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 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.
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