JOHN IRISH THE IRISH-BORN. PART II.

…Having thus established Erigena’s bona fides in more than one way, let us touch upon his life and thought, as both are of great interest to the history of philosophy, and also to me personally.

He was born in Ireland between 810 and 815, but later emigrated to the Continent in a wave of emigrations, caused by a series of barbarian Scandinavian invasions that did nothing good for the cause of culture except for returning it from the no longer wild west closer to its original home eastward. In 845 he was accepted at the court of Charles the Bald, whose own possessions including Paris were being ravaged by the Normans.

Erigena’s authority as a classical scholar with an invaluable knowledge of Greek had been well established by the time he traveled to France. Getting into theological trouble all the time, due to his independent mind and a highly unorthodox preference for honest philosophy and reason over dogmatic theology and religious revelation, he, however, was extremely lucky not to be branded a heretic in his lifetime, thanks to his great scholarly reputation, and the royal protection of his benefactor. Only well after his death would his writings be condemned, and even burned as heretical, guaranteeing him a virtual oblivion, but, luckily, not an everlasting one, as the fortuitous rediscovery of his manuscripts in Oxford in 1681 brought him back to life and established him ever since as a foremost thinker of all time. The end of his life is clouded in total obscurity. Most sources give 877 as the year of his death, without any ground, except for the fact that his royal benefactor died in that year. There is a legend that after Charles the Bald died, he left for England, where Alfred the Great bestowed more honors on the old man, for which (or, perhaps, for something else) Erigena’s students at Oxford stabbed him to death with their styli. This is, however, only a legend, and there is no factual or circumstantial substantiation for it whatsoever.

Erigena’s first theological work (which has been irrevocably destroyed, but its gist is known) was devoted to the subject of the Eucharist, and it was instantly controversial and potentially blasphemous. We know of the later disagreement between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, concerning transubstantiation versus consubstantiation, both, however, entailing substantiation, that is, the transformation of bread and water, in the course of the sacrament, into the body and blood of Christ. Erigena dismissed this transformation out of hand. His view, closely resembling that of modern Baptists, is that the Eucharist is a purely symbolic rite, in which no substantiation ever takes place. Erigena never suffered the consequences of his heresy, but its later proponents such as, say, Berengar of Tours did. Most ironically, as part of his forced penance Berengar was required to publicly burn… that selfsame Erigena’s treatise!

In his treatise On Divine Predestination Erigena defended free will and couldn’t resist the daring challenge of defending philosophy and reason against their ecclesiastical repudiation. He contended that philosophy is not inferior, but sometimes even superior to revelation, in the sense that both reason and revelation are bona fide sources of truth, and are not supposed to come in conflict with each other, but if they should, this would not be the reason’s fault, but there must have been something wrong with the revelation. An amazing boldness in a very dangerous time for it!

His attitude toward hell is no less heretical. For Erigena, hell is not a place, but a condition for purification, and eventually, after such purification, all God’s Creation, including the demons, was to join God in good harmony. Once again, one must marvel how such liberties on his part did not bring Erigena into some very serious harm, but this odd fact remains, that he thus went through his whole life, ever ranting and raving, yet emerging unscathed at the end.

Another outstanding fact of Erigena’s intellectual accomplishments was his already mentioned translation from Greek into Latin of the Neo-Platonic works of Pseudo-Dionysius. (See the previous entry.) On having receiving the translation, Pope St. Nicholas I the Great was offended only by the fact that his permission for this translation had not been sought in the first place, but he refrained from any negative comments on the controversial treatment of theology in it, and he even expressed an admiration, based on the opinion of his Greek scholars, for the superlative quality of Erigena’s translation and exhibited scholarship.

Erigena’s magnum opus, as I have already said, was his work De Divisione Naturae (Periphyseon), where he divides the whole of nature into four classes: [1] what creates and is not created (God); [2] what creates and is created (the Platonic ideas which subsist in God); [3] what is created and does not create (all things in space and time); and [4] what neither creates nor is created (God again, but this time teleological rather than the first cause). Thus, everything comes from God, and through Logos returns to Him. It is easy to see the connection with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit here, although the influence of the one on the other can hardly be ascertained. Establishing such connections of influence we may convincingly argue that Erigena has borrowed the first three classes of being from Aristotle (whom he however criticizes, preferring Plato to him), and the fourth class from Pseudo-Dionysius, who teaches the return of all being into God.

Aside from the four classes of being, there is also a realm of non-being, which includes all physical things which do not belong to the intelligible world, but also sin (!), which are not parts of the divine pattern. This teaching is also greatly suspect, which means that any powerful ill-wisher could easily accuse Erigena of a large number of heresies, but one of the reasons why this had not happened must have been the mentioned Biblical authority of Dionysius, which may, most of the time, have been Erigena’s powerful shield against such trouble, and, most probably, his chief motivation for drafting Dionysius under his banner, in the first place.

A remarkable life, a remarkable personal luck, and a wonderful fortune for posterity to have the knowledge of this man and his work restored to us, proving that even the darkest ages of our cultural history have not been altogether pitch dark.