What do you think?
Rate this book
John Scottus Eriugena
John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irish philosopher and theologian, is known as the interpreter of Greek thought to the Latin West. He was perhaps the most important philosophical thinker to appear in Latin Christendom between Augustine in the fifth century and Anselm in the eleventh. In this volume, Deirdre Carabine provides a clear and accessible introduction--the only one available in the English language--to the thought of this important figure.In part I, Carabine describes the intellectual revival of the ninth century and situates Eriugena's role within that movement. She looks closely at Eriugena's life and intellectual achievements, including his contribution to the theological controversy on predestination and his roles as teacher and translator of Greek thought. She also examines the Periphyson, undoubtedly Eriugena's most original and important work. In part II, Carabine discusses Eriugena's metaphysics, the structure of reality, the theocentric character of creation, and the role of the trinity and the primordial causes. In particular, she explores Eriugena's employment of negative theology and his understanding of human nature. In conclusion, part III looks at Eriugena's interpretation of the return of all things to their source, including his belief that all people, saints and sinners alike, will return to paradise to the "vision" of a transcendent God.Revealing the unique and compelling nature of Eriugena's thought, and showing why his work continues to appeal to a modern audience, this volume is required reading for students and scholars of medieval philosophy and theology.
144 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2000
7 people are currently reading
112 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 28, 2021
As herself an Irishman as well as a medievalist, the present author Deirdre Carabine naturally takes a special interest in her fellow countryman John Scotus Eriugena. In the ninth century, a period commonly thought of as the darkest of the Dark Ages, Eriugena rises like a solitary mountain, the only western European intellectual figure of standing in the five hundred years between Boethius and Anselm, neither of whom possesses his speculative genius. Having learnt Greek most probably at a monastery in Ireland before settling down in France, he synthesized the Latin and Greek patristic traditions (his main sources are Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus Confessor, whom he translated into Latin) and elaborated his own speculative philosophical system, which after many centuries of neglect was to reemerge to exert a subterranean influence on the founders of German idealism. In this recensionist’s view, the spurious charge of pantheism, which no doubt explains his obscurity during the medieval period, rests upon a failure to take into account the eschatological nature of his vision (which he acquired from Maximus Confessor) – he certainly intends to be orthodox, after all.
What have we to recommend in the present contribution to the Oxford University Press’ distinguished series of introductory monographs on the great medieval thinkers? With two doctorates under her belt, in philosophy from the Queen’s University in Belfast and in classics from the University College in Dublin, she is well equipped to lead the curious modern reader on a tour through what might appear to him a very strange intellectual landscape. At a concise 131 pages including end notes, it will scarcely tax his stamina. A few remarks on her prose style, level of scholarship etc.: pleasant to read, smooth, unstilted, suitably technical but not overwrought. She is not out to impress the reader with her erudition but rather places it in the service of helping along his understanding, where he can be assumed already to possess a certain maturity and does not need to be talked down to.
Review of contents: the first two chapters provide background, on the world of the ninth century and the intellectual revival that goes under the name of the Carolingian renaissance as well as on the enigmatic figure of the master himself. Not overly extensive, level of detail judged probably about rightly. One gets a little sense of the early medieval milieu, Eriugena’s participation in the theological controversy over predestination, the significance for his time and for the later middle ages of his activity as a translator of difficult texts into Latin from the Greek and, lastly, a feeling for his unique and distinctive symbolical framework for understanding what he labels ‘nature’ [natura]. Anyone accustomed to the current climate of thought in the western world, in which nature is hurled into opposition to the divine (in our parlance, the term naturalism can with few exceptions be equated with materialism, and in any case stands for a dedicated denial of God), will be apt to be misled, for Eriugena means by it the sum total of all that is and is not, whether natural or supernatural. Even a religious person could be tempted to find such terminology disconcerting in that on the surface of things it seems to conflate creature with Creator, the two of which exist on very different ontological planes. If so, the confusion would be on our part, not Eriugena’s; he is eminently clear as to what he intends, just that his vision stands at variance with modes of thought that have dominated reflection on divine things ever since the recovery of Aristotle early in the thirteenth century. Therefore, Carabine’s clarifications on this perplexed issue come as very helpful.
