a superessential manner’ to reach the divinity itself, and to be ‘one and the same thing in it and with it’ (ibid.). Eriugena distinguishes the restoration of humanity to the angelic state from which it fell (reditus ipsius generaliter per se ipsam in angelicum statum quem deseruit) and the transformation of humans into God by grace (dono diuinae gratiae… in ipsum Deum transferentur).87 From Greek Patristics Eriugena inherited the notion of telos as deification. Restoration and salvation is granted to all humans – indeed to all creatures – but what about deification?88 Eriugena Deus]. Quod autem illorum peruersis motibus naturae ab ipso substitutae accidit, omnino ignorat, Periph. 5.925D. 84 Periph. 5.979B: Qui reditus duobus modis consideratur, quorum unus est, qui totius humanae naturae docet in Christo restaurationem, alter uero, qui non solam ipsam restaurationem generaliter perspicit, uerum etiam eorum qui in ipsum Deum ascensuri sunt, beatitudinem et deificationem. Aliud enim est in paradisum redire, aliud de ligno uitae comedere … ligni autem uitae, quod est Christus, fructus est beata uita, pax aeterna in contemplatione ueritatis, quae proprie dicitur deificatio. See also the words of the teacher ibid. 1001B: reditus omnium, quae in suas causas reuersura sunt, quando mundus iste sensibilis soluetur et mundus ille intelligibilis … in Christo implebitur, dupliciter intelligitur. Est enim generalis et est specialis. The ‘general return’ is the restoration of all creatures to the principle of their creation; the ‘special return’ is the restoration of those who non solum ad primordia naturae reuocabuntur, sed etiam ultra omnem naturalem dignitatem in causa omnium (quae Deus est) reditus sui finem constituent. 85 Quando omnis sensibilis creatura in intelligibilem et omnis intelligibilis in causas, et causae in causarum causam (quae Deus est) mutabuntur aeternaque requie gaudebunt ineffabilique claritate fulgebunt et sabbatizabunt. 86 Periph. 5.952C: anima rationalis ad imaginem Dei facta in eum, cuius imago est et similitudo, reuertetur; 957C: anima itaque ad imaginem Dei facta, sicut numquam corrumpitur per se ipsam, ita numquam punitur. 87 Periph. 5.949AB. This concept is further explained ibid. 950A: ultra omnes naturales uirtutes iustorum beatitudo per conditoris gratiam exaltabitur; 951B: homines mortales per naturam … in immortalem Deum mutabuntur per gratiam. The passage from mortality to immortality is not reserved to the deified alone. 88 Omnes nos, qui homines sumus, nemine excepto, in spiritalibus corporibus et integritate naturalium bonorum resurgemus, et in antiquitatem primae conditionis nostrae reuertemus, sed non omnes immutabimur in deificationis gloriam, quae superat omnem naturam et paradisum. Itaque sicut aliud est generaliter resurgere, aliud specialiter immutari, ita aliud est in paradisum redire, aliud de ligno uitae comedere … Non omnes plane, sed soli qui mundum et carnem uicerunt … ex gratia siquidem et natura omnibus hominibus communiter praestatur in paradisum redire, soli vero gratia solis deificatis de ligno uitae edere (ibid.). Periph. 5.980B: those who will

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remarks upon the rarity of the term deificatio in Latin and its equivalence to θέωσις (Periph. 5.1015BC), and clarifies the difference between restitutio (ἀποκατάστασις) and deificatio (θέωσις), the culmination of the return to God in Eriugena’s movement ‘from God to God’: aliud est eandem humanam naturam in suam gratiam quam peccando perdiderat (diuinae uidelicet imaginis dignitatem) restitui, aliud uniuscuiusque electorum propriam in bonis meritis conscientiam … super omnem humanitatis uirtutem deificari.89 Eriugena uses the imagery of the Sabbath in Periph. 5.1016A: restoration is the generale sabbatum in omnibus diuinis operibus; deification will be reserved to the angels and the elect qua speciale sabbatum sabbatorum. Apokatastasis is universal, for all humanity, and all creation, while θέωσις is for the elect, but universal ἐπιστροφή also culminates in θέωσις: is there a tension between ‘pagan’ ἐπιστροφή and Christian θέωσις, as possibly different from apokatastasis? To support apokatastasis, Eriugena cites Luke’s parables of the prodigal son, the lost sheep, and the lost drachma (1001B-6A). All these represent lost humanity, restored by Christ, and show that ‘not a part of humanity, but all of it will be restored in Christ’ (Periph. 5.1005CD). Eriugena recovers Origen’s exegesis, followed by Nyssen and the Dialogue of Adamantius.90 He also cites the prophecy in Ez. 16:55, of the future restoration of Sodom and Samaria, in which ἀποκαθίστημι occurs thrice in the LXX and is translated restituo thrice: Sodom et filiae eius restituentur sicut fuerunt a principio et Samaria et filiae eius restituentur sicut erant a principio, et tu et filiae tuae restituemini. Apokatastasis, in Eriugena’s view, is universal salvation. He took over the allegory of the Temple used by Nyssen at the end of De anima in its support:91 for both, all humanity will eventually enter the Temple. Nobody will be excluded; however, not all will occupy the same place inside, as Eriugena stresses.92 Eriugena’s spatial order corresponds to the temporal order contemplated by be deified are those who have won the world and flesh: soli qui mundum et carnem uicerint. Eating the tree of life results from grace and is reserved for those deified: sola uero gratia solis deificatis. 89 Periph. 5.948D. The same difference is repeated in Periph. 5.978D-979A, between totius humanae naturae in Christo restaurationem and eorum qui in ipsum Deum ascensuri sunt beatitudinem et deificationem. Eriugena distinguishes between naturae restauratio and electorum deificatio (979C). 90 As argued in my Apokatastasis (2013), 393, 410, 435 on Nyssen, and ‘Dialogue of Adamantius’ (2012-13) for the Dialogue. 91 See my ‘Christian Soteriology’ (2007); further in ‘Gregory on the Soul’ (2018). 92 Periph. 6.981AC: eschatology in mystica Salomonis templi aedificatione praefiguratum est. Omnes siquidem, nemine excluso, et boni et mali … in extremas porticus intrabant, ibique negotia sua peragere sinebantur; soli uero sacerdotes et Leuitae in porticum Sacerdotum et in porticum Salomonis ingrediebantur. Deinde sacerdotes loti et purgati … in sanctum templum exterius, ubi erant panes propositionis et candelabra, introibant, nulli uero ultra uelum in Sancta Sanctorum … nisi summo sacerdoti introire licebat. Ex hoc datur intelligi, quod omnes homines intra terminos naturalis paradisi, veluti intra quoddam templum, unumquemque in suo ordine contineri, soli uero in isto sanctificati interiora intrabunt, et iterum in sancta sanctorum, ueluti in interiora

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Origen and Nyssen, according to whom all rational creatures will be restored to God, each in its order: first the saints, then the sinners, in various degrees of sin, finally the devil, God’s creature too – as Origen and Nyssen envisaged. From God to God. For Eriugena, the saved will enjoy different levels of glory, from the outer to the inner parts of the Temple, up to the Holy of Holies, accessible to those who have achieved union with Christ, the High Priest. Eriugena may think of a process of sanctification inside that temple, in the eschatological dimension, a dynamic perspective as in Nyssen: those who are not yet sanctified will be sanctified and then enter the inner part of the Temple. This interpretation is suggested by Eriugena’s claim: ‘sanctified in Him, they will enter the inner parts’ (in isto sanctificati interiora intrabunt). Now, Christ sanctifies all humans as propitiatorium, offering his own life ‘for the purification and redemption of all humanity, without exclusion … there is nobody whom He did not redeem, and thereby save and sanctify [in nullo reliquit quod non redemerit et redimendo saluauit et sanctificauit], since Christ is the redemption, salvation, purification, illumination, and perfection of all humanity, generally and in each single human [et perfectio uniuersae humanitatis in omnibus et singulis]’ (Periph. 5.981D). To receive perfection and sanctification, faith and adhesion to Christ are necessary, but in his Homily on the Johannine Prologue Eriugena observes that those who receive Christ are deified, and ‘to those who do not receive him God offers the occasion to receive him in the future. For nobody can deprive anyone of the possibility of believing in the Son of God and of becoming children of God, since this is grounded in human freewill and in the help of Grace’ (20). In Periph. 5.984B Eriugena insists that all will be deified: Christ ‘omnia et ambit uirtute, disponit prouidentia, regit iustitia, ornat gratia, continet aeternitate, implet sapientia, perficit deificatione. Quoniam ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso et ad ipsum sunt omnia’. Πρόοδος is from Christ, ἐπιστροφή to Christ and both are universal: Christ ‘perfects all with deification’. Eriugena cites Nyssen, to the effect that deification will be universal: Gregorius similiter et incunctanter astruit mutationem corporis tempore resurrectionis in animam, animae in intellectum, intellectus in Deum. Ac sic “omnia in omnibus Deus” erit, sicut aer uertitur in lucem (Periph. 5.987C). This is echoed in the conclusion of the last book of Periphyseon: ut in nullo appareat nisi solus Deus, quemadmodum in aere purissimo nihil aliud arridet nisi sola lux (Periph. 5.1021B). God will shine in all, when every nous is deified. For Origen too, all will be deified, and Eriugena quotes with approval a passage from the third book of Origen’s Commentary on Romans, which supports this theory: Audiat beatum Origenem in libro III in epistolam ad Romanos: “Ego dixi: Dii estis et filii excelsi,” et addidit “omnes”. Quae adiectio omne interiorum, ipsi qui in summo pontifice, Christo uidelicet, sunt, et unum cum ipso et in ipso facti sunt introducentur.

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simul sub hoc titulo humanum connexuit genus … sub mysterio de futuris praedictum … “ecce enim deleo sicut nubem iniquitates tuas”, ut uideatur delens eum secundum hoc quod homo est, post haec facere eum deum, tunc cum erit Deus “omnia in omnibus” (Periph. 5.922CD). Immediately after (Periph. 5.922D-23B), Eriugena cites De hominis opificio by Nyssen, called ‘Gregory the Theologian’, on the unity of human nature. In 942AD, he parallels the unity of human and that of the divine nature (an idea typical of Nyssen93): this parallel returns in the discussion of the eschatological return to unity in 953A.94 Asserting the unity of humanity is crucial in that, if humanity is a unity, Christ by assuming it has assumed and sanctified the whole of it, not only a part (Periph. 5.984A). The order in the access to salvation is based on one’s conduct in this life.95 The eventual apokatastasis will be beyond all times and all aeternitates (αἰῶνες), as Origen taught,96 God being ‘supereternal’. Apokatastasis will be characterised by the return of all to God, when God will be all in all, when all genera and species have returned to their causae primordiales, the Ideas in the mind of God, and these to God. At that final stage, deification itself seems to be universal. Deification is ‘becoming God’ and ‘being’ God: In ipso … homo efficitur Deus: ipse est; it is a return to God, the original condition of all: Primordialis conditio: ipse Deus.97 This return is made possible, in Eriugena’s view, as in Origen’s, by Christ’s incarnation: Tota itaque humanitas in ipso, qui eam totam assumpsit, in pristinum reuersura est statum, in Uerbo Dei uidelicet incarnato.98 Here Eriugena uses the lexicon of reversion or ἐπιστροφή (revertorreversio), speaking of the apokatastasis of all humanity to God. God alone is eternal: evilness, death and torments could never be coeternal with God.99 Eriugena uses Origen’s syllogism that death cannot be coeternal with life/Christ and will be annihilated (C.Rom. 5.7, a work extensively quoted in Periphyseon). Christ liberates all humanity from the death of the body and of the intellect: Non solum generaliter mors corporis, uerum etiam mors mentis destruetur.100 Like Origen, Eriugena reads the destruction of death in 1Cor. 15:26 93 For this theological tenet and its use in Gregory’s arguments, see my Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2016), 172-89. 94 In simplicem quandam unitatem adunabimur. … Oportebat siquidem imaginem unius ac summae Trinitatis, quae in se ipsa inseparabilis et simplex et incomposita est, in unitatem et inseparabilem simplicitatem redigi. 95 In paradiso itaque humanae naturae unusquisque locum suum secundum proportionem conuersationis suae in hac uita possidebit. 96 ‘Aἰώνιος and αἰών in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa’, SP 47 (2010), 57-62. 97 Hom. Joh. 23.9; Periph. 5.38 respectively. 98 Periph. 5.36.978D. 99 Periph. 5.926A-927A. See my ‘Time and Eternity’, in The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Philosophy, ed. Mark Edwards (forthcoming). 100 Periph. 5.1002D-1003A; cf. 5.985D.

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in reference to spiritual death. Evilness and torments cannot be coeternal with God101; if the damned were tormented eternally without being consumed, they and the world could never return to their primordial causes and thence to God, who could never be ‘all in all’.102 Thus, no movement ‘from God to God’. All creatures must return to their primordial, paradigmatic causes, and thence to God, also because no creature of God can be annihilated. Commenting on Mark 13:31, ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my logoi will not pass away’, Eriugena also rejects the possibility that God’s creatures will be reduced to nothing: quorsum caelum et terra transibunt? Numquid in nihilum? – Absit… Nihilum autem nunc dico absentiam et priuationem omnium quae sunt et quae non sunt, in quod nulla creatura et uisibilis et inuisibilis occasura sit. Rather, heaven and earth will return to their primordial causes (Periph. 5.887BC). Origen, as Eriugena knew, had already commented on Mark 13:31 in Cels. 5.22: God created all creatures ‘that they might exist’ (Wis. 1:13-4) and the logoi of God’s creatures will never pass away, since they are forms of the species of the Logos, who will never pass away. So, Origen ruled out the annihilation of God’s creatures, especially in reference to the devil. Satan, identified with ‘the last enemy, death’ (1Cor. 15:26), ‘will be destroyed, not so as to cease to exist, but so that he may no longer be an enemy and death’ (Princ. 3.6.5). What will disappear is Satan’s rebellious will; what will be saved is God’s creature, who will no longer be opposed to God. The destruction of the last enemy is the destruction ‘not of the substance created by God, but of the inclination and hostile will that stemmed, not from God, but from the enemy himself’ (ibidem). This distinction between a creature’s substance, which cannot perish because created by God, and its evil will, which was not created by God and will perish, was taken over by Eriugena, who cited Princ. 3.6.5 ad verbum,103 adding the glossa diabolus after novissimus inimicus, or finding this reading in his manuscripts. Eriugena maintains that matter is made of qualities and to these it must revert, as all creatures to their logoi. This conception of matter as the concourse of qualities, which are intelligible, derives from Nyssen, who thereby explained how God, who is intelligible, created matter. This solution surfaces in De hominis opificio and Apologia in Hexaëmeron:104 Eriugena translated the former, as 101 Impietas quam superbiendo attraxerat [the devil] penitus peribit, ne diuinae bonitati coaeterna fieri possit, 941B. 102 Periph. 5.935C. 103 Periph. 5.100.929A-930D (3165-80 Jeauneau), discussed thoroughly in my Apokatastasis (2013), 797-8. 104 See Cinzia Arruzza, ‘La matière immatérielle chez Grégoire de Nysse’, FZPhTh 54 (2007), 215-23; Ilaria Ramelli, ‘The Dialogue of Adamantius: A Document of Origen’s Thought? Part One’, SP 52 (2012), 71-98; ‘Part Two’, SP 56 (2013), 227-73; Anna Marmodoro, ‘Gregory of Nyssa on the Creation of the World’, in ead. and Brian Prince (eds), Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2015), 94-110.

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mentioned. He explains that the primordial causes to which all things must revert are the logoi of all things that dwell in God’s Logos, rationes in Uerbo Dei constitutas (along Origen’s lines of the logoi in the Logos105) and contain all substances and their properties. From these logoi all processed (processerunt), and to these logoi all will revert (reuersurus, Periph. 5.887AC). Again on the basis of Origen, Eriugena claims that the logoi of the Logos (uerba Uerbi) are the incommutabiles rerum rationes in Sapientia Dei, in that in God’s Logos ‘ineffable and incommunicable logoi, so to say, remain eternally. Wisdom and Logos are the first epinoiai of Christ, as Origen claimed, and the Logos contains in itself the logoi of all things. This Middle Platonic notion, also thanks to Philo, had entered Christian thought with Clement, Origen, and Nyssen, and was still found in Maximus the Confessor.106 As pointed out above, Eriugena sometimes distinguishes the restoration (restitutio = ἀποκατάστασις) of all humanity from the deification (deificatio = θέωσις) of the elect.107 Totius humanae naturae in Christo restaurationem differs from eorum qui in ipsum Deum ascensuri sunt beatitudinem et deificationem (Periph. 5.978D-979A), as naturae restauratio differs from electorum deificatio (Periph. 5.979C). Restoration is the ‘general Shabbat’; deification will be the ‘special supreme Shabbat’, speciale sabbatum sabbatorum for angels and the elect.108 This distinction, however, vanishes if considered from the angle of ἐπιστροφή. Beatitudo/deificatio is described as eternal peace in the contemplation of truth,109 and the restoration of all creatures to their primordial causes and to God is also described as peace and rest,110 as apokatastasis was in Origen (and in Bardaisan111). Eriugena quotes ‘St Origen’ (beatum Origenem) with approval, as seen above, on the deification of all after the purification of all sins: “Ego dixi: Dii estis et filii excelsi” et addidit “omnes”. Quae adiectio omne simul sub hoc titulo humanum connexuit genus … sub mysterio de futuris praedictum … “ecce enim deleo sicut nubem iniquitates tuas”, ut uideatur delens eum secundum hoc quod homo est, post haec facere eum deum, tunc cum erit Deus omnia in omnibus (Periph. 5.922CD). The deification of all here corresponds to God’s being ‘all in all’ in the telos. The tension between the distinction of apokatastasis and theosis and the affirmation of universal deification seems to depend on how much apokatastasis is conceived as universal reversion. 105

I. Ramelli, ‘Logos/Nous One-Many’ (2021). See my ‘Logos/Nous One-Many’ (2021). 107 Periph. 5.948D: aliud est humanam naturam in suam gratiam quam peccando perdiderat (diuinae uidelicet imaginis dignitatem) restitui, aliud uniuscuiusque electorum propriam in bonis meritis conscientiam … super omnem humanitatis uirtutem deificari. 108 Periph. 5.1016A. 109 Periph. 5.979B. 110 Periph. 5.991C. 111 See my ‘Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation’, HTR 102 (2009), 135-68. 106

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Eriugena, while distinguishing salvation and deification, in many places, as we are seeing, insists that deification applies to all humans, who are all saved and ascend to God in Christ, whose reditus is a deificatio: Exitus ergo eius a Patre humanatio est et reditus eius ad Patrem hominis, quem accepit, deificatio et in altitudinem divinitatis assumptio. Solus ille descendit … omnes, quos salvavit, in ipso ascendunt, nunc per fidem in spe, in fine uero per speciem in re.112 Eriugena applies the exitus-reditus scheme to Christ and all humanity: Christ’s πρόοδος (exitus) in his inhumanation; his ἐπιστροφή (reditus) to God is the deification of all humanity. All will return to God; consequently, God will be ‘all in all’ (1Cor. 15:28), once all genera and species have returned to their original causes (causae primordiales), and these to God. Here, deification seems to be universal, given the reversion scheme. All rational creatures will be transferred to God.113 Eriugena’s five theoriae remind me of Evagrius’s list of five successive θεωρίαι, the penultimate and last of which are the contemplation of the Judgment and, afterwards, of God’s mercy.114 Like Evagrius’, Eriugena’s five theoriae (quintuplex rationalis creaturae theoria) cover the history of salvation: 1) the original condition of humanity, wanted by God at creation (in prima eius conditione); 2) the historical existence of each human (in processionibus ipsius in hanc uitam mortalem per singulorum hominum ex corporibus generationem); 3) the return of all humanity to its angelic state (in reditu ipsius generaliter per seipsam in angelicum statum); 4) the restoration of humans (ad communem suae naturae integritatem redire) and their deification (ac deinde dono diuinae gratiae super omnia, post se relinquentes omnia, in ipsum Deum transferentur); 5) the contemplation (speculatio) of all the goods that God’s generosity will bestow on all. Eriugena thus delineates a trajectory ‘from God to God’. Eriugena suggests that all will be deified also when observing, as seen, that ‘Christ perfects all with deification [omnia … perficit deificatione], because all are from him, through him, in him, and return to him [ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso et ad ipsum sunt omnia]’ (Periph. 5.984B). Eriugena even cites Nyssen in support of the eventual universal deification and interprets it as the fulfilment of Paul’s prophecy that God will be ‘all in all’: Gregorius … astruit mutationem corporis tempore resurrectionis in animam, animae in intellectum, intellectus in Deum. Ac sic omnia in omnibus Deus erit, sicut aer uertitur in lucem.115 Gregory 112

Édouard Jeauneau, Jean Scot, Commentaire sur l’Évangile de Jean (Paris, 1972), 224-5. Periph. 5.32. 114 KG 1.27. See Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, Evagrius Ponticus’ Kephalaia Gnostika (Leiden, Atlanta, 2015), the extensive commentary on KG 1.27. 115 Periph. 5.987C. 113

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theorised the subsumption of body into soul into intellect into God, identified with the eschatological presence of God ‘all in all’.116 This was taken over by Evagrius.117 Eriugena construes Nyssen’s return path as a reditus (ἐπιστροφή). In the footsteps of Origen and Evagrius, the role of knowledge and the relation between ontological and gnoseological plane in understanding Eriugena’s grand movement ‘from God to God’ is paramount. Eriugena’s emphasis on the transcendence of God, who is beyond being,118 derives from Dionysius, and that on God’s infinity from Nyssen (both anticipated by Origen119). Finite creatures cannot have a comprehensive grasp of God: infinitus enim infinite, etiam in purgatissimis mentibus, formatur.120 Even pure souls and blessed spirits know just theophanies, i.e. God’s creatures.121 Also, as seen, finite creatures can return to God, who is infinite, via the Ideas/Forms. These are used by God to know creatures. They have an ontological and a gnoseological role, between God as Creator and Knower, respectively, and creatures. Indeed, in Periph. 1.486B-487B, Eriugena contends that only the divinity knows the creatures by contemplating them in the perfection of the primordial causes in which all things subsist in a perfect act, entelechia or perfectio naturalis.122 Created minds can know more imperfectly, in succession, and 116 I. Ramelli, ‘Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul’ (2018); ead., ‘The Reception of Paul’s Nous in Christian Platonism’, in Der νοῦς bei Paulus im Horizont griechischer und hellenistisch-jüdischer Anthropologie (Tübingen, 2021). 117 See my ‘Gregory Nyssen’s and Evagrius’ Relations’ (2017). 118 See Ilaria Ramelli, ‘The Divine as Inaccessible Object of Knowledge in Ancient Platonism: A Common Philosophical Pattern across Religious Traditions’, JHI 75.2 (2014), 167-8; ead., ‘Epopteia, epoptics in Platonism, “pagan” and Christian’, in Harold Tarrant (ed.), The Language of Inspiration in the Platonic Tradition (Bream, UK, 2020). 119 As I argue in ‘Apokatastasis and Epektasis’ (2018). 120 Comm. Ioh., ed. Jeauneau, Commentaire (1972), 182-3. 121 Comm. Ioh., ed. Jeauneau, Commentaire (1972), 122-4: Apertissime et sanctus Ambrosius et Dionysius Ariopagita [sic] absque ulla cunctatione inculcant Deum, summam Trinitatem, nulli per seipsam umquam apparuisse, numquam apparere, numquam apparituram. Apparebit itaque in theophaniis suis … Theophania autem sunt omnes creaturae visibiles et invisibiles, per quas Deus, et in quibus, saepe apparuit, et apparet, et appariturus est. Item virtutes purgatissimarum animarum et intellectuum theophaniae sunt et eis quaerentibus et diligentibus se Deus seipsum manifestat, in quibus, veluti quibusdam nubibus, rapiuntur sancti obviam Christo, sicut ait apostolus: “Rapiemur in nubibus obviam Christo,” nubes appellans altitudines clarissimas divinae theoriae, in qua semper cum Christo erunt. Hinc et Dionysius ait: “Et si quis eum, Deum videlicet, vidisse dixerit, non eum vidit, sed aliquid ab eo factum.” Ipse enim omnino invisibilis est, “qui melius nesciendo scitur,” et “cuius ignorantia vera est sapientia”. 122 ‘Entelechia is called the perfect age … the soul in Greek is called nus [νοῦς]; when it has reached a perfect age, it is called entelechia: Thus, the soul is called “perfect” after the splendour of wisdom/science.’ See also Glosae Marciani [sic], 7.10: Endelechia vocatur perfecta aetas … ideo autem dicitur anima esse filia Solis, quae gr(ece) vocatur nus, quia, dum anima ad perfectam aetatem pervenerit, endelechia vocatur. Perfecta igitur anima a claritate scientiae dicitur; Adnotationes, 10.16-22, with mention of the relevant Platonic authorities, Plato himself and Calcidius: Entelechia, ut Calcidius in expositione Timei Platonis exponit, perfecta aetas interpretatur… Entelechia vero quasi entos êlikia, hoc est intima aetas. Generalem quippe mundi animam

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potentially. After its fall, each soul ‘loses all ornaments of wisdom’, but the situation can improve thanks to engagement in study (17.8-9).123 This view is closer to Origen’s than to Augustine’s (at least from the latter’s anti-Pelagian phase onwards). The reditus of all things to their causes to God is the same process that human minds accomplish. Discursive ratio and intuitive intellectus (a Platonic distinction) can return to the universal cause of all realities, that is, God, in a knowing process, in which the real agent of knowledge is God (nam si inuenitur [Deus], non ipse qui quaerit [homo], sed Ipse qui quaeritur [Deus], inuenit). This idea, I suspect, stems from Origen (Comm. Cant. 1.1.14). The gnoseological return described by Eriugena parallels the ontological return of all things to God: ‘all realities emanate from one font of ousia and into it they return again in a circular movement, by nature’ (Periph. 1.494B): this describes the exitus–reditus scheme, πρόοδος–ἐπιστροφή.124 From God to God. The human being is, as seen above, the pivot of universal reditus, because Eriugena identifies the intelligible world not only with Christ-Logos but with the human, qua image of God in its intellectual soul125 (not the soul’s inferior faculties or the body). Since the human intellect reflects God’s intellect, it also coincides with the intelligible world, all the ideas or forms of all realities as subsisting in God’s Mind (Christ). For Eriugena, the body of the Logos is not only humanity, but – as in Origen – the world (cosmic Christ) and Scripture, both being the ‘body of Christ’, as Eriugena explains in his commentary on John.126 Entelechiam Plato nominat, ex qua speciales animae sive racionabiles sint sive racione carentes in singulas mundane corporis partes, sole administrante vel potius procreante, procedunt, ut Platonici perhibent, ed. Ramelli, Tutti i commenti (2006), 106. 123 Glosae Marciani, ed. Ramelli, Tutti i commenti (2006), 788, 794. 124 Édouard Jeauneau, ‘The Neoplatonic Themes of Processio and Reditus in Eriugena’, Dionysius 15 (1991), 3-29; David Puxley, ‘The Role of the Human in the Procession and Return of the Cosmos from Plotinus to Eriugena’, Dionysius 24 (2006), 175-208. 125 Mundum igitur superiorem, quem ad imaginem et similitudinem suam condidit, id est humanam naturam, Pater dilexit … ideo homo “cosmos” vocatur quoniam ornatus est ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei quae, vel solum vel maxime, in anima intelligetur, non mundus. Et quae creatura tam ornata est quam ea quae ad imaginem creatoris condita? Ad hoc itaque dilexit Deus mundum, ut pro eo tradidit filium, ut omnis credens in eum non pereat, sed habeat vitam, non temporalem, sed aeternam (Comm. Ioh., ed. Jeauneau, Commentaire [1972], 230-1). 126 Potest etiam per calciamentum Christi visibilis creatura et sancta scriptura significari … Habitus quippe verbi est creatura visibilis, quae eum aperte praedicat, pulchritudinem suam nobis manifestans. Habitus quoque eius facta est divina scriptura, quae eius mysteria continet… Duo pedes verbi sunt, quorum unus est naturalis ratio visibilis creaturae, alter spiritalis intellectus divinae scripturae. Unus tegitur sensibilis mundi sensibilibus formis, alter divinorum apicum, hoc est scripturarum, superficie. Duobus quippe modis divinae legis expositores incarnationem Dei verbi insinuant. Quorum unus est, qui eius incarnationem ex virgine, qua in unitatem substantiae humanam naturam sibi copulavit, edocet. Alter est, qui ipsum verbum quasi incarnatum, hoc est, incrassatum litteris rerumque visibilium formis et ordinibus asserit; Comm. Ioh., ed. Jeauneau, Commentaire (1972), 154-5. See also Willemien Otten, ‘Anthropology between Imago mundi and

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Within the process of reversion to God mediated by the human being, the liberal arts play a core role. Their structural norms are not conventional, but derive from studium, the engagement with which human reason discovers in nature the laws established by God. Among the seven arts, (Platonic) dialectica attends to this task primarily, being the art of the discovery of the true forms of things, and of the thought and language that conceive and reproduce them. Dialectica is the epistemological foundation of human knowledge, and establishes the norms which the other arts must follow to serve the truth. Therefore, it leads back to the only Cause: to God.127 Eriugena’s notion of dialectica is Platonic, as is clear from his division of dialectica into divisio/diairetica, which follows the derivation of multiplicity from unity, and resolutio/analytica, which resolves every multiplicity and diversity into identity and universality.128 Dialectica thereby indicates the metaphysical structure of reality: processio from the unity of the divine cause129 to multiplicity, and reditus to unity:130 from God to God. Not by chance, Schrimpf, discussing Eriugena’s Periphyseon and the conception of sciences in his day, deliberately inserted passages from his commentary on Martianus, especially Book 4 on dialectica.131 Likewise, it is no accident that Hauréau observed that Eriugena’s commentary on Martianus bristles with signs of Eriugena’s dialectical prowess.132 Eriugena illustrates the dialectical (Platonic) processes of division and union,133 and again commenting on Martianus he proves that he is aware of the role played by Plato in the

Imago Dei: The Place of Johannes Scottus Eriugena in the Tradition of Christian Thought’, SP 43 (2006), 459-72. 127 Periph. 4.748D-749A; 869D-870C. 128 Expositiones in hierarchiam coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CChr.CM 31 (Turnhout, 1975), 7.2.184C-185A, pp. 106-7. 129 Eriugena was profoundly influenced by Dionysius, who conceived of God as τριαδικὴ ἑνάς. Dionysius, in turn, was influenced by Origen in his definition of God as μονὰς καὶ ἑνάς. On the conception of unity and trinity in God according to both Eriugena and Dionysius, see Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Unity and Trinity in Dionysius and Eriugena’, Hermathena 157 (1994), 1-20, who also points out Proclus’ influence upon Dionysius’s conception of unity. 130 On Eriugena’s notion of dialectica, see Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Negati affirmatio’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 83 (1976), 237-65; id., ‘Sprache und Sache’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 38 (1984), 523-43; id. (ed.), Begriff und Metapher: Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena (Heidelberg, 1990). 131 Gangolf Schrimpf, Das Werk des Johannes Scottus Eriugena im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsverständnisses seiner Zeit: Eine Einführung zu ‘Periphyseon’ (Münster, 1982). 132 Barthélemy Hauréau, ‘Commentaire de Jean Scot Érigène sur Martianus Capella’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale 20 (1862), 1-39, esp. 9-39. 133 Genus est multarum formarum substantialis unitas. Secundum quosdam sic diffinitur genus: sursum est generalissimum genus ultra quod nullus intellectus potest ascendere, quod a Grecis οὐσία, a nobis essentia. Est enim quaedam essentia quae comprehendit omnem naturam cuius participatione consistit omne quod est, et ideo dicitur generalissimum genus. Descendit autem per divisionem per genera per species usque ad specialissimam speciem quae a Grecis ἄτομος dicitur, hoc est individuum vel insecabile (In Mart.157. 17, ed. Ramelli, Commenti [2006], 286).

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history of dialectica.134 Dialectica is not simply one liberal art, but the method of philosophy. Eriugena in Periphyseon remarks that human reason must investigate the four naturae (that which creates and is not created: God; that which is created and creates: rationes seminales; that which is created and does not create: all creatures; that which is not created and does not create: all creatures qua reverted to God in the end: God as telos) using the tools of dialectica, both diairetica and analytica (Per. 2.525D-26C). Eriugena’s De praedestinatione also praises dialectica and uses it actively.135 It exalts it since its inception as disputandi disciplina, quae est ueritas.136 This mater artium can reach the truth, as is guaranteed by the harmony between the ontological and gnoseological planes, which both proceed from the same diuina dispositio. In God, knowledge and ontology identify, because ‘to know and to make are one in the Godhead, since by knowing it makes, and by making it knows’ (Periph. 2.559B). This structural correspondence between the ontological and the gnoseological level is discussed in Periphyseon (e.g. 2.559B and 4.749A-C)137 and guarantees that the exercise of dialectica leads to truth, because this discipline was not invented by humans, but created by God.138 Forms of the liberal arts are embedded in human intellect, which thereby becomes creative: human nature, which is ‘that in which everything could be found [inerat]’, becomes ‘that in which everything is/was created [condita est]’.139 The process of knowledge itself is creative, and the eternal liberal arts, innate in human intellects and crowned by Dialectica, are actualised by knowing. The objects of knowledge – the intelligent disciple says – are ‘in a way created in me’. For, ‘when I imprint their phantasms in my memory, and when I treat these things within myself, I divide, I compare, and, as it were, I collect them into a certain unity, I perceive a certain knowledge of the things which are 134 Socrates primo docuit in Athenis; post eum Plato suus discipulus, qui, eruditus in doctrina Socratis magistri sui, perrexit Aegyptum. Ibi peritus in artibus Aegyptiacis, reversus in Italiam quae quondam Magna Gretia [sic] vocabatur, ubi Phitagoras [sic] summus philosophus docuit. Postquam didicit omnem doctrinam Phitagorae, reversus est iterum Athenas. Achademia [sic] interpretatur tristicia populi, in qua Plato amplificavit veram philosophiam dialecticae artis (Adn. 4.153.4, ed. Ramelli, Commenti [2006], 284). 135 See Giulio D’Onofrio, Fons Scientiae: La dialettica nell’Occidente tardo-antico (Naples, 1986), 3-152, on dialectica among the disciplines in the fourth to ninth centuries. Discussion of the main texts on dialectics in that period: 155-274; in Eriugena’s De praedestinatione, ibid. 277-320. See also my ‘Eriugena’s Commentary on Martianus in the Framework’ (2012), 269-71. 136 Ed. Goulven Madec, CChr.CM 50 (Turnhout, 1978), I.1-3, pp. 5-8. 137 Periph. 2.559B: Intellectus enim rerum veraciter ipsae res sunt, dicente sancto Dionysio: “Cognitio eorum quae sunt, ea quae sunt est”… cognitio intellectualis animae praecedit omnia quae cognoscit et omnia quae praecognoscit, ut in divino intellectu omnia causaliter, in humana vero cognitione effectualiter subsistant. 138 Διαλεκτική … non ab humanis machinationibus sit facta, sed in natura rerum, ab Auctore omnium artium, quae vere artes sunt, condita (Periph. 4.749A). 139 Periph. 4.807A. See Periphyseon: Liber quartus, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 64 (Turnhout, 2000), viii-xxiv.

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external to me being created within me’.140 Eriugena’s description goes back to Plotinus’ account of noetic knowledge: ‘The argument, then, has demonstrated that self-thinking in its proper and primary sense [κυρίως] is something which exists. Thinking is different when it is in soul … for the soul thinks itself belonging to another, but nous does so as itself … from its own nature and thought, by turning back to itself. For in seeing the real being, it sees itself, and in seeing it is an act(uality), and its actuality is itself, since intellect and intellection are but one [νοῦς γὰρ καὶ νόησις ἕν] and it thinks of the whole with the whole of itself, not just one part of itself with another’.141 In noetic knowledge, there is a circle of identification, between knower and known, as in divine knowledge – like in Eriugena’s cosmologico-salvific circle ‘from God to God’, from creation to apokatastasis, from πρόοδος to ἐπιστροφή.

140 141

Periph. 4.765C; version V. Enn. 5.3.6.1-10.

SECOND PART: COSMOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY,

AND

ETHICS

Eriugena as the Last Patristic Cosmologist Willemien OTTEN, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT According to a well-known adage, Bernard of Clairvaux is often called the last of the Fathers, an honorific that appears attributed to him based on his near biblical, virtuoso rhetorical Latin style. Following this pattern but shifting its emphasis, I argue in this paper that there is much to be said for calling Eriugena the last great patristic cosmologist, but I do so based not on style but on the content of his thought. My concrete reason for this claim is that Eriugena’s texts hark back to the days of Origen but also to those of Gregory of Nyssa and, especially, Maximus the Confessor. Standing in what seems very much the same cosmological tradition, even though he wrote in Latin rather than Greek, Eriugena ostensibly displays more affinity with Eastern than with Western authors, whose cosmologies – such as those of Augustine and, before him, Ambrose – are generally less speculative; instead they are more directly wrapped up within their biblical hermeneutics, as is evident from their form as commentaries on Genesis or the Hexaemeron. With Augustine being known for authoring a monograph on the self (Confessions) and also on God (On the Trinity) but never engaging in a single-work treatment of nature, one could argue, as this paper will consequently do, that Eriugena’s Periphyseon is best seen as the natural theology that Augustine might have written – had he ventured out beyond exegetical bounds in his treatment of nature – but never actually undertook to write. The article continues by analyzing what the upshot is of the assertion that Eriugena is the last patristic cosmologist. It does so by placing this claim in the wider context of the perennial question whether to consider Eriugena as a Western or an Eastern thinker and, in the end, comes down on the side of seeing him more as a Western thinker. Lastly, the article will discuss what, if anything, we should make of the attention to hexaemeral exegesis that so determines Eriugena’s path of return in the Periphyseon. Specifically, what could be Eriugena’s point in devoting the latter half of the Periphyseon to exegesis, if exegesis is in the end not the work’s final goal? And if exegesis is indeed not the work’s final goal, then what is?

Introduction: From Papal Censure to Papal Praise for Eriugena This article takes as its point of departure the famous label often found affixed to Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153 CE) as ‘the last of the Fathers’ (ultimus inter Patres), first stated by the editor of Bernard’s works Jean Mabillon (1632-1707 CE).1 1 See Jean Mabillon, Praefatio generalis, § II, De Bernardi sanctitate, doctrina et auctoritate in Ecclesia, PL 182, 25-6: Antequam ulterius procedamus, juvat expendere duos qui Bernardo

Studia Patristica CXXII, 127-142. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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In 1953, on the 800th anniversary of his death, Pope Pius XII called Bernard not only doctor mellifluus, likewise an expression borrowed from Mabillon but now a complimentary embellishment of the title doctor which he was officially accorded by Pope Pius VIII in 1830,2 and also, indeed, ‘the last of the fathers’, clearly an even more laudatory honorific. Specifically, with this honorific Bernard seems to altogether transcend the realm of medieval luminaries,3 which includes Anselm, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. It is as if he can step out of the medieval frame and come over to his modern readers in direct fashion, just as the Fathers seemed to be able to do in the modern intellectual movement of ‘nouvelle théologie’ which flourished around the time of Pius’ pronouncement. Yet this post World-War II theological resonance belies that the honorific ‘the last of the Fathers’ is anchored in a broader vision that the famed Maurist editor and scholar Jean Mabillon, the first modern editor of his works, lays out. By describing the Fathers’ role and their authority, Mabillon fleshes out his own motives for placing Bernard in their company, as he clearly intends to heap more ecclesial praise on him: Those are called Fathers by the Church whose sanctity, teaching, and antiquity it holds in reverence. By ‘teaching’ I mean teaching that abides by Scripture and tradition rather than philosophical reasons … Those may be called Fathers who are made venerable thanks to the authority they already commanded and to their non-philosophical approach.4

Mabillon’s seventeenth century perspective makes clear that he sees philosophy and theology as separate enterprises or journeys. Yet an actual contemporary of Bernard’s, Peter Abelard (1079-1142 CE), found such a separation far more difficult to apply, and a few centuries before Abelard, Eriugena, who is the topic of this essay, found it well-nigh impossible. From Eriugena’s early work De diuina praedestinatione (‘On Divine Predestination’) stems the famous saying that ‘true philosophy is true religion and, conversely, true philosophy is true religion’,5 which makes the equation of philosophy and theology as a next tribui solent, titulos, nempe quod sit inter doctores mellifluus, atque ultimus inter Patres, sed primis certe non impar. 2 Note that Mabillon places Bernard as flowing with honey among the Doctors of the church but does not officially proclaim him a doctor. Bernard was canonized in 1174 by Pope Alexander III. 3 Note that Mabillon says that Bernard is the last of the Fathers and not unlike the foremost of them. As he goes on Mabillon distinguishes Fathers from Doctors, which distinction I heed here. 4 See Mabillon, Praefatio generalis, 25-6: Patres vocat (sc. Ecclesia) eos, quos sanctitas, doctrina, et antiquitas commendat; doctrina, inquam, Scripturae et traditioni potius, quam rationibus philosophicis inhaerens …. Patres vero nonnisi quos recepta jamdudum auctoritas venerabiles fecit, et modus tractandi res, a philosophia alienus. Translation slightly adapted from Burcht Pranger, ‘Sic et Non: Patristic Authority Between Refusal and Acceptance: Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Bernard of Clairvaux’, in Irena Backus (ed.), Theological Innovation and the Shaping of Tradition. The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden, 1997), I 165-93, 169. 5 In this treatise on predestination, Eriugena, drawing on Augustine’s De uera religione 5.8 to the effect that one cannot share in religious ideas yet not live according to them, states:

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step relatively easy. While the Eriugena-specialists will know that we are dealing here with a citation, namely from Augustine’s De uera religione 5.8, the equation of religion and philosophy is foreshadowed already earlier. Thus, Eriugena stated in his Annotationes in Marcianum that ‘nobody enters heaven except through philosophy’.6 From this brief comparison between Bernard of Clairvaux, an acclaimed and bona fide spiritual writer who would go on to become a doctor of the church, and Eriugena, who never reached that status and, quite in contrast, was even charged with heresy by Pope Honorius III in 1225, more than three centuries after his death, the situation may seem clear enough. It would appear that for Eriugena, an undiluted strict rationalist and a proto-Abelard of sorts, faith can only be a second-hand option, a shortcut far inferior to rational argument. Thus far then, a clear and compelling picture seems to present itself before us: of the Fathers as associated with biblical, non-philosophical knowledge and of rationalist thinkers like Abelard and Eriugena whose departure from that authoritative scriptural model leads them to be dismissed as suspect. However, it seems the time may be ripe to overcome the divide between the Fathers as scripturally inflected, spiritual authors and Eriugena (leaving Abelard out of the picture) as an enlightened rationalist pur sang. This becomes apparent when we compare the following two statements by Pope Benedict XVI about these two contrary paradigmatic icons: his general audience address from June 10, 2009 on Eriugena and his subsequent address of October 21, 2009, on Bernard of Clairvaux. The slightly later address on Bernard is to some extent what one might have predicted given his aforementioned reputation as doctor mellifluus, a motif that is a running thread through this audience address. As for Bernard’s reputation as one of the Fathers, all Benedict gives us is a fairly formal summary: ‘Today I would like to talk about St Bernard of Clairvaux, called ‘the last of the Fathers’ of the Church because once again in the twelfth century he renewed and brought to the fore the important theology of the Fathers’. The content that he gives us with it, concentrating on Mary and the role of Christ, is in many ways the standard medieval theological fare one would expect from the papacy.7 If we turn to Pope Benedict XVI’s earlier audience address on Eriugena, however, the level of detail and specificity but also of sheer excitement found there is altogether surprising: Conficitur inde ueram esse philosophiam ueram religionem conuersimque ueram religionem esse ueram philosophiam (De diuina praedestinatione 1.1, ed. G. Madec, CChr.CM 50 [Turnhout, 1978], 5 lines 16-8). 6 See Iohannis Scotti Annotationes in Marcianum 57, 15, ed. Cora E. Lutz (Cambridge, 1939), 64: Nemo intra in celum nisi per philosophiam. See on this work, Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 40-5. 7 The text of Benedict XVI’s general audience on Bernard can be found here: https://w2. vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20091021.html

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John Scotus Erigena had a patristic culture, both Greek and Latin, at first hand. Indeed, he had direct knowledge of the writings of both the Latin and the Greek Fathers. He was well acquainted, among others, with the works of Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory the Great and the important Fathers of the Christian West, but he was just as familiar with the thought of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom and other Christian Fathers of the East who were equally important. He was an exceptional man who in that period had also mastered the Greek language. He devoted very special attention to St Maximus Confessor and above all to Dionysius the Areopagite. This pseudonym conceals a fifth-century ecclesiastical writer, but throughout the Middle Ages people, including John Scotus Erigena, were convinced that this author could be identified with a direct disciple of St Paul who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (17:34). Scotus Erigena, convinced of the apostolicity of Dionysius’ writings, described him as a ‘divine author’ par excellence; Dionysius’ writings were therefore an eminent source of his thought. John Scotus translated his works into Latin. The great medieval theologians, such as St Bonaventure, became acquainted with Dionysius’ works through this translation. Throughout his life John Scotus devoted himself to deepening his knowledge and developing his thought, drawing on these writings, to the point that still today it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish where we are dealing with Scotus Erigena’s thought and where, instead, he is merely proposing anew the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius.8

It is hard not to read Pope Benedict’s words as an overt attempt to rehabilitate Eriugena. While along the way he critically mentions that Eriugena is also a radical Platonist whose vision borders on pantheism and that he was censured, in the overarching view he gives us of his oeuvre Eriugena comes through more as a man of faith and scripture, in other words, remarkably like the Fathers, than as the rationalist thinker I portrayed above. To illustrate Benedict’s departure from the rationalist portrait, I want to point out how Benedict also cites from De diuina praedestinatione but sets quite a different tone than found in the passage I gave above: ‘Our author says: “Salus nostra ex fide inchoat: our salvation begins with faith”;9 in other words, we cannot speak of God starting with our own inventions but rather with what God says of himself in the Sacred Scriptures’. I cannot help but think that Pope Benedict’s appreciation of Eriugena has indeed something to do with the latter’s patristic aura, which is especially obvious from the way in which Benedict forges a close alliance between Eriugena and Pseudo-Dionysius. But it may also be informed by Benedict’s own previous scholarship on Bonaventure’s concept of creation. Joseph Ratzinger’s wellknown Habilitationsschrift on The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure stands out because of its sustained focus on Bonaventure’s exegesis of the six days of creation, found in his so-called Collationes in Hexaemeron. I have become 8

For the text of Benedict XVI’s general audience on Eriugena, see https://w2.vatican.va/ content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20090610.html 9 The citation is from De diuina praedestinatione 1.3, CChr.CM 50, 8 line 78.

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especially fascinated by the salvation-historical (rather than allegorical) approach Benedict sees Bonaventure taking to Genesis, which leads him to reflect on the six days of creation as kernels that contain even the historical developments that must still come to pass.10 However we want to judge Pope Benedict’s scholarship on Bonaventure – whether there are traces of Joachimitism, which would explain Benedict’s heightened sensitivity for historical unfolding in what is generally an anti-apocalyptic reading of creation in Bonaventure, or whether we should see his interpretation as in the end driven more by a desire to present Bonaventure’s creation as an alternative to the aridity of scholastic natural theology – fact is that through Benedict’s intervention we now have two commanding, even if contrasting, views of Eriugena. On the one hand, there is the standard rationalist account by which Eriugena employs philosophy as a razor to lay out his finely tuned Platonic cosmology and in the process seems to want to assess, if not downplay, the relevance of religious utterances, perhaps including scripture. On the other hand, there is another account in which Eriugena takes his point of departure in faith, that is, in the way God manifests himself primarily in and through Scripture. For Benedict, there is no doubt that the second view is what endears Eriugena to him. It would also seem to link him to the patristic tradition and perhaps earn him a place in the company of the Fathers. From Eriugena’s Anthropology to the Periphyseon as Patristic Cosmology For a long time, the focus of my own work on Eriugena has been on his anthropology, which I have repeatedly identified as the key to an integral reading of his main work Periphyseon.11 It is helpful here to retrace the steps that led me to take this initial approach. The underlying question of my work was how best to read the Periphyseon on its own terms, that is, as a self-enclosed work, and hence no longer approach it as a work that should primarily be interpreted externally, that is, as a patchwork of the remarkably diverse set of patristic influences for which it was so well-known, whether of the Eastern authors Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor or the Western authors Ambrose, Augustine, and Boethius.12 In Eriugena’s new appraisal by 10 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes (Chicago, 1971; repr. 1989). For a further analysis of Ratzinger with particular relevance to medieval creation, including Bonaventure’s Collations and Eriugena’s Periphyseon, see W. Otten, ‘Joseph Ratzinger and the Paradigm of Medieval Creation: From Bonaventure to Eriugena’, in Emery de Gaál and Matthew Levering (eds), Joseph Ratzinger and the Healing of the Reformation-Era Divisions (Steubenville, OH, 2019), 257-77. 11 See W. Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, 1991). 12 A helpful tool in this kind of forensic approach to Eriugena is Goulven Madec, Jean Scot et ses auteurs. Annotations érigéniennes (Paris, 1988).

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Pope Benedict XVI we clearly find echoes of this older forensic approach, however much Benedict is keen on newly rehabilitating Eriugena’s work, which comes out especially when he draws him very close to Dionysius. Since I decided early on not to accept the influence of patristic authors as a structuring or organizing principle for my own reading of the Periphyseon, I needed to look for another key that was intrinsic to the work itself and yet would allow me to cover its entire span. That key, for me, became Eriugena’s anthropology. From it I distilled the central dynamic question that I saw guiding the entire work, namely how humanity, created in the image of God, could on the one hand set up a rational investigation (rationabilis inuestigatio) of nature, and on the other hand, after it fell victim to sin and was exiled from paradise, be expected to complete such a daring enterprise. I still consider this question one of the central impulses that propels the Periphyseon’s dialogue with such energetic force. In my view, it is precisely the kind of overreach in which we see Eriugena engage, as he wants to think through the divine universe on God’s terms even in the awareness that humanity’s rationality is gravely impaired by the Fall, that forces him to muster all his intellectual and rhetorical skills. For not only does he need them to bring his great inquiry of nature, of the so-called uniuersitas rerum, underway but, once started, he also needs them to bring it to a close. I have not become in any way then disenchanted with the theme of anthropology in Eriugena nor with the work it did for me in uncovering the dynamics of the Periphyseon’s dialogue. Far from it. But over time I have become increasingly aware of the fact that the Periphyseon remains in the end a work not about the division of nature but ‘about natures’, to use Jeauneau’s rephrased translation of its Greek title, and not only or even primarily about human nature.13 Hence, I increasingly felt that natures and the universal concept of natura that Eriugena defines in the beginning of the Periphyseon by giving us two divisions of it ought to be given their rightful place in a comprehensive treatment of the work. While in his well-known and seminal article ‘On the Concept of Nature in the Periphyseon’, Dominic O’Meara refers to the work as a physiology,14 as it espouses indeed an all-encompassing concept of natura that O’Meara eloquently lays out, my sense is that the work is ultimately about all natures: human, divine, animal; created and uncreated, for which I find the conventional term cosmology more helpful and fitting.

13

See on this my articles ‘Anthropology between Imago Mundi and Imago Dei: The Place of Johannes Scottus Eriugena in the Tradition of Christian Thought’, SP 43 (2006), 459-72 and ‘Eriugena on Natures (Created, Human and Divine): From Christian-Platonic Metaphysics to Early-Medieval Protreptic’, in Isabelle Moulin (ed.), Philosophie et Théologie chez Jean Scot Érigène, Collection de l’Institut d’études médiévales de l’Institut Catholique de Paris (Paris, 2016), 113-33. 14 D. O’Meara, ‘The Concept of Natura in John Scottus Eriugena (De divisione naturae Book 1)’, Vivarium 19.2 (1981), 126-45.

