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Updated: June 13, 2025
A few brave minds rebelled against this unnatural imprisonment of the intellect, with the usual consequences. Peter Abelard was condemned for his scepticism at a council at Sens in 1140; the philosophy of John Scotus Erigena was condemned for its pantheistic ideas by a council at Sens in 1225; and the pantheistic views of Bruno had much to do with his martyrdom in the year 1600.
One observes, however, the style in the Latin writings of men who think for themselves, those who have not deigned to imitate, as, for instance, Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, etc. Affectation in style is like making grimaces.
We witness it in the downfall of the Alexandrian Museum, in the cases of Erigena and Wiclif, in the contemptuous rejection by the heretics of the thirteenth century of the Scriptural account of the Creation; but it was not until the epoch of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, that the efforts of Science to burst from the thraldom in which she was fettered became uncontrollable.
Erigena in the ninth century surveying all things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison "through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest aspirations, the very heart of the race.
According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy," "the soul of the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every portion of the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The world, too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of God." John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all."
The celebrated Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, the greatest churchman of the age, was the most influential minister of the king; at whose table also sat John Erigena, then engaged in a controversy with Gotteschalk, the German monk, about the presence of Christ in the eucharist, the earliest notable theological controversy after the Patristic age.
To these names, known to every enlightened man, might be added many others less familiar to the public, but belonging to men who held a high place in the philosophical contests of their times, such as John Scot Erigena, Berenger, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Gilbert of La Poree, &c.
These theories, some of which, as has been seen, go beyond dogma and form at least the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated with Platonism, especially with Neoplatonism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning. ARABIAN SCIENCE. A great literary and philosophical fact in the eighth century was the invasion of the Arabs.
Erigena, for example, in the ninth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Raimond Lully in the thirteenth, with a hundred others, speak straight to us in the very language that they naturally adopted in thinking of learned matters. They thus come quite close to us even at this distance of time: we are in direct contact with them, and really come to know them.
John Scotus Erigena, a subtle and acute thinker, left behind him works which have made some regard him as the founder of the Realist school of the middle ages, the school which followed Aristotle, in opposition to the Nominalists, who held with Zeno and the Stoics.
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