Abstract
John (Johannes) (c. 800–c. 877 CE), referred to by his contemporaries as “the Irishman” (Scottus), and who signed himself “Eriugena,” was an Irish-born Christian Neoplatonist philosopher and theologian of great originality. The most outstanding philosopher writing in Latin between Boethius and Anselm, Eriugena is best known as the author of Periphyseon (De divisione naturae, On the Division of Nature, c. 867 CE), an immense dialogue unfolding an impressive cosmological system, and as the influential transmitter of Greek Christian theology to the medieval West, notably through his translations of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus Confessor.
Eriugena’s philosophy centers around God, understood in Neoplatonic terms as an infinite, transcendent “immovable self-identical one” (unum et idipsum immobile, Peri. I.476b). This God is incomprehensive to created, finite minds (angels, humans) but through His freely willed theophanies (theofaniai, divine manifestations) He becomes manifest to and can be apprehended by His creation. The One, as highest principle, engenders all things timelessly, causing them to proceed into their genera, species, and individuals located in space and time, and then retrieves them back into itself. This cosmological process is triadic or Trinitarian, involving a dialectic of oneness, outgoing and return. All created entities, including human nature, are to be understood as eternal “ideas” (ideae, notiones) in the mind of God. But only human nature is made in the divine image and likeness. Humankind, therefore, plays a special role in the dialectic of outgoing and return. Eriugena quotes Augustine to the effect that God became man (inhumanatio) so that humans can become God (deificatio). Humans fail to understand their own true nature as images of God because they are distracted by created, fleeting temporal “appearances” (phantasiai), which cloud the intellect and generate the sensible spatiotemporal realm. However, through the practice of intellectual contemplation (theoria, intellectus), assisted by the grace of divine illumination (which is the receiving of a divine self-manifestation, theophania), humans may return to and achieve unification (henosis) with God. Salvation, or return to the One, involves the corporeal body being resolved into its original incorporeal essence. Both heaven and hell are maintained to be states of mind, not actual places (loci). Paradise, Eriugena says, is nothing other than perfect human nature. A select few (e.g., St. Paul) will even undergo deification (deificatio, theosis). Eriugena’s account of nature as inclusive of God and creation has been interpreted as pantheist. Eriugena, however, stresses both the immanence of God in creation and His transcendence beyond it.
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Moran, D. (2020). John Scottus Eriugena. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_279
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