CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
John Scotus Erigena
"THE MIDDLE AGES"
IS A SOMEWHAT
ELASTIC TERM
covering more or less the ten centuries between the Fall of Rome to the barbarians in the fifth century of the Christian era and the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the fifteenth—a thousand years of European history which divide the Classical Ancient World of Greece and Rome from the Modern. These medieval ages have often been called the Dark Ages, both by the Humanists, the people for whom the classical world of Litterae Humaniores, or humane letters, is the best, and by those for whom Modern
Times alone are civilized.
A French historian, Michelet, for example, gloomed about "a thousand years without a bath," whereas another French historian, Etienne Gilson, speaks glowingly of "a thousand years of abstract speculation." The Humanists, Christopher Dawson tells us, regard the Middle Ages as a dark age of Gothic barbarity, while to the Reformers they were ages of spiritual darkness, and both parties wanted to wipe the whole thousand years clean off the slate and start again from classical antiquity. The modern-age enthusiasts want to start with the Reformation or the Renaissance, when they don't want to start still later with the French Revolution.
But there they are, those Middle Ages, a thousand years, straddling across human history. They "saw the making of Europe and the birth and rebirth of Western culture: they also witnessed the creation of that socio-religious unity that we call Christendom, and the gradual penetration of our culture by Christian beliefs and Christian moral and intellectual standards." It is with the last two words of Christopher Dawson that this book has to deal, with the
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q3 "intellectual standards," or, rather, with the philosophical.
With Christian cultural standards too as they relate to philosophy. Not, however, with medieval political, psychological, artistic, literary, mystical or devotional standards.
All medieval ideas were religious, since in the Middle Ages religion and civilization were so closely united that "religious institutions were the main organs of culture and almost every form of social activity possessed a religious sanction."
Like Gaul, and unlike God, the Middle Ages can be divided into three parts. The first, or Patristic period, is the transition, when the glow of the classical sunset dies into the stormy barbarian dawn. The real Dark Ages follow, during which the barbarians overran Europe, and then, painfully and gradually, were coaxed into the Christian fold. The Dark Ages culminate in the glorious twelfth century renaissance, which lasted for nearly two hundred years.
Then it was that Christian culture produced such a feast of learning and literature, of law and art, as made it one of the glorious golden ages of man.
Christopher Dawson has described three ways in which religion may enter and become part of a culture. It may grow up "as it were naturally, with the life of the people, so as to seem inseparable from it." That was the case in Egypt, China, India, Greece and Rome. Or it may enter as a conqueror, as Buddhism entered China, or Islam
Persia in the seventh, or Turkey in the fourteenth, century. Or it may enter a culture at the formative stage, and become part of, and be modified by, the new culture that is growing up. "The history of medieval Christianity is a classic example of the third process."
What is difficult for people of the Modern Age to understand (and it is just as hard for Christians as for agnostics) is that the Middle Ages were totally unaware of nationalism. From Iceland to Sicily there was one faith, one culture: as from Poland to Portugal. And from the point of view of ideas, whether a man came from Prester
John's central Asiatic kingdom or the Church of Malabar in India, from the deserts of Egypt or the snows of Lapland, mattered not at all. Climaxing the Middle Ages is the
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thirteenth century, which, like the age of the Greek Pericles, or the Roman Augustus, that of Akbar the Indian or of the English Elizabeth I, is one of the "classical" ages, when human civilization, that slow, thorny cactus, suddenly flowers, and, as Voltaire said, "compensates the historian for the barren prospect of a thousand years of stupidity and barbarism."
The "stupidity and barbarism" were but a part, the growing-pains part, of an organization of society that was complete and perfect in its way. Resting on the uniformity of the faith professed, and on the absolute universality of the Church, undisputed by any sectarian body, there was, in the early Middle Ages, as Dr. Waldemar Gurian puts it,
"nofundamental divergence of view as to the reciprocal concordance, and the repartition of rights, between the spiritual and temporal power. The medieval formula on the basic relation between the spiritual and the secular order presupposed a spiritual unity which was the signal feature of medieval society and was unique in history."