The heart of the work, though, is contained in parts two and three. Part II covers the first half of the Neoplatonist-inspired schema: the way down, or exitus. In chapters three and four, Carabine articulates Eriugena’s dialectical method (at once epistemological and ontological) and brings into relief the precise meaning of his fourfold division of natura. In Eriugena’s theocentric outlook, the problem is to characterize God’s procession from non-being into being and the generation thereby of a unity in diversity among created effects – where one has to be careful since, as Carabine stresses, he does not share the privative understanding of non-being introduced by Augustine. In a section entitled trinitarian causality in the Word, Carabine rebuts a frequent charge that there is precious little place for the Son of God in Eriugena’s philosophy – in Pseudo-Dionysius as well, for that matter. Rather, creatio ex nihilo is to be described as a theophany. Here is where the so-called primordial causes figure in the picture, since they represent (in a sense that has to be elucidated) a bridge from the divine to the created world, in as much as they participate in the former and give rise to the latter. Carabine:
In a thoroughly Neoplatonic fashion, Eriugena explains that every order participates in the order above it and in turn is participated in by the order below it. Participation can be understood as the distribution of divine gifts and graces – the distribution of being and well-being from the highest to the lowest order in creation….Eriguena explains that the Greek terms metoche and metousia more clearly show that participation means ‘the derivation from a superior essence of the essence which follows’….In this sense, Eriugena shows that there is a fundamental interconnectness between the various orders of reality, an interconnectedness that today finds expression in the idea that the whole biotic (and abiotic) community is related in that all things are made from ‘the ashes of dead stars’. (p. 58)
There follows an extended section on negative theology and on how, for Eriugena, ‘apophasis and cataphasis are not simply useful devices that enable human beings to speak or not speak about God but are, rather, an integral part of Eriugena’s analysis of reality’ (p. 60).
For many a reader familiar with Christian Neoplatonism, the foregoing might not seem too far off the beaten track, but unless one has read the Periphyseon itself in extenso, the succeeding two chapters devoted to, respectively, human nature in paradise and human nature in the world, will strike him as very strange indeed for here Eriugena’s idiosyncrasies are most openly on display. Suffice it to say that his abstract doctrine of paradise ranges very far from what anyone might construe from a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis – and this statement holds even for those who would be willing to inject a fair degree of metaphor into the scriptural account. For, in Eriugena’s eyes, there never was even a moment in the past when Adam and Eve could be said to have been living in paradise and one could, thus, characterize what he means by it along the lines of a boundary condition. But, if we are not to seek paradise in man’s past we certainly must look forward to it in the future [as in the last lines of the Nicene creed: et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi]. This doctrine, then, forms the topic of Part III, the way up, or reditus. Once again, Eriugena entertains very distinctive views, both with respect to what may be prevalent among us moderns and with respect to his contemporaries. His soaring speculations, following 1 Corinthians 15, on the spiritual nature of the resurrected bodies make for heady going.
