EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR Celtic Christianity in the Bible, Fathers, Liturgy, & Literature

SEMINAR SCHEDULE FRIDAY 3.13.20 4:30 p.m. - Seminar at The Ladder Celtic Christianity in the Bible The Gospel according to St. John 1-2

6:00 p.m. - Dinner

7:30 p.m. - Seminar continues until 9:00 p.m. Celtic Christianity in the Fathers The Mystical Theology by St. Dionysios the Areopagite

SATURDAY 2.29.20 9:00 a.m. - Seminar at The Ladder Celtic Christianity in the Liturgy Feast of St. Patrick

10:30 a.m. - Break

11:00 a.m. - Seminar continues until 12:30 p.m. Celtic Christianity in Literature Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John by John Scotus Eriugena

TABLE of CONTENTS

1. BIBLE: St. John the Evangelist & Theologian John 1-2 translated by David Bentley Hart………………………………………………….…………………………2

2. FATHERS: St. Dionysios the Areopagite The Mystical Theology…………………………………….……………….……………………………………..6

3. LITURGY: Patrician Hymns Hymn on St. Patrick by St. Secundinus…………………………………..……………………………………….11 The Lorica by St. Patrick………………………………..………………………………………………..………….14 Icon of St Patrick…………………………………………………………………………………….…Front Cover

4. LITERATURE: John Scotus Eriugena Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John………..……………………………………………….17

5. SUPPLEMENT: Patristic Essay Remarks on Eastern Patristic Thought in John Scotus Eriugena by John Meyendorff……………..…32 d THE BIBLE The Gospel according to St. John 1-2 CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 2

JOHN 1-2 d translated by David Bentley Hart

CHAPTER ONE 1In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD, and the Logos was god; 2This one was present with GOD in the origin. 3All thing came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. 4In him was life, and this life was the light of men. 5And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it. 6There came a man, sent by GOD, whose name was John; 7This man came in witness, that he might testify about the light, so that through him all might have faith – 8But only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light. 9It was the true light, which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. 10He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be, and the cosmos did not recognize him. 11He came to those things that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. 12But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become GOD’s children – to those having faith in his name, 13Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD. 14And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth. 15John testifies concerning him and has cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who is coming after me has surpassed me, for he was before me.’” 16For we all have received from his fullness, and grace upon grace; 17Because the Law was given through Moses, the grace and the truth came through Jesus the Anointed. 18No one has ever seen GOD; the one who is uniquely god, who is in the Father’s breast, that one has declared him.

19And this is John’s testimony when the Judaeans of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to him, so that they might ask him, “Who are you?” 20And he avowed, and did not deny, and confessed that: “I am not the Anointed.” 21And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” And he says, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” 22So they said to him, “Who are you? So that we may give an answer to those who have sent us, what do you say concerning yourself?” 23He said, “I am a voice of one crying in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” 24And some who had been sent were of the Pharisees. 25And they questioned him and said to him, “Why then do you baptize, if you are not the Anointed or Elijah or the Prophet?” 26John answered them saying, “I baptize in water; among you there stands one whom you do not know, 27The one coming after me, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” 28These things occurred in Bethany beyond the Jordan where John was baptizing. 29The next day he sees Jesus coming toward him, and says, “See the lamb of GOD who is taking way the sin of the cosmos. 30This is he concerning whom I have said, ‘A man is coming after me who has surpassed me, for he was before me.’ 31And I myself did not recognize him, although I came baptizing in water so that he might be made manifest to Israel.” 32John also testified by saying: “I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove from the sky, and he rested on him. 33And I did not recognize him; rather he who sent me to baptize in water, that one said to me, ‘On whomever you see the Spirit descending, and resting upon him, this is he who baptizes in a Holy Spirit.’ 34And I have seen and have borne witness that this man is the Son of God.”

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35The next day John again stood there, and two of his disciples as well. 36And, watching Jesus walking by, he says, “Look: the Lamb of God.” 37And the two disciples heard him saying this and followed Jesus. 38And turning around, and seeing them following, Jesus says to them, “What do you seek?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” – which isd to say, when translated, “Teacher” – “where are you staying?” 39He says to them, “Come and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and stayed with him that day; it was about the tenth hour. 40One of the two men who had heeded John and were following him was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter; 41The first thing he does is find his own brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (which, being translated, is “the Anointed”). 42He led him to Jesus. Looking at him, Jesus said, “You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas” (which is translated as “Peter” [Rock]). 43On the following day he wished to go away into Galilee, and he finds Philip. And Jesus says to him, “Follow me.” 44Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city from which Andrew and Peter came. 45Philip finds Nathanael and says to him, “We have found him of whom Moses wrote in the Law and the Prophets, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” 46And Nathanael said to him, “Can there be anything good out of Nazareth?” Philip says to him, “Come and see.” 47Jesus saw Nathanael approaching him and says of him, “Look: truly an Israelite, in whom there is no guile.” 48Nathanael says to him, “Where do you know me from?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, I saw that you were beneath the fig tree.” 49Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel.” 50Jesus replied and said to him, “You have faith because I told you I saw you below the fig tree? You shall see greater things than these.” 51And he says to him, “Amen, amen, I tell you, you shall see the heavens open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

CHAPTER TWO 1And on the third day there was a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. 2And both Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding. 3and, when the wine was exhausted, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4And Jesus says to her, “What, madam, is this to me and you? My hour is not yet arrived.” 5His mother says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6Now six stone water jars, as prescribed for purification for the Judaeans, were set nearby, each containing two or three measures [15-25 gallons]. 7Jesus says to them, “Fill the water jars with water.” And they filled them to the brim. 8And he tells them, “Now pour out a draft and take it to the master of the festivities.” 9And when the master of the festivities tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from – though the servants who had drawn the water knew – the master of festivities calls out to the bridegroom, 10And says to him, “Everyone sets out the fine wine first, and the worse when they have been made drunk; you have saved the fine wine till now.” 11This inauguration of signs Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee, and made his glory manifest, and his disciples had faith in him.

12Thereafter he went town into Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples, and remained there for not many days.

13And the Passover of the Judaeans was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14And in the Temple he found men selling oxen and sheep and doves, as well as installed moneychangers, 15And, having fashioned a stockwhip out of cords, he drove all of both the sheep and the oxen out of the Temple; he also spilled out the coins and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, 16And said to those selling doves, “Take these away from here; do not make my Father’s house a house for merchandise.” 17His disciples remembered that it is written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

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18In reply, then, the Judaeans said to him, “What signs do you show us, since you do these things?” 19Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I shall raise it.” 20So the Judaeans said, “This sanctuary was built over forty-six years, and you will raise it in three days?” 21But he was speaking about the sanctuary of his body. 22Thus when he was raised from the dead his disciples remembered that he said this, and they believed the scriptures and this saying that Jesus had uttered.