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This is especially the case when we consider Eriugena in the context of great patristic predecessors like Origen of Alexandria. The title of Origen’s Periarchon inevitably comes to mind when we think of the Periphyseon. In an address at the 2011 Chicago-conference of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies (SPES) on Eriugena and Creation the late Edouard Jeauneau rightly drew attention to their comparison.15 One of Jeauneau’s important suggestions was that, just as Origen’s work was sometimes known by its hybrid GrecoLatin title Periarchon sive de principiis, Eriugena’s work might in similar fashion be henceforth called Periphyseon sive de naturis.16 Echoes of just this title are actually found in medieval libraries. Jeauneau made a few other interesting points as well, which are particularly relevant for the perennial question whether to see Eriugena primarily as a Western or an Eastern thinker. The first of these is that, although Eriugena may not have been aware of Origen’s condemnation, the West or the Latin church seems generally to have been less intransigent towards Origen than the East or the Greek church.17 This puts yet another twist on Eriugena’s fraught predilection for Eastern authors, whom he generally deemed allegorical and hence more philosophical.18 While Ambrose seems to fit more in the Eastern than the Western camp for Eriugena due to his predilection for allegorical exegesis, conversely, his positive appraisal of Origen would seem to betray that in some ways he has a more Western than an Eastern perspective, given his remarkable insouciance vis-à-vis Origen’s assumed heresy. It is relevant to note, furthermore, that contrary to the absence of Origenian findings in Madec’s survey of patristic influences in Eriugena,19 there may have been an awareness of Origen in Eriugena already as early as his On divine predestination, as has been argued by Ernesto Mainoldi,20 making Eriugena’s admiration of and conversation with him truly a lifelong affair. 15 E. Jeauneau, ‘From Origen’s Periarchon to Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, in Michael I. Allen and W. Otten (eds), Eriugena and Creation. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Eriugenian Studies, held in honor of Edouard Jeauneau, Chicago, 9-12 November 2011 (Turnhout, 2014), 139-82. 16 Ibid. 140. 17 Ibid. 144. 18 On Eriugena’s choice and taste in assessing Eastern and Western authors, see W. Otten, ‘Eriugena and the Concept of Eastern versus Western Patristic Influence’, SP 38 (1993), 217-24 and, especially, G. d’Onofrio, ‘The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot’s Periphyseon’, in Bernard McGinn and W. Otten (eds), Eriugena: East and West (Notre Dame, 1994), 115-40. 19 See above n. 12. 20 See Ernesto S.N. Mainoldi (ed.), De praedestinatione liber: dialettica e teologia all’apogeo della rinascenza carolingia / Giovanni Scoto Eriugena; edizione critica, traduzione e commento (Tavernuzza, 2013), 184 and 186. The question whether Eriugena had command of Greek while writing On divine predestination still stands, but he might well have had access to a Latin text of Origen.

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While I do not want to go deeper into the aspect of apokatastasis here, which demands a more complete treatment and has recently received comprehensive attention,21 I want to remind us of Jeauneau’s finding to the effect that Eriugena seems to have exercised great nuance in presenting us with this theory. He generally seems to have embraced it for humanity but was less clear about it where the devil was concerned, perhaps echoing Origen himself. As for the apokatastasis of humanity, Eriugena seems indeed to have wanted to embrace it, at least according to Jeauneau, but he may have been held back by the times and the need to find favor with his patron Charles the Bald.22 It is this reticence, as if he literally was of two minds, that may well have led him to institute instead the famous difference between a general and a special return at the end of the Periphyseon,23 and perhaps, again according to Jeauneau, also develop an idea of proto-purgatory. Yet the point I want to make about Origen in terms of my take on Eriugena as the last patristic cosmologist is a different one. It departs also from Jeauneau’s conviction about the Origenian influence behind Eriugena’s adoption of procession and return as the main grooves according to which the unfolding of the universe needs to occur.24 Instead, I want to emphasize, although I realize that I do so in line with what Jeauneau has argued elsewhere, that Eriugena’s cosmology is at heart an Origenian one because of its integral ties with Scripture which, following Mabillon’s remarks and Eriugena’s evaluation by Pope Benedict, I have likewise come to accept as one of the features that marks it as a patristic one. In his essay on Eriugena and Origen Jeauneau mentions that Eriugena considers Origen a favored author in the Periphyseon because he accords him the rare distinctions ‘great’ (magnus) and ‘blessed’ (beatus), the latter of which epithets he generally reserved for the saints and the doctors of the church. Thus, he had no hesitation in placing Origen in their company,25 and Origen shares the honorific beatus in the Periphyseon with Ambrose, Augustine, Dionysius, Gregory Nazianzen, James the Apostle, John the Evangelist and Maximus the Confessor. Jeauneau’s next point may be even more directly revealing of Origen’s high status for Eriugena, thereby further consolidating Eriugena’s preference for thinking and writing a cosmology in a patristic vein. This point is that Origen is alternatively called summus sanctae scripturae expositorem (‘the exegete ‘par excellence’ of Sacred Scripture’, 21 See Ilaria E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis. A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 120 (Leiden, 2013). 22 See E. Jeauneau, ‘From Origen’s Periarchon to Eriugena’s Periphyseon’ (2014), 178. 23 See on this W. Otten, ‘Eriugena’s Dialectic of the Return’, Harvard Theological Review 84 (1991), 399-421. 24 In my book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking. From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford, 2020), 36-7, I argue that procession and return ultimately do not dictate nature’s unfolding in Eriugena’s Periphyseon; instead, I see their use as premised on his latent sense of selfhood. 25 See E. Jeauneau, ‘From Origen’s Periarchon to Eriugena’s Periphyseon’ (2014), 142-3, 145.

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Periphyseon 4.818B)26 and diligentissimus rerum inquisitor (‘the most conscientious investigator of the realities of nature’, Periphyseon 5.929A).27 The combination of these epithets in Eriugena’s description of Augustine in Periphyseon 5.992A, where he uses only slightly different wording, makes a strong case that they are integrally and perhaps indissolubly connected for him, as they were for these Fathers. It also leads us to consider whether it is not only true that Augustine and Dionysius are on a par for Eriugena,28 but also that there is parity between the status of Augustine and Origen, at least from an exegetical perspective. I should make it clear at this point that by focusing on his patristic status I do not mean to distract from Eriugena’s legitimate place as a medieval thinker. I see him particularly as a Carolingian author, for comparison with Theodulf of Orleans shows the latter’s intellectual approach marked by a similar overreach: an audacity to make pronouncements about the alignment of the West with biblical witness and its superiority to the Greek tradition combined with a lack of detailed source-knowledge.29 Yet the indissoluble link between cosmology and scriptural exposition is one that puts Eriugena in my view closer to Origen and Augustine than to later medieval universalists like Hugh of Saint Victor, Thomas Aquinas, or even Bonaventure, who is so beloved by Benedict XVI.30 These later medieval authors all lack the parallelism of nature and scripture that so marks the integral paradigm of Eriugena’s thought, in which he was deeply – and directly – influenced by Maximus the Confessor.31 Their analogy is at best an illustration for Thomas Aquinas, whose thought is exegetical but not organically so. And while the connection of nature and scripture is clearly a more substantive model for Bonaventure, it still rises in the end not above that, not even in the aforementioned Collations on the Hexaemeron, overtaken as it is by the overriding urgency of his soteriological drive.32 26

See Eriugena, Periphyseon 4.818B, CChr.CM 164 (Turnhout, 2000), 109 lines 3266-7. Ibid. 146, with Jeauneau’s translation from the Latin. Jeauneau notes that the same description is given of Augustine in Periphyseon 5.992A, Nota 11 (CChr.CM 165, 184 lines 56-8) be it in slightly different terms: de magno diuinarum humanarumque rerum et sollertissimo inquisitore et copiosissimo expositore (‘this great and most skilful enquirer into all things human and divine and this most copious commentator’, in Eriugena, Periphyseon, trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by J.J. O’Meara [Montreal, Washington, 1987], 677). The fact that Augustine combines these same qualities obviously cements their integral connection as extremely valuable for Eriugena. 28 As argued by, among others, G. d’Onofrio, ‘The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius’ (1994) (n. 18 above). 29 See on this W. Otten, ‘Suspended between Cosmology and Anthropology: Natura’s Bond in Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, in A. Guiu (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Eriugena (Leiden, 2020), 191-2. 30 See on this W. Otten, ‘Joseph Ratzinger and the Paradigm of Medieval Creation: From Bonaventure to Eriugena’ (2019), 262-74. 31 For my analysis of Maximus see W. Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking (2020), 49-78, esp. 66-70. 32 See W. Otten, ‘Joseph Ratzinger and the Paradigm of Medieval Creation: From Bonaventure to Eriugena’ (2019), 266-79. 27

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As an indirect way to give the patristic contours of Eriugena more profile, we do well to dwell on the difference between Eriugena and Bonaventure by looking at two different quotations from their respective works. Referencing Maximus’ view that nature and scripture are the two vestments of Christ at his Transfiguration, Eriugena states the following in Periphyseon 3.723D-724A: And if Christ at the time of his Transfiguration wore two vestments white as snow, namely the letter of Divine Oracles and the sensible appearances of visible things, why we should be encouraged diligently to touch the one in order to find Him Whose vesture it is, and forbidden to inquire about the other, namely the visible creature, how and by what reason it is woven, I do not clearly see. For even Abraham did not know God through the letters of scripture, which had not yet been composed, but by the revolution of the stars. Was he simply regarding the appearances only of the stars, as other animals do, without being able to understand their reasons? I should not have the temerity to say this of the great and wise theologian.33

Of particular interest here is the fact that Eriugena sees Abraham as an independent theologian who was active even prior to the composition of Scripture. For on the basis of his scrutiny of the stars he was able to unearth divine truths about nature in ways that are not unlike, and not inferior to, the very truths of Scripture. Eriugena’s position here is rather different in tone from the urgency that we find lodged inside the following statement from Bonaventure’s second Collation in Hexaemeron: … we do not find her (i.e., wisdom), just as the unlettered layman is not interested in the contents of the book that he holds in his hands. So it is with us. The language of the universe has become like Greek, Hebrew, or some barbarous language; it has become fundamentally unknown.34 33 Eriugena, Periphyseon 3.723D-724A, CChr.CM 163 (Turnhout, 1999), 149 lines 4351-7: Et si duo uestimenta Christi sunt tempore transformationis ipsius candida sicut nix (diuinorum uidelicet eloquiorum littera et uisibilium rerum species sensibilis), cur iubemur unum uestimentum diligenter tangere, ut eum cuius uestimentum est mereamur inuenire, alterum uero (id est creaturam uisibilem) prohibemur inquirere et quomodo et quibus rationibus contextum sit, non satis uideo. Nam et Abraham non per litteras scripturae, quae nondum confecta fuerat, uerum conuersione siderum deum cognouit. An forte simpliciter sicut et caetera animalia solas species siderum aspiciebat, non autem rationes eorum intelligere poterat? Non temere hoc de magno et sapienti theologo ausim dicere. The translation is taken from Eriugena, Periphyseon, trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by J.J. O’Meara (Montreal, Washington, 1987), 357. For a fuller discussion of this passage and its relation to Maximus, see also W. Otten, ‘Creation and Epiphanic Incarnation. Reflections on the Future of Natural Theology from an Eriugenian-Emersonian Perspective’, in B.S. Hellemans, W. Otten and M.B. Pranger (eds), On Religion and Memory (New York, 2013), 74-9. 34 See J. Ratzinger, Theology of History (1971; repr. 1989), 85, with reference to Collationes in Hexaemeron II 20, Quaracchi edition vol. 5 (Ad Claras Aquas, 1891), 340a: et tamen nos non invenimus eam, sicut laicus nesciens litteras et tenens librum non curat de eo; sic nos; unde haec scriptura facta est nobis Graeca, barbara et Hebraea et penitus ignota suo fonte. I have followed Ratzinger’s translation, which is close to the new translation in Works of St. Bonaventure, Vol. XVIII: Conferences on the Six Days of Creation: The Illuminations of the Church, trans. Jay M. Hammond (St. Bonaventure, NY, 2018), 102: ‘And yet we do not find her, like an unlettered man

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In Bonaventure’s admittedly compressed statement here, it seems the wisdom of Scripture may once have been directly known but all natural access to that knowledge has since been irretrievably lost such that there is no access to nature other than through Scripture. Instead of the Maximian metaphor of the parallelism of nature and scripture, Bonaventure makes occasional use of the Augustinian trope of creation as a book, but it is a book the adequate reading of which cannot be brought alive other than with remedial knowledge drawn from another book, Scripture. For Bonaventure, we need to urgently retrieve scriptural access first, because we need to use it as the exclusive lens through which to interpret nature. There is no longer the sense that nature can actually be studied and give us a revelation of its own, that is, without a scriptural filter. Eriugena’s Periphyseon between Augustine and Origen Extrapolating from my comments on Bonaventure, let me try to formulate now the position on Eriugena’s patristic cosmology that I have come to embrace and that I have injected here and there in my recent book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson.35 In many ways, Eriugena seems to have a close affinity with Origen, inasmuch as he unfolds a cosmology that is universalist, perhaps including a sense of apokatastasis, but that is before all deeply impregnated by Scripture. But while this is an important comment to make in terms of the exegetical character I want to claim for Eriugena’s cosmology, the more so because it helps me underline his patristic character along the lines laid out by Benedict XVI, we should not lose sight of the important differences between Origen and Eriugena. Thus, Eriugena is inspired by Maximus the Confessor rather than Origen in seeing Scripture and nature as interdependent sources of divine knowledge and truth. It is their interdependence which subsequently allows him to approach them independently in the confidence that the knowledge he wrests from one source will be structurally aligned with that found in the other. It is crucially important to stress the uniqueness of this Maximian move in Eriugena’s thought, since I consider it a principled position that is fundamentally different from other, more tactical moves he makes in the Periphyseon. For example, he may periodically line up and, frankly, can even manipulate certain statements by the Fathers in cases where he feels compelled to rally them all behind a particular univocal viewpoint. There his aim is usually to score a point, and so, can be deemed a tactical or mercenary move, which even applies to his dealings with Western and Eastern holding a book who has no interest in it. Such are we: hence, this writing (scriptura) [of the world] has become Greek to us, foreign and like Hebrew, and its source thoroughly unknown’. 35 See above n. 24.

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Fathers. In the case of his adoption of the parallelism of nature and scripture, by contrast, we are dealing with something that affects the direct fabric of his text. In some respects, if I am to follow the analysis of Brian Daley here, the approach of Origen anticipates the later one of Thomas Aquinas, be it that Scripture as the underlying tapestry in Origen will in Aquinas be replaced with a richer tapestry consisting of Scripture, tradition and the assumed Christian worldview taken from church teaching on which he builds his Summa Theologiae. Daley’s view of Origen, which he has unfolded in his article ‘Origen’s De principiis. A Guide to the Principles of Christian Spiritual Interpretation’,36 is that the apostles were unable to lay out all truths, thus requiring Christians of later generations to deduce further truths in credible fashion from those already known. Origen’s procedure in his Periarchon then, on Daley’s reading, is to distill certain scientific principles from scriptural materials and organize these in terms of an Aristotelian episteme, into which further information can then be incorporated. The reason why Daley feels it necessary to broach the problem of exegesis in the Periarchon in the first place is that, notwithstanding Origen’s reputation as a prime exegete, actual exegesis surfaces only relatively late in the work, namely in Book IV, thereby suggesting that its status might be an afterthought. Contradicting this view, Daley explains Origen’s laggard turn to actual exegetical practice by making clear that in the scientific setup of the Periarchon scriptural elements are integrated right from the start as part of the aforementioned episteme. The reason why exegesis stricto sensu surfaces relatively late in the work is because Origen holds to the theory that one first needs to master the essential lay-out of the cosmos conceptually, that is, including the scriptural tenets integrated in it, before one can actively undertake exegesis in the spiritual way he desires, that is, such that its conclusions will have an edifying effect in facilitating humanity’s return to God. Whether or not Daley is correct in seeing the entire Periarchon as a project of scriptural interpretation is not a debate I want to pursue here, but the thought that one develop a skeletal conceptual structure first from which next to approach the exegesis of scripture in a fuller, more direct sense is something that one later also finds in Aquinas, with this difference that in my view the scaffolding that Aquinas constructs in the Summa Theologiae is less integrally anchored in Scripture than is the case in Origen. It is in part the effect of having undergone various degrees of separation from Scripture that Aquinas becomes a strong exegete in his own right, insofar as he knows better than previous generations when to use exegesis and for which precise purposes of instruction

36

Brian E. Daley, ‘Origen’s De principiis. A Guide to the Principles of Christian Scriptural Interpretation’, in J. Petruccione (ed.), Nova et Vetera. Patristic Studies in Honor of Th. P. Halton (Washington, DC, 1998), 3-21.

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and edification.37 As I stated above, the Maximian move of adhering to a strict parallel of nature and Scripture makes exegesis in Eriugena a rather different affair, one that is directly woven into the fabric of his text, specifically insofar as nearly half of it is written in the form of an Hexaemeron. It is at this point that the role of Augustine needs to be brought back to the fore. When Jeauneau revealed that Eriugena calls both Origen and Augustine investigators of nature and expositors of scripture, the case we find him make for Origen is actually stronger than for Augustine. About Augustine we read in Periphyseon 5.992A that he is ‘this great and most skilful inquirer into all things human and divine and this most copious commentator’ (de magno diuinarum humanarumque rerum et sollertissimo inquisitore et copiosissimo expositore in Periphyseon 5.992A),38 which is not quite the same as Origen’s two crisp parallel epithets of diligentissimus rerum inquisitor (‘the most conscientious investigator of the realities of nature’ in Periphyseon 5.929A) and summum sanctae scripturae expositorem (‘the exegete ‘par excellence’ of Sacred Scripture’ in Periphyseon 4.818B). In short, the connection in Augustine between nature and scripture is not as clear-cut. In the chapter that I have devoted to Augustine in my book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking I highlight the fact that Augustine does not engage in the writing of a cosmology like Origen’s. In my assessment this represents a notable shift away from the standards of the Greek patristic world, such that we see Augustine write a monograph on selfhood (Confessions) and on God (De trinitate), but never on the universe.39 Maybe with his reference to ‘human and divine things’ Eriugena intends to refers to ‘The City of God’ (De civitate Dei), which he at times seems to mistake for or conflate with Augustine’s more directly exegetical De Genesi ad litteram, and which he cites repeatedly in his own Hexaemeron. Zooming in more closely, one even may be tempted to conclude, as I have done, that Augustine apparently did not wish to write on cosmological themes other than through scriptural exegesis. His commentaries on Genesis are indeed numerous. It is Eriugena’s reliance on the hexaemeral form in connection with his desire to take cosmological speculation also outside exegetical bounds, something Augustine never did, that has led me to make the comment that the Periphyseon can be seen as the natural theology that Augustine never wrote.40 The Periphyseon complements Augustine’s oeuvre in interesting ways and Eriugena’s position fits in organically with a Western development, notwithstanding his repeated genuflections to Eastern wisdom and sagacity. 37 This marks the difference between a thirteenth-century thinker like Aquinas and twelfthcentury thinkers like Hugh of St Victor whose Summa-like treatise De sacramentis suffers from being in the end neither exegetical nor fully scholastic or doctrinal. 38 See Eriugena, Periphyseon 5.992A, CChr.CM 165. 39 See W. Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking (2020), 90. 40 Ibid. 205.

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Conclusion: The Periphyseon as Eriugena’s Natural Theology In conclusion, I want to bolster my claim that there is indeed reason to see Eriugena’s Periphyseon not just as the last patristic cosmology but, more precisely, as the natural theology that Augustine never wrote. I will do so by making two further comments. The first of these has as its aim to link Eriugena more closely to Augustine, while the intent of my second comment is to help assign the Hexaemeron-part of the work an undeniable place in the overall conceptual development of the Periphyseon. The latter point is also what in the end sets Eriugena apart from patristic authors, tilting him firmly to the Middle Ages after all, and what makes me identify him specifically as a Carolingian author. If it is true that Augustine does not write extensively about nature outside the context of Scripture and exegesis, it is surely not because he does not have anything to say about nature. Rather, Augustine stands out among his patristic peers because he is well aware that nature has something to tell us. Here I follow the lead of Robert Markus, who has drawn attention to the fact that in Augustine’s famous sign-system, it is not only the case that verbal signs point to things, as the word ‘ox’ references the beast ‘ox’, but there is also a secondary referential layer in which things qua signs, such the beast ‘ox’, can in themselves signal other things. Markus’ example is that the beast ox can in turn signify the evangelist Luke. This means that there is not only a verbal network of signs that signify to us but also a network of things qua signs that do the same. Markus was especially interested in the meaning of the so-called res gesta, God’s historical deeds in the Old Testament. In the context of discussing these Augustine introduces the term eloquentia rerum (‘the eloquence of things’), building on which I have tried to expand its resonance to cover the Periphyseon’s discourse as one in which all the things in the world, from inanimate objects to animals and other sentient beings, together can raise their voice and speak their identity. Whether this identity goes beyond their simple outcry that God is their maker, as is the position Augustine takes in Confessions 10.6.9, stating that creatures do not actually speak but their beauty speaks for them, or should be conceptualized differently, as I have done by seeing Eriugena’s natures as collectively making up the collective reality that is natura, is not the main issue. The main issue is indeed that creatures or natures speak, that is, that their material existence allows them to have their own voice in the universe and that by raising that voice they can have an impact by making the universe a place that is more diverse and more comprehensive. In overseeing the Periphyseon’s long and meandering journey, I am increasingly of the opinion that it is best to cast the narrative by which Eriugena integrates natura as the universitas rerum with all the individual natures by which it is populated in terms of an ongoing conversation. The reason I call it so, which I further elaborate in my book, is that there are moments in the

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Periphyseon where it is clear that natura takes charge, that is, that we see it absorb problems into its capacious fold and continue its course as if unhampered by them. This signals how committed Eriugena is to finishing the conversation that he has gotten underway with his formulation of the concept of natura.41 The idea that natura is a vehicle for ongoing conversation concludes my first point. My second point is a related one and concerns the idea that there must be progress and continuity to the conversation on which Eriugena has embarked, as the Periphyseon’s narrative starts from God as that which created but is not created and must end with God as that which is not created and does not create, just as procession must at the end of the day be both continued and completed by return. As we follow Eriugena over the course of his intellectual trajectory, I have found him to be an insightful but also unusually astute exegete, insofar as the exegetical choices he makes are not epiphenomenal to his larger argument but serve as important waystations that aid natura in making its way to final rest in God. To clarify this point I have borrowed from Stanley Cavell, who features in my book because of the close comparison I make between Eriugena and Ralph Waldo Emerson and who poignantly states that ‘the need for a call for change gets expressed as an imperative when what is problematic in your life is not the fact that between alternative choices the right one has become hard to find, but that in the course of your life you have lost your way’.42 If we transfer Cavell’s remarkable saying to Eriugena’s choices in the Periphyseon, we can say that his exegetical strategies, such as whether to use literal or allegorical exegesis, are always deployed with an eye toward bringing natura home. Not only are they not epiphenomenal, but they are also not primarily salvational; rather, they are functional in the sense that they are geared towards carrying out the Periphyseon’s own agenda. It seems to me that there are indeed various instances in the Periphyseon where the exegetical choices Eriugena makes are best seen in terms of such a particular imperative. An obvious and well-known example, which I also discuss in Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking, is when he reads the story of Adam’s expulsion as a promise for his return, thereby changing protology forcibly into eschatology.43 Another example that is not in my book but I consider equally important and would like to mention here is the passage from Periphyseon 5.898D onward, where we find Eriugena insisting that the general resurrection of the dead is not something happening on the basis of grace alone but is something that requires the cooperation of nature, for which he cites 41

Ibid. 109-24. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, The Carrus Lectures 1988 (Chicago, London, 1990), xxx. Cited in W. Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking (2020), 122. 43 See ibid. 42

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natural examples of resurrection drawn from Epiphanius’ Ancoratus. This is what he comes to conclude then in Periphyseon 5.902D: M(aster): Resurrection is effected then by the cooperation of both agents, nature and Grace. S(tudent): So I believe. But how much of the operation is attributable to grace and how much to nature, I am not sure. For no shrewd explorer into the secrets of wisdom would allow that the two are identical.44

The obvious importance of nature’s involvement in the resurrection is that it allows Eriugena to demonstrate that natura has been able to preserve its integrity unscathed as it prepares for the final return to God. At times then we see the interests of nature clearly take over in the Periphyseon, for it is clear that natura should never be embarrassed or left deprived of appropriate room to maneuver,45 showing itself instead increasingly equipped to follow its own course. In sum, with the Periphyseon Eriugena has written a masterful physiology, one that lays claim to being the last patristic cosmology but one that also can be seen as the natural theology that Augustine never wrote.

44 See Eriugena, Periphyseon 5.902D, CChr.CM 165 (Turnhout, 2003), 61 lines 1959-64: N(utritor): ‘Ambabus itaque cooperatricibus, ipsa quidem natura et gratia, resurrectio perficietur’. A(lumnus): ‘Crediderim. Sed quid ad gratiam, quid ad naturam proprie in hac resurrectionis actione pertineat, non satis conspicor. Nullam siquidem inter eas esse nemo sollerter sapientiae secreta rimantium dixerit differentiam’. The translation is taken from Eriugena, Periphyseon, trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by J.J. O’Meara (1987), 574. 45 A potential case of patching up embarrassment is Eriugena’s insistence that the sin of Adam and Eve happens to a ‘superadded body’ (corpus superadditum), which allows him to leave the integrity of humanity’s paradisiacal physical body undefiled and leads to such unusual statements as homo melior est quam sexus (‘man is better than sex’, Periphyseon 2.534A). At the end of time the superadded body will be stripped away, thereby baring humanity’s original body as undefiled by sin. For Eriugena’s thinking on sexual division and gender, including the superadded body, as especially influenced by Gregory of Nyssa, see E. Jeauneau, ‘La division des sexes chez Grégoire de Nysse et chez Jean Scot Érigène’, in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Eriugena: Studien zu seinen Quellen (Heidelberg, 1980), 33-54, reprinted in E. Jeauneau, Études érigéniennes (Paris, 1987), 341-4. See esp. 46-54, 356-64.

Creation out of Nothing – Creation out of God: Eriugena’s Philosophy as the Origin of Idealism Theo KOBUSCH, University of Bonn, Germany

ABSTRACT One of the philosophical pioneering feats in Eriugena’s Periphyseon consists in giving a whole new meaning to the traditional concept of ‘creation out of nothing’. ‘Nothing’ is no longer understood as ‘privative nothing’ (nihil privativum) in which Augustine still saw the cause of all nothingness. Now, instead, it stands for the richness of all reality in the Neoplatonic, i.e. ‘superessential’ or eminent sense of the οὐδὲν πάντων in Plotinus from which everything created originates. However only in creation God comes to himself. Creation is the condescendence of God. Motion in Periphyseon is the motion of creation, in which God is condescending to the limit, creating himself by returning to himself in everything created. That is, as this paper is going to show, the basic model of idealist thought. For that reason, Eriugena has been rediscovered by 19th-century Schellingians, by F.A. Staudenmaier and others. In his name Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel rejected the traditional understanding of creation out of nothing.

1. Creation out of nothing The Christian doctrine of the creation out of nothing must be regarded as a critical response to the numerous Platonic teachings of cosmogony, the theory of the world’s coming into being. And yet it was not native to Christianity from the beginning. While a great number of Christian thinkers, such as Athenagoras of Athens, Justinus, and even Clement of Alexandria have held on to the Platonic teaching of the un-become matter and only Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch speak explicitly of the creation out of nothing, whom Tertullian and Iraneus then align themselves with, it is indeed the Gnosis, a generation prior, which has already laid the foundation for a doctrine of a creation out of nothing. Among the three significant Gnostics (Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus) it is especially Basilides who has set standards. ‘Basilides is the first Christian theologian known to us who speaks of the creation out of nothing in the proper sense’.1 With Christianity engaging in the discussion surrounding the genesis of the world with its thesis of the creation out of nothing, peculiar constellations arise 1

Gerhard May, Schöpfung aus dem Nichts (Berlin, New York, 1978), 78.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 143-152. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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in the philosophical world. On the one side Neoplatonism struggles against this new idea, as when Proclus submits the Christian concept of creation to a respective critique in the lost work On the Eternity of the world, against the Christians in 18 arguments. Directed against Proclus himself are the writings De opificio mundi and De aeternitate mundi of the Christian John Philoponos, which in turn evoked the criticism of Simplicius in his De caelo- and Physicscommentary.2 This late-antique discourse between Neoplatonism and Christianity is, however, – so to speak – not the final word of late-antique philosophy. At its end it brought forth a light which illuminates the dark ages of the west: John Scottus Eriugena. His works breathe the spirit of late-antique philosophy, indeed both the pagan as well as the Christian. From his early work De praedestinatione, through which he intervenes in a theological dispute of the Carolingian époque, one can immediately tell the Augustinian origin. Beyond this Eriugena has, with commentaries and translations, made contributions to the dissemination of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. To the Gospel of John – which was understood since Origen as the ‘metaphysics’ of ‘Christian philosophy’ by the Church Fathers – he dedicated a commentary and a homily. Yet his main work Periphyseon outshines all. It is a system according to a Neoplatonic pattern. Just as for the Neoplatonists the Platonic dialogue Parmenides as the metaphysics of Platonic philosophy is very closely connected to the Timaios, i.e. physics, so too are the philosophies of the immaterial and the material world in Periphyseon closely intertwined with each other. What distinguishes Periphyseon from the Neoplatonic systems and marks it as a conception of its own, however, is that it describes an overall movement of a particular nature. Though the Neoplatonic triad: ‘Moné, Prohodos, Epistrophé’ also expresses a movement, it is one such through which something which remains in itself drives forth something which will again return to it. The movement in Periphyseon is instead the movement of the creation, in which God condescends to the utmost and creates Himself by returning to Himself in all that has been created. This is, as is to be eventually shown, the basic model of idealistic thought. There are certain indications in the text of Periphyseon for this change of fundamentals in Eriugena here, despite all dependency on Augustine and Neoplatonic thought. Thus the concept of the ‘creation out of nothing’ receives a completely different sense. Nothing is no longer the privative nothing, in which Augustine had still seen the ground of all nothingness of created being. Now it 2 The fragments of the Platonists are collected in Heinrich Dörrie and Matthias Baltes (eds), Die philosophische Lehre des Platonismus. Platonische Physik (im antiken Verständnis), II. Bausteine 125-150: Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt, 1998), 84-180, and summarized: 523-35.

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signifies more so in the Neoplatonic, i.e. ‘superessential’ or eminent sense, like the ‘ouden pantôn’ of Plotin,3 the plethora of all reality from which all created being comes forth. Or as Eriugena himself says: ‘I should assume, that through this name (sc. the “nothing”) which […] signifies the ineffable, inconceivable and inaccessible clarity of the divine benevolence, which, if it is viewed in and of itself, neither is, nor was, nor will be. In none of the existing is it known, because it surmounts everything’.4 Creation out of nothing therefore purports tantamount to a ‘creation out of God’. ‘Indeed John’s interpretation of creation ex nihilo compels us to take divine transcendence itself as the ground for created being’.5 This understanding of nothing is concurrently a harsh criticism of the traditional, i.e. also Augustinian, concept of nothing as understood in a privative sense.6 The attempt has been made to trace the new interpretation of the concept ‘creation out of nothing’ back to Gregory of Nyssa.7 It may have indeed been prepared there, but the philosophical pervasion of this novelty and the awareness of the consequences – this is the pioneering feat of Eriugena. 2. Condescension and Self-creation Yet the proper challenge for traditional philosophy lies in what Eriugena understands by ‘creation’. For the above cited passage continues in the following sense: If divine benevolence is not viewed in and of itself, but instead becomes visible in as far as it is a form of an ineffable condescension into being, then it is the divine benevolence alone which is, was and will be within everything. In other words: if we can understand divine benevolence, viewed abstractly, as something inconceivable, then the denotation of ‘nothing’ in the 3

Plotin., Enn. 5, 5, 13,28-9. Iohannes Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon III, 88.2541, ed. É. Jeauneau. 5 Donald F. Duclow, ‘Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation in John Scotus Eriugena’, The Journal of Religion 57 (1977), 115. – There is no unambiguous clarification to be found in research as to the question if the thought of the Gnostic Basilides (see above) must be viewed as the origin of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo as a creation ex Deo. Gershom Scholem, ‘Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes’, Eranos-Jahrbuch 25 (1956-1957), 87-119, 100-1 sees a line in this respect: Basilides – Eriugena – Kabbalah. Cf. also Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘Negative Attributes in the Church Fathers and the Gnostic Basilides’, The Harvard Theological Review 50 (1957), 145-56; G. May, Schöpfung aus Nichts (1978), 68 believes this interpretation to be possible. Also Winrich A. Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule. Eine Studie zur Theologie und Kirchengeschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1996), 308 speaks in this sense of the creatio ex Deo. 6 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 86.2483-7. Werner Beierwaltes, Eriugena. Grundzüge seines Denkens (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 128 seems to assume a harmony between the two concepts of nothing which does not, however, correspond to the Eriugian view of things. 7 Cf. Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Identification of “Ex Nihilo” with Emanation in Gregory of Nyssa’, The Harvard Theological Review 63 (1970), 53-60; Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena (Oxford, New York, 2000), 46. 4

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sense of the ‘excellence’ has its justification. However, in actuality, seen in its theophanies, it is that which comes forth out of nothing into something, out of un-being into being, it is that which makes itself visible, that which steps out from indeterminacy into determinacy.8 The concept of condescension or simply of the descension is of crucial significance in this connection. Shortly thereafter it reads in the same sense that the creation is the divine benevolence which “descends” from the negation of all essential beings into the affirmation of the all of essential being, and namely ‘from itself into itself’ (a se ipsa in se ipsam).9 Through the condescension the super-essential nothing also arrives at itself. The descension reaches not only to the primordial causes, which represent the reasons of being of all things, but also beyond, to their ‘effects’, to which man also belongs, and finally to the outermost order of nature, i.e. the dead physical world.10 Eriugena here turns what had never before been thought in philosophy into a task for thought. As if for confirmation thereof, the pupil then puts the following words into the mouth of someone who has never before heard of it: ‘He who says this is insane. For how could the invisible, incorporeal, imperishable God who is sublime above all, descend from Himself and create Himself in everything, so that He is everything in all and come forth from the last visible turpitudes and depravities and lowest forms and shapes, to Himself be also within them?’11 What is here imposed upon the traditional sense is indeed of greatest significance and difficulty. For the concept of ‘condescension’ utilized by Eriugena originally stems from the Christian doctrine of incarnation, where it, often in connection with the concept and the idea of the kenosis from the Epistle to the Philippians,12 denotes the appearance of the divine Son in the flesh and thereby the kindness of God and His solidarity with all that is finite.13 Eriugena normally also uses the concept with this meaning himself. And yet in as early as the first book of his main work, he has underlain the concept of the condescension with a different meaning by calling the ‘deification’ of man a condescension, since it was made possible to man from above. In the third book of Periphyseon, which is of critical importance for our connections, a consequential change in the meaning of the concept ‘condescension’ occurs, which is the first to make the process of creation indeed comprehensible. Not that this shift 8 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 88.2546sq. The “obtutus mentis” is presumably the gaze of the spirit, which comparable to the ‘intuition’, is capable of concurrently grasping everything. Cf. id., Periphyseon V, 153.4993. 9 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 89.2569-75. 10 Cf. Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 91.2639sq. 11 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 92.2687sq. 12 Cf. Phil. 2:7. 13 Cf. e.g. Athan., De inc., 8, 1. Ps.-Epiphanius, Homilia in assumptionem Christi, 4, PG 43, 477B. Greg. Nyss., Deit fil, GNO X/2, 127-9. Ioh. Chrys., In illud: Pater si possibilis est, PG 51, 34.35sq.

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in meaning as it were befell Eriugena unawares, it is more so that he explicitly distances himself from the narrow incarnational meaning of the concept of condescension to lend it a wide meaning pertaining to creation theory (which does not exclude the incarnational sense). He says: ‘And this I do not say of the fleshly and human incarnation of the word, but of the ineffable condescension, […], the greatest goodness in that which is, in order for it to be, yes, to itself in all from the highest to the lowest, […] be made by itself in itself’.14 To understand the whole creation thus as condescension means, however, that just as according to the incarnational interpretation, God indeed descends into the realm of men and becomes human, as God already relinquished Himself and has lowered Himself to the utmost degree. The doctrine of the creation in the sense of the condescension, while it seems to resemble it, is the farewell to the Neoplatonic model of emanation, according to which creation is indeed also a creation out of God, yet a God who does not descend, but instead remains in the transcendence, who does not relinquish Himself, but ‘abides’ (monê) in the abundance of His being. If however creation is not an actual ‘Mach-Werk’ (‘work of doing’), but an utmost condescension of God Himself, then the process of creation must be a self-creating process. Through the creation of the primordial grounds, the ‘effects’ of the same, i.e. of living nature, of man and so forth to the world of dead bodies, God creates Himself. In this respect what can be said of Him in a passive sense is that in everything He creates He is also created Himself by making Himself apparent, from an invisible into a visible, from an unfathomable into a fathomable, from a hidden into an unveiled, from an unknown into a known.15 W. Beierwaltes has warned against misunderstanding the notion of the divine self-creation in the sense of a becoming ‘God only bringing Himself forth and completing Himself in the creatures’.16 On the other side, what is novel in Eriugena’s thought, as opposed also to Neoplatonism, is not to be misjudged. No other philosophy prior has ever spoken of a divine self-creation, which is to be distinguished from a divine self-causation in the sense of Plotinus. D.F. Duclow rightly says: ‘John was fully aware of the novelty and the radical character of this metaphor’.17 The Neoplatonic, especially the Proclian doctrine of the causa sui denotes – if it is at all conceivable – the immediate bringing forth of a self, i.e. a self-referential spirit, through itself. The self-creation of God in Eriugena instead signifies the self-constituting process as mediated by what He has created.18 14

Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 85.2455sq. Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 85.2445sq.; cf. I, 21.520sq.; 22.554; III, 81,2327sq.; 91.2639; 93.2688; 99.2899sq. 16 W. Beierwaltes, Eriugena (1994), 129. 17 F. Duclow, ‘Divine Nothingness and Self-Creation’ (1977), 116. 18 Cf. J. Kreuzer, ‘Natur als Selbstwerdung Gottes’, in A. Zimmermann and A. Speer (eds), Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter (Berlin, New York, 1991), 3-19, 18: ‘This creational principal 15

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3. Human Knowing – Divine Self-Knowledge The process of creation thus leads to the self-constitution of God. With God beginning to appear in his theophanies and to emerge from the most hidden folds of his essence – within which He was also unknowable to Himself –, and descending into the principles of things, He also begins to ‘know Himself in unison’.19 And although God is in Himself inconceivable, after the end of the world, therefore after all corporeal and incorporeal nature has become God while preserving its nature, He is indeed ‘in a certain way conceived in the creature’.20 The self-knowledge of God is, like His self-creation, something that is mediated by what has been created by Him. Human knowledge likewise serves such a mediation: ‘It is not thee who know Me, but it is I myself who knows me in thee through my spirit, because thou art not substantial light, but the participation of the light which subsists in itself’.21 According to Eriugena human thought, speech, sight, and love owe themselves to the divine working in us. To conceive of God thus as the subject, however, who grounds human knowledge and enables it, deeply connects Eriugena, as W. Beierwaltes also ascertains, to the thought of Hegel.22 As the whole creation, down to the lowest level, experiences a unique ontological valorisation through this notion of the self-creation of God, so is human knowledge, by fulfilling this function of mediating divine self-knowledge, in an outstanding way ennobled. Is therefore human thought necessary for divine self-knowledge? Here too W. Beierwaltes has rejected the ‘progressive’ reading, namely that which lets itself be inspired by the ‘continuation’ of this thought in Meister Eckhart and in the ‘Classical German Philosophy’.23 However, can there truly be anything not necessary or even coincidental, arbitrary, capricious in the realm of divine workings? If one takes into account the doctrine of the God-likeness of man, which for Eriugena is grounded in the same structure of the divine and human consciousness, then it also cannot be that there is something which is necessary, i.e. well-founded to divine consciousness, yet which appears to human consciousness dark and arbitrary. Hence there must belong to the entire process of creation in the sense of the condescension a kind of necessity, which, as a moral necessity, does not exclude freedom, but instead represents its highest degree. J. Huber, the Schellingian, who portrayed Eriugena requires the appearing nature’ (‘Dieses schöpferische Prinzip bedarf der erscheinenden Natur’) and ibid. 19: ‘He (ss. God) becomes Himself’ (‘wird er [scil. Gott] selbst’). On the Neoplatonic doctrine of the causa sui, cf. T. Kobusch, ‘Bedingte Selbstverursachung’, in T. Kobusch, B. Mojsisch and O.F. Summerell (eds), Selbst – Singularität – Subjektivität. Vom Neuplatonismus zum Deutschen Idealismus (Amsterdam, 2002), 55-173, 155-61. 19 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 99.2899sq. 20 Eriugena, Periphyseon I, 16.382sq. 21 Jean Scot, Homélie sur le Prologue de Jean, SC 151, 266.23-6. 22 Cf. W. Beierwaltes, Eriugena (1994), 23. 23 Ibid. 60.

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adequately to idealism, says: ‘The entire world view of Eriugena urges one to the assumption that the world is a necessary and thereby complementary moment of the divine life; that without the world God is not veritable and really God’.24 We find the same assertion in Meister Eckhart and Hegel.25 Even in Rilke this novel song resounds: ‘What will You do, God, when I die? / I am Your jug (if I shatter?) / I am Your drink (if I spoil?) / I am Your robe and Your craft, / with me You lose Your own meaning’.26 If in the concept ‘creation out of nothing’, in accordance with Eriugena, ‘nothing’ is to be understood in the sense of the eminent super-essentiality then this necessarily has consequences for the knowability of God as well as the things created by Him. The divine nothing is for every intellect unknowable. That the created intellect cannot know the essence of God, is something the Neoplatonic (the pagan as well as the Christian) tradition has always said. Eriugena draws another necessary consequence beyond this: also ‘God does not know of Himself, what He is, because He is no “what”, as He is inconceivable in everything for both, namely for Himself and for every intellect. […] He does not know Himself as something being. Therefore He does not know that He is a “what”, because He knows that He is not one of all the things, […] of which can be said or understood what they are’.27 This divine ‘self-ignorance’ is admittedly not a sign of deficient unknowing or impuissance, but the negation of all finite what-ness and essentiality. The God-likeness of man also shows itself in his self-knowledge. For it is given to him, only to know that he is, but not what he is.28 Hence one can say of man as well as of God that both are true: he knows himself in some way, but in some way he does not.29 Yet just as man cannot know his own essence, he cannot know the essence of any one thing at all. At the beginning of his main work Eriugena references the teaching of the ‘theologian Gregory’ – normally Gregory of Nazianzus is meant by this – who is supposed to have proven with many arguments that the essence of a visible or invisible creature cannot be conceived by human reason with respect to ‘what it is’. What becomes clearly apparent here already is what will later be explicitly stated in the work, being that Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus are the same person to Eriugena.30 In the background of the doctrine cited here quite obviously stands Gregory of Nyssa and not Gregory 24

Johannes Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena (Hildesheim, 1861), 254. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion I, TW 16, 192. 26 R.M. Rilke, ‘Das Buch vom mönchischen Leben’ (1899), in Das Stunden-Buch (Leipzig, 1918), 26 [= SW I, 275-6]. 27 Eriugena, Periphyseon II, 87.2067sq. 28 Cf. Eriugena, Periphyseon IV, 44.1196sq. 29 Cf. Eriugena, Periphyseon IV, 44.1196sq. 30 On this question cf. D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 53sq. 25

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of Nazianzus. For it was the Nyssenian who was the first in ancient philosophy – once one disregards the vague interjections of the Sceptics – to principally question the possibility of a knowledge of essence through sensorially guided human reason. To therefore attribute to him, who has already for other reasons been named the ‘Sartre of Antiquity’, the title of a ‘J. Locke of Antiquity’, seems not to be entirely inappropriate.31 Eriugena has taken up this anti-Aristotelian foray of the Nyssenian and understood his complete metaphysics not as a doctrine of essence, but as the doctrine of the creation out of the super-essential nothing. As D. Moran already said in his ground-breaking book on Eriugena decades ago: ‘Eriugena’s philosophy is best understood as a kind of idealism and as a deconstruction of the metaphysics of substance’.32 An objective criterion for the meaning and importance of a doctrine seems to be the history of impact. In the case of Eriugena it is a downright proof for it. It was the doctrine of the creation out of nothing which, in its Eriugenian form as it were made history. It can merely be remarked here and not explicated in detail, that Meister Eckhart’s doctrine of creation cannot be understood without the influence of Eriugena. It is a similar case with the teaching of ‘Zimzum’, i.e. the self-contraction of God for the purpose of the creation of the world, which appears in the Jewish Kabbalah and has significantly determined Jewish philosophy up until H. Jonas, yet has also been adopted by the so-called Christian Kabbalah (Christian Knorr von Rosenroth), by Jakob Böhme, by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and lastly also by Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling.33 None other than Gershom Scholem has not only assumed an influence of Eriugena on the Kabbalah, but also viewed the ‘self-contraction of God’ as a helpful notion for the understanding of the ‘creation out of nothing’.34 Eriugena’s doctrine of creation acquired its proper meaning, however, by becoming, as it were, the midwife of the idealistic systems. It is no coincidence 31 Cf. T. Kobusch, ‘Zeit und Grenze. Zur Kritik des Gregor von Nyssa an der Einseitigkeit der Naturphilosophie’, in S.G. Hall (ed.), Homilies on Ecclesiastes: an English Version with Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the VII. International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, St. Andrews 5.-10. Sept. 1990 (Berlin, 1993), 317; G. Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity (Durham, 2013), 106sq. 32 D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), 122. 33 Cf. C. Schulte, ‘Zimzum’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel, 2004). On the concept of creation in the Christian Kabbalah cf. R. Fludd, ‘Enzyklopädie und Kabbala’, in W. Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, Bd. 2 (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt, 2013), 61-147, 129sq., 200sq. 34 G. Scholem, Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 85sq.; id., Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala, 2nd ed. (Berlin, New York, 2001), 278, 332, 389; on Eriugena’s influence on the world of the Christian Kabbalah see also W. Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, Bd. 3 (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt, 2013), 142, 248 and on the editor of Eriugena C.B. Schlüter (1838), who helped to publish the Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition by F.J. Molitor, which was so important to G. Scholem, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (2001), 392, 398.

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that Eriugena was rediscovered specifically in the periphery of idealistic thought. Thus already 1810 in the bildungsroman Alonso or the Wanderer to Montserrat (Alonso oder der Wanderer nach Montserrat) of Ignatius Aurelius Fessler, the Capuchin Father and associate of Fichte in the revision of the statutes of a Masonic Lodge, Eriugena is named alongside Malebranche and Spinoza as a representative of a philosophy of interiority and furthermore – as where Eriugena is, Origen is not far – Origen’s interpretation of the Solomonic books is referenced. First Peder Hjort, lecturer for German Language at the academy Sorø, portrayed Eriugena 1823 as the true founder of Christian Science with a broad summary of the content of his main work.35 Then F.A. Staudenmaier substantially contributed to the rediscovery of Eriugena. He not only considers Eriugena’s philosophy to be widely orthodox, but also to be the origin of the idealistic systems. The reader is informed of the contents of the Eriugenian philosophy less in the book dedicated specifically to Eriugena, than more so in The Philosophy of Christianity.36 The influence of Eriugena’s doctrine of creation is further felt in all three great idealistic systems. For Johann Gottlieb Fichte as well as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling have rejected the traditional doctrine of the creation out of nothing. What became famous was a critical remark of Fichte, which Schelling cites, namely ‘that on the concept of creation within philosophy the first comprehensible word has still to be produced’.37 According to Hegel creation is the eternal self-revelation of the spirit (das ewige Sichoffenbaren des Geistes). Also Schelling, like Hegel and Fichte, has not been able to conceive of anything according to traditional understanding with the expression ‘creation out of nothing’. Schelling’s concept of creation betrays the influence of Eriugena most clearly. For Schelling understands creation as the ‘Herablassung’ of God. Yet ‘Herablassung’ is the German translation of the concept of ‘condescension’ which Eriugena utilizes in the same connection. Already for Johann Georg Hamann it was of central importance and would become so also for Franz von Baader.38 Herablassung is the voluntary self-contraction of God. Herein Schelling sees – historically rightly so – what makes the époque of Christianity: ‘Indeed it is the condescension of God which is the greatest also in 35 Peder Hjort, Johan Scotus Erigena oder von dem Ursprung einer christlichen Philosophie und ihrem heiligen Beruf (Kopenhagen, 1823), 47-86. 36 Cf. Franz Anton Staudenmaier, Johannes Scotus Erigena und die Wissenschaft seiner Zeit. Erster Theil (Frankfurt am Main, 1834); id., Die Philosophie des Christentums oder Metaphysik der heiligen Schrift als Lehre von den göttlichen Ideen und ihrer Entwicklung in Natur, Geist und Geschichte, Bd. 1 (Gießen, 1840). 37 F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 14. Vorl., SW XIII, 292. 38 N.N., Art. ‘Kondeszendenz’, HWPh 4 (1976) 942-6; Karlfried Gründer, Figur und Geschichte: Johann Georg Hamanns ‚Biblische Betrachtungen‘ als Ansatz einer Geschichtsphilosophie (Freiburg/ Br., 1958), 21-92.

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Christianity. A metaphysically cranked up God neither suits our head nor our heart’.39 If one has, as I do, the honour of being invited to speak here in England about Eriugena’s history of impact, one would be making oneself culpable if one failed to advert to the reception of Eriugena and Schelling by the two famous Romantic poets William Wordworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which I can only seek to avert with very few remarks here. Eriugena’s De divisione naturae was edited 1681 by the Cambridge professor for Greek – Thomas Gale. R. Cudworth refers to him as his scholarly friend Mr. Gale.40 Douglas Hedley has ascribed the ‘rediscovery’ of Eriugena to this circle of scholars of the Cambridge Platonists. For Coleridge Eriugena is a ‘wonderful man’ who must be regarded as the modern founder of the School of Pantheism.41

39

F.W.J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, SW VII, 429. R. Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe, Vol. I, p. 539. 41 On this cf. e.g. D. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aid to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge, 2000; repr. 2009), 295. M.A. Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy. The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford, 1994), 87, 111. 40

Traces of Ancient Virtue in Eriugena? Dominic J. O’MEARA, Fribourg, Switzerland

ABSTRACT Plotinus developed a theory of virtue in Ennead I 2, elaborated further by Porphyry in the Sentences ch. 32, which can be found to some degree in Augustine and in some detail in Macrobius. In this article I attempt to see to what extent this theory of virtue may be present in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, how it might relate to other sources (in particular Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor) which may have inspired Eriugena’s theory of virtue in the Periphyseon.

In a recent survey of early medieval ethics, Erik Kenyon refers to the conception of a hierarchy of virtue to be found in Plotinus and Porphyry, according to which there are ‘civic’ virtues which are subordinate to ‘contemplative’ virtues. He claims that the ‘tension’ which (some) modern scholars find between these two sorts of virtue was broken by John Scottus Eriugena in favour of the ‘contemplative’ virtues.1 In this case, I believe, as quite often in other modern accounts, Plotinus’ theory of virtue, as presented in Ennead I 2, and its relation to Porphyry’s reformulation and elaboration of the theory in Sentences ch. 32 are not adequately understood.2 Be that as it may, it does indeed seem reasonable to compare Eriugena’s views on virtue to those of Plotinus and of Porphyry, to the extent that the latter could have reached him through Augustine and thanks to the detailed accounts given of them by Macrobius, not to speak of other possible mediators of late ancient philosophical ethics such as Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. To what extent, we may then ask, can we detect traces in Eriugena of Plotinus’ theory of virtue and its Porphyrian reformulation, as transmitted by various sources? Of what importance is this for Eriugena and for his own views on virtue? In this article I would like first (I) to bring together some of Eriugena’s statements about virtue in the Periphyseon, attempting to piece them together into a unified account. As little research has been done in this field, my account must be regarded as provisional and very probably incomplete. A further limitation 1 Erik Kenyon, ‘From Augustine to Eriugena’, in Thomas Williams (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics (Cambridge, 2018), 9-31, 29-31. 2 I provide a succinct summary below in Part II. Kenyon speaks, for example, of three (!) grades of virtue in Plotinus (ibid. 15-6).

Studia Patristica CXXII, 153-160. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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consists in the fact that virtue theory is clearly not one of Eriugena’s primary concerns in the Periphyseon and we must search for indications scattered on the margins of his great metaphysical inquiry. Then I would like, in the second part of this article (II), to compare what has been pieced together with the conceptions of virtue to be found in Plotinus and in Porphyry. While taking account of possible intermediaries, my primary concern will not be philological, identifying sources, but systematic, comparing Eriugena’s position on virtue with that of Plotinus and of Porphyry.

I Like the Greek word ἀρετή, the Latin word uirtus has a range of different meanings. Eriugena distinguishes three senses of uirtus: 1. Uirtus substantialis: this is uirtus understood as part of the triad, naturally present in and constitutive of everything, of essentia, uirtus and operatio (here uirtus has the meaning of Greek δύναμις). 2. Uirtus as that which fights the corruption of nature, such as health (against sickness), or knowledge and wisdom (against ignorance and stupidity). 3. Uirtus as that which opposes vice, such as humility opposed to pride, chastity opposed to lust. Here virtue counters the irrational motions of the free will of intellectual nature.3 It is primarily this third sense of the term which will be of concern here, uirtus as the subject of ‘practical’ (actiua) philosophy.4 In Book I of the Periphyseon the discussion of the ten categories gives Eriugena the occasion to define the ontological status of uirtus, in the third sense defined above. Uirtus is a habitus (ἕξις), a state in the possession of virtues or vices, indeed an inseparable state reached in the rational or irrational motions of mind (animus)5 and which appears to be one with the mind: all ‘perfect virtue’ (perfecta uirtus) is a state inseparably adhering to the mind. States of the body, on the other hand, are unstable and do not therefore qualify as ‘states’, properly speaking.6 Eriugena includes vices with virtues in his account, but we will discover later that in fact only virtues can be described as ‘states’ as defined here. 3 Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 161-5 (Turnhout, 1996-2003), 632A. 4 705B. 5 On these motions see Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, 1991), 136. 6 474A. See the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem, c. 12.