In a brief retrospect, Carabine formulates her reasons for an occupation with the thoughts of a man so distant from us, not only in time but also in outlook:
Of the many themes in Eriugena’s works that are especially significant for me, perhaps his astute and penetrating unraveling of natura is the most exciting. Despite his ingenious, and at times extremely complicated, approach to uncreated and created reality, Eriugena consistently points up the mystery that lies at the heart of all reality. As we reach the end of the century that has seen the most advanced scientific and technological inventions in human history, we are not much nearer to an explanation of created natura. In fact, many of our attempts to master nature have had disastrous consequences in terms of the ruthless plunder of nature. The modern conception of the dichotomy conceived to exist between reason and nature sets human beings apart from nature and all other species. Eriugena’s much more holistic and perspectival approach to the whole of reality does not suppose a strict hierarchy (which inevitably leads to dominators and the dominated) but, rather, perceives all things as bound together in an ineffable harmony. Technological advances can result in our forgetfulness of nature and the fact that human nature is a part of it. The obvious reverence Eriugena had for nature – an attitude that is becoming increasingly more evident in contemporary environmental ethics – serves to remind us that even in our frenzy to technologize our lives and all that surrounds them, we human beings will ultimately return to the earth from which we came. (pp. 109-110)
Now for this recensionist’s tack. Why should a modern take an interest in Euriugena, if it is to be other than purely antiquarian? His idea of the ‘primordial causes’ [causae primordiales; cf. Genesis 1:1-3] will repay rapt contemplation, for it may well be more instructive and rudimentary to think of space and time as primordial causes rather than as a priori forms of intuition in the Kantian sense (not to deny the relevance of the latter). The concept of motion stands at the beginnings of physics and involves an interplay between space and time. It is ever popular, particularly among the religiously minded, to decry the long-term effects on modern civilization of the mechanization of the world-picture accomplished during the seventeenth century, but the issue is not quite so simple: we cannot just go back to a pre-modern world-picture; mechanism has proved itself a spectacularly successful research program, from which fact it is therefore apparent that mechanism plays an indispensable role in God’s plan of creation. The challenge is to understand how mechanism interrelates with the other kinds of causality we know of from Aristotle. The reductionist program of deriving all phenomena from strict mechanism at the microphysical level proves to be more a mirage than solid fait accompli. For as soon as one leaves the laboratory and enters the world of human affairs, the laws of physics offer little effectual guidance. Setting aside the paranormal as too elusive to yield to any rational inquiry, nobody doubts but that, in the main, the known laws of nature must apply to the human realm as well, but, if one were to proceed straightforwardly, they would issue in models much too great in complexity ever to be tractable and therefore one cannot gather from them any detailed understanding of what actually occurs, apart perhaps from a handful of general statements such as Lavoisier’s law of conservation of mass. Therefore, we must have recourse to another method of analysis and here is where Eriugena comes into his own.
Eurigena’s speculations on the primordial causes aim to get back to the root behind the phenomena, hence are not merely descriptive but characterize what generates the dynamical process of the world, viewed at an appropriate level of abstraction. There is no space here to descend into detail, but let us call out two sections in the Periphyseon that exemplify the author’s idiosyncratic approach: the masterful recapitulation in Book III of Boethian arithmetic which is concerned with the generation of number from the monad and the dyad, and the immediately following illuminating treatment of what creatio ex nihilo means when cast in these terms. Already with the principle of virtual work in statics and again with the variational principles of classical mechanics, one deals with a system whose behavior is determined by what could be but so far isn’t, and if this were not enough, certainly after the advent of the quantum mechanics Born’s probabilistic rule has taught us to view the wavefunction as embracing a range of possibilities, only one of which will emerge into the light of day upon the act of measurement. If we are ever to decipher the riddle of the quantum, we shall have to do better than the current crop of its interpreters, none of whom seems to have hit upon the key that fits the lock. However contrived, their putative elucidations just do not have the ring of truth.
For these reasons one may well expect to profit from a renewed investigation into Eriugena’s signature metaphysics of meontology, or the study of non-being [from the Greek, μὴ ὄν], what forms the crux of Dermot Moran’s argument in The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A study of idealism in the middle ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Indeed one could, with Moran, make a good case that nobody else in the entire intellectual tradition since the pre-Socratics has ever deliberated quite as profoundly and as systematically about non-being and all the surrounding issues.
So: first riffle through Carabine for a competent overview of Eriugena’s oeuvre, then turn to Moran for a deeper theoretical exploration of aspects of his thought that are pertinent to the current status of philosophical reflection among those trained in the aftermath of German idealism and which may indeed stimulate original work in the field. Accordingly this recensionist must promise a complementary review of Moran’s monograph, to be forthcoming conditions permitting in that mythical phantasm, before long!
