John Scotus Erigena was born in Ireland about 810. He went to France about 845 and became master of the Palace School of Emperor Charles the Bald. His translations from Greek into Latin of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (On the Divine Names, Mystical Theology, Celestial Hierarchy), and some writings of Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662) and of Gregory of Nyssa (fl. 379-304) acquainted him with Platonic thought. Erigena also drew from the Latin Platonism of St. Augustine and Origen in writing his most important original work On the Division of Nature (c. 862-866).1 Legend has it that about 877 he was stabbed to death by the pens of his pupils.

- Writings.2 Anselm expressed his philosophy in the following works: The Monologion, a kind of theodicy showing the existence and nature of a supreme being; the Proslogion,3 which replaces the proofs of the Monologion with a single argument for God’s existence from the notion of God; Liber Apologeticus contra Insipientem (Apologetic Book against the Fool);4 a response to Gaunilo’s objections to the a priori proof; three dialogues between teacher and students, On Truth, and On Free Will;5 Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man).

Not all Christians at the time of Anselm welcomed the investigation of such issues. In their efforts to renew Christian life, some reformers, like Peter Damian (1007-1072), strongly attacked philosophy as a tool of the devil, adulterating the Word of God with specious speculation.6 This anti-philosophical attitude was not without provocation. When Berengar of Tours (c. 1000-1088) used dialectics to explain the Eucharist, he denied transubstantiation.7 He was opposed by Lanfranc (c. 1010-1089), the teacher of Anselm, for abandoning "sacred authorities" and indiscreetly using dialectics to interpret the mysteries of the faith.8 Though Anselm was a staunch traditionalist who respected the authority of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, he was an eleventh century dialectician who was firmly convinced that human reason, obeying the laws of logic, could gain invaluable insights into the teachings of faith. Anselm wanted to avoid the Scylla of Damian and the Charybdis of Berengar.

- Identity of Philosophy and Religion. Presently, reason finds itself united with faith. That is why Erigena simply repeated Augustine’s words that "true philosophy is true religion, and conversely, true religion is true philosophy."9 In virtue of this identity, philosophy is nothing other than the understanding of Sacred Scripture: "What else is philosophy except the explaining of the true rules of true religion, by which God, the highest and principal cause of all things, is both worshipped humbly and investigated rationally."10 In view of his identification of philosophy and religion, it is not too surprising that he wrote "no one can enter heaven except by philosophy."11

Reason, illumined by faith, is the source of authority in interpreting Scripture, for "true authority . . . is nothing else but the truth which was uncovered by the power of reason . . ."12 Emanating from the same source, divine wisdom, right reason and true authority cannot contradict each other.

Dialectics: Division and Analysis. Reason understands faith by dialectical division and analysis. Division derives less general concepts from a more universal one, for example, "corporeal" and "incorporeal" from "substance," whereas analysis begins with individuals to gather them into a higher genus, for instance, "Peter" and "Paul" into "rational substance." Erigena viewed these two complementary operations as a single dialectical movement in which the ordering of concepts is nothing but the laws of nature by which the multiplicity of the universe proceeds from the unity of God and returns to that unity.13

- Faith and Reason. Like Erigena, Anselm followed Augustine in recognizing two sources of knowledge: faith and reason. Against the extreme dialecticians who subordinate Scripture to reason, Anselm upheld the primacy of faith as the starting point: "For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand. For I also believe this, that unless I believe, I shall not understand."14

Unlike Peter Damian, Anselm regarded it "a neglect if, after we are established in the faith. we do not seek to understand what we believe,"15 in order to draw nearer to the very sight of God. Although the human mind in this life cannot comprehend the mysteries of faith, it can give necessary reasons to confirm belief in them; for example, it is possible to prove the necessity of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Like Erigena, he combined a sovereign faith in the authority of Scripture with an almost unbounded confidence in the capacity of human reason to demonstrate its truths.

