Hyperlink Philosophy #2
Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, & John Scotus Erigena
One intellectually honest man in the early scholastic period was John Scotus Erigena, alternately John the Scot (~800–877), an Irish philosopher-monk whose thinking relied heavily on the Greek tradition transmitted by his predecessors and commended by Russell as the only ‘eminent philosopher’ between Boethius (~477–524) and Anselm of Canterbury. Boethius (~480–524) was one of the last great philosophers with a command of Greek and knowledge of the philosophers from Classical Antiquity. Boethius was a contemporary of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, and prior to his execution by the latter for a reputed treasonous conspiracy with the Byzantines, he had planned to translate all of Plato and Aristotle’s works into Latin. In fact, it was Boethius who preserved the two surviving works of Aristotle in Latin, Categories and On Interpretation, and it was primarily through him that Neoplatonism came to be so absorbed into Christian theology.[1]
This scarcity of philosophers is not surprising given the Church’s disdain for secular knowledge combined with the gradual loss of Greek language skills and the subsequent ensuing ignorance of eastern works and thinkers. However, Russell notes that many Greek writings seemed to have survived in Ireland, despite their loss in mainland Latin western Europe, a fact which seems to have contributed to Erigena’s knowledge of Greek which was very unusual for the time. Of the Greek works available to Erigena, he may not have had the original Neoplatonist texts, rather, they seem to have come to him through commentaries by the enigmatic writer Dionysius, who proved to be critically important to Erigena’s thinking. It was through Erigena’s Latin translations of the works of Dionysius that he entered western Christian philosophy — the only Greco-Byzantine thinker to do so — and becoming highly influential, as demonstrated by the over one thousand references Aquinas makes to Dionysius in his Summa.[2]
Dionysius was a contemporary of Boethius living sometime between the fifth and sixth centuries and was a Neoplatonist Syriac Christian known today as Pseudo-Dionysius. This writer borrowed the authority of Dionysius the Areopagite, a fact which provided his writings longevity and respect among Christians that they might not otherwise have attained. In Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius copied from the Commentary on the Parmenides by Proclus (412–85), which was an analysis of Plato’s dialogue, Parmenides.[3] Parmenides thought about the nature of being and non-being, which was captured by Plato, passed on through Proclus, and from Pseudo-Dionysius to Erigena in Periphyseon alternately known as The Division of Nature:
Plato: If being and the one be two different things, it is not because the one is one that it is other than being; nor because being is being that it is other than the one; but they differ from one another in virtue of otherness and difference.
Certainly.
So that the other is not the same either with the one or with being?
Certainly not.
And therefore whether we take being and the other, or being and the one, or the one and the other, in every such case we take two things, which may be rightly called both.[4]
Erigena: Nature, then, is the general name, as we said, for all things, for those that are and those that are not.
It is. For nothing at all can come into our thought that would not fall under this term. . . .
. . . Let then the second mode of being and not being be that which is seen in the orders and differences of created natures. . . .
. . . It is also on these grounds that every order of rational or intellectual creatures is said to be and not to be: it is in so far as it is known by the orders above it and by itself; but it is not in so far as it does not permit itself to be comprehended by the orders that are below it.[5]
Erigena, by using nature to describe God, echoes Pliny and precedes Spinoza who makes many of the same arguments while having known nothing of Erigena’s thought. It was because of this description of nature that some people assume Erigena was making a pantheistic argument. Yet, Erigena’s writings are full of references of finding unity with God, utilizing the logos concept and bringing it into western theology. Erigena would have denied being pantheistic, especially as his terminology is best explained as striving to reconcile Neoplatonism with his devout Christian beliefs. This unity with the transcendent ‘beyond being and non-being’ God, was particularly attractive to mystics. As with many thinkers who were far ahead of their times, Erigena’s cosmology was also ‘too conceptually advanced for the philosophers and theologians’ in his era, and Russell writes he was ‘the most astonishing person of the ninth century; he would have been less surprising if he had lived in the fifth or the fifteenth century. . . . He set reason above faith, and cared nothing for the authority of ecclesiastics.’[6] However, by 1851, Schopenhauer notes his time had finally come:
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 day pantheism, although presented 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.[7]
It was for the perceptions of pantheism that Russell notes Erigena’s The Division of Nature was ‘repeatedly condemned as heretical, and at last, in 1225, Pope Honorius III ordered all copies of it to be burnt.’ Despite the papal order, it continued to be influential on other Neoplatonists and especially for the Renaissance humanist, Bishop Nicholas of Cusa, then mostly forgotten until it resurfaced in the late seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, Erigena’s philosophy went on to impact the German idealists, such as Hegel and his adherents, who ‘read Eriugena rather uncritically as an absolute idealist.’ Once again, there is a direct connection from Classical Antiquity to the ideals of the Enlightenment and beyond, as the being/non-being conceptualizations of Parmenides came to be filtered through Plato, Proclus, and Dionysius to Erigena whose ‘theory of place and time as defining structures of the mind anticipates Kant, his dialectical reasoning prefigures Hegel.’[8]
Notes
[1] MacCulloch 2009, 321–22. Russell 1945, 188; 254. Russell (pp. 227; 228–29) heaps praise on Boethius: ‘There is no trace of the superstition or morbidness of the age, no obsession with sin, no excessive straining after the unattainable. There is perfect philosophic calm….During the two centuries before his time and the ten centuries after it, I cannot think of any European man of learning so free from superstition and fanaticism. Nor are his merits merely negative; his survey is lofty, disinterested, and sublime. He would have been remarkable in any age; in the age in which he lived, he is utterly amazing.’ The introduction to two of his works (Boethius 1908, x) states ‘Boethius was the last of the Roman philosophers, and the first of the scholastic theologians.’