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The mind of which virtues are states is man’s higher nature, the ‘inner man’, rational soul as a nature created by God.7 This nature includes, as innate in it, what Eriugena calls ‘natural virtue’ (uirtus naturalis): [Natural and general goods …] shall abide eternally and substantially in all men, when all taint of corruption and the conflict of the passions has been removed. They may, however, acquire contrary accidents, namely good will and evil will and they are capable of virtue and of shame: good will and virtue are present to them by nature and by grace: but the harmful impulses of the evil will, which are rightly and properly held to be no more than accretions to our true nature, are present to them as accidents which have no cause either natural or supernatural, and therefore the natures which experience them, whether within themselves or without, remain unaffected by them. For that which by deprivation is nothing comes neither from nature nor from grace: for it is neither a substance nor a natural accident, nor any one of those four natural virtues which clothe the soul, prudence, temperance, courage, or justice; nor either one of their two sources, wisdom or mildness, which in turn flow forth from love.8

Virtues seem to be ‘natural’ in the sense that they are part of the original human nature created by God in His image, human nature before the Fall. These virtues are quite different from ‘natural virtue’ as understood by Aristotle and included in the later Greek Neoplatonic hierarchy of virtue, where it represented the lowest rank in the hierarchy, well below ‘political’ ‘purificatory’ and ‘contemplative’ virtue.9 Rather, Eriugena seems to be inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s inclusion of virtue in human nature as created by God in His image before the Fall.10 These ‘natural virtues’ do not appear to be the same as the ‘perfect virtue’ defined by Eriugena, as we have seen above, as a state inseparably united with mind, since they can be lost or can be retrieved and actualized: 7 753AB. On Eriugena’s anthropology, see W. Otten, The Anthropology (1991), 140-9; Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (Cambridge, 1989), 154-85. 8 946BC: [generalia naturaliaque bona …] aeternaliter in omnibus et substantialiter permanebunt omni corruptione contrariaque passione absoluta. Attamen sunt contrariarum qualititatum, bonarum dico malarumque uoluntatum, uirtutis ignominiaeque capacia. Et bonae quidem uoluntates atque uirtutes ex natura et gratia eis adsunt, prauae uero uoluntatis obnoxii motus, qui uere proprieque superflua naturae dicuntur, ex nulla causa naturali seu supernaturali eis accidunt, ideoque extra se simul et intra se impassibiliter eos sustinent. Non enim ex natura uel gratia prouenit quod per privationem nihil est, quoniam neque substantia est, neque naturale accidens, neque uirtus naturalis quadriformis, qua rationalis anima ornatur (prudentiam dico, temperantiam, fortitudinem, iustitiam), neque harum bicornis fons (sophia uidelicet ac mansuedo, quae ex caritate manant) […]. In the last lines of this passage Eriugena is using Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Iohannem; in Eriugena’s translation, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.SG 18 (Turnhout, 1988), XVII 135-48. See also Periphyseon 603D, 816B (using Ambrose, De paradiso III 12-4), 822C. I quote the English translation of the Periphyseon (with slight modifications) by Inglis P. Sheldon-Williams and John O’Meara, Eriugena Periphyseon (The Division of Nature) (Montréal, Washington, DC, 1987). 9 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1144b3-9; for a brief description of the later Greek Neoplatonic hierarchy of virtues see my Plotin traité 19 sur les vertus (Paris, 2019), 20-1. 10 796AB, quoting Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis, ch. 16; see also Gregory, ch. 4 and below, note 24, for Eriugena’s use of Gregory.

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‘For evil is the intellectual soul’s forgetfulness of natural goods’, and ‘its failure to operate the virtues that inhere in nature, and the irrational orientation of her natural powers in some direction other than her proper end, which is brought about by erring judgment. By her proper end I mean the cause of all things that are, towards which all things naturally tend’ […] human nature will eventually, by exercise of its reason and in accordance with the natural virtues which inhere in it, moved by its search for its proper cause, ascend and return into Paradise, by which is meant delight in the virtues which, innate in it, it lost in sinning.11

Thus, endowed by God with natural virtues,12 human nature, mind, may lose these virtues through sin, or bring them back into action so as to live a life of perfect virtue. Vice originates in an initial inclination to imprudence, in false choice, erring judgement, in phantasms when vices which take the appearance of goods and of virtues in the ‘animal’ which is added to human nature with the Fall: Let him next consider how the passions of the irrational creature which after man’s fall from the glory of the divine image human nature put on as something added to it for a punishment for sin and which, although now in that nature, it did not possess before its transgression, can change, in those who are made perfect, into natural virtues. Now by the passions I mean pleasure and pain, lust and fear, and the emotions that arise from them. There is no doubt that these can be changed into virtues: ‘for example, lust can be changed by those who so wish into an intellectual longing for the things of God; pleasure may take the form of innocent delight in the nutritive function of the soul; fear, a precaution against the future punishment of sins; sorrow, repentance which checks our present ill deeds’. If then the passions, which the rational nature has won over to herself from the irrational, can be changed into the natural virtues of the soul, why may we not believe that irrationality itself may not be changed to rationality?13 11 919AB: “Malitia nanque est animae intellectualis naturalium bonorum obliuio” et “ad finem insitarum naturae uirtutum operationis defectus naturaliumque potentiarum per fallentem iudicationem in aliud praeter finem irrationabilis motus. Finam uero dico eorum quae sunt causam, quam naturaliter appetunt omnia” […] rationabiliter secundum insitas sibi naturales uirtutes humana natura mouebitur sursum uersus erecta, causam suam semper appetens et in paradisum (delicias dico uirtutum quas naturaliter sibi insitas peccando perdiderat) rediens. The passages quoted in this text are taken from Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium; in Eriugena’s translation, ed. Carl Laga and Carlos Steel, vol. I, CChr.SG 7 (Turnhout, 1980), ‘Prologus’, 48-9 and ‘Introductio’, 193-8. 12 822C, 829C; on natural virtues see also 799A. 13 916B: Perspiciat quoque passiones irrationabilis creaturae, quae post casum hominis a dignitate diuinae imaginis insertas sibi poena quadam peccati humana natura attraxerat, quas insitas naturaliter ante lapsum non habebat, moueri posse in his qui perfecti sunt in uirtutes naturales. Passiones autem dico uoluptatem et tristitiam, concupiscentiam atque timorem, et quae ex his nascuntur, quas in uirtutes posse mutari dubium non est. “Verbi gratia, concupiscentia quidem intellectualis diuinorum appetitus desideratiuum operatur motum, uoluptas uero innocuam nutritiuae animi operationis laetitiam, timor quoque futurae in delictis prouidam ultionis curam, item tristitia correctricem in praesenti malorum poenitentiam”. Si ergo passiones, quas rationabilis natura ex irrationabili in se ipsam deduxerat, in naturales animae possunt mutari uirtutes, cur incredibile sit ipsam irrationabilitatem in altitudinem rationabilitatis transmutari?

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Irrational passions are added to human nature as a consequence of the Fall. They are not an integral part of human nature and may be eliminated, restoring human nature to its innate natural virtues: See what glory and praise is acquired by the virtues of perfect souls when they control and contain the vices that are within them, and tame and dominate them and force them into obedience and submit them to the laws of God so that the evil which assaults the soul shall not drown it in the depths! Often they even completely destroy those vices, often they convert them into themselves, so that vices become virtues.14

By dominating vices, even eliminating them, perfect souls purify themselves and restore themselves to their natural virtuous state, to their pristine sinceritas.15 If passions and vices are something additional to human nature, if they are accidents which can be eliminated from this nature, as we can see from the passages quoted above, then they do not have the same ontological status as that of natural virtues. Natural virtues are innate, inseparable from human nature; vices are accretions which can be removed. As privations, vices are neither substances nor natural accidents; they are nothing.16 Indeed Eriugena believes that the ‘inner man’, rational soul, remains unaffected (impassibilis) by these accretions, quoting in this regard as his authority Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis.17 ‘Natural virtues’ are goods conferred on humans by God’s creation of human nature as rational soul. This means that all humans are naturally virtuous. However, as we see in the first passage quoted above, virtue comes not only by nature, but also by grace. So Eriugena also refers to human souls which can be raised up, by the grace of God, from the activation of natural virtues to virtues ‘above all natural virtues’ (ultra omnes naturales uirtutes), virtues which are spiritual and divine.18 This distinction between a life of natural virtues and a life raised by the grace of God to the higher level of supra-natural virtues corresponds to the distinction Eriugena makes between the general return of all humanity to its pristine state, to paradise, and the ascent of some, the elect, beyond this to a higher deification.19 The quotation in this passage comes from Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium; in Eriugena’s translation, ‘Interrogatio prima’, 18-23. See also 511A. 14 972A : Vide quantum ornamenti laudisque perfectarum animarum uirtutibus comparatur, dum intra se uitia coambiunt atque coartant suoque dominatui subigunt ac refrenant legibusque diuinis ordinant, ne in profundum malitiae animas, quas conantur corrumpere, mergant. Saepe etiam penitus ea (uitia dico) extinguunt, saepe in semet ipsas transfundunt, ita ut et uitia in uirtutes uertantur. 15 747BC. 16 See above the passage quoted at n. 8. 17 872AC, quoting Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis ch. 27; 944B. 18 950A; see 851B, 1014C, 1016A (super omnem naturalem uirtutem). 19 See 756AB, 979BC, 1014BC (I think that the expression absque uirtutum ornamentis at 1014B, 7003, may perhaps be read relative to the higher virtues conferred by divine grace); Paul

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II In the second part of this article, I would like to propose a systematic comparison of the theory of virtue which we find in Plotinus’ treatise on the virtues (Ennead I 2) and in its reformulation in Porphyry (in Sentences, ch. 32) with the views about virtue that have been pieced together above, drawing from Eriugena’s Periphyseon. But first the following remarks might be made about virtue in Plotinus’ and Porphyry’s texts.20 Plotinus distinguishes between two sorts of virtues: what he calls ‘political’ virtues (often rendered as ‘civic’ virtues in modern studies) and the ‘greater’ virtues. Porphyry introduces two more sorts: ‘purificatory’ virtues (coming between Plotinus’ two levels of virtue, even if Plotinus himself does not consider the process of purification to be a virtue) and ‘paradigmatic’ virtues (coming above Plotinus’ ‘greater’ virtues, even if Plotinus himself rejects the idea that the paradigms of virtue in divine Intellect are virtue). Plotinus views virtue as a disposition (διάθεσις) of the soul, which it can acquire or lose: this is why the divine Intellect, to which nothing can be added or from which nothing can be removed, cannot ‘have’ a virtue. Plotinus’ ‘political’ virtues correspond to the four cardinal virtues defined at the end of Plato’s Republic Book IV, definitions recalled by Plotinus and repeated by Porphyry. Plato defines the four cardinal virtues in terms of three parts of the soul: reason, spirit and desire. However, Plotinus does not think that spirit and desire are parts of the nature of the soul, a nature which is rational and impassible. Rather, spirit and desire are irrational passions which arise in the body enlivened by the soul. Consequently, Plotinus redefines the four cardinal virtues, not as virtues of three parts of the soul, but as the order and measure which the rational soul can give to irrational affects, the passions of the living body, along with right opinions, as opposed to the false opinions which may arise from the passions. This order expresses itself as different virtues in relation to differences in the passions and in the circumstances in which they arise. The ‘political’ virtues make us good human beings. To make ourselves ‘god’, however, we need to cultivate the ‘greater’ virtues: these virtues are defined as the turning away of the rational soul’s attention from the affairs of the body and of the sensible world and its orientation to and contemplation of the divine Intellect. There are degrees in this assimilation of the soul to the divine Intellect, but the knowledge it brings to the soul also provides the epistemic premises whereby the soul can fully exercise the ‘political’ virtues, i.e. govern the passions by giving them a rational order based on knowledge. This Dietrich and Donald Duclow, ‘Paradise and Eschatology: Symbolism and Exegesis in “Periphyseon V”’, in Guy Allard (ed.), Jean Scot écrivain (Montréal, 1986), 31-7; D. Moran, The Philosophy (1989), 180-4. 20 I summarize the reading I provide in my commentary on Ennead I 2 in Plotin Traité 19 (2019), where I also briefly compare (19) Plotinus’ views with Porphyry’s reformulation in Sentences ch. 32 and refer to further studies.

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means that possessing the ‘political’ virtues without having attained the ‘greater’ virtues is to possess them incompletely: a complete ‘political’ virtue requires the possession of a ‘greater’ virtue. The wise, having both types of virtue, will know how to act in relation to bodily concerns, even if the life of the ‘greater’ virtue, contemplation of the divine Intellect, is of greatest value and the goal sought by the soul as representing an assimilation of the soul to the divine as far as possible. In this sense there is no tension, for the sage, between the ‘contemplative’ and the ‘political’ life: the former is the ultimate Good which the soul seeks; the latter the expression of its goodness in the care of lower things. A sage will not confuse or replace the one with the other. Coming back now to our sketch of virtue in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, we may note some similarities between Plotinus and Eriugena.21 The rational soul, both in Plotinus and in Eriugena, is impassible.22 The passions, spirit, desire, are assigned, not to the original nature of the soul in Plotinus, the ‘inner man’ in Eriugena, but to the living body in Plotinus, the ‘animal’ in Eriugena.23 The most obvious link between Plotinus and Eriugena in regard to this conception of human nature is provided by Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis, a text frequently used by Eriugena.24 We might wonder then if a Plotinian anthropology, transmitted to Eriugena by Gregory, will have consequences as regards how virtues are seen in Eriugena. Can we compare Plotinus’ two sorts of virtue, ‘political’ and ‘superior’, with virtue in Eriugena? Eriugena’s second and third meanings of the term uirtus, as distinguished in the passage summarized above,25 may seem to correspond in part to Plotinus’ two types of virtue. But a corresponding concept of two levels of virtue does not appear to be clearly present in Eriugena’s Periphyseon. A text of Maximus the Confessor, used by Eriugena,26 derives the four (cardinal) natural virtues from wisdom and mildness, which in turn derive from love. But again, this does not seem to be part of a theory of two levels of virtue in Eriugena comparable to Plotinus’ ‘political’ and ‘greater’ virtues. Rather, the more evident distinction between levels of virtue in Eriugena is that between virtues which are possessed by nature and virtues conferred by divine grace. If we consider Eriugenian ‘natural’ virtue in more detail, it seems that this virtue corresponds to both types of Plotinian virtue. For in Eriugenian ‘natural’ 21 On Augustine and Macrobius as mediators of Plotinus’ and Porphyry’s views on virtues, see my Plotin Traité 19 (2019), 23-4 (with further bibliography). 22 On the impassibility and impeccability of the rational soul in Eriugena, see above at note 8; W. Otten, Anthropology (1991), 152, 160-1. 23 752D. 24 See Eriugena’s quotation at 792AD from Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis, ch. 15, a very Plotinian passage; at 875AB his quotation from Gregory, ch. 18; and W. Otten, Anthropology (1989), 142-5. 25 At note 3. 26 See above note 8.

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virtue we can observe, in a single kind of virtue, functions which are assigned separately to the two Plotinian types of virtue: the function of ordering and controlling the passions (Plotinian ‘political’ virtue); and that of turning away from them and contemplating God (Plotinian ‘greater’ virtue). Both functions are attributed to ‘natural’ virtue in Eriugena.27 However, what we might be tempted to describe as the horizontality of Eriugenian ‘natural’ virtue (as opposed to the verticality of the two levels of Plotinian virtues) includes the idea of a progression from innate ‘natural’ virtue to activation and ascent to the perfection of this virtue. And if the two functions of Plotinian virtues (‘political’ and ‘greater’ virtues) appear to be encompassed in the Eriugenian ‘natural’ virtue, the contemplative function has the greatest weight and is superior in Eriugena. Indeed contemplation is described by Eriugena elsewhere as the perfection of virtue: We compare action to contemplation, the mind yet to be purified to the perfectly purified mind, virtue which ascends to an unchangeable state to virtue which has already reached it.28

‘Purification’ appears, in Porphyry’s account of the scale of virtues in the Sentences ch. 32, as a level of virtue leading from the Plotinian ‘political’ virtue to contemplative virtue. And of course purification of the soul is a major theme in Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor.29 In Eriugena purification appears, not as a separate level of virtue, but as part of the process leading the natural virtue up to its perfection in contemplation.30 In this sense, then, Eriugenian ‘natural’ virtue includes contemplation as a higher level within itself. Eriugenian ‘natural’ virtue is even further removed, it seems, from the somewhat scholastic grading of virtues in four levels of Porphyry’s Sentences. Finally, as noted above, Eriugena introduces, over and above a virtue possessed by nature, a virtue given by divine grace: this, I think, is also a point that distinguishes Eriugenian from Plotinian virtue.

27

See above the passage quoted at note 13 and 793B. Homily on the Prologue of Saint John, ed. É. Jeauneau, SC 151 (Paris, 1969), 3, 22-5: Sed conferimus actioni contemplationem, purgando adhuc animo perfecte purgatum, ascendenti adhuc uirtuti ad incommutabilem habitum peruenientem iam uirtutem. See also É. Jeauneau’s note, 241, n. 3. 29 See P. Dietrich and D. Duclow, ‘Paradise and Eschatology’ (1986), 35-6. 30 See also the triad actio, purgatio, contemplatio in Eriugena’s Commentary on Saint John, ed. É. Jeauneau, SC 180 (Paris, 1972), VI, II, 19-24 (with Jeauneau’s note, 318, n. 3). 28

Betrayal and Contemplation: Judas and the Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena John GAVIN, S.J., College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA

ABSTRACT This article examines Eriugena’s adoption and adaptation of Neoplatonic themes in his treatment of Judas’ betrayal at the Last Supper and in the Passion. Before looking at a particular passage from the Periphyseon, however, it considers several Neoplatonic themes in Proclus’ portrayal of the ambitious traitor Alcibiades and Pseudo-Dionysius’ own treatment of Judas. It concludes by comparing the three authors in order to demonstrate the similarities and differences in their approach to the ethical analysis of betrayal through a Neoplatonic and Christian lens.

The Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena gave the West a remarkable synthesis of two strands of Platonism stemming from Augustine of Hippo and Dionysius the Areopagite. Eduard Jeauneau wrote that ‘while Augustine was indebted to the older form of Neoplatonism, that represented by Plotinus and Porphyry, Dionysius is indebted to a later form, represented by Proclus. For the first time in the history of human thought the two Neoplatonic streams converged. And they converged in a mind widely open, qualified to combine them harmoniously’.1 Yet, Eriugena achieved more than just a synthesis. The appropriation of Neoplatonic ideas through the filter of Christian authors – especially Augustine, the Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor – gave rise to new forms within his Scriptural exegesis, as well as a deep understanding of conciliar teachings and the celebration of the Christian sacraments. In particular, the significance of the Incarnation of the Logos radically shaped his vision in ways that distinguished him even from his Christian sources. In this article I would like to examine Eriugena’s adaptation of Neoplatonic themes in his treatment of Judas’ betrayal at the Last Supper and in the Passion. Before looking at that passage in the Periphyseon, however, I will examine several Neoplatonic themes in Proclus’ portrayal of the ambitious traitor Alcibiades and Pseudo-Dionysius’ own treatment of Judas. I will conclude by comparing the three authors in order to demonstrate the similarities and differences 1 Edouard Jeauneau, ‘The Neoplatonic Themes of Processio and Reditus in Eriugena’, Dionysius 15 (1991), 3-29, 8.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 161-173. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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in their approach to the ethical analysis of betrayal through the lens of Neoplatonism and Christianity. 1. Proclus and the Disordered Ambition of Alcibiades In his commentary on Alcibiades I2 – a dialogue between Socrates and the young, impetuous Athenian – Proclus wonders why Socrates’ daemon led him to engage the wanton Alcibiades in the first place: ‘On this topic it is customary to enquire how the guardian spirit (τὸ δαιμόνιον) came to allow Socrates to associate with Alcibiades at all, since he [Alcibiades] was to receive no benefit therefrom; for pointless activity is appropriate neither to spirit-natures nor to serious-minded men’.3 In his commentary, Proclus examines the reasons behind the sad corruption of the promising Alcibiades and, in doing so, summarizes the basis for his Neo-Platonic ethics. 1.1. Basic principles of Proclus’ ethics Throughout his commentary, Proclus emphasizes the necessity of self-knowledge for assimilation to and union with the divine.4 One must turn inward, into the self, to know the unifying first principles within the soul: ‘the man who has reverted to and become a spectator of himself will thereby also behold all the divine, and through reversion to himself like some step leading upwards will be translated to the vantage point of the divine and so turn towards the elevation of himself to the superior principle’.5 The soul, ‘of its own motion, must within itself seek both the true and the good and the eternal notions of reality’.6 In turn, the movement into the self and the apprehension of first principles or innate notions7 forms one’s character in the authentic moral virtues: ‘[A]nd 2

Most scholars would no longer attribute this dialogue to Plato. Proclus, Commentary on Alcibiades I, 86-7. English: Alcibiades I, trans. William O’Neill (The Hague, 1965), 57; Greek: Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato, ed. L.G. Westerink (Amsterdam, 1954), 38.17-20; 39.1-10. 4 In fact, the goal of all existents is assimilation to God. ‘For each thing, even the lowest grade of being you could mention, becomes God by participating in unity according to its rank. For if God and One are the same because there is nothing greater than God and nothing greater than the One, then to be unified is the same as to be deified’. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides 1, 641. English: Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s ‘Parmenides’, trans. Glenn Morrow and John Dillon (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 36. Greek: Procli in Platonis Parmenidem commentaria, ed. Carlos Steel (Oxford, 2009), 28.5-8. For an overview of this position see, Radek Chlup, Proclus: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2012), 235-6. 5 Proclus, Alcibiades I, 21. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 13; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 9.15-7. 6 Ibid. 250. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 164; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 115.15-8. 7 We know through the notions in us according to essence (διὰ τοὺς κατ᾽οὐσίαν ἡμῖν ἐνυπάρχοντας λόγους). Ibid. 7. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 5; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 3.5. 3

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sure the more we pass over to the ascending scale and loftier form of virtues, the more we arrive at irrefutable notions concerning them. The reason is that we become nearer to intelligent being, with which resides stability, determinateness, and a condition that is ever the same’.8 In short, self-knowledge through an inward turn toward the reflection of the Intellect within the soul assimilates one to God through unity, stability, and the formation in the higher virtues. In order to make this inward turn, one generally requires external aid. The aid may take various forms: a god or daemon;9 the Chaldean mysteries and theurgy;10 or even a human lover or teacher.11 Socrates himself models the character of the teacher-lover who, through ‘friendship, identity, and communion’,12 helps his beloved to ascend toward the interior light. Every person therefore should seek aid to move from ignorance to self-knowledge, from depravity to virtue.13 Finally, just as interior self-knowledge both unifies and deifies, so ignorance through exterior sensory knowledge both divides and deforms. Reliance upon fragmented sensory knowledge causes ignorance of the self (i.e., of first principles and the virtues) and the emergence of evil.14 The ignorant, irrational soul that lives only in the world of process (ἐν τῇ γενέσει) falls prey to emotions, disordered desires, and fragmentation. The self becomes dissipated in the world and contributes to the strife and rivalries among men. The soul that desires 8

Ibid. 96. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 63; L.G. Westerink (1954), 43.10-4. Ibid. 32. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 20-1; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 14.19. 10 Ibid. 39-40. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 24-5; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 17.5. A person, knowing the image of the One in his soul, must pray to be taken up by the One. See Ben Schomakers, ‘The Nature of Distance. Neoplatonic and Dionysian Versions of Negative Theology’, American Catholic Theological Quarterly 82 (2008), 593-618. 11 The teacher helps one to move from imperfect vision to clarity: ‘[T]he souls that are being led must first of all be linked with the objects of their desire through knowledge and attention … and it sometimes happens that souls which are still imperfect do not lay hold on the thing they know but see it partially and incompletely, and other times they see it as whole, when they grasp it perfectly and through it know also other matters that are higher than it’. Commentary on the Parmenides, 1, 670. English: G. Morrow and J. Dillon (1987), 55. Greek: C. Steel (2009), 59.5-11. 12 Φιλία, ταυτότης, κοινωνία, Alcibiades I, 232: English: W. O’Neill (1965), 153; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 107.20. 13 ‘The reason is that man’s soul is yoked to a body and lives a common life with the body: it is obstructed thereby and requires outside powers to arouse it. The imperfect intellect is guided by the perfect, just as imperfect Nature is actually being brought to perfection by the activity of the perfect’. Ibid. 235. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 155; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 108-9.8-12. 14 ‘When they are in the world of process (ἐν τῇ γενέσει), they resemble those who spend their time in a plague-ridden spot, but when they are outside the world of process, just as Plato himself says, they resemble those who dwell in a ‘meadow’. Just as therefore there is nothing surprising in the fact that in places of pestilence more people suffer from disease than are in a natural state of health, so also it is no cause for surprise that in the world of process there are more souls that are depraved and in the grip of the emotions than otherwise’. Ibid. 256-7. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 167; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 118.9-19. 9

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assimilation to God must therefore undergo purgation from the fractious senses, abandon disordered desires, and open itself to divine aid.15 1.2. The fall of Alcibiades Alcibiades, Proclus makes clear, was not a hopeless case and we should not be surprised that Socrates loved him and sought to enlighten him. The potential virtues manifested themselves even in the least edifying deeds of the young Athenian. Socrates was right to ennoble him through philosophy. Proclus writes: ‘Well, then, that the young man [Alcibiades] has been rendered nobler (to begin from the less perfect) is made clear by Plato’s Banquet, where Alcibiades, even though drunk, is represented as marveling at “the arguments in philosophy” as efficacious’.16 Yet, disordered ambition (φιλοτιμία)17 proves to be Alcibiades’ downfall. He no longer strives for nobility, but allows sense perception, opinion, and anger (θυμός) to poison his soul.18 Trapped at this level, he ‘utters the arguments neither of sense-desire nor of the superior soul’.19 He totters between shameful ignorance and liberating knowledge. Unjust desires preoccupy him, but he still has enough sense to keep them hidden. In the end, disordered ambition leads Alcibiades to conclude that nobility (τὸ καλόν) rests not in the stable principles of the soul, but with the crowd. He assumes that what is noble is so by convention (θέσις) and not by nature.20 The multitude, what the Chaldean Oracles call ‘those who go in herds (ἀγεληδόν)’, therefore pulls the young man to pieces.21 His ambition drives him to seek things outside of himself, in material goods and opinion, and the disordered drive deforms his soul: ‘[T]he soul that resembles the body undergoes the experience of bodies and conceives that its good lies in things other than itself, either money or friends or honors or other such objects, so as to possess the appearance of self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια), but not the reality’.22 15 Proclus notes the importance of a participant’s ‘fitness’ to share in divine gifts through the stripping off all that makes one unlike God. See especially Proclus, The Elements of Theology, prop. 140-2, in The Elements of Theology, ed. and trans. E.R. Dodds (Oxford, 1963), 124-6. See also Kevin Corrigan, ‘Solitary Mysticism in Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius’, Journal of Religion 76 (1996), 28-42. 16 Alcibiades I, 89. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 59; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 39-40.1-11. 17 The final emotion to be cast off in order to reach union with God is ambition. See ibid. 138. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 91; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 63.12-3. 18 Ibid. 288. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 188; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 133.5-8. 19 Ibid. 219. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 144; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 101.2-3. 20 Ibid. 328. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 215; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 152.19-22. 21 Proclus warns: ‘Beginning from below we must shun the multitude of men who “rush in herds”, as the oracle says, and must not share either their lives or their opinions’. Ibid. 245. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 161; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 113.6-8. 22 Ibid. 107. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 69; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 48.1-4.

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Proclus also notes that Alcibiades, in the dialogue, has already initiated a rift with his mentor and lover. Socrates, through a series of questions, has helped the young man to conclude that he needs aid to enter the healing unity of the soul. Yet, instead of being grateful, Alcibiades gets angry at Socrates and others for revealing his weaknesses. ‘So here once more Alcibiades is revealed as at war with himself and under the impression that he knows what he does not and blaming others for the refutations for which he is personally responsible to himself, and in general out of accord with himself, because he withdrew from intellect and followed evil and unintelligent men, empty imaginings and strange conceits and in general persons who cling to external objects’.23 Indeed, Socrates becomes his ‘rival’,24 since the good teacher has shown him up and tricked him into admitting his limitations. Proclus concludes, ‘But such is the ambitious character all over – unduly involved in contentions, because it always employs the same terms and the like choice of conversation on the wrong subjects, at the wrong times, and in the wrong circumstances’.25 History would prove that Alcibiades did not benefit from the attempts to heal his soul. Betrayal, profligacy, and rivalries would mar his reputation, despite his tremendous innate virtues. In the end, he was an evildoer [κακοποιός] and purveyor of bad counsel. Socrates, according to Proclus, had, early on, subtly ‘revealed him as deserted by all the higher causes and for these reasons gone astray unawares’.26 Alcibiades did not know himself, abandoned the counsel of his teacher-lover, and plunged into the world of disparate senses and opinions – the seeds of corruption and betrayal. 2. Dionysius the Areopagite and the Expulsion of Judas Dionysius the Areopagite, whose works served as a conduit for the transmission of Proclus’ thought to the Christian world, professed the same goal for beings endowed with soul and intellect: assimilation to and union with the divine. Deification, he wrote, ‘is the inimitable imitation of the one who is beyond divinity and beyond goodness, according to which we are deified and made good’.27 This assimilation requires both external aid – grace, the sacraments, angelic assistance – and knowledge of unchanging realities.28 23

Ibid. 288. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 189. Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 133.18-23. He is dominated by ‘life of rivalry’ (ἡ φιλόνεικος ζωή). Ibid. 288. 25 Ibid. 306. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 201; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 142.8-15. 26 Ibid. 291. English: W. O’Neill (1965), 190; Greek: L.G. Westerink (1954), 135.12-4. 27 Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 2. All citations for Dionysius the Areopagite from Patristische Texte und Studien (PTS) 36, ed. G. Heil and A.M. Ritter (Berlin, 1981), 158.2-4. Translations are my own. 28 Within the hierarchy such aid and knowledge are conveyed in symbol and sacrament. For instance, the Hierarch, within the liturgy, offers divine gifts and illumination: ‘Besides, as I have 24

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Yet, this deifying communion with God comes first and foremost through the Incarnation, in which God becomes accessible to our mode of perception and participation: ‘For it is necessary that we, if we desire communion (κοινωνία) with him, look toward his most divine life according to the flesh and, by assimilation (ἀφομοίωσις) to it, we must run upwards toward the Godlike and unblemished state (ἕξις) of sinlessness. And thus, he will fittingly give to us the communion with the likeness’.29 There is clearly one greater than Socrates here: the Word, who is more than just a teacher-lover, has become man and revealed God’s love for humanity (φιλανθρωπία). To know Christ does not mean that humans can grasp the essence of God, but it does mean that human beings have a unique manner of encountering the divine likeness and imitating his way of life. In turn, this encounter is perpetuated through the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and the celebration of the sacraments: that is, intimate and transformative encounters with the grace of the Incarnation. Especially in the celebration of the Eucharist, the celebrant ‘leads Jesus Christ into our view’ and makes him present by images (εἰκόσι).30 Yet, a person may fall away from the unity in communion with Christ and enter into a fragmented perception of reality. ‘Thus, if the free will (ἡ … αὐθαίρετος αὐτεξουσιότης) of intelligent beings should, out of the love for evil, separate itself from the spiritual light, thereby closing off the powers naturally inseminated in it for enlightenment, it is removed from the light that is present to it. The light has not gone away, but it shines upon a freedom that is now shortsighted and it runs benevolently toward a freedom that has turned away’.31 This distortion can even take place in the celebration of the sacraments or in the reading of the Scriptures – the perpetuation of the benefices of the Incarnation in history – when the viewer cannot see past the material symbols and know the realities behind them. Dionysius contrasts those who have a properly illuminated vision with the ‘mob’, that is, with those enamored with material impressions for their own sake: And it is this way for those who rightly do not love the likeness of things that seem to be good and just, but rather love those things that truly are. They do not look toward the glory that is unintelligently lauded by the mob (ὑπὸ πλήθους), but rather they imitate God by distinguishing Good in itself and Evil in itself. They are the divine images of the most divine fragrance that, being in itself that which is truly fragrant, does not said, the Divine Light is always beneficently revealed to spiritual eyes (ὄψεσι) and it is possible for those eyes to seize the Light that is always present and very ready to impart, in a way worthy of God, its own qualities. The divine Hierarch, with a view toward imitation, reveals and bounteously impresses the enlightening rays of divine teaching upon all. He is very ready to enlighten, in imitation of the God, the one who approaches’. Dionysius the Areopagite, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, II 3, PTS 36, 75.1-9. 29 EH III 12, PTS 36, 93.1-9. 30 EH III 13, PTS 36, 93.14-9. 31 EH II 3, PTS 36, 74.15-8.

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return to that which appears in an unlike way (ἀνομοίως) for the masses (τοῖς πολλοῖς), but impresses that which is unfeigned (τὸ ἀνυπόκριτον) in those that are true images of itself.32

A member of the mob – one who cannot see past the instability of material objects and symbols – becomes a source of division and is incapable of receiving divine gifts. He cannot see true beauty and, as a hypocrite, seeks counterfeits instead. This becomes clear in the case of the traitor Judas, who ceased to be devoted to Jesus and, in turn, could no longer live Jesus’ manner of life. Dionysius makes this point in his contemplation of the distribution of the consecrated gifts in the liturgy: Thus, the varied and holy synthesis of the symbols is not unprofitable for them [the congregation], even though it only appears up to the point of external things. For, on the one hand, the most holy chanting of the Scriptures and the readings instruct them in a teaching of the virtuous life and, prior to that, the complete cleansing from deathdealing evil. But, on the other hand, the most divine, communal, and peace-giving sharing of the one and the same bread and cup establishes (νομοθετεῖ) a divinely inspired, similar disposition (ὁμοτροπία) in them as those nourished in the same way. And it leads to a holy recollection of the most divine banquet [the Last Supper], which is the original symbol (ἀρχισυμβόλον) of all the perfecting rites. In that banquet even the creator of the symbols himself most justly excluded the one who did not feast with him on holy things piously and with similar manner of life (ὁμοτρόπως), thereby teaching lawfully and, at the same time, in a manner worthy of God, that the true approach (προσέλευσις) to divine things, in respect to one’s state (καθ᾽ἕξιν), grants to those approaching a communion suitable for their likeness.33

Jesus himself excluded the traitorous Judas from Last Supper because Judas was no longer ‘like Christ’.34 An approach to Christ and the sacred mysteries demands a prior purgation from evil and growth in the virtues; in turn, the mysteries form the person according to a divinely gifted manner of being in communion with Christ. Yet, Judas entered the Last Supper as one already separated from Christ: he did not form himself according to the teachings and example of Jesus. His disposition (ἕξις), lacking in virtue and marred by sin, could no longer claim kinship with the divine likeness. He had betrayed Christ and, in turn, he handed himself over to unlawfulness. Thus, while Alcibiades fell into betrayal and rivalry with his teacher because disordered ambition drove him into the realm of opinion and material desire, 32

EH IV 1, PTS 36, 96, 20-3; 97.1-3. EH III 3, PTS 36, 81.17-24. 34 The Evangelists themselves are unclear on whether Judas received bread and wine from Christ at the Last Supper. Among the Fathers, Ephraim the Syrian, the Apostolic Constitutions, and Hilary of Potiers directly exclude him, while Origen and Cyril of Alexandria waffle between including and excluding Judas. St John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo maintained that Judas was present, though he received no merit from his participation. For an overview of the tradition see Goran Sekulovski, ‘Jean Chrysostome sur la communion de Judas’, SP 67 (2013), 311-21. 33

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Dionysius’ Judas found himself at odds with Jesus because of dissimilitude: his manner of life was no longer similar to that of Christ’s. Assimilation to God therefore demands that one knows and imitates Christ alone, while division comes from the abandonment of Jesus for the mob and matter. 3. John Scottus Eriugena and Judas the Traitor 3.1. Basic principles of Eriugena’s ethics First, the goal of creation, according to Eriugena, is unification with and assimilation to God. ‘Thus the healthy intellect’, writes Eriugena, ‘must accept that after the end of this world every nature, whether corporeal or incorporeal, will seem to be only God, with the integrity of its nature remaining’.35 In fact, God created man in the divine image to serve as the instrument, or intermediary, for this unity of all created things in God. ‘In Man every creature, both visible and invisible, is created. Therefore, he is said to be the “workshop of all things”, since in him all things which come after God are contained’.36 Man unifies the cosmos in himself. Yet, Man betrayed his mission as unifier by turning from God and choosing the ignorance stemming from dissipated sensory knowledge. This fall into irrationality and ignorance – seeing things apart from God in their sensible multiplicity – led to the fragmentation of all things and the entrance of evil into the world.37 The created source of unity became the instigator of division. The Word, however, condescended to recover Man for his divine mission. The Incarnation – the descent of the Creator into the created causes – effected the unity of all things to the divine and restored man’s capacity to serve as the intermediary of unification. ‘Therefore, in assuming human nature, he [Christ] assumed every creature. For this reason, if he saved and restored human nature, which he received, he has restored perfectly every visible and invisible creature’.38 The Incarnation not only saves Man from disintegration into multiplicity, but it also allows Man to fulfill his unifying mission. In coming to know Christ, Man comes to know himself and all things in their truest causes.39 35 Peri. I, CChr.CM 161, 16.384-7. All citations from the Periphyseon I-V, CChr.CM 161-5, ed. Édouard Jeauneau (Turnhout, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2003). All translations are my own. 36 Peri. V, CChr.CM 165, 49.1517-20. 37 Peri. IV, CChr.CM 164, 41.1104-7. This in no way means that sensible things are, in and of themselves, evil. The sensible multiplicity may serve as the occasion of sin, but it is also divinely ordered as a remedy: a proper vision of the multiplicity in the unity of Christ can lead all things back to God. See Avital Wohlman, ‘L’homme et le sensible dans la pensée de Jean Scot Erigène’, Revue Thomiste 83 (1983), 265-8. 38 Peri. V, CChr.CM 165, 74.2361-72. 39 ‘The incarnate Word of God descended in order to lead human nature back to this vision [of all things in their primordial causes]. He took on that previously fallen nature in order to recall it to the original state. He healed the wounds of its crimes, extinguished the shadows of false

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In turn, this restored vision of unity in the person of Christ will lead Man, and with him all creation, back to the full unity and likeness in God. Second, contemplation leads to growth in the divine likeness and establishes right action. The moral life depends upon a restored manner of contemplation that sees the created world as a theophany of the Creator and not as an end in itself.40 The contemplative mind allows one to approach God, to come spiritually near and to grow in the divine likeness, as opposed to the human mind that distances itself from the Creator through disordered affection for sensible things. While the divine image remains unstained in the human person, ‘through sin it has become discolored by a kind of unlikeness and it is said to have grown distant. For likeness draws it near, unlikeness makes it distant. For it is not by the paces of the body, but by the affections of the mind that it draws away from God or draws near’.41 Ignorance and dissimilitude therefore distance one from Christ; contemplation and similitude allow one to approach him. Third, human beings require divine aid for their restoration and elevation to divine union. The given of human nature (datio) requires the gifts (donationes) that come from God.42 Eriugena highlights, for example, the Eucharist as the source of gifts for participation in God. He comments on Dionysius’ understanding of the rite of synaxis : ‘It is right, therefore […] that the human mind, which is ascending from sensible things to the likeness and equality of the celestial powers, observe the most divine, visible Eucharist formed in the Church, which is the greatest type of participation in him. By the Eucharist, we now participate in Jesus through faith, and in the future we will participate by sight, and will be united to him by charity’.43 The Eucharist brings together contemplation and receptivity: the transformation of the participant through right vision and the personal incorporation of gifts. 3.2. Judas and the Last Supper In Book V of the Periphyseon, Eriugena offers an exegesis of the Last Supper scene within a larger discussion of the manner in which individuals will fantasies, opened the eyes of the mind, and revealed himself in all those things to those who are worthy of such a vision.’ Peri. III, CChr.CM 163, 92.2678-82. 40 ‘But where the observation of created nature precedes the knowledge of the Creator, there is no way of escaping the phantasies and illusion of sensible things. Consequently, there cannot be freedom from error save in those who, bathed in the splendor of the divine ray, take the path of right contemplation and seek themselves and their God; for in these the knowledge of the Creator precedes the knowledge of the creature’. Peri. IV, CChr.CM 164, 146.4475-9. 41 Peri. V, CChr.CM 165, 18.494-8. 42 ‘The givens are said to be appropriately the distributions by which every nature subsists, while gifts truly are distributions of grace by which every subsisting nature is adorned. Therefore, nature is a given (datio), grace is something gifted (donatio)’. Peri. III, CChr.CM 163, 20.542-51. 43 Expo. I, iii, CChr.CM 31, 16-7.570-84. Citations from Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, ed. J. Barbet, CChr.CM 31 (Turnhout, 1975).

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participate in God after the unification of all things. He wishes to demonstrate that, though humanity will be united in a single essence in God, there will be a diversity in the degrees of participation in the divine. Christ’s final gathering of the disciples before his Passion reveals how this may take place: Indeed, one essence unites those whom differing merits divide. A little before the Lord was to suffer, Judas Iscariot and Simon Peter were dining with the Lord at the same time in the dining room: one was next to Christ, one was far from Christ. The one who dipped his hand with Christ into the dish was the betrayer of the humanity of Christ; the other, who was not said to have dipped his hand with Christ into the dish, was the contemplator of Christ’s divinity. The greedy one sold the man-God; the other, a theologian, knew the God-man. One betrayed the body by the kiss of the body; the other loved the divine mind by a kiss of the mind. And so, I say this: know that it is not the intervals of space, but the qualities of merits that make man approach Christ or move away from him.44

An analysis of this passage will demonstrate Eriugena’s adaptation of themes already encountered in Proclus. 3.2.1. Peter the Theologian Eriugena’s treatment of the Last Supper scene demonstrates the link between disordered vision and sinful actions. The table below summarizes the contrasting approaches to Christ for Judas and Peter: Judas: Division

Peter: Union

Physically close to Christ

Physically far from Christ

Spiritually far from Christ

Spiritually close to Christ

Betrays Christ’s humanity

Contemplates Christ’s divinity

The greedy one sells the man-God

The theologian knows the God-man

Betrays through physical kiss

Loves through a spiritual kiss

Peter exemplifies the unitive way in Christ. Eriugena calls him a ‘theologian’, that is, he possesses the wisdom that ‘revolves solely or mostly around contemplation of the divine nature’.45 He defines his relationship with Christ through three actions: contemplation, knowledge, and love. First, he is the contemplator of Christ’s divinity. This is not an interior turn toward the soul, but a passage from the physical, exterior signs into the depths of God.46 While 44

Peri. V, CChr.CM 165, 173.5623-36. Peri. II, CChr.CM 162, 101.2443-50. 46 Eriugena describes this experience of ‘the supreme and clearest contemplation’ in John, the model theologian, as follows: ‘Thus the blessed theologian John soars above not only things that can be understood or expressed, but also into those things which surpass every intellect 45

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Peter did not ascend to the heights of the beloved disciple John, nonetheless he transcended the limited view of material things and was drawn into the unifying mystery of Christ’s divinity.47 Second, Peter knows [cognovit] the God-man. As noted earlier, humanity scattered creation into debilitating diversity by choosing the ignorance in sensory knowledge.48 Peter, however, has come to know the perfect theophany that is Jesus, who liberates him from destructive ignorance, restores the integrity of his nature, and allows him to transcend the physical distance in order to draw near spiritually. Christ’s humanity (the man-God) allows all to know the incomprehensible Divinity (the God-man) and creation in the causes.49 Finally, Peter loves Jesus through a ‘spiritual kiss’. Love, Eriugena writes, ‘is a connection and chain with which the totality of all things is joined by an ineffable friendship and indissoluble unity’.50 All love comes from God and all respond in love to God: ‘God moves and is moved, as one thirsting to be thirsted for, loving to be loved, and desiring to be desired.’51 In fact, a genuine meeting with Christ can only come through love and that love, in turn, unites one with Christ.52 3.2.2. The avarice of Judas Judas, however, defines himself only by the action of betrayal or ‘selling Jesus out’. In this action, Judas’ duplicity remains on the level of the physical: he is the betrayer of Christ’s humanity (humanitatis Christi traditor), he sells the man-God (vendidit hominem deum), and he hands over the body with a and surpass all meaning. He is borne up beyond all things, by an ineffable flight of the mind, into the secrets of the One Principle of all things’. Homilia in prologum Sancti Evangelii secundum Johannem XV, in Homélie sur le Prologue de Jean, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, SC 151 (Paris, 1969), 208.13-21. 47 In contemplating Christ’s divinity, he embraces a form of imitatio Christi through a spiritual appropriation of Christ’s life. See Bernard McGinn, ‘Eriugena Mysticus’, in C. Loenardi and E. Mesestò (eds), Giovanni Scotto nel suo Tempo. L’Organizzazione del sapere in età carolingia (Spoleto, 1989), 235-60; John Gavin, A Celtic Christology (Eugene, OR, 2014), 105-38. 48 ‘When, therefore, it [the human mind] turns towards Him, it preserves the beauty and integrity of its nature; but when it turns away from Him, it dissipates and disfigures not only itself, but also that which is subject to it – material life and matter itself.’ Peri. IV, CChr.CM 163, 71.2025-29. 49 ‘For when we understand the humanity of Christ, we know perfectly – to the extent that we are allowed to know – the hidden divinity of the Son, his Father, and the Spirit of both.’ Expo. I 1, 7, 234-40. 50 Peri. I, CChr.CM 161, 106.3304-6. 51 Ibid. 108.3364-5. Quoting Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Ioannem XIX, PG 91, 1260C. 52 Hilary Mooney writes regarding Eriugena’s ‘theophanic Christology’ that, ‘this encounter [with Christ] is said to be granted to those who not only seek God (which could be a purely intellectual enterprise devoid of all attempts to live a moral life) but who in addition love God’. Hilary Mooney, Theophany: The Appearing of God according to the Writings of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Tübingen, 2009), 172.

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physical kiss (corpus tradidit). His actions therefore stem from a perverse view of creation itself: he sees things only in their physical diversity and not in their spiritual unity. Eriugena writes that ‘no other part of human nature receives the error of falsity apart from the exterior senses. Indeed, through them [the exterior senses] the interior sense, reason, and even intellect itself very often fall into error’.53 As one who only knew creation apart from God, Judas became a traitor of all that is Good. Eriugena also contrasts Peter, the theologian (theologus) – the one who sees creation as a theophany – with Judas, the greedy (avarus) man who yearns to exploit creation for his own gain. While disordered ambition was the downfall of Alcibiades and dissimilitude was the flaw of Dionysius’ Judas, for Eriugena’s Judas the vice is avarice. This greed, if left unchecked, could only lead to moral and spiritual disintegration. Eriugena summarizes this phenomenon of avarice: ‘Therefore the creature is not evil, nor its knowledge, but the perverse motion of the rational soul, by which it abandoned the contemplation of the creator. On account of a lustful and illicit appetite, it bent down with deadly steps toward the love of sensible matter, from which, without first being liberated by grace, it cannot return’.54 In his greed Judas sells out his master and lacerates his soul. 3.2.3. Grace and abandonment Eriugena concludes his reflection on the Last Supper scene by noting that the openness to divine aid also determined the contrasting actions of Judas and Peter. Peter, moved by grace (the donatio), could respond in love; Judas, closed to grace, sank into betrayal. Thus, Eriugena writes that ‘the differences between good and evil acts, by which someone has lived well in this life having been helped by God through grace, or by which someone has lived in an evil manner having been justly deserted by God, are divided greatly from one another in multiple and infinite ways’.55 The radically different conclusions to the two Apostles’ lives therefore come from both the attentiveness of the mind and the receptivity toward divine assistance. Conclusion Eriugena’s treatment of Judas’ treachery shares elements that are found in Proclus’ portrayal of Alcibiades and Dionysius’ treatment of Judas. 1) The movement toward betrayal begins with an adherence to sensible things and the 53 54 55

Peri. IV, CChr.CM 164, 120.3610-23. Ibid., 146.4479-84. Peri. V, CChr.CM 165, 173.5640-4.

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world of divergent opinions. 2) One needs external aid in order to escape the divisive world of multiplicity and the betrayal of the unifying Good. The three thinkers point to the need for liturgical rites, teachers, and divine illumination. 3) The unifying powers of the soul – contemplation, knowledge of the truth, and love – lead to divine similitude. 4) Evil actions such as betrayal emerge from the disordered and dissimilar soul, one that ‘sells out’ all that is good in order to possess the blandishments of the material. Thus all three thinkers, sharing in a platonic tradition, approach the theme of treachery in similar ways. Yet, there are also significant differences that, in part, stem from the influence of Christianity. 1) Each thinker emphasizes a different flaw that leads to betrayal: disordered ambition, dissimilitude from the divine, and greed. These differences, however, are in fact related in their emphasis on adherence to sensory experience. 2) While Proclus emphasized the need for an inward turn toward the light of first principles, Dionysius and Eriugena call for knowledge of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. For the Christian authors, Christ is the liberator and perfect theophany. 3) Eriugena provides the most striking and succinct summary of the betrayal that begins with spiritual distancing from the source of unity, the incarnate Word: physical proximity does not guarantee the spiritual approach to the divine. This distancing of the traitor must be contrasted with the approach of the theologian – a figure that can only come from formation in the Christian faith and the elevation through the Logos. The theologians Peter and, above all, John reveal the truest approach to the divine through grace and revelation. Thus, Eriugena’s approach to Judas demonstrates that the betrayal of persons or communities begins with a betrayal of God and creation. In turn, closing oneself to the unifying power of contemplation, knowledge of the truth, and love can only end in the exploitation of the goods in the world and the destruction of communion. The traitor is contrasted with the theologian, the one who desires union with Christ and knows creation through the Word.

Universal Salvation and the Completeness of Heaven in Eriugena Adrian MIHAI, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT My purpose in this article is to discuss the last stage of the ontological and cosmogonic process of God’s self-realization in and through creation, as described in Eriugena’s Periphyseon. I shall, in consequence, concentrate on Eriugena’s doctrine of universal salvation and its essential relation to the doctrine of the completeness of Heaven as a replacement of the fallen angels, which, though perhaps the most interesting, has been scarcely noticed. One of Eriugena’s most daring and fundamental philosophical statements is that in creating the universe, God ‘creates’ (creatur) himself. In other words, God realizes himself in and through creation. ‘God, says Eriugena in the third book of his Periphyseon, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in creation [deus in creatura creatur]’.1 Accordingly, and in order to describe this process of self-realization or self-awareness, the whole of Eriugena’s Periphyseon (ca. 864-866) has a cyclical structure, devised according to the Neoplatonic causal scheme of permanence or remaining or abiding (μονή or mansio), procession (πρόοδος or processio), and conversion or return (ἐπιστροφή or reditus).2 In other words, not only processio and reditus, but also mansio are the guiding principles of Eriugena’s reasoning. God, out of its permanence, manifests or creates itself in creation (procession), in order to return and revert to itself.

1. Preliminary clarification Before considering Eriugena’s arguments it will be wise to show how the division of the Periphyseon into five books complements both the ontological 1

Eriugena, Periphyseon III 678C1–D1 (ed. Édouard Jeauneau). See, among others, Werner Beierwaltes, ‘The Revaluation of John Scottus Eriugena in German Idealism’, in L. Bieler and J.J. O’Meara (eds), The Mind of Eriugena (Dublin, 1973), 190-8 (especially p. 194); Édouard Jeauneau, ‘The Neoplatonic Themes of Processio an Reditus in Eriugena’, Dionysius 15 (1991), 3-29; id., ‘Le theme du retour’, in É. Jeauneau, Études érigéniennes (Paris, 1987), 365-94; Jean Trouillard, ‘Érigène et la théophanie créatrice’, in L. Bieler and J.J. O’Meara (eds), The Mind of Eriugena (Dublin, 1973), 98-113; id., ‘Procession néoplatonicienne et création Judéo-Chrétienne’, in Néoplatonisme. Mélanges offerts à Jean Trouillard (Paris, 1981), 1-30; Stephen Gersh, ‘The Structure of the Return in Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Begriff und Metapher (Heidelberg, 1990), 108-25; Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Leiden, 1991). 2

Studia Patristica CXXII, 175-181. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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structure of Eriugena’s system and the Neoplatonic scheme of causation. Édouard Jeauneau has already showed how the Periphyseon follows the Neoplatonic scheme, taken by Eriugena from Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor. The Periphyeon […] is entirely pervaded by these two themes of Processio/divisio on one hand, and of Reversio/adunatio on the other. Its plan itself follows faithfully this twofold movement. Books I, II, III and IV correspond to the movement of Procession: from the Nature which creates and is not created (Book I) to the Nature which is created and also creates (Book II), and then to the Nature which is created and does not create (Books III and IV). Book V is entirely dedicated to the theme of Return: it explains how all things revert to the Nature which neither creates nor is created.3

Already in the first book, Eriugena sets the main goal of his analysis, which is the return and union of every being with God: … so the sound intellect must hold that after the end of this world every nature, whether corporeal or incorporeal, will seem to be only God, while preserving the integrity of its nature, so that even God, Who in Himself in incomprehensible, is after a certain mode comprehensible in creation, while creation itself by an ineffable miracle is changed into God (I, p. 59, ed. and trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams, 1968). … ita sano intellectu accipiendum quia post finem huius mundi omnis natura, sive corporea sive incorporea, solus deus esse videbitur, incomprehensibilis est, in creatura quodam modo comprehendatur, ipsa vero creatura ineffabili miraculo in deum vertatur (I 451b).