- Interiority. To understand his faith in God, Anselm followed the interior path trod by Augustine and Erigena: "Enter the inner chamber of your mind, shut out all things save God and whatever may aid you in seeking God; and having locked the door, seek Him."16 By turning away from sense experience and inward to intelligible objects, Anselm believed the mind could know real being.

The decisive event in Erigena’s philosophical career was his translating of some writings of Greek Neo-Platonist thinkers: Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and especially Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite.17 Erigena, fully committed to Neo-Platonism, followed Dionysius in constructing a vast system incorporating the classical Neoplatonic theses: emanation, the ineffability of the divine One, the method of negative theology, and the antithesis between the spiritual and material orders. Less profound than Augustine’s use of Neoplatonic ideas, Erigena’s synthesis of Christian thought organized by a Neoplatonic dialectic in his chief work, On the Division of Nature, appears more daring and spectacular than the Bishop of Hippo’s philosophy.

- Nature. In his chief work On The Division of Nature, Erigena worked within the method of division and analysis to unfold the laws of nature governing the relation between God and creatures. In its broadest sense, nature includes the totality of things that can be understood by the intellect or perceived by the senses, things which are not, for example, God who is a non-object of human knowledge; also potential being is the nonbeing of what it will be once it is actualized.18 In its specific sense, nature is ultimately reducible to God as the origin, sustainer, and end of creatures. Between God and creatures, Erigena recognized four divisions.

- God as Origin. The first division of nature refers to "God alone, for only he is understood to create all and yet is himself without any beginning or source."19 In his infinity, God is completely perfect, ineffable, and incomprehensible to man and himself. Beyond the limits of finite beings and human knowledge like the One of Plotinus, God cannot be expressed in human concepts or defined in terms of the Aristotelian categories.

- Negative Method. Creaturely categories such as substance, essence, and good, which are affirmed of God, must be immediately denied of him who transcends all beings that are directly accessible to us. Assertions in which such perfections are raised to a superlative degree, for example, "super-essence," and "super-good," and predicated of God as more-than-essence and more-than-good, are more negative than positive statements which say not what he is but rather what he is not.20 Reason learns from creatures that God is, but it cannot know what he is.

God is also "unknown to himself."21 Without limits, God cannot be circumscribed by self-comprehension or a definition of himself by himself. "How can the divine nature understand what it is, when it is no-thing? It transcends everything that is. God does not know what he is because he is not a "what." Both to himself and to every intellect he is incomprehensible in anything."22

- Ideas. The second division of nature includes the divine ideas which, created by God, in turn create individual things. Like the Neo-Platonists, Erigena made Plato’s world of ideas the first creatures of God: "The divine nature is created by itself in the primordial causes (the divine ideas). In this way it creates itself, that is, it begins to appear in its theophanies, for it wishes to emerge from the most hidden recesses of its nature in which it is unknown even to itself."23 Emerging from the depths of obscurity and darkness wherein he dwells into the light of self-comprehension, God passes in self-creation from being "no-thing" to being something, thereby becoming manifest to himself. Nevertheless, God’s transcendence of his ideas, the medium of his self-knowledge, keeps him incomprehensible to himself in his innermost depths.

- Hierarchy. These primal exemplar causes of all things originate according to a definite hierarchical order in the divine Word or Wisdom generated by the Father. In a continuing process from the more universal to the less universal, the divine ideas divide into genera, genera into sub-genera, and sub-genera into species from which individuals flow. This order unfolds as the ideas are realized in the universe. According to this order, the idea of goodness appears first, and is followed by the ideas of essence or being, life, reason, intelligence, wisdom, virtue, beatitude, truth and so on.24

- Unity and Plurality. As the number one implicitly contains all number, so the Word embraces the infinite plurality of divine ideas in its perfect simplicity. However, as multiple, limited natures, the created ideas are not identical with God who is infinite and one. The ideas, existing eternally in God are not absolutely coeternal with him inasmuch as they have a beginning in their cause; properly speaking, they participate in eternity.25 The Word of Erigena is reminiscent of Plotinus’ Intelligence or Nous whose unity contains the seeds of future multiplicity.