Because of these broad agreements, disagreements could exist in many subsidiary areas, and a freedom of divergence was possible which was astonishing and has remained unique. The "freedom of the faith" was an astonishment even to Lecky, whose opinion of religion was that on the whole it had been detrimental to the pursuit of truth. But of the Middle Ages he wrote, in his History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (Longmans, 1865):
{ Catholicism was then perfectly in accordance with the intellectual wants of Europe. It was not a tyranny, for the intellectual latitude it permitted was fully commensurate with the wants of the people. It was not a sect or an isolated influence acting in the midst of Europe and forming one weight in the balance of power, but rather an all-pervasive energy animating and vivifying the whole social system. A certain unity of type was then manifested, which has never been restored. The corporations, the guilds, the feudal system, the monarchy, the social habits of the people, their laws, their studies, their very amusements,
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all grew out of ecclesiastical teaching, embodied ecclesiastical modes of thought, exhibited the same general tendencies, and presented countless points of contact or of analogy. All of them were strictly congruous. The Church was the very heart of Christendom, and the spirit that radiated from her penetrated into all the relations of life, and colored the institutions it did not create. In such a condition of society, heresies were almost impossible. For while the particular form that a heresy assumes may be dependent upon circumstances that are peculiar to the heresiarch, the existence and success of heretical teaching always proves that the tone of thought or measure of probability prevailing at the time has begun to diverge from the tone of thought or measure of probability of orthodoxy.
As long as a church is so powerful as to form the intellectual condition of the age, to supply the standing-point from which every question is viewed .
. it will realize so perfectly the general conceptions of the peoples, that no difficulties of detail will seriously disturb it. This ascendancy was gained by medieval Catholicity more completely than by any system before or since, and the stage of civilization that resulted from it was one of the most important in the evolutions of society. }
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY THUS OWED ITS CONTENT TO TWO
sources: on the one hand, to the religious background, Jewish, Patristic, or later, as will be seen, also Muslim; and, on the other, to the philosophy of the Greeks. The development of religion and the assimilation of Greek thought were two parallel] and interactionary movements, which culminated in a repeated attempt to reconcile philosophy and religion by separating their spheres. And the more complete the separation, the more satisfactory and lasting the reconciliation, as will be seen.
As the barbarian pressure increased, the Roman legions were not withdrawn; neither were they replaced. It was not that "some people went away," but, rather, that others failed to come: reinforcements did not come. Britain, Gaul,
Spain, Austria, Illyria were left to fend for themselves, after the Roman garrisons, outnumbered, had been mas-
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sacred, often to a man—as at Shrewsbury, as in Brittany, and elsewhere.
The waves of conquerors had come from the East, over the low Ural Mountains, the "not very high hills" which, as Hitler pointed out, are all that separate Europe from Asia; Goths and Vandals, Franks and Huns, in varying degrees and in different places, kept coming for some four hundred years; then they more or less settled down. The process took a long time, and was gradual; little pockets of Roman culture and civilization survived, in monasteries, around cathedrals, in corners of countries or on islands, such as the Ile de Lérins, in the south of France, or at Lindisfarne, off the North Sea coast of England, or in Ireland, or on Jona. From these islands and outposts gradually, too, the monks ventured back onto the mainland; sometimes they were successful and remained beside the conquerors to chivvy and Christianize, as did St. Columbanus, or St.
Willibrod. Sometimes they were murdered, like St. Boniface, but something of what they had brought remained.
The monks alone tried to conquer the conquerors, for generally the subject peoples hated them too greatly, and treasured their relics of Romanitas, or Roman being, and feeling, too dear. Indeed the long delay in the Christianization of the invaders owes much to the bitter hatred of the subject peoples, who once had been Roman. The Celts, for example, so hated the Saxons that they refused to try and convert them, lest they succeed, and the Saxons be saved.
