Justified True Belief

(●) The one original philosopher the Latin West produced between Boethius and Anselm, and the one man at the Frankish court who could read Greek well enough to translate it. + Imagine a library where most of the shelves are in a language nobody in the building can read. That was the situation of Latin Europe in the ninth century. The great theology of the Christian East, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, the mysterious author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, sat in Greek manuscripts that a Frankish scholar could admire, dust, and not understand. Charlemagne’s reforms had rebuilt the schools and filled them with copyists. What the schools had not produced was anyone who could open those particular books. Then an Irishman turned up at the palace of Charles the Bald who could. He translated the Greek fathers into Latin, and then he did something nobody had asked him to do: he sat down and wrote a system of his own, five books long, taking in God, angels, matter, time, the human body, paradise, and the end of the world. It is called the Periphyseon, and nothing on its scale was attempted in Western Europe across the five and a half centuries between Boethius in the sixth century and Anselm in the eleventh. Here is the fact about him that a reader will remember. Three and a half centuries after he died, a pope ordered every copy of that book burned. The order was obeyed thoroughly enough that the Periphyseon nearly vanished, and it survives today largely because a handful of monks had copied it quietly beforehand, and because his most-loved short work, a sermon on the opening of John’s Gospel, spent the Middle Ages circulating peacefully under somebody else’s name.

(●) c. 800 AD: Born in Ireland, the one corner of the Latin West where Greek had never quite died out. + Nobody wrote down the year of his birth, and the estimates scholars work with run from about 790 to about 815, with c. 800 the figure most often given now, so every date in his early life is a reckoning rather than a record. What is certain is where he came from, because he took the trouble to tell us. In the ninth century the Latin word Scottus meant Irish, not Scottish, and plenty of men at the Frankish court carried it. So he coined a second name to be unmistakable: Eriugena, from Ériu, the old name of Ireland, and gena, born of. Ireland-born. He built it on the pattern of a word he had met in Virgil, Graiugena, Greek-born, and he signed it to the title page of his Dionysius translation like a man planting a flag. Ireland had been Christian for four centuries by then, and its monasteries had a reputation on the continent for two things: sending scholars abroad, and teaching Greek when almost nowhere else did. How much Greek Eriugena actually learned at home and how much he taught himself later is impossible to settle. What the record shows is that by middle age he read the language better than anyone in the Frankish kingdoms, well enough to argue with a translation and to write poems in it for fun.

(●) c. 845 AD: He crossed to Francia and became a master in the palace school of Charles the Bald. + Charles the Bald was a grandson of Charlemagne, and he had inherited his grandfather’s conviction that a king should keep learned men about him the way he keeps soldiers. The palace school travelled with the court, and its job was to teach the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric and logic first, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Eriugena taught there, and his earliest surviving work is exactly what a schoolmaster leaves behind, a set of running notes on Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the odd allegorical textbook every medieval schoolroom used for the arts. The court remembered him as good company. A story William of Malmesbury told nearly three centuries later, in his Deeds of the Bishops of the English, has the king and the Irishman drinking at the same table, with Charles asking, in a pun that works in Latin and nowhere else, Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?, what is the distance between a sot and a Scot? Eriugena is supposed to have answered, mensa tantum, only the table. It is a good line and a late one, and there is no way to know whether he ever said it.

(●) c. 851 AD: Asked to settle a quarrel about predestination, he wrote a book that got him condemned twice. + A Saxon monk named Gottschalk of Orbais had been teaching what he called twofold predestination: that God has eternally chosen some people for salvation and, just as deliberately, chosen the rest for damnation. He believed he was quoting Augustine, and he was quoting him, in places. Two synods, which is to say two councils of bishops called to settle a disputed question, had already condemned him, and he had been flogged and imprisoned for it. Still the argument would not die down. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims wanted a refutation from somebody clever, and Bishop Pardulus of Laon suggested the Irishman at the palace. They got more than they wanted. Eriugena’s On Divine Predestination argues that God is utterly simple, without parts or divisions, so the phrase "twofold predestination" is already broken before it reaches the question of who is saved: God does not have two of anything. Sin, he went on, is not a thing God made, and neither is the punishment of sin. Both are privations, which is the old word for an absence where something ought to be, the way a hole is not a substance but a place where substance is missing. Nobody manufactures a hole. You get one by taking something away, and that, for Eriugena, is all evil ever is. God foreknows evil without causing it, and the damned are not dragged anywhere. They keep the free will they were made with, and they use it. What alarmed his readers was not mainly the conclusion. It was the method. He had settled a question about grace largely by reasoning, with far fewer citations of the fathers than a ninth-century theologian was expected to produce. Prudentius of Troyes and Florus of Lyons wrote whole books against him. The Council of Valence condemned the treatise in 855 and the Council of Langres followed in 859, and the bishops at Valence reached for language that has stuck to his name ever since. A council issues its rulings as numbered canons, and theirs are worth reading for the temperature alone. The sixth throws out the whole business as Scotorum pultes, the porridge of the Irish, turning the stomach of a pure faith; the fourth finds in his nineteen syllogisms diaboli commentum, a contrivance of the devil, rather than any argument of faith. It is among the earliest cases on record of a Western theologian being told he had used too much philosophy.