23And when he was in Jerusalem during the Passover, at the feast, many had faith in his name, seeing the signs he was performing; 24But Jesus did not entrust himself to them because he knew everyone, 25And because he had no need that anyone should make attestation concerning humanity, for he knew what was in humanity.

*Text from The New Testament: A Translation by David Bentley Hart (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 168-173.

A MERE CHRISTIAN GATHERING d THE FATHERS St. Dionysios the Areopagite CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 6

THE MYSTICAL THEOLOGY d St. Dionysios the Areopagite

CHAPTER ONE What is the divine darkness?

1. Trinity!! Higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness! Guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence. Amid the deepest shadow they pour overwhelming light on what is most manifest. Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen they completely fill our sightless minds with treasures beyond all beauty.

For this I pray; and, Timothy, my friend, my advice to you as you look for a sight of the mysterious things, is to leave behind you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with Him who is beyond all being and knowledge. By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is.

2. But see to it that none of this comes to the hearing of the uninformed, that is to say, to those caught up with the things of the world, who imagine that there is nothing beyond instances of individual being and who think that by their own intellectual resources they can have a direct knowledge of Him who has made the shadows His hiding place. And if initiation into the divine is beyond such people, what is to be said of those others, still more uninformed, who describe the transcendent Cause of all things in terms derived from the lowest orders of being, and who claim that it is in no way superior to the godless, multiformed shapes they themselves have made? What has actually to be said about the Cause of everything is this. Since it is the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmation we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being. Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.

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3. This, at least, is what was taught by the blessed Bartholomew. He says that the Word of God is vast and miniscule, that the Gospel is wide-ranging and yet restricted. To me it seems that in this he is extraordinarily shrewd, for he has grasped that the good cause of all is both eloquent and taciturn, indeed wordless. It has neither word nor act of understanding, since it is on a plane above all this, and it is made manifest only to those who travel through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent, who leave behind them every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where, as scripture proclaims, there dwells the One who is beyond all things. It is not for nothing that the blessed Moses is commanded to submit first to purification and then to depart from those who have not undergone this. When every purification is complete, he hears the many-voiced trumpets. He sees the many lights, pure and with rays streaming abundantly. Then, standing apart from the crowds and accompanied by chosen priests, he pushes ahead to the summit of the divine ascents. And yet he does not meet God Himself, but contemplates, not Him who is invisible, but rather where He dwells. This means, I presume, that the holiest and highest of the things perceived with the eye of the body or the mind are but the rationale which presupposes all that lies below the Transcendent One. Through them, however, His unimaginable presence is shown, walking the heights of those holy places to which the mind at least can rise. But then he [Moses] breaks free of them, away from what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to Him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.

CHAPTER TWO How one should be united, and attribute praises, to the Cause of all things who is beyond all things.

I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings. We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.

Now it seems to me that we should praise the denials quite differently than we do the assertions. When we made assertions we began with the first things, moved down through intermediate terms until we reached the last things. But now as we climb from the last things up to the most primary we deny all things so that we may unhiddenly know that unknowing which itself is hidden from all those possessed of knowing amid all beings, so that we may see above being that darkness concealed from all the light among beings.

CHAPTER THREE What are the affirmative theologies and what are the negative?

In my Theological Representations, I have praised the notions which are most appropriate to affirmative theology. I have shown the sense in which the divine and good nature is said to be one and then

INKLINGS FESTIVAL visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 8 triune, how Fatherhood and Sonship are predicated of it, the meaning of the theology of the Spirit, how these core lights of goodness grew from the incorporeal and indivisible good, and how in this sprouting they have remained inseparable from their co-eternal foundation in it, in themselves, and in each other. I have spoken of how Jesus, who is above individual being, became a being with a true human nature. Other revelations of scripture were also praised in The Theological Representations.

In The Divine Names I have shown the sense in which God is described as good, existent, life, wisdom, power, and whatever other things pertain to the conceptual names for God. In my Symbolic Theology I have discussed analogies of God drawn from what we perceive. I have spoken of the images we have of Him, of the forms, figures, and instruments proper to Him, of the places in which He lives and of the ornaments He wears. I have spoken of His anger, grief, and rage, of how He is said to be drunk and hungover, of His oaths and curses, of His sleeping and waking, and indeed of all those images we have of Him, images shaped by the workings of the symbolic representations of God. And I feel sure that you have noticed how these latter come much more abundantly than what went before, since The Theological Representations and a discussion of the names appropriate to God are inevitably briefer than what can be said in The Symbolic Theology. The fact is that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing. In the earlier books my argument traveled downward from the most exalted to the humblest categories, taking in on this downward path an ever-increasing number of ideas which multiplied with every stage of the descent. But my argument now rises from what is below up to the transcendent, and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely, since it will finally be at one with Him who is indescribable.

Now you may wonder why it is that, after starting out from the highest category when our method involved assertions, we begin now from the lowest category when it involves a denial. The reason is this. When we assert what is beyond ever assertion, we must then proceed from what is most akin to it, and as we do so we make the affirmation on which everything else depends. But when we deny that which is beyond every denial, we have to start by denying those qualities which differ most from the goal we hope to attain. Is it not closer to reality to say that God is life and goodness rather than that He is air or stone? Is it not more accurate to deny that drunkenness and rage can be attributed to Him than to deny that we can apply to Him the terms of speech and thought?

CHAPTER FOUR That the supreme Cause of every perceptible thing is not itself perceptible.

So this is what we say. The Cause of all is above all and is not inexistent, lifeless, speechless, mindless. It is not a material body, and hence has neither shape nor form, quality, quantity, or weight. It is not in any place and can neither be seen nor be touched. It is neither perceived nor is it perceptible. It suffers neither disorder nor disturbance and is overwhelmed by no earthly passion. It is not powerless and subject to the disturbances caused by sense perception. It endures no deprivation of light. It passes through no change, decay, division, loss, no ebb and flow, nothing of which the senses may be aware. None of all this can either be identified with it nor attributed to it.

THE PEN, THE PIPE & THE PINT 9 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR

CHAPTER FIVE That the supreme Cause of every conceptual thing is not itself conceptual.

Again, as we climb higher we say this. It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing things do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth – it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.

*Text from Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works translated by Colm Luibheid and annotated by Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 135-141.

FLOROVSKY-NEWMAN WEEK visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org d THE LITURGY Feast of St. Patrick 11 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR

THE HYMN ON ST PATRICK d by St. Secundinus

1 Hear ye all, lovers of God, the holy merits Of the man blessed in Christ, Patrick the bishop, How for his good ways he is likened to the angels, And because of his perfect life is deemed equal to the apostles.

5 Christ’s holy precepts he keeps in all things, His works shine bright among men, And they follow his holy and wondrous example, And thus praise God the Father in heaven.

Constant in the fear of God and steadfast in his faith, 10 On him the Church is built as on Peter; And his apostleship has he received from God – The gates of Hell will not prevail against him.