The Consolation of Philosophy, written while he was imprisoned by Theodoric is very Stoic in nature despite the scorn Boethius (1908, 139) has for Stoics and Epicureans, as he preferred the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle: ‘Have we not in ancient times before our Plato’s age had oftentimes great conflicts with the rashness of folly? And while he lived, had not his master Socrates the victory of an unjust death in my presence, whose inheritance, when afterward the mob of Epicures, Stoics, and others (every one for his own sect) endeavoured to usurp, and as it were in part of their prey, sought to draw me to them, exclaiming and striving against them.’ Valla (2012, 83) takes Boethius to task for this attitude: ‘The fountainhead of this sophistry is Greek, and it was accepted by none of the ancient Latins, as far as I know, expect for one — Boethius. As one born to Roman gravity and wishing to be seen as eloquent, why did he chase after this nonsense rather than hunting it down.’
[2] Russell 1945, 244. Moran & Guiu, 2019. Britannica, Scholasticism.
[3] Dionysius the Areopagite was a convert of St. Paul, see Acts 17:34. For more on writers in the Christian tradition using borrowed authority, see Forged by Bart Ehrman. Franke (2007, 158) notes it was not until 1895 that two Catholic scholars working independently, Joseph Stiglmayr and Hugo Koch, confirmed that Dionysius was pseudonymous when their analysis revealed Dionysius built on Proclus and incorporated much of his thinking; however, centuries before Valla had deduced in his Annotations on the New Testament that Dionysius was a Neoplatonist and could not have been the first-century convert. Perhaps he may have been a student of Proclus.
[4] Plato 1892, 68–69.
[5] John Scotus Erigena 1987, 25; 27; 28.
[6] Moran & Guiu 2019. Russell 1945, 246–47; 244.
[7] Schopenhauer 1974, 6.
[8] Russell 1945, 247–58. Moran & Guiu 2019.
References
Boethius. (1908). The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy. (H. F. Stewart & E. K. Rand Trans.). Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2Ua4sSo
Britannica. Scholasticism. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3debX1p
Franke, W. (Ed.). (2007). On what cannot be said: Apophatic discourses in philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts (Vol. 1). University of Notre Dame Press.
John Scotus Erigena. (1987). Periphyseon (The Division of nature). (J. O’Meara Trans.). Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/35W7Xia
MacCulloch, D. (2009). Christianity: The first 3000 years. [Kindle Reader version]. Penguin Books.
Moran, D. & Guiu, A. (2019). John Scottus Eriugena. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Winter 2019 Edition. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottus-eriugena/
Plato. (1892). Parmenides. In B. Jowett (Trans.), The Dialogues of Plato (Vol. 4) (pp. 1–106). Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3jklB6M
Russell, B. (1945). A History of Western philosophy. Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3eRRs8I
Schopenhauer, A. (1974). Sketch of a history of the doctrine of the ideal and the real. In E. F. J. Payne (Trans.), Parerga and Paralipomena: Short philosophical essays (Vol. 1) (pp. 1–28). Google Books. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/36ck8aV
Valla, L. (2012). Dialectical disputations (Vol 1., Books II-III.). (B. P. Copenhaver & L. Nauta Trans. & Ed.). Harvard University Press.
Note: This article was taken from my book, Sins of the Fathers.