And, at the end of this philosophical and spiritual itinerary, towards the end of the fifth and final book, Eriugena states again that ‘All will see the glory of God’ / Omnes enim videbunt gloriam dei (967D4). It is worthwhile to notice that Eriugena’s fourfold division of nature (φύσις, natura) corresponds, respectively, to God (that which creates and is not created), to the Trinitarian processions and primordial causes (that which is created and also creates), to the temporal effects, like genus, species, numbers (that which is created and does not create), and to God as final purpose of all things, or that which neither creates nor is created (441A-442B): 1. That which creates and is not created (God)

3. That which is created and does not create (Temporal Effects, i.e. genus, species, numbers)

2. That which is created and also creates (Trinitarian processions & Primordial causes)

4. That which neither creates nor is created (God)

In the architectonics of Eriugena’s system, all these levels – the ontological, the pentadic structure of the book and the Neoplatonic scheme of causation – are deeply and reciprocally imbricated. 3 Édouard Jeauneau, ‘The Neoplatonic Themes of Processio an Reditus in Eriugena’, Dionysius 15 (1991), 3-29, 10-1.

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Diagrammatically, all this can be schematised in the following way: Periphyseon

Synopsis of ontological system

Neoplatonic scheme of causation

Book I

1st stage: God as superessentialis and esse omnium

Abiding / μονή

Book II

2nd stage: Trinitarian processions & Primordial causes Procession / πρόοδος

Books III & IV 3rd stage: Temporal Effects Book V

4th stage: God as final purpose of all things

Conversion / ἐπιστροφή

Now, this synthesis is based on two fundamental statements. The first, Eriugena finds in Pseudo-Dionysius, according to which every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.4 Διὸ καὶ πάντα ἐπ’ αὐτὴν ἐνδίκως ἀναπέμπεται καὶ ἀνατίθεται, ὑφ’ ἧς καὶ ἐξ ἧς καὶ δι’ ἧς καὶ ἐν ᾗ καὶ εἰς ἧν πάντα ἔστι καὶ συντέτακται καὶ μένει καὶ συνέκεται καὶ ἀποπληροῦται καὶ ἐπιστρέφεται.5

Eriugena translates this Pseudo-Dionysian passage thus: Proinde et omnia in ipsam juste remittuntur et referuntur, sub qua, et ex qua, et per quam, et in qua, et in quam omnia sunt, et coordinantur [scil. πρόοδος], et manent, et continentur [scil. μονή], et replentur, et convertuntur [scil. ἐπιστροφή].6

Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem have translated Pseudo-Dionysius’s extract in the following way: All things are rightly ascribed to God since it is by him and in him and for him that all things exist and are co-ordered [scil. πρόοδος], remain and hold together [scil. μονή], are completed and are returned [scil. ἐπιστροφή].7

Secondly, and as we have already seen, Eriugena’s system is rooted in his affirmation that God realizes Himself in and through creation. Nam et creatura in deo est subsistens, et deus in creatura mirabili et ineffabili modo creatur, se ipsum manifestans, inuisibilis uisibilem se faciens, et incomprehensibilis comprehensibilem, et occultus apertum, et incognitus cognitum, et forma et species carens formosum ac speciosum, et superessentialis essentialem, et supernaturalis naturalem, et simplex compositum, et accidentibus liber accidentibus subiectum et accidens, et infinitus finitum, et incircunscriptus circunscriptum, et supertemporalis temporalem, et superlocalis localem, et omnia creans in omnibus creatum, et factor omnium factus 4 This thesis is taken indirectly, through Pseudo-Dionysius, since Eriugena has not read Proclus, from the Elements of Theology, prop. 35 (ed. Eric R. Dodds, 19632 [1933]): πᾶν τὸ αἰτιατὸν καὶ μένει ἐν τῇ αὐτοῦ αἰτίᾳ καὶ πρόεισιν ἀπ’ αὐτῆς καὶ ἐπιστρέφει πρὸς αὐτήν. 5 Ps.-Dionysius, On the Divine Names XIII 3, 980b, ed. Beate R. Suchla (Berlin, 1990). 6 Eriugena, ‘De divinis nominibus’, in Ph. Chevalier (ed.), Dionysiaca I (Paris, 1937). 7 Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York, 1987), 129.

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in omnibus, et aeternus cepit esse, et immobili mouetur in omnia et fit in omnibus omnia (underlining mine).8 For both creation [creatura],9 by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates [creatur] Himself in creation [creatura], the invisible making Himself visible, and the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the hidden revealed, and the unknown known, and being without form and species formed and specific, and the superessential essential, and the supernatural natural, and the simple composite, and the accidents-free subject to accident, and the infinite finite, and the uncircumscribed circumscribed, and the supratemporal temporal, and the Creator of all things created in all things, and the Maker of all things made in all things, and the eternal He begins to be, and immobile He moves into all things and becomes in all things all things (tr. Sheldon-Williams, slightly mod., underlining mine).

2. Universal salvation and the completeness of Heaven Notwithstanding the numerous articles and book chapters on Eriugena’s doctrine of universal salvation,10 it has been scarcely noticed that this doctrine goes hand in hand with another doctrine of Eriugena, the doctrine of the completeness of heaven.11 The doctrine of the completeness of Heaven stated that mankind was a replacement for the fallen angels. In Augustine’s words, God filled the places and restored ‘the ranks emptied by the fallen angels’. This sort of idea is found as early as Luke, when he says that human beings ‘cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection’ (20:36). Augustine, following such statements as the one of Luke, says, in his City of God (XXII 1.2), that in fact, out of this mortal race [scil. the fallen angels], deservedly and justly doomed, God gathers, by His grace, so numerous a people that out of them He fills the places 8

Periphyseon III 678C1-D1 [ed. É. Jeauneau]. We follow the translation of Peter Dronke and Michela Pereira in translating creatura as creation, and not as creature, as Sheldon-Williams does, in order to emphasise that Eriugena is considering creation as a whole, and not only creatures. 10 On the concept of universal salvation in Eriugena, see Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden, 2013), 773816; ead., A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich (Eugene, 2019), 189-96; Pasquale Arfé, ‘Triplex modus theoriae de reditu. The Doctrine of Universal Return in Eriugena’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 78 (2011), 7-45. For the same concept in Christianity as a whole, see Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2 vol. (Grand Rapids, 2018); according to McClymond, the concept of Christian universalism comes from a so-called Gnostic universalism; argument refuted by I. Ramelli, ‘Invited Reply to Professor Michael McClymond’, Theological Studies 76 (2015), 827-35; ead., ‘Review of Michael McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 22 (2020), 240-9. 11 On the completeness of heaven in Eriugena, see Peter Dronke, ‘The Completeness of Heaven’, in id., Forms and Imaginings: From Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century (Roma, 2007), 47-62. 9

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and restores the ranks emptied by the fallen angels. Thus is it that the beloved City, which is above, is not deprived of the full complement of its citizens and, in fact, may even rejoice in a fuller complement than it had before the angels’ fall (trans. G.G. WalshD.J. Honan, 1954, underlining mine).

In the last section of his fifth book (V 978D-1021B), Eriugena arrives at the return of all things to God, and at the doctrine of the universal salvation of mankind. He will thus distinguish between two typologies of return: a general or universal return of all things to God, and a special return or deification (deificatio, theosis), that is, a merging with God completely. Eriugena’s compressed and tightly knit analysis of the doctrine of universal salvation and its relation to the completeness of heaven in the fifth book of his Periphyseon (1001B101018D6) is structured around eight Biblical exempla et similitudines of general and special returns. Seven for the general return, and one for the special return. The seven examples for a general return of all things to God are the following (1001B10-1010A3): 1. 2. 3. 4.

1-4. Four examples from the Old Testament (1001B10-1004C4): Exodus 14 (Crossing of the Red Sea); Isaiah 9:1 (For to Us a Child is Born); Ezekiel 16 (The Faithless Bride); Leviticus 25 (The Sabbath Year);

5-7. Three parables from Luke (1004C5-1010A3): 5. The Prodigal Son (15:11-32); 6. The Lost Coin (15:8-10); 7. The Lost Sheep (15:3-7). The single Biblical example for a special return, which exemplifies the doctrine of theosis or deification, is a parable from Matthew, and one to which Eriugena dedicates by far the longest explanation in the whole section (1011A6-1018D6): 8. Matthew: The Ten Virgins (25:1-13). The discussion regarding the replacement of the fallen angels in the Heavenly City, or the Paradise, is mentioned in Eriugena’s exegesis of the parable of the lost sheep. In other words, this philosophical interpretation is inserted as a transition between the exemplification of the two types of return, and it pertains to the general return type of salvation, and functions as a general conclusion. To better understanding the digression of Eriugena on the completeness of heaven, let us briefly describe his exegesis of the parable of the wandering or lost sheep, since the digression is supposed to be a speculative conclusion to this same exegesis.12 12 On the Gnostic and Patristic exegeses of this parable, see especially Antonio Orbe, Parábolas evangélicas en San Ireneo (Madrid, 2015 [1972]), 575-643.

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Here are the two synoptic narratives:13 Matthew 18:12-4

Luke 15:3-7

12

3

What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray [πλανηθῇ], does he not leave the ninetynine on the mountains [ἐπὶ τὰ ὄρη] and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it [εὑρεῖν], truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish [ἀπόληται].

So he told them this parable: ‘What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost [ἀπολέσας] one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country [ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ], and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 4

As most of the previous exegetes, Eriugena pays close attention to the numerological significance, interpreting the number 100, from ‘a hundred sheep’, as symbolising the perfection of the heavenly Jerusalem (1006A6-7). Eriugena interprets the ‘lost sheep’ – thus 99 + 1 = 100 sheep –, similarly to Origen, as mankind, after Adam’s sin. Eriugena does not mention who the 99 other sheep symbolise, though for Origen, whom Eriugena knew very well, they symbolize the angelic hierarchies.14 After his discussion of Luke’s lost sheep parable, and continuing his speculation on the number 100 (99 + 1), Eriugena launches into a digression about the number of those who will be saved at the end of times (1006A11-1008A6). The question is, if the number of men that shall return to take their place in the Heavenly City, that is, in the society of the company of the blessed under the One God, is equal to the number of the transgressing angels who fell therefrom. Clearly, either (1.) the number to which the human race has increased from the first man to the end of the world must be equal to that of the apostate angels [numerositas humanae multiplicationis a primo homine usque ad finem mundi tanta sit quanta apostatarum angelorum], so that their heavenly thrones which they relinquished in their pride, may be sufficient for the whole human race to take on their Return; or, (2.) if the number of the fallen angels is less than that to which the human race has grown, a non-necessary part of 13

We give the translation from the English Standard Version (ESV, 2001). On Origen’s exegesis, see Antonio Orbe, Parábolas evangélicas en San Ireneo (2015 [1972]), 611-9. Origen’s exegesis was taken over in the Dialogue of Adamantius, as pointed out by Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, ‘The Dialogue of Adamantius: A Document of Origen’s Thought? Part Two’, SP 56 (2013), 227-73, esp. 257-9. 14

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human nature [pars humanae naturae non necessaria] equal to that by which it exceeds the number of the fallen angels will be excluded from the company of the Kingdom of Heaven: for they will not be able to ascend there if they can find no place in heaven for them.15

Eriugena, asks, following Augustine, a simple question: either (1.) the number of saved people will be equal to that of the apostate angels, or (2.) the number of those saved will exceed the number of the fallen angels? Against Augustine’s choice, Eriugena will choose the second. In order to support his choice, Eriugena will call the authority of the prophet David (Psalm 39:6). As Pasquale Arfé concludes in his study of Eriugena’s universalism, Eriugena’s apokatastasis, therefore, like Origen’s, is not pantheistic, but places a special emphasis on preserving the ontological figure of each individual in the context of the universal return of all things. This is one of the most significant fruits of ninth-century Christian Neoplatonism.16

3. Conclusion To sum up. We outlined Eriugena’s contribution to the study of the philosophic and eschatological problem of personal salvation, and showed that his answer goes hand in hand with his view of the completeness of heaven as a replacement of the fallen angels. The result of our inquiry is that it seems that Eriugena’s system is theocentric, or, as John Meyendorff (1926-1992) calls it, a ‘theocentric anthropology’, according to which we are but a tool in God’s self-awareness: God needs us in his own process of self-realisation and self-awareness, the work of creation bringing the Other that allows God to realise its own presence and existence.

15

Periphyseon V 1006B1-13, mod. trans. Sheldon-Williams (1968), V, 695. Pasquale Arfé, ‘Triplex modus theoriae de reditu. The Doctrine of Universal Return in Eriugena’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 78 (2011), 7-45, 45. 16

Eriugena’s Theory of Light and its Hexaemeral Sources: Rethinking Eriugena’s Knowledge of the Greek Patristic Corpus Isidoros C. KATSOS, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel & University of Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT In the hexaemeral part of the Periphyseon, Eriugena reports on two hermeneutical traditions on the first light of creation. According to the first tradition, attributed to Basil, primordial light is corporeal and of fiery nature. According to the second tradition, attributed to Augustine, primordial light is of intelligible, angelic nature. Based on this report and other passages contemporary scholarship assumes a close acquaintance of Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaemeron. The purpose of this article is to put the latter assumption under scrutiny. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I compare Eriugena’s report of Basil in the Periphyseon with Basil’s original text in the Hexaemeron. The comparison shows that the corporeal theory of light attributed to Basil deviates significantly from Basil’s own theory, at least in two respects. In a second step, I investigate whether Eriugena’s report of Basil is mediated through other sources. I here compare the Periphyseon with the theory of light defended by Gregory of Nyssa in his Apology to Basil’s Hexaemeron. The comparison now yields positive results: if one reads the Hexaemeron through the mediation of the Apology, one ends up indeed with the report in the Periphyseon. If my argument is correct, the current scholarly assumption about Eriugena’s knowledge of the Greek patristic corpus in general, and of Nyssen’s corpus in particular, needs to be reconsidered. Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology exercises a tremendous influence on Eriugena’s physical thought, a fact that has up to now escaped scholarly attention.

I. Introduction* In his magisterial study on Eriugena, John O’Meara explores Eriugena’s knowledge of Gregory of Nyssa, which he limits to one work, the De opificio hominis: From Gregory of Nyssa Eriugena derived many ideas – the notion of matter as a union of invisible realities, ideas on man as an image of God, his teaching (up to a point) on

* Part of this research was supported by a postdoctoral Fellowship at The Center for the Study of Christianity, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. I am grateful to Prof. Ilaria Ramelli for inviting me to the seminar she directed, and to Christian Hengstermann for reading the manuscript version of this paper.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 183-192. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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the division of the sexes, and the concept of ἐπέκτασις. Eriugena’s use of Gregory of Nyssa is confined to the De opificio hominis and, therefore, is seen for the most part in the anthropological part of the Periphyseon, that is, Book IV.1

O’Meara is not alone in this assessment. In a landmark essay on the physics of the Periphyseon, Dermot Moran argues that ‘Eriugena cites Gregory of Nyssa as his authority on the nature of matter and material things’, and more specifically Gregory’s De opificio hominis.2 O’Meara and Moran expand the views of the great Eriugena scholar Édouard Jeauneau, who first explored in depth the relation of Eriugena to the Greek Patristic Corpus.3 Following Jeauneau then, O’Meara and Moran argue that, when it comes to Eriugena’s physics the only work that matters from the whole of Nyssen’s corpus is the De opificio hominis. In this article I will challenge this assumption by drawing attention to a work of Nyssa that has been completely neglected in current scholarship: the Apologia in Hexaemeron.4 Contrary to the established view, I will argue that Eriugena uses this work as one of his major sources of influence when it comes to explaining the physical world. To substantiate my argument, I will focus on a single, but important aspect of Eriugena’s physics: his theory of light. Eriugena develops his theory of light in the course of his so-called ‘hexaemeral’ exegesis, commenting on days one and four of the biblical creation narrative. As a general remark, Eriugena’s hexaemeral exegesis is marked by his attempt to reconcile two seemingly antithetical traditions: the Latin tradition represented by Augustine, identified with the spiritual reading of Genesis, and resulting in Eriugena’s theory of spiritual/angelic light; and the Greek tradition represented by Basil, identified with the literal reading of Genesis and resulting in Eriugena’s theory of sensible, physical light. In between, Eriugena develops his own metaphysical exegesis of Genesis resulting in a theory of light as the first manifestation of sensible effects from their intelligible causes as a via media between the two inherited hermeneutical traditions, the Greek-literal and the Latin-spiritual.5 In this article, I will focus only on Eriugena’s reading 1

John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford, 1988; repr. 2002), 79; see also 76-7. Dermot Moran, ‘Time, Space and Matter in the Periphyseon: An Examination of Eriugena’s Understanding of the Physical World’, in Fran O’Rourke (ed.), At the Heart of the Real: Philosophical Essays in Honour of the Most Reverend Desmond Connell Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin, 1992), 67-96, 76, 78; quotation on 80. 3 See Édouard A. Jeauneau, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor in the Works of John Scottus Eriugena’, in Édouard A. Jeauneau, Études érigéniennes (Paris, 1987), 175-87, 179-81, 184-5 [first printed in Ute-Renate Blumenthal (ed.), Carolingian Essays: Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Early Christian Studies (Washington, 1983), 137-49]. Jeauneau only considers Gregory’s De opificio hominis. 4 Critical edition: Gregorii Nysseni, Opera Exegetica in Genesim I. In hexaemeron, ed. Hubertus R. Drobner, GNO IV/1 (Leiden, 2009). All translations from the Apology are my own. 5 See Periphyseon III.691B-693C. ‘Augustine’ and ‘Basil’ function rather as literary constructions representing two schools of thought. Augustine’s hexaemeral exegesis is closer to Basil’s than is often assumed and Eriugena’s exegesis aims to make this point, see 693B-C. Eriugena bears 2

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of Basil’s physical exegesis of primordial light. I will show that unless Eriugena reads Basil through the lens of Gregory’s Apology, his references to Basil’s Hexaemeron are rather infelicitous. If my argument is correct, there is a much richer picture of Eriugena’s though-world emerging in front of us, a picture that forces us to reopen the question of Eriugena’s acquaintance with and use of the Greek patristic corpus. II. A well-informed but not so accurate reader of Basil? I will start by showing that Eriugena is a well-informed reader of Basil’s Hexaemeron. Basil’s theory of physical light is divided into two parts, namely the creation of light on day one (homily 2) and the creation of the heavenly bodies on day four of the biblical creation narrative (homily 6). Basil regards the two days as two consecutive stages of the creation of light, the first referring to the creation of light’s essential properties and the fourth day referring to the creation of light’s accidental properties.6 The accidental properties become visible through the great variety of cosmic light radiating from the stars, which function as bearers of light’s essential properties: Just as fire is different from a lantern, the one having the power to generate light, and the other made to light the way ahead for those who need it, so also in this case the luminaries have been prepared as a vehicle (ὄχημα) for that purest (καθαρότατον), clear (εἰλικρινές), and immaterial (ἄϋλον) light. […] Do not let what has been said seem to anyone to be beyond belief, namely, that the brightness of the light is one thing and the body that is the substrate of the light another. First, because we divide all compounds into the bearing substance and its accompanying quality. Just as, therefore, whiteness by nature is one thing, but a whitened body something else, so also the things just mentioned, although different by nature, are brought together by the power of the Creator. (Hex. V 2-3, GCS 90.22-91.18, tr. Way, amended)

Here is Eriugena’s version of it: For the subject bodies in them [sc. the stellar bodies in the upper regions of the universe], occupying their allotted places, mean one thing, the brightness that shines from them everywhere throughout all the zones of the world means another. For the white object is one thing, the whiteness another nor are the bright and brightness the same; witness to a growing tension between two interpretative traditions (Greek and Latin) and early attempts to reconcile them. 6 The two stages correspond to the basic Aristotelian distinction between substance (οὐσία) and accident (συμβεβηκός) or quality (ποιότης). Basil’s exegesis suggests that the work of day one was light as substance, i.e. elemental fire with its power of illumination, while the work of day four was light as a hylomorphic compound, i.e. the heavenly bodies that produce the sensible light in the world with all its visible variations; see Isidoros C. Katsos, The Metaphysics of Light in the Hexaemeral Literature: From Philo of Alexandria to Ambrose of Milan (PhD diss., Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, 2018), 108-10.

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the one is the subject, the other accident. Therefore, by the divine decree by which it was commanded, ‘Let there be luminaries in the firmament of heaven’, the vehicles of light, as St. Basil calls them, by which it might be carried about the circuit of the world at given intervals of time, were made. (Periphyseon III 715B, tr. Sheldon-Williams)

Eriugena here proves to be a very close reader of Basil, even though he does not reveal his source of inspiration but only at the very end. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Genesis reiterates the basic Basilian scheme distinguishing between substance and accident, illustrated by whiteness and whitened bodies and applied to primordial light and the heavenly bodies as its bearers or ‘vehicles’. Being a close reader of Basil, however, does not also mean that Eriugena is necessarily an accurate reader of Basil. I here want to mention two examples which actually put Eriugena’s reading into doubt. i. Eriugena’s ‘corporeal’ vs Basil’s ‘immaterial’ light The first example concerns Basil’s literal/physicalist exegesis of Genesis 1. Eriugena, following the aforementioned stereotypical attribution of different readings of Scripture, imputes to Basil a straightforward corporeal/physical theory of light: Since many have given many explanations both in Greek and Latin of the works of the first six days, our present discourse must be brief and succinct, and what has been said by you concerning the first light seems to me sufficient. For whether, as St Basil thought, it signifies the creation of this corporeal light substantially in fire (lucis corporeae substantialiter in igne), or, as St Augustine thought, the formation of the heavenly powers, or the general procession of the primordial causes into their effects, whichever of these opinions one chooses, one will not be far from the truth. (Periphyseon III 693C, tr. Sheldon-Williams)

Is Basil indeed such a one-dimensional reader of Scripture as Eriugena presents him? First, it must be noted that Basil acknowledges three ontological levels of light in his hexaemeral exegesis. His second hexaemeral homily, on light, concludes with the astonishing remark that God’s true light (ἀληθινὸν φῶς) manifests as heavenly light (οὐράνιον φῶς) in this world and as intelligible and never-ending light (νοερὸν καὶ ἄπαυστον φῶς) in the eschaton7. Physical light then is not the only option that Basil considers in his hexaemeral exegesis. Secondly, and more importantly, Basil ascribes three essential attributes to primordial light. As already mentioned, he calls it ‘purest’ (καθαρότατον), ‘clear’ (εἰλικρινές), and ‘immaterial’ (ἄϋλον).8 If we now combine these two textual facts, namely that Basil refers also to the intelligible light in his Hexaemeron and that he explicitly predicates primordial light as ‘immaterial’, 7 8

Hex. II 8, GCS 37.6-9. Hex. VI 2, GCS 91.5-6.

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why should we assume, merely on account of Eriugena’s testimony, that Basil’s primordial light is ‘corporeal’? Could it not be some sort of intelligible light? I am not claiming that Eriugena’s reading is necessarily wrong. Instead, I am claiming that the alleged corporeality of primordial light cannot be directly derived from Basil’s text, certainly not without further qualification or explanation. The textual comparison reveals a significant gap between Basil’s immaterial light (φῶς ἄϋλον) and Eriugena’s allegedly Basilian corporeal light (lux corporea). This is the first instantiation of the above claim that, under deeper scrutiny, Eriugena is not an accurate reader of Basil. ii. Eriugena’s ubiquitous ‘fire’ vs. Basil’s ubiquitous ‘light’ The second example has to do with the allegedly Basilian view, reported by Eriugena, that the substance of light, which is fire, fills the whole universe instantly. In discussing this view, Moran adds in a footnote that “Eriugena could also have counted Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis XXI.3 on this account”.9 It is useful to take a closer look at the texts. Eriugena writes: And do not be surprised to hear that the nature of light, which is fire, fills the whole sensible world and is everywhere without change. For St. Dionysius also teaches this in his book on the Celestial Hierarchy, and St Basil too affirms the same in the Hexameron, (saying) that the substance of light is everywhere (ubique esse), but (in vero) breaks forth (prorumpere) by some natural operation in the luminaries of the world whether they be great or small, not only in order to provide illumination but that it may mark off the whole of time into portions by the motions of the celestial bodies. (Periphyseon I 521A-B, tr. Sheldon-Williams)

In Eriugena’s reading of Basil, then, it is the nature of light, which is fire, that instantly fills the whole universe in the first day of creation. But is this what Basil also says? Here is the relevant passage from the Hexaemeron: ‘And God said, “Let there be light”’. The first word of God created the nature of light, did away with the darkness, put an end to the gloom, brightened up the world, and bestowed upon all things in general a beautiful and pleasant appearance. The heavens, so long buried in darkness, appeared, and their beauty was such as even yet our eyes bear witness to. The air was illumined, or rather, it held the whole light completely permeating it, sending out dazzling rays in every direction to its uttermost bounds. It reached upward even to the ether itself and the heavens, and in extent it illuminated in a swift moment of time all parts of the world, north and south and east and west. For, such is the nature of ether, so rare and transparent, that the light passing through it needs no interval of time. (Hex. II 7, GCS 32.1-11, tr. Way)

According to Basil, then, God created the nature of light, i.e. fire, which, in turn, illuminated the world by its power of light. 9

D. Moran, ‘Time, Space and Matter’ (1992), 8343.

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We can now compare the two views: for Eriugena, the nature of light, i.e. fire, is everywhere; for Basil, light, i.e. the light ray that proceeds from fire, is everywhere. The two are not the same, simply because a substance (fire) is not the same as its power (light). The shift may easily escape the attention of the reader but it is a significant shift in terms of the metaphysics of light because it conflates the fundamental distinction between substance (οὐσία) and power (δύναμις).10 Basil’s and Eriugena’s accounts of light are not therefore identical from a metaphysical perspective and only a hasty reader could confuse substance and power without realizing the mistake. If we now turn to the De opificio hominis for a similar position, as Moran suggests, we get the metaphysics of light of Basil, not of the Periphyseon. For Gregory writes in ch. 21 section 3 of the De opificio: … as those skilled in astronomy tell us that the whole universe is full of light…

Once again, it is light that fills the whole universe, not the nature of light, which is fire, as Eriugena would have it. These two examples clearly show, in my view, that there are subtle but real discrepancies separating Basil’s Hexaemeron from Eriugena’s close, albeit inaccurate, reconstruction of it. We therefore need to conclude, in terms of a preliminary assessment, that Eriugena is a rather average and surely not-so-bright student of Basil – or is he? III. The Apology as mediatrix between the Hexaemeron and the Periphyseon It is now time to introduce Gregory’s Apology to the discussion. In this third and final section, I will argue that this entirely neglected work of Gregory holds the key to understanding Eriugena’s reading of Basil in the Periphyseon. In 10 To the possible objection that the ray is itself of a fiery nature, hence there is no issue, the answer is that Eriugena works with a clear distinction between fire as the cause and the ray as the effect of light, see James McEvoy, ‘Metaphors of Light and Metaphysics of Light in Eriugena’, in Werner Beierwaltes (ed.), Begriff und Metapher: Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena, Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften 3 (Heidelberg, 1990), 149-67, 154-63. More precisely, Eriugena first gives an accurate account of Basil’s theory, without however attributing it to Basil. He distinguishes between the light-source and the light-ray and states, correctly, that it is the light that permeates the whole universe through the diffusive nature of the ray, Periphyseon I.520C-521A. Eriugena then associates this theory with Basil’s Hexaemeron and it is during this association that the slip happens. Eriugena now wrongly claims that according to Basil it is the nature of light, i.e. fire, that is everywhere. Similarly, in stating Basil’s theory in III 691B, Eriugena correctly distinguishes between cause (fire) and effect (light) and states that ‘the effect of the fiery nature is light’. That means that Eriugena knows the correct version of Basil’s theory which distinguishes between the fiery substance as cause and the light ray as effect. It is only when Eriugena turns to Basil’s Hexaemeron that the shift happens, claiming now wrongly that fire (the cause) fills the whole universe instead of light (the effect). In other words, the theory is Basilian, but the reading is not. My aim is to investigate the reason for this discrepancy.

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fact, I will show that Eriugena reads Basil’s theory of light through the lens of Gregory’s Apology. I will discuss first the second example, i.e. the question of what permeates the universe: fire, as Eriugena suggests, or light, as Basil argues. If we now take a look at the early part of the Apology, Gregory describes a primordial condition of the world, during which the four elements were in a mixed and chaotic state, scattered around the universe. In this condition of total blending no element could manifest its intrinsic powers because of the co-presence of its opposite neutralizing its powers. The first three days of creation signify, according to Gregory, the successive stages of separation (διάκρισις) of one element from the other. Once each element was separated from the original, chaotic state of the world, it immediately showed forth its natural powers. According to this account, which strongly echoes the formation of the four elements from their pre-cosmic ‘traces’ in the Timaeus (52d-53b), the divine command fiat lux simply signifies the setting in motion of the cosmic mechanism of separation of one element from the other. The first element to break free was fire. Once separated from the rest, fire actualised its power of illumination by giving light to the whole world. In Gregory’s words: In this way, everything was invisible and imperceptible before the luminous substance (φωτιστικὴν οὐσίαν) manifested itself. At that stage, in which everything acquired existence at once by a single motion of the divine inclination, all the elements being compounded with each other, fire was scattered everywhere (τὸ πανταχοῦ κατεσπαρμένον πῦρ) clouded in darkness, hidden under an abundance of matter. But because its power is both sharp and agile, the moment God gave the signal to nature to give birth to the world, fire leaped out (προεξέθορε) before the other elements, which were heavier, and immediately everything was filled with light. (In Hex. 10, GNO 20.8-15)

Later on, the same doctrine is repeated and further elaborated: The light was thus made together with everything else but did not show forth (προεφάνη) at once before everything else. At that stage, the luminous power was hidden under the dark bits of creation. The very moment, however, that God gave the signal for the orderly arrangement of creation, the fiery and luminous power of creation showed forth (προεφάνη), leaping out before (προεξαλλομένη) everything else, due to the lightness and mobility of its nature. For a while then it was all together and patrolling the universe. Later, however, it was separated into [aggregates of] characteristic particles, according to affinity and suitability. (In Hex. 65, GNO 72.16-73.4)

I suggest that these two passages provide the missing link between Basil’s and Eriugena’s accounts of propagation of light. If Eriugena is reading Basil through the lens of Gregory, then the two seemingly divergent readings are, in fact, complementary, describing the same event from different perspectives. Following Gregory, fire as the substance of light was ubiquitous in the world – as Eriugena would have it – but this refers only to the original chaotic and unformed state of the world, in which fire could not shine forth because of its total

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blending with the other elements. Once, however, fire was set free through the divine command, its light penetrated the whole universe – as Basil would have it. Do we have any further textual evidence to substantiate the claim that Eriugena is reading Basil through the lens of Gregory? I believe we do: Eriugena’s prorumpere describes how fire ‘burst forth’ from the other elements being the equivalent in Latin of the Greek constellation of verbs προεξέθορε, προεφάνη and προεξαλλομένη that we find in Gregory’s Apology for the exact same event.11 Let us now go back to the first discrepancy, that between Basil’s immaterial and Eriugena’s corporeal light. Here too, I want to suggest that Gregory’s Apology holds the key to reconciling the two views. According to Gregory, a second process of separation took place during the three days intervening between the first and the fourth day of creation. While the other three elements were separating from each other on earth, up in the sky the element of fire was further divided into species, each one of which occupied its natural place in the world according to its internal degree of purity. In Gregory’s words: the lightest and subtlest of the fiery substance and purely immaterial (καὶ καθαρῶς ἄϋλον) dwells in the farthest limit of the sensible universe, after which comes the intelligible and incorporeal realm; whereas the other species [sc. of fire], which are more inert and heavy, occupy the region beneath the lightest and subtlest. (In Hex. 66, GNO 74.5-9)

Gregory here makes abundantly clear that we are still talking about a sensible entity because everything supra-sensible belongs to the intelligible and incorporeal world lying beyond the limits of the sensible. Due to this ontological divide between the sensible and the intelligible realms, even the purest sensible light and its fiery substance must be, with Eriugena, ‘corporeal’. But this does not mean that all substances are of the same purity. The fire that abides at the outskirts of the material universe is so refined compared to other species of fire in the lower parts of the world that it can be called, with Basil, ‘immaterial’. This does not excise heavenly light from the material world. It merely denotes that pure light is so refined that it cannot be compared to any other condition of corporeality in the world. For this reason, it is an immaterial but nevertheless corporeal light.12 Gregory reconciles Basil and Eriugena, 11 Moreover, the continuation of the passage from the Periphyseon I.521B, which describes the division of fire forming the heavenly bodies, corresponds to the continuation of Gregory’s second passage, which introduces the formation of the heavenly bodies through a process of separation of celestial fire. The notion of separation, which Eriugena attributes to Basil, is not explicit in Basil’s Hexaemeron. Eriugena could have only derived it from Gregory’s In Hex. §§ 65-9. 12 The idea is old reaching back to Aristotle, see De generatione et corruptione 335a19-20: fire is the element most akin to the form because it tends by nature to be borne towards the limit. The Cappadocian terminology is Neoplatonic, see Iamblichus, De mysteriis V 11.6: ἄϋλον πῦρ in the sense of ‘celestial fire’ (cf. also for a Christian hexaemeral parallel, Severian In cosmogoniam I 4, PG 65, 434: ἄϋλον πῦρ), explained by Proclus, In Tim. II 9.12-3: enmattered fire (ἔνυλον

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showing that both can be right. But one cannot derive this directly from Basil’s text, which is the reason why Eriugena must be reading Basil with Gregory’s Apology at this desk. If so, he is, actually, a much more nuanced and astute reader of Basil than a simple comparison of the Periphyseon with the Hexaemeron would yield.

IV. Conclusions In this article, I have focused on Eriugena’s theory of light in the Periphyseon in order to show its paradoxical reading of Basil’s Hexaemeron. On the one hand, Basil is Eriugena’s undisputable source on the theory of sensible light. On the other hand, Eriugena’s reconstruction of Basil’s theory deviates at key points from what Basil actually says, making him look like a knowledgeable yet inaccurate reader of Basil. The conundrum could mean one of two things: either Eriugena is reading Basil without really understanding in depth what he reads; or he is reading Basil through borrowed lenses. I have argued for the latter option and identified Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology to his brother’s Hexaemeron as Eriugena’s unnamed source. If my argument is correct, we stand in front of a double discovery. Its primary significance has to do with Eriugena’s sources. If Eriugena is reading Basil’s Hexaemeron through the lens of Gregory’s Apology, as I have argued, we need to rethink Eriugena’s acquaintance with and use of the Greek patristic corpus. If the Periphyseon is dependent on the Apology as regards the theory of light, maybe there are other instances of dependence from the same or other works of Nyssen. It must be the task of future scholarship to re-examine the influence of GNO on Eriugena. It is perhaps time that Eriugena scholars sat at the same table with scholars of Nyssa and engaged in serious interdisciplinary work. The need for future interdisciplinary approaches is the first conclusion of this article. The second conclusion has to do with the rather curious fact that there is no explicit reference to Gregory’s Apology in the whole of the Periphyseon. Eriugena’s silence may explain why the influence of the Apology has escaped

πῦρ) is one thing but immaterial fire (ἄϋλον πῦρ) is another; it is immaterial compared to the things in the sublunary sphere. Eriugena’s terminology of ‘corporeal light’ is Origenian, see De principiis I 1.1: corporali lumine. Origen, however, endorses the doctrine of ‘immateriality’ of light under the terminology of ‘incorporeality’, see ibid., Preface (§8): ἀσώματον (id est incorporei), to denote the subtle aethereal substance of the demonic body, which ‘is by nature a fine substance and thin like air’. Yet, in II 2.2, Origen clarifies that the terminology of ‘incorporeality’ befits strictly speaking only the Trinity: solius namque trinitatis incorporea uita existere recte putabitur. In order to avoid the terminological confusion of an ‘incorporeal corporeal’ light the Cappadocians shift to the language of ‘immateriality’.

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attention by scholars of Eriugena.13 Eriugena, however, is not the first to use but not cite the Apology. Even today, this work of Gregory has not received the recognition it deserves in patristic scholarship.14 This might have to do with the fact that although it reverberates throughout the whole Greek hexaemeral tradition, it seems to have been constantly overshadowed by Basil’s homilies and Gregory’s complementary anthropological treatise known as the De opificio hominis. At this stage of research, I have no adequate explanation as to why Eriugena did not mention the Apology in his sources. I suspect that Eriugena has no particular reason for it and he is simply following a convention of his time. If so, Eriugena is a very interesting and perhaps typical example of the shadowy existence of the Apology in medieval hexaemeral exegesis.15 Herein, then, lies another task for future research. As for now, it is extremely interesting to note, and to conclude, that many modern scholars approach Gregory and Basil as diverging in their hexaemeral exegesis, in spite of Gregory’s explicit affirmation of the contrary.16 Not so Eriugena, I submit, who is a fine example of how the tradition read the Hexaemeron and the Apology in agreement, so much so that the explicit reference to Gregory’s work disappeared from the text but also from memory. It is high time we restored the Apology to its proper place in the history of Western thought. Eriugena would be a very good place to start.

13

Apart from the secondary literature mentioned above, I have also checked the critical apparatus of the relevant passages in Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon, ed. Édouard A. Jeauneau, vols. 1 and 3 (Turnhout, 1996 and 1999); and Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), ed. I.P. Sheldon-Williams, vols. 1 and 3, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 7 and 11 (Dublin, 1968 and 1981). There is no mention of Gregory’s Apology here either. 14 For a thorough discussion of the influence of the Apology in the reception history and contemporary scholarship see Franz Xaver Risch, Gregor von Nyssa, Über das Sechstagewerk: Verteidigungsschrift an seinen Bruder Petrus (Stuttgart, 1999), 46-52. 15 To briefly give another indicative example: Grosseteste, In Hexaemeron, I XVI.3, refers to a view attributed to Josephus, Gregory and other anonymous hexaemeral commentators, according to which, contrary to the standard interpretation of Jerome, Strabus, Bede, John Damascene and Basil, the firmament of the second day is the same as the heaven of the first day. In his annotated translation, C.F.J. Martin, Robert Grosseteste: On the Six Days of Creation – A Translation of the Hexaëmeron, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 6.2 (Oxford, 1996), 744, mentions as Grosseteste’s source the first chapter of Gregory’s De opificio, which offers a recapitulation of the creation narrative from Gen. 1:1 to 1:26. But there is no discussion there of the relation of the ‘firmament’ [Gen. 1:6] to ‘heaven’ [Gen. 1:1], even less an allusion to their identification, nor anywhere else in the De opificio, as far as I can tell. The only source that Grosseteste could derive that information from Gregory is through some reading of the Apology. 16 For two recent examples see Doru Costache, ‘Approaching An Apology for the Hexaemeron: Its Aims, Method and Discourse’, in Doru Costache and Philip Kariatlis (eds), Cappadocian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal (Sydney, 2013), 369-93; David DeMarco, ‘The Presentation and Reception of Basil’s Homiliae in hexaemeron in Gregory’s In hexaemeron’, ZAC 17 (2013), 332-52.

Eriugena is Reading St Augustine1 Agnieszka KIJEWSKA, Institute of Philosophy, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

ABSTRACT Eriugenian scholarship often puts emphasis on the fact that his intellectual formation was strongly influenced by Greek Fathers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor or Gregory of Nyssa. Meanwhile, in his early work, that is De praedestinatione, Eriugena principally refers to the works of St Augustine. This is to some extent obvious as the whole debate over predestination was triggered by Gottschalk of Orbais and arose precisely from Gottschalk’s interpretation of Augustinian teaching in the spirit of double predestination: for the elect to salvation and for the condemned to hell. In my presentation, I would like to analyze the way Eriugena uses St Augustine’s doctrine, mainly in his De praedestinatione where he tries to establish his authority as vera auctoritas. To achieve this aim, Eriugena reads Augustine’s teaching in the context of other authoritative texts, among others those of Boethius. In his book, John Scotus proposes the way of quadrivium ratiocinationis which is based, as I believe, on Boethian methodology. Having established this hermeneutical instrument, Eriugena approaches St Augustine’s texts and reads them in an anti-predestinarian way: the only acceptable answer to Gottschalk’s concept of gemina praedestinatio is the thesis of one unique predestination to salvation.

1. Authority A lot has been said and written about Scotus’s concept of authority. Eriugena discusses that issue, so significant for the culture of that time, in various works, but one of the most popular ‘definitions’ comes from the first book of Periphyseon, along with important statements preceding it: [Nutritor] We have learnt that reason is prior by nature, authority in time. For although nature was created together with time, authority did not come into being at the beginning of nature and time, whereas reason arose with nature and time out of the Principle of things. 1 Article prepared as part of the project funded by the Minister of Science and Higher Education under the ‘Regional Initiative of Excellence’ programme for the years 2019-2022, project number: 028/RID/2018/19, the amount of funding: 11 742 500 PLN. Many thanks to the organisers of the International Conference on Patristic Studies Oxford and to Prof. Ilaria Ramelli, the director of the Eriugena workshop.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 193-212. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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[Alumnus] (…) For authority proceeds from true reason, but reason certainly does not proceed from authority. For every authority which is not upheld by true reason is seen to be weak, whereas true reason is kept firm and immutable by her own powers and does not require to be confirmed by the assent of any authority. For it seems to me that true authority is nothing else but the truth that has been discovered by the power of reason and set down in writing by the Holy Fathers for the use of posterity. (…) [N] (…) And that is why reason must be employed first in our present business, and authority afterwards.2

If we examine these words, we can conclude that (1) reason has a ‘natural’ priority over authority because reason was created by God along with time and the nature of things. (2) What we encounter first in the natural course of things is authority that imposes something on us. Eriugena, following St Augustine, refers to it as a temporal primacy of authority over reason. (3) Authority depends on reason as its source, but the reverse correlation does not occur: authority is shaky without the foundation of reason.3 (4) The value of authority is closely correlated with truth that reason discovers in the nature of things because it is essentially associated with knowledge about the objective structure of reality; (5) this truth is manifested in the form of language (text), by the ‘Holy Fathers’ who hold a strong authority as those who reveal truth. (6) The acceptance of this truth is beneficial both in the individual and social dimension (for future generations). This fundamental non-contradiction of reason and authority is based on the fact that ‘both flow from the same source, the Wisdom of God’.4 Divine Wisdom is defined by a set of causes which also include truth in the narrower sense. But truth is primarily associated with Divine Wisdom because it is the Divine Word, Logos, in which the structure of reality is defined. That is why truth primarily has an ontological dimension and, secondarily – in logical, not temporal terms – it has a logical, language dimension. The real authority ‘reads’ this truth from two sources, from two parallel texts in which it is embodied: from the book of the world and the book of Scripture.5 Both books constitute the most significant articulation of this truth and, therefore, one has to read them in parallel. The Holy Bible, in Eriugena’s eyes, holds the strongest, unquestionable authority, it is a ‘theo-logy’ – the Divine Word itself,6 in which and through which the world was created. The effect of the Divine Word is also 2 Eriugena, Periphyseon (divison of nature) I, tr. by John J. O’Meara (Montréal, Washington, 1987), 110; Eriugena, Periph. I, 513B-C, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 161 (Turnhout, 1996), 98. 3 J.C. Marler, ‘Dialectical Use of Authority in the Periphyseon’, in Eriugena: East and West, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, London, 1995), 95-113, 99. 4 Eriugena, Periph. I 511B, CChr.CM 161 (1996), 108. 5 Willemien Otten, ‘Nature and Scripture: Demise of a Medieval Analogy’, Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995), 257-84, 262-3; ead., ‘The Parallelism of Nature and Scripture: Reflection on Eriugena’s Incarnational Exegesis’, in Iohannes Scottus Eriugena. The Bible and Hermeneutics, ed. Gerd Van Riel, Carlos Steel and James McEvoy, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 20 (Leuven, 1996), 81-102. 6 Goulven Madec, Jean Scot et ses auteurs. Annotations érigéniennes (Paris, 1988), 13.

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manifested in the created reality with all its rich and complex structure of being. Man, as a workshop of creation (officina omnium) or all creatures (omnis creatura), participates in this Divine creative power in some way.7 This brings to light even more clearly the basic principle of Neoplatonism, according to which the power of creation is proportionally correlated with cognitive power. This is what Gersh referred to as the subjective-objective structure of the Neoplatonic system.8 Such a reading of the structure of the world in these two books is ‘useful’, not in terms of any ‘material’ benefits but, rather, in terms of contributing to learning the First Cause of reality (cognitio Dei ex facturis suis) and, thus, to man’s return to the source. Such a ‘reading’ of the First Cause, which may result in the return to it – reditus – can have an individual dimension – and, in this aspect, it culminates in a mystical experience – as well as a social dimension manifested in the general return of the whole reality to God (reditus generalis).9 The Fathers were the ones who were discovering this truth about reality, and this is where their authority originated. In his works, Eriugena demonstrated a very broad – for those times – range of authors/authorities whose writings he quoted and on whom he drew without referring to them by name. The important authors frequently mentioned in Eriugena’s works include, of course, St Augustine whose authority for the entire Carolingian culture was of enormous significance. Many researchers have noted the rather ambivalent attitude of Eriugena to this great Father: Cappuyns believes that John Scotus always refers to St Augustine with some qualifications, de facto belittling his authority,10 while Goulven Madec claims that Eriugena’s choices in this respect are absolutely free, guided only by the logic of his system, particularly because it was Augustine who had thoroughly defined the dialectics of ratio-auctoritas, fides-intellectus, to which Eriugena was referring later.11 In various studies, Willemien Otten places Eriugena in the Latin Carolingian tradition, particularly in the context of the reception of Augustine’s thought.12 Many authors emphasise, however, that Eriugena’s 7 Periph. III 733A-B, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 163 (Turnhout, 1999), 163. Francis Bertin, ‘Les origines de l’homme chez Jean Scot’, in Jean Scot Érigène et l’histoire de la philosophie, ed. René Roques (Paris, 1977), 307-14; Carlos Steel, ‘La création de l’univers dans l’homme selon Jean Scot Érigène’, in L’homme et son univers au moyen âge. Actes du VIIe Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale, ed. Christian Wenin (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), 205-10. 8 Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena. An Investigation in the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition, Studien zur Problemgeschichte der Antiken und Mittelalterlichen Philosophie VIII (Leiden, 1978), 2-3, 82. 9 Stephen Gersh, ‘The Structure of Return in Eriugena’s Periphyseon’, in Begriff und Metapher. Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena, ed. Werner Beierwaltes (Heidelberg, 1990), 108-25 ; Édouard Jeauneau, ‘Le thème du retour’, in Études érigéniennes (Paris, 1987), 341-64. 10 Maieul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène : sa vie, son œuvre, sa pensée (Louvain, Paris, 1933), 284: ‘Il le veut d’autant moins que souvent il s’agit de diminuer Augustin’. 11 G. Madec, Jean Scot et ses auteurs (1988), 19. 12 Willemien Otten, ‘Eriugena’s Periphyseon: A Carolingian Contribution to the Theological tradition’, in Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (eds), Eriugena: East and West: papers of

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references to Augustine, as well as to other representatives of the Western tradition, were often accompanied by a remark that the Greeks had expressed it more accurately and clearly (significantius).13 Therefore, Michael Harrington asks: Does Eriugena simply ornament a fundamentally Augustinian philosophy with Greek embroidery, does he turn away from Augustine to identify himself with the Greeks, does he develop them both into something new, or was there no significant difference between them to start with? At times, Eriugena does use Augustine simply as additional and sometimes questionable evidence for the theses that are developed more explicitly and at much greater length in his Greek sources.14

Eriugena declares, however, that, rather than adjudicating which of the Fathers has greater authority, one should ‘invent’ (machinare) agreement between them.15 Such a statement shows that Eriugena was independent in his approach to various authorities. A real authority should meet the above-mentioned criteria which should also govern the reading of a specific authoritative text. When writing about the authorities of Eriugena as the master of the Carolingian Palace School, John J. Contreni observed: A thorough-going Augustinian, John also absorbed Augustine’s teaching on the arts and learning from De dialectica, De doctrina christiana, De magistro, De musica, De ordine, and Soliloquia. His commentaries on Priscian’s The Principles and Martianus Capella’s The Marriage and observations scattered throughout his body of work record the profound role the liberal arts played in his thought and teaching and warrant his place as the most eloquent expositor of the new role of the arts in European culture.16

I would like to add another author whose influence seems to be significant to this list of Eriugena’s authorities – Boethius. I think that his texts, in which – as he himself claimed – he was only elaborating the semina rationum that came from St Augustine’s works,17 helped Eriugena develop a new methodology that can be summarised as vera philosophia est vera religio and that was guided by his reading of Augustinian texts.18 the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Chicago and Notre Dame, 18-20 October 1991 (Notre Dame, IN, 1994), 69-93, 80. 13 Periph. III 632A, CChr.CM 163 (1999), 21. 14 Michael Harrington, ‘Eriugena and the Neoplatonic Tradition’, in A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena, ed. Adrian Guiu, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 86 (Leiden, 2020), 64-92, 70. 15 Periph. IV 804C-D, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 164 (Turnhout, 2000), 89; Periph. IV 816D, CChr.CM 164 (2000), 107. 16 John J. Contreni, ‘John Scottus, Nutritor, and the Liberal Arts’, in A Companion to John Scottus (2020), 31-63, 33. 17 Boethius, ‘De Trinitate’, in The Theological Tractates, ed. Henry F. Stewart and Edward K. Rand (London, Cambridge, MA, 1968), 4-5. 18 Giulio d’Onofrio, ‘The Speculative System of John Scottus Eriugena and the Tradition of “Vera Philosophia”’, in A Companion to John Scottus (2020), 213-38, 213.

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2. The predestination controversy and the authority of St Augustine The special importance of Augustine’s authority is visible in De praedestinatione because the inappropriate – according to John Scotus – reading of Augustine’s texts by Gottschalk of Orbais was one of the reasons of the whole predestination controversy and the resulting heresy. Why was Gottshalk’s teaching so disconcerting? Andrzej Stefańczyk summarised the essence of the problem thus: Amply quoting Augustine, Gottschalk taught the doctrine of the infallible efficacy of the divine judgment, which having been issued from eternity, must needs predetermine all human beings in their ways of conduct: those predesigned to be saints will of necessity become good in their ways, while those predestined to be reprobates will necessarily become evil. Essentially, this was the doctrine of theological determinism in its classical formulation, yet it was rendered particularly awkward owing to the quotes of St. Augustine invoked in its support.19

The theological determinism forming the basis of Gottschalk’s theses was dangerous for at least a few reasons. First, (1) this view makes God responsible for evil in the world; (2) it excludes those predestined for damnation from the salvific effects of Christ’s work of salvation. The practical consequences of such a position are dire: (3) the effort of reformation and moral improvement appears to be pointless as also does (4) sacramental life; especially baptism is no longer held to obliterate original sin in those predestined for eternal damnation. (5) Gottschalk found the sources of this teaching – that was difficult to accept – in the works of St Augustine whose authority seemed be superior and unquestionable.20 By order of Archbishop Hinkmar of Reims and his coadjutor Pardulus of Laon, Eriugena entered the dispute, with a clear support from king Charles the Bald.21 It seems, however, that Eriugena joined the debate on predestination not only at the initiative of his patrons, but also out of an inner impulse because this issue represented quite an intellectual challenge to him. He expressed his position in De divina praedestinatione liber (850/851), a treatise that caused an even greater confusion than the original controversy started by Gottschalk’s 19 Andrzej P. Stefańczyk, ‘Gottschalk of Orbais’ Teaching on Predestination’, in If God does exist… Human Freedom and theistic hypothesis: studies and essays, ed. Andrzej P. Stefańczyk and Roman Majeran (Lublin, 2019), 53-70, 69. 20 J.J. Contreni, ‘John Scottus, Nutritor, and the Liberal Arts’ (2020), 31. 21 Avital Wohlman, ‘Foreword’, in Eriugena, Treatise on divine Predestination (Treatise), trans. Mary Brennan (Notre Dame, 1998), XX; Treatise I, 2, 8: ‘And we are constrained to reply specifically on the instructions of the vigilant pastors of the catholic church within whose sheepfold such poison is striving to creep. We have, too, the particular approval of the most orthodox prince and venerable lord, Charles, whose greatest concern is to harbour devout and proper sentiments towards God, to refute the distorted teachings of heretics by true reasonings and the authority of the holy Fathers, and to root them out utterly to the last one’.