(●) c. 862 AD: He translated Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Greek fathers began to speak Latin. + A generation earlier, in 827, the Byzantine emperor Michael II had sent Louis the Pious a diplomatic gift: a Greek manuscript of the writings that circulate under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian whom Paul converted in Acts 17:34. The West, and Eriugena with it, took the attribution at face value. The books are in fact by an unknown Syrian author of about the year 500, which is why he is now called Pseudo-Dionysius, but for seven hundred years Latin readers believed they were holding the private theology of one of Paul’s own converts, and that belief is a large part of why the books mattered so much. Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis, had already attempted a Latin version, and it was rough going. Charles the Bald handed the manuscript to Eriugena and asked for a better one. He produced it around 862, translating so close to the Greek that the Latin sometimes buckles under the strain, which was a deliberate choice: he would rather be awkward than lose a word. Pope Nicholas I wrote to Charles complaining that a work of this weight had been published without being sent to Rome for review first. Nothing came of the complaint. Having started, he kept going, and the rest of the Greek shelf followed: Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua and Questions to Thalassius, and Gregory of Nyssa’s book on the making of man, which he retitled On the Image. For the next four centuries, when a Western theologian quoted Dionysius on the orders of angels or on the darkness in which God is met, he was usually reading Eriugena’s Latin.

(●) c. 867 AD: He finished the Periphyseon, five books of one long conversation between a teacher and a pupil. + Somewhere in the early 860s, with the Greek fathers fresh in his head, Eriugena began the book that would carry his name. He gave it a Greek title, Periphyseon, meaning "on natures", though the Latin Middle Ages knew it as On the Division of Nature. It runs to five books and takes the form of a conversation between two characters, the Nourisher and the Nursling, a master and his student, and the student is not a stooge. He interrupts, he objects, he says he does not follow, and he occasionally catches the master in something. The scale of the thing is what startles. Nothing else attempted in Latin for centuries on either side of it tries to take in so much: what it means to say a thing exists, how God can be called good when goodness is a creature’s word, what the primordial causes are, meaning the eternal patterns in God’s mind after which everything else is made, why there are four elements, whether the body is part of the person, what paradise was, what the resurrection will be, and where everything is finally going. He works by argument and by the Greek fathers together, and he is perfectly willing to say that a passage in Genesis does not mean what it appears to mean. Some of the surviving manuscripts carry corrections in more than one hand, made while the work was still in his own circle, so what a modern reader holds is a text he was still tinkering with. He was not finished with it. He simply ran out of time.

(●) c. 877 AD: His patron died, his traces stop, and legend rushed in to fill the silence. + The last thing anyone can date to him is a poem written for the dedication of Charles the Bald’s new church at Compiègne in 875, a piece about starry halls and light, which is the sort of subject he could not leave alone. Charles died in 877, and after that the record simply goes quiet. He may have died the same year, or a few years later in some monastery nobody thought to name. We do not know, and pretending otherwise would be inventing a deathbed. Later ages disliked the silence and filled it. William of Malmesbury, writing in the twelfth century, reported that John the Scot had come to England at King Alfred’s invitation, taught at Malmesbury Abbey, and been stabbed to death by his own pupils with their iron writing styluses. It is a vivid story and almost certainly not about him, because the scene came from somewhere else entirely. Around the year 400 a poet named Prudentius, a different man from the bishop of Troyes who had written against the predestination treatise, described the martyrdom of Saint Cassian, a schoolmaster killed by his students with their styluses and wax tablets. That scene became a stock image for classroom violence, and medieval writers reached for it more than once. The John buried at Malmesbury seems to have been a different man altogether. Ireland’s greatest philosopher has no known grave.