What have we to recommend in the present contribution to the Oxford University Press’ distinguished series of introductory monographs on the great medieval thinkers? With two doctorates under her belt, in philosophy from the Queen’s University in Belfast and in classics from the University College in Dublin, she is well equipped to lead the curious modern reader on a tour through what might appear to him a very strange intellectual landscape. At a concise 131 pages including end notes, it will scarcely tax his stamina. A few remarks on her prose style, level of scholarship etc.: pleasant to read, smooth, unstilted, suitably technical but not overwrought. She is not out to impress the reader with her erudition but rather places it in the service of helping along his understanding, where he can be assumed already to possess a certain maturity and does not need to be talked down to.
Review of contents: the first two chapters provide background, on the world of the ninth century and the intellectual revival that goes under the name of the Carolingian renaissance as well as on the enigmatic figure of the master himself. Not overly extensive, level of detail judged probably about rightly. One gets a little sense of the early medieval milieu, Eriugena’s participation in the theological controversy over predestination, the significance for his time and for the later middle ages of his activity as a translator of difficult texts into Latin from the Greek and, lastly, a feeling for his unique and distinctive symbolical framework for understanding what he labels ‘nature’ [natura]. Anyone accustomed to the current climate of thought in the western world, in which nature is hurled into opposition to the divine (in our parlance, the term naturalism can with few exceptions be equated with materialism, and in any case stands for a dedicated denial of God), will be apt to be misled, for Eriugena means by it the sum total of all that is and is not, whether natural or supernatural. Even a religious person could be tempted to find such terminology disconcerting in that on the surface of things it seems to conflate creature with Creator, the two of which exist on very different ontological planes. If so, the confusion would be on our part, not Eriugena’s; he is eminently clear as to what he intends, just that his vision stands at variance with modes of thought that have dominated reflection on divine things ever since the recovery of Aristotle early in the thirteenth century. Therefore, Carabine’s clarifications on this perplexed issue come as very helpful.
The heart of the work, though, is contained in parts two and three. Part II covers the first half of the Neoplatonist-inspired schema: the way down, or exitus. In chapters three and four, Carabine articulates Eriugena’s dialectical method (at once epistemological and ontological) and brings into relief the precise meaning of his fourfold division of natura. In Eriugena’s theocentric outlook, the problem is to characterize God’s procession from non-being into being and the generation thereby of a unity in diversity among created effects – where one has to be careful since, as Carabine stresses, he does not share the privative understanding of non-being introduced by Augustine. In a section entitled trinitarian causality in the Word, Carabine rebuts a frequent charge that there is precious little place for the Son of God in Eriugena’s philosophy – in Pseudo-Dionysius as well, for that matter. Rather, creatio ex nihilo is to be described as a theophany. Here is where the so-called primordial causes figure in the picture, since they represent (in a sense that has to be elucidated) a bridge from the divine to the created world, in as much as they participate in the former and give rise to the latter. Carabine:
In a thoroughly Neoplatonic fashion, Eriugena explains that every order participates in the order above it and in turn is participated in by the order below it. Participation can be understood as the distribution of divine gifts and graces – the distribution of being and well-being from the highest to the lowest order in creation….Eriguena explains that the Greek terms metoche and metousia more clearly show that participation means ‘the derivation from a superior essence of the essence which follows’….In this sense, Eriugena shows that there is a fundamental interconnectness between the various orders of reality, an interconnectedness that today finds expression in the idea that the whole biotic (and abiotic) community is related in that all things are made from ‘the ashes of dead stars’. (p. 58)
There follows an extended section on negative theology and on how, for Eriugena, ‘apophasis and cataphasis are not simply useful devices that enable human beings to speak or not speak about God but are, rather, an integral part of Eriugena’s analysis of reality’ (p. 60).
For many a reader familiar with Christian Neoplatonism, the foregoing might not seem too far off the beaten track, but unless one has read the Periphyseon itself in extenso, the succeeding two chapters devoted to, respectively, human nature in paradise and human nature in the world, will strike him as very strange indeed for here Eriugena’s idiosyncrasies are most openly on display. Suffice it to say that his abstract doctrine of paradise ranges very far from what anyone might construe from a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis – and this statement holds even for those who would be willing to inject a fair degree of metaphor into the scriptural account. For, in Eriugena’s eyes, there never was even a moment in the past when Adam and Eve could be said to have been living in paradise and one could, thus, characterize what he means by it along the lines of a boundary condition. But, if we are not to seek paradise in man’s past we certainly must look forward to it in the future [as in the last lines of the Nicene creed: et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi]. This doctrine, then, forms the topic of Part III, the way up, or reditus. Once again, Eriugena entertains very distinctive views, both with respect to what may be prevalent among us moderns and with respect to his contemporaries. His soaring speculations, following 1 Corinthians 15, on the spiritual nature of the resurrected bodies make for heady going.