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theses. To counter Gottschalk’s teaching about the double predestination, Eriugena drew on the very sources of his opponent’s convictions, namely St Augustine’s texts. In his reading of these texts, he tried to build Augustine’s authority on a completely new foundation – that of a ‘real authority’ (vera auctoritas) in the sense presented above. This is the intention one can perceive when analysing the Preface to De praedestinatione, the dedicatory letter to Hincmar and Pardulus. Leaving aside all conventional elements typical of such dedications, it is worth highlighting some of Eriugena’s statements in which he clearly refers to Augustine who can thus be regarded as a ‘real authority’: (1) ‘Although far from possessing the competence of your powers in words and understanding, yet I trust that through faith and dedication I am capable of proclaiming truth. Your attention is partly drawn upwards in contemplation towards the exploration of the truth and partly faced downwards in the activity of governing the church’.22 (2) ‘… ever allowed even the shortest interval of time to scan the records of wisdom’. (3) ‘… although the renown of your eloquence is sufficient to guard against, to overcome, and to destroy all the subtlety of newly hatched heresies, yet you have not scorned to strengthen of your perfect definition of the faith of predestination by the affirmation of our reasoning…’ (4) ‘Indeed, as Augustine says, it is an outstanding characteristic of virtuous minds to love the truth in words, not the words themselves’.23 Eriugena clearly declares that his objective is to discover the truth in words/ in a text – the truth that is one with contemplation, ‘an insight into the traces of Wisdom.’ He uses rhetoric and reasoning to eradicate heretical views and defend true faith by demonstrating that his opponents does preach the truth. Such a course of action was undoubtedly advocated by St Augustine who wrote in De doctrina christiana: So the interpreter and teacher of the divine scriptures (tractator et doctor), the defender of the true faith (defensor rectae fidei) and vanquisher of error (debellator erroris), must communicate what is good and eradicate what is bad, and in the same process of 22 Treatise, 1; Giovanni Scoto Eriugena, De praedestinatione liber (De praed.), praef., ed. Ernesto S. Mainoldi (Firenze, 2003), 2: … impos quidem longe uirium uestrarum sermone atque intelligentia, compos uero fide et douotione in asserendae ueritatis fiducia. Studium quippe uestrum partim sursum uersus contemplatiue erigitur ad speculandam ueritatem, partim uero deorsum uersus actiue reprimitur ad regendam ecclesiam. 23 Treatise, 2; De praed. Praef., 2-4: … uix aliquando ad uestigia sapientiae intuenda breuissimo temporis sinimur interuallo. (…) vos, religiosissimi patres, cum uestrae nobilitatis eloqueniae ad omnes nouellarum heresium uersutias cauendas, conuincendas, destruendas sufficiat; nostrae tamen ratiocinationis astipulationibus uestram perfectissimam de fide praedestiantionis diffinitionem roborare non spreuistis (…). Bonorum siquidem ingeniorum, ut ait augustinus, insignis est indoles, in uerbis rerum amare non uerba.

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speaking must win over the antagonistic, rouse the apathetic, and make clear to those who are not conversant with the matter under discussion what they should expect. When he finds them favourable, instead, and receptive, or has made them so by his own efforts (…). To clarify disputed issues there must be rational argument and deployment of evidence. But if listeners have to be moved rather than instructed, in order to make them act decisively on the knowledge that they have and lend their assent to matters which they admit to be true, then greater powers of oratory are required. In such cases what one needs is entreaties, rebukes, rousing speeches, solemn admonitions, and all the other things which have the power to excite human emotions.24

In De predestinatione, John Scotus adopts a specific methodology, relying directly on St Augustine, and thus creates a new programme of teaching that he intends to promote by means of this debate: Every true and complete doctrinal system by which the theory of all things is most assiduously inquired into and most clearly ascertained is established within that discipline which the Greek usually call philosophia. We have, therefore, considered it necessary to discuss briefly its divisions or constituent parts. If, indeed, as Saint Augustine says, it is believed and taught as the fundamental principle of man’s salvation that philosophy, that is the study of wisdom, is not one thing and religion another – for they whose teaching we do not favour do not in fact participate with us in the sacraments – what else is the exercise of philosophy but the exposition of the rules of true religion by which the supreme and principal cause of all things, God, is worshipped with humility and rationally search for? It follows then that true philosophy is true religion and conversely that true religion is true philosophy.25

It is worth noting the first words in this quotation – omnis piae perfectaeque doctrinae modus – in its Italian translation Ernesto Mainoldi retained the ‘religious’ sense of the word pius: ‘della pia e perfetta dottrina’.26 For Eriugena, a typical representative of Carolingian mentality,27 faith is the indispensable and inalienable starting point for all further rational inquiry. In De praedestinatione, he writes ‘that our salvation (…) takes its beginning from faith’ whose unity Satan attempts to destroy and which, therefore, has to be strengthened with rational arguments.28 While adopting a temporal primacy of faith/authority, the 24

Augustine, De doctrina Christiana IV, 14-5, ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford, 1995), 201-3. Treatise I, 1, 7; De praed. 6: Cum omnis piae perfectęque doctrinae modus, quo omnium rerum ratio et studiosissime quaeritur et apertissime inuenitur, in ea disciplina, quae a grecis philosophia solet uocari, sit constitutus, de eius diuisionibus seu particionibus quaedam ureuiter disserere necessarium duximus. Si enim, ut ait sanctus augustinus, creditur et docentur, quo est humane salutis caput, non aliam esse philosophiam, id est sapientiae studium, et aliam religionem, cum hi quorum doctrinam non approbamus nec Sacramento nobiscum communicat, quid est aliud de philosophia tractare, nisi verę religionis, qua summa et principalis omnium rerum causa, deus, et humiliter colitur et rationabiliter inuestigatur, regulas exponere? Conficitur inde ueram esse philosophiam veram religionem conuersimque ueram religionem esse ueram philosophiam. 26 De praed. I, 1, 7. 27 G. d’Onofrio, ‘The Speculative System of John Scottus Eriugena’ (2020), 230-2. 28 Treatise I, 4, 9. 25

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‘system’29 of knowledge designed by Eriugena relies on rational inquiry to build a specific structure of thinking that will come closer to grasping the cause/principle/foundation of all things (omnium rerum ratio). This is the goal of the ‘study of wisdom’ that – as Boethius, following Augustine, demonstrated – is true philosophy and teaching of the principles of the true religion.30 When presenting De predestinatione, Ernesto Mainoldi observes that the fact that Eriugena joined the debate was not a manifestation of his naiveté but, rather, of a conscious propagation of his methodology and approach, an attempt at implementing a specific cultural programme.31 I completely agree with this diagnosis and believe that the implementation of this programme was largely determined by Eriugena’s reading of the Boethius’ work that provided the methodological framework for this programme.

3. Boethius and Carolingian models of erudition A lot has been written about Eriugena’s attitude to Boethius by Giulio d’Onofrio, John Marenbon, Michael Harrington, Christoph Erismann, and Catherine Kavanagh.32 These authors have demonstrated that, to Eriugena, Boethius’ texts were a fundamental source of knowledge on Aristotelian logic or theory of topics. Eriugena knew at least some of Boethius’ opuscula sacra and De consolatione philosophiae. We can assume that he was probably familiar with Boethius’ textbooks on the arts. As Laura Cochrane recently indicated, Charles the Bold, Eriugena’s patron, received a beautifully illuminated manuscript of De institutione arithmetica from the scriptorium in Tours ca. 845. To my mind, it has not escaped Eriugena’s attention. Miniatures in this manuscript showed allegorical personifications of the liberal arts regarded as the path to the shrine of Divine Wisdom, in whose centre was the Bible. Thus, the study of the liberal arts, particularly the quadrivium, constituted a convenient path to 29

G. d’Onofrio, ‘The Speculative System of John Scottus Eriugena’ (2020), 238. Boethius, De Institutione arithmetica, proem., tr. By Michael Masi (Amsterdam, New York, 1983), 71; Agnieszka Kijewska, ‘Eriugena’s De Praedestinatione: The Project of Rationalisation of Faith and Its Critics’, Roczniki Filozoficzne 65.3 (2017), 71-98. 31 E. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention in the Debate on Predestination’, in A Companion to John Scottus (2020), 243. 32 Giulio d’Onofrio, ‘A proposito del ‘magnificus Boetius’: un’indagine sulla presenza degli ‘Opuscula sacra’ e della ‘Consolatio’ nell’opera eriugeniana, in Eriugena. Studien zu seinen Quellen, ed. Werner Beierwaltes (Heidelberg, 1980), 189-200; M. Harrington, ‘Eriugena and the Neoplatonic Tradition’ (2020), 74-5; Christophe Erismann, ‘Between Greek and Latin: Eriugena on Logic’, in A Companion to John Scottus (2020), 95-100; John Marenbon, ‘Eriugena, Aristotelian Logic and the Creation’, in Eriugena and Creation, ed. Willemien Otten and Michael I. Allen, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 68 (Turnhout, 2014), 349-57; Catherine Kavanagh, ‘Eriugenian Developments of Ciceronian Topical Theory’, in Medieval and Renaissance Humanism: Rhetoric, Representation and Reform, ed. Stephen Gersh and Bert Roest, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 115 (Leiden, 2003), 1-30. 30

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discovering the numerical structure of Divine Wisdom which comprised the equations of all of God’s creation.33 How could one embark on this path, however? When presenting the Carolingian approach to knowledge, Calvin Bouwer distinguishes two basic models that he describes as (1) quadrivial reasoning and (2) allegorical revelation.34 The first model, described as quadrivial reasoning, is rooted in Boethius’ texts, primarily in his De institutione arithmetica where Boethius seeks to determine the path appropriate for each of the disciplines of the quadrivium that takes the mind to an increasingly higher level of knowledge until the highest level of abstract, immutable truth is attained: This, therefore is the quadrivium by which we bring a superior mind from knowledge offered by the senses to the more certain things of the intellect. There are various steps and certain dimensions of progressing by which the mind is able to ascend so that by means of the eye of the mind, which (as Plato says) is composed of many corporeal eyes and is of higher dignity than they, truth can be investigated and beheld. This eye, I say, submerged and surrounded by the corporal senses, is in turn illuminated by the disciplines of quadrivium.35

Arithmetic is the mother of the quadrivium and it determines the standards in the other arts. Justifying the primacy of arithmetic, Boethius writes: It is prior to all not only because God the creator of the massive structure of the world considered this first discipline as the exemplar of his own thought and established all things in accord with it; or that through numbers of an assigned order all things exhibiting the logic of their maker found concord; but arithmetic is said to be first for this reason also, because whatever things are prior in nature, it is to these underlying elements that the posterior elements can be referred.36

This ‘arithmetical’ model requires the simplest elements to be determined first. On this basis, the edifice of knowledge will be built by way of dialectics. In De Institutione, as Calvin Bower observes, Boethius does not mention dialectics; instead, he describes the subject of mathematical knowledge in a way that brings to mind an association with the science of categories that formed the basis of dialectic procedures:37 33 Laura E. Cochrane, ‘Secular Learning and Sacred Purpose in a Carolingian Copy of Boethius’s De Institutione Arithmetica (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Class 5)’, Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 5.1 (2015), 10-4; A. Kijewska, ‘Eriugena’s De Praedestinatione: The Project of Rationalisation of Faith’ (2017), 71-98. 34 Calvin M. Bower, ‘Quadrivial Reasoning and Allegorical Revelation: ‘Meta-Knowledge’ and Carolingian Approaches to Knowing’, in Carolignian Scholarship and Martianus Capella. Ninth-Century Commentary Traditions on ‘De Nuptiis’ in Context, ed. Mariken Teeuwen and Sinéad O’Sulivan, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 12 (Turnhout, 2011), 57. 35 Cf. Michael Masi, Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica I, 1 (Amsterdam, 1983), 73; C. Bower, ‘Quadrivial Reasoning’ (2011), 59. 36 Boethius, De Institutione Arithmetica I, 1, 74. 37 Cf. Bower, ‘Quadrivial Reasoning’ (2011), 59.

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For this is the wisdom of things which are, and the perception of truth gives to these things their unchanging character. We say those things are which neither grow by stretching nor diminish by crushing, nor are changed by variations, but are always in their proper force and keep themselves secure by support of their own nature. Such things are: qualities, quantities, configurations, largeness, smallness, equalities, relations, acts, dispositions, places, times, and whatever is in any way found joined to bodies. Now those things which by their nature are incorporeal, existing by reason of an immutable substance, when affected by the participation of a body and by contact with some variable thing, pass into a condition of inconstant changeableness.38

The method that Bower described as quadrivial reasoning would thus encompass (1) identifying the simplest element of a given science, what Boethius described in the opuscula, in relation to theological issues, as conceptio communis that is self-evident to those who comprehend it. The next stage (2) encompasses dialectical procedures that, by way of dividing and combining concepts, enable the construction of a series of rational arguments (iter rationis). Allegorical revelation, on the other hand, would be a form of ‘a more mystical – on the surface somewhat less rational – process of learning that begins with experience in this world’.39 This path encompasses the process of reading signs, metaphors and allegories in order to reach a certain, unclear – mirrorlike – understanding of higher laws. An exemplar of such an approach was undoubtedly present in Capella although Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae was also an influence. According to Bower, both of these approaches co-existed in Carolingian erudition, and I believe that Eriugena’s texts are an excellent example of that. 4. Eriugena’s programme If we look at De praedestinatione, we can say that it embodies the Augustinian programme of Christian teaching while adding to it the discipline of quadrivial reasoning and the imaginativeness of allegorical revelation. All this, however, serves the process of rejecting the perversity of heresy and strengthening true faith, in accordance with what St Augustine recommended to those who want to be: ‘interpreter and teacher of the divine scriptures, the defender of the true faith and vanquisher of error.’ Eriugena wants his work to be part of the process of defending true faith, and we can say that refuting heresy is a basic form of the ‘usefulness’ of this undertaking. This was also the goal that Eriugena’s patrons – Archbishop Hincmar and Pardulus – had in mind. John Scotus asserts: Although the renown of your eloquence is sufficient to guard against, to overcome, and to destroy all the subtlety of newly hatched heresies, yet you have not scorned to 38 39

Boethius, De Institutione Arithmetica I, 1, 71. C. Bower, ‘Quadrivial Reasoning’ (2011), 58.

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strengthen your perfect definition of the faith of predestination by the affirmation of our reasoning, so that the noble vigour of your piety may be evident to all.40

Eriugena is convinced that his opponent’s views are not in accordance with faith and he refers to them as ‘Gottschalkian heresy’ that is between Pelagianism, negating the gift of Divine Grace, and the opposite view, which rejects the freedom of will.41 However, so that ‘defenders of the truth appear to contend without weapons with the advocates of falsehood’,42 John Scotus proposes a fourfold system of teaching, summarising his own philosophical quadrivium based on Boethius’ model:43 While philosophy may in many and various ways be divided up, it is seen, however, to have twice two principal parts necessary for the solution of every question. These the Greek have been pleased to name DIAIRETIKE, ORISTIKE, APODIKTIKE, ANALITYKE, and in Latin we can call these divisoria (divisory), diffinitiva (defining), demonstrative (demonstrative), resolutiva (resolutionary). Of these, the first by dividing one into many, separates; the second, by determining one from among many, concludes; the third, by indicating what is hidden through what is manifest, reveals; the truth, by separating compound into simple, resolves.44

Analogously to the mathematical quadrivium, Eriugena establishes the ‘fourfold path of human reasoning’ (ratiocinationis quadriuium) that is essentially the art of dialectics discovering the truth about reality, on the one hand, and refuting false views, on the other (I, 2). Just like Boethiu’s quadrivium was to purify the ‘eye of the mind’ and open it to what really exists, Eriugena’s quadrivium seeks to open the mind to ‘the light itself which illuminates the heart of its seekers, will have opened our approach to the matters we are trying to enter into’45. Philosophy thus defined, not limited to strictly arithmetical problems, 40 Treatise, pref. 4; De praed., pref. 3 : Cum uestrae nobilitas eloquenitae ad omnes nouellarum heresium uersutias cauendas, conuincendas, destruendas sufficat; nostrae tamen ratiocinationis astipulationibus uestram perfectissimam de fide praedestinationis diffinitionem roborare non spreuistis, ita ut et uestrae pietatis pulcherrima uirtus omnibus pateat. 41 De praed. IV, 1, 36. Boethius, ‘Contra Eutychen et Nestorium’, in The Theological Tractates (1968), 77: ‘… let me first clear away the extreme and self-contradictory errors of Nestorius et Eutyches; after that, by God’s help, I will temperately set forth the middle way of the Christian Faith’. 42 Treatise I, 3, 8. 43 E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention’ (2020), 245. 44 Treatise I, 1, 7-8; De praed. I, 1, 6-8: Quae, dum multifariam diuersisque modis diuidatur, bis binas tamen partes principales ad omnem quaestionem solvendam necessarias habere dinoscitur, quas grecis placuit nominare DIAIRETIKE, ORISTIKE, APODIKTIKE, ANALITIKE, easdemque latialiter possumus dicere diuisoriam, diffinitiuam, demonstratiuam, resolutiuam; quarum enim prima unum in multa diuidendo segregat, secunda unum de multis diffiniendo colligit, tercia per manifesta occulta demonstrando aperit, quarta composita in simplicia separando resoluit. Mainoldi claims that it is the division of David of Armenia commentary to Isagoge. E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention’ (2020), 251. 45 Treatise I, 2, 8.

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plays a propaedeutic role in striving to grasp what truly exists and what is the subject of true knowledge.46 This quadrivium must start in a methodical manner from what is the simplest and the first, what is revealed by division (divisio) and can be a convenient starting point for further reasoning. The number that can be odd or even – in Boethius’ Institutio, and the concept of nature whose first division is also binary – in Eriugena’s Periphyseon, are such a fundamental notion. Thus, the art of division is aided by the art of defining (ars diffinitiva), by means of which the elements of division can be appropriately distinguished. In Quomodo substantiae, Boethius recommended beginning a study from the most general concepts (conceptiones communes), construed as concepts that are self-evident to everyone who comprehends them.47 A further division of these primary concepts is the task of dialectics, as Eriugena demonstrated in his commentary to the fourth volume of Capella’s De Nuptiis.48 Evidence of this dialectical procedure of division can also be found in De praedestinatione, particularly where the author tries to define the concepts of predestination and foreknowledge and their mutual relationship: For although all predestination is called foreknowledge but not all foreknowledge is called predestination, nevertheless we do not say that all predestination is foreknowledge and that not all foreknowledge is predestination in the same way as we are accustomed to speak of the genera and their forms.49 46 Ernesto Mainoldi suggests that Prudentius, in his criticism of Eriugena, referred to this fragment his work. E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention’ (2020), 245. Prudentius, De praedestinatione 1052B-C: Relinque quadruvium vanitatis, quo sequens extorris viae factus es veritatis. Quanto melis, quantoque salubrius ageres, si uni verae sempiternae viae innitens, quadriga illius humilis vehi, quam quadruvii tui inflatus typho raptum ire in diversa diligeres! Quadriga huius viae sunt quattuor Evangelia, uno paradisi fonte manantia, quibus nobis via panditur salutaris. Quadriga huius viae quatuor sunt virtutes, prudentia, temperantia, fortitudo, iustitia, quibus omnis morum probitas venustatur. Quadriga huius viae sunt quatuor divinorum eloquiorum species historica, ethica, allegorica, anagogica, quibus ad omnem sacrarum litterarum intellectum, illuminante gratia eius, inducimur: quae si humiliter fideliterque sectari studuisses, nunquam in tanta errorum atque abominationum, imo blasphemiarum praecipitia incidisses. 47 Boethius, Quomodo substantiae I, in The Theological Tractates (1968), 41; Agnieszka Kijewska, ‘Eriugena and the Twelfth Century: The Concept of Ratio’, in Eriugena and Creation (2014), 397-8. 48 Eriugena, Annotationes in Martianum 157, 17, in Scoto Eriugena, Remigio di Auxerre, Bernardo Silvestre e Anonimi, Tutti I commenti a Marziano Capella, ed., tr., and comm. by Ilaria Ramelli (Milano, 2006), 269: GENUS est multarum formarum substantialis unitas. Sursum est generalissimum genus quod a Graecis ousia, a nobis essentia vocatur, ultra quod nullus potest ascendere. Est enim quaedam essential quae comprehendit omnem naturam cuius participatione subsistit omne quod est, etideo dicitur generalissimus genus. Descendit autem per divisiones per genera per species usque ad specialissimam speciem quae a Grecis atomos dicitur, hoc est individuum, u test unus homo vel unus bos. 49 Treatise II, 2, 9; De praed. II, 2, 16: Cum enim omnis praedestinatio praescientia, non autem omnis praescientia praedestinatio dicatur, non tamen eo modo dicimus omnem praedestinationem esse praescientiam, non omnem uero praescientiam esse praedestinationem, quo solemus dicere in generibus eorumque formis.

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Studying the relationships between these concepts and an attempt at defining them are, in Eriugena’s opinion, the task of dialectics – ‘the art which diligently investigates the rational common concepts of the mind’.50 The division procedure is thus complemented with the art of defining, thanks to which the concepts (praenotio) of foreknowledge and predestination can be distinguished in order to express their meaning with greater accuracy. Thus, Eriugena makes a distinction between the concept of Divine foreknowledge and predestination, and concludes that predestination is Divine foreknowledge accompanied by a specific work of God: But that same knowledge, to make a distinction in specific meanings, is expressly called predestination only when it is perceived in the works of God.51

Starting from the concepts of foreknowledge and predestination thus defined, Eriugena tries to prove, ‘by necessary argument’ (argumentum necessitatis) that two predestinations cannot exist simultaneously because it contradicts the fundamental unity of Divine Nature: Then if it is irreverent to teach that there are two essences in God, or two wisdoms, knowledges, virtues, and that all the other qualities attributed to God are double or trebled or heaped in some kind of multiple fashion, anyone who is proved to have stated that there are two predestinations in God is involved in the charge of ungodliness.52

In order to reject the thesis of double predestination, Eriugena then proposes reasoning ‘from the effects to the cause’, based on the conviction that contradictory effects may not originate from the same cause. Sin defies justice, hence predestination to punishment opposes predestination to salvation. Therefore, these two types of contradictory ‘effects’ may not have their common cause in the unity of Divine Nature: But if the divine nature, the highest cause of all the things that are, although it is simple and one, is most soundly believed to be multiple, it follows that it must be believed not to allow any division within itself. It remain therefore that in God there are not two predestinations which would effect as well as enforce mutual opposition. This cannot be.53

Boethius protested against the shattering of Divine unity in various ways, touching upon Christological or Trinitarian issues. Introducing difference to the

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Periph. I 475A, CChr.CM 161 (1996), 65. Treatise II, 5, 14; De praed. II, 5, 20: Eadem autem scientia, ad discretionem scilicet significationum, praedestinatio expresse nominatur, dum in diuinis tantum operibus conspicitur. 52 Treatise II, 6, 15; De praed. II, 6, 22: Deinde si impium est duas essentias in deo doceri, uel duas sapientias, scientias, uirtutes, ceteraque omnia quae de deo dicuntur, geminari uel triplicari uel quacunque multiplici specie cumulari, quicunque duas in deo praedestinationes asserere conuincitur, reatu impietatis ligatur. 53 Treatise III, 2, 19; De praed. III, 2, 26-8: Si autem diuina natura, summa omnium que sunt causa multiplex, cum sit simplex et una, saluberrime creditur, consequenter necesse est nullam in se ipsa controuersiam recipere credatur. Relinquitur ergo in deo duas non esse praedestinationes quae inter se discordantia et efficiant et fier cogant. Nec earum ulla fieri potest. 51

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simplicity of Divine Nature is always a form ‘belittling’ it and is always the cause of heresy, as it was the case with Arians.54 Another instrument used by Eriugena against the concept of double predestination was enthymematic reasoning based on contradictory premises. Eriugena learnt this rhetorical syllogism, ‘which is of all modes of reasoning and verbal signs the noblest’,55 from Boethius and the rhetorical tradition of the Late Antiquity.56 In the third chapter of De Praedestinatione, Eriugena proposes two such syllogisms that lead to one common conclusion: God cannot be both the highest essence and not be the cause of those things only that derive from him. But God is the highest essence. He is therefore the cause of those things only which derive from him. Sin, death, unhappiness are not from God. Therefore God is not the cause of them. The same syllogism can be put in this way: God cannot be both the cause of those things that are and the cause of those things that are nothing. But God is the cause of those things that are. Therefore he is not the cause of those things that are not. Sin and its effect, death, to which unhappiness is conjoined, are not. Of them, therefore, neither God nor his predestination, which is what he himself is, can be the cause.57

Boethius’ texts could have also been an inspiration for the proposition that God is the author only of things that are. Thus Boethius presents his understanding of the term ‘nature’ in the treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius or in Institutio arithmetica.58 In the methodology described in De Trinitate, Boethius asserts that the subject of theology, the superior theoretical science, is ‘that Form which is pure form and no image, which is very Being and the sours of Being’.59 Philosophy was to prepare the lower sciences, particularly mathematical sciences, to study this Form.60 Eriugena is obviously aware of this when he emphasises the fact that God is the cause of what exists. As Ernesto Mainoldi 54

Boethius, De Trinitate I, 7: ‘Therefore Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, not three Gods. The principle of this union is absence of difference: difference cannot be avoided by those who add to or take from the Unity, as for instance the Arians, who, by graduating the Trinity according to merit, break it up and convert to Plurality. For the essence of plurality is otherness’. 55 Treatise X, 1, 65. 56 Boethius, In topicis Ciceronis commentaia, V. PL 64, 1141C: Ex hoc illa rhetorum ex contrariis conclusa, quae ipsi enthymeme appellant; 1143A-B. 57 Treatise III, 3, 19; De praed. III, 3, 28: Non et deus summa essentia sit et eorum tantum quae ab eo sunt causa non sit. Est autem deus summa essentia. Est igitur eorum tantum quae ab eo sunt causa. Peccatum, mors, miseria a deo non sunt. Eorum igitur causa deus non est. Idem quoque syllogismus hoc modo conectitur : non et deus eorum quae sunt causa sit et eorum que nihil sunt causa sit. Est autem deus eorum causa que sunt. Igitur non est causa eorum quae non sunt. Peccatum eiusque effectus, mors profecto cui adheret miseria, non sunt. Eorum igutur nec deus nec eius praedestinatio, quae est quod ipse est, causa esse potest. On God as not responsible for evil, see Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of apokatastasis (Leiden, 2013), 773-815. 58 Boethius, Contra Eutychen I, 77; Boethius, De Institutione arithmetica I, 1, 71. 59 Boethius, De Trinitate II, 9. 60 Ibid.

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shows, it was not until Periphyseon that Eriugena abandoned this privative concept of non-being and moved towards the concept that I refer to as ‘relational’: non-being can denote a lack, privation (privatio) as well as excess in relation to a being defined in some way (eminentia)61. Relying on the above arguments, Eriugena demonstrates that his opponent does not reveal the truth, hence he does not propagate it, because his method of arriving at the truth is inadequate. Since truth is the foundation of authority, Gottschalk has misread Augustine’s texts, even making a mistake about authorship: But when, in your heresy, you had already begun to make faulty and ill-considered assertions and toiled insolently in your pride to defend two predestinations, you were shown to have scant authority and retreated from your first assault. (…) Your write in the ravings of your confessions, or rather of your perfidy, as if you wished to defend the source of your error, namely the opinion of Isidore: ‘There is a twin predestination, either of the elect to rest or of the condemned to death’.62

5. The anti-predestinationist reading of St Augustine The method that Eriugena employs in his inquiry strives for the appropriate reading of the truth about reality whose only Cause is Divine Will. It is one with Divine Substance itself, is not subject to any necessity and does not allow any divisions in itself; it is characterised by unity and immutability. Divine Will is the only cause of everything that exists although, in fact, existence in the absolute sense can only be ascribed to God, while other things have a derivative being that is dependent on God. And this is not surprising since nothing is contrary to God except non-being, because he alone it is who said: ‘I am who am’, but other things also that are said to exist do not entirely exist, because they are not what he is, and they are said to exist, because they are from him who alone is being63. 61 De praed. XV, 9-10, 154-6; Periph. I 517B-C, CChr.CM 161 (1996), 103-4; E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention’ (2020), 246, 256-7. 62 Treatise III, 4, 19-20; De praed. III, 4, 28: Sed quia, heretice, iam de prima tua congressione, qua duas praedestinationes et asserere mendose coepisti, incautus et defendere contumeliose sudasti, superbus et modica conuictus auctoritate fugisti et apertissima ueritate prostratus occubuisti (…). Scribis enim in deliaramentis confessionum, immo perfidiarum tuarum, tanquam originem erroris tui defendere uolens, sententiam uidelicet isidori: Gemina est praedestinatio, siue electorum ad requiem, sive reproborum ad mortem. 63 Treatise IX, 4, 61; De praed. IX, 4, 94: Nec mirum, cum nihil deo contrarium sit, nisi non esse, quoniam ipse solus est qui dixit: Ego sum qui sum, cetera uero quae dicuntur esse nec omnino sunt, quia non sunt quod ipse est, nec omnino non sunt, quia ab ipso sunt qui solus est esse. Mainoldi indicates Augustine’s Confessions (VII, 10, 16-11, 17) as a source of the passage but I think that Boethius’ inspiration is also possible. Boethius, De Trinitate II, 8-9; Quomodo substantiae VI, 42-3.

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Divine Substance thus construed cannot be the cause of contradictory effects nor – as the only true Being and source of existence – can it be the cause of what does not exist. Thus the path set by quadrivium ratiocinationis is the path of theology proper – understood as the science about God. However, this teaching must be complemented by an appropriate concept of man, a concept that was an extremely important element in the predestination controversy. Eriugena describes Gottschalk’s position so as to argue that his views negate both the vision of humans as a being endowed with free will and, consequently, responsible for their acts, and the vision of God as the one who is the Creator of man and sustains man through the gift of His grace. The very concept of grace assumes that is God’s gift of free will and can be accepted freely, ‘for freedom, either of grace or of will, has no place where there is an unchangeable captivity of nature’.64 The possibility of accepting grace thus requires freedom of will that can accept or reject this grace, and the corollary of this thesis is the conviction, stemming perhaps from Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, that the idea of justice and judgement has no foundation without freedom of human will. Accordingly the conclusion is that both the choice of man and the gift of grace are free, because it is conceded that the salvation of the world has come and there will be judgement. The king’s highway must then be trodden with no turning aside to right or left, which means that free choice must not be defended in such a way that good works are attributed to it without the grace of God; nor must grace be so defended that, as it were from the safety afforded by it, evil deeds may be habitually performed.65

The only acceptable solution to the problem of Divine predestination is interpreting it as a voluntary, non-necessary work of God expressing God’s plan for man. God’s plan is exclusively aimed at man’s happiness (predestination to salvation) that man can freely accept or reject. Human beings, created in God’s image, are endowed with free will and it is in this space of freedom, not necessity, that individual happiness is achieved. In broad outline, Eriugena’s vision of man presented in De predestinatione, follows St Augustine. In his view, human nature is constituted by three elements thanks to which man is an image of God. namely being, knowing and willing: ‘for he is and he wills and he knows; he wills to be and to know; he knows that he is and that he wills’.66 This distinctly Augistinian wording expresses the internal character of human being that constitutes a peculiar unity in multitude. The elements of this triad, associated with the substance of the 64

Treatise IV, 4, 28. Treatise IV, 3, 27; De praed. IV, 3, 40-2: Conclusum est igitur et liberum hominis esse arbitrium et gratie donum, ex eo quod concessum est et salutem mundi uenisse et iudicium esse futurum. Via igitur regia gradiendum nec ad dexteram nec ad sinistram diuertendum, hoc est, ne sic defendatur liberum arbitrium ut ei bona opera sine dei gratia tribuantur, nec sic defendatur gratia, ut, quasi de illa securi, mala opera diligantur. 66 Treatise IV, 4, 29. 65

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whole, cannot be separated from each other. That is why Eriugena goes on to speak about ‘rational will’ and mentions freedom, rationality and mutability as its significant features.67 None of the elements of this triad can be lost without damaging the entire nature, which is extremely significant in the context of the question about the consequences of original sin for human nature and functioning. St Augustine also emphasised the catastrophic effects of sin while Pelagius believed that original sin did not essentially affect human nature and Adam’s transgression boiled down to being ‘a bad example’. Eriugena thus faces a peculiar dilemma: What, then, did the first man have before sinning that he lost after the sin? For up to then he did not have the life of happiness which was to have been bestowed on him if he kept the commandment. If we say it was free will he had, then he lost his nature. But if reason points out that no nature can perish, we are forbidden to say that he lost free will, which without doubt is a substance.68

Thus, original sin did not cause the loss of will – being an integral part of human nature – or the loss of its freedom that is its significant property. In fact, what was lost as a consequence of original sin was the facility and effectiveness of the execution of decisions made by human will. Eriugena introduces a distinction between free will, which is a power of the soul, and free choice that is an action of human will, originating in the will itself. The cause of free choice lies exclusively in man. Referring to Neoplatonic terms that Eriugena develops later in Periphyseon,69 one can say that human substance (ousia/substantia) contains free will as one of its powers (dynamis/virtus) and whose power is the ability to perform acts (energeia/operatio) of free choice. So what man lost as a consequence of sin was the facility of performing acts of free choice, which, in the original state, was possible thanks to the grace of the Creator70. Eriugena introduces here an interesting distinction between the act of Divine Goodness (Bonitas) that creates what exists in nature (datum), the work of Divine Largesse (Largitas) that adorns nature (donum).71 The gifts of Divine Largesse may be withdrawn without detriment to nature, but the withdrawal of the gifts of Divine Goodness would mean the destruction of the substance itself. If man had not sinned, the freedom of choice accessible to man thanks to grace would transform into the ability to avoid sin, which is the grace now enjoyed by angels. In this debate, Eriugena’s takes an intermediate position between Augustine and 67

Treatise VIII, 3, 52. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei XI, 26. Treatise IV, 6, 29; On praed. IV, 6, 46: Quid ergo primus homo habuit ante peccatum, quod perdidit post peccatum? Non enim adhuc habebat uitam beatam quae ei tribuenda fuerat, si praeceptum seruaret. Si dixerimus liberam uoluntatem, perdidit igitur suam naturam. Si autem ratio edocet nullam naturam posse perire, prohibemur dicere liberam uoluntatem perdidisse, quae sine dubio substantialis est. 69 Periph. I 490A-B, CChr.CM 161 (1996), 66-7. 70 Augustinus, De dono perseverantiae VII, 13-4; PL 45, 1001. 71 De praed. VII, 1, 68; VIII, 3, 78. 68

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Pelagius: sin did not damage the integrity of human nature but its consequences for man are grave: From this, one is given to understand that the first will of man was created naturally free so that something nevertheless should be added to it if it wished to keep God’s commandment. And just as the animal body was capable of dying because it was not yet perfect, so the free will, hitherto rightly animal because mortal, could sin since it was not yet perfect. Which perfection of freedom would assuredly be fulfilled after keeping of the commandment, when that will to sin would be totally taken away, forming a will like that future will which our lord Jesus Christ will give to those who love him.72

Invoking St Augustine, Eriugena regards free will as a medium good, i.e. a kind of good that can be misused, and not an absolute good.73 The freedom of will that allows it to be used both for good and bad purposes constitutes a significant property of free will because there is no ‘compelling cause’ that would precede the act of will. Thus, whatever action issues from the will, it flows from that will alone, and the will is the only and ‘voluntary’ (voluntaria) cause of its own acts. It seems that one can clearly discern traces of the conceptions of Boethius who emphasises that significant determinants of free choice include the lack of external compulsion and judgement (iudicium) exercised after carrying out a specific examination (examinatio). In such a situation, man alone is the only source of human actions whose ‘quality’ depends on the clarity of human judgement.74 If we thus define the essence of freedom, God is the most free being, thanks the perfection of His knowledge, and the closer humans are to the simplicity of knowledge of Providence, the freer they will be.75 However, the source of human actions is in man alone, and man alone is responsible for the shape of his/her freedom. Eriugena’s conclusion is also unequivocal: 72  Treatise VIII, 5, 53-4; De praed. VIII, 5, 80: Hinc datur intelligi primam hominis uoluntatem liberam naturaliter fuisse creatam, cui tamen aliquid adderetur, si praeceptum dei seruare uellet, ut, sicut animale corpus potuit mori, quia adhuc non erat perfectum, ita uoluntatis libera adhuc animalis merito, quia mortalis, potuit peccare, quoniam adhuc non erat perfecta, quae utique perfectio libertatis post mandati custodiam impleretur, dum ea peccandi uoluntas penitus auferretur, qualis erit illa futura, quam dominus noster ihesus christus daturus est diligentibus se. Treatise V, 4, 36: ‘But human nature is not only a will but also a free one (…) although that freedom is so vitiated after sin that its punishment impedes it from either willing to live righteously, or should it so will, from so doing’. 73 Augustinus De libero arbitrio, II, XIX, 53, PL 32, 1269. 74 Boethius, In librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias commentarii (editio secunda) III, 9, PL 883B, 195: Nos enim liberum arbitrium ponimus nullo extrinsecus cogente in id, quod nobis faciendum vel non faciendum iudicantibus perpendentibus que videatur, ad quam rem praesumpta prius cogitatione perficiendam et agendam venimus, ut id quod fit ex nobis et ex nostro iudicio principium sumat nullo extrinsecus aut violenter cogente aut inpediente violenter. 75 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, 2, tr. Joel C. Relihan (Indianapolis, Cambridge, 2001), 129: ‘Now it is necessarily the case that human souls are indeed at their freest when they preserve themselves intact within the contemplation of the divine mind; but they are less free when they fall away toward bodies, and still less free when they are tied to libs of earthly matter’.

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One must, then, in no way concede that any compelling cause either good or bad precedes the will of man or of any other rational nature, lest the reward of its freedom be taken from it, whether good, if one has lived well with the assistance of divine grace, or bad if one has lived badly in one’s own irrational and perverse manner. Hence no cause constrains man to lead a good or a bad life. For God in neither the necessary cause of all good things (…), nor the compelling cause.76

Eriugena backs his theses with quotes from St Augustine’s texts, primarily De vera religione, indicating that man is responsible for sin and, consequently, must have the freedom of choice.77 The fact of the freedom of will whose efficacy was limited as a consequence of original sin also indicates the fundamental significance of Divine Grace that supports good human deeds. God the creator of the universe has given man free choice, that is the option either of good or of evil, and that he could not fittingly have given it otherwise than totally free. Thus he would demonstrate what efficacy nature had in man without grace, what power grace had in nature, what the reward of justice, what of sin, what finally the gift of his ineffable generosity.78

It seems that these reflections could also be concluded with an excerpt from Boethius: And since this is the way things are, this remains unchanged for mortals: an inviolate freedom of independent judgement. Laws are not unjust, and they assign rewards and punishments to wills that are free of every necessity. God also remains unchanged, looking down from high with foreknowledge of all things: the ever-present eternity of his vision keeps pace with the future qualities of our actions, dispensing rewards to good people and punishments to the bad.79

6. Conclusions – Already in De praedestinatione, Eriugena emerges as a ‘systematic’ thinker who – in a coherent system of thinking – wants to encompass various aspects of reality (parallelism of reality, thinking and language). Guidelines stemming from Boethius’ texts played an important role in the designing of this system. 76 Treatise V, 5, 36; De praed. V, 5, 56: Non ergo ullo modo concedendum aliquam causam compulsatiuam siue bonam siue malam praecedere uoluntatem hominis seu alterius rationalis naturę, ne ab ea meritum sue libertatis auferatur, sive bonum, si bene uixerit, cooperante diuina gratia, siue malum, si male uixerit, suo motu irrationabili peruersoque. Proinde nulla causa constringit hominem seu bene seu male uiuere. Non enim deus omnium bonorum causa est necessaria. 77 De praed. V, 9, 62-4. 78 Treatise V, 9, 38; De praed. V, 9, 62: … deum uniuersitatis conditorem dedisse homini liberum arbitrium, id est electionem siue boni siue mali, nec aliter eum dare debuisse nisi omnino liberum, eo scilicet monstraturus quid in homine praeualeret natura sine gratia, quid gratia posset in natura, quid iustitię meritum, quid peccati, quid deinde suę ineffabilis largitatis donum. 79 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, 6, 150.

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– According to his programme, Eriugena wanted to arrive at the ‘simplest’ features, common notions that should be identified and defined. Further course of action should be governed by the rules of rhetoric and dialectic. – In his approach, Eriugena combines quadrivial reasoning and allegorical revelation, treating the former as a form of exercise preparing the eye of the mind to gain insight into what truly is. – An important role in Eriugena’s approach is played by authorities, including that of St Augustine whose works he interprets according to his own methodology, reading them in the context of the works of Boethius and Capella. John Scotus strives to following Boethius’ recommendation to extract from Augustine’s works the ‘seeds of thought’ (semina rationum) that will yield fruits. Augustine’s texts are thus viewed by Eriugena as ‘truly authoritative’; reading them brings one closer to a fuller understanding of the structure of reality and its First Cause. Such a hermeneutic approach is ‘useful’ because it refutes the unorthodox teaching and reading of authoritative texts (in this case, Augustinian texts) and can be a weapon against heresy. In such an interpretation, St Augustine’s texts present via regia between extreme views. As Ernesto S. Mainoldi demonstrates, Eriugena thus joins the ranks of those interpreters of Augustine’s works who regarded him as a defender of both the freedom of will and the teaching about grace.80

80 E. S. Mainoldi, ‘Eriugena’s Intervention’ (2020), 259. Representatives of this interpretative trend characteristically credit Augustine with writing Hypomnesticon, a text that presents the doctrine on grace that is close to Prosper of Aquitaine. Alexander Y. Hwang, Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace: the Life and Thought of Prosper of Aquitane (Washington, 2009), 23-5.

Eriugena’s reditus vs Neoplatonic epistrophé: Tracing Paradigmatic Divergences Ernesto Sergio MAINOLDI, Fondazione Franceschini, Florence, Italy

ABSTRACT This article will focus on the elaboration of the Neoplatonic model of procession-manencereturn in Eriugena’s thought, aiming at shading new light on the path that has led the Irish master to elaborate a synthesis between Christian-platonic and Christian-orthodox speculation.

Some forty years have passed since the publication of Stephen Gersh’s From Iamblichus to Eriugena.1 This influential book played an important role in the development of studies on Neoplatonic thought since the late 1970s. Actually, this book appeared at the end of a period during which scholarship had not paid much interest to late antique philosophy, but in fact devaluated it. Looking retrospectively at the historiography of Neoplatonism, Gersh pointed out the lack of interest in late antique thinkers and the prejudice against them. They were seen as minor epigones and slavish commentators of the masters of the previous ages, namely: Plato and Aristotle. Specifically, sharp criticism was shared among scholars against the interest that Neoplatonists had in religious and theological themes and against their involvement in theurgical practices. Such criticisms reflected the materialistic cultural climate of the time, which was unfavorable to these topics. Gersh underlined the importance of progressing in critical editions, recalling the publication of the works of Proclus and Damascius, but he also complained about the unsatisfactory situation that affected the edition of Eriugena’s works at that time. The rediscovery of late antique Neoplatonism widely involved and influenced the study of Eriugena, who has been identified as one of the main exponents of the so-called ‘Christian Neoplatonism’. This historiographical label puts the accent on the continuity between two different traditions, namely those represented by the philosophical systems elaborated by pagan authors in Late Antiquity, and the philosophical arguments elaborated by Christian thinkers in order to support theology and scriptural exegesis. Both traditions largely 1

Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition, Studien zur Problemgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Philosophie 8 (Leiden, 1978).

Studia Patristica CXXII, 213-225. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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involved theological issues, but while theology in pagan philosophy was an allegorizing reflection on the noetic principles that define the relationship between the One and the many, for Christians thinkers, the exploitation of philosophical arguments was aimed at defining the rationale of theological dogmas, the starting point of which was always scriptural revelation, and the main subject was God and his salvific plan for humankind. Behind the historiographical approach focused on continuity between pagan philosophy and Christian theology through the conceptual structures of Neoplatonism we may recognize a double aim: on the one hand, highlighting the philosophical richness that characterized a period in the history of thought that had been unjustly underestimated and until then was described as magical-religious in the case of pagan Neoplatonism, and dogmatic and irrational in the case of Christian thought; on the other hand, this historiographical approach was aimed at underlining the idea that philosophical speculation in early Middle Ages was not inferior to late medieval Aristotelianism which fed Scholastic philosophy and theology. Scholasticism has been, in fact, generally been perceived in Western historiography as the golden age of medieval philosophy, and has been reputed by some scholars as the only period in the whole Middle Ages in which genuine philosophical reflection has been produced. I also note here that religious ideas have been seen by some scholars as the mere cultural background of those authors who wrote philosophical works during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Consequently, taking into account religious ideas was intended as a way to a better understanding of the historical milieu in which philosophy was produced, but the religious background itself was assumed as uninfluential for true philosophical reflection. In other words, we would say that religious thought was maintained as paradigmatically neutral. Under this assumption, it was possible to describe this historiographic category as ‘Christian Neoplatonism’, giving to the term ‘Neoplatonism’ a neutral religious connotation and assuming it as the distinctive attribute common to the authors that were considered Neoplatonists. The adjective ‘Christian’ was instead assumed as a secondary signifier that was supposed to define the cultural context to which the authors belonged, although this context was not believed to radically affect the Neoplatonic trait of their thought. Certainly, scholars have been always pretty aware that Christian tenets have never been accepted by pagan Neoplatonists, and vice versa. This was the case, especially, with the paradigmatic concepts of creation and incarnation on the Christian side, and transcendental idealism and eternity of the world on the Neoplatonic side. Although these paradigmatic differences did not prevent many influences to pass from one side to the other, these concepts marked indeed the boundaries between the Christian and the pagan worldviews. Another aspect of this complex issue is that the influences between Christian thought and pagan thought have been investigated in one direction only, that is

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from pagan philosophy to Christian authors, but many evidences suggest that late antique pagan speculation was also influenced by Christian thought. This may be seen in the theologization of the philosophical discourse, which progressively included more and more theological and religious aspects in order to provide a valid answer to Christian cultural hegemony (but also to other religious systems spread in Late Antiquity, like Gnosticism, Manichaeism etc.). Neoplatonic studies have been consequently shaped by methodologies that focused on continuities and privileged a structuralist approach. This was also due to the influence that structuralism has played on philosophical reflection in the 1970s, backing the analytical approach that gives priority to linguistic similarities and speculative continuities rather than to paradigmatic discontinuities. In the preface to the 2009 Italian edition of From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Gersh himself acknowledged that his book was influenced by structuralism.2 Generally speaking, we may note that current Neoplatonic studies are tacitly based on structuralist assumptions. In fact, the search for the elements of continuity is based on linguistic analogies, that is on the coincidences between words and terminological structures that can be easily recognized in the texts belonging to the two cultural traditions. In historical reality, however, the philosophical traditions we are talking about were clashing cultural systems that opposed each other under the banner of hard rivalry, opposition, and antagonism. Christianity and paganism were systems in rivalry, both in terms of their institutions and their worldviews, and finally – and this is what the historians of philosophy must firstly take into account – in the interpretation of shared terms and concepts. At any rate, that rivalry did not prevent that mutual influences stretched their respective paradigms to their limits and generated the phenomenon of heterodoxies and heresies (as, for example, in the case of Origen). In Gersh’s book the historical line of continuity between these traditions is drawn from Iamblichus to Eriugena. This line is conceived as encompassing the origins and the developments of the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition. This approach managed to fruitfully highlight the continuity of the structures of thought underlying the surface of cultural, institutional, and religious tension between the two traditions, without denying or concealing their specific discontinuities. Nevertheless, this methodology can underestimate paradigmatic discontinuities, as well as the historical motives and the ultimate goals of the philosophical speculation respectively developed by pagans and Christians. A similar approach is also followed by other great scholars who have focused their research on the continuity of the Neoplatonic tradition between pagan and Christian authors during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In particular 2

Stephen Gersh, Da Giamblico a Eriugena. Origine e sviluppo della tradizione pseudodionisiana, trans. Marialucrezia Leone and Christoph Helmig, Biblioteca filosofica di Quaestio (Bari, 2009), VIII.

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I would like to remember Werner Beierwaltes, Dominic O’Meara, and Carlos Steel. These scholars have pursued systematic investigations in the philosophical elaborations issued in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages moving from the assumption of the speculative unity of the Neoplatonic tradition. Although they did not underestimate the theoretical differences connected to respective theological positions of pagan and Christian authors, their perspective of research did not focus on paradigmatic discontinuities emerging from religious creeds and theological convictions. Gersh’s approach follows a more properly analytical methodology, based on the identification of structures (and their possible modifications), while Beierwaltes’s approach moved from the systematic deepening of concepts and proceeded by verifying their occurrences in the course of the history of thought. Steel, being also a critical editor of texts, is more sensitive to the problem of the incidence of the historical context on the ultimate consistency of concepts among the authors who reflected on them from different paradigmatic and religious perspectives. It is no coincidence that these scholars, who represent the best expression of the last generation of scholars in Neoplatonic studies, are also counted among the most eminent Eriugenian scholars. Evidently, John Scottus perfectly fits into the historiographic framework of Christian Neoplatonism. Incidentally, we may also notice that this generation of scholars – with the sole exception of Dominique O’Meara – has been poorly attracted by Byzantine Neoplatonism, which is a domain of research that still deserves a vast effort, and which can challenge the understanding of what Christian Neoplatonism has been. On the opposite side, we may also recall that Byzantine scholars – for instance Vladimir Lossky,3 and more recently, Georgi Kapriev4 – have also questioned Eriugena’s fidelity to his Eastern Patristics sources, on the basis of his alleged indebtedness to Augustine’s Neoplatonism. In this article I would like to problematize the historiographic comprehension of Eriugena’s indebtedness to Neoplatonism, taking into account his adoption of the Neoplatonic triadic scheme moné-próodos-epistrophé. As it has been already pointed out by Stephen Gersh, the comprehension of this triad is not destined to remain unaffected by the religious tradition to which an author belongs.5 In sum, Gersh points out that according to pagan Neoplatonism, moné is seen as the initial moment, while according to Christian authors, moné comes as the final moment of the eschatological process. This does not prevent us from verifying that authors belonging to the two traditions adopted the same scheme of understanding the dynamics of cosmic motion. Nonetheless, we have 3 See Vladimir Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient (Paris, 1944), chapter V. 4 See Georgi Kapriev, ‘Eodem sensu utentes? Die Energienlehre der «Griechen» und die causae primordiales Eriugenas’, Theologische Quartalschrift 180 (2000), 289-307. 5 See S. Gersh, Da Giamblico a Eriugena (2009), XVII-XVIII.

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to ask ourselves whether the adoption of this triad – but we can also extend the question to many other triads and conceptual structures – is sufficient to establish the ultimate paradigm on which the reflection of our authors depends. In other words, does the argument of the triad allow us to deduce that the worldviews espoused by the authors who adopted it are mere expressions of same philosophical system? The problem, in fact, is not the source of this terminological structure, but its conceptual goal. In this case, the source is undoubtedly Neoplatonic since this is ensured by textual evidence. The conceptual problem is whether the worldview to which Christian authors applied it can be still comprehended as a genuine expression of Neoplatonic thought. Consequently, the problem can be put in these terms: can the triad still be reputed an expression of Neoplatonic thought, even if the context to which it is applied does not depends on Neoplatonic worldview? Gersh has framed Eriugenian thought within the speculative tradition inaugured by Iamblichus, which has been elaborated by the School of Athens, especially by Proclus, and finally transmitted to Christians by Pseudo-Dionysius. This historiographic scheme has constituted the main paradigm of interpretation of Eriugena’s thought in the last decades. However, a recent extended study – whose importance for Eriugenian studies has yet to find its full reception – has focused on the Irish master’s thought from another perspective: contextualizing it within the line of the ontological realism of immanence. This is the concern of Christophe Erismann’s book entitled L’homme commun.6 The assumption of this theory is that universals exist only in immanence within the individuals. Therefore, realism of immanence represents an ontological model opposite to the Neoplatonic model which is based on the transcendence of the universals. Its beginning is traced back to Aristotle and to his criticism of Platonic idealism, but its development is intertwined with the history of late antique Neoplatonism, since it passed through the fundamental intermediation of Porphyry. Among Latin authors before Eriugena, it was adopted by Boethius. Finally, it constituted the ontological model to which Eastern Christian Fathers and Byzantine authors gave their preference, since this solution to the problem of universals was reputed paradigmatically in accordance with the tenets of Christian theology. Among Christian Eastern exponents of realism of immanence, two of Eriugena’s main sources are to be counted, namely Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. From them, as well as from Porphyry and Boethius, the Irishman learned and adopted realism of immanence.7

6 Christophe Erismann, L’homme commun. La genèse du réalisme ontologique durant le haut Moyen Âge, Sic et Non (Paris, 2011), 188-91. 7 C. Erismann, L’homme commun (2011), 185, 191-2, 231; E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Artibus purgatur platonicus oculus. La ricezione carolingio-ottoniana di Porfirio e la tradizione eriugeniana’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 24 (2013), 31-68.