They wanted them eternally damned. On the other hand, there were Romans who welcomed the barbarians, as being less corrupt and evil than they. Such pessimistic Christians as Salvian, whose long life covered most of the fifth century, wrote in bitter melancholy of the wickedness of Christians at home in Rome contrasted to the virtues of the nice, healthy pagans. In his The Governance of God Salvian complains:
{ I have made sufficient mention of how great are the vices of the Romans, vices with which the barbarians are not befouled .
. The vices of our bad lives alone have conquered us...
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Teh But what can be said of the present-day situation? The old abundances have gone from us. The resources of former times have gone. ..
. With us, therefore, the causes of corruption are not in enticements, as with other men, but in our hearts. Our wickedness is in our mind, so that the loss of our wealth does not move us to amend our ways of life. We proceed to sin through love for evil things.* }
OTHERS OF THE CLERGY WERE MORE CHARITABLE—OR
more provident. Gregory of Tours, for example, who came from a whole family of Saints (as today someone might come from a legal or medical family), tried hard to soothe the savage Frankish breast. His chronicles of court life are tragic, desperate accounts of superhuman efforts to contend with revolting savages—no missionaries in cannibal islands ever had more unpleasing characters with whom to deal. Gregory's problem, as Harmon Grisewood said,
"was not endurance and resistance. His was acceptance and inclusion. He was not called to defend Troyes as did St.
Loup, or to die in his cathedral, as St. Nicaise at Rheims, or to arm the city as St. Aignan at Orleans. His was a complex task. The conquerors were already baptized into eternity.
They now had to be Christianized in the world. The danger was not that the Franks, Goths, etc., would destroy the Church, but that they would dominate it."
And so long as that danger was daily present, and until the relation of Church and State settled down into the dichotomy that was to be routine for the Middle Ages, there was no time for philosophy. Even sanctity had to be active, a "divinely guided improvisation" facing daily human grossness, greed, concupiscence; facing murder, poisoning, slaughters, and their resultant suffering, with firm compassion, and without any amazement.
In Rome, St. Gregory the Great (7540-604), one of the greatest of all Popes, by sending to England St. Augustine of Canterbury (who had been trained, as St. Patrick also, in the south of France), renewed the direct contacts
* Salvian, The Governance of God, from The Writings of Salvian, trans. Jeremiah O'Sullivan (Cima Publishing Co., 1947).
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between Rome and the far parts of Europe and made possible the Carolingian Renaissance that began two hundred years later. For it was from the outposts, from Ireland, the only country in Europe where the monks still knew Greek, from Iona and York, that learning and philosophic thinking came back to the mainland. Alcuin of York (735-804) towards the end of his life wrote, "in the morning, when my years and my studies were in full flower, I sowed in England; now my blood chills, it is almost evening, but I never cease sowing." Summoned by Charlemagne, the first
Holy Roman Emperor (crowned in St. Peter's, Rome, on Christmas Day, 800), Alcuin was tutor to this great Frankish king and conqueror, and followed his court wherever it moved. For Charlemagne's court was where he was, not in any fixed place. Alcuin laid the foundations of what he thought would be a new Athens, a France taught by both
Plato and Christ. He wrote a little book, a sort of catechism, for his royal pupil (although it is not certain that Charlemagne ever read it—or, indeed, ever learned to read) to instruct him in the virtues. Alcuin planned the complete curriculum of studies, too, for the whole Middle
Ages. His sevenfold division of the arts and sciences was taken from Martianus Capella. Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric (these formed the trivium); arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). Later these seven formed the requirements for the Master of Arts degree all over Europe, and are still, essentially, the basis of the Litterae Humaniores or Greats' "School" at Oxford. Taken in medieval times as a seven-year course, the mastery of these liberal arts qualified a student to be considered cultured. And into this sevenfold scheme, and through it, philosophy crept back into the Western World, taking a modest place as a part of logic.
