John Scotus Eriugena 815 – 877

John Scotus Eriugena was an Irish theologian and Neoplatonist philosopher active at the court of the Carolingian king Charles the Bald. He produced the first Latin translation of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, transmitting Eastern Neoplatonic theology to the Latin West. His magnum opus, the Periphyseon, divides nature into four categories ordered by whether they create or are created, and develops a daring synthesis of Christian doctrine with Greek philosophical metaphysics. His work was condemned in the thirteenth century but later inspired Nicholas of Cusa and the speculative tradition.

John Scotus Eriugena was born around 815, almost certainly in Ireland — both Scotus and Eriugena, 'Irish-born', distinguish him from the later philosopher Duns Scotus. By the 840s he had crossed the sea to the West Frankish court, where Charles the Bald appointed him master of the palace school. He became the leading scholar of the Carolingian intellectual revival and the only Western thinker of his century with a serious command of Greek.

Charles entrusted him with the translation of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which had reached the West as a diplomatic gift, and with translations of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa. His own works include the Treatise on Divine Predestination (851), written against Gottschalk, and his masterwork Periphyseon, or On the Division of Nature, in five dialogue books, in which the four categories of nature — that which creates and is not created, that which is created and creates, that which is created and does not create, and that which neither creates nor is created — frame a vast Christian Neoplatonic cosmology.

Eriugena's apophatic theology, his teaching that all things proceed from and return to God, and his insistence on the harmony of true reason and true authority drew condemnation in the thirteenth century but exerted lasting influence through Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Rhineland mystics. The date and circumstances of his death are unknown; he is reported to have been killed by his own students around 877.