The Irish Carolingian philosopher whose Periphyseon synthesized Greek and Latin Christian Neoplatonism into the most ambitious philosophical system between Augustine and Aquinas, and whose translation of Pseudo-Dionysius gave the Latin West its principal channel to apophatic theology.
eriugena
Irish philosopher and translator (c. 815–877) at the court of Charles the Bald, whose Latin translations of Pseudo-Dionysius and other Greek theologians transmitted Eastern Christian thought to the medieval Latin West and whose Periphyseon constructed the most ambitious philosophical theology of the early middle ages.
c. 815 – c. 877; precise dates uncertain
Life
Johannes Scottus — the Eriugena ("Ireland-born") is a later self-coinage to distinguish him from other Johns named Scottus — was born around 815 in Ireland, most probably in what is now the Republic of Ireland, during the period when Irish monastic learning was at its high point and Irish scholars were carrying their training across Carolingian Europe. The biographical record is sparse; what is known about his life depends almost entirely on inferences from his works, from the imperial court documents that mention him, and from the brief late references in Anglo-Saxon chronicles.
He arrived at the Frankish court of Charles the Bald, the West Frankish king and (from 875) emperor, probably in the 840s. The Carolingian court was the chief center of Latin learning in northwestern Europe, supported by Charles's deliberate patronage of scholars from across the Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and Italian worlds. Eriugena, possessing the extraordinary qualification of competence in Greek (an exceedingly rare skill in the ninth-century Latin West), was given the responsibility for the major project of translating the Greek theological works that had been received as an embassy from the Byzantine emperor Michael II in 827.
The principal work of this translation project was the Corpus Areopagiticum — the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, then universally accepted as the apostolic writings of Dionysius the Areopagite of Acts 17:34. Hilduin of Saint-Denis had already produced a Latin translation in 832, but the translation was widely considered inadequate. Eriugena's translation, completed around 862, became the standard Latin text of Dionysius and the principal channel by which Greek Neoplatonic theology entered the Latin West.
Eriugena's other translations included works of Maximus the Confessor (Ambigua ad Iohannem, Quaestiones ad Thalassium) and Gregory of Nyssa (De Hominis Opificio). These translations, the most extensive corpus of Greek patristic theology rendered into Latin in the entire early medieval period, gave Western theologians direct access to a body of thought they would otherwise have known only at second hand if at all.
The theological writing was conducted in parallel with the translation work. De Divina Praedestinatione (c. 851), composed at the request of Hincmar of Reims to refute the predestinarian theology of the monk Gottschalk, took a position so Origenist and Greek-patristic in coloration that it was condemned by two regional synods (at Valence in 855 and Langres in 859). Periphyseon (composed c. 862–67), Eriugena's masterwork in five books, similarly drew condemnation a century later — by Pope Honorius III in 1225, who ordered all copies burned, and by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585 — though the survival of the manuscripts in Carolingian and later medieval libraries was extensive enough that the censures had limited effect.
The Anglo-Saxon chronicle of William of Malmesbury reports that Eriugena moved to England in his last years, took up teaching at the monastic school of Malmesbury, and was killed by his students with their iron pen-styluses — a colorful but probably legendary report. Whether or not the manner of his death is correctly recorded, he died around 877, near or shortly after the death of his patron Charles the Bald in October of that year.
The Periphyseon
Periphyseon — also known as De Divisione Naturae (On the Division of Nature) in its Latin transmission — is the most ambitious philosophical work composed in the Latin West between Augustine's De Civitate Dei and Aquinas's Summa. The five books are structured as a dialogue between Master and Disciple, the form Eriugena inherited from the patristic tradition (Augustine's Soliloquies, Boethius's Consolation).
The work opens with a fourfold divisio naturae that organizes the entire treatise:
- Nature which creates and is not created — God as the source of all that is.
- Nature which is created and creates — the Primordial Causes (the Platonic Forms reframed as the divine Word's eternal causal principles).
- Nature which is created and does not create — the temporal world of created things.
- Nature which neither creates nor is created — God again as the final end to which all things return.
The structure is a circular procession-return: from God through the Primordial Causes into the created world, and back through the created world into God. The model is Neoplatonic emanation-return, drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius and from the broader Christian Neoplatonic tradition through Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus.
Book I treats the divisions of nature, defines the methods of theological discourse, and develops the apophatic/cataphatic distinction inherited from Pseudo-Dionysius. Book II treats the Primordial Causes — the divine Word as the eternal ground of all created possibilities. Books III and IV treat the procession of created things from the Primordial Causes through the six days of creation (Eriugena's commentary on Genesis 1 is integrated here) and the fall of humanity from its original spiritual condition into the material world. Book V treats the return of all things to God — the doctrine of cosmic apokatastasis (universal restoration) that Eriugena inherits from Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus.