"And the philosophers?" Alcuin's pupil asked him.
"They knew that virtue, wisdom and truth were inherent in human nature, and they sought them diligently," came
Alcuin's answer. "But then what difference is there between such philosophers and Christians?" asked Charlemagne rhetorically. "Faith only, and baptism," replied Alcuin,
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Alcuin was a schoolmaster, not a philosopher. His successor, John Scotus Erigena, born in Ireland, and a great
Greek scholar, was one of the most original thinkers of the whole Middle Ages. He reached the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald about 840, and translated from Greek into Latin the works of Denys, the pseudo-Areopagite, and those of another early mystic, Maximus the Confessor, which had been sent to the king of France by the emperor of Constantinople, Michael the Stammerer.
But John Scotus Erigena was much more than a translator, and he won great renown from King Charles the Bald, as a master of argument and dialectic.
A monk, Gottschalk, had insisted there was a double predestination, the righteous predestined to go to heaven, the sinners to hell. Predestination means that God—or destiny—has predetermined a man's fate, so that whether he is saved or damned is all arranged before he is even born. One of the great Christian problems was (and is) how to reconcile God's absolute foreknowledge with man's equally absolute free-will, without positing some form of predestination. Actually, as many medieval philosophers pointed out, to know is not necessarily the same thing as to will: God knows we will sin, but here in time His will is not our law unless we will it, and God no more prevents what He foresees, than a wise mother prevents a child spending its allowance on candy which will she knows make it both sick and sorry. Hrabanus Maurus, another monk, and Hincmar, bishop of Rheims, both saw the dangers for the Church in Gottschalk's position, which is a denial of the intrinsic value of all good works. Hincmar asked John Scotus to reply to Gottschalk. John Scotus
Erigena, who had succeeded Alcuin as head of the Palace School, brilliantly proved that there can be predestination only to good—in that we are all called to be saints.
John Scotus Erigena's greatest work, The Division of Nature, "synthesizes the philosophical accomplishments of fifteen centuries, and appears as the final achievement of ancient philosophy."* Like Alcuin's little book, it is
* George Burch, Early Medieval Philosophy (Kings Crown Press, 1951).
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in the form of a dialogue between Master and Pupil.
Where reason is, faith has no place, declared John Scotus, anticipating Thomas Aquinas' statement that one cannot know and believe a thing at the same time. But the function of reason is to understand revelation, and interpret it.
"Authority is the source of knowledge, but our own reason remains the norm by which all authority must be judged."
And he defines faith as "a certain beginning by which knowledge of the Creator begins to be produced in the rational nature." He could not even imagine a faith which was opposed to reason.
In The Division of Nature John Scotus pointed out that to divide nature into Creator and creature is not enough.
For him there are four divisions: God, Who is nature which creates and is not created; the intelligible world, which is nature, which is created and creates; the world of experience, nature which is created and does not create; and nature which neither creates nor is created—this last the return of the two that are not God to the divine unity. In the first and fourth, God is both beginning and end; He creates and is not created, and He neither creates nor is created. In the second and third John Scotus Erigena is speaking of ideas and existences, both being created, but not in the same sense. From God, via creation, back to Him, this process of exodus and return is at the heart of Erigena's philosophy.
But John Scotus, although he said that no one gets into heaven except by philosophy, was also a theologian; in all things, he said, see God only, for everything comes from Him, and to Him is the return. At the world's end, all nature, corporeal or incorporeal, will be deified, as fused iron is molten, as air is invisible when irradiated by light.
Only the integrity of the natures will remain; for God, Who is our beginning and our end, still is our Creator, and the whole of human history, as the whole of natural science, is the total rhythm of procession and return, from the Creator and back to Him. Only, because of the Fall, in history the process is irreversible, whereas in nature it is continuous, circular, eternal. All things are resolved into the same unity from which they are derived:
JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA
{ The end of all motion is its beginning; for it terminates at no other end save its own beginning from which it begins to be moved and to which it tends ever to return, in order to cease and rest in it.
