Alexander Titus: Some Dionysian Influences on John Scottus Eriugena's On Divine Predestination

While Eriugena's magnus opus, the Periphyseon, is well-known for its extensive use of Greek patristic materials, his earlier, lesser-known treatise, On Divine Predestination contains only explicit references to Latin sources, most notably Augustine. Therefore, Eriugena scholars have often concluded that the Irish theologian underwent a substantial transformation in the shape of his thought between his involvement in the Predestination Controversy of the early 850's and his time as an officially-commissioned Greek translator in the middle and later years of the same decade, with the Corpus dionysiacum generally regarded as his first introduction to the Greek-speaking theological milieu. However, a close examination of Eriugena's historical context as well as the primary texts of both On Divine Predestination and the writings of Dionysius suggests the distinct possibility that former's acquaintance with the latter had already begun to inform his thought much earlier than has commonly been believed. This paper therefore aims to demonstrate some of these textual dependencies, both in terms of theological content as well as method, which link aspects of Dionysian thought with some of Eriugena's controversial arguments regarding divine predestination.

Adrian Mihai: "Erotical Ascent in Eriugena’s Periphyseon"

Based on an insight of Maximus the Confessor, found in his Ambigua ad Iohannem X (1113b11-14), according to which God and the human are paradigms of each other, and as God is humanised through his love for humanity, so is the human deified through love for the divine, Eriugena, in his Periphyseon, establishes a daring Metaphysics of Eros — since ἔρος, which he translates into Latin by amor (Periphyseon I 519d5), is more divine than ἀγάπη. Love is the vinculum that holds together all things that exist, and draws all things back to God through the cycle of nature.
The soul’s erotical journey to God involves not only an upward movement of the soul toward God, through the virtus gnostica, but also a downward movement of God toward creation, since God’s love is expressed in one of Eriugena’s fundamental philosophical statements: in creating the aaa universe, God was creating himself. In other words, God realizes himself in and through creation (see especially Periphyseon I 519d5-520a2 and III 678c1–d1).
Finally, the return of the soul to God (reditus in unum) through love (amor, ἔρος), unlike the mystical ascent of ps.-Dionysius, is a sort of intellectual mysticism. In Eriugena, the spiritual is intellectualised, and, through this innovation, he could well be seen as the forefather of Eckhartian mysticism.

Isidoros Katsos: Eriugena’s Notion of Light and His Hexaemeral Sources

In the hexaemeral part of the Periphyseon Eriugena reports on two hermeneutical traditions on the first light of creation. According to the first tradition, attributed to Basil, primordial light is corporeal and of fiery nature. According to the second tradition, attributed to Augustine, primordial light is of intelligible, angelic nature. Based on this report and other passages contemporary scholarship assumes a close acquaintance of Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaemeron. The purpose of this paper is to put the latter assumption under scrutiny. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I compare Eriugena’s report with Basil’s own theory of light in the Hexaemeron. The comparison shows that the corporeal theory of light reported in the Periphyseon deviates significantly from Basil’s own theory. In a second step, I investigate whether Eriugena’s report is mediated through other sources. I here compare the Periphyseon with corporeal theories of light in Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa and a hexaemeral source available to John Damascene. The comparison now yields positive results: if one reads Basil through the mediation of such theories one may end up indeed with the report in the Periphyseon. If my argument is correct, the current scholarly assumption about Eriugena’s thorough knowledge of Basil’s Hexaemeron needs to be reconsidered. As far as the interpretation of primordial light is concerned, Eriugena did not have direct access to Basil’s own theory and if he did, he understood very little of it.

Dermot Moran: "Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources"

In this paper I shall examine Eriugena’s quinque modi or ‘five modes’ of being and non-being as outlined in his Periphyseon, especially in Book One, and to which he returns in Book Three, and I shall evaluate the current research concerning its sources and its originality. Eriugena’s immediate Latin sources have been suggested as Augustine, Marius Victorinus, and Frigudius, but he was also deeply influenced by passages in the Greek Christian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus, particularly on God as “non-being” or nothingness (nihilum). I shall examine the relevant texts and evaluate Eriugena’s original contribution in the Periphyseon.