Creatures participate in the primordial causes which, in turn, participate immediately in God. Participation signifies the distribution of natures in the structure of the universe, the derivation of a lower essence from a higher essence. As water from a fountain overflows into the river, so the divine goodness, essence, life, reason, and so forth, flows out from the Font of all things into the primordial causes to effect their being, and then proceeds through them into their effects. God is present in all beings as in his participations. Although this account sounds as if it was a purely Neoplatonic theory of emanation, John Scotus maintained that divine goodness created the whole universe, not from any pre-existing matter, but out of nothing (ex nihilo), in the sense of no essence whatsoever.26 Here he tried to combine the Christian doctrine of creation and the Neoplatonic theory of emanation.

- Man. The idea of humanity in all its perfection is "an intellectual notion eternally produced in the divine mind."27 Thus the true substance of man by which he images God exists among the ideas in the divine mind. When he ceased contemplating the divine truth and alienated himself from God, man lost the beauty of the divine image and sank to the level of an animal. As a result, the human race multiplied by the division of sexes instead of in a purely spiritual manner like the angels, and there arose the vast diversity of qualities, thoughts, customs, time, and places which now characterize human beings.28

- Universe. The fate of tho universe is bound up with man. Originally, the whole universe existed in the ideal man in the divine mind before it became externalized in the present world. Man’s original sin not only separated him from God and brought individual human beings into existence, but also caused the fall of the whole universe, with the result that the other species in man divided into myriad sensible substances which are subject to generation and corruption.29 A sensible substance is composed of a nature and the accidents of space and time, quantity and quality.

As a shadow, formed by light falling upon a body, disappears when they are separated and still remains in its causes, so a sensible substance is an appearance effected by the coming to ether of intelligible immaterial causes in which it still remains potentially after they no longer converge.30 As the one infinite rises above the realm of intelligible, immaterial ideas, so multiple visible matter falls below them into confusion and lack of intelligibility. The material world, in the final analysis, is an appearance of reality which in itself is the immaterial, intelligible realm of ideas. Basically immaterial, the universe appears to Erigena as a vast system of symbols not to be studied for its own sake but to be contemplated for the traces of the invisible God which can lead man up the ladder of creation to God.

- God as Goal. Nature, not creating and not created, is God insofar as his beauty draws all things back to himself without moving himself. Matter aspires toward form, nonbeing toward being, and multiplicity toward unity. The cosmic process of division by which creatures proceed from God comes to completion in analysis by which they return to him. Deficient and restless apart from the unity of God, all creatures aspire to reunion with God from whom they came. "For the end of the whole movement is its beginning, since it is terminated by no other end than its principle, from which its movement begins and to which it constantly desires to return, that it may halt and rest in it."31

- Soul. The soul can be described as "a movement toward God." Always remaining one, the soul moves toward God in three operations: starting from sensations of multiple sensible images, it reassembles individuals through discursive reasoning into their intelligible species and genera — theophanies of the creator -- and ultimately in contemplation brings them back to the unity of God’s transcendence.32 In this ascent the soul progressively unifies itself as it deepens its unity with God.

- Return. Man returns to God first through death and then through the resurrection of his body which is spiritualized or glorified in its reunion with the soul. The pledge of fallen man’s resurrection is the resurrection of Christ, his savior. Man’s complete return to God requires grace as well as nature. The reunion of man’s soul with the idea of man will be accompanied by the return of the whole material universe to the unity of the idea of man. Mutable and unspiritualized matter which John Scotus, following Gregory of Nyssa, viewed as a complex of accidents and as appearance, will perish. As all things originated in man and fell with him, so they will be saved through him. In the end everything will go back to God: "For God will be all in all when there is nothing but God."33

When man and the universe are absorbed into God and transfigured in his light, they retain their identity without confusion with God, as air permeated by light is not destroyed or transubstantiated. Upon completion of the cosmic return, moral evil and physical suffering will disappear, all men will become pure spirits and the wicked will be punished with ignorance of Christ who is truth.34

