The
jocular title of this entry is by no means a joke for its own sake. John
Scotus Erigena (810-877) does mean exactly what the title says. All Scots
were originally Irish, as my Braveheart entry (to be posted later) elucidates.
As for the word Erigena, it is easy to figure out, as soon as we
remember that Eire is the name of Ireland on every Irish stamp, and genus
refers to birth, making the whole mean Irish-born.
Although
by the time of his birth Erigena belongs to the Darkest Ages of Europe, he is
clearly out of place among his contemporaries, belonging instead on the pages
of the world history of philosophy, where he is perhaps the only representative
of his generation and of that age as a whole.
The
fact that this unique place of honor has been captured by an Irishman, rather
than by any other son of medieval Europe, is not in the least surprising, as
Ireland at that time happened to be the sole repository of Western culture,
which historical fact is covered in my Sonnets entry under the title Erin
Go Bragh. (Another “to be posted
later” item, but the reader’s curiosity having hopefully been aroused, I
suggest that the reader do some independent research on this matter.)
Erigena
was, indeed, an important and valuable philosopher, as evidenced by the fact
that Bertrand Russell allots him a separate personal chapter (John the Scot),
preceded by a comparable chapter on St. Augustine, and followed by one on Thomas
Aquinas. With regard to his overall world-historical importance, we can quote
this passage in Schopenhauer’s Parerga, where he, Erigena, shares a very
distinguished company:
"On the whole, one may be surprised that even in the seventeenth
century pantheism did not gain a complete victory over theism, for the most
original, finest and thorough European expositions of it (none of them, of
course, bear comparison with the Upanishads of the Vedas) came to
light at that period, namely, through Bruno, Malebranche, Spinoza and Scotus
Erigena (!). After Scotus Erigena had been lost and
forgotten for many centuries, he was again discovered at Oxford and, in 1681,
thus four years after Spinoza’s death, his work first saw the light in print.
This seems to prove that the insight of individuals cannot make itself felt, so
long as the spirit of the age is not ripe to receive it. On the other hand, in
our own day (which is 1851), pantheism, although represented only in
Schelling’s eclectic and confused revival thereof, has become the dominant mode
of thought of scholars, and even of educated people. This is because Kant had
preceded it with his overthrow of theistic dogmatism, and had cleared the way
for it, whereby the spirit of the age was ready for it, just as a ploughed
field is ready for the seed."
In
his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche, too, places
Erigena in a highly distinguished company, showing his esteem of the Irishman
by the mere mention of him in that context:
"Probably the most sublime part of Greek thought and its expression
in words is lost to us; a fate which will not surprise the man who recalls the
misfortunes of Scotus Erigena or Pascal, and who considers that even in this
enlightened century the first edition of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will
And Representation was turned into wastepaper."
Analyzing
Erigena’s masterpiece De Divisione Naturae, some modern scholars have
seen in it a prototype of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. One may argue
about the extent of Erigena’s influence on Hegel, and it is even possible that
Erigena’s fourfold cycle is only coincidental to Hegel’s spiral, but the fact
itself that we might be talking about the similarities of these two thinkers,
one of them belonging to the philosophical cream of the crop, and that a
distance of one millennium separates them (favoring the Irishman!), speaks for
itself...
To
be continued tomorrow…
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