In the intelligible world this law is the fundamental principle of all the sciences, that is of the seven liberal arts.
Grammar begins with the letter, from which all writing is derived and into which it is all resolved. Rhetoric begins with a definite question, from which the whole argument is derived and to which it returns. Dialectic begins with essence, from which the whole argument is derived and to which it returns. Arithmetic begins with unity, from which all numbers are developed and into which they are resolved. Geometry begins with the point from which all figures are developed and into which they are resolved.
Astronomy begins with the moment from which all motion is developed and into which it is resolved. Metaphysics begins and ends with God. In nature as a whole, division is creation, by which all things emanate, by successive states, from the divine unity. Analytic is called return, because all things return, through the same stages, to the same unity.
All things flow constantly from God as water flows from a spring, and tend ever to return to Him as water tends ever to return to its level. God alone is without motion because, being the beginning and end of all things, he has himself neither beginning nor end. The flux of all things is not a motion in time, because all time is comprehended within one part of the process. It is not a cycle which repeats itself, but an eternal cycle, and the two aspects of the process are simultaneously eternal. Nature is eternal, but not static.
It is eternally dynamic, moving by the dialectical process of division and return.
We do not know what God is .
. because He is infinite and therefore objectively unknowable. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything.
Therefore, nothing can be predicated of God literally or affirmatively. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.
Although we do not know what God is, we infer from the existence of the world that He is, not that He is as any
THE AGE OF BELIEF
intelligible essence, but merely that He exists as the cause of all things. This inference is threefold. We observe that things are, and infer that their cause is. We observe the order of the universe, and infer that their cause is wise.
We observe that things are in constant motion, being alive, and infer that their cause is life. Thus.God, considered not in Himself but as the cause of all things, has three aspects:
He is, He is wise, and He lives. His being is called the Father, His wisdom is called the Son, His life is called the Holy Ghost, words which denote not the three aspects themselves, but their relation to each other. God's being is
His essence, what He is. His wisdom is His power, what He can do. His life is His operation, what He does. Essence, power and operation, in God or in anything, are not three parts which compose the substance, but a simple and inseparable unity. Although the Son and the Holy Ghost are in a certain sense derived from the Father, so that only the Father is without any source, they are in no wise created by Him, but are coeternal and coessential with Him. God, therefore, in all three persons, constitutes nature which creates and is not created.
All things created by God are created in the image of God, and are therefore trinities consisting of essence, power and operation. These three are the substance of the thing, all else is accident. As in the Trinity of God these three are an inseparable unity, but they are distinct aspects of that unity. In a tree these aspects are for it to be, to be able to grow, and actually to grow. The essence is the unknowable being of the thing; the power is its specific character; the operation is its particular movement. All things subsist in these three ways. Therefore, there is a threefold creation of things .
. and there are three stages in the division of nature; nature is divided into nonbeing and being; essence is divided into genera and species; species are divided into individuals. These divisions are accomplished, respectively, by the three persons of the Trinity; the Father wills, the Son makes, and the Holy Ghost perfects. The Father wills. This act of God is His essence; the creation of the universe is not in God by accident, but by a certain ineffable law that effects subsist eternally in their cause.
[OHN SCOTUS ERIGENA
30d does not know things because they are: they are be- 'ause He knows them, and His knowledge of them is their sssence. The Son makes. That is, He divides the created sssence into the eternal ideas, which are called the primorlial causes, because they cause and create all things. They ire the forms of things, not the visible qualitative forms, ut the intelligible substantial forms, by participation in which all things subsist, that is, have their separate and spevial properties or powers. A tree grows because it participates in life. These ideas, existing in the mind of God, vontain the substances of all things: man, for example, is nost correctly defined as a certain intellectual notion sternally made in the divine mind. The Holy Ghost perects. That is, God, in His infinite activity, leads forth the wimordial causes into their effects, dividing the eternal deas into the particular things, both intelligible and visible, which participate in them. These effects are related to the rimordial causes as words are related to the voice which speaks them; they are subsequent not in time but in order f causality. Unlike the eternal causes, they form genera ind species, they come into being through generation, they nove in time and space, and they are subject to accidents.