Erigena’s attempt to understand his faith gave rise to a polarity in his system between Christian and Neoplatonic tendencies. Regarding the origin of all creatures from God and their return to him, Erigena tried to harmonize two opposing tendencies, the Christian view of God’s freedom and the Neoplatonic position of the necessity of nature. The resurrection which he accepted on faith as an effect of God’s free grace operating through Christ, is made a natural, necessary event in the return of man — and through man, the universe — into his eternal primordial causes. This tension is also evident, on the one hand, in his Christian affirmation of the transcendence of God who "is not the whole of his creation, nor is his creation part of God,"35 and on the other, in his Neoplatonic view that God is "the essence of all things."36 The first statement which agrees, with the theistic distinction between God and creatures is in line with orthodox Christian doctrine, whereas the second which suggests their pantheistic identification is incompatible with orthodoxy.

In the first argument, Anselm observed that experience reveals a great number of things that are good. But a number of things possess an attribute to a greater, less, or equal degree insofar as they have it through one thing that is the same in all. Accordingly, things are said to be just to any degree, can be understood to be just only through justice. "It follows, therefore, that all other goods are good through another being than that which they themselves are, and this being alone is good through itself."37 This being which is supremely good and completely excels all others is God.

The third proof bears on the degrees of perfection which things possess in the universe, for example, a horse is superior to a tree, and a man to a horse. Granting this gradation, there must be either an infinity of beings with none so perfect that there is not another still more perfect, or else a finite number of beings, and consequently one more perfect than all the others. However, it is absurd to suppose an infinite number of things. Therefore, there must exist a being surpassing all others in perfection and inferior to none.38

- Proslogion: Concept of Greatest Conceivable Being. Driven by the desire for a simpler proof, Anselm meditated long on God’s existence and expressed the fruit of his reflection in the Proslogion. Turning his thoughts inward towards God, Anselm prayed to God for "a little understanding of the truths which my heart believes and loves,"39 and then developed his so-called "ontological" argument for the existence of God.40 For purposes of clarity, this argument can be put in syllogistic form.

The major premise consists of a definition of God as "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived . . ."41 Thus the proof starts from the idea of God as absolutely perfect. Even the atheist ("The fool has said in his heart, `There is no God.’" Psalm 13:1) understands that idea as what is meant by God, otherwise he would not really know the being to which he is denying existence.

According to the minor premise, that than which no greater can be thought must exist not only as an idea in the mind but also in reality. If such a being existed merely instrumentally, then it would not be the greatest conceivable being, for a greater could be thought, namely, a being existing extramentally as well as conceptually. As Anselm put it: "If that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which none greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible."42 In other words, it is contradictory to have the idea of a being as absolute perfection and at the same time deny real existence to that being.

Anselm predicated of God all those perfections that, absolutely speaking, it is better to be than not to be, for example, spirit, life, wisdom, power, and truth.43 Before creating the world from nothing, God possessed in his infinite nature and knew eternally the exemplars of all things to be. The Anselmian doctrine of eternal ideas which are identical with God’s uncreated nature radically differs from Erigena’s teaching of created ideas. Since creatures subsist more truly as ideas in God — with whose nature the ideas are identified — than in themselves, they are said to be reflections or participations of the divine reality.

- Human Nature. Man’s nature images the ineffable Trinity inasmuch as his soul recollects, understands, and loves itself.44 The knowledge of things requires the cooperation of the senses and the intellect which is aided by divine illumination. The presence of God is manifested clearly in the truths of the intellect and the freedom of the will.

- Truth. Anselm’s inquiry into God and man rests upon his theory of true knowledge. With regard to universals, he opposed the nominalism of some of his contemporaries by insisting on the reality of genera and species.45 The nominalists identify the content of thought with words, whereas the realists identify it with things. If one thinks simply of words, one can say, for example, that fire is water, but if one has in mind the things signified by the words, this statement is impossible. Likewise, in the order of words a nominalist can deny God’s existence, but with respect to the being signified by the word one cannot say that the being than which none greater can be thought, does not exist, for the very being conceived necessarily implies existence in reality as well as in thought.