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Erismann does not deny Eriugena’s indebtedness in some respects to Christian Neoplatonism, acknowledging his acceptance of the Augustinian version of idealism, which conceives ideas as divine thoughts.8 Erismann underlines that Eriugena’s realism of immanence is intended to interpret the ontological paraphernalia of the world (‘le mobilier ontologique’), but it is not suitable to understand the nature of God. Following Dionysian apophaticism, the Irish master devotes a long section of the first book of the Periphyseon (463A-474B) to demonstrate the inapplicability of the ten Aristotelian categories to God. Erismann’s book highlights the complexity of Eriugena’s reflection and his capability to draw from several sources and to combine them into an original frame. Erismann points out how Neoplatonic influences on Eriugenian thought coexist alongside conceptual aspects that are irreducible to Platonic transcendental realism. Eriugena was aware of the theoretical conflicts existing between the Augustinian theory of primordial causes, Dionysian apophaticism, and the biblical doctrine of creation out of nothingness. The tortuous path on which he leads the readers of his masterwork, the Periphyseon, witnesses in all respects his effort to find an agreement among these contrasting doctrines.9 The adoption of the triad moné-proodos-epostrophé by Eriugena responds to the same need he felt for finding an agreement between the clashing theoretical models entailed by his sources. The theory of the three moments of the universal motion surfaces in many places of Eriugena’s works. He took it from the thirteen chapter of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names, which is dedicated to the name of God as One, and where the Greek Father discusses the return of all things to God: So all things are rightly ascribed to God since it is by him and in him and for him that all things exist, are co-ordered, remain, hold together, are completed, and are returned.10

In the second book of the Periphyseon, Eriugena clearly exposes the sequence of these three moments: For the reason why the Cause of all things is said to create is that it is from it that the universe of those things which have been created after it (and) [by it] proceeds by a wonderful and divine multiplication into genera and species and individuals (numeros), and into differentiations and all those other features which are observed in created nature; but because it is to the same Cause that all things that proceed from it shall 8

C. Erismann, L’homme commun (2011), 57. See E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Creation in Wisdom. Eriugena’s Sophiology beyond Ontology and Meontology’, in Willemien Otten and Michael Allen (eds), Eriugena and Creation. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Eriugenian Studies, held in honor of Edouard Jeauneau, Chicago, November 9-12, 2011, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 68 (Turnhout, 2014), 183-222. 10 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names, XIII 3, in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York, 1987), 129. Eriugena translates this passage as follows in PL 122, 1170A-B: Proinde et omnia in ipsam [divinam unitatem] juste remittuntur et referuntur, sub qua, et ex qua, et per quam, et in qua, et in quam omnia sunt, et coordinantur, et manent, et continentur, et replentur, et convertuntur. 9

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return when they reach their end, it is therefore called the end of all things (quae ab ea procedunt dum ad finem peruenient reuersura sunt, propterea finis omnium dicitur) and is said neither to create nor to be created. For once all things have returned to it (postqam in eam reuersura) nothing further will proceed from it by generation in place and time (and) genera and forms since in it all things will be at rest and will remain an indivisible and immutable One (quoniam in ea omnia quieta erunt et unum indiuiduum atque immutabile manebunt). For those things which in the processions of natures (in processionibus naturarum) appear to be divided and partitioned into many are in the primordial causes unified and one (unita atque unum sunt), and to this unity they will return and in it they will eternally and immutably remain (ad quam unitatem reuersura in ea aeternaliter atque immutabiliter manebunt).11

In spite of the structural similarities with the Neoplatonic theory of universal motion, which unfolds through the moments of rest, procession, and return (moné-próodos-epistrophé), Eriugena relies on this scheme limitedly to its formal triadicity, since his conception of universal motion falls under the biblical frame of the creation out of nothingness and the eschatological return to God. This aspect becomes more and more evident in the course of the Periphyseon. Eriugena’s perspective is not just a matter of religious narrative, but it is strictly connected with the ontological rationale of universal motion. According to the Irish master, procession is the act of creation that instantiates the division of genera, species, and individuals. Division falls under the rules of dialectics, which are established by God.12 The outcome of division is the creation into being of the me-ontological divine paradigms. Through this process all creatures, which are foreseen before coming into being by God’s virtus gnostica,13 are instantiated as immanent universal. Consequently, Eriugena’s notion of procession falls under the ontological frame of immanent realism of essence, which he combines with the Eastern Patristic theory of me-ontological disposition of all things in God’s wisdom.14 11 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, II, 526C-527B, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 162 (Turnhout, 1997), 5-6; Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), trans. Inglis P. SheldonWilliams and John O’Meara (Montreal, Washington, 1987), 125-6. 12 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 749A, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 164 (Turnhout, 2000), 12: Ac per hoc intelligitur quod ars illa, quae diuidit genera in species, et species in genera resoluit, quae ΔΙΑΛΕΤΙΚΗ dicitur, non ab humanis machinationibus sit facta, sed in natura rerum, ab auctore omnium artium, quae uere artes sunt, condita, et a sapientibus inuenta, et ad utilitatem sollertis rerum indagis usitata. 13 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, III, 632D-633A, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 163, (Turnhout, 1999), 22: Summae siquidem ac trinae soliusque uerae bonitatis in se ipsa immutabilis motus et simplex multiplicatio et inexhausta a se ipsa in se ipsa ad se ipsam diffusio causa omnium, immo omnia sunt. Si enim intellectus omnium est omnia et ipsa sola intelligit omnia, ipsa igitur sola est omnia, quoniam sola gnostica uirtus est ipsa quae, priusquam essent omnia, cognouit omnia. Et extra se non cognouit omnia, quia extra eam nihil est, sed intra se [[habet omnia]]. Ambit enim omnia et nihil intra se est, in quantum uere est, nisi ipsa, quia sola uere est. Between double square brackets the lection attested in the fourth version of the Periphyseon. 14 See E.S. Mainoldi, ‘Creation in Wisdom’ (2014), 202, 208, 212, 215.

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While Pseudo-Dionysius is to be identified as the main source of Eriugena’s me-ontology, his interpretation of procession as division follows Maximus the Confessor, from whom he also took the idea of return as deification: The aforesaid divine procession in all things is said ΑΝΑΛΥΤΙΚΗ, that is resolution, and the reversion ΘΕΩCΙC, that is deification.15

By these words, John Scottus summed up Maximus’ teaching on procession and return, which he found in the Ambigua, the first work of the Greek Father he translated (very likely in the years preceding the composition of the Periphyseon). The interpretation of return as deification, demonstrates that the threefold scheme moné-próodos-epistrophé is not assumed by Maximus and his Irish translator as the general structure of cosmic motion, but as a conceptual scheme that depicts in cosmological terms the economy of Salvation revealed by the Holy Scripture. At the beginning of the fifth book of the Periphyseon, Eriugena discusses procession and return as a general law affecting all beings, but his main concern, as for Maximus, is the return of humanity to its primordial condition, which was lost on account of sin. The adoption of the triadic scheme by Eriugena is not due to his supposed reliance on Neoplatonic philosophy,16 indeed that is justified by its suitability to provide a philosophical comprehension of the modalities through which human nature will be restored to its original state of perfection, according to biblical eschatology. Anthropology represents the core of Eriugenian cosmology,17 and this is not surprising in the case of a Christian author, but the anthropological reflection of the Irish master was enriched in a novel way by the theory of return and by focusing on the problem of the eschatological persistence of individuals. This perspective disregards the metaphysical circularity of the threefold scheme moné-próodos-epistrophé,18 since procession is comprehended by the Irishman as dialectical division that instantiates immanent universals, and return is comprehended within the historical-eschatological frame established by the Scripture. Both developments diverge from the original Neoplatonic significance of the triad which was linked to the issue of the derivation of 15

Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Proemium in Ambigua Maximi, in Maximus Confessor, Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.SG 18 (Turnhout, 1988), 4. Translation is mine. 16 It is not worthless to underline that Eriugena maintained this scheme as derived from Dionysius the Areopagite, since he had no direct access to Neoplatonic sources. 17 See Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Studies in Intellectual History 20 (Leiden, 1991), 190-219. 18 On the principle of the cyclical activity of all beings in Neoplatonism, see Carlos Steel, ‘The Return of the Body into the Soul: Philosophical Musings on the Resurrection’, in James McEvoy and Michael Dunne (eds), History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Maynooth and Dublin, August 16-20, 2000, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 30 (Leuven, 2002), 581-609, 586.

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sensible things from the intelligible forms against the background of the doctrine of the eternity of the world. In Eriugena’s view, procession and return do not involve each other as if they were the movements traced by natures and individuals on a circular pattern; they are to be conceived instead as two distinct ontological statuses in the history of creation. As of the fifth book of the Periphyseon, the Irish master focuses on the return of individuals with respect to the general return of all natures to God. He links general return to the Pauline statement that God shall ‘be all in all’,19 but when he turned to the problem of how to reconciliate the general motion of the universe with the personal dimension of salvation, he found the solution he needed in the second of the works of Maximus the Confessor he translated: the Quaestiones ad Thalassium. That solution was the theory of the double return: The resurrection is the reformation of nature, provoking the formation of the nature in Paradise, generally (generaliter) in the universal immutability of all things, specially (specialiter) in the ineffable deification of the saints according to grace.20

On the basis of this passage, we may underline another aspect that entails paradigmatic divergence between Eriugena’s thought and Neoplatonism in relation to the theory of reditus. This is the notion of return as the deification of individuals. Following Maximus, Eriugena conceives deification as the fulfilment of the eschatological return which happens in a twofold way: the general reditus of the whole human nature to its primordial condition which shall affect all human individuals; and the special reditus which shall affect only some individuals, that is the personal hypostases – which Eriugena calls substantiae – who will enjoy spiritual election. The theory of double return (duplex reditus) transforms the metaphysical frame of the return of the natures: it is not intended as a symmetrical reditus from God to God, from principle to principle, from nothingness to nothingness. Instead, it is matter of hierarchical reditus, whereby the essential return of the whole nature is ontologically distinguished from the substantial return of the deified ones. The general reditus will encompass all human beings; the special reditus only the elected ones. In a strict sense, the special reditus is not properly a return since the status of deification was not yet attained by humanity before sin: We must consider this Return in two ways (reditus duobus modis consideratur): first, the restoration (restauratio) of the whole of the human nature in Christ; and then,

19

1Cor. 15:28. Maximus Confessor sec. transl. Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, ed. C. Laga and Carlos Steel, CChr.SG 7 (Turnhout, 1980-1990), 474-5: Resurrectio nature est reformatio, nature in paradiso formationem copiosam faciens, genraliter quidem uniuersali omnium inconuersibilitate, specialiter uero per gratiam ineffabili sanctorum deificatione. Translation is mine. 20

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having dealt with its general aspect (generaliter), we must consider the individual bliss and deification of those who shall ascend into God Himself. For it is one thing to return into Paradise, another to eat of the Tree of Life (aliud enim est in paradisum redire, aliud de ligno uitae comedere). Thus, we read that the first man, when he was created in the image and likeness of God, was placed in Paradise, but we do not read that he ate of the Tree of Life. For having first chosen to taste of the forbidden tree, he was prevented from enjoying the taste of the Tree of Life: that would have been his to enjoy thereafter, had he obeyed the Divine Precepts. But even before tasting of it he could have lived happily had he not sinned the moment he was created. From this it follows that while the whole of our nature, which is included generally in the man who was made in the image and likeness of God, shall return into Paradise, that is, to the glory of our original state, it shall only taste of the fruit of the Tree of Life in the case of those who are worthy of deification (in his autem solummodo, qui deificatione digni sunt ligni uitae fructum participabit). Now the Tree of Life is Christ, and its fruits is the blessed life and eternal peace in the contemplation of the Truth; for that is what is meant by deification (deificatio).21

On the basis of this passage, we may notice that Eriugena modified his allegorical exegesis of the biblical earthly Paradise with respect to the interpretation he gave in the fourth book of the Periphyseon: according to his previous reading, eating the All-Tree of Paradise (omne lignum) was interpreted as a symbol of deification; in the fifth book instead, he distinguished between returning to Paradise and eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life (comedere de ligno vitae), maintaining that only this latter symbolizes deification.22 This possibly demonstrates that Eriugena came upon the theory of double return when he translated Maximus’ Quaestiones ad Thalassium, and this was after the fourth book of the Periphyseon was already written. According to the new interpretation, Adam has not been deified because he did not eat from the Tree of Life, that is, he did not attain the communion with the Word as he was supposed to, according to the divine plan, had he obeyed the divine commandment. The theory of the double reditus is based on the distinction between nature and hypostasis: generalis reditus is the reversion of human nature to its primordial state, in which it has the possibility to fulfill its potentialities; specialis reditus is the particular motion of the individual substances (hypostases) found worthy of the gift of deification, that is, of the unending participation in the communion with the Logos. The deification of the human is personal participation in divine life. The subject of deification, in fact, is not the human nature, but the singular hypostases, through their particular participation in the donum of deifying grace. Deification is not in the power of human nature, is not a datum, but a gift of 21 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, V, 978D-979A, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 165 (Turnhout, 2003), 165-6; trans. Sheldon-Williams and O’Meara (1987), 663. 22 See Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 823B, ed. Jeauneau, CChr.CM 164 (2000); trans. Sheldon-Williams and O’Meara (1987), 478.

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God.23 In the Homily Vox spiritualis, John the Evangelist is said to be plus quam homo,24 because his communion with the Logos has allowed him to go beyond the boundaries of his nature. Finally, we have to turn to another theory related to cosmic motion which Eriugena discusses in the third book of his masterpiece: the doctrine of the eternity of the world. An investigation of Eriugena’s view on this issue may help us to shed more light on his position with respect to the pre-Christian vision of the world. The Irishman makes no secret of his interest in the opinions of pagan authors, but his assent to their ideas is always determined by the need for an agreement with the Scriptures: for example, Eriugena quotes Plato’s opinion that angels are immortal rational animals, concluding that this idea is not against reason, but he dismisses it since it finds no evidence in the Christian tradition.25 In the case of the eternity of the world, the Irishman admits his previous assent to this issue, admitting that he has been deceived by false human reasoning. As Eriugena puts it, his distancing from this doctrine sounds like the confession of a philosophical conversion, but what is most important to notice is that Eriugena presents the theory of the eternity of the world as contrasting with the theory of the reditus: By these and similar false opinions they attempt to establish that the things that were not [and began to be] can [be said] to be at the same time both made and eternal, because they shall always abide in the same state in which they were created in time; and they think that those things that are not without a beginning are without an end, so that they are both made, because they began to be, and eternal, because they shall not cease to subsist. But neither would I suppose that you assent to such opinions, which right reason ridicules, nor that such was the eternity (neque talem aeternitatem), or, to speak more truly, semieternity (semiaeternitatem), which you intended by the arguments you have just put forward nor that it is thus that you thought that (things) are both made and eternal (neque sic et facta simul et aeterna docuisse), but I perceive that it was from a more profound observation of natures that you penetrate beyond human opinions by some means unknown to us to the depths of the Divine Mysteries (diuinorum arcanorum) [by following in the footsteps of the Fathers (uestigia patrum) who have 23 On the correspondence of the couple datum and donum with the couple nature and grace in Eriugena, see Deirdre Carabine, ‘Five Wise Virgins: Theosis and Return in Periphyseon’, in Gerd Van Riel, Carlos Steel and James McEvoy (eds), Iohannes Scottus Eriugena: The Bible and Hermeneutics. Proceedings of the Ninth Colloquim of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies Held at Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve June 7-10, 1995, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 20 (Leuven, 1996), 195-207, 200. 24 Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, Homilia super ‘In prinicipio erat Verbum’, 285D, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, CChr.CM 166 (Turnhout, 2008), 10. 25 Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 762C-763A, ed. Jeauneau, CChr.CM 164 (2000), 31: Non enim [angeli] extrinsecus phantasias accipiunt, sed intrinsecus in se ipsis rationes eorum quae uident cognoscunt. Nam et anima non extra se uidet quae sentit, sed per phantasias in seipsa. Quod angeli non patiuntur, quamuis Plato angelum diffiniat animal rationale et immortale. Sed quod auctoritate sanctae scripturae sanctorumque patrum probare non possumus, inter certas naturarum speculationes (quoniam temerarium est) recipere non debemus.

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examined these things more profoundly. For they say that the nature of this world shall remain for ever because it is incorporeal and incorruptible (aiunt enim naturam huius mundi semper mansuram, quia incorporea est et incorruptibilis), whereas the other things of which it consists shall pass away, that is, everything in it which is composite; and because there is in it no body which is not composite, and every composite shall be resolved (soluetur) into those things from which it is composed, therefore the whole of this visible, corporeal, composite world shall be resolved, and only its simple nature remain]. N. I cannot deny that I was at one time deceived by the false reasonings of human opinions that are far from the truth, for deceived I was (falsis ratiocinationibus humanarum opinionum longe a ueritate distantium quondam me deceptum esse negare non possum, quia deceptus sum). For whilst still uninstructed I gave assent to all these, or almost all, seduced (seductus) by some likeness of the truth, and by the carnal senses, as happens to many. But now, following in the footsteps of the Holy Fathers (sanctorum patrum uestigia sequens), and recalled from my errors and those of others by the ray of the Divine Light, and brought into the right way, I retract a little.26

On closer inspection, Eriugenian epistrophé cannot be conceived as circular cosmic motion affecting all beings; rather it may be comprehended as hypostatic motion following a spiral pattern. The triadic model of rest-procession-return shows that Eriugena’s reflection responds not only to the tenets of Christian theology and Biblical narrative but entails a different philosophical paradigm with respect to the pagan Neoplatonic one. If we consider that pagan Neoplatonists assumed the eternity of the cosmos as the paradigmatic axiom of their worldview and consequently rejected the biblical doctrine of creation out of nothingness, we shall conclude that the theory of reditus, which Eriugenian historiography has seen as a common point between the Irish master’s thought and Neoplatonism, represents – on the opposite – the limit to their assimilation. For Neoplatonists the steps of moné-próodos-epistrophé describe the universal metaphysical motion, while for Eriugena these steps are realized by individuals in the immanent dimension of the history of salvation. We have to conclude that this triad, whose formal and terminological shape is undoubtedly of Neoplatonic origin, radically changes its conceptual significance in the outcome of John Scottus’s reflection. Neoplatonism responds to a paradigm that establishes the cosmos as the ultimate subject of philosophical reflection. Christianity, on the other hand, responds to a paradigm that puts personhood at the center of the cosmic drama. The divine personhood of the Logos is the principle of all things, their return, and their rest. According to the well-known definition given by Étienne Gilson, Eriugena’s masterwork outlines an ‘immense épopée métaphysique’.27 Definitely, this epic should be regarded as the epic of personhood. This is well 26 Eriugena, Periphyseon, III, 649C-650B, ed. Jeauneau, CChr.CM 163 (1999), 45-6, trans. Sheldon-Williams and O’Meara (1987), 270. 27 Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge, des origines patristiques à la fin du XIVe siècle (Paris, 1946), 222.

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exemplified by the parable of the ten virgins through an original exegesis as an allegory of the duplex reditus, and by which the long navigation on the oceans of the Periphyseon comes to an end.28 Coming back to Stephen Gersh’s book From Iamblichus to Eriugena, we read in the prolegomena of the Italian edition the assertion that neither Iamblichus nor Eriugena would have considered themselves as Neoplatonists.29 We may fully agree with this statement: while Iamblichus would have simply considered himself a Platonist, Eriugena, had he been informed about the meaning of Neoplatonism, would have considered himself plus quam Neoplatonicus.

28 See Paul A. Dietrich and Donald F. Duclow, ‘Virgins in Paradise: Deification and Exegesis in “Periphyseon” V’, in Guy H. Allard (ed.), Jean Scot écrivain. Actes du IVe Colloque international, Montréal, 28 août-2 septembre 1983 (Montréal, Paris, 1986), 29-49; D. Carabine, ‘Five Wise Virgins: Theosis and Return in Periphyseon’ (1996), 195-207, 200-5. 29 S. Gersh, Da Giamblico a Eriugena (2009), X.

Some Dionysian Influences on John Scottus Eriugena’s On Predestination Alexander R. TITUS, Princeton, NJ, USA

ABSTRACT While Eriugena’s magnum opus, the Periphyseon, is well-known for its extensive use of Greek patristic materials, his earlier, lesser-known treatise On Predestination contains only explicit references to Latin sources, most notably Augustine. Therefore, Eriugena scholars have often concluded that the Irish theologian underwent a substantial transformation in the shape of his thought in the time between his involvement in the Predestination Controversy of the early 850s and his time as an officially-commissioned Greek translator in the middle and later years of the same decade, with the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite generally regarded as his first introduction to the Greek-speaking theological milieu. However, a close examination of Eriugena’s historical context as well as the primary texts of both On Predestination and the Dionysian text (the Corpus dionysiacum) suggests the distinct possibility that former’s acquaintance with the latter had already begun to inform his thought much earlier than has commonly been believed. This paper therefore aims to demonstrate some of these textual dependencies, both in terms of theological content as well as method, which link aspects of Dionysian thought with some of Eriugena’s controversial arguments regarding divine predestination.

Introduction: Eriugena’s De praedestinatione in Recent Scholarship In recent decades, Eriugena scholars have begun to pay closer attention to an often-neglected, but earliest extant work, his treatise De pradestinatione (referred to hereafter as the DP), including Mary Brennan’s first ever English translation of the text in 1998.1 Until recently, the tendency has been to treat the DP as an outlying product only of Eriugena’s earlier life, to relegate it simply to the context of the Carolingian predestination controversy, and regard its theological significance as relatively minor compared to the much larger, more complex, and more influential Periphyseon. 1 In his Preface for the Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies (SPES), the then-president of the Society, Carlos Steel, selected the end of the 20th century as a turning point – a culmination of 30 years of SPES scholarship, which finally saw the availability of all of Eriugena’s extant works in critical editions and translations. ‘Introduction’, in James McEvoy and Michael Dunne (eds), History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time (Leuven, 2002), v.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 227-238. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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While scholars have offered varying accounts of the alleged 15-year gap between the ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Eriugena,2 the agreement seems to be that Eriugena had undergone a decisive shift in his thinking between his one-time involvement in the predestination controversy of the late 840s and early 850s on the one hand, and his work as a Greek translator in the mid-to-late 850s on the other – this latter period of course culminating in the Periphyseon in the mid-860s. However, following John Marenbon’s helpful critique, this is perhaps an excessively de-contextualized reading of Eriugena’s thought, that is, the notion that he was merely a ‘problem solver’ in his early years, but a Platonist and ‘systematic metaphysician’ in his later years.3 I too would, at least implicitly, want to resist this rather overly-strict periodization of Eriugena’s thought, and suggest that his ‘Greek awakening’ (to borrow Dermot Moran’s phrase), in fact occurred much earlier than is often supposed. Indeed, as Goulven Madec once suggested, Eriugena’s acquaintance with the Greek fathers at the time of writing the DP ‘has yet to be determined’.4 It seems that, just as it is clearly untenable to claim that Eriugena gave up his liberal arts method of dialectical reasoning in composing the Periphyseon, so too one should not necessary assume that the elements of Greek patristic thought explicitly present in this later work were altogether absent from the DP. That being said, one immediately encounters the obvious fact that Eriugena in the DP does not directly cite any patristic authority from the East, nor does he even mention any by name. However, this lack of explicit Greek sources should not surprise us. Indeed, Eriugena himself (in Chapter 11) makes clear 2

I.e., before and after what Dermot Moran calls Eriugena’s ‘Greek awakening’. The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 48. However, even Moran himself suggests that ‘we should not try to make too strong of a contrast between Eriugena the liberal arts master and Eriugena the follower of Greek platonism’, 46. Eriugena’s encounter with Greek patristic writings was, according to Otten, ‘not so much of a technical achievement as an intellectual awakening’. Willemien Otten, ‘Eriugena’s Periphyseon and the Concept of Eastern Versus Western Patristic Influence’, SP 28 (1991), 217-24, 217. 3 ‘There is, moreover, another respect in which the approach of the “platonists” and the close textual interpreters need to be complemented and corrected. In abstract thought there is usually a tension between the wish to construct a system coherent in itself and the need to explain – to answer important questions about the world as conceived by the culture of the time. Most of the thinkers widely accepted as great are ones who successfully resolved this tension, answering important questions through the construction of a coherent system … Eriugena tended to systematize at the expense of explaining; but this was just a tendency, not an invariable mark of all his thinking’. John Marenbon, ‘John Scottus and Carolingian Theology: From the De praedestinatione, Its Background and Its Critics, to the Periphyseon’, in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (eds), Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom (Aldershot, 1990), 305-25, 324-5. Marenbon’s thesis is that, contrary to popular opinion, Eriugena did not simply remain detached from the later predestination controversy of the mid-to-late 850s, but in fact utilized Florus’ and Prudentius’ criticisms leveled against his DP in Book V of his Periphyseon where he returns again to the eschatological issues of foreknowledge and predestination. 4 Dominic J. O’Meara, ‘The Problem of Speaking about God in John Scottus Eriugena’, in UtaRenate Blumenthal (ed.), Carolingian Essays (Washington, DC, 1983), 151-67, 160 n. 29.

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that his nearly exclusive reliance on the Latin tradition was largely a tactical and argumentative necessity. It is not, as he says, ‘because we cannot reach the same conclusions by examples of other catholic fathers (aliorum catholicorum Patrum)’, but simply because his opponent, Gottschalk, had so extensively used Augustine to support his heterodox theory of double predestination.5 In other words, this lack of ‘direct evidence’ does not necessary mean a lack of ‘circumstantial evidence’, both textual and contextual. In fact, as we shall see, such evidence suggests strongly that it was the collection of writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, more than any other Greek patristic texts (with the possible exception of Origen), which was most likely to have influenced the early Eriugena. Context One should note from the outset that Dionysius indeed very probably constituted Eriugena’s first encounter with the Greek patristic world.6 As is well known, the West first knew Dionysius through Hilduin’s translation of the Greek,7 produced between the years 832 and 834; however, this initial translation does not appear to have had much initial impact and was curiously overlooked, at least at the time. Thus, it remains difficult to say how early, in what form, and (most importantly) to what extent Eriugena knew of this prior translation. Nevertheless, that Dionysius was Eriugena’s first (and subsequently most influential) experience with Greek patristic thought has been convincingly demonstrated.8 As Edouard Jeauneau points out, in Eriugena’s prefatory remarks to his own translation of Dionysius, he thanks Charles the Bald for encouraging him to continue his work with ‘the Greek springs (Graium latices)’, and for ‘waking 5 DP 11.2.44-7: non quod aliorum catholicorum patrum exemplis haec eadem concludere non possimus, sed quod neccessarium duximus, et utiliter ad rem pertinere uidemus, illius auctoris dicta ponere, cui maxime Gotescalcus haereticus sui nefandi dogmatis causas solet referre. 6 In fact, Dionysius is the only one of Eriugena’s three primary Greek sources (with Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor) to have existed in previous Latin translation prior to Eriugena’s own work as a translator. See P.G. Théry, Études Dionysiennes, Vol. 1: Hilduin, Traducteur de Denys (Paris, 1932), 12: ‘Mais exception faite pour Epiphane, Grégorie de Nysse, et peut-être pour quelques autres, l’occident septentrional du IXe siècle ne semble pas avoir connu les originaux grecs de toutes ces traductions’. It remains unclear to this day where Eriugena would have acquired his Greek manuscript of Gregory’s Περὶ κατασκευῆς ἀνθρώπου (de hominis opificio). See Édouard Jeauneau, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor in the Works of John Scottus Eriugena’, in U.-R. Blumenthal (ed.), Carolingian Essays (1983), 138-49, 142. 7 A gift from the Byzantine emperor Michael II to the Abbey of St Denys in Paris, which is extant as MS Grec 437 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale). 8 É. Jeauneau, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor in the Works of John Scottus Eriugena’ (1983), 140-3. Also id., ‘Jean Scot Érigène et le grec’, in id. (ed.), Études érigéniennes (Paris, 1987), 85-132.

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him up’ from the Latin authors whom he apparently had begun to find sleepinducing, which he seems to have meant in both a literal and spiritual sense.9 According to Jeauneau, this early encouragement allowed Eriugena to ‘assimilate more completely’ the theological worldview contained within Dionysius.10 This leads me to suspect the very real historical possibility of Eriugena’s implicit absorption of Dionysian concepts even at such a relatively early stage.11 Here Dominic O’Meara has speculated that even an early and rudimentary knowledge of Dionysius’ On the Divine Names ‘might have been enough’ to set the tone for Eriugena’s treatment of the ineffability of God in Chapter 9 of the DP.12 Similarly, Ernesto Mainoldi’s paper from 200013 offers several helpful textual comparisons between the DP and the Dionysian corpus, some of which this article will point out in what follows. 9 Epistola dedicatoria translationi Dionysii praefixa, PL 122, 1031C: Hinc est, quod et ingenioli nostri parvitatem non dedignati estis impellere, nec nos velut otiosos inertiaeque somno sopitos perpossi estis dormire, ne, dum hesperiis solummodo apicibus stadium impendimus, ed purissimos copiossismosque Graium latices recurrere, haustumque inde sumere non valeremus. He also mentions that prior to this ‘awakening’ from his inertia, he was rudes admodum tirones adhunc helladicorum studiorum. 10 This seems to have found considerable support among Eriugena scholars. W. Otten, ‘Eriugena’s Periphyseon and the Concept of Eastern Versus Western Patristic Influence’ (1991), 220, describes the difference between Eriugena’s quantitative preference for Gregory and his qualitative preference for Dionysius: ‘We learn that despite the “horizontal” abundance of texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropological treatise De hominis opificio in Book IV of the Periphyseon, Eriugena is very well able to choose his own “vertical” path as he develops a synthetic view of human nature’. Additionally, while differing in approach from Marenbon, she also suggests that ‘the deeper core of Eriugena’s theology, fully elaborated in the Periphyseon, is in essence already visible in his predestination treatise’, albeit somewhat differently articulated. ‘Eriugena’s Periphyseon: A Carolingian Contribution to the Theological Tradition’, in Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (eds), Eriugena: East and West (Notre Dame, 1994), 69-93, 81; John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford, 1988), 56. See also, 52: ‘We may well ask if Charles commissioned [Eriugena] to translate Pseudo-Dionysius precisely because he was known to have an interest in him or such authors already?’ This thesis is not without its detractors: Stephen Gersh, ‘Review of Eriugena by John J. O’Meara’, Speculum 66 (1991), 220: ‘O’Meara is mistaken in concluding that the influence of Gregory of Nyssa is of lesser importance than that of Dionysius. It is quite clear that the second half of Eriugena’s text – dealing with the notions of return, paradise, and salvation – is uniquely dependent upon metaphysical ideas stemming from Gregory. By contrast, Dionysian material recedes into the background’. 11 John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (1988), 47: ‘One wonders if Eriugena at the time of his composition of De praedestinatione had already added, to what Neoplatonic ideas he might have got from such as Augustine, some acquaintance with the work of Pseudo-Dionysius’. 12 Ibid. He draws the comparison specifically between Eriugena’s statement in DP 9, that omnia paene siue nominum, siue uerborum, aliarumque orationis partium signa proprie de deo dici non posse (CChr.CML 9.1.12-4) and his more explicit use of Dionysius in the Periphyseon (PL 122, 456A): At enim: nulla verborum seu nominum, seu quacunque articulatae vocis significatione summa omnium … essentia potest significari, as well as 510D 1: neque nomen eis est neque verbum. For the original, see DN 981A: οὐδέ ὄνομα αὐτῆς ἐστιν οὐδέ λόγος. 13 Ernesto Sergio N. Mainoldi, ‘Su alcune fonti ispiratrici della teologia e dell’eschatologia del De Divina Praedestinatione Liber di Giovanni Scoto Eriugena’, in History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time (2002), 313-29.

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Text: Methodology In discussing the text of the DP itself, I will focus first on methodology, and then on theological content. As for Dionysius, who did not in fact speak about predestination at length, most of the relevant passages come from his treatise On the Divine Names, which includes his theological methodology as well as his theological understanding of good and evil in Book IV. First, with regards to methodology, which forms the subject of the DP’s early-to-mid chapters and Book I of On the Divine Names, both Mainoldi and O’Meara have pointed out several similarities between Eriugena and Dionysius’ approaches. As Eriugena makes clear in Chapter 1, he claims to be able to refute the ‘doctrines of the heretics’ not only with ‘the authority of the holy fathers’, but also with ‘true reasoning’ (ueris rationibus),14 which has also been pointed out recently by Agnieszka Kijewska.15 He claims to use the argument ‘from contrariety’ (a contrario, κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν)16 as his method of interpreting the received theological tradition on predestination. As O’Meara’s noted above, Eriugena in Chapter 9 asserts simply that ‘almost no speech signs, whether nouns or verbs or other parts of speech, can be properly affirmed of God’.17 Mainoldi likewise points to several compelling parallels with Book I of On the Divine Names,18 such as when Dionysius states that ‘just as the senses can neither grasp nor perceive the things of the mind, just as representation and shape cannot take in the simple and shapeless, just as corporeal form cannot lay hold of the intangible and incorporeal (Sicut enim incomprehensibila et incontemplabilia sunt sensibilibus invisibilia, et his, quae sunt in figmento et similitudine), by the same standard of truth beings are surpassed by the infinity beyond being, intelligences by that oneness which is beyond intelligence’.19 As Mainoldi notes, both Eriugena and Dionysius make a distinction between those the divine names which are attributed ‘properly’, and those which are either attributed (as Eriugena says) ‘by similitude’ (per similitudem) or ‘from contrariety’ (a contrario).20 For Eriugena, the ‘quasi-proper’ names of God include 14

CChr.CML 1.2.42-4. ‘Eriugena’s De Praedestinatione: The Project of Rationalisation of Faith and Its Critics’, Roczniki Filozoficzne 65 (2017), 71-98. 16 Eriugena also identifies what he transliterates as entimema (‘enthymeme’), as used by dialecticians and rhetoricians, with the grammatical technique of a contrario, or antiphrasis. CChr. CML 10.1.5-8. For his earlier discussion of ‘enthymeme’, see 3.3.81. 17 CChr.CML 9.1.13-4: omnia paene siue nominum siue uerborum aliarumque orationis partium signa proprie de deo dici non posse. See also n I 28. 18 E.S.N. Mainoldi, ‘Su alcune fonti ispiratrici della teologia e dell’eschatologia del De Divina Praedestinatione Liber di Giovanni Scoto Eriugena’ (2002), 323-4. 19 DN 588A-B. The Latin is derived from Eriugena’s translation (see below). 20 In following Capella’s threefold schema, Eriugena also adds a final category, ‘from difference’ (a differentia), which he explains as those attributes which, ‘to signify the divine substance, are those conditions taken from the disturbances of our minds (ad animorum nostorum pertubationis), 15

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verbs of being (sum, est, erat, esse) and the nouns ‘essence, truth, virtue, wisdom, knowledge, design (destinatio)’. In Dionysius too, the proper names include the verbs of being, as in the very first name listed, ‘ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν’, but also with the nouns, ‘truth’, ‘wisdom’, and the participle, ‘existent’ (ὡς ὄντα). Whereas in the category of ‘improper’ names, both Dionysius and Eriugena list those Scriptural passages which refer to divine body parts, such as ‘arm’ (Isa. 53:1), ‘hands’ (Job. 10:8, Ps. 118:73), ‘eyes’, and ears’ (Ps. 30:16). Dionysius calls these ‘forms and types’ (μορφὰς αὐτῇ καὶ τύπους),21 while Eriugena says they ‘are rightly called improper, since the divine substance is in every way devoid of such lineaments of bodily members’.22 I would myself add to these parallels the ‘via negativa’ of The Mystical Theology, in which one finds the well-known ‘dialectical process of affirmation and negation’.23 The Areopagite’s approach again finds common ground with Eriugena’s ‘similitude by relation’, which too involves an affirmation of that which is according to ‘likeness’ followed by a negation ‘from contrariety’. One might say that, for Eriugena’s Dionysian mindset, while predestination and foreknowledge are predicated of God, God himself is also properly ‘beyond predestination’ and ‘beyond foreknowledge’. When Dionysius then asks: ‘Is it not closer to reality to say that God is life and goodness rather than that he is air or stone’,24 he is likely pointing back to the aforementioned demarcation between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ divine names. Eriugena speaks of a ‘transferred meaning’, which occurs when ‘such words are taken metaphorically (talia uerba transferri) from the first mode to the fourth, that is, from their basis in time to their basis in eternity’.25 such as anger, rage, indignation, fear, sadness, and other conditions drawn from the basis of difference (quae de differentia), of which no likeness to the divine nature is found, but for the sole necessity of expressing a meaning, they are used in an extremely remote transferred sense’, ed. Goulven Madec, CChr.CM 50 (Leuven, 1978), 9.2.48-54. 21 Eriugena, in his usual fashion, later translates this as formas ei et similitudines. PL 122, 1118C. 22 Ibid. 9.2.38-43. DN 597B. The Latin terms are again from Eriugena’s later translation of Dionysius, PL 122, 1118C-1119B. 23 MT 1000B. See Augustine, De ciuitate Dei XII 7: ‘In fact those things that are known not in species but in the privation thereof – if it is possible to say or understand this – are in a certain way known by not knowing, with the result that by knowing they are not known (quodam modo nesciendo sciuntur ut sciendo nesciantur)’, PL 41, 355, also quoted by Eriugena, CChr.CM 50, 10.4.114-7. 24 MT 1033D; PL 122, 1176A. 25 CChr.CM 50, 9.7.162-4. Eriugena is referring here to four ‘modes of likeness’ between temporal things and intemporal things, namely priority time, rank, origin, and eternity: ‘Now since some likeness of eternity is implanted in temporal things – not only because from it they were made but also because that part of the temporal from which these names are taken, that is, human, will be transformed into some likeness of the true eternity – how then is it understood from the contrary when from the temporal to the intemporal some particular signification is transferred? They come, then, from the basis of likeness (loco igitur similitudinis)’. 9.7.144-53.

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Text: Theology As for the theological content, in many popular and even scholarly presentations of Eriugena, it is commonly held that his critique of Gottschalk’s double predestination is founded primarily on his own philosophical commitment to the absolutely simple nature of the Godhead.26 However, this is not entirely accurate, or at least largely incomplete. Along with the initial premise of divine simplicity, which he clearly shares with Dionysius and Augustine,27 Eriugena must bring forward the additional premise that goodness is an essential attribute of the divine nature, and one which extends necessarily to the divine will.28 While it would perhaps be overly simplistic to claim that the Greek East had no particular interest in the questions of providence or predestination, this seems largely true at least of Dionysius, who uses πρόνοια (providentia, ‘foresight’)29 in a considerably less technical sense than that found in Augustine or Eriugena. Rather, perhaps the greatest dependence on Dionysius for theology comes from Book IV of On the Divine Names – which Eriugena re-appropriated 26 E.g. Brian J. Matz, ‘Augustine, the Carolingians, and Double Predestination’, in Alexander Y. Hwang, Brian J. Matz and Augustine Casiday (eds), Grace for Grace: The Debates after Augustine & Pelagius (Washington, DC, 2014), 235-70, 253: ‘Whereas everyone on both sides of the [predestination] debate viewed the problem as one of properly interpreting the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, Eriugena argued the problem was rather about a proper understanding of the divine nature’. This sort of characterization betrays something of a false dichotomy, as Eriugena himself, at least ostensibly, only offers his own view of divine nature (i.e. divine simplicity) on the basis of what he thought was the proper interpretation of Scripture and the fathers. 27 DN 592B: ‘And so it is that the Transcendent one is clothed in terms of being, with shape and form on things which have neither, and numerous symbols are employed to convey the varied attributes of what is an imageless and supra-natural simplicity (ὑπερφυῆ καὶ ἀσχημάτιστον ἁπλότητα)’. 28 As summarized by J.J. O’Meara, Eriugena (1988), 40: ‘Eriugena derives his teaching on predestination from the simplicity, goodness, and life of God’s individual eternal substance’. 29 He does dedicate a portion of Book V to discussing ‘those names which tell of the Providence of God’, which fall under the παραδείγματα (Luibheid: ‘exemplars’; Eriugena: paradigmata) of Good, Being, Life, and Wisdom. Like the younger Augustine, Dionysius does this in a very consciously anti-Gnostic fashion: ‘I do not think of the Good as one thing, Being another, Life and Wisdom as yet another, and I do not claim that there are numerous causes and different Godheads, all differently ranked, superior and inferior, and all producing different effects (ἄλλων ἄλλας παρακτικὰς θεότητας ὑπερεχούσας καὶ ὑφειμένας). No. But I hold that there is one God for all these good processions (τὰς ὅλας ἀγαθὰς προόδους, optimas processiones) and that he is the possessor of the divine names of which I speak and that the first name [that is, ‘the name “Being”’: οὐσιωνυμίαν] tells of the universal Providence of the one God (παντελοῦς τοῦ ἑνὸς θεοῦ προνοίας ἐκφαντικήν, universalis unius Dei providentiae manifestativam), while the other names reveal general or specific ways in which he acts providentially’. DN 816D-817A. Of these παραδείγματα, he later says, ‘Theology calls them predefining (προορισμοὺς, predestinationes), divine, and good acts of will (θεῖα καὶ ἀγαθὰ θελήματα, divinas et optimas uoluntates) which determine and create things and in accordance with which the Transcendent One predefined (προώρισε, praedestinavit) and brought into being everything that is’. DN 824C; for Eriugena’s translation, see PL 122, 1137A-C; 1150C-D.

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for his more specific purposes. In short, Eriugena likely saw himself as bringing the Dionysian discussion concerning ‘the supra-existing Goodness’ (ὕπαρξιν ἀγαθότητα)30 to its own logical conclusion regarding divine predestination. For the Platonic-Christian tradition (of which both Dionysius and Augustine are representative), evil is always a ‘privation of the good’, and hence not a substance, but a kind of anti-substance. For Dionysius ‘evil is not a being (τὸ δὲ κακὸν οὔτε ὄν ἐστιν); for if it were, it would not be totally evil (οὐ πάντη κακόν). Nor is it a nonbeing (οὔτε μὴ ὄν); for nothing is completely a nonbeing (οὐδὲν γὰρ ἔσται τὸ καθόλου μὴ ὄν), unless it is said to be in the Good in the sense of beyond-being (τὸ ὑπερούσιον)’.31 Drawing from their common Platonic heritage, evil is rather for Dionysius and Augustine (and therefore Eriugena) a ‘movement’, ‘change’, or ‘disorder’, but not a nature, a substance, or a ‘thing’. In rejecting Gottschalk’s notion of twofold or ‘twin’ predestination (praedestinatio gemina),32 Eriugena cannot, therefore, admit of either a ‘twofold goodness’ or even of a ‘twofold evil’: a sin against the neighbor is a sin against God. One finds here a rather striking parallel in Dionysius, who says ‘it is also absurd to suppose that two opposites can owe their origin and their being to the same thing, since this would mean that the source itself was not simple and unique but was actually divided, double, internally in a state of contradiction, and discordant’. For Eriugena, there could be no fundamental distinction between God’s justice, mercy, punishment, or forgiveness, but each is a manifestation of the same single, divine energy of love and goodness. Eriugena rather describes salvation as when the motion of human free will ‘cooperates’ (cooperor) with the motion of the divine will (that is, with divine grace); hence damnation is merely that which ‘naturally’ results from refusing to cooperate with the same grace. Where Eriugena begins going beyond Augustine is precisely in his claims about the eternal punishments of hell,33 as expressed in the final chapters.

30

DN 693B. Luibheid: ‘the essential Good’. Ibid. 716D. 32 Gottschalk in fact derives the term from Isidore of Seville, Sententiae 2.6.1: ‘Predestination is twofold (gemina est praedestinatio), either of the elect to rest or of the reprobate to death. Both are done by the divine judgment so that it always makes (faciat) the elect follow heavenly and interior things and, by abandoning them, always permits (permittat) the reprobate to take delight in lower and exterior things’. PL 83, 606A. Quoted by Gottschalk in his ‘Responses to Various Questions’ 4, as well as his ‘Longer Confession’ 10. Gottschalk & A Medieval Predestination Controversy: Texts Translated from the Latin, ed. and trans. Victor Genke and Francis X. Gumerlock (Milwaukee, 2010). 33 Which he had already intimated as early as Chapter 2, CChr.CM 50, 2.5.139-43: ‘It is also in the very qualities of the elements which, while by their nature they appear to be good because they derive from the highest good, nevertheless are experienced as punishment (poenaliter sentiuntur) by those for whom, according to their just deserts, the just judge has prepared eternal torments. And thus they are said to be evil although they are by their nature good’. 31

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The premise that the necessary antecedent to justice is always free will,34 when coupled with the assertion that evil is always extrinsic to substance and the providential ‘allowance’ of sin, leads Eriugena inexorably to the conclusion that, ‘in great heat of the eternal fire there should be no other punitive unhappiness (misera) than the absence of blessed happiness (felicitatis)’.35 In other words, the eternal fire in which the wicked are punished was predestined by God not as a punishment, but as the means of eternal glorification for the righteous. In describing the torment presently experienced by the devil and his angels,36 Eriugena repeatedly struggles to find support from the Lain tradition37 and again relies more on Dionysius, who, in reference to the demons, repeatedly affirms that while their natural angelic beauty remains undestroyed, it is precisely this same counter-movement of their will, their ‘lack of angelic virtues (ἐνδείᾳ τῶν ἀγγελικῶν ἀγαθῶν, indigentiae angelicorum bonorum)’, which is the source of their hostility towards God.38 Dionysius in fact affirms that the demons ‘are brilliantly complete (ὁλόκληροι καὶ παμφαεῖς)’.39 Likewise for Dionysius, God’s justice is not in opposition to his mercy, but forms one and the same energy of the Good (ἐνεργεία τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, operatio boni). God gives ‘indiscriminately to all’ (πᾶσιν ἁπλῶς, omnibus simpliciter) those things which are befitting (τὰ προσήκοντα, opportuna).40 According to Eriugena, then, it is not the absence of goodness, but rather the very presence of goodness, which itself creates the experience of eternal punishment for the damned.

34

Ibid. 4.3.75-6: ‘If you are unable to believe in free choice, you do not believe that there will be a judgment of the world’. 35 Ibid. 16.1.1-2; 16.1.11-3: ‘Therefore, in a most hidden and most true way (occultissimo itaque uerissimoque modo) the damned, in the deepest unhappiness of punishments, will possess happiness (felicitatem) and will not possess it’. Chapters 16 and 17 are in many ways the thematic centerpiece of Eriugena’s entire treatise, and best encapsulate his eschatological worldview as expressed in the DP on the whole. 36 Ibid. 16.2.52-5: ‘If, therefore, the angelic nature in the devil may not justly be punished, why wonder if the same divine justice prevents the human substance being punished even in the most wicked men?’ 37 Eriugena continues to use Augustine here, as well as Gregory the Great, but appears in these concluding chapters to be struggling, at least compared to the earlier chapters, to find direct and explicit support for his own ideas. One particular citation from Augustine’s Enarratio in psalmum 7.16 (PL 36, 107) stands out, especially for its use of the symbolism of light: ‘let us not think that that tranquility and ineffable light (ineffabile lumen) of God provides from itself the means of punishment for sins, but so orders the sins themselves (sed ipsa peccata sic ordinare) that the things which were the delights of the sinning man become the instruments of the punishing lord’. Quoted by Eriugena, CChr.CM 50, 6.6.225-31. 38 DN 725B; PL 122, 1142C. The phrase here forms an implicit contrast with God’s ἐρωτικὴν κίνησιν (Eriugena: amatorium motum) of DN 712C. Both are described as ‘movements’, but with very different attributes. 39 DN 725C; PL 122, 1142D: integri et clarissimi. 40 For Eriugena’s translations, see PL 122, 1146C.

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Conclusion: Eriugena’s Ecclesiastic Reception To conclude, in appropriating these elements of Dionysian thought, Eriugena was able to claim continuity with the Greek tradition in his own interpretations of the Latin fathers, namely Augustine. Indeed, the evidence presented here makes it rather difficult to accept Robert Crouse’s claim (1996) that ‘there are no aspects of De divina praedestinatione which necessarily suggest Byzantine sources’.41 Yet perhaps the difficulty here is in thinking of ‘influence’ strictly in terms of particular, isolated doctrinal elements rather than in terms of an general hermeneutic approach. Indeed, for example, Augustine had also said that temporal appellations were, strictly speaking, inappropriate for God42 (that there is ‘no entity contrary to the divine’43) and clearly, as we have seen, shares a common Platonic heritage with Dionysius on the theology of good and evil. It is also true that similar ideas from the later Latin tradition, especially those found in Boethius, could also in part account for some of Eriugena’s more idiosyncratic approach to predestination. It seems likely, however, that whatever he had already found earlier in Boethius, could also easily have been confirmed by his introduction to Dionysius. In light of this, the question for this article becomes less, ‘what elements from Dionysius did Eriugena import?’ and more, ‘how did Eriugena use Dionysius to interpret the Latin theological tradition with which he and his interlocutors were already familiar?’ That Eriugena would have taken Dionysius as representative of the general Greek patristic outlook is not surprising due to the latter’s claim of sub-apostolic antiquity. Determined to be a truly ecumenical man of the Church, Eriugena 41 ‘Predestination, Human Freedom and the Augustinian Theology of History in Eriugena’s De divina praedestinatione’, in History and Eschatology in John Scottus Eriugena and his Time (2002), 303-12, 306. See Giulio d’Onofrio, who, according to Crouse, suggests that Eriugena was already influenced by ‘le fonte teologiche byzantine’. Storia della teologia nel Medioevo, Vol. I (Casale Monteferrato, 1996), 208. One wonders here exactly what Crouse means by ‘necessary’, if not little more than explicit references to the Greek fathers. 42 De Genesi ad litteram II 6.12: ‘It is true that the words “when” and “sometime” refer to time, but the when of something that must be created is eternal in the Word of God; and it is created when in the Word there is an exigency for its creation. But in the Word Himself there is no when and no eventually, because the Word is in every way eternal’, Ancient Christian Writers 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York, 1982); De Trinitate IV 1.3: ‘Because therefore the Word of God is One, by which all things were made, which is the unchangeable truth, all things are simultaneously therein, potentially and unchangeably; not only those things which are now in this whole creation, but also those which have been and those which shall be. And therein they neither have been, nor shall be, but only are; and all things are life, and all things are one; or rather it is one being and one life. For all things were so made by Him, that whatsoever was made in them was not made in Him, but was life in Him’, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 3, trans. Arthur West Haddan, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, 1887). 43 De civitate Dei XII 2: Nullam essentiam Deo esse contrariam, quia ab eo, qui summe et semper est, hoc totum videtur diversum esse quod non est. PL 41, 320. For Eriugena, CChr.CM 50, 9.4.77: nihil deo contrarium sit, nisi non esse…

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was henceforth led to an audacious interpretation of the Latin fathers which would, perhaps not surprisingly, contribute to his condemnation at the Council of Valencia (855). As Victor Genke describes it, Eriugena advanced ‘a theology that seemed to deny the reality of hell and even the reality of good and evil’.44 Or, as John O’Meara says, ‘Eriugena thought in terms of God, not in those of man: this way of seeing things was uncommon in the ninth century … his insistence that sin and death are simple deficiencies, not made by God, was equally an uncommon view at the time: it was to become better known through Hilduin’s and Eriugena’s own translations of the Pseudo-Dionysius…’45 Thus, when Eriugena was condemned by Valencia’s Canon 6 as ‘Irish porridge’46 (echoing Jerome against Pelagius),47 this was perhaps more than a passing sneer. Even at the Carolingian court, Eriugena was an outsider, not only on account of his race,48 but particularly his education and mindset, perhaps derived from time spent at the strikingly abundant patristic libraries of the Irish monasteries.49 In any case, this mindset already placed him in a certain opposition to the strict Augustinianism that characterized much of southern France at the time, including two of its most distinguished representatives Florus of Lyons and Prudentius of Troyes.50 Even as early as the DP, Eriugena 44

Gottschalk & A Medieval Predestination Controversy (2010), 49. Eriugena (1988), 47. 46 The Synod of Valence, Can. 6: Ineptas autem quaestiunclas, et aniles pene fabulas, Scotorumque pultes puriati fidei nauseam inferentes…, in Enchridion symboloroum definitionum er delarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 43rd Edition, ed. Heinrich Denzinger and Peter Hünermann (San Francisco, 2010), 633. 47 That is, as one stolidissimus and Scotorum pultibus proegravatus. Commentary on Jeremiah I: Prologue, PL 25, 708A. 48 The first extant mention of Eriugena by name in fact comes from Pardulus of Laon in a letter written to the Church at Lyons, probably composed around 850, in which he describes ‘a certain Scot’ (which up until the High Middle Ages referred not to modern day Scotland, but to Ireland), ‘John by name’, whom he and Hincmar had enrolled to combat Gottschalk’s continued promotion of double predestination: Sed quia haec inter sec valde dissentiebant, Scotum illum qui est in palatio regis, Joannem nomine, scriber coegimus. PL 121, 1052A. The above-mentioned papal librarian, Anastasius, although he himself had reservations about the quality of Eriugena’s translation of Dionysius, nevertheless in his letter to Charles the Bald (Epistola ad Karolum regem) expressed his sincere wonder that such a ‘barbarian’ who, ‘even though living at the ends of the earth’, was able to make such a credible translation: Mirandum est quoque, quodomo vir ille barbarus, qui in finibus mundi positus, quanto ad nominibus conversatione, tanto credi potuit alterius linguae diction longinoquus talia intellectu capere, in aliamque linguam transfere valuerit. PL 122, 1027-8. 49 As O’Meara explains, with reference to Jeauneau, the best Greek scholars of the time in France were predominantly Irish peregrini who had begun, in the early 9th century, to seek refuge on the continent in response both to increased Viking incursions as well as to the renowned patronage of learning and the liberal arts widely associated with the Carolingian court. Aside from Eriugena himself, the most notable Irish-Carolingian Greek scholars include Sedulius Scottus and Martin Hiberniensis. J.J. O’Meara, Eriugena (1988), 52. 50 See Matthew J. Pereira, ‘Augustine, Pelagius, and the Southern Gallic Tradition: Faustus of Riez’s De gratia Deo’, in B.J. Matz (ed.), Grace for Grace (2014), 180-207. Eriugena, perhaps 45

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represented a unique, yet simultaneously Carolingian, Byzantine, and Irish attempt to move ‘beyond the Augustinian synthesis’ (as Jaroslav Pelikan puts it) and draw on the broader tradition, even in a very small part.

even more so than his earlier Irish forebears mentioned in Kelly’s survey, was of course himself thoroughly and self-consciously (as one would rightly expect from a well-educated Carolingian) anti-Pelagian. He thus regarded Gottschalk’s doctrine of double predestination as a kind of, as he says, tertia haeresis, which combines both the errors of Pelagianism and divine determinism, effectively denying both divine grace and human freedom, respectively. DP 4.2-4: ‘In short, this new sect agrees with the Pelagian in that it declares that a gift of grace is of no advantage to man in the exercise of justice, but only the necessity of predestination is of advantage; it disagrees with it in that it has totally ruled out the power of free choice as having no force either for doing good or committing sin, shamelessly placing all these acts within the necessity of predestination. But, in that it strives to remove the desire for free choice, it appears to side with those opposed to the Pelagian, to which it again reverts when it agrees that gifts of divine grace are of no profit to man’.