The Lord has chosen him to teach the barbarian tribes, To fish with the nets of his teaching, 15 And to draw from the world unto grace the believers, Men who would follow the Lord to His heavenly seat.

He sells the choice talents of Christ’s Gospel And collects them among the Irish heathens with usury; As a reward for the great labor of his journey, 20 His will be the joy of heaven’s kingdom in union with Christ.

God’s faithful servant and His distinguished ambassador, He gives the good an apostolic example and model, Preaching as he does to God’s people in words as well as in deeds, So that him whom he converts not with words he inspires with good conduct.

25 Glory has he with Christ, honor in the world, He who is venerated by all as an angel of God. God has sent him, as He sent Paul, an apostle to the gentiles, To offer men guidance to the kingdom of God.

Humble is he of mind and body because of his fear of God; 30 The Lord has pleasure in him because of his good deeds; In his holy body he bears the marks of Christ; In His Cross alone, his sole comfort, he glories.

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Untiringly he feeds the faithful from the heavenly banquet, Lest those who are with Christ faint on the way; 35 Like bread he gives to them the words of the Gospel, Which are multiplied like manna in his hands.

He preserves his body chaste for love of the Lord; This body he has made a temple for the Holy Spirit, And he keeps it such by purity in all his actions; 40 He offers it as a living sacrifice, acceptable to the Lord.

The great Gospel light of the world is he, Lifted up on a candlestick, shining over all the earth – The fortified city of the King, seated on a mountain, Wherein there is great abundance of the Lord

45 Greatest indeed will be called in the kingdom of heaven The man who fulfills with good deeds the holy words he teaches, Who by his good example is a leader and model to the faithful, Who in sincerity of heart has confidence in God.

Boldly he proclaims the name of the Lord to the heathens, 50 And gives them eternal grace in the bath of salvation. He prays to God daily for their sins, For them he offers sacrifices, worthy in the eyes of God.

For the sake of God’s law he despises all worldly glory; Compared to His table he considers all else as trifling; 55 He is not moved by the violence of this world, But, suffering for Christ, he rejoices in adversity.

A good and faithful shepherd of the flock won for the Gospel, God has chosen him to watch over God’s people And to feed with divine teaching His folk, 60 For whom, following Christ’s example, he gives his life.

For his merits the Savior has raised him to the dignity of a bishop, That he may spur the clergy in their heavenly service, Providing them with heavenly rations, besides vestments – The rations of divine and sacred words.

65 He is the King’s herald, inviting the faithful to the wedding. He is richly clad in a wedding garment, He drinks heavenly wine from heavenly cups And gives God’s people the spiritual cup to drink.

He finds a holy treasure in the Sacred Volume 70 And perceives the Savior’s divinity in His flesh.

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It is a treasure he purchases with holy and perfect works. ISRAEL his soul is called – “seeing God.”

A faithful witness of the Lord to the Catholic Law, His speech is spiced with divine words, 75 That the human flesh may not decay, eaten by worms, But be salted with heavenly savor for sacrifice.

A true and renowned tiller of the Gospel field, His seeds are Christ’s Gospels. These he sows from his God-inspired mouth into the ears of the wise, 80 And cultivates their hearts and minds with the Holy Spirit.

Christ chose him to be His vicar on earth. He frees captives from a twofold servitude: The great numbers whom he liberates from bondage to men, These countless ones he frees from the yoke of the devil.

85 Hymns, and the Apocalypse, and the Psalms of God he sings, And explains them for the edification of God’s people. What he tells them he believes in the Trinity of the holy Name, And teaches that there is only one substance in Three Persons.

Girt with the Lord’s girdle day and night, 90 He prays unceasingly to God the Lord. He will receive the reward for his immense labor – With the Apostles will he reign, holy, over Israel.

*Text from The Works of St. Patrick; St. Secundinus, Hymn on St. Patrick translated and notes by Ludwig Bieler, Ancient Christian Writers 17 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1953), 61-65.

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THE LORICA d by St. Patrick

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness towards the Creator. I arise today through the strength of Christ with His Baptism, through the strength of His Crucifixion with His Burial, through the strength of His Resurrection with His Ascension, through the strength of His descent for the Judgment of Doom. I arise today through the strength of the love of Cherubim, in obedience of Angels, in the service of the Archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet their reward, in prayers of Patriarchs, in predictions of Prophets, in preachings of Apostles, in faiths of Confessors, in innocence of Holy Virgins, in deeds of righteous men. I arise today through the strength of Heaven: light of Sun, brilliance of Moon, splendor of Fire, speed of Lightning, swiftness of Wind, depth of Sea, stability of Earth, firmness of Rock. I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me,

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God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to secure me – against snares of devils, against temptations of vices, against inclinations of (?) nature, against everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and anear, alone and in a crowd. I summon today all these powers between me (and these evils) – against every cruel and merciless power that may oppose my body and my soul, against incantations of false prophets, against black laws of heathenry, against false laws of heretics, against craft (?) of idolatry, against spells of women and smiths and wizards, against every knowledge that endangers man’s body and soul. Christ to protect me today against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come abundance of reward. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness towards the Creator. Salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. Savlation is of Christ. May Thy salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.

*Text from The Works of St. Patrick; St. Secundinus, Hymn on St. Patrick translated and annotated by Ludwig Bieler, Ancient Christian Writers 17 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1953), 69-72.

EIGHTH DAY INSTITUTE visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org d LITERATURE John Scotus Eriugena 17 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR

HOMILY ON JOHN’S PROLOGUE d by John Scotus Eriugena

1. The voice of the spiritual eagle strikes in the hearing of the church. May our outer senses grasp its transient sounds and our inner spirit penetrate its enduring meaning.

This is the voice of the bird of high light – not of the bird who soars above the material air or over the aether, orbiting the entire sensible world – but the voice of that spiritual bird who, on swiftest wings of innermost theology and intuitions of most brilliant and high contemplation, transcends all vision and lies beyond all things that are and are not.

By the things that are, I mean the things that do not wholly escape perception, either angelic or human, since they come after God and because of their numbers do not transcend what has been fashioned by the single cause of all. And by the things that truly are not, I mean those that actually surpass the powers of all understanding.

The blessed theologian John therefore lies beyond not only what may be thought and spoken, but also beyond all mind and meaning. Exalted by the ineffable light of his spirit beyond all things, he enters into the very arcanum of the one principle of all. There he clearly distinguishes the superessential unity and the supersubstantial difference of the beginning and the Word – that is, of the Father and the Son – both incomprehensible, and begins his Gospel saying: “In the beginning was the Word.”

2. O blessed John, not unworthily are you called John. The name John is Hebrew. Translated into Greek, it means “to whom is given.” For to whom among theologians is given what is given to you? Namely, to penetrate the hidden mysteries of the highest good and to intimate to human mind and senses what was there revealed and declared unto you. To whom else, I pray, was given grace so great and of such a kind?