What He Taught

(T1) True philosophy and true religion are one and the same thing. + A man who repairs engines and a man who studies thermodynamics are not in a turf war. They are working on one thing from two directions, and when the theory and the engine disagree, somebody has made a mistake that can be found. That is roughly how Eriugena saw faith and reasoning. Philosophy is not a rival authority set up against the church; it is what worshipping God looks like when you are also thinking carefully. Investigate God rationally, adore him humbly, and you are doing one job. He drew a conclusion from this that his contemporaries found alarming, and it is worth stating in his own terms. If reasoning and the authority of the fathers both come from God, they cannot really conflict, and where they appear to, the reasoning has priority in the order of discovery: authority, he wrote in the Periphyseon, came out of true reason in the first place, while reason never came out of authority (Periphyseon I, chapter 69). He did not mean that a clever man may overrule Scripture. He meant that a father of the church was believed because what he said was true, not true because he said it, and that a reader is therefore allowed to ask why. Christian readers have been arguing about that sentence ever since, though not along the lines one might expect. The quarrel is not between a party that wants reasoning and a party that wants faith. Anselm and Aquinas, two of the greatest theologians the Latin West would ever produce, would both keep reasoning and faith on the same side, each insisting that faith seeks understanding and that nothing God reveals is irrational. Neither would grant Eriugena his ordering, and Aquinas held plainly that in theology an argument from divine authority is the strongest a man has. The worry, then and now, is less about the reasoning itself than about where it can carry someone: a thinker who trusts his own reasoning that far can talk himself a long way from where he started, and Eriugena eventually did.

(Q) "What, then, is it to treat of philosophy, unless to lay down the rules of the true religion by which we seek rationally and adore humbly God, who is the first and sovereign cause of all things? Hence it follows that the true philosophy is the true religion, and reciprocally that the true religion is the true philosophy." + Source: On Divine Predestination, chapter 1 (Kenelm Henry Digby translation, 1837). The opening move of the book that got him condemned, written before he had read a line of Dionysius. He is borrowing the thought from Augustine, who had said something very like it in On True Religion, and the borrowing is part of his defence: he is not smuggling philosophy into theology, he is doing what the greatest of the Latin fathers told him to do.

(T2) Everything that is, and everything that is not, falls into four kinds, and God stands at both ends of the list. + Start with the way a tidy person sorts a shed. You pick a question that every object in the shed must answer, and then you let the answers make the piles. Eriugena picked two questions and asked them of absolutely everything: does this make other things, and was this made? Two questions, yes or no each, give four boxes, and the four boxes are the frame of his whole book. - Makes, and was not made. God as source. Nothing produced him and everything comes from him. - Was made, and makes. The primordial causes: God’s eternal ideas of goodness, life, wisdom, truth, the patterns after which particular things are made. They are called made because they are in the Word, which is John’s name for the Son of God, rather than being the Word himself. - Was made, and does not make. The world as we meet it: this oak, this sparrow, this reader. - Neither makes nor was made. God again, now as the end of all things, when the going out is over and everything has come to rest. Notice that the first box and the fourth hold the same God. That is the point of the arrangement rather than a slip in it, and it is the thing to hold on to, because the system is going to end exactly where it started. His word for the whole field is natura, nature, and he means far more by it than a modern reader does. Not the countryside, not the physical world: everything whatever, God included. It also takes in what he calls the things that are not, and by that he does not mean the things that are simply missing. He means the things that overflow our knowing, the ones our minds are not equipped to register, the way a sound can be too high for an ear that is working perfectly well. God belongs in that second category as surely as in the first. He is not less than existence. He is more than it, and our word for existence was never built to hold him. So the four divisions are not a filing cabinet. They are a journey with a shape: out from God, through the patterns, into the world of particular creatures, and home again. Christians would recognise the shape. Paul sketches it in one line, that from him and through him and to him are all things (Romans 11:36).

(Q) "It seems to me that the division of nature admits of four species through four differences: the first is that which creates and is not created, the second that which is created and also creates, the third that which is created and does not create, and the fourth that which neither creates nor is created." + Source: Periphyseon I, 441a–442b (Patrologia Latina 122, columns 441–442; rendered from the Latin). The teacher says this in the opening pages, almost in passing, and then spends five books unpacking it. The pupil’s first response is to point out that the fourth division looks impossible, since everything must either make or be made, and the answer he is given takes the rest of the work.

