Scotus!

Who’s my favorite 9th-century Christian philosopher?

John Scotus Eriugena, an Irishman transplanted to France, where he translated early Greek church scholars into Latin.

Whew! You don’t see many of them these days.

Scotus Eriugena should not be confused with Duns Scotus, who came later and is better know. Eriugena has pretty much evaporated with time, and it’s a shame. Something about the man has attracted me for the past 50 years, though I confess I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

How did I even come to know of him, back in my occultist-leaning after-college days? As I just discovered, pieces of him were sitting all these years on the top shelf in our living room, hiding in a crumbling paperback titled The Age of Belief, one in a series of Mentor Books on philosophy put out in the ‘50s.

Now I’ve found a 1976 translation of his Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature {Bobbs-Merrill). Well, most of it – a few parts are summarized, presumably as being even more abstruse than the rest of him (which is abstruse enough for anyone).

What Scotus talks about – the nature of God, man and the Trinity – generally drives me nuts. I don’t believe in much of anything, and the idea of the trinity seems particularly ludicrous (yet another bit of mischief likely traceable to St. Paul). And I’ve read little of the Church Fathers, especially the Eastern ones on which Scotus bases many of his arguments.

Yet the man himself, his underlying sense of hope and humor, a certain restrained passion…. I can’t justify my interest through philosophy; it’s a personal reaction to someone I’d love to share a few beers with across the table. I see the Irishman peeking through – fearfully erudite, voluble, puckish, uncertain, windbaggy at its best.

For exposition, Scotus uses the time-honored student-teacher interchange. But there’s a twist to it, especially in Book I, where student and teacher rag on each other for being muddled or discursive:

“S: Return to the main point.

"T: I wish you would remind me of the point. In trying to discuss incidental questions, we often forget the main ones.”…

“T: Now your mind is awake, I see.”…

“S: You seem to me to have made quite a long digression… and I still don’t see the point of the discussion.”

Often, the argument seems to be developing in the teacher’s head, and I get the feeling that the student is an internal voice that Scotus uses to question and expand himself. At times he reaches a point where he finds himself cornered mentally – there’s no final answer, a fact that he admits, if somewhat sheepishly.

But why wasn’t all this internal banter hammered out before it was put down on vellum? I see Scotus rattling on at a mad pace to a secretary or jotting down everything as fast as it flashes through his mind. Vellum was rare, expensive and difficult to correct. If he’d been scribbling on a legal pad, the next morning he could have looked at his notes, said, “Well that’s a load of crap,” and lobbed them into the wastebasket. Instead, we got reams of his immediate ferment.

The 1976 translation is more difficult to follow than the '50s selections, which makes me suspect that it meanders along the literal wanderlust of Scotus’s mind. The words tumble out and trip over each other as he tries to exhaust every scintilla of possibility from a speeding thought train. Look at this wonderful explosion (following Eastern church traditions, he often uses “It” to refer to God; God the Son – the Word – usually, but not consistently):

“The Maker of all, made in all, begins to be eternal and, though motionless, moves into everything and becomes all things in all things. Nor am I talking about the incarnation of the Word and Its becoming Man, but about the ineffable condescension of the Highest Good, which is Unity and Trinity, to things with being in order that they may have being or rather that It Itself may be in everything from the highest down, always eternal, always made by Itself in Itself, eternal by Itself, made in Itself; and while It is eternal, It does not cease to be made; and though made, It does not cease to be eternal, and makes Itself from Itself.”

Woo-ie! In some funny way this involuted ramble reminds me of another Irishman who spent much of his life in France – Samuel Beckett. Though maybe I’m nuts to think that.

Much of Scotus’s writing seems like muck on the first reading (or second or third), but in most cases there’s actually a clear, lovely through-line, often a pretty amazing one.

So, for instance, in the quote above, God creates Himself and all else continually, and creation as we know it had no physical, temporal start but has always existed in God’s mind. All of creation is in God, all is God, there is nothing but God. Man is in and of God – is God in that sense. At the ultimate level, both Man’s soul and God exhibit unity and simplicity; Like God, in our spirit, we have no parts, no divisions.

Scotus was declared a heretic at one point for being thought a pantheist, something he would have denied. His arguments are much more subtle that that.

There’s also a mystical side to him with an Asian slant:

Of God: “It is Form; It is not Form. It is Formlessness; It is not Formlessness.” This is next door neighbor to the Buddhist “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

Scotus is a firm believer that all nature is cyclical – for which he gives endless examples – and that mankind will return to God and blessedness as a matter of course.

Some of his expoundings on God and the universe would fit well with modern cosmology. The closest cosmologists have come to “explaining” why there is a universe, rather than just nothing, is that particles spontaneously pop into existence and wink out again. Basically, there can’t be “nothing”; it must manifest as “something.” Scotus says pretty much the same thing in his discussions of cycles and of God’s continually creating all, including Himself. Throughout creation, something and nothing roll over each other like puppies.

There’s more, lots more, and much of it mind-numbing if you’re not wedded to the history of Western theology. But Scotus – working in the Dark Ages, multi-lingual and multi-scriptoral at a time when European kings were illiterate – was centuries ahead of his time in many of his arguments.

What do they amount to in the end, these colossal edifices of something or other?

Hell, what does anything we do amount to in the end?

by Derek Davis