Perhaps some will say such a grace was given to the chief of the Apostles, I mean to Peter, who, when the Lord asked him whom he thought he was, replied, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” However it may be said without fear, I think, that Peter in answering thus spoke more as the igure of faith and action than that of knowledge and contemplation.

Why? For obvious reason that Peter is always presented as the model of faith and action, while John portrays the type of contemplation and knowledge. The one indeed leans on the bosom of the Lord, which is the sacrament of contemplation, while the other often hesitates, which is the symbol of restless action.

For the execution of divine commands, before it becomes habitual, may shatter the pure brilliance of virtue and fall short in its judgments, clouded by the fog of sense-bound thinking. The keenness

FLOROVSKY-NEWMAN WEEK visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 18 of profoundest contemplation, on the other hand, once it has perceived the countenance of the truth, neither hesitates, nor slips, nor is ever darkened by any cloud.

3. Both apostles, however, run to the tomb.

Christ’s tomb is Holy Scripture, in which the mysteries of His divinity and humanity are secured by the weight of the letter, just as the tomb is secured by the stone.

But John runs ahead and arrives before Peter – for contemplation, being deeply puriied, penetrates more sharply and speedily into the secret power of the divine intent than does action, which still needs puriication.

Nevertheless, although they have both run to the tomb and both enter it, Peter enters irst, and John only enters after him. For if Peter symbolizes faith, then John signiies the intellect. Therefore, since it is written, “Unless you believe you will not understand,” faith necessarily enters irst into the tomb of Holy Scripture, followed by the intellect, for which faith has prepared the entry.

Peter, who recognized the Christ, now made human and divine in time, and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” lew very high, but higher still lew the one who, having known this same Christ as God, born of God before time, said, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Let it not be thought, however, that we prefer John to Peter. For who could do so? Who indeed among the Apostles could be higher than he who is, and is called their chief?

We do not prefer John to Peter, we only compare action and contemplation: the soul still needing puriication to the soul that is already puriied. We only compare virtue that is still in the process of ascending to an immutable state to virtue that has already attained it. We do not here consider the personal dignity of the Apostles, but only investigate the beautiful distinctions that are made in the divine mysteries.

Thus Peter, action practicing virtue, perceives, through the virtue of faith and action, the Son of God conined in the lesh in a wonderful and ineffable manner. But John, who is the highest contemplation of the truth, wonders at the Word of God in itself, before the lesh, in its principle or absolute and ininite origin: that is, in the Father.

Peter, truly, when he observes eternity and time made one in Christ, is led by divine revelation; but it is John alone who leads the faithful among souls to knowledge of what in Christ is eternal.

4. The spiritual bird therefore, fast-lying, God-seeing – I mean John, the theologian – ascends beyond all visible and invisible creation, passes through all thought and intellect, and, deiied, enters into God who deiies him.

O Blessed Paul, you were caught up, as you yourself assert, into the third heaven, to paradise; but you were not caught up beyond every heaven and every paradise. John, however, went beyond every heaven formed and paradise created, beyond every human and angelic nature.

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In the third heaven, O vessel of election and teacher of the gentiles, you heard words not lawful for a human being to utter. But John, the observer of the inmost truth, in the paradise of paradises, in the very cause of all, heard the one Word through which all things are made.

It was permitted to him to speak this Word, and to proclaim it, as far as it may be proclaimed, to human beings. Therefore most conidently he cried out, “In the beginning was the Word.”

5. John, therefore, was not a human being but more than a human being when he lew above himself and all things that are. Transported by the ineffable power of wisdom and by purest keenness of mind, he entered that which is beyond all things: namely, the secret of the single essence in three substances and the three substances in the single essence.

He would not have been able to ascend into God if he had not irst become God. For, as the gaze of our eyes cannot feel the forms and colors of sensible things unless it is irst mixed and united with the sun’s rays, so the soul of saints cannot receive the pure knowledge of spiritual things transcending all intelligence, unless they have irst been made worthy of participation in the incomprehensible truth.

Thus the holy theologian, transmuted into God, and participating in the truth, proclaims that God, the Word, subsists in God, the beginning: that is, that God, the Son, subsists in God, the Father. “In the beginning,” he says, “was the Word.”

Behold heaven opened and the mystery of the highest and holiest Trinity revealed! Observe the divine angel ascend above the Son of Man, proclaiming Him to be the Word existing in the beginning before all things. Observe him descend upon the same Son of Man and cry, “And the Word was made lesh.”

The angel descends when the Gospel speaks of the Word made human supernaturally among all things from the Virgin. The angel ascends when the Gospel proclaims the same Word born superessentially from the Father before all things.

6. The holy Evangelist writes: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Here we must note that the signiicance that he gives to this utterance “was” is not temporal but substantial. For the verb “to be,” whence we derive by irregular conjugation the imperfect “was,” contains a double meaning. Sometimes it means the subsistence of whatever is predicated without temporal movement, in which case it is called “the substantial verb.” At other times, however, like other verbs, it indicates a temporal movement. Therefore, when he afirms that “In the beginning was the Word,” it is as if the Evangelist were saying openly, “The Son subsists in the Father.” What person, indeed, of sound mind would say that the Son at any given time subsisted temporally in the Father? For only where eternity is known may immutable truth be understood.

And lest anyone thing that the Word subsists in the beginning without substantial difference, the Evangelist immediately adds, “And the Word was with God.” That is to say, “The Son subsists with the Father in unity of essence and distinction of substance.”

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And again, lest a venomous contagion infect anyone – such as that the Word is only in the Father and with God, but does not subsist substantially and co-essentially as God with the Father – which error befell the faithless Arians – the Evangelist immediately adds, “And the Word was God.”

Similarly, knowing that there would not lack those who would claim that he was not referring to one and the same Word when he said, “In the beginning was the Word” and “the Word was God,” and would assert that the “Word in the beginning” and “The Word was God” were different – in order to destroy this heretical view – the Evangelist adds next, “This was in the beginning with God.”

That is to say: the Word, which is God with God, is not other than He who was in the Beginning.

This may be grasped more meaningfully in the Greek versions of the Gospel. In these, it says autos, that is “the same,” which may refer to either God or to the Word – for these two words, Theos and Logos (“God” and “Word”) are masculine in Greek, as indeed autos is also. And therefore the statement “And the Word was God, this (same) was in the beginning with God” may be understood to state more clearly than if it had been said in broad daylight, “This God-Word, who is with God, is the same of whom I say, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’”

7. All things were made through Him, through God-the-Word Himself. Through the very God-Word, all things were made.

And what does “All things were made through Him” mean if not that as the Word was born before all things from the Father, all things were made with Him and by Him? For the generation of the Word from the Father is the very creation itself of all causes, together with the operation and effect of all that proceeds from them in kinds and species. Truly, all things were made from the generation of God-the-Word from God-the-beginning.