Theo Kobusch: Creation out of nothing: Creation out of God Eriugena’s doctrine of creation as the beginning of idealism

One of the philosophical pioneering feats in Eriugena’s Periphyseon consists in giving a whole new meaning to the traditional concept of ‘creation out of nothing’. ‘Nothing’ is no longer understood as ‘privative nothing’ (nihil privativum) in which Augustine still saw the cause of all nothingness. Now, instead, it stands for the richness of all reality in the Neoplatonic, i.e. ‘superessential’ or eminent sense of the οὐδὲν πάντων in Plotinus from which everything created originates. However only in creation God comes to himself. Creation is the condescendence of God.
Motion in Peripyseon is the motion of creation, in which God is condescending to the limit, creating himself by returning to himself in everything created. That is, as this paper is going to show, the basic model of idealist thought. For that reason, Eriugena has been rediscovered by 19th century Schellingians, by F.A. Staudenmaier and others. In his name Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel rejected the traditional understanding of creation out of nothing.

Bernard McGinn: Dionysius and Eriugena on Divine Infinity and Incomprehensibility

John Scottus Eriugena had knowledge of a number of Greek Patristic authors, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus Confessor, and sought to bring them into harmony with the Latin theological tradition (consensum machinari, as he put it). Forging this agreement was a broad intellectual program, demanding speculative ingenuity and subtle adjustments. This paper will address one strand in this rich web of connections, that is, the notion of divine infinity and its relation to the unknowability of God as it played out in Dionysius and Eriugena. Dionysius denied the logical view of affirmations and negations put forward by Aristotle, so that negations are to be viewed “not simply as the opposites of affirmations,” but as supra-logical and hyperphatic modes of discourse that suggest, but do not capture the divine incomprehensibility and ineffability (MT 1.2, DN 1.1, etc.). Among these hyperphatic terms were “infinity” (apeiria) and “infinite” (apeiros), which Dionysius used over thirty times. In his translations of the corpus dionysiacum, Eriugena had to make decisions about how to translate these texts, and, in his Periphyseon, needed to work out his own view of the relation of infinity and incomprehensibility. Deciphering the relation between these two thinkers on this issue is a complex task, as is evident from the observation that infinitas and related words appear 150 times in the Periphyseon.
 

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.

Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi: Eriugena's reditus (and its Patristic Sources) vs Neoplatonic epistrophé: Tracing Paradigmatic Divergences

This paper will focus on the elaboration of the Neoplatonic model of procession-manence-return in Eriugena's thought, aiming at shading new light on the path that has led the Irish master to elaborate a synthesis between Christian-platonic and Christian-orthodox speculation

Ilaria L.E. Ramelli: “From God to God: Eriugena’s Protology and Eschatology against the Backdrop of His Patristic Sources”

I shall explore Eriugena’s notion of apokatastasis ('restoration, reintegration' as the return to God and the heritage of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (and Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor) in this respect. I shall investigate the reception of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonic theories of apokatastasis (and its link to epistrophē) and their relation to protology in the identification of the primordial state with the Divinity itself: primordialis conditio: ipse Deus.
This investigation will relate the two main sections of this symposium: that on God, to which it belongs, and that on cosmology and anthropology, since it will focus on the notion of the return of creation (particularly on rational creatures, but also all of creation) to God and on protology, within the three Neoplatonic movements of monē, proodos, and epistrophē.

John Gavin: Betrayal and Contemplation:Eriugena’s Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Last Supper

In Perphyseon V, Eriugena offers a reflection on the different approaches to Christ by Judas and Peter in the Last Supper: Judas, who remains at the level of the material, becomes the betrayer of Christ’s flesh; Peter, who ascends through the material to contemplation, comes to know (cognoscere) and love Christ’s mind. This passage is complemented by Eriugena’s treatment of the Eucharist in his Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, in which he discusses the movement from the material perception of the sensible elements to the immaterial understanding (intellegere) of Christ. The major themes in these passages—material reality as both deceptive and anagogical; contemplation as an ascent to participatory understanding—come from the Christian Neoplatonism that Eriugena inherited from Pseudo-Dionysius and other Patristic thinkers. This paper will examine the roots of Eriugena’s appropriation of these themes in his interpretation of the Last Supper, as well as his creative adaptation and application of these ideas in his approach to Christian philosophy.