(T3) God does not know what he is, because he is not a "what" at all. + Ask someone to describe a colour to a person born blind and watch what happens. Every honest answer is a negation: it is not a sound, it is not a shape, it is not warm or cold. You are not being coy. You are working with a vocabulary built for a different kind of thing. That is the situation Eriugena thinks we are in when we talk about God, and the technical name for the method is apophatic theology, from the Greek for denial, also called negative theology: the practice of saying what God is not, on the grounds that every positive term we own was learned from creatures. He took the method from Dionysius, whom he had just translated, and he pushed it further than his source. God is good, we say, and Eriugena agrees, but he insists the sentence is a loan. Goodness is a word we learned by meeting good creatures, so when we apply it to their maker it will not fit. Better to say God is more than good, beyond goodness, the way the sun is not bright in the way a lamp is bright. Run the same move through every attribute and you get his God: not a being among beings, not a thing with properties, not an item the mind can put its arms around. Then comes the sentence that makes readers sit up. If God is not a what, then there is no what for God to know about himself. This is not a limit on God’s intelligence, and Eriugena is emphatic that God knows perfectly that he is. It is a claim about the kind of thing definitions are. To know what something is, is to locate it, to fence it in, to say which box it goes in, and the maker of every box is in none of them. Scripture says something similar without the machinery: God dwells "in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16), and Job asks the same question flatly, "Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?" (Job 11:7).

(Q) "God does not know of himself what he is, because he is not a what; he is in a certain respect incomprehensible both to himself and to every intellect." + Source: Periphyseon II, 589b (Patrologia Latina 122, column 589B; rendered from the Latin). The pupil has just asked the obvious question, whether this makes God ignorant, and the teacher’s answer is that God knows that he is with perfect certainty and has no "what" to know. Eriugena then applies the same reasoning to human beings, made in God’s image: a person knows that he is, and cannot get to the bottom of what he is either.

(T4) Every creature is a showing of God, so the world is a book written in light. + Here is the other half of his thought, and without it the first half would be unbearable. If the apophatic way is right (T3) and God is beyond every word we own, how is anyone supposed to know anything about him at all? Eriugena’s answer is that God, who cannot be caught, shows himself on purpose, and the showings are called theophanies. A theophany, from the Greek for God-appearing, is any way the invisible God makes himself visible to a creature. The burning bush is one. So, he says, is the sparrow. Think of someone reading by lamplight. You never see the light itself; you see a page, a hand, the grain of the table, and every one of them is the light arriving somewhere. Creation, for Eriugena, works like that. Each created thing is God arriving at a particular place, in a form small enough to be received. Stones, stars and souls are not obstacles between the mind and God. They are the only light the mind has. He liked to say that all things which exist are lights, and Paul is saying something close when he writes that God’s "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20). Now the obvious danger. Say that everything is a showing of God, and it is a very short walk to saying that everything is God, which is pantheism, the belief that God and the universe are one and the same. Eriugena walked further along that road than most Christian writers are comfortable with, and some of his sentences fall over on the wrong side of it, which is the charge his censors would press three and a half centuries later. His own defence is that a showing is not the thing shown: the sparrow is God’s appearing and not God, as your face in a window is not you. Whether every page of the Periphyseon keeps to that distinction is precisely what his critics have doubted.

(Q) "When we are told that God is the maker of all things, we are simply to understand that God is in all things, that He is the substantial essence of all things." + Source: Periphyseon I, chapter 72 (Patrologia Latina 122, column 518; Hugh Fraser Stewart translation, 1891). A sentence that shows both sides of him at once. Read one way it is ordinary Christian teaching, that nothing holds together for a moment without God sustaining it. Read another way it says the being of the creature simply is God, and that is the reading his thirteenth-century censors took.

(T5) Everything that came out from God is on its way back to God, and human nature is the road. + A river does not stop at the sea by accident. It was going there the whole time, and the going was the point of the river. Eriugena thought the universe was built on that plan, and he had a pair of Latin words for it that run through the whole Periphyseon: exitus, the going out, and reditus, the return. Book five is about the return, and it is the most beautiful and the most contested thing he wrote. The return runs through human beings, and specifically through Christ. Eriugena, following Maximus the Confessor, held that man is a kind of workshop where every level of creation meets: mineral in the body, life shared with plants, sense shared with animals, and reason shared with angels. A human being is the one creature with a foot on every floor of the building. Whatever happens to human nature therefore happens to all of it, and that is what makes the next step so large. When human nature fell, it dragged the creation down with it, and when the Word took human nature and rose in it, he carried the whole of it up. Christ’s resurrection, in this account, is not one man’s private survival. It is the return of everything, already begun. He then distinguished two stages, and that distinction is what keeps him from teaching universalism outright, the view that in the end every last person is saved. The first stage is the general return: every human being will rise, the body will be restored, and nothing God made will be annihilated, because God does not unmake his own work. The second is what he called deification, the free gift by which some are drawn into God’s own life. The first is owed to nature. The second is grace, and not everyone receives it. Whether that second stage leaves room for what Christ says about the end of the wicked is the hardest question on his record.