Hear, then, the divine and ineffable paradox – the unopenable secret, the invisible depth, the incomprehensible mystery! Through Him, who was not made but begotten, all things were made but not begotten.

The beginning, the principle, from whom all things are is the Father; the beginning, the principle, through whom all things exist is the Son. The Father speaks His Word – the Father brings forth His Wisdom – and all things are made. The prophet said, “In wisdom has Thou made them all.” And elsewhere, introducing the Father in person, the Father says, “My heart has brought forth.” And what did His heart bring forth? He explains it Himself: “I spoke a good Word.” I speak a good Word, I bring forth a good Son. The Father’s heart is His own substance, of which the Son’s own substance was begotten.

The Father precedes the Son, not naturally, but causally. Hear the Son Himself say, “My father is greater than I.” That is to say: “His substance is the cause of my substance.” Causally, I say, the Father precedes the Son; naturally, the Son precedes all things which are made through Him. The substance of those things, which are made by Him, began in Him before all the ages of the world, not in time but with times. Time, indeed, is made with all things that are made. It is neither made before them, nor is it preferable to them, but it is co-created with them.

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8. And what is the consequence of the Word that was spoken from the mouth of the most high? Certainly the Father did not speak in vain, neither fruitlessly nor without great effect, since even human beings, speaking among themselves, effect something in the ears of their hearers. Three things, therefore, we must believe and understand: the Father speaking, the Word proclaimed, and the things effected by the Word. The Father spoke, the Word was begotten, and all things were effected. Hear the prophet speak: “For he spake and it was done.” That is: He brought forth His Word, by whom all things were made.

And lest you hold that among those things that are, some were made by the very Word of God Himself, while others in fact were made, or existed, outside of Him – so that the things that are and are not are referable to a single principle – the Evangelist adds to all his previous theology the conclusion: “And without Him was not anything made that was made.” That is: nothing was made without Him, because He Himself circumscribes and comprehends all, and nothing can be conceived that is co-eternal, consubstantial, or co-essential with Him, except the Father and the Spirit that proceeds from the Father through the Word.

This is easier understood in Greek. For where the Latin says sine ipso (without Him), the Greek says choris autou, that is, outside Him. And similarly the Lord Himself says to His disciples: “Without me you can do nothing.” “You,” He says, “who without me have not been able to make yourselves, what can you do without me?” Here again the Greek says not aneu but choris, that is, not “without” but “outside.”

For this reason, I say that the Greek is more easily understood, because one who hears sine ipso can still think “without His help or counsel,” thereby attributing to Him neither the totality nor all things. Understanding choris as “outside,” however, leaves nothing whatsoever that is not made in and through Him.

9. “What was made in Him was life.” At the furthest distance from all reason and intellect, the blessed Evangelist reveals the divine mysteries. He shows the God-Word clearly revealed in the God who speaks, leaving behind for those who contemplate the Divine Scriptures the revelation of the Holy Spirit in both.

Indeed, just as one necessarily breathes forth breath in the word one speaks, so God the Father, together and at the same time, gives birth to His Son, and through His Son, thus born, produces His Spirit.

Following this, the Evangelist adds that through the Son all things were made and that nothing subsisted outside of Him.

Then, as if to pursue the unfolding of his theology from another beginning, he says, “What was made in Him was life.” Earlier he had said, “All things were made by Him,” and then, as though someone had asked him about these things that are made by God – how and what these things made by Him were in Him – the Evangelist replies, “What was made in Him was life.”

This last sentence is ambiguous and may be spoken in two ways. For either one says, “What was made,” adding, “in Him was life.” Or one says, “What was made in Him,” and then adds, “was life.”

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Through these two punctuations, two different meanings are given to us for contemplation. For the contemplation that asserts, “What was made in places, discrete times, kinds, forms, and distinct numbers, whether of sensible or intellectual substance, compact or separated, all this was life in Him,” is not the same as one that declares, “What was made in Him is not other than life.”

Let our meaning therefore be the following: All things that are made in Him, in Him are life and are one. All things were – subsist – in Him as causes before they are in themselves as effects. For the things that are made through Him are beneath Him in one way; and the things that He is are in Him in another.

10. All things, therefore, that were made by the Word, live in Him unchangeably and are life. In Him all things exist neither by temporal intervals or places, nor as what is to come; but all are one in Him, above all times and places, and subsist in Him eternally.

Visible, invisible, corporeal, incorporeal, rational, irrational – heaven and earth, the abyss, and whatever is therein – in Him all live and are life and subsist eternally. Even what seems to us to be without all vital movement lives in the Word.

And if you want to know how, or by what reason, all things that are made through the Word thus subsist vitally, causally, and in the same manner in Him, consider examples chosen from created nature. Learn to know the Maker from those things that are made in Him and by Him. “For the invisible things of Him,” as the Apostle says, “are clearly understood by the intelligence, being understood from the things that are made.”

See how the causes of all things which this spherical sensible world contains subsist simultaneously and similarly in that sun which alone is called the great luminary of the world. Thence the forms of all bodies proceed; thence the beauty and diversity of colors; and whatever else may be known of sensible nature.

Consider the ininite, multiple power of the seed – how many grasses, fruits, and animals are contained in each kind of seed; and how there surges forth from each a beautiful, innumerable multiplicity of forms. Contemplate with your inner eye how in a master the many laws of an art or science are one; how they live in the spirit that disposes them. Contemplate how an ininite number of lines may subsist in a single point, and other similar examples drawn from nature.

From the contemplation of such as these, raised above all things by the wings of natural contemplation, illuminated and supported by divine grace, you will be able to penetrate by the keenness of your mind the secrets of the Word and, to the extent that it is granted to the human being who seeks signs of God, you will see how all things made by the Word live in the Word and are life: “For in Him,” as the Sacred Scripture says, “We live and move and have our being.” Truly, as the great Dionysius the Areopagite says, “The being of all things is their superessential divinity.”

11. “And the life was the light of human beings.” The Son of God, whom previously you called the Word, O blessed theologian, you now call life and light. And not without reason have you changed the names, but rather in order to allow us to understand different meanings. If, indeed, you have named the Son of God “the Word,” it is because the Father spoke all things through the Word. As it is written, “He spake and it was done.” And now you call Him “light” and “life,” because this same

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Son, who is the Word, is the life and light of all things that are made through Him. And what does He light? Not other than Himself and His Father. The light, therefore is, and illuminates, itself. The light of the Word reveals itself to the world; it manifests itself to the ignorant.

When humanity abandoned God, the light of divine knowledge receded from the world. Since then, the eternal light reveals itself in a twofold manner through Scripture and through creature. Divine knowledge may be renewed in us in no other way, but through the letter of Scripture and the species of creature. Learn, therefore, to understand these divine modes of expression and to conceive of their meanings in your soul, for therein you will know the Word.

Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things, and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only He who made them, outside of whom you have nothing to contemplate, for He Himself is all things. For whatever truly is, in all things that are, is He. Indeed, just as no substantial good exists outside of Him, so no essence or substance exists that is not He.

And the life was the light of human beings. Why does the theologian add “the light of human beings,” as if the light that is the light of angels, the light of the created universe, should be especially and peculiarly the light of humanity. Is not the Word that gives life to all things perhaps said especially and peculiarly to be the light of humanity because in human beings He declared Himself not only to them, but also to the angels and to all creatures able to participate in divine knowledge.

For God did not appear as an angel to the angels, nor as an angel to humanity, but as a human being to both human beings and angels. God appeared not simply in appearance but in true humanity, which He took upon Himself completely, in unity of substance. Thus He presented Himself – cognition of Himself – to all who might know Him. The light of humanity, therefore, is our Lord Christ Jesus, who in His human nature showed Himself to all rational and intellectual creatures, revealing the hidden mysteries of His divinity, by which He is equal to the Father.

12. “And the light shone in darkness.” Listen to the Apostle: “For ye were sometimes in darkness, but now ye are light in the Lord.” Hear Isaiah: “Those that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

The light shines in darkness. All humanity, by virtue of original sin, was in darkness – not darkness of the outer eyes that sense the forms and colors of sensible things, but darkness of the inner eyes that discern the kinds and beauties of intelligible things; not the darkness of a gloomy atmosphere, but the darkness of the ignorance of the truth; not the absence of the light that reveals the corporeal world, but the absence of the light that illumines the incorporeal world. Born of a virgin, this light shines in darkness – that is to say, in the hearts of those who know it.

And following this, since it is true that humanity is now, as it were, divided into two parts – into those whose hearts are illumined by the knowledge of the truth and those who still remain in the darkness of unholiness and faithfulness – the Evangelist adds: “And the darkness comprehended it not.”

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This is as if he had said: The light shines in the darkness of faithful souls, and shines there more and more, beginning in faith and leading to knowledge; but the hearts of the unholy, through faithlessness and ignorance, have not grasped the Light of the Word glorifying the lesh. “Their foolish hearts were darkened,” as the Apostle says. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” Such, at least, is the moral sense of darkness.

13. But the natural contemplation of these words yields another meaning to the phrase “And the light shone in the darkness.”

For human nature, even if it had not sinned, would have been unable to shine by its own strength; for human nature is not naturally light, but only participates in the light. Although human nature is capable of wisdom, it is not itself wisdom: only participation in wisdom allows it to be wise. Just as the air does not shine by itself – and is for this reason named darkness – and yet is nevertheless able to receive the light of the sun, so too our nature, considered in itself, is a substance of darkness, but is able to receive the light of wisdom. And just as the air, while it participates in the sun’s rays, is not said to shine by itself – but the splendor of the sun is said to appear in it, so that it does not lose its natural obscurity but only receives the supervening light into itself – so the rational part of our nature, while possessing the presence of the Word of God, knows – not through itself but through the engrafting on it of the divine Light – intelligible things and even God Himself. The Word Himself says: “It is not you who speak, but the spirit of your father which speaketh in you.”

By means of this one sentence the Word wishes to teach us to understand this universal truth and to have this meaning always and ineffably sounding in the ears of our hearts: It is not you who shine, but the spirit of your Father shines in you. In other words, it is He, the Father, who manifests me, the Word, to shine in you, for I am the light of the intelligible world, that is, of rational and intellectual nature. You, who know me, are not. It is I myself, through my spirit, who know myself in you – for you are not a substantial light, but only participate in the self-subsisting light.

Thus the light shines in the darkness, for the Word of God – the life and light of human beings – does not cease to shine in our nature which, investigated and considered in itself, is found to be without form and dark. Nor, despite its fall, does the Word wish to forsake human nature; nor will He ever forsake it. For He forms it, since He contains it by nature; and He reforms it by deifying grace. And since He Himself is the light incomprehensible to all creatures, the darkness comprehended it not.

For God surpasses all meaning and intelligence, and alone possesses immortality. Whose light is called darkness by virtue of its excellence, since no creature can comprehend either what or how it is.

14. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”

Behold the eagle, relaxing his wings of sublimest contemplation, descend in gentle light from the highest peaks of the mountain of theology into the deepest valley of history, from the heaven of the spiritual world to the earth.

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For Divine Scripture is a certain intelligible world, constituted of its four parts, its four elements. Whose earth, as it were, in the midst, at the lowest point, like a center, is history. Surrounding it, like the waters, is the abyss of moral understanding, that the Greeks are wont to call ethike. And in this intelligible world, around these two, as it were, lower parts, that I have called history and ethics, loats what I call natural knowledge or knowledge of nature, that the Greeks called physike. Rolled around, outside and beyond all, is the celestial and burning ire of the empyrean heaven, that sublime contemplation that the Greeks named “theology,” beyond which no intelligence passes.

Thus the great theologian – I mean John – in the beginning of his Gospel, touches the highest peaks of theology, and penetrates the secret spiritual heaven of heavens, ascending beyond all history, ethics, and physics. From thence, turning downward in his light, he narrates the historical sequences just preceding the incarnation of the Word, and says: “There was a man sent from God.”

15. John introduces John into his theology. “Deep calleth unto deep” in the voice of the divine mysteries. John, the Evangelist, narrates the history of John, the forerunner. The one, to whom it is given to know the Word in the beginning, commemorates the one to whom it is given to come before the incarnated Word.

“There was,” he says, not simply “sent from God,” but “there was a man.” By this the Evangelist distinguishes the one who was only a human being and came before from the other who united God and humanity in compact union and came after.

In this way the Evangelist separates the transient voice from the always and unchangingly abiding Word. He makes known that one is the morning star, appearing at the dawn of the kingdom of heaven, and declares the other to be the supervening sun of justice.

Thereby he distinguishes the witness from the One to whom he bears witness, the message from the One who sends it, the light of the lamp in the night from the brightest Light that ills the worlds and destroys the darkness of death and the sin of the whole human race.

Therefore the forerunner of our Lord was a human being, not God, while the Lord, whose forerunner he was, is at once a human being and God. The forerunner was a man called by grace to pass beyond humanity into God, while the One before whom he came was God by nature and was called to become human by humility and the will to our salvation and redemption.

“There was a man sent.” By whom? By God. By God the Word, before whom he, the human being, came. His mission was to be the precursor. Crying aloud, he sends his voice, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” before. The messenger prepared the coming of His Lord.

“Whose name was John” – to whom it was given to be the forerunner of the King of Kings, to make manifest the incarnate Word. To whom it was given to baptize Him as a prophetic promise of his spiritual adoption to come; and to bear witness to the eternal light by his voice and martyrdom.