They include all essences (which in this aspect are more sroperly called natures), all qualities, all quantities, and all hings comprised in the other categories. Separately, that s, apart from their combinations, they are incorporeal, inorruptible, and indivisible. A combination of a certain juality and a certain quantity produces matter, which is lot a new thing but a result of the combination, just as the combination of light and an opaque body produces a hadow, without in any way affecting either the light or the ody itself. Matter itself (apart from the forms it receives) s likewise invisible and even indefinable. It is merely a ormlessness or mutability capable of receiving forms.
When, at a certain time, matter is joined to a certain form, . visible body is produced. Thus, bodies are composed of Acorporeal things, qualities, quantities, forms and times.
They are not substances, being composed only of accidents, ind are therefore corruptible, for they can be resolved into he accidents which compose them; when these are taken
THE AGE OF BELIEF
away, nothing remains. All these accidents are accidents of an essence and substantial form, but not of the body; rather, the body is an accident of the accidents. In everybody, therefore, three aspects are considered: the matter, that is, quality and quantity, of which it is made; the qualitative form which makes it a solid and visible body, and the eternal essence or substantial form of which these are the accidents.
The substance of every creature is threefold; there is the essence of the thing, that is, God's knowledge of it, by which it is made to be; there is the eternal form of the thing, established among the primordial causes in the Word, by which it is defined to be what it is; and there is the particular thing, moving in time and subject to accidents, by which it is manifested.
All things always were, in the Word of God, causally, in force and potency, beyond all places and times, beyond generations made in place and time, beyond all forms and species known by sense and understanding, beyond all quality and quantity and other accidents by which the substance of any creature is understood to be, but not what it is.
But also, all things were not always, for before they flowed forth by generation into forms and species, places and times, and into all the accidents which happen to their eternal substance, immutably established in the Word of God, they were not in generation, they were not in space, nor in time, nor in the proper forms and species to which accidents happen.* }
DR. BURCH, WHO MADE THE MAGNIFICENT TRANSLATION
of Erigena quoted above, discusses at length whether Erigena was a pantheist or not. Every Christian philosopher has continually to steer clear of the three great denials of natural truth (that is, truth attainable by reason, as against revealed truth). These denials are all sins against, or breakings of, the first commandment of the Christian, as * Jobn Scotus Erigena, Patrologia Latina, CXXII, ed. JacquesPaul Migne, trans. George Bosworth Burch in Early Medieval
Philosophy. (Kings Crown Press, 1951.)
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of the preceding Jewish, and the succeeding Islamic, faiths.
This commandment is: "Thou shalt have none other Gods but Me," or "the Lord thy God is one," or "there is no God but God." The three denials of it are polytheism, pantheism and prometheanism. They mottle medieval philosophy as they mottle pre-Christian thought and the thought of postChristian thinkers.
Polytheism is the commonest, the simplest, and the most elementary of the three. Subtle thinkers, like
John Scotus, never fall into it. The Manichaeans were polytheists. Prometheanism is named for the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole his father Zeus' fire from heaven, instead of waiting for the god to give it to him. Adam, too, was promethean when he took what he should have waited to be given, and man is promethean whenever he uses magic, whenever he seeks for God as power, or seeks God for His gifts; for example, when he tries by asceticism to capture higher states of consciousness, or to enter them by means of drugs or arts, or even when he tries to put himself into them, instead of waiting to be brought into them by God. Prometheanism is, at bottom, a mixture of conceit and cupboard love, and Aldous Huxley has brilliantly described it in his
Grey Eminence only to fall into it in his the Doors of Perception.