Philosophical Dialogue and Contemplation of the Cosmos in Augustine, Boethius, and Eriugena Adrian N. GUIU, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT In this essay I discuss the Periphyseon as a philosophical dialogue comparing it with two other philosophical dialogues that have preceded it: Augustine’s De ordine and Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae; the goal is to discern some common elements and differences in order to shed light on less obvious aspects of the Periphyseon. Moreover, this essay is part of a larger project that tries to retrieve the philosophical dialogue tradition.

1. Introduction In this essay, I will focus on the genre of Eriugena’s Periphyseon, as a dialogue, and try to interpret its scope and message in light of the Ancient philosophical dialogue tradition which started with Plato; the philosophical dialogue has not vanished after the dialogues of Plato; although it somewhat peters out, this tradition continues in the lost dialogues of Aristotle, through Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, Boethius, Alcuin, Eriugena, and from there to the masters of the twelfth century all the way to Nicholas of Cusa. My goal in the essay is to connect the Periphyseon with this tradition by comparing it with two earlier dialogues: Augustine’s De ordine and Boethius’ De onsolatione; this will allow us to better grasp the character and scope of Eriugena’s grand dialogue by observing the elements it shares and those it does not share with this tradition. In order to better understand the character of these dialogues I will use the interpretative framework provided by Pierre Hadot and his view of ancient philosophy as a ‘way of life’: in his view, the dialogue (in particular Socratic and Platonic dialogues) is the earliest form of spiritual exercise.1 I complement Hadot’s position by using two additional lenses offered by Henri-Irénée Marrou 1 Pierre Hadot, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life (Malden, MA, 1995): ‘… a philosophical school, in the most concrete sense of the term, in which a master forms his disciples, trying them to self-transformation and realization. Thus, the written work is a reflection of pedagogical, psychologic and methodological preoccupations. Although every written work is a monologue, the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue’, 104-5.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 239-262. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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and Brian Stock.2 Marrou used the term exercitatio animi with regard to Augustine’s early dialogues and the De Trinitate:3 thus, the convoluted character of the dialogue is not due to a lack of rhetorical prowess but is intentional; it has a pedagogical-performative rationale. The digressions are supposed to refine, train, and correct the understanding of the readers in order to train them for the ascent and the contemplation of the divine realities; the eye of the soul needs to be cleansed by first contemplating the refractions of the divine light and then progressively raised to the contemplation of the source. In Brian Stock’s view, exercitatio animi as described by Marrou is too intellectualist and does not cover ‘the physical, emotional and mental exercises outlined by Augustine in his early writings’.4 According to Stock, Augustine adopts a variety of methods and techniques from the heritage of antique philosophy: ‘Socratic interrogation, Stoic emphasis on self-control, Neoplatonic methods of mental elevation which are applied to one person’.5 Thus, according to Stock, for Augustine, ‘philosophy and religion become supporting methods for bringing about personal purification and moral progress’.6 Another helpful lens for understanding these philosophical dialogues is provided by the Ancient division of philosophy and especially the division of the branches of knowledge encountered in Stoicism: ethics, physics and logic. According to Hadot, it is in the Stoic system that dialectic truly gains center stage in the process of knowledge; for the Stoics, reason has both an ontological, cosmic presence and an epistemological role. ‘The same Logos produces the world, illumines the human in the faculty of reasoning and expresses itself in the human discourse’.7 Hadot shows that for the Stoics, these are three 2 See Henri-Irénée Marrou, Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1948). See also H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, 1983); see also W. Otten, ‘Religion as Exercitatio Mentis: A Case for Theology as a Humanist Discipline’, in Christian Humanism, Essays Offered to Arjo Vanderjagt on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Leiden, 2009), 59-73. 3 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin (1983), 297-327. 4 Brian Stock also offers arguments for the importance of exercitatio animi for the interpretation of Augustine in Augustine’s Inner Dialogue. The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2010), 18-62. Nevertheless, Stock argues that the tradition of the ancient philosophical dialogue becomes more introspective in Augustine and ultimately becomes an ‘interior dialogue’. This transformation is best seen in Augustine’s ‘soliloquies’. I do not completely share Stock’s position that Augustine intends to transform dialogue into an introspective interior dialogue. As I will try to show, there exists a dialectic between inside and outside in Augustine. Gillian Clark goes even further and argues that a threefold abandonment of dialogue takes place in Augustine: ‘movement away from dialogue as a literary genre; loss of confidence in dialectic as the way to achieve truth; and failure to engage with people who held different views’. Gillian Clark, ‘Can We Talk? Augustine and the Possibility of Dialogue’, in Simon Goldhill (ed.), The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008), 117-35. 5 See B. Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue (2010), 24. 6 Ibid. 28. 7 Pierre Hadot, ‘Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité’, Museum Helveticum 36 (1979), 209.

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disciplines that have to be practiced simultaneously; however different exercises can focus on one or the other of these disciplines. Thus, although these three dialogues discussed here are primarily exercises of physics and dialectic/ logic, the ethical dimension is always implied. My preliminary observation is that some of these elements are reflected in the three dialogues here discussed: the dialogue is an exercitatio, a training for cleansing and ordering the soul in order to prepare it for the contemplation of the cosmos and ultimately for the return to the creator. Seeing the dialogue of the Periphyseon in light of the tradition of philosophical dialogues allows us to discern several important common traits. These different aspects about the role of disciplina and learning and their connection to the dialogue form can also be observed in the Periphyseon. As a dialogue, the Periphyseon reflects the fundamental connection between the liberal arts (as disciplina and method) and the dialogue as a framework and an ideal genre in which the reordering of vision can be achieved; the Periphyseon, through the digressions and sometimes convoluted character of the dialogue, provides a ‘training ground’ – for both the participants and the readers – for using the arts in the proper way and thus order the soul in order to achieve the contemplation of nature through scripture and creation. 2. Augustine’s De ordine The early philosophical dialogues of Augustine distill several ideas from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, especially the liberal arts as a curriculum of knowledge and training, and the dialogue as a genre most suited to develop and embody dialectic.8 Augustine’s dialogues are both a great synthesis of an entire tradition that he inherits and a depository of a variety of elements. These dialogues take place in Cassiciacum in the villa of Verucundus shortly after Augustine’s conversion in September 386.9 De ordine10 is written shortly before Augustine’s baptism, and shortly after the conversion from Manichaeism, the question of evil for which Manichaeism constituted a panacea, is still very 8 Phillip Cary has observed: ‘Like Plato’s Socratic dialogues (and interestingly, unlike Cicero’s philosophical dialogues), the nature of teaching and learning is near the center of attention here, not only as a topic of conversation but as a matter for drama. The Cassiciacum dialogues do not just talk about the search for wisdom and truth; they dramatize it’. In Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self (Oxford, 2000), 142. 9 For the context of the dialogues see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkley, 2000), 125-40. 10 For my discussion I have drawn on several helpful studies: Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique. Contribution à l’histoire de l’éducation et de la culture dans l’Antiquité, Textes et traditions 11, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2005), 101-37; H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin (1983), 159-299; Jö Trelenberg, Augustins Schrift De Ordine: Einführung, Kommentar, Ergebnisse, Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie 144 (Tübingen, 2009); Ryan Topping, Happiness and Wisdom: Augustine’s Early Theology of Education (Washington, DC, 2012).

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much on his mind: the main concern of Augustine’s early dialogue De Ordine is the question of divine providence related to the question of evil. Along with other early philosophical dialogues: And yet there is nothing that the most gifted minds search out eagerly … there is nothing that these are more desirous of hearing and learning than how it is that God has a care for human affairs, and nevertheless perversity is so serious and widespread that it must seem unattributable to God’s governance but rather to a hireling’s management.11

After this, he starts to build the foundation of a possible answer by employing the image of the inlaid pavement. The preliminary answer is that evil is only the result of the misperception, of our limited perspective, which does not grasp the harmony and order owing to its lack of instruction; the ones who do not perceive the unity are compared to those who look at a mosaic and do not discern the underlying image. They only see fragments or splinters in the mosaic or perceive them as chaotic because they are not able to bring them together into a whole. In the same way, the uninstructed are not able ‘to reflect on the harmonic and universal order’; they practice mental beggary (aviditate pauperiem) and are scattered into many objects and therefore lack the proper perspective that would allow them to integrate the separate, sometimes contradictory, aspects. Very early in Book I, Augustine already offers an inkling of what will be the solution to the conundrum: The greatest cause of this error is due to the ignorance of oneself. Now for acquiring this self-knowledge, a person needs a constant habit of withdrawing from things of the senses and of concentrating his soul within himself and holding it there. Only those persons arrive to unity, who, through solitude or though the liberal disciplines, cure the wounds caused by human opinions of daily life […].12

The fact that the soul is scattered and outside itself is a result of the plagues of common opinion and ignorance which impedes it from seeing the unity (the ‘unum’) and the order in the uni-verse. Ordering the soul brings about the unification of its movements and through this ordering it manages to acquire a unitary vision of things. This ordering is tantamount to the ability to withdraw into oneself and to become integrated. ‘The soul, returned to itself in this manner, 11 Augustine, De ord. I 1, p. 89: Nec tamen quidquam est quod magis avide expetant quaeque optima ingenia, magisque audire ac discere studeant qui scopulos vitae huius et procellas, velut erecto quantum licet capite, inspiciunt, quam quomodo fiat ut et Deus humana curet, et tanta in humanis rebus perversitas usquequaque diffusa sit, ut non divinae, sed ne servili quidem cuipiam procurationi, si ei tanta potestas daretur, tribuenda esse videatur. 12 Augustine, De ord. I 3, p. 90: Cuius erroris maxima causa est, quod homo sibi ipse est incognitus. Qui tamen ut se noscat, magna opus habet consuetudine recedendi a sensibus, et animum in seipsum colligendi atque in seipso retinendi. Quod ii tantum assequuntur, qui plagas quasdam opinionum, quas vitae quotidianae cursus infligit, aut solitudine inurunt, aut liberalibus medicant disciplinis.

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understands what the beauty of the universe is; this term is evidently derived from the word unum (one). Wherefore the beholding of oneness is not granted to that soul which wanders towards many objects and eagerly pursues mental beggary’.13 The crux of the problem is whether evil has a place in this cosmic order or is outside of it. Evil is that element in the order which God does not love, but Augustine insists, is still part of order, otherwise the oneness of everything would be forfeited. Augustine captures this in a paradoxical way, ‘Thus the evil itself that God does not love is not outside the order, yet God loves the order and he loves it by loving the good and not loving the evil which exists by means of the great order and divine disposition’.14 Augustine argues that evil has to be seen as part of order and not as something extraneous; the challenge is to find a place for evil in the grand order of things. Nevertheless, this argument is not entirely convincing for one of the interlocutors, Trygetius: ‘Of a certainty, you said that evil is comprised in order, and that order itself comes from God supreme, and that it is loved by him. Whence it follows that evils are from the supreme God, and God loves evils’.15 So the task of Augustine will be to elucidate how order can be all comprehensive and providential but still include evil in it for the sake of preserving the oneness of the cosmos. Augustine urges Licentius to offer a workable definition of order so that they can start the discussion: ‘Order is that by which all things that God has constituted is governed’.16 ‘Order is that which will lead us to God, if we hold to it during life; and unless we do hold to it during life, we shall not come to God’.17 According to this definition, order seems to be a mediator between God and creation; but then Augustine asks a challenging question: is God also part of this order and thus ruled by it, or is he above order itself? The conversants establish one principle according to which movable and changeable beings could still approach God’s immovability: that which knows God manages to attain God, because ‘whatever understands God is with God’.18 Thus, knowledge of God is the only way for the human being to attain the level 13 Augustine, De ord. I 3, p. 90: Ita enim animus sibi redditus, quae sit pulchritudo universitatis intellegit; quae profecto ab uno cognominata est. Idcircoque illam videre non licet animae quae in multa procedit, sectaturque aviditate pauperiem. 14 Augustine, De ord. I 18, p. 98: Ita nec praeter ordinem sunt mala, quae non diligit Deus, et ipsum tamen ordinem diligeit: hoc ipsum enim diligit diligere bona, et non diligere mala, quod est magni ordinis, et divinae dispositionis. 15 Augustine, De ord. I 17, p. 97: certe enim et mala dixisti ordine contineri in ipsum ordinem manere summo Deo atque ab eo diligi. Ex quo sequitur ut et mala sint a summo deo et mala deus diligat. 16 Augustine, De ord. I 28, p. 103: Ordo est, inquit, per quem aguntur omnia quae Deus constituit. 17 Augustine, De ord. I 27, p. 102: Ordo est quem si tenuerimus in vita, perducet ad Deum, et quem nisi tenuerimus in vita, non perveniemus ad Deum. 18 Augustine, De ord. II 4, p. 108: Cum Deo est quidquid intelligit Deum.

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of immovability. Thus, intelligible knowledge becomes the way to connect to the divine and to transit from changeability to immovability. Only fixing one’s gaze on the divine, the unity and source of creation, allows the soul itself to become centered and to fix its gaze in order to contemplate the oneness of the cosmos. So the only possibility for the soul to glimpse the underlying order in spite of the apparent movement is to bring its own movements in order and measure through the practice of virtues. This is what Augustine calls true wisdom: ‘The soul of the wise, perfectly purified by the practice of virtues is now unified to God, and deserves the name wise’.19 Hence a second principle emerges: ‘whatever things are understood by a wise man are also with God’.20 Thus, it is through attaining wisdom that the soul can ascend to the unchangeable God. Like Eriugena, Augustine mentions two ways that lead to truth: reason and authority. ‘We are led to knowledge through two ways: authority and reason; chronologically authority comes first, logically, reason’.21 But, in Augustine’s view, reason comes first ‘in the order of reality’ and therefore the discussants decide to pursue that route: this route leads through instruction and learning the precepts, to the discovery of reason in oneself and in creation and from there follows the ascent to the intellect ‘in which all things are and which itself is the sum total of all things’.22 The remainder of the dialogue will continue as an exercise in ‘reason’ meant to reinsert the soul into the movements of reason. ‘Reason is the movement through which the spirit distinguishes and connects the things we perceive’.23 But reason is more than the individual human faculty; it is the principle of order both in human knowledge and in creation. In Augustine’s view, there are three things in which reason manifests itself: first in actions which have an end; the second in discourse; the third in pleasure. ‘The first admonishes us to do nothing without purpose, the second to teach correctly; the last to find delight in contemplation. The first deals with right living; the other two, with those branches of learning which we are now considering’.24 The first refers to human relationships and to ethics and the last two pertain to the sciences. Thus, the rest of the dialogue is spent on discovering reason through the order of disciplines (ordo disciplinarum) and through their lens, in the cosmos. 19 Augustine, De ord. II 6, p. 109: … anima, inquit, sapientis perpurgata virtutibus et iam cohaerens Deo, sapientis etiam nomine digna. 20 Augustine, De ord. II 8, p. 111: Nam si cum deo sunt quaecumque intelligit sapiens… 21 Augustine, De ord. II 26, p. 121-2: … ad discendum item necessario dupliciter ducimur, auctoritate atque ratione. Tempore auctoritas, re autem ratione prior est. 22 Augustine, De ord. II 26, p. 123. 23 Augustine, De ord. II 30, p. 124: Ratio est mentis motio, ea quae discuntur distinguendi et connectendi potens. 24 Augustine, De ord. II 35, p. 139: Ergo iam tria genera sunt rerum in quibus illud rationabile apparet. Unum est in factis ad aliquem finem relatis, alterum in dicendo tertium in delectando. Primum nos admonet nihil temere facere, secundum, recte docere, ultimum, beate contemplari. In moribus est illud superius, haec autem duo in disciplinis de quibus nunc agimus.

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However, disciplina for Augustine does not merely refer to a theoretical content which has to be mastered. He says explicitly that disciplina has a cosmic and ontological scope since it constituted the very reasonable underpinning of the cosmos: ‘Now this science is the very law of God, which, ever abiding fixed and unshaken with him, is transcribed, so to speak, on the soul of the wise, so that they know they live a better and more sublime life in proportion as they contemplate it more perfectly with their understanding and observe it more diligently in their manner of living’.25 Through disciplina the soul can inscribe the divine laws upon itself; this ‘transcribing’ of the disciplina on the soul will re-order it and will help i contemplation of the cosmos feasible since it will be able to recognize these same laws in the cosmos. The order that disciplina imposes is twofold: one the one hand it is moral and on the other epistemological; at this juncture the dialogue again takes the path of knowledge; the rest of the dialogue is spent offering such a practical exercise of ‘walking the path of reason’, as Eriugena’s alumnus and nutritor will also do it, by carefully following the regimen of the arts in order to attain the intellectual perspective. The progress through the arts that follows allows the soul to ascend through reason to the level of the intellect; as for Plotinus, the intellect is the highest accessible ontological level that one can attain by following the path of reason. Augustine starts with the senses and notices that even there one can discover traces of reason: there is a rationale behind the way the cook seasons the food. From there he moves to the exterior world and notices the harmony of any edifice and then they proceed through the disciplines. Both with regard to the ear and with regard to the eye one can discover a certain rhythm or proportionality which has to be related to reason. He brings the example of dancers and singers in order to show that pleasure itself must entail some kind of harmony which is based on reason. Thus, in his account of reason, Augustine starts by discerning forms of reason in the realm of the sensible and visible: the senses, vision, hearing, and then ascends by moving inside towards human knowledge.26 Then Augustine moves to the steps of ascent proper, the arts. In the first stage he goes through the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric), which is centered on dialectic. As Augustine puts it, ‘dialectic teaches how to teach and teaches how to learn; in it reason itself exhibits itself, and reveals its own nature, its desires, its powers’.27 Dialectic conveys the movement, the goal, and 25

Augustine, De ord. II 25, p. 121: Haec autem disciplina ipsa Dei lex est quae apud eum fixa et inconcussa semper manens, in sapientes animas quasi transcribitur, ut tanto se sciant vivere melius tantoque sublimius, quanto et perfectius eam contemplantur intellegendo, et vivendo custodiunt diligentius. Haec igitur disciplina eis qui illam nosse desiderant, simul geminum ordinem sequi iubet, cuius una pars vitae, altera eruditionis est. 26 Augustine, De ord. II 33, p. 126. 27 Augustine, De ord. II 38, p. 144: Haec docet docere, haec docet discere; in hac se ipsa ratio demonstrat atque aperit quae sit, quid velit, quid valeat. Scit scire.

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value of the soul itself.28 So, dialectic is the hub where the spokes of the other arts come together and it is the epitome of the disciplina. From here the soul progressively leaves behind the domain of the audible (heard words) and passes into the province of the visible: thus it passes from the domain of the senses and imagination into the domain of knowledge and then ascends to contemplation through the level of numbers, the proportions underlying the cosmos, epitomized by the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). ‘From this stage, reason advances to the province of the eyes. And scanning the earth and heavens, it realizes that nothing pleases it but beauty; and in beauty design; and in design dimensions; and in dimensions number’.29 After having traversed and ascended through the trivium, the sciences of thinking and argument,30 one is able to reach the level of the eyes and to peruse first the earth and then the heaven and to realize that number is the basis of everything. Number underlies even the visible elements on earth, therefore number and the sciences of number (the quadrivium) become a ladder of ascent through which one can traverse and then transcend the human-created level: the observation of nature leads one to knowledge and from there the contemplation of the cosmos. The last stage of the ascent through the sciences of number is also a process of abstraction which brings the soul to geometry and ultimately to astronomy where number appears purer and more constant. From the lower levels, from the domain of irregular change, one ascends to the domain of constancy and harmony: The movement of the heavens also aroused it and invited reason to consider it diligently. And there too, on account of the most constant alternations of the seasons, as well as the fixed and unerring courses of the stars and regulated spacing of distance, it understood that nothing other than dimension and number held sway. Linking these also into an orderly whole by definition and division, it gave rise to astrology.31

This passage marks the moment when the soul is fully aware of its deep affinity with the cosmos at the level of reason: after having learned to discern 28

Topping offers a great explanation of dialectic and its role: ‘Dialectic is to the other arts as the capstone is to an arch. It is the science that orders every other rational study insofar as it is the discipline through which the mind becomes conscious of its own rational capabilities’. In R. Topping, Happiness (2012), 137. 29 Augustine, De ord. II 42, p. 130: Hinc est profecta in oculorum opes et terram coelumque collustrans, sensit nihil aliud quam puchritudinem sibi placer, et in pulchritudine figures, in figures dimensiones, in dimensionibus numeris. 30 On the uses of the trivium, see David L. Wagner, The Seven Liberal Arts (Bloomington, 1983), 58-147. 31 Augustine, De ord. II 42, p. 130: Motus eam caeli multum moverbat et ad se diligenter considerandum inviabat. Etiam ibi per constantissimas temporum vices, per astrorum ratos definitosque cursus, per intervallorum spatia moderata, intellexit nihil aliud quam illam dimensionem numerosque dominari. Quae similiter definiendo ac secernendo in ordinem nectens, astrologiam genuit.

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the order in the cosmos, it is capable to withdraw into oneself and to master the movements of the soul in order to avoid getting distracted. ‘Then reason gained much courage and preconceived a great achievement: it ventured to prove the soul immortal … it came to feel that it possessed great power, and that it owed all its power to numerical proportions … And it began to suspect that it itself was perhaps the very number by which all things are numbered’.32 Thus, the soul discovers its own immortality after it contemplates the order and permanence of creation; only after this can it finally realize its own stability and fix its gaze. After going through the cycle of the sciences Augustine adds a warning in order to make the task less daunting: in the beginning, one can choose between two routes: ‘let him master either number alone or only dialectics’.33 But the final ideal is the full integration of these disciplines; once the disciplines are integrated into an ordo disciplinarum, the order of the soul and the clarity of its vision are also realized. As a recapitulation, Augustine explains that the question of philosophy is twofold: it first treats of the soul, and secondly of God. Through the first we get to know ourselves; through the second, we arrive at the knowledge of our origin.34 However, as observed in this dialogue, only after the long detour through the cosmos guided by the arts, does the soul realize its own ability of introspection and also the responsibility to order itself. As can be seen in De ordine, by exercising itself to order the visible creation, the soul achieves its own order. Nonetheless the relation between the two is not linear but rather dialectical. Augustine seems to say that the order which exists independent of human creation awakens and then guides the soul to finding its own order and thus it can give him the first impulse for the process of self-cultivation and selftransformation. Nonetheless, as the soul gets trained through instruction and is brought back into harmony with itself and its various faculties, it becomes progressively attuned to the cosmic harmony. It is only after its interior harmony is realized that the deep underlying harmony of the cosmos becomes more visible. Although this order had been in front of its eyes, the soul was not aware of it due to its uncouth ignorance and epistemological chaos; only after passing through the therapy of the arts and at the same time observing nature, can it raise up its eyes and have 32 Augustine, De ord. II 43, p. 130: Hic se multum erexit multumque praesumpsit; ausa est immortalem animam comprobare. Tractavit omnia diligenter, percepit prorsus se plurimum posse et quidquid posset, numeris posse. Movit eam quoddam miraculum et suspicari coepit seipsam fortasse numerum esse eum ipsum quo cuncta numerarentur aut si id non esset, ibi tamen eum esse quo pervenire satageret. 33 Augustine, De ord. II 47, p. 133: Si quis etiam hoc plurimum putat, solos numeros optime noverit aut solam dialecticam. 34 Augustine, De ord. II 47, p. 133: Cuius duplex quaestio est: una de anima, altera de Deo. Prima efficit ut nosmetipsos noverimus, altera, ut originem nostram. Illa nobis dulcior, ista carior, illa nos dignos beata vita, beatos haec facit.

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an inkling of the order. ‘But if he raises the eyes of the mind and broadens his field of vision and surveys all things as a whole, then he will find nothing unarranged, unclassed or unassigned to its own place.35 Concluding, we, along with the dialogue, arrive to the insight that not seeing the way various elements (including evil) harmonize is due to a false or limited perception which in turn is due to the fact that the faculties are not ordered according to the ordo disciplinarum. ‘And furthermore, it is clear to a learned man that what displeases in a portion, displeases for no other reason than because the whole with which that portion harmonizes wonderfully, is not seen; but that in the intelligible world, every part is as beautiful and perfect as the whole’. It is through the training of the sciences and especially of dialectic, that one observe the harmony of all the parts and one can contemplate divine providence; this in fact is the answer of the dialogue to the question of evil. So the task is not just to learn to employ the different arts but to see their underlying unity and harmony both epistemologically and ontologically. But when the soul has properly adjusted and disposed itself and has rendered itself harmonious and beautiful, then will it venture to see God, the very source of all truth and the very Father of Truth. O great God, what kind of eyes shall those be! How pure! How beautiful.36

3. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae is another philosophical dialogue which uses the arts in order to attain the contemplation of providence in the cosmos.37 In the beginning of the dialogue, the imprisoned philosopher is overwhelmed by despondence and overwhelmed by the injustice of his fate. The current state of the prisoner contrasts with his former self: ‘His mind, all dulled its own light fled … this man used once to wander free under open skies the paths of the heavens … He sought and told all nature’s secret causes’.38 Lady Philosophy, who appears to the depressed prisoner blames his state on the forgetfulness of his art: ‘Now I know another that is perhaps the greatest cause of thy sickness: Thou has forgotten thy art’.39 She appears as the one 35 Augustine, De ord. I 3, p. 92: Si autem mentis oculos erigens atque diffundens, simul universa collustret nihil non ordinatum suisque semper veluti sedibus distinctum dispositumque reperiet. 36 Augustine, De ord. II 51, p. 167. 37 Boethius, The Theological Tractates. The Consolation of Philosophy (Loeb Classical Library 74), trans H.F. Stewart et al. (Cambridge, 1973). For an account of the circulation and usage of De consolatione, see Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire. Antecédents et postérité de Boèce (Paris, 1967). 38 Boethius, De consol. I 2, 137: Mens hebet et propria luce relicta … hic quondam caelo liber aperto … rimari solitus atque latentis naturae varias reddere causas. 39 Boethius, De consol. I 3.

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who consoles, but she does much more and administers healing and solace to the sick prisoner; she proceeds almost clinically and first opens and cleans the wound before curing it. He has fallen into the pit of the common herd, ‘which does not look up at the stars’, and he is like ‘a man having completely lost his sight and forgotten even that he ever possessed sight at all’.40 Her task is to clear his sight through her healing and to allow his mind to ascend to (the contemplation of) the divine as the center of providence. Boethius presents Lady Philosophy as the embodiment of the liberal arts; this is reflected in the description of her demeanor: ‘Her clothes were made of perishable material, of the finest thread woven with the most delicate skill. […] on the bottom could be read the embroidered Greek letter Pi, and on the top hem the Greek letter Theta. Between the two a ladder of steps rose from the lower to the higher letter’.41 In fact the dialogue can be read as an ascent of the mind from the most practical to the theoretical, on the rungs of the ladder unfolded in the garments of Lady Philosophy. The dialogue could be read as a progressive re-learning of the arts, in order to escape the dungeon of desperation through the right contemplation of the universe. Thus, Lady Philosophy takes the prisoner blinded by desperation because of his tragic destiny and leads him out this existential dungeon on the steps of her garment, as it were. She starts the treatment from ethics and the question of self-knowledge (Book II), to the question of the final goal (Book III-physics), the laws that rule the world (Book IV, focuses on physics but moving towards theology through the question of providence), and ultimately to theology (Book V). She helps the prisoner escape the narrow confines of his cell by grasping the order of the cosmos.42 The overarching theme of the dialogue could be summarized by the question in one of the hexameters: ‘But is it the mind, eclipsed by the body’s unseeing parts that cannot recognize by its suppressed light’s fire the world’s fine fastenings?’ (Consol. V 3) The answer is that seeing the fastenings of the world, the way it holds together as a unity through the presence of divine providence depends on the vantage point of the mind. The task of Lady Philosophy is to lift 40

Boethius, De consol. III 11, 287: Quid si quis amisso penitus visu ipsum etiam se habuisse oblivisceretur intuitu. 41 Boethius, De consol. I 1, 133: Vestes erant tenvissimis filis subtili artificio […] Harum in extrema margine. ∏ Graecum, in supremo vero Θ, legabatur intextum. Atque inter utrasque litteras in scalarum modum gradus quidam insigniti videbantur quibus ab inferiore ad superius elementum. 42 ‘Philosophie elle-même expose ce plan à son malade: « Parce que l’oubli de ce que tu es a mis le trouble dans ton âme, tu t’es affligé de ton exil et de la confiscation de tes biens. Parce que tu ignores [I, 6] … » Il s’agit donc d’une double conversion de trois étapes: connaissance de soimême (livre II), connaissance de la fin suprême (livre III et IV jusqu’à la prose 5); connaissance des lois qui régissent le monde (fin du livre IV et livre V). Cette progression philosophique est habituelle et naturelle à ceux qui admettent la préexistence des âmes’, see P. Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire (Paris, 1967).

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the prisoner up on the epistemological scale until he is able to glimpse that everything is indeed held together by divine providence and not the result of fortuna. Along the ascent through the disciplines, there is a progress through the faculties of the soul which in its turn corresponds to the levels of creation: sensation-forms in matter, imagination-forms abstracted from matter, reasonthe level of the individual as rooted in the universal, intelligence-the level of the intelligible beyond the categories of creation. Book I is where the diagnosis is given, lady philosophy starts applying the treatments progressively and making sure that the state of the prisoners is ready to receive her ideas. In book II, Lady Philosophy helps the prisoner understand the fickleness of fortune and the resulting impermanence and inconstancy of human affairs; he needs to understand that nothing in the human realm can ground lasting happiness. ‘It is decreed by firm, eternal law; nothing that comes to be can firm remain’.43 The first things he needs to learn is that he should not look outside for happiness when it is to be found within oneself: ‘If therefore you are in possesion of yourself, you will possess that which you will never wish to lose, and which fortune cannot take away from you’.44 Humans lose their foothold because they start defining themselves through elements inferior to them. ‘God wanted man to be above all earthly things; you men reduce your worth to less than that of the lowest’.45 The only way for humans not to degrade themselves by reducing their dignity to something lower is through self-knowledge: ‘For the nature of man is such that he is better than other things only when he knows himself, and yet if he ceases to know himself he is made lower than the brutes’.46 Although, she emphasizes his lack of selfknowledge, the first stage of the treatment is actually focused on the will: the prisoner suffers from an excessive concern with oneself and his disordered will leads him to believe that he is at the center of cosmos: he does not deny the existence of the divine creator but believes that in the lower spheres it is fortuna that rules, and fortuna is not favorable to him. The prisoner responds that he had never been tempted by empty ambition but has been motivated only by the desire to put his gifts to use for doing good. The lesson she tries to convey through this simple exercise is how insignificant human affairs are in the grand cosmic picture. ‘Now it is in this tightly-enclosed and tiny point, that you think of spreading your reputation?’47 43

Boethius, De consol. II 3, 190: Constat aeterna positumque lege est, ut constet genitum

nihil. 44

Boethius, De consol. II 4, 199. Boethius, De consol. II 5, 205: Ille genus humanum terrenis omnibus praestare voluit; vos dignitatem vestra infra infia quaeque detruditis. 46 Boethius, De consol. II 5, 204: Humanae quippe naturae ista condicio est ut tum tantum ceteris rebus cum se cognoscit excellat, eadem tamen infra bestias redigatur, si se nosse desierit. 47 Boethius, De consol. II 7, 216: Aut quid habeat amplum magnificumque gloria tam angustis exiguisque limitibus artata? 45

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At the end of book II, Lady Philosophy offers a first picture of the cosmic harmony unfolded later in the hymn O qui perpetua. This harmony, unlike fortune, is not unsteady because it is not fragmented by competing forces; rather ‘What binds all things to order, governing earth and sea and sky, is love’.48 From the cosmic level Philosophy descends to that of human community: ‘And love joins people too by a sacred bond’.49 Finally, she applies this to the soul itself: ‘O happy race of men, if the love that rules the stars, may also rule your hearts’.50 The blinded prisoner does not yet grasp that the true engine of the world is not competition among various forces, but the deep harmony forged by the cosmic love, which binds things together. Book III offers an entire inventory of false sources of happiness (felicitas): fame, wealth, glory, etc., while the prisoner is being moved towards the awareness of true happiness: beatitudo. After the intonation of the great Boethian hymn O qui perpetua, the sick philosopher starts to see that there is a providential arrangement of the cosmos: ‘O you, who in perpetual order govern the universe, Creator of heaven and earth, who bid time ever move, and resting still grant motion to all else’.51 Lady Philosophy attempts to re-order the chaotic movements of the prisoner’s soul by incrementally bringing him to the realization that ‘all is bound together by most firm reasoning’.52 Only after encountering and grasping the reasonable and providential order of the cosmos can the soul turn within itself and start reordering its own movements ‘into a circle’. Throughout the entire process the prisoner is being guided and nudged by the philosophical healer. Whoever with deep thought seeks out the truth And wants not to go wrong down devious ways, Must on himself turn back the light of his inward vision, Bending and forcing his far-reaching movements Into a circle and must teach his mind, Whatever she is striving for without, Removed within her treasury to grasp.53

The goal of Lady Philosophy is not just to make him realize or acquiesce, but also to help him rearrange the motions of his soul in order to actually have 48

Boethius, De consol. II 8, 226: Terras ac pelagus regens et caelo imperitans amor. Boethius, De consol. II 8, 226: Hic sancto populos quoque iunctos foedere continet, hic et coniugii sacrum castis nectit amoribus. 50 Boethius, De consol. II 8, 226: O felix hominum genus, si vestros animos amor quo caelum regitur regat. 51 Boethius, De consol. III 9, 270: O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas terrarium caelique sator qui tempus ab aevo ire iubes stabilisque manens da cuncta moveri. 52 Boethius, De consol. III 11, 286: … cuncta enim firmissimis nexa rationibus constat. 53 Boethius, De consol. III 11, 296: Quisquis profunda mente uestigat uerum cupitque nullis ille deuiis falli in se reuoluat intimi lucem uisus longosque in orbem cogat inflectens motus; animumque doceat quicquid extra molitur suis retrusum possidere thesauris. 49

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the glimpse of this cosmic order. Throughout the dialogue, there is a constant back and forth between the ordering of the soul and the perception of cosmic harmony, but it is only in book V that she will finally focus on the faculties of the soul as such. The distinction made here between providence and fate constitutes the crux of the dialogue: providence is the perspective on the world from the level of divine reason, as the things are conceived and ordered by the divine mind which binds them in perfect harmony. However, as the predicament of the prisoner shows, the human perspective does not reach the level of providence because it is deceived by its own limitations and ignorance. Being encumbered by various distractions, it perceives only the lower image of providence, i.e. fate: For providence is the divine reason itself, established in the highest ruler of all things, the reason which disposes all things that exist; but fate is a disposition inherent in the movable things, through which providence binds all things together, each in its own proper ordering. For providence embraces all things together, though they are different, though they are infinite; but fate arranges as to their motion separate things, distributes in place, form and time; so that this unfolding of temporal order being united in foresight of the divine mind is providence, and the same unity when distributed and unfolded in time is called fate.54

The task of the human mind is to raise itself as far as possible to the level of stability and permanence of the divine mind. This ascent allows one to realize that even temporal, changeable things pertaining to fate are ultimately rooted in the permanence and uniformity of providence. In order to convey this, Lady Philosophy uses the image of concentric spheres which move from an indivisible, immovable center: ‘And if anything is joined or associated to the center, it is gathered into its simplicity and ceases to spread and diffuse itself; in a similar manner, that which is furthest separated from the principal mind is entangled in the tighter meshes of fate, and a thing is the more free from fate, the more closely it moves towards the center of things’.55 Thus, as one ascends, one discovers that fate itself moves towards the immovable center and source; this ascent is like moving from the periphery where the world seems to be run by blind forces towards the center where necessity and freedom coincide. 54 Boethius, De consol. IV 6, 358: nam prouidentia est ipsa illa diuina ratio in summo omnium principe constituta quae cuncta disponit, fatum uero inhaerens rebus mobilibus dispositio per quam prouidentia suis quaeque nectit ordinibus. Prouidentia namque cuncta pariter quamuis diuersa quamuis infinita complectitur, fatum uero singula digerit in motum locis, formis ac temporibus distributa, ut haec temporalis ordinis explicatio in diuinae mentis adunata prospectum prouidentia sit, eadem uero adunatio digesta atque explicata temporibus fatum uocetur. 55 Boethius, De consol. IV 6, 360: … si quid uero illi se medio conectat et societ in simplicitatem cogitur diffundique ac diffluere cessat: simili ratione quod longius a prima mente discedit maioribus fati nexibus implicatur ac tanto aliquid fato liberum est quanto illum rerum cardinem uicinius petit.

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In the same way, the perceived injustice of the prisoner is also the consequence of lingering on the outside circles as it were. In the beginning the prisoner perceives fate as something deeply unfair, because he does not comprehend in what way the exterior circle of fate is also rooted in the harmonious center of providence. Only after progressively healing and opening his eyes and thus raising his mind out of the mire of despondency, does Lady Philosophy turn him properly within in order to rearrange the faculties of the soul. She first reminds the prisoner how the faculties are structured and then teaches him how to proceed through an investigation of the faculties in order to ascend: ‘Sense, imagination, reason and intelligence look at man himself in different ways. For sense examines the shape set in the underlying matter, imagination the shape alone without the matter; while reason surpasses this too and examines with a universal consideration the specific form itself which is present in single individuals. But the eye of intelligence is set higher still’.56 After she gives him an outline of the levels of knowledge as they are reflected in the human faculties, Lady Philosophy helps the prisoner ascend from the senses through memory, and imagination to reason, and ultimately to the intellect which will bring one close to the divine mind. ‘Now, if just as we have a share in reason, so we could possess the judgment belonging to the divine mind, then just as so we have judged that imagination and sense ought to give way to reason, so we should think it most just that human reason should submit to the divine mind’.57 Through the instruction of Lady Philosophy, Boethius, the despondent prisoner who in his self-centeredness forgot of his art, is cured and is finally able to ascend from the narrow perception of the senses to the level of intelligence, passing though the levels of imagination and reason to the level of intelligible where he can perceive; from here, he ultimately reaches the contemplation of supreme intelligence. This ascent allows him to become aware of the interconnectedness of the elements and ultimately of their cohesion: he moves from a very narrow vision of things to that of divine intelligence (within himself and in the cosmos), which allows him to grasp underlying providence. Philosophy urges the prisoner to rise to this level: ‘Wherefore let us be raised up, if we can, to the height of that highest intelligence; for there reason will see that which cannot be seen in herself’.58 56 Boethius, De consol. V. 4, 410: Ipsum quoque hominem aliter sensus, aliter imaginatio, aliter ratio, aliter intellegentia contuetur. Sensus enim figuram in subiecta materia constitutam, imaginatio uero solam sine materia iudicat figuram. Ratio uero hanc quoque transcendit speciemque ipsam quae singularibus inest uniuersali consideratione perpendit. Intellegentiae uero celsior oculus exsistit. 57 Boethius, De consol. V 5, 418: Si igitur uti rationis participes sumus ita diuinae iudicium mentis habere possemus, sicuti imaginationem sensumque rationi cedere oportere iudicauimus sic diuinae sese menti humanam summittere rationem iustissimum censeremus. 58 Boethius, De consol. V 5, 418: Quare in illius summae intelligentiae cacumen, si possumus, erigamur; illic enim ratio videbit quod in se non potest intueri.

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In De consolatione, Boethius takes Augustine’s dialogues to another level by making the performative exercise aspect more evident. This is obvious throughout the dialogue, in the injunctions, chastisements, encouragements of Lady Philosophy. At the end of the book it appears as if the command to the prisoner is also addressed to the reader, namely to start practicing training the mind in order to attain contemplation. ‘Turn away then from vices, cultivate virtues, lift up your mind to righteous hopes, offer up humble prayers to heaven. A great necessity is solemnly ordained for you if you do not want to deceive yourself, to do good when you act before the eyes of a judge who sees all things’.59 4. Eriugena, Periphyseon Eriugena’s magnum opus, the Periphyseon is an extensive, meandering dialogue between a teacher (Nutritor) and pupil (Alumnus); the scope and character of this dialogue have been hotly debated; I have ventured an argument that the scope of the dialogue actually is to perform an exercise of dialectic by dividing and then reassembling the divisions of the greatest genus of all: natura. However, what starts as a simple exercise of dialectic, as a small stream as it were, will meander into unexpected rivers and will attempt to encompass the entire scope of creation. The extrapolation from a simple exercise of dialectic to a reading of creation as a whole can be explained through the status of the human being as the officina omnium. This new vision of the role and status of the human being, which Eriugena learns from Maximus, reconfigures the role of the participants in the philosophical dialogue and greatly expands the role and character of the arts.60 For Eriugena, as for his predecessors, the liberal arts are the necessary correction spectacles the soul needs in order to relearn the right view of creation and thus to be able to return to the primordial condition. ‘For although through the accident of its transgression of the divine command whereby it became forgetful of itself and its creator the mind is born unskilled and unwise, yet when it is reformed by the rules of doctrine (doctrinae regulis) it may discover again in itself its God and itself and its skill and the discipline’.61 59 Boethius, De consol. V 6, 434: Aversamini igitur vitia, colite virtutes ad rectas spes animum sublevate, humiles preces in excelsis porrigite. Magna vobis est, si dissmulare non vultis, necessitas indicta probitatis, cum ante oculos iudicis concta cernentis. 60 Adrian Guiu, ‘Le Periphyseon d’Érigène comme une extrapolation de l’Ambiguum 41 de Maxime le Confesseur’, Les Études philosophiques 104 (2013), 79-99; id., ‘“Reading the Two Books”: Exegesis and Natural Contemplation in the Periphyseon’, in Eriugena and Creation (Turnhout, 2014), 263-90. 61 For the citations from the Periphyseon, I will use Édouard Jeauneau, Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon curavit Eduardus A. Jeauneau, 5 vol., CChr.CM 161, 162, 163, 164 and 165 (Turnhout, 1996-2003). The Periphyseon is cited according to the following translations:

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As Augustine and Boethius before him, Eriugena sees a deep correspondence between the arts, the dialogue (as dialectic in action) and the contemplation of the cosmos. In this respect, the Periphyseon is quite similar to Augustine’s early dialogues and to Plato’s dialogues. In the previous chapter, I have sketched a horizon against which to read the Periphyseon as an exercitatio animi. Seeing the Periphyseon in this tradition allows us to have a better understanding of the issue of genre but also accounts for the ‘missing link’ in Eriugena’s anthropology: the role of ethics and spiritual practice. The exercitatio of the dialogue is primarily realized through the careful application of the rules of reason to the interpretation of scripture and the reading of the book of nature. ‘For the text of Holy Scripture is all interrelated, and is a tissue of indirect and oblique allusions worthy of Daedalus. But the Holy Spirit did not ordain this to spite our understanding […] but to exercise it and make it worthy of the reward of its effort and ingenuity: the reward of those who labour in the study of Holy Scripture, which is pure and perfect understanding’.62 Interpreting scripture is like finding one’s way through a true labyrinth; the difficulty is almost welcome since it challenges the reader to train and labour. Although the Periphyseon does not dwell too much on ascetic practice, it could be argued that the role of askesis is fulfilled by the exercise of reforming the mind by making it go through the regimen of the liberal arts and also by sustained and complex exegesis of scripture: the careful weighing of various alternatives of exegesis; the way the discussants caution each other to focus on the appropriate levels of exegesis; the constant negotiations between examples and the multitude of dilemmas and detours which the conversation goes through. There are many moments in which the difficulty and challenge of the enterprise is signaled. ‘There are many ways, indeed an infinite number, of interpreting the scriptures’.63 The same idea of the multiplicity of meanings is reflected in a passage in the Expositiones: ‘Like a poetical art, through imagined allegories and stories composed for the exercitation of the human souls, thus also theology, like some kind of poetry conforms holy scripture to our mind’s I.P. Sheldon-Williams (ed.), Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae) Book One (Dublin, 1968); Book Two (Dublin, 1970); Book Three, with John O’Meara (Dublin, 1981); Book Four, ed. E. Jeauneau (Dublin, 1995). There is a complete English translation by I.P. Sheldon-Williams and J.J. O’Meara, published in John J. O’Meara (ed.), Eriugena. Periphyseon (Dumbarton Oaks, Montréal, 1987); Periph. IV 767C, CChr.CM 164, 38: Quamuis enim imperita et insipiens nasci uideatur (quod ei accidit diuini transgressione mandati, qua et suimet et creatoris sui oblita est), doctrinae tamen regulis reformata, deum suum et se ipsam suique peritiam et disciplinam … potest reperire. 62 Periph. V 1010B, CChr.CM 165, 210: Concatenatus quippe est divinae scripturae contextus daedalicisque diverticulis et obliquitatibus perplexus. Neque hoc spiritus sanctus fecit invidia intelligendi sed studio nostram intelligentiam exercendi sudorisque et inventionis praemii reddendi. 63 Periph. IV 749D, CChr.CM 164, 13: Est enim multiplex et infinitus divinorum eloquiorum intellectus.

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thinking and helps us pass from the external, sensible towards the perfect knowledge of intelligible’.64 This infinity is not something daunting, but rather is regarded as a welcome pedagogical opportunity. Scripture for Eriugena is like a training ground, a place where the willing soul is invited to train itself through various interpretative exercises in order to progressively transit from exterior image to a more intelligible understanding and thus get used to ascend also ontologically. Thus the density and variety of scripture is not problematic, but welcome to Eriugena; he regards the multiplicity of meanings and layers as a necessary exercise ground for those who want to retrain their ability to contemplate the divine. The exercitatio of the dialogue performed as a multiplicity of contemplations (multiplex theoriae) corresponds to the variety of transformations of created things within creation and it ultimately reflects, as if in a mirror, the refraction of the infinite divine truth; this plurality of perspectives reflects the change and mutability observed in creation and the polyvalence of scripture and our limited ability to grasp the ungraspable as it is reflected in these mirrors. Therefore, the transformations observed at various levels intend to correct and to provide transformative healing to the readers and the participants. And if anyone should argue that the transformations through birth and dissolution of sensible bodies within themselves are the result of sin … let him remember that in the spatial and temporal changes of nature consist the beauty and the order of the whole visible creature and that mutability and variety have no cause but the dispositions of the Divine Providence and that they rather contribute to the perfecting of human nature and to its recall to its Creator than to the punishment of sin. For in this manner of spiritual medicine God wanted to call back his image both into himself and to him, so that fatigued and trained by the tedium of mutable things, it would desire to contemplate the stability of immutable and eternal things, would ardently hunger for the incommutable forms of true so as to rest in their beauty without any variety.65 64 Eriugena, Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae Expositiones in Ierarchiam coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CChr.CM 21 (Turnhout, 1975), 24.146-51: … quemadmodum ars poetica per fictas fabulas allegoricasque similitudines, moralem doctrinam seu physicam componunt ad humanorum animorum exercitationem … ita theologia, ueluti quaedam poetria, sanctam scripturae fictis imaginationibus ad consultum nostri animi et reductionem a corporalibus sensibus exterioribus, ueluti ex quadam imperfecta pueritia, in rerum intelligibilium perfectam cognitionem, tamquam in quamdam interioris hominis grandeuitatem conformat. 65 Periph. V 959B, CChr.CM 165, 138-9: Et si quis dixerit sensibilium corporum in semet ipsis transfusiones per generationem et solutionem corporum propter peccatum humanae naturae fieri … videat totius visibilis creaturae ordinem et pulchritudinem non nisi in vicissitudinibus rerum per loca et tempora constare, illasque vicissitudines ac varietates non aliunde nisi divina providentia et administratione causas ducere, et plus ad humanae naturae eruditionem et a creatorem suum revocationem factas fuisse, quam ad peccati ultionem. Eo enim modo spiritualis medicinae imaginem suam deus voluit et in se ipsam et ad se ipsum revocare, ut rerum mutabilium taedio fatigata et exercitata immutabilium aeternorumque stabilitatem contemplari desideraret ardenterque verorum incommutabiles species appeteret, in quarum absque ulla varietate pulchritudine quiesceret.

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Thus, in Eriugena’s view, reading scripture and creation provides a necessary adjustment to dealing with multiplicity and learning to discern the divine behind it. However, first learning to read scripture one becomes a better reader and observer of creation. The Bible is the center piece of Eriugena’s pedagogical program which is meant to lead the soul back to God. Thus, the tedious exegesis of the Hexaemeron provides a privileged training ground for achieving the contemplation of creation but also a careful consideration of visible creation, that will allow the discussants and the readers to discern God’s theophanic presence. The fallen soul needs this training through the figures and difficulties of scripture in order to be able to re-learn the correct reading of the book of creation. The diverse, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory character of the dialogue, with all its meandering moments and fragmentations, reflects the disparate tensions in human being and the resulting fragmented character of the cosmos. So the travail and effort of the enterprise represents the travail to harmonize the contradictions and tensions of interpretation. But this effort also extends to creation. However, even after the extensive toil of the dialogue, Eriugena believes the Periphyseon is only an imperfect, mirror-like reflection of the infinite divine truth; therefore, its exemplary dialogical exercise of division and analysis needs to be picked up over again by the labors of its readers; each reader has the task of ‘treading on the path of reason’ (herein Eriugena’s dialogue serves as an example) with diligence and caution in order to attain the contemplation of Truth. The symphony of ideas will be heard much more clearly as the dialogue progresses and as the protagonists learn to discern the underlying harmony that obtains between apparent contradictions. This presupposes a sustained effort of navigating through the treacherous territory of various interpretations and authorities. The Alumnus is oftentimes on the brink of losing heart and confidence of ever reaching a clear view: ‘I think that the obscurity of the reasoning is impenetrable and were it not that he who is being sought Himself extends his aid to those who seek him […]’.66 This sign of despondence comes as the two navigate one of the most hazardous stretches of the journey: the issue of God’s ignorance and the unknowable character of created substances. The reassuring words of the Nutritor mitigate the anxiety and point towards the final reward of their effort. Do not be troubled but rather be of good heart. For this discussion is drawing us towards an understanding of ourselves and teaching us the things which it is right to think and understand and declare about our God, He being our Guide. For the more obscure and

66 Periph. II 587B, CChr.CM 162, 85: Praesentis huius ratiocinationis caliginem inaccesibilem esse aestimo, et nisi ipse qui quaeritur dextram suam quaerentibus se praetendat […]

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wearisome it will be thought at the beginning of the inquiry, the more lucid and fruitful it will turn out to be.67

This encouraging statement could very well apply to the reader who might lose patience with the lengthy detours which seem to lead nowhere. The conviction of the teacher, and of Eriugena, is that these detours are necessary because they allow the participants and the readers to exercise themselves and to eventually reach the consciousness of the oneness underlying plurality. The dialogue allows the readers themselves to partake in the ascent to the higher, intelligible perspective. The sometimes meandering and convoluted trajectory of the dialogue is an exercise meant to achieve the ascent of the mind. Dermot Moran also sees the dialogue as being crucial to the process of self-understanding: ‘The aim of dialogue must be to produce a unity of minds and self-integration which Eriugena sees as fundamental to both philosophy and Christian salvation’.68 Elisabeth Kendig has also noted that reflexive character of the dialogue.69 The back and forth exchange of ideas recreates each interlocutor in the other and this allows them to ascend beyond contractions and dualities towards an intellectual synthesis. So, as Kendig argues, the dialogue realizes the very ideas it is dealing with, and the participants themselves are the ones who realize them. I would take a step further and add that the minds of the readers are also drawn into the transformative process of the dialogue. Eriugena says: For when we enter upon a discussion together the same thing happens: each of us is created in the other: for when I understand what you understand I am made your understanding, and in a certain way that cannot be described I am created in you. In the same way when you clearly understand what I clearly understand, you are made my understanding and of two understandings is made one, formed from that which we both clearly and without doubt understand.70

The reciprocity of the conversation leads to ever deeper levels of inter-subjectivity and this allows the discussants go beyond their strict individualities. The dialogue meanders, but at the same time ascends to higher levels of viewing 67

Periph. II 587D, CChr.CM 162, 85: Ne turbere, se magis bono animo esto. Haec enim consideratio nos ad nos ipsos intelligendos attrahit, et ad ea quae pie de deo nostro cogitanda et intelligenda et pronuntianda sunt ipso preeunte perducit. 68 Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 72. 69 This point was made very convincingly by Elisabeth Kendig in a recent article: ‘La forme dialogique dans le Periphyseon: Recréer l’esprit’, Les Études philosophiques No. 1, Érigène (2013), 101-19. 70 Periph. IV 780B-C, CChr.CM 164, 57: Nam et nos, dum disputamus, in nobismet inuicem efficimur. Siquidem dum intelligo quid intelligis, intellectus tuus efficior, et ineffabili quodam modo in te factus sum. Similiter quando pure intelligis quod ego plane intelligo, intellectus meus efficeris, ac de duobus intellectibus fit unus, ab eo quod ambo sincere et incunctanter intelligimus formatus.