In a brief retrospect, Carabine formulates her reasons for an occupation with the thoughts of a man so distant from us, not only in time but also in outlook:
Of the many themes in Eriugena’s works that are especially significant for me, perhaps his astute and penetrating unraveling of natura is the most exciting. Despite his ingenious, and at times extremely complicated, approach to uncreated and created reality, Eriugena consistently points up the mystery that lies at the heart of all reality. As we reach the end of the century that has seen the most advanced scientific and technological inventions in human history, we are not much nearer to an explanation of created natura. In fact, many of our attempts to master nature have had disastrous consequences in terms of the ruthless plunder of nature. The modern conception of the dichotomy conceived to exist between reason and nature sets human beings apart from nature and all other species. Eriugena’s much more holistic and perspectival approach to the whole of reality does not suppose a strict hierarchy (which inevitably leads to dominators and the dominated) but, rather, perceives all things as bound together in an ineffable harmony. Technological advances can result in our forgetfulness of nature and the fact that human nature is a part of it. The obvious reverence Eriugena had for nature – an attitude that is becoming increasingly more evident in contemporary environmental ethics – serves to remind us that even in our frenzy to technologize our lives and all that surrounds them, we human beings will ultimately return to the earth from which we came. (pp. 109-110)
Now for this recensionist’s tack. Why should a modern take an interest in Euriugena, if it is to be other than purely antiquarian? His idea of the ‘primordial causes’ [causae primordiales; cf. Genesis 1:1-3] will repay rapt contemplation, for it may well be more instructive and rudimentary to think of space and time as primordial causes rather than as a priori forms of intuition in the Kantian sense (not to deny the relevance of the latter). The concept of motion stands at the beginnings of physics and involves an interplay between space and time. It is ever popular, particularly among the religiously minded, to decry the long-term effects on modern civilization of the mechanization of the world-picture accomplished during the seventeenth century, but the issue is not quite so simple: we cannot just go back to a pre-modern world-picture; mechanism has proved itself a spectacularly successful research program, from which fact it is therefore apparent that mechanism plays an indispensable role in God’s plan of creation. The challenge is to understand how mechanism interrelates with the other kinds of causality we know of from Aristotle. The reductionist program of deriving all phenomena from strict mechanism at the microphysical level proves to be more a mirage than solid fait accompli. For as soon as one leaves the laboratory and enters the world of human affairs, the laws of physics offer little effectual guidance. Setting aside the paranormal as too elusive to yield to any rational inquiry, nobody doubts but that, in the main, the known laws of nature must apply to the human realm as well, but, if one were to proceed straightforwardly, they would issue in models much too great in complexity ever to be tractable and therefore one cannot gather from them any detailed understanding of what actually occurs, apart perhaps from a handful of general statements such as Lavoisier’s law of conservation of mass. Therefore, we must have recourse to another method of analysis and here is where Eriugena comes into his own.
Eurigena’s speculations on the primordial causes aim to get back to the root behind the phenomena, hence are not merely descriptive but characterize what generates the dynamical process of the world, viewed at an appropriate level of abstraction. There is no space here to descend into detail, but let us call out two sections in the Periphyseon that exemplify the author’s idiosyncratic approach: the masterful recapitulation in Book III of Boethian arithmetic which is concerned with the generation of number from the monad and the dyad, and the immediately following illuminating treatment of what creatio ex nihilo means when cast in these terms. Already with the principle of virtual work in statics and again with the variational principles of classical mechanics, one deals with a system whose behavior is determined by what could be but so far isn’t, and if this were not enough, certainly after the advent of the quantum mechanics Born’s probabilistic rule has taught us to view the wavefunction as embracing a range of possibilities, only one of which will emerge into the light of day upon the act of measurement. If we are ever to decipher the riddle of the quantum, we shall have to do better than the current crop of its interpreters, none of whom seems to have hit upon the key that fits the lock. However contrived, their putative elucidations just do not have the ring of truth.