(Q) "The voice of the spiritual eagle strikes the hearing of the Church." + Source: Homily on the Prologue of John, opening line (Patrologia Latina 122, column 283; translated from the Latin). The eagle is John, whose symbol it is, and the sermon goes on to say that the outward ear should catch the passing sound while the inner mind takes hold of what stays. It is his warmest and simplest work, and the one that was actually read: it travelled through the Middle Ages attached to the name of Origen, and generations of monks who would have been warned off Eriugena heard him every year without knowing it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His translations handed the Latin West four centuries of Greek theology it could not otherwise read. + Whatever else the church decided about him, it kept the translations, and the people who used them turn out to be the people who built medieval theology. In the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor wrote a commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, working from Eriugena’s Latin. Thomas Aquinas quotes Dionysius well over a thousand times across his works, usually from John Sarrazin’s twelfth-century version, though Eriugena’s older Latin was copied beside it in the Paris manuscripts and consulted whenever the two disagreed. Bonaventure’s ladder of the mind climbing up to God is built out of the same imported materials. And when Dante set the nine ranks of angels circling in the Paradiso, he was arranging them in the order that had reached Italy in this Latin. Maximus the Confessor is the clearer debt, because without Eriugena the West would have had almost nothing of him for centuries. The idea that human nature is the hinge of the whole creation, and that Christ in rising carries creation with him, entered Latin theology through these translations and never left it. Behind the whole enterprise is a conviction worth naming, since it is the reason a Christian site cares about a translator at all. Eriugena believed the church is one church, that what the Greek fathers had seen was owed to the Latin ones, and that a language barrier was not a good enough reason for half the body to go without. He spent the better part of a decade acting on that.

(†) The Periphyseon was copied quietly for three centuries, then condemned and ordered burned. + For a long time the big book had a small, admiring readership. In the twelfth century Honorius of Autun made a shortened version of it called the Key to Nature, which is how most later readers met it, and the masters at Chartres who were trying to think about creation and the natural world found it useful. Then, early in the thirteenth century, a group in Paris associated with Amalric of Bène began teaching that God is the being of all things in a sense that made the distinction between Creator and creature collapse, and they cited the Periphyseon. A council at Paris condemned their teaching in 1210, and in 1225 Pope Honorius III ordered the book itself burned. The order was carried out with some thoroughness. Only a handful of manuscripts survived, in monastic libraries far enough from Paris to be overlooked, and the work was not printed until Thomas Gale’s edition at Oxford in 1681, which promptly went onto the Index, the register of books Rome forbade its members to read. It is worth being exact about what the condemnation says and does not say. It is a judgment on a book that had been read to dangerous conclusions, not a verdict on the man’s life or his Christianity, and it came three and a half centuries after his death, with nobody able to ask him what he had meant. His sermon on John kept circulating under Origen’s name the whole time, entirely untroubled.

(†) His own sentences blur the line between Creator and creature, and his doctrine of the return leaves little room for a final separation. + He was a Christian writing for Christians, and he would have been appalled to be called a pantheist. That is worth saying first, because the objections that follow are not inventions of his enemies. Three of them come straight out of sentences he wrote himself, and the other follows from where his doctrine of the return leaves the wicked. - God and the creature. In book three he tells his pupil that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same (Periphyseon III, 678c). His own gloss is that the creature subsists in God and God is manifested in the creature, which is not identity. Still, the sentence as it stands erases a line Scripture keeps hard, between those who "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25) and those who do not. A distinction that has to be rescued by a gloss every time is doing less work than it should. - Creation from nothing. He affirms that God made all things out of nothing, and then identifies the nothing with God’s own super-essential hiddenness, super-essential meaning above and beyond being itself, so that creation becomes God coming forth out of that hiddenness into visible form. Read strictly, that is not creation from nothing at all; it is God unfolding. Genesis has something else in view, a maker who is not his own material: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). - The end of the wicked. His doctrine of the return is so thorough that it is hard to see what a final separation could consist of. He does deny that anyone is annihilated and does distinguish deification from the general return, and he locates punishment in the sinner’s own frustrated will rather than in a place or a physical fire. Whether that is enough to carry the plain sense of Christ’s own words is doubtful: "And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46). - Male and female. Following Gregory of Nyssa, he read the division of humanity into the sexes as God’s provision against a fall he foresaw, something added to human nature and to be undone in the return. Genesis puts the two sexes in the good creation before any fall, and calls them the image of God: "male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). None of this makes him a heretic by intention, and the church has never said he was one. It makes him a warning of a particular kind, which he would have understood better than most: a mind can be right that reason and faith are one thing, and still reason its way past the edge of the map. What he got right, that God is past all our words and yet shows himself in every created thing, is worth the trouble of reading him carefully.