Dermot Moran: Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on his Sources

In this paper I shall examine Eriugena’s quinque modi or ‘five modes’ of being and non-being as outlined in his Periphyseon, especially in Book One, and to which he returns in Book Three, and I shall evaluate the current research concerning its sources and its originality. Eriugena’s immediate Latin sources have been suggested as Augustine, Marius Victorinus, and Frigudius, but he was also deeply influenced by passages in the Greek Christian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus, particularly on God as “non-being” or nothingness (nihilum). I shall examine the relevant texts and evaluate Eriugena’s original contribution in the Periphyseon.

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.

Catherine Kavanagh: Eriugena's Trinity: A framework for interreligious dialogue

The Carolingian philosopher and theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena is an important point of confluence of many streams of Trinitarian thought, as well as a significant and creative theologian in his own right. Because of his remarkable ability to work back through Patristic sources to the original Neoplatonic doctrine by means of sheer ratiocination, Eriugena also acts a valuable critic of the many streams of Trinitarianism that come through to him, both Eastern and Western. This issue has been well explored from the perspective of the Neoplatonic elements that went up to make it. However, a good deal of new work on the Liberal Arts tradition has appeared recently (including my own). The integration of this work with existing scholarship on the Neoplatonic elements in his Trinitarian theology is an important project, which also has implications for contemporary debates in theology, especially as regards inculturation. In this communication, the issue of Eriugena's methodology will be addressed, and the extent to which that reflects Patristic methodology as a whole, when confronted with an attractive and sophisticated system of thought.

Lavinia Cerioni: The Patristic Sources of Eriugena's Exegesis of the Parable of the Bridesmaids

Eriugena’s thought is traditionally interpreted as the result of the encounter between East and West. Using the parable of the Bridesmaids (Mt. 25:1-13) as a case study, this paper’s aim is to determine the extent of this statement truth.
This parable was commented on by most of the Western theologians, first of all Augustine, but also Ambrose, Gregory the Great and Bede. Contrariwise, most Eastern theologians (e.g. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius) overlooked this text almost completely. The Western exegesis certainly influenced Eriugena, but his use of these sources appears highly selective. However, while he uses the Western sources, he did so using allegorical bridal imagery more akin to the eastern exegesis of the passage.
To demonstrate my argument, I will compare Eriugena’s use of the parable’s main images, such as the lamps, the oil and the sleep, with previous patristic interpretations. In addition, given that the parable was used in discourses on eschatology, I will examine Eriugena’s use of the parable in his own eschatology.

In conclusion, Eriugena uses the parable, an evangelical text suggesting an exclusive soteriology, to symbolise his idea of universal salvation. This paper will show that such an unexpected exegesis can be explained only through his original use of patristic sources.

John Gavin, S.J.: "And then there was One: Ambrose and Eriugena on the Transfiguration"

John Scottus Eriugena, the brilliant and controversial Irishman in the court of Charles the Bald (840-877), drew upon both the Latin and Greek patristic traditions in order to present a bold and original Christian vision. Gregory of Nyssa, Ephiphanius of Salamis, pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor all found their way into Western thought through Eriugena’s translations, while such works as the De praedestione liber, Commentarius in evangelium Johannis and, above all, the Periphyseon (De natura) provided stimulating contributions to Christian Neoplatonism.

Though numerous scholars have dedicated studies to the examination of Eriugena’s Greek sources and his appropriation of Augustine, few have taken into consideration the importance of Ambrose of Milan in the Irishman’s works.

This paper contributes to the assessment of Ambrose’s influence through a study of important passages in Eriugena’s Periphyseon V (CCM 165, p. 195) and Ambrose’s In LucamVII, xx (CCL 14, p. 222). In both passages the authors discuss the Transfiguration of Christ and focus upon the theme of unity: at the end of the Transfiguration, the figures of Moses, Elijah and Jesus become the single person of Christ. Yet, though Eriugena clearly found inspiration in Ambrose, he significantly changes the meaning of this unity in order to accommodate his understanding of the various embodied states of humanity. A comparison of the passages gives a new perspective on Eriugena’s appropriation of sources and exegetical concerns.