Willemien Otten: Eriugena as the last patristic cosmologist

According to a well-known label, Bernard of Clairvaux is called the last of the Fathers, an honorific that appears based on his near biblical, virtuoso Latin style. Not based on style but rather on the content of his thought, I argue in this paper that there is much to be said for calling Eriugena the last great patristic cosmologist. His texts hark back to the days of Origen but also to Gregory of Nyssa and, especially, Maximus the Confessor. Standing in the cosmological tradition, he displays more affinity with Eastern than with Western authors, as the cosmology of Augustine and, before him, Ambrose is much more wrapped up with their biblical hermeneutics as known from their commentaries on Genesis and the Hexaemeron. With Augustine writing a book on the self (Confessions) and on God (On the Trinity) but not on nature, one could argue, as this paper will do, that Eriugena’s Periphyseon is in fact the natural theology that Augustine could have written but never did write. The paper will analyze what the upshot is of this assertion, seeing it in the context of the perennial question whether to consider Eriugena more a western or an eastern thinker. It will furthermore ask what, if anything, we should make of the hexaemeral exegesis that so determines Eriugena’s path of return in the Periphyseon.