Kevin Corrigan: “From Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus to Eriugena: some sources for the development of Eriugena's thought”

John Scottus Eriugena’s Periphyseon is one of the great creative works of Christian thought, second only perhaps to Origen’s De Principiis and, like Origen’s work, something new in the history of thought that provides an original viewpoint on the whole of antiquity, pagan and Christian. Attempts to find traces of a reading of Plotinus’ Enneads in this work have been inconclusive since any Plotinian-type passages may well be derived from the considerable amount of Neoplatonic  thinking in the Medieval West available in the works of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Macrobius, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, etc. This paper will reassess the evidence for seeing Eriugena as a Christian Platonist in a tradition represented by both Origen and Plotinus.