For these reasons one may well expect to profit from a renewed investigation into Eriugena’s signature metaphysics of meontology, or the study of non-being [from the Greek, μὴ ὄν], what forms the crux of Dermot Moran’s argument in The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A study of idealism in the middle ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Indeed one could, with Moran, make a good case that nobody else in the entire intellectual tradition since the pre-Socratics has ever deliberated quite as profoundly and as systematically about non-being and all the surrounding issues.
So: first riffle through Carabine for a competent overview of Eriugena’s oeuvre, then turn to Moran for a deeper theoretical exploration of aspects of his thought that are pertinent to the current status of philosophical reflection among those trained in the aftermath of German idealism and which may indeed stimulate original work in the field. Accordingly this recensionist must promise a complementary review of Moran’s monograph, to be forthcoming conditions permitting in that mythical phantasm, before long!
May 14, 2012
As one whose brain doesn't naturally gravitate toward philosophical thinking (much less medieval philosophical thinking), picking up this book was a struggle. I mainly did it because John Scottus Eriugena (815-877) came up in a couple church history books I've been working through, and I thought it'd be a good idea to at least know a little about the guy. And the church histories aren't much help--all they say is:
- He was a master of Greek at a time when very few in Europe were.
- He translated Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin.
- He was one of the greatest thinkers in the West at this time (in fact, Gonzalez says he is "THE one outstanding original thinker of the ninth century in the West").
Unfortunately, that last claim isn't backed up with too much evidence in the church histories, and I can't say I blame them--if their authors have read Eriugena at all, they probably didn't understand what the heck he was talking about. I sure didn't as I navigated (what I've read of) Carabine's book. I'm sure Carabine understood, and if you have a background in medieval thought and/or philosophy (of which I have neither), I am sure it would have made a lot of sense to you. Really.
But alas, for the layman like me, I can't make heads or tails of what Eriugena believed.
For starters, he divides all of nature into four categories:
1. That which creates and is not created (God. Duh.)
2. That which is created and creates (???)
3. That which is created and does not create (everything we see)
4. That which is not created and does not create (God again. Mind blown! Not.)
To quote Carabine, "The first division denotes God as cause; the second division refers to the causes of all things created by God in the Word; the third division denotes all that is created by the causes; the fourth division refers to God as end." So basically everything begins in God and ends in God, and the process by which this comes about is called "reditus," which Eriugena sees as the fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 15:28, "when God shall be all in all."
There's some other stuff in there too that fills in the blanks (like how God and everything is both being and non-being [umm wat]).
To be continued...
- He was a master of Greek at a time when very few in Europe were.
- He translated Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin.
- He was one of the greatest thinkers in the West at this time (in fact, Gonzalez says he is "THE one outstanding original thinker of the ninth century in the West").
Unfortunately, that last claim isn't backed up with too much evidence in the church histories, and I can't say I blame them--if their authors have read Eriugena at all, they probably didn't understand what the heck he was talking about. I sure didn't as I navigated (what I've read of) Carabine's book. I'm sure Carabine understood, and if you have a background in medieval thought and/or philosophy (of which I have neither), I am sure it would have made a lot of sense to you. Really.
But alas, for the layman like me, I can't make heads or tails of what Eriugena believed.
For starters, he divides all of nature into four categories:
1. That which creates and is not created (God. Duh.)
2. That which is created and creates (???)
3. That which is created and does not create (everything we see)
4. That which is not created and does not create (God again. Mind blown! Not.)
To quote Carabine, "The first division denotes God as cause; the second division refers to the causes of all things created by God in the Word; the third division denotes all that is created by the causes; the fourth division refers to God as end." So basically everything begins in God and ends in God, and the process by which this comes about is called "reditus," which Eriugena sees as the fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 15:28, "when God shall be all in all."