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the whole as if ascending a spiral.71 While not immediately evident, this progression is embedded in the dialogue; the back and forth of the exchanges allows the teacher and his pupil to reach higher levels of understanding, until they attain the level of the intellect in which there is little or no duality. Thus, the moments of recapitulation and repetition during the long conversational journey are not random and superfluous but are moments in which the conversation reaches a new level in the return, and the discussants need to catch their breath and take stock of the trodden path. However, the various moments of anakephalaiosis (recapitulation) can also be related to the Neoplatonic notion of recollection as the reditus to the divine source.72 As they grasp certain issues, these are integrated into their intellect and are thus unified. ‘Yes, but I should like you to make an anakephalaiosis or recapitulation which may embrace in the form of a conclusion and make precise all the scattered remarks which you have made about paradise’.73 But each recapitulation brings the scattered threads together and lifts the conversation to a higher level of contemplation. The conversants always keep each other in check and reign in any rushing ahead. The application of the arts is performed within the dialogue since without the ‘other’ the un-trained reason could get carried away in the wrong direction. The path of reason has to be trodden with patience, being ready to take all necessary detours and meanderings. When the student gets impatient with the teacher for dwelling too long on the subject of the return, the Nutritor reminds him that the matter is difficult and that he would rather review than risk overlooking an important aspect: ‘When a subject is complicated and has many different aspects, it is necessary that the explanation should be complicated and repetitive. And perhaps there are not a few who would prefer to hear the explanation repeated many times than have a brief and cursory summary of matters which often escape the mind’s eye’.74 One finds such an approach in an example in Book V. After a tedious discussion of the issue of hell, the teacher congratulates the student for being able to escape the trap of ignorance. The student replies triumphantly: ‘For I deliberately set that trap for myself, that is, I deliberately raised those questions, so that I should no longer be caught in it, but escaping therefrom should see with a clear mind … 71 Jeauneau has referred to the helicoidale trajectory of the dialogue; see the introduction to Jean Scot, L’Homélie sur la prologue de Jean (Paris, 1969), 45. 72 See D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), 74: ‘Of course recapitulation is itself a form of recollection or return of all things to the One. In gathering everything together, the participants are themselves participating in the cosmic cycle of nature’. 73 Periph. IV 829B, CChr.CM 164, 124: Sed velim anakephalaiosin (hoc est recapitulationem) a te fieri, quae veluti modo quodam conclusionis ea, quae sparsim dicta sunt de paradiso, in unam quondam complexionem atque diffiniat. 74 Periph. V 978C, CChr.CM 165, 165: Perplexaque materia difficillimarumque rerum anfractus multiplicem perplexamque ratiocinationem exigunt. Et fortassis non deerunt quibus magis placebit frequens earundum rerum repetitio quam brevis cursimque ingrediens de his quae saepe mentis aciem fugiunt intimatio.

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that the unification of the universal nature consists of the coming together of many mutually opposed elements […]’.75 At the beginning of Book IV, as the conversants are set to ascend to a higher level of interpretation, they are aware of the difficulty of the task and encourage each other to confront the challenge. This enterprise is supposed to help reason enhance her power through training. Even seemingly impenetrable passages can be dealt with, if reason exercises itself enough. For reason, not inexperienced in these waters, fearing neither the threats of the waves nor windings nor the Syrtes nor rocks, shall speed our course: indeed she finds it sweeter to exercise her skill in the hidden straits of the Ocean of Divinity than idly to bask in the smooth and open waters, where she cannot display her power.76

At a certain moment the student chastises the teacher for progressing too quickly and thus risking to reach wrong conclusions: ‘The path of reasoning must be trodden step by step lest we arrive at conclusions that are hasty and rash’.77 They are reminding themselves that the field of scripture is full of thistles and thorns and therefore it is not easy to till, ‘for in the sweat of her brow is she to get her bread, and to follow with unflagging steps of investigation the study of wisdom, undaunted by the seeming impassability of the path “until she finds the place of the Lord”’.78 The great prayer, which appears towards the end of the dialogue, intimates in a suggestive way the argument of the whole Periphyseon. Could the Periphyseon itself be conceived as a banquet of multiple contemplations, a banquet which anticipates, and in its own way prepares, the spiritual banquet of true knowledge? As the dialogue itself exemplifies, this banquet is reached by passing through the words and forms found in the books of divine manifestation (scripture and creation) but also through the exchange of words in conversation. The ultimate goal of the dialogical banquet of the Periphyseon is that it finally joins the intelligible, banquet of knowledge where Christ himself is the true contemplation of those who attend.

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Periph. V 965C, CChr.CM 165, 147: Nam retia quae tetendi (hoc est problemata quae posui) propterea a me tensa sunt, ne diutius in eis caperer, se ab eis absolutus libero mentis contuitu clare perspicerem universae naturae adunationem ex diversis sibique oppositis copulari… 76 Periph. IV 744B, CChr.CM 164, 5: Accelerat nanque ratio perita ponti, nullas veretur minas, nullos afractus syrtesque cautesue formidat, cui delectabilius est in abditis divini oceani fretibus virtutem fretibus virtutem suam exercere, quam in planis apertisque otiose quiescere, ubi vim suam non valet aperire. 77 Periph. III 657C, CChr.CM 163, 56: Nimium acceleras. Pedetemptim ratiocinationis ingredienda est via, ne quid incaute temereque statuamus. 78 Periph. IV 744B, CChr.CM 164, 5: In sudore enim vultus sui panem suum ipsa iussa est vesci, terramque sanctae scripturae, spinas et tribulos (hoc est divinorum intellectum exilem densitatem) sibi germinatemque studiumque sapientiae spernentibus inviam assiduis theoriae gressibus lustrare.

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5. Conclusion I have argued that Eriugena’s grand dialogue, Periphyseon, builds on ideas and methods found in the earlier philosophical dialogue tradition: it combines the enkyklios paideia tradition with the philosophical dialogue tradition in two essential ways: like Augustine’s early dialogues and Boethius’s De Consolatione, the Periphyseon is an exercitatio and training ground (mostly as a passing through the enkyklios paideia) geared towards healing and ordering the soul as a preparation for the contemplation of creation. The dialogue as a performative exercise helps us better understand the scope and character of the Periphyseon: the Nutritor and the Alumnus do not just expound the exitus and reditus of creation by way of the division and analysis of the genus natura, but attempt to perform it. Thus, for Eriugena, as for Augustine and Boethius, the dialogue is much more than a genre: it is a method in the true sense of the word: met-hodos,79 a way and pursuit to return to God. This comparison helped us to shed light on several elements of the ancient dialogue traditions that can be observed in the Periphyseon: the dialogue as an arena of training and application of the arts (disciplina artium) and as an attempt to return (albeit in a meandering way) to the creative divine source. For Augustine, Boethius and Eriugena, the detour of natural contemplation (theoria physike) is essential and necessary for being able to return to God and to oneself; the cosmic detour is realized through the dialogue; the dialogue as a meditative exercise is the mediation that weaves the variety of perspectives and approaches into a unitary (although variegated tapestry: the exercise of the dialogue brings together physics (theoria physike) with exegesis (the reading of scripture) and with ethical training.80 The regimen of the dialogue guided and restrained by the disciplina of the arts (as the embodiment of reason and authority) achieves the mediation and the transitus necessary in order to be able to return to God. Eriugena, like Augustine and Boethius, believes that both the epistemological and the cosmological ascent are mediated through the dialogue; all three believe that truth can only be attained in the exchange of ideas and the mediation of the dialogue as an exercise of listening and being corrected by other minds; it is through the dialogue that the multiplex theoria is carried out. This exercise 79 This is also intimated by Dermot Moran: ‘Furthermore, it is clear that the dialogue is written not merely to instruct and impart knowledge, but also to provide a vehicle for travelling the road towards spiritual enlightenment, and ultimately gaining unity with the Truth itself, which is God’. D. Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), 68. 80 So, these dialogues rehash in different ways and with difference nuances the traditional Stoic division of knowledge: ethics, logic and physics.

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yields a symphonic banquet of a variety of voices and perspectives. Thus, each interlocutor is made in the intellect of the other, as the Nutritor and the Alumnus put it, and it is through this reciprocal mediation that they ascend the rungs of the epistemological and ontological ladder in order to reach the level of intellectual knowledge.

RESPONSES

Response Willemien OTTEN, Chicago, IL, USA

Session 1: God/Theology This response covers the first of two Eriugena-workshop-sessions, in addition to which a third session was held, directed by Prof. Ilaria Ramelli and aimed to shed fresh light on a new and yet perennial theme in Eriugena, namely the reception of his sources in patristic thought and ancient philosophy. The theme is perennial, insofar as it is a recognized feature of Eriugena’s reasoning that he quotes his sources profusely and even puts whole chunks of them on the page, thereby transforming them into powerful evidence to reckon with. His long quotations in Periphyseon IV from Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio, which he had translated into Latin as Sermo de Imagine, demonstrate just how much he likes to anchor his views in tradition. Whether or not in doing so he privileges the Eastern over the Western tradition is a sub question of this perennial problem. Yet there is a newness to the question of sources as well, insofar it is now – more than in previous generations – appreciated that Eriugena’s Periphyseon is more than a composite text. We find multiple arguments running through the Periphyseon, connecting its beginning with its ending. These arguments show how Eriugena turns his sources into effective resources that can be strategically employed to bolster his views and support a variety of tailor-made points that are for the main part his own. It is as if the way in which Eriugena cites or summarizes his sources and, on occasion, even opposes them frees up much needed space for original thought, thought that befits the Neoplatonic tradition in myriad ways. Eriugena’s borrowing and citation practice has been studied since the beginning days of SPES (the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies founded in 1970), notably by John O’Meara and Giulio d’Onofrio.1 The integrity of Eriugena’s arguments as his own, meanwhile, has been highlighted especially in the work of Werner Beierwaltes and Edouard Jeauneau, who passed away respectively in 2019 and 2020. Of course, Jeauneau’s 1 John J. O’Meara, ‘“Magnorum virorum quendam consensum velimus machinari” (840D): Eriugena’s Use of Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram in the Periphyseon’, in W. Beierwaltes (ed.), Eriugena. Studien zu seinen Quellen (Heidelberg, 1980), 105-16; G. d’Onofrio, ‘The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot’s Periphyseon’, in B. McGinn and W. Otten (eds), Eriugena: East and West (Notre Dame, 1994), 115-40.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 265-272. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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critical edition of the Periphyseon and nearly all of Eriugena’s other works stands as an unparalleled contribution that puts current interpretive work on a sure footing. The first of the two sessions was devoted to Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism and Its Sources and focused on the themes of God and Theology. It opened with Andrew Louth’s paper on ‘Eriugena and Maximos on Division of Beings’. In his paper Louth makes some important programmatic comments that are elucidating and worth highlighting. The most significant one may well be that Eriugena thought everything, including his Greek sources, through in Latin. Louth is right that the language-element is indeed an important aspect of Eriugena’s oeuvre, which confronts us afresh with the question of whether he is a Greek or a Latin thinker. Yet Louth complicates this traditional dilemma of Eriugenastudies by stating that Eriugena absorbs his Greek sources in Latin. With specific regard to the influence of Maximus, Eriugena famously translated his Ambigua ad Iohannem (but seems to have been unaware of the Ambigua ad Thomam) and the Quaestiones ad Thalassium. Louth considers him with this selection to have captured the very heart of Maximian brilliance. But Eriugena goes even further for Louth in that he is not only enamored of Maximus as a single author but, through him, reveals a deeper attraction to the Byzantine synthesis and its central genius. In other words, Eriugena may digest his Greek sources in Latin but he knows very well what their strength is. Louth contrasts this with how Eriugena is also Augustinian. He indeed is but in such a way that he can also use Augustine against himself, at least, for example, against how Gottschalk cited him on predestination. This clever use of Augustine against Augustine does not seem to be applied to the Greeks. And yet, for all his keen insight into the brilliance of the Greek genius, Louth also finds fault with Eriugena. Not surprisingly, he does so in the Irishman’s understanding of Maximus’ cosmology. Maximus’ five diaireseis from Ambigua 41 are well-known to Eriugena, and are cited early in Book II. Also, the Periphyseon opens with divisions, a twofold and a fourfold one. The Periphyseon may have originated as a dialectical exercise, as Louth remarks, but then turned cosmological, which is reflected in his absorption of Maximus’ diaireseis and their integration with the famous fourfold division of nature. But that is where the similarity ends. Louth holds that in Maximus the divisions were to end in humanity, which as a bond and microcosm was to hold them all together. But the Fall forced God’s hand, resulting in the incarnation of the Word as a way to recapitulate the divisions of nature and reestablish the cosmos. Louth stresses that in Maximus there is a clear difference between God and nature, which is incomprehensible and for which he uses the term ‘unknowing’, while Eriugena is of course known for his four forms of nature, by which he makes the latter a central concept that includes God. Clearly, for all his capturing of Maximian brilliance, Eriugena is not dissuaded from following his own course. Maybe that is not unlike how he handled Augustine after all.

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The second paper in the session was Dermot Moran’s ‘Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources’. It aligns well with Louth’s paper in that the focus is also on the connection between the fourfold division and a fivefold one. But Moran does not mean the five diaireseis or divisions in Maximus of Ambigua 41. Instead he is focused on the first division of nature in the Periphyseon, a twofold one into being and non-being, of which Eriugena gives a fivefold interpretation after he has laid out the fourfold division. Moran suggests that Maximus may well have suggested the idea of a fivefold interpretation of Eriugena’s first division. Moran’s actual discussion of the fivefold interpretation of Eriugena’s first division into being and non-being comes up later in the paper, which on the whole presents us with a ‘grand tour d’horizon’ of the use of negation in the Periphyseon. A central building-block of Moran’s theory of Eriugenian negation is his claim that Eriugena’s work reflects in the end, with a term derived from Schelling, a meontology, by which he means a discussion of the various meanings of nonbeing. Moran’s paper guides us through these different meanings, drawing on available scholarly literature on Eriugena and his sources while using them as, indeed, building-blocks of his larger view of Eriugena as a meontologist. In Eriugena’s discussion of modes of non-being an important role is played by a large excursion on nothingness found in Periphyseon III 634A-690B; it has fittingly been called a tractatus de nihilo. A well-known take-away from that discussion, which treats the various ways in which non-being can be interpreted is that God is himself called Nothing, which Eriugena justifies with the claim that he is called by this name in the scriptures, after which the theologians then took it to mean ‘beyond being’. God is ‘not this nor that nor anything’ (Periphyson I 510C), so we may conclude; he rather is the negation of essence. Things are not always so clear-cut in Eriugena, however, and to bring this out Moran reserves considerable room in his discussion for the idea, first developed by Werner Beierwaltes, of duplex theoria, by which he means that Eriugena can take different viewpoints, based on which he classifies entities either as being or non-being. Different theoriai or contemplationes can hence lead to different conclusions. Applying this to nothingness, Eriugena can take nothing to mean nihil per privationem, that is, the absence of being, or nihil per excellentiam, that is, nothing by excellence; the latter becomes an exclusive designation of God. In a fascinating part of his paper, Moran makes clear that Eriugena favors the reading of nihil per excellentiam, in which he is guided and inspired by Dionysius and his practice of negative theology, which had such an impact on Eriugena. But Moran then pivots by stating that for Eriugena duplex theoria can in fact be seen as shorthand for a more layered approach, in which he includes the aforementioned fivefold interpretation of the first division of nature into being and non-being. These modes of interpretation are better seen as contemplations of nature, with their fivefold format a subtle nod perhaps to Maximus.

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In terms of Eriugena’s sources for all this, we see the usual suspects Augustine and Dionysius, who according to D’Onofrio’s seminal treatment of their authority in the Periphyseon never contradict each other, occupy a prominent position in Moran’s paper, with Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus in supporting roles. Especially interesting is Moran’s attention for Marius Victorinus, who as first argued by the late Gustavo Piemonte, also has four levels of non-being. Eriugena may have had access to his Ad Candidum and thus known them. Victorinus’ four modes closely correspond with the first three of Eriugena’s five modes of interpretation and the incidental reference in Periphyseon III 634B-C to God as plus quam esse rather than non esse, which could after all imply privation, may be a subtle nod to Marius Victorinus. Victorinus himself does not use the language of per excellentiam but his wording of per praelationem et per eminentiam conveys similar meaning. The focus of the third paper by Paul van Geest was on ‘Augustine and Eriugena on God’s being. Differences in their Apophatic Approach of God’. It struck a different tone in more ways than one. For, Van Geest compares Eriugena with Augustine on the apophatic approach to God. While Moran sees Augustine as a Platonic thinker who could refer to God through negation, in the debate that Eriugena conducts in Periphyseon I about affirmative and negative theology he is usually put in the category of the kataphatic. That is also the case in the scholarly literature about medieval mysticism, such as in Denys Turner’s Darkness of God. Hence, Van Geest’s paper not only is a change of tone after the papers by Louth and Moran, but he imposes on himself the challenging task of reading negative theology as conventionally received in Eriugena against the grain. In doing so Van Geest builds on his 2010-monograph The Incomprehensibility of God. Augustine as a Negative Theologian in which he argues that Augustine has always had an interest in pushing the limits of kataphatic language through engaging in apophatic assertions, even as kataphatic language prevailed in matters of orthodoxy. Van Geest focuses especially on Eriugena’s reflections on divine ousia (essentia) and hyper-ousia (super-essentia); he does so from the perspective of and in connection with Augustine’s translation of ousia vis-à-vis hypostasis in De trinitate. In that treatise Augustine does not want God qualified as substantia, leading him to prefer the Greek hypostasis translated as persona, even if it is less adequate. With respect to Ex. 3:14 Augustine states in De trinitate 7 that essentia is a better term than substantia. As Van Geest sees it, essentia for Augustine reflects divine incomprehensibility and thus brings out the apophatic side of language, while persona is more kataphatic in reflecting relation, with the caveat that Augustine interprets persona more from the side of exegesis and grammar than of the theater given that the term can refer to actors wearing masks. The translation persona also allows the Son to become incarnate (which the term substantia would not), turning Christ into a medicus humilis for a sickened humanity and therein fostering proximity with God.

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Van Geest sees the inadequacy of the Aristotelian categories for Eriugena related to his strong awareness of an ontic and ontological difference between God and the human being as exemplary creature. That divide is emphasized by the use of superlatives for God as a way of denial, and of the term nihil. Some time is spent on the fact that for both Augustine and Eriugena theophanies are important but in the end have an apophatic function as well, in that they do not fully capture the divine essence but only give us a partial revelation. Van Geest concludes by seeing both Augustine and Eriugena as pioneers of negative theology, blaming it on the Pelagian controversy that Augustine has come down to us mostly as the doctor of grace and of kataphatic theology, whereby the tension between God as mystery and as relation has unhelpfully been obscured. The fourth paper by Deirdre Carabine on ‘The Transcendence and Alterity of God in Eriugena and his Patristic Sources’ brings us back to Eriugena’s fascination with Greek thought, but in what we might call a chastened way. Carabine’s fascination is with Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, whereby for her understanding of the latter she engages David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite. Her point in engaging these Greek thinkers is not to underline their transcendence, however, which through their reading by postmodern authors has become the standard interpretation, but to reclaim the transcendentimmanent as a central truth in Christianity. Seeing the work of Jean-Luc Marion, that is, his God-without-Being, and that of Richard Kearney, that is, his anatheism as a discovery-cum-retrieval of God-without-tradition, as normative for this standard, postmodern reading of the tradition, Carabine turns to Bentley Hart for an alternative. That alternative is not an abandonment of apophasis but rather an awareness that God’s alterity is not only expressed in God-talk but is also realistically, rather than merely linguistically, expressed, namely in the imago Dei as the image of uncreated beauty in Gregory of Nyssa, and in the unity with God in unknowing knowing in Dionysius. God then is not entirely without being, as the Derridian-inflected postmodern reading of Marion would have it, but God comes into being in creation, even though we cannot say what that being is because it is cloaked in the otherness of creation, as she puts it, rippling under a sea of invisibility. To live up to the challenge of reclaiming the transcendent-immanent in Eriugena, Carabine turns to Periphyseon III 633A-B where God’s becoming is described as ‘the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated…’, and to the Christological framework found in Eriugena’s ‘Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John’. This homily, which embodies in nuce the exitus and reditus of the entire Periphyseon, shows John as the model of the deification of the soul, as the human becomes God in order to ascend to God. It is Christ’s humility of the incarnation, not unlike what Van Geest argued, that enables this ascent. As the Word became flesh, so the flesh becomes Word, as all things eventually return to their causes in the Word.

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On this point Carabine observes a difference between Gregory and Dionysius on the one hand and Eriugena on the other. Whereas for the former two the apophatic is the basis of the mystical, in Eriugena, created things – just as the evangelist John – return to the alterity of God through their causes until everything is once again just God. If in all the Neoplatonic and postmodern entanglement of the earlier papers we might have lost sight of the fact that the Christian tradition in which Eriugena partakes is steeped in scripture, John Gavin’s paper brings scriptural hermeneutics back in. The fifth in the session, Gavin’s paper on ‘Betrayal and Contemplation: Judas and the Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena’ continues the Christological discussion taken up by Carabine and subtly prepared by Van Geest. It does so by focusing on the biblical figure of Judas to highlight Eriugena’s adoption and adaptation of Neoplatonic themes, which leads Gavin to focus on the topic of Christ’s passion. Following Jeauneau in seeing Dionysius represent the Neoplatonism of Proclus, which in Eriugena gets combined via Augustine with the Neoplatonic legacy of Plotinus and Porphyry, Gavin starts off his paper with a section on Proclus’ commentary on Alcibiades I, no longer considered a Platonic dialogue, where Alcibiades is seen as rivaling with his teacher Socrates through disordered ambition. Gavin compares this with Dionysius’ Judas, who is found in dissimilitude with Christ, no longer sharing his manner of life, and was therefore excluded from the Last Supper. As may be clear from these comments, ethics is an explicit theme in Gavin’s paper and in the paper’s final section on Eriugena Gavin lays out the basic principles of Eriugena’s ethics, namely that unification with and assimilation to God is the goal of creation. Humanity is the workshop of creation, in the Maximian expression that Eriugena borrows, because all things after God are contained in the human, since man was meant to unify the cosmos in himself. To remedy the effects of the fall, however, which derailed this prospect, the Word descends and saves man from disintegration into multiplicity, while allowing him once again to fulfill his unifying mission. Why contemplation matters for Eriugena is because it does the work of fostering divine likeness and establishing right action, allowing the moral agent to see the world as a theophany of the creator. This contemplation will hence allow a renewed growth in similitude. Gavin’s paper culminates in an analysis of the Last Supper in Periphyseon V, where Judas the traitor is contrasted with Simon Peter the contemplative theologian. Judas physical proximity to Christ signals what is his spiritual distance. He betrays Christ’s humanity (humanitatis Christi traditor), while Peter contemplates his divinity. Judas sells the man-God (vendidit hominem deum), and hands over the body (corpus) with a physical kiss, while Peter the theologian knows the God-man and loves him through a spiritual kiss. Gavin concludes by saying that, while there is much similarity in structure between Proclus and Dionysius/Eriugena, the focus on incarnation in the latter two authors sets a different dynamics in motion. For Eriugena, that dynamics does not end with

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Peter but culminates in John as the most esteemed and most contemplative theologian, with privileged access to grace and revelation. The sixth and final paper by Stephen R.L. Clark on ‘Plotinus, Eriugena and the Uncreated Image’, continues Gavin’s path of going back directly to the ancient Neoplatonic sources themselves. In Gavin’s case it was Proclus, the source behind Dionysius, while for Clark it is Plotinus, the source behind many of the Christian Fathers including Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus. Although it is clear that Eriugena did not have direct access to Plotinus, Clark suggests that Plotinus and Eriugena are nevertheless closer in their thought and practice than usually proposed, especially on God, humanity, and creation. Their similarity is not the result of direct influence but reflects rather what Clark calls their rational solutions to endemic problems. Clark states that Eriugena’s division of nature really shows the primacy of the uncreated creator, echoing Moran here, since there are no divisions in God, who is both the wholly other of our reality and the sustaining force of it. Quoting Moran on the point that the genus of the divisions is God and the forms of nature the species, Clark resists the pantheist reading that so worried Hans Urs von Balthasar about Neoplatonic sources, quoting Gregory of Nazianzen (cited by Maximus) to the effect that ‘we are a part of God and slipped down from above’, and calling it a very Plotinian phrase. As part of the same impulse to put worries about the paganism of Neoplatonism to rest, Clark discusses emanation as reflecting the awareness that being contains a mixture of necessity and contingency, which makes him concur that Plotinus’s philosophical teaching, in the words of T. Tollefsen, is more a doctrine of creation than of emanation. Drawing on both Islamic and Jewish sources, such as the book of Wisdom, Clark relativizes the notion of creation as an act of will, since if God created wisdom, how else would he have done so than by wisdom? The role of the primordial causes gets some attention as well in this context; they are in the Word, the second person of the Trinity that becomes incarnate, but they are nevertheless as created creators not entirely similar to the uncreated creator. Of course, the incarnation or Word made flesh is the apparent difference that separates Christian Neoplatonic sources overtly from pagan Neoplatonic ones, and yet Clark does not think Plotinus would have rejected Christian metaphysical thought. If for Maximus the incarnation was the first idea of the Creator, it is not just the remedy for sin but the motivating course for creation, comparable to the role of Zion in rabbinic thought. The phenomenal world is obviously fallen but Clark holds that in Maximus and Eriugena there is room for the notion of return. Eriugena even sees ‘everything created naturally in man necessarily remaining whole and uncorrupted’. In the pagan world memories and the imagination are the cause of conversion, the turnaround, that leads us back to God. If there would be such a thing as incarnation for Plotinus, it would be the incarnation in the World Soul as the fullest expression of Soul herself. Alternatively, the idea of man as microcosm could perhaps also function as

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such, though it is obviously still different from the Christian notion that the man Jesus provides the model for humanity to live by. Still, Plotinus and Eriugena seem to find common ground in the deeper idea that for the ascent to the superessential radiance of the divine shadows (cf. 2Cor. 12:2-4) we should not abandon this world but rather rediscover its original reality. At the end of the session, it seems the clear takeaway of these papers is that critical scholarship has moved beyond the more traditional and schematic statements about Eriugena’s source-influence with which I began, such that he prefers the Greeks to the Latins and thinks through philosophical problems only with the aid of a line-up of available church fathers. Not surprisingly, Eriugena remains very much his own man, even though he does indeed benefit from having access to a holistic Christian tradition that combines East and West. He always insists on presenting his view as holistic by lining up Dionysius and Augustine consistently as allies. Still, it is fair to say he is not tied to any one authority as privileged. Louth’s paper shows this in uncovering not only his loyalty to but also his divergence from Maximus. Moran’s paper does the same by alerting us to his unusual engagement of Marius Victorinus, and Paul van Geest’s paper emphasizes both his proximity to and his difference from Augustine. The latter three papers in this session, by Carabine, Gavin, and Clark, focused more on the actual philosophical positions that Eriugena espoused, with Carabine keen on reclaiming the transcendent-immanent as Eriugena’s preferred Christian position. In her paper as well in those by Gavin and Clark, the latter two focusing explicitly on Eriugena’s ancient philosophical background as independent of as well as mediated by his patristic sources, the theme of Christology occupies an important position as a distinctive feature of Eriugenian thought. As Eriugena-scholarship moves forward, it may be worthwhile to deal more directly and in-depth with Eriugena’s Christology in order to see whether it is indeed a salient feature of his thought per se or a feature that requires us to give it more profile when Eriugena’s Christian thought is compared to that of his non-Christian philosophical sources.

Response Deirdre CARABINE, Kampala, Uganda

This response, which concerns the presentations given in the second session of the conference on Eriugena, directed by Professor Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, reveals a broad understanding of Eriugena as cosmologist, anthropologist, and of course, ‘ontologist’ if such can be used as a description of this most erudite and original of apophatic thinkers. A range of views and interpretations of our ninth-century author can be discerned throughout the contributions, and while many of the themes have received scholarly attention in the past, not all of them have, and at times some surprising conclusions are drawn by the various authors. One common thread that runs through the majority of the essays is Eriugena’s reliance on patristic sources as his ‘go-to’ authors for mapping out the grand schema of the Periphyseon, notably the Neoplatonic triad: monē, proodos, and epistrophē. Fathers from east and west, together with other authors, form a solid basis upon which he ably builds what can only be described as a masterpiece of creative thinking. Beginning with Ramelli’s paper: ‘From God to God: Eriugena’s Protology and Eschatology against the Backdrop of his Patristic Sources’, we find a masterful account of Eriugena’s notion of the return to God through the lens of selected patristic writers (notably Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius). Ramelli’s chapter is an original contribution to our understanding of Eriugena’s understanding of apokatastasis (and indeed brings together the double-stranded thematic of the conference itself). Her elucidation of this subject seems particularly apt in light of the (sometimes heated) discussions raised by orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (2019). Ramelli’s meticulous scholarship on this most difficult – and divisive – of topics, unearths Eriugena’s sources for the striking conclusions he reaches in Book V of the Periphyseon, and challenges the simplistic account of Eriugena’s ontological schema as exitus and reditus. Through her investigation of the ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic theories of apokatastasis, her main concern is the return of creation to God within the Neoplatonic triad of monē, proodos, and epistrophē, which, she argues, Eriugena christianized, albeit in his own way. Her explication of the change of order in this traditional triad is compelling: ‘in Eriugena μονή does not only designate an initial status, prior to πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή, but also indicates the final state of rest’. Here Ramelli’s investigation reveals a scriptural source for Eriugena’s interpretation: John 14:2.

Studia Patristica CXXII, 273-282. © Peeters Publishers, 2021.

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In my view, Ramelli’s underlying conception of the Periphyseon as a hexaëmeral commentary is key to a correct understanding of Eriugena’s use of the terms ἐπιστροφή and ἀποκατάστασις in that he takes his cue from Dionysius, who conflates or uses the terms interchangeably (DN 4.14 [160.15]). However, she clarifies that in Eriugena, epistrophē infers a reversion to source, while apokatastasis means a restoration to original state and at the same time reversion to source. In her explication and nuances of these terms Ramelli’s keen eye takes us on a journey through many of Eriugena’s own sources for a conclusion that was not unorthodox in Greek patristic theology. The intervening centuries appear to have rendered this most patristic of ideas almost heretical in many theological circles (as the many critics of Bentley Hart demonstrate). In her unravelling of the various strands and levels of return to that state of rest when God shall be ‘all in all’ (1Cor. 15:28) – which have been examined in many of her other outstanding academic papers and books – Ramelli strives to assure her readers that Eriugena always preserves an order (according to one’s deeds) in entering the many-mansioned house of God. And while the universality of Christ’s salvific mission means no one can be unredeemed, evil itself will be annihilated (it is, after all, a privation): only substance will remain and be restored into God, Natures ‘shall be finally free from evilness, by means of God’s occultissima operatio (Praed. 2.5), a mysterious operation of divine providence, enabling the final reditus of sinners to God – ‘from God to God’: from God the Creator to God the telos.’ As Ramelli puts it: ‘God punishes sin, which he did not create, but does not condemn his own creatures’ – a logical conclusion since evil is finite and cannot, therefore, be co-eternal with God. Much in the same way that the prodigal son returns and the lost sheep is found (Eriugena uses both scriptural parables to make his point), all shall be saved – although some good souls will be admitted to a ‘special sabbath’ through deification. Eriugena’s mentions of deification are not numerous, and the reader of the Periphyseon could be forgiven for the niggling thought that he was not fully at ease with the idea of the individual soul returning into God, becoming deified; of course, in a true apophatic sense such things cannot be spoken of. Many of the essays in this volume will cast some light on this most enigmatic of topics. While more unravelling of reditus and apokatastasis could surely be done (and is to be anticipated), Ramelli’s discussion brings us to a clearer understanding of the density and complexity of Eriugena’s thought as the carrier of so many patristic ideas and themes into the western medieval world of God talk, not all of which received equal attention, not least apokatastasis. In my view, Ramelli’s insightful explication of the many levels of return, the resolution of all things, through their causes, seeking their end in the rest that is God, points up a theme that appears to be central to a full understanding of Eriugena’s thought, and one that is deserving of further investigation. The contribution of Isidoros Katsos, ‘Eriugena’s Theory of Light and Its Hexaemeral Sources: Rethinking Eriugena’s Knowledge of the Greek Patristic

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Corpus’, is a scholarly detective work that entails a close reading of Basil’s Hexaemeron and Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology to Basil’s Hexaemeron. Katsos begins with Eriugena’s reports on Basil’s corporeal, fiery primordial light and Augustine’s primordial light as intelligible and angelic – the literal and the spiritual senses of light. Katsos’s intention here is to put the supposed familiarity of Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaemeron under the microscope to determine if Eriugena had read Basil directly or via a mediated source (or together with), perhaps Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology. His original suspicion appears to be confirmed according to the evidence he presents. And if this were the case, scholarship would be forced to rethink the influence of Gregory on Eriugena’s cosmology. This would, in effect, dispel the idea promoted by John O’Meara in his monograph on Eriugena, and indeed other scholars since, that Gregory’s influence on Eriugena was limited to the De hominis opificio, which Eriugena translated and refers to as De imagine. In relation to the light thematic, Eriugena’s seemingly constant struggle to reconcile east and west is once more evident as Katsos notes Eriugena taking another position on intelligible light as ‘the first manifestation of sensible effects from their intelligible causes’. Katsos suggests, however, that while Eriugena read Basil closely, it may not have always been an accurate reading: ‘[there is] a significant gap between Basil’s immaterial light (φῶς ἄϋλον) and Eriugena’s allegedly Basilian corporeal light (lux corporea)’. Without repeating the argumentation of the essay, suffice it to say that Katsos concludes, as a result of dense textual analysis, that Eriugena did, in fact, read Basil through the lens of Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary, hence the ‘inaccuracy’ he suggests. The significance of this conclusion relates to Eriugena’s patristic sources. Given that Eriugena mentions only the De hominis opificio of Gregory, and never refers to the Apologia (which is rarely mentioned in medieval hexaëmeral exegesis), suggests that there may well be further instances of dependence on Gregory or indeed other patristic sources. Katsos concludes that further interdisciplinary work is needed here. Reading Katsos’ paper alongside the work of J. McEvoy and others on the metaphysics of light builds up a better picture of our Carolingian author as an astute cosmologist reliant on patristic hexaëmeral commentaries yet anxious to present a theory that brings together not only east and west, but also his own patristic sources. We look forward to the scholarship to come in this field. Willemien Otten’s essay: ‘Eriugena as the Last Patristic Cosmologist’ presupposes that Eriugena’s cosmology is firmly rooted in the tradition of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. She states one of her intentions at the outset: to argue that ‘Eriugena’s Periphyseon is best seen as the natural theology that Augustine might have written – had he ventured out beyond exegetical bounds in his treatment of nature – but never actually undertook to write’. Otten’s second intention is to examine the claim stated in the title of the paper in the broader context of Eriugena as an eastern or western thinker;

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ultimately, she comes down on the side of the Latins. Her final aim is to examine the relationship between Eriugena’s hexaëmeral exegesis in relation to his concept of reditus, and begins with a fundamental question: what is the goal of the Periphyseon? Otten situates her discussion within the context of various perspectives on Eriugena using Bonaventure as a point of similarity, finally focusing, rather unexpectedly, on Benedict’s XVI’s comments on Eriugena during a general audience in the year 2009. Otten concludes that Benedict’s positive remarks on (and attraction to) Eriugena (despite the condemnation of 1225) likely stem from Eriugena’s link with the patristic tradition, which could, she adds ‘perhaps earn him a place in the company of the Fathers’. Having tentatively established Eriugena’s credentials as a ‘Father’ – although she notes that this does not detract from his status as a medieval writer – Otten argues for her current approach to Eriugena as cosmologist through a critical analysis of her previous approach to the Periphyseon as a self-enclosed work using his anthropology as her starting and end point rather than the usual organizing structure that focusses on his creative use of the authorities of both east and west. Although her seminal text of 1991 remains a key source for Eriugena scholars after almost thirty years, Otten stresses that she has not become disenchanted with her original approach; rather she is widening her lens to view the Periphyseon as a work about natures. She concludes: ‘the work is ultimately about all natures: human, divine, animal; created and uncreated, for which I find the conventional term cosmology more helpful and fitting’; in this sense Bonaventure becomes for Otten an inspirational voice: ‘the language of the universe … has become fundamentally unknown’ laments Bonaventure. The scriptural verses concerning the two garments of Christ at the Transfiguration, namely: scripture and nature (Periphyseon III 723D-724A), two interdependent sources of divine knowledge and truth, is the final salvo in the argument for reading Eriugena as cosmologist (while remaining anthropologist, no doubt). Having justified author, method, and the work itself, Otten points up the often unremarked presence of Origenian thought in Eriugena, concluding that it is no surprise for him to have written a cosmology in a patristic vein. And so here we find Eriugena reading the book of nature rather than the book of scripture (the subject of her forthcoming book Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson). In the final part of her essay Otten engages with Origenian and Augustinian exegesis, both of them ‘investigators of nature and expositors of scripture’. In effect, she makes the case for Eriugena’s skillful use of both ‘garments’, as Origen had done before him. The contrast she makes with Aquinas some centuries later is clear. Reading the book of nature did, she notes, surface in Augustine, but was not a theme he systematically developed. Can we say that Eriugena completed Augustine’s oeuvre by writing a natural theology? Perhaps we can. Otten makes a very powerful case in the affirmative, but in so doing

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she does not turn Eriugena’s Periphyseon into a natural theology; rather, she develops the idea that our Master’s scriptural exegesis (and the exegetical choices he makes) are generally ‘deployed with an eye toward bringing natura home’ – the theme that finds many echoes in this volume. Her final point is that nature works with grace in terms of the final reditus: that natura is not subservient to grace or scripture. In my view, what Otten has rather masterfully done in this essay is make the case for a re-reading of Eriugena as Latin cosmologist in the patristic tradition. She has laid stepping stones that will allow scholars (including herself) read the Periphyseon in a different light, not her former anthropological light, nor the light that so many have used before and after her. Eriugena has generally been regarded as a rather mysterious figure straddling late antiquity and early medieval times; Otten’s paper adds a further dimension to the work of this most creative of Irish thinkers. In ‘Traces of Ancient Virtue in Eriugena?’ Dominic J. O’Meara sets himself a somewhat original task: to what extent did the Plotinian theory of virtue as espoused in Ennead 1, 2 and elaborated by Porphyry in the Sentences, find its way (through Augustine, Macrobius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor) into the Periphyseon? In his attempt to piece together Eriugena’s thoughts on virtue into a unified account, O’Meara breaks new ground in this field of research. Once he has garnered the scattered comments into the semblance of a whole, the author will compare them with the accounts of Plotinus and Porphyry and make his conclusions. Eriugena’s account of virtue in Book I of the Perihyeson describes virtus ‘as a habitus (ἕξις), a state in the possession of virtues or vices … an inseparable state reached in the rational or irrational motions of mind (animus) and which appears to be one with the mind’ – mind being the higher nature of a person. For Eriugena, virtues are part of the original human nature created by God in God’s own image. This, O’Meara points out, is very different from the Aristotelian understanding of natural virtue and perhaps takes its cue from Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio. The passions and vices added to human nature as a result of the Fall can be tamed and eliminated because they are not part of the original creation in imago dei. In this sense, vices are, in fact, privations. Eriugena’s optimism, which stems from the inescapable fact that human is created in the image of God, is evident when he describes all humans as naturally virtuous. However, he also notes that human souls can be raised up, by the grace of God, to virtues that are spiritual and divine – perhaps, as O’Meara notes, a direct consequence of the ‘special return’ afforded those to be deified. In the second part of his paper O’Meara compares what has been gleaned from Eriugena with the accounts of virtue as given by Plotinus and Porphyry. Without repeating what the author summarizes in relation to virtue in the earlier writers, I concentrate here on his conclusions. Given Eriugena’s reading of Gregory of Nyssa, O’Meara wonders if a Plotinian anthropology could have

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been thus transmitted to Eriugena. One tentative conclusion of the comparison between Plotinus and Eriugena appears to be that the two levels of virtue in Plotinus (political virtue which orders and controls the passions) and ‘greater’ virtue (which entails a turning toward contemplation of the Good) are not separate in Eriugena’s conception of natural virtue. And if we turn to Porphyry (in the Sentences ch. 32), purification is introduced as a level of virtue bridging Plotinian political and contemplative virtue. According to O’Meara’s account of Eriugena, ‘purification appears, not as a separate level of virtue, but as part of the process leading natural virtue up to its perfection in contemplation’. And so it would appear that while Eriugena may well have been influenced by Plotinus indirectly, Eriugena’s understanding of virtue is integral in that it includes the movement to God. In this sense Plotinian virtue can be thought of as ‘vertical’ while virtue in Eriugena is more ‘horizontal’ in nature. O’Meara’s final comment is a reminder that virtue can also be bestowed by grace, an idea that sets Eriugena apart from his Neoplatonic predecessors. It appears that further work on this theme could yield another fruitful harvest. Theo Kobusch’s essay: ‘Creation out of Nothing – Creation out of God: Eriugena’s Philosophy as the Origin of Idealism’ begins with a brief history of the idea of creation out of nothing and characterizes Eriugena as a shining light at the end of late antiquity when the Neoplatonic triadic movement is transformed: ‘God condescends to the utmost and creates Himself by returning to Himself in all that has been created’. In viewing creation out of nothing as creatio ex deo, a remarkable conclusion can be drawn: through condescension ‘the super-essential nothing also arrives at itself’. This moment of ‘revelation’ is akin to a seismic wave in terms of philosophical-theological thinking, and demonstrates that Eriugena moves away from the narrow incarnational meaning of the concept of condescension and gives it a wider meaning in relation to creation, albeit one that ‘does not exclude the incarnational sense’. Here we come to a deeper significance of Eriugena’s interpretation of condescension. As Kobusch suggests, it transforms the Neoplatonic concept of emanation where creation is indeed out of God, but out of a self-creating God who remains transcendent, ‘a God who does not relinquish Himself, but “abides” (monê) in the abundance of His being’. This has repercussions in terms of the human subject and, as Kobusch notes, the entire creation ‘experiences a unique ontological valorisation through the self-creation of God’. It follows that human knowledge, ‘by fulfilling this function of mediating divine self-knowledge, [is] in an outstanding way ennobled’. This is the basis for Eriugena’s link with Idealism as so many scholars have posited, not least the late Werner Beierwaltes and subsequently Dermot Moran and others. Without the world, without creation, God would not be God. The echoes with Eckhart’s thought are evident. Kobusch’s quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is a wonderful expression of God incarnate and immanent: “What will You do, God, when I die? / I am Your jug (if I shatter?) / I am Your drink (if I spoil?) / I am Your robe and

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Your craft, / with me You lose Your own meaning” (Poems from the Book of Hours). Kobusch’s short summary of Eriugena’s nachleben as ‘midwife’ of idealistic systems, especially of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling is illuminating, and his tantalizingly brief mention of the reception of Eriugena and Schelling by Wordsworth and Coleridge an apt conclusion to a most interesting read. The short papers presented at Session III began with Agnieszka Kijewska’s ‘Eriugena is Reading St Augustine’. While it is common for Eriugena scholars to emphasize his use of both Greek and Latin sources, in this essay, Kijewska’s focus is on his reading of Augustine, primarily the De praedestinatione, where we find Eriugena establishing Augustine’s authority as vera auctoritas in the context of other authorities, among them Boethius and Martianus Capella. This reading contrasts nicely with the interpretation of Alexander Titus elsewhere in this volume. Kijewska’s main thesis is that Eriugena reads Augustine through a Boethian lens in order to answer to Gottschalk’s concept of double predestination. She emphasizes the non-contradiction of authority and reason (because both flow from the Wisdom of God); here again, we find another Eriugena scholar focus on the two-fold way to truth: the book of nature and the book of scripture. If these are read in parallel, the untruth of Gottschalk’s teaching can be revealed. Kijewska stresses the Carolingian inheritance of Eriugena as he teases out false reasoning based on the fundamental truth: true philosophy is true religion and true religion true philosophy. Her overall thesis is that Eriugena uses Boethian ‘quadrivial reasoning’ in support of a correct understanding of Augustine, namely: divisoria, diffinitiva, demonstrative, and resolutiva. This ‘method’ she argues both refutes false views and discovers the truth because not only is it the path of dialectics, but also the path of theology proper. Without repeating the lines of reasoning in Kijewska’s essay, suffice it to say that she is more than satisfied that Eriugena reads Augustine correctly and in line with authority and reason, subsequently refuting Gottschalk adequately and permanently. The scholarship and attention to detail Kijewska demonstrates has surely added a further dimension to our understanding of Eriugena. The contribution of Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi: ‘Eriugena’s reditus vs Neoplatonic epistrophé: Tracing Paradigmatic Divergences’ takes as its starting point Stephen Gersh’s From Iamblichus to Eriugena (1978), and his focus is on the continuity of the Neoplatonic tradition between pagan and Christian authorities in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This essay is pivotal in that it provides another take on Eriugena’s use of the Neoplatonic triad, this time from a Byzantine perspective. Mainoldi’s focus on Eriugena’s adoption of the Neoplatonic triadic scheme, and his central question: ‘can the triad still be reputed as an expression of Neoplatonic thought, even if the context to which it is applied does not depend on a Neoplatonic worldview?’ is framed within the context of Christophe Erismann’s

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L’homme commun (2011), the main concern of which is the ontological realism of immanence, adopted by Eriugena from his reading of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. Interestingly, Mainoldi posits the idea that the triad is not reflective of the general structure of cosmic motion, ‘but as a conceptual scheme that depicts in cosmological terms the economy of Salvation revealed by the Holy Scripture … the return of humanity to its primordial condition, which was lost on account of sin.’ Clearly, Eriugena deviates from Neoplatonism in his understanding of reditus. Mainoldi’s discussion of the double return in the Periphyseon shows Eriugena’s indebtedness to the Greek authorities he had read. Mainoldi concludes that ‘Eriugenian epistrophé cannot be conceived as circular cosmic motion affecting all beings; rather it may be comprehended as hypostatic motion following a spiral pattern’. This juxtaposition of cosmos and person reflects the real and significant differences between Eriugena and Neoplatonism. Mainoldi concludes his paper by returning to Gersh’s point that neither Iamblichus nor Eriugena may be considered Neoplatonists. As Mainoldi puts it: Iamblichus would have simply considered himself simply as a Platonist but Eriugena would have seen himself as ‘plus quam Neoplatonicus’. It is this skillful and insightful analysis of Eriugena’s concept of reditus that renders Mainoldi’s essay a must-read for those of us who simply read the Periphyseon in the light of the Neoplatonic triad. ‘Universal Salvation and the Completeness of Heaven in Eriugena’ by Adrian Mihai concentrates on Eriugena’s doctrine of universal salvation and its relation to the doctrine of ‘the completeness of Heaven’ which infers that in the return, humankind becomes a ‘replacement’ for the fallen angels, a thematic Eriugena would have read in Augustine. Here again we find the context of the Neoplatonic triad of remaining, outgoing, and return, but in relation to the reditus Mihai concentrates on Eriugena’s use of scriptural examples (four from the Old Testament and four from the New Testament) to illustrate the idea that all shall be saved and some shall be deified: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Exodus 14 (Crossing of the Red Sea) Isaiah 9:1 (For to Us a Child is Born) Ezekiel 16 (The Faithless Bride) Leviticus 25 (The Sabbath Year) The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) The Lost Drachma (Luke 15:8-10) The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7) The Ten Virgins (Luke 25:1-13)

Mihai limits his discussion to the parable of the lost sheep where Eriugena discusses the completeness of heaven where the 100 sheep (99+1) indicate the perfection of the heavenly Jerusalem, the one sheep being the human race. Taking his lead from Augustine, Eriugena, says that the number of saved people will either be equal to that of the fallen angels, or the number of those saved

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will exceed that number. For if humanity will be more, not all will find a place in the heavenly kingdom; this would mean that not all will be redeemed, a position Eriugena would be reluctant to endorse. To find a way out of this dilemma Eriugena turns to Augustine’s City of God. Eriugena’s conclusion is that whatever the case we are not prevented from believing that the whole human race will be redeemed in Christ (P.1007C). Mihai’s discussion here is rather ambiguous and does not perhaps reflect fully Eriugena’s (and Augustine’s) reluctance to come down on one side or the other, although perhaps I have misunderstood his interpretation of this point. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that Mihai has drawn our attention to the very close scriptural exegesis Eriugena employs when explicating the reditus. If read in tandem with the essays that deal with Eriugena’s Neoplatonism and his re-working and use of the Neoplatonic triad, this paper, like that of Mainoldi, draws our attention more to Eriugena’s Christian roots than his Neoplatonic affiliation. The essay of Alexander R. Titus: ‘Some Dionysian Influences on John Scottus Eriugena’s On Predestination’ is an interesting complement to the discussion of Agnieszka Kijewska. This essay is based on the assumption that a close examination of Eriugena’s historical context as well as a close reading of De praedestinatione against the backdrop of the Corpus dionysiacum, suggests the distinct possibility that Eriugena’s knowledge of Dionysius had already begun to inform his thought much earlier than most scholars have hitherto noted. Titus focusses on demonstrating some textual dependencies, ‘both in terms of theological content as well as method, which link aspects of Dionysian thought with some of Eriugena’s controversial arguments regarding divine predestination’. Titus rightly notes that while Eriugena makes no explicit reference to Greek authorities in his refutation of Gottschalk’s heresy, the lack of ‘direct evidence does not necessary mean a lack of circumstantial evidence, both textual and contextual’. Titus takes his cue from Dominic O’Meara and Ernesto Mainoldi, both of whom have made contributions to this debate. Throughout the essay Titus makes a fine case for a Dionysian influence on Eriugena through his method of expanding the notion of ‘influence’ from isolated doctrinal elements or direct quotations to a general hermeneutic approach that sees Eriugena use Dionysius to interpret the Latin theological tradition. I do believe this astute examination of Dionysian themes in De praedestinatione, will garner renewed scholarly interest. In my view, the papers in this collection not only point up the many dimensions of Eriugena’s thinking, but also the undeniable fact that much more remains to be done as we continue to build a body of scholarly work that together reveals his originality and erudition. The recurrent thematic of the Neoplatonic triad and the issue of his primary allegiance (Greek or Latin) are two important issues that have been revealed as multi-dimensional and could well be subject to scholarly revision. The different perspectives we see in the

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various essays of the volume are testament to Eriugena as a ‘Renaissance Man’ who had the vision (and ability) to read the past with a discerning eye that reveals the treasures and richness of patristic thought – much in the same way that the ‘Fathers’ of the twentieth century (de Lubac, von Balthasar and others) looked to their roots in Patristic Christianity as a way of injecting a new vision into the sometimes stultifying Christian theology and philosophy of their day. And as we continue to interpret and discuss Eriugena’s ground-breaking work, we remember those who have gone before us in the quest for understanding, among them: Cappuyns, Sheldon-Williams, O’Meara, D’Onofrio, Beierwaltes, and Jeauneau, upon whose work our own efforts stand.