Being and Creation in the Theology of John Scottus Eriugena

An Approach to a New Way of Thinking

Sushkov

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498298254
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Despite his prominent role in the formation of Christian thought, John Scottus Eriugena still remains an enigmatic figure whose background and potential arouse a great deal of scholarly interest. This is true especially today, when faith seeks to regenerate: his honesty and profundity encourage us in our search for the authentic teaching of Christ. As a theologian who strongly believes in human dignity as equal to that of the imago dei, Eriugena helps us meet Christ again and follow him towards a new horizon of being. What makes Eriugena's theology unique is his innovative approach to theological thinking, which is to be properly understood, as argued in this book, in terms of the paradigmatic shift from metaphysics to dialectic. The way we think, while trying to adopt and follow the truth of revelation so as to get freed from the world of finite things, cannot actually dispense with a dialectical treatment of contradiction. And Eriugena is explicit about this, which allows him to win a reputation as the "Hegel of the ninth century" and to make us look at our faith anew in coherence with such pivotal ideas as the divine unity, right reason, and return to the reality of creation.

CHAPTER 1

Eriugena: Personality and Origin

Vision

Eriugena is a thinker who said aloud that true philosophy and true religion are one.81 And the world heard this in the mid-ninth century, when Christendom was still in its infancy, and when a possibility of building God’s kingdom on earth was still believed to be a realistic social project in the Carolingian Gall.82

Having found himself at the center of a new historical undertaking of building up a Christian kingdom in the West of Europe (he appears in the royal court of Charles the Bald around the year 847), Eriugena sought to reconsider the way creation was traditionally understood. To him, it could not be severed from the Creator and opposed to him, because it is the reality that takes its origin from the Universal Principle which, due to its infinite universality, can never be abandoned by anything coming forth from it. It is the corrupt mind (the one subject to the irrational motion or entirely captive to the dictates of senses) that makes things leave the Principle of their being and take their place, as it were, outside it. Thus the corrupt mind gives rise to the world of finite things which, like a veil made of sensible fantasies, covers up the substantial reality that subsists in unity with the ultimate Principle of all. Finding themselves in such an illusory world, human beings have to lead a false life or search for the way back to where they truly belong by their genuine nature brought forth into being by one and the same Principle of all.

In this search for the way out, Religion and Philosophy, as Eriugena saw them, must go hand in hand, indeed, because they have one and the same subject of their interest—namely, the Ultimate Reality; and the objective, or the basic question they are both concerned about, is that of the way human beings can actually subsist in it. Thus Religion and Philosophy do meet together, while providing the proper goal for the human soul’s aspiration and the tool for having this aspiration brought about, which, as Eriugena persistently convinces us, is all about the restoration of the human mind to its proper rational motion.

The articulation of this fundamental vision of the meaning of human life, profoundly religious and philosophical at the same time, must have sounded very revolutionary for the ninth century—at the dawn of a new era and new expectations of human life. Nevertheless, the most amazing thing about all this perhaps is that it sounds very much the same at the outset of the twenty-first century, when the human world is facing a dilemma of its further degradation and complete annihilation or spiritual regeneration and movement towards a new horizon of being. To be or not to be is the perennial dilemma of Hamlet, haunting humanity all the way through its historical drama. Does Eriugena bring us any closer to its solution? This is the question to be answered by those who feel call for searching the Truth.

Background

John Scottus Eriugena is undoubtedly a prominent and at the same time a mysterious figure in intellectual history. He appears in Gall (the territory of modern France), literally speaking, out of the blue around the year 847, and likewise suddenly disappears after the year 877. The height of his intellectual might, the depth of his thought, and the scope of his erudition are extraordinary. He is a philosopher and theologian, translator and commentator, poet and educator. His knowledge of Greek and Greek Fathers is quite unique in the West of those days. His monumental works On Divine Predestination and, above all, the voluminous Periphyseon are out of comparison with anything else of the kind. No one like him was ever known to the West between Augustine and Anselm, that is, for a span of about six hundred years. The brilliance of his mind strikes many, as much amongst his contemporaries as among the illustrious scholars of the following generations. Like a rock, he is said to rise above the empty plain, surprisingly enough anticipating many of the crucial turns and developments of thought of later days, up to the post-Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism, which deservedly won him, as mentioned above, a reputation of the “Hegel of the ninth century.” Despite all this, however, on the horizon of the ninth century Europe Eriugena, seen from the perspective of the magnitude of his system, remains a solitary and enigmatic figure. How he could suddenly emerge among the Carolingian scholars who were just taking some faltering steps on their intellectual path, where he did come from, from what intellectual background—remains a mystery.

Sources

For about two centuries (actually, since the post-Hegelian time in Germany) Eriugenian studies have been trying to shed light upon this mystery, upon the sources of Eriugena’s thought and the intellectual tradition it might be associated with, but hardly anyone could say for sure nowadays that this riddle has been unraveled.

Perhaps, one of the misleading assumptions was and still is, since researchers have been gathered under the aegis of SPES, to approach this problematic issue from speculations upon the meaning of Eriugena’s name. For some reason, it is strongly believed by many that his nomen gentile Scottus and cognomen Eriugena can explain much. In particular, it is assumed that these two parts of Eriugena’s full name allow scholars to firmly bind up his fleshly and intellectual origin with both the Celtic area (Ireland or probably Scotland) and the Celtic spiritual tradition, normally associated with a network of Irish monasteries settled in mainland Hibernia and widely spread across the Continent.83 The truth about all these speculations is however that the meaning of the cognomen “Eriugena” does not seem to be as clear as that of the nomen gentile. As John O’Meara suggests, it might indicate either Ireland (meaning then “the Irishman born in Ireland”) or some other individual locations in the Celtic world. The meaning of the name is in fact so uncertain that the range of possible interpretations may go as far as Schaar Schmitt’s solution to the riddle. “Schaar Schmitt,” O’Meara admits, “took Eriugena to be equivalent to the Greek Erigenes, meaning “born in the East.”84 To my mind, the latter version of the name would sound quite plausible and relevant to what we are actually dealing with in Eriugena. Given his unique expertise in the Greek language and Eastern thought that came not from the monastery schools in Ireland, why would it be illogical to assume that a young man could travel to the East, live there for some time and, when the time was ripe, come from over there to the Carolingian Gaul as a mature scholar? Should not the main name be proper to the experience of the second, spiritual, birth as an intellectually advanced personality comes through in the process of his or her formation? To me, this is precisely the case with the name of John Scottus Eriugena, the Irishman born in the East. If so, however, then the problematic issues of the origin of his thought as well as the way of his thinking and the objectives of his mission in the Carolingian Gaul should definitely be seen from a different perspective.

As for the “sources” of Eriugena’s system, almost all key figures of Christian thought that flourished both in the Latin West and the Greek East prior to Eriugena are normally reckoned among them. Not much has actually changed in this area of Eriugenian studies sin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Eriugena: Personality and Origin
• Chapter 2: Parmenides’s Ontology: The Cradle of Dialectic
• Chapter 3: The Keys to Eriugena’s System
• Chapter 4: The Text Unlocked
• Chapter 5: The Doctrine of Contradiction
• Chapter 6: The Doctrine of Knowledge
• Chapter 7: Overcoming the Division
• Conclusion
• Bibliography