There's some other stuff in there too that fills in the blanks (like how God and everything is both being and non-being [umm wat]).
To be continued...
April 7, 2019
Professor Carabine's book on Eriugena is an excellent introduction to who is, perhaps, one of the most overlooked Christian thinkers of not only the Medieval period, but all of Christian history. Here is a man who read Greek with exceptional adroitness at a time when few in the Latin West could do so, who translated some of the most influential texts for the next thousand years (the works of Pseudo-Dionysius), and worked to created a synthesis of Eastern and Western Christian thought.
Carabine focuses on Eriugena's magnus opus, the Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), and follows the broader arguments of the text. For some, this might be seen as a weakness in that she rarely refers to his other works; but if it is a weakness, it is a weakness due only to the restrictions of length within which she must work. I consider it a wonderful introduction to a man whose thought will hopefully become more respected and well-known.
Carabine focuses on Eriugena's magnus opus, the Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), and follows the broader arguments of the text. For some, this might be seen as a weakness in that she rarely refers to his other works; but if it is a weakness, it is a weakness due only to the restrictions of length within which she must work. I consider it a wonderful introduction to a man whose thought will hopefully become more respected and well-known.
December 29, 2017
A couple of favorite quotes in the "Return" chapter:
Even in the return of all diversity in the unity of God, the quest for God will be endless, for although God is "found" in theophany to a certain extent, God is not found as to what God is in God's self. But since that which it seeks and towards which it tends ... is infinite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it necessarily follows that its quest is infinite ... And yet although its search is unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find it, for It cannot be found. Therefore, even the highest of all theophanies will find only that God is, not what God is.
Life is simply seeking God.
Many of our attempts to master nature have had disastrous consequences in terms of the ruthless plunder of nature. The modern conception of the dichotomy conceived to exist between reason and nature sets humans apart from nature and all other species. Eriuegena's much more holistic and perspectival approach to the whole of created reality does not suppose a strict hierarchy (which inevitably leads to dominators and the dominated) but, rather, perceives all things as bound together in an ineffable harmony. Technological advances can result in our forgetfulness of nature and the fact that human nature is a part of it. The obvious reverence Eriugena had for nature - an attitude that is becoming increasingly more evident in contemporary environmental ethics - serves to remind us that even in our frenzy to technologize our lives and all that surround them, we human beings will ultimately return to the earth from which we came.
Of course, I love the T.S. Eliot quote:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Even in the return of all diversity in the unity of God, the quest for God will be endless, for although God is "found" in theophany to a certain extent, God is not found as to what God is in God's self. But since that which it seeks and towards which it tends ... is infinite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it necessarily follows that its quest is infinite ... And yet although its search is unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find it, for It cannot be found. Therefore, even the highest of all theophanies will find only that God is, not what God is.
Life is simply seeking God.
Many of our attempts to master nature have had disastrous consequences in terms of the ruthless plunder of nature. The modern conception of the dichotomy conceived to exist between reason and nature sets humans apart from nature and all other species. Eriuegena's much more holistic and perspectival approach to the whole of created reality does not suppose a strict hierarchy (which inevitably leads to dominators and the dominated) but, rather, perceives all things as bound together in an ineffable harmony. Technological advances can result in our forgetfulness of nature and the fact that human nature is a part of it. The obvious reverence Eriugena had for nature - an attitude that is becoming increasingly more evident in contemporary environmental ethics - serves to remind us that even in our frenzy to technologize our lives and all that surround them, we human beings will ultimately return to the earth from which we came.
Of course, I love the T.S. Eliot quote:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
October 22, 2024
This is a wonderful introduction to Eriugena, and serves as a very helpful cheat sheet if you want the high points of his major work, Periphyseon, but don’t really want to wade through it. Obviously, she can’t cover everything, but she helps clarify and explain his theology and why it matters and how it is situated in larger medieval Christian thought.
September 16, 2016
Clear and brief.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews