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As far as our experience goes, those who are loudest in their jubilations over the wonderful progress of the age are those who have never helped that progress forward one inch, but find it a great deal easier and more profitable to use the results which humbler men have painfully worked out as second-hand capital for hustings-speeches and railway books, and flatter a mechanics' institute of self-satisfied youths by telling them that the least instructed of them is wiser than Erigena or Roger Bacon.
Augustine. Scotus Erigena, a Scotsman attached to the Palatine Academy of Charles the Bald, lived in the eleventh century. He was extremely learned. His philosophy was Platonic, or rather the bent of his mind was Platonic. God is the absolute Being; He is unnamable, since any name is a delimitation of the being; He is absolutely and infinitely.
Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great classical ancients; next the primitive fathers; then Abailard, Erigena, Peter Lombard, Ramus, Major, and the like.
The Scholastic philosophy sent forth such daring thinkers as Erigena and Abélard. Orthodoxy was still supreme before such mighty intellects as Anselm, Bernard, and Thomas Aquinas, but it was assailed. Abélard put forth his puzzling questions. The Schoolmen began to think for themselves, and the iron weight of Feudalism was less oppressive. Free cities and commerce began to enrich the people.
Strange yet from the date of the book of the Celestial Hierarchies of the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite to that of its translation by Joannes Scotus Erigena, the contemporary of Alfred, and from Scotus to the Rev. John Oxlee in 1815, not unfrequent delusion of mistaking Pantheism, disguised in a fancy dress of pious phrases, for a more spiritual and philosophic form of Christian Faith!
The immediate subject of these observations is slight and trivial; but the evil itself is wide-spread and important, and deserves severe reprehension, as many portions of our national history have been strangely disfigured by such indefensible practices. Harris, I. 873. Hakluyt, V. II. 38. Chron. Sax. Ed. Gibson, p. 86. Hakluyt, II. 88. Travels of John Erigena to Athens, in the Ninth Century .
Erigena taught that the soul would be re-absorbed into the divine spirit, from which it had originally emanated; from God all things had come to Him would they ultimately return; God alone was eternal, and in the end nothing but God would exist. Some of Erigena's works naturally fell under the displeasure of the Church, and were duly burned: he was a philosopher, and therefore dangerous.
This man was John Scotus Erigena, or John the Erin-born, who was also a monk, and whose early days had been spent in some secluded monastery in Ireland, or the Scottish islands. Somehow he attracted the attention of Charles the Bald, A.D. 843, and became his guest and chosen companion. And yet, while he lived in the court, he spent the most of his time in intellectual seclusion.
Both in Paris and Oxford, the two great schools of medieval thought, we find the boldest and most subtle of their disputants an Irishman,—the monk John Scotus Erigena, at Paris, and Duns Scotus, the Franciscan friar, at Oxford. Now, it is my belief, Gentlemen, that this character of mind remains in you still.
No very remarkable man arose with a rationalizing spirit, after Erigena, until Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century, who maintained that in the Sacrament the presence of the body of Christ involves no change in the nature and essence of the bread and wine. He was opposed by Lanfranc.
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