16. “The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light” – that is to say, of Christ. Hear his witness: “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” And again: “He it is who

THE CHRISTIAN NEWS-LETTER visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 26 coming after me was made before me.” The Greek here is clearer: emproston mou – that is, “He was made before my sight, before my eyes.”

This is as if he had openly said, “He who in the order of times was born in the lesh after my birth, Him I saw before my eyes in a prophetic vision while I was still in my mother’s barren innards, Him I saw conceived in my sight and made a human being in the Virgin’s womb.”

“He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.” This must be read and understood with the following emphasis: “He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.” The forerunner of the Light was not the Light. Why is he then called “a burning and a shining light” and “the morning star?” He was a burning light, but he did not burn with his own light. He was the morning star, but he did not receive his light from himself. The grace of Him, before whom he came, burned and shone through him. He was not the Light, but a participant in the Light. What gleamed in and through him was not his. As we have said before: no creature, either rational or intellectual, is in itself substantially light, but participates in the one true substantial Light that shines intelligibly everywhere and in all things.

This is why the Evangelist then adds, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” “The true Light” is what he calls the Son of God, who subsists by Himself and who, before all aeons, was born of God the Father, who also subsists by Himself. “The true Light” is what he calls that same Son who, for the sake of humanity, became a human being among human beings. He is the true Light who said of Himself, “I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

17. “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

What does “cometh into the world” mean? What are we to understand by “every man that cometh into the world”?

Whence do human beings come into this world? Into what world do they come?

And if those are meant who come into this world from the hidden folds of nature through generation in times and places, then what sort of illumination is possible for them in this life where we are born but to die, grow but to decay, coagulate but to be dissolved again, falling from the restfulness of silent nature into the restlessness of bustling misery? Tell me, please, what kind of spiritual and true light there is for those procreated in a transitory and false life? Is not precisely this world a it dwelling for those alienated from the true Light? Is it not justly called the religion of the shadow of death, the valley of tears, the abyss of ignorance, the earthly habitation that weighs down the human soul and expels the true beholding of the Light from the inner eyes?

The phrase “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” cannot therefore refer to those who proceed from hidden seminal causes into corporeal species. Rather it must refer to those who, by the spiritual regeneration through grace that is given in baptism, enter the invisible world. Rejecting the birth according to the corruptible body, these chose the second birth, which is spiritual. They tread underfoot the world that is below and ascend to the world that is above. Leaving behind the shadows of ignorance and death, they yearn for the light of wisdom and life. Ceasing to be children of human beings and beginning to be children of God, they leave behind

READING & THINKING TOGETHER 27 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR them the world of vices, destroying these in themselves, holding before their mental eyes the world of virtues, longing with all their strength to ascend there. Thus the true Light illumines those who enter this world of virtue, not those who lee into the world of vices.

18. “He was in the world.” Here the Evangelist calls “the world” not only sensible creation in general but also, and more speciically, the rational nature that is in human beings. In all human beings, indeed to put it simply, in the created universe as a whole, the Word is the true Light that subsists now and always has, because it never ceases to subsist in all things.

For, just as in the case of one who speaks, when he stops speaking, his voice ceases and disappears, so also with the heavenly Father, should He stop speaking His Word, the effect of His Word – the created universe – would cease to subsist. For the continuous maintenance by substitution – the very continuance – of the created universe is the speech of God the Father, the eternal and unchangeable generation of His Word.

Therefore, not irrationally, one may proclaim the following sentence of the sensible world alone: “He was in the world and the world was made by Him.”

In other words: Lest anyone, partaking of the Manichean heresy, think that the world, falling into bodily perception, was created by the devil and not by the Creator of all visible and invisible things, the theologian adds: “He was in the world” – that is, He subsists in this world that contains all things – “and the world was made by Him.” For the Creator did not dwell in a universe made by another but in that which He Himself had made.

19. Notice that the blessed Evangelist names “the world” four times.” Nevertheless, we must understand that there are three worlds.

The irst of these worlds in order is illed uniquely with the invisible and spiritual substances of the angelic hierarchies. Whoever enters it possesses full participation in the true Light.

The second is directly counter to the irst, for it is constituted wholly of visible and bodily natures. And yet, however low a position in the universe this world might possess, the Word was nevertheless in it, and it was made by the Word. Thus it is the irst stage for those wishing to ascend to the cognition of the truth by sensible means, for the species of visible things draws the thinking soul toward the cognition of things invisible.

The third world is that which, like a mediating principle, unites in itself the upper, spiritual world and the lower, bodily world, making of these two one. By this world, humanity alone is meant, in whom all creatures are joined as one. For the human being consists of a body and a soul. Binding together the body of this world and the soul of the other world, the human being – humanity – creates a single cosmos. For the body possesses all bodily nature and the soul all spiritual nature, and these itting together into a single harmony make up the cosmic world of the human being. That is why “man” is called “all” – for all creatures are in humanity as if melted down in a crucible. Therefore the Lord Himself teaches His disciples, as they are about to go forth and preach: “Preach the Gospel to every creature.”

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This world, therefore, which is humanity, did not know its Creator. Neither by the symbols of the written law nor by the paradigms of visible creation did human beings, held down by the bonds of leshly thinking, wish to know their God. “And the world knew Him not.”

Human beings knew God the Word neither through the nakedness of His true divinity, before He assumed human nature, nor through the garment of the incarnation, after He assumed human nature. They did not know the invisible; they denied the visible. They did not wish to seek Him who sought them. They did not wish to hear Him who called them. They did not wish to care for Him who deiied them. They did not wish to receive Him who received them.

20. “He came unto His own” – unto those things, that is to say, that were made by Him and so are not unworthily His own – “and His own received Him not.”

“His own” is humanity, whom He wished to redeem and whom He redeemed.

“But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.”

Here a division is made, not in the humanity of the rational world, but in its will. Those who receive the incarnate Word are separated from those who reject it. The faithful believe that the Word has come and freely receive their Lord. The ungodly deny and stubbornly refuse Him – the Jews through envy, the Pagan through ignorance. To those who received Him, He gave the power to become sons of God. To those who did not receive Him, He gave the opportunity to receive Him one day.

For the possibility of believing in the Son of God and of becoming a son of God is denied to no one – for this is made of the human will, together with the cooperation of divine grace.

To whom, then, is given the power to become sons of God? To those who receive Him and believe in His name. Many receive the Christ. the Arians, for instance, receive Him, but they do not believe in His name. They do not believe that He is the only begotten Son of God, consubstantial with the Father. They deny His homoousion – His co-essentiality with the Father – and afirm his heteroousion – His being of another essence than the Father. By this token it proits them not to receive the Christ, for they strive to deny His name. Those who truly receive the Christ – true God and true human being – and believe this most irmly: to these is given the possibility of becoming sons of God.