The distinctive Eriugenian doctrines include: God as super-essential and unknown even to himself in the sense that knowing requires definition by something other than oneself; the created world as the theophany (manifestation) of God, such that the world is essentially God's self-manifestation rather than a fundamentally separate reality; the eventual return of the entire creation, including humanity, into God; and the role of Christ as the second Adam in whom the cosmic return is accomplished.
The philosophical method blends scriptural exegesis, patristic citation, and dialectical reasoning in proportions and with a confidence in human reason that anticipated the high Scholastic synthesis. "True philosophy is true religion," Eriugena writes, "and true religion is true philosophy" — a formula that the later Latin theological tradition would treat with greater wariness than Eriugena himself did.
The critical edition is by Édouard Jeauneau in the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (5 vols., 1996–2003), replacing the earlier H. J. Floss edition of 1853. I. P. Sheldon-Williams's earlier critical edition of Books I and II (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968, 1972) included English translation; Jeauneau and John O'Meara's complete English translation appeared from Bellarmin in 1987. The Sheldon-Williams and O'Meara translation remains the principal English access.
The Translation Project
Eriugena's translations of Greek patristic texts — Pseudo-Dionysius primarily, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa secondarily — transformed the resources available to Latin theology. Before Eriugena, the Latin tradition's access to Greek patristic theology had been limited and often indirect, mediated by Augustine's reading of selected Greek sources and by the few earlier Latin translations (Rufinus of Aquileia's Origen translations being the principal exception). Eriugena's body of translation gave the Latin West direct textual access to the apophatic-mystical theological tradition of the Greek East.
The Pseudo-Dionysius translation in particular shaped subsequent Latin theology in lasting ways. Hugh of Saint-Victor, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Eckhart, and the medieval mystical tradition all worked from Eriugena's translation (sometimes revised in details by later translators like John the Saracen). The conceptual vocabulary in which Latin theology spoke of God's transcendence, the divine names, the apophatic ascent, and the celestial hierarchies derived in part from Eriugena's translation choices.
Reception
The immediate Carolingian reception was modest — Eriugena's work was too philosophically ambitious for the institutional setting of late ninth-century Frankish theology, and the Greek learning on which it depended faded rapidly with the political decline of the Carolingian court. The Periphyseon survived in a small number of manuscripts, most of which remained at the abbey of Malmesbury and at Reims.
A second reception came in the twelfth century. The school of Chartres, particularly Bernard Silvestris and Honorius Augustodunensis, drew on Eriugena. Hugh of Saint-Victor used the Dionysius translation in his own commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy. The condemnation of 1225, prompted by the Albigensian crisis and by the heretical theologians Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant, who had drawn on Eriugenian themes, suppressed the work's circulation but did not extinguish it.
Meister Eckhart and the fourteenth-century Rhineland mystics drew on Eriugenian themes — the apophatic God beyond being, the cosmic theophany, the return of all things to God. Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century absorbed Eriugena directly. The early modern reception is sparser, the Periphyseon having become an obscure text by the seventeenth century and being printed for the first time only in 1681.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought recovery. The Floss edition of 1853 made the work textually available. Hegel and the German Idealists, on encountering Eriugena, treated him as a forerunner of their own speculative theology. Twentieth-century scholarship from Maurice de Wulf, Henry Bett, Maieul Cappuyns, John Marenbon, Bernard McGinn, Dermot Moran (The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Édouard Jeauneau has produced the scholarly framework within which the Periphyseon is now read.
Significance
Eriugena's importance is twofold. As translator, he provided the Latin West with its principal access to Greek patristic theology, particularly to the Dionysian apophatic tradition that shaped medieval mysticism and Scholastic angelology. As philosopher, he constructed the most ambitious systematic theology produced in the Latin West between Augustine and Aquinas — a philosophical synthesis of Greek Neoplatonism and Christian doctrine that anticipated themes the high Scholastic tradition would develop more cautiously and that the late medieval mystical tradition would develop more daringly. The condemnations of 1225 and 1585 testify to the perceived dangers of the synthesis; the survival of the manuscripts through those condemnations testifies to the work's enduring intellectual interest. Eriugena was a solitary figure with no school in his own century, but he supplied the Latin West with linguistic and philosophical resources whose effects extended through the next eight centuries.