In his treatise On Truth Anselm analyzed the nature of truth. First, he agreed with Aristotle that a proposition is true when what it affirms is, and what it negates is not. Thus the truth of a judgment lies in "rectitude," or, in expressing what it ought to express.46 Second, truth is also found in the rectitude of the will and action when one wills and does what he ought to will and to do. In this sense, nonrational creatures realize the truth in doing what they ought to do, for example, fire in burning. Third, truth resides in the essence of all existing things inasmuch as they are what they ought to be in conforming to their ideas in the divine mind.47 Since rectitude is the object of the intellect and not of the senses, truth can be defined as "rectitude perceptible to the mind alone."48

As there is only one time that measures all temporal events, so there is one highest truth, God, who owes nothing to another, and measures and causes the truth of things which in turn cause the truth of thought and of propositions.49 As with Augustine so for Anselm, the human mind can move from the truth of propositions to the truth of thought, and from there to the truth of things, and upward towards the divine ideas which are one with God. Thus, Anselm combined the Aristotelian notion of truth as correspondence with the Platonic theory of participation to show that God is truth.

- Will and Liberty. To understand the nature of moral truth or rectitude whereby a man is just in the sight of God, Anselm analyzed the notions of the will and liberty. The term of "will" has three meanings. First, it means the soul’s natural self-determining power to will, or to decide, or to love. Second, it refers to the affection or disposition of the will’s power towards either the useful or the just. While permanently inclined to what is useful, the will is not inseparably disposed to what is just, as is obvious in the case of injustice. Since the tendency to what is useful can get out of hand and lead to sin, it should be brought under control of the propensity to justice which always orients towards good. Third, the term "will" means the exercise of the power and inclination to will. Among the acts of the will is choice, a judgment or decision to accept or reject objects according to the evidence of reason. The ability to choose is natural to man’s powers of will and reason.50

Like Augustine, Anselm distinguished between the freedom of choosing or not choosing to act in this or that way and even of sinning, and liberty which is "the power of preserving rectitude of will for the sake of rectitude itself."51 In this definition, the phrase "rectitude of will" signifies freedom from the bondage of sin, and "for the sake of rectitude itself" means that the truly free person acts rightly not from any selfish motive but from the knowledge that his act is right. Man gives up his liberty when he enslaves himself to sin. Only the grace of God can liberate him from the slavery of sin and enable him to properly use his natural freedom of choice in the performance of just actions for true happiness.

Ontological Argument.52 Anselm’s bold and original argument for God’s existence from the notion of the greatest possible being was strongly criticized by one of his contemporaries, Gaunilon, the astute Benedictine monk from Marmoutier. In his remarkable pamphlet, "In Defense of the Fool," Gaunilon objected that he has in his mind no distinct idea of a being than which a greater cannot be thought. Replying to Gaunilon’s objection that one cannot form a notion of God from other realities unequal to him, Anselm explained that any human mind can ascend from the knowledge of a lesser good to the notion of a greater, from the awareness of less perfect things to the idea of a more perfect being, and construct a concept of a being than which a greater is inconceivable.53

Gaunilon also objected that, even if one could conceive of a being than which none greater can be thought, one can conclude at most that it exists, not in reality, but only in thought. Though there are any number of unreal things existing in the mind, for example, the notion of an earthly paradise, the Isles of the Blessed, the conclusion that they really exist is unwarranted. While agreeing with Gaunilion’s second objection that one cannot reason from existence in thought to existence in reality, Anselm excepted the case of the being which cannot he thought not to be. Unlike the idea of the Isles of the Blessed which contains no compelling reason to affirm their real existence, the being than which none greater can he thought necessarily implies existence in reality.54

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