Pantheism is far more plausible. Like polytheism, it constrains God to our own image, and whittles Him down to our size: it takes as its premise that God is all things, and that there is nothing which is not God. It may seem a paradox that pantheism is a denial of the unity: if created and creator are one, as they are for the true monist (and a pantheist must be a monist, since he insists on one, allembracing Reality), and not two, as they are for the pluralist, surely the monist is affirming the unity, and it is the pluralist who is fractioning it? In reality, the reverse is true.
For by denying his own createdness, the creature denies the Creator's omnipotence. If I am part of God, if the Self at its core IS God, then I cannot deny Him, nor He deny me, and there is no relationship, for He is as constrained by His being as I, and He is not the only necessary being, for I am necessary too, and He exists by my will as
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much as I do by His; then too, He is made in my image and likeness, not I in His. This monism or pantheism was skirted by John Scotus Erigena, though some think he came perilously close. Others think he escaped by a fairly wide margin, for he insisted that to return to God we must come forth from Him, while for the true pantheist we could not leave Him any more than He could leave us and there can be neither procession, nor return. The Rig-Veda, the greatest of the Hindu Scriptures, put it thus, tat tuam asi, i.e., God, thou art also. For the Christian, as for the Muslim and the Jew, there is always enough identity given to the creature for his "I" to say "Thou": for the Hindu there is no one who can say "I" except God, and God cannot separate anything from Himself.
Dr. Burch quotes rather a compromising passage of Erigena:
{ God Himself is the maker of all things, and is made in all things; when He is sought above all things, He is not found in any essence, for He is not yet being, but when he is understood in all things, nothing subsists in some save him alone. Nor is He one thing and not another thing, but He is all things. [But then Erigena goes on to say that] man is the unity of all creatures. He is intellect, reason, sense, life and body, and there is no other nature besides these except God. All things are made in the divine mind, but they may be made in other minds also. You and I, when we argue, are made in each other. For when I understand what you understand, I become your understanding, and am made in you, in a certain ineffable way.
As all things are derived originally from God, by various intermediate steps, so all things are resolved ultimately into God by the same intermediate steps. Thus God is the beginning, the middle and the end of all things, beginning because all things are from him by participation in his essence, middle because all things live and move and have their being in him, end because all things have their perfection and the end of their motion in him. Diffusion is goodness: reunion is love. God as cause of things is supreme goodness, and as end of all things is supreme love.
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Love is the end and quiet cessation of the natural motion of all moving things, beyond which no motion continues; it is the connection and bond by which the universe of all things is joined together in an insoluble unity and an ineffable sympathy. God as goodness and God as love, the first cause of all things and final end of all things, are the same. The fact that they are identical is the fundamental law of nature. }
IN DESCRIBING THE FINAL END OF THE CREATED UNIVERSE,
Erigena uses a simile many other mystics subsequently used:
{ Just as the air appears to be all light, and the molten iron to be all fiery, nay, fire itself, their substances nevertheless remaining, so it is understood by the intellect that after the end of this world every nature, whether corporeal or incorporeal, will seem to be only God, the integrity of the nature remaining, so that God, who is in himself incomprehensible, will be somehow comprehended in the creature. }
JOHN SCOTUS DISAPPEARED FROM VIEW ABOUT 877, AND
the next medieval thinkers of any importance were Bérenger, professor at the monastic school of Tours, who insisted that we only attain truth by reason and that it cannot be given by revelation, and St. Peter Damian, who said the opposite, agreeing with Tertullian that since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think. St.
Peter Damian was prior of Fonte Avellana and later Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia; he died in 1072. Lanfranc (10051089), another Italian, who was prior of Bec in Normandy, insisted, like St. Peter Damian, on the priority of faith, but refused to deny the validity of reason. His pupil and successor, St. Anselm, born at Aosta in Italy in 1033, became abbot of Bec in 1078, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. His solution of the problem of the relationship of truth to reason, although only temporary, was one of the landmarks of medieval thought.