21. “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the lesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

In the ancient Greek manuscripts it says simply, “Which were born, not of blood, but of God.”

“Not of blood,” says the Evangelist, not by bodily procreation are those born who by merit of their faith gained adoption as the sons of God. They are born of God the Father, through the Holy Spirit, as co-inheritors with Christ: in co-iliation with the only begotten Son of God.

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“Nor of the will of the lesh, nor of the will of man.” Here the Evangelist introduces two sexes from which the many born carnally are born in the lesh. For by the word “lesh” the Evangelist means the female condition, and by the word “man” the male condition.

And in case you are tempted to say that it is impossible that mortals should become immortals, that corruptible beings should become free of corruption, that simple human beings should become sons of God, and that temporal creatures should possess eternity – whichever of these doubts poses the greatest temptation for you – accept the argument that faith prepares for what you doubt: “And the Word was made lesh.”

If what is greatest has undoubtedly already gone before, why should it seem incredible that what is less should be able to come after? If the Son of God is made a human being, which none of those who receive Him doubt, why is it astonishing that a human being who believes in the Son of God should become a son of God? For this very purpose, indeed, the Word descended into the lesh: that in Him the lesh – the human being – believing through the lesh in the Word, might ascend; that, through Him who was the only begotten Son by nature, many might become sons by adoption.

It was not on His account that the Word was made lesh, but on our account, for it is only through the lesh of the Word that we can be transmuted into sons of God. Alone He came down; but with many He goes up. He, who from God made Himself a human being, makes gods from human beings.

“And dwelt among us”: that is, possess our nature, so as to make us participants in His nature.

22. “And we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father.”

Where did you see, O blessed theologian, the glory of the incarnate Word, the glory of the Son of God made a human being? With what eyes did you perceive it?

With bodily eyes, I believe, at the time of the Transiguration on the mountain. For you were there then, the third witness to the divine gloriication. And you were present also, I think, in Jerusalem when you heard the voice of the Father glorifying His son by these words: “I have gloriied Him and I shall glorify Him again.” You heard the crowds of children crying, “Hosanna to the son of David.”

And what may I say of the glory of the Resurrection? You saw Him rising from the dead when, locked in as you were with the other disciples, He entered in to you through closed doors. You saw His glory as He ascended to the Father when He was taken up by angels into heaven. But above all these you saw His glory when, by the highest vision of the mind, you contemplated Him – I mean the Word – in His beginning, with His Father. There you saw the glory that He has “as the only begotten of the Father.”

23. “Full of grace and truth.” The meaning of this phrase is twofold. For it may be understood of the humanity and divinity of the incarnate Word – in which case the fullness of grace refers to His humanity and the fullness of truth to His divinity. For the incarnate Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, received the fullness of grace according to His humanity, since He is the head of the Church and the

ST JOHN OF DAMASCUS AWARD visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 30

irstborn of universal creation – that is, of the totality of universal humanity, which is in Him and through Him healed and restored.

I say “in Him” because He is the greatest and principal example of the grace by which, without any preceding merits, a human being becomes God. In Him this is manifested primordially.

“Through Him,” I say, because of His fullness we have all received the grace of deiication in exchange for the grace of faith, by which we believe in Him, and the grace of action, by which we keep His commandments.

The fullness of the grace of Christ, however, may also be understood to refer to the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit, since it distributes and operates the gifts of grace, is often called grace. This Spirit, by its seven-fold operation, illed the humanity of Christ and rested in Him. As the prophet says, “And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.”

If, therefore, you wish to understand Christ Himself by the phrase “full of grace,” know that it refers to the fullness of His deiication and of His sanctiication as a human being.

Of His deiication, I say that humanity and God were joined in the unity of a single substance. Of His sanctiication, that not only was He conceived by the Holy Spirit but that in truth He was illed with the fullness of its gifts and that, as if at the summit of the mystical candle of the Church, the lamps of grace shine in and from Him.

If, however, you wish to understand the fullness of the grace and truth of the incarnate Word as referring to the New Testament, as the Evangelist Himself seems to have thought a little later when he says, “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Christ,” then it would not be inappropriate to say that the fullness of the grace of the New Testament was given through Christ and that the truth of the symbols of the law were fulilled in Him. For as the Apostle says, “In Him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

Here the Apostle calls the fullness of the Godhead the revelation hidden in the shadows. Christ, coming and dwelling in the lesh, reveals this Godhead bodily, teaching and manifesting that He in Himself is the revelation. For He Himself is the fountain and fullness of grace, the truth of the symbols of the law, the end of prophetic vision. To Him be glory, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, for now and evermore. Amen.

*Text from Christopher Bamford, The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity – John Scotus Eriugena’s Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2000), pp. 69-114. Book also includes introduction and 52 Relections. Available from Eighth Day Books.

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REMARKS ON EASTERN PATRISTIC THOUGHT IN JOHN SCOTUS ERIUGENA d by John Meyendorff

THE BIFURCATION between the Eastern and the Western theological approaches to the Christian faith did not occur instantly or through anyone’s specific bad will. It was a long and slow process of estrangement. Even the schism itself between the churches cannot be dated with precision. It did not occur as other schisms within eastern Christianity (e.g., the christological conflict between supporters and critics of the Council of Chalcedon), or within western Christianity (as the Reformation of the sixteenth century). In those schisms, theologians of similar training and similar background disagreed on specific formulas or specific doctrines. East and West, on the contrary, developed different visions, different perceptions, long before they clashed on specific points, such as the Filioque dispute, or the issue of Rome’s authority. When these – and a few other – specific conflict occurred, it is the lack of a deeper, common vision which made solutions impossible.

In order to have prevented the different visions and perceptions from becoming one-sided and therefore divisive, as they eventually did, constant watchfulness, concern for communication, and dialogue between East and West would have been needed. Such concerns did actually exist, but only in the cases of some few major patristic figures. In the West, Hilary and Ambrose knew Greek and cherished connections with eastern theologians, although by inclination and method, they anticipated the later Latin approach to the Trinity. St. Augustine knew less Greek. Using his own creative genius, he conceived a philosophical interpretation of Christianity. His thought shaped western Christendom in its distinctiveness, but nothing was further from his mind than the conscious creation of a separate tradition, distinct from the eastern one. Dominating all his Latin contemporaries intellectually, he was convinced that he was defending and expressing the catholic faith common to East and West. And he really did so, in so many ways. But he was not capable of discerning the importance of the lonely voice of Cassian and the monks of Lérins, who – in the name of the East – were raising doubts about some of his positions in the anti-Pelagian polemics.

In the East, St. Basil had made unsuccessful but dedicated efforts to gain Pope Damasus and the western bishops to his understanding of the Trinitarian faith which made possible the triumph of Nicaea in the East. A few decades later the Council of Chalcedon recognized the commonsense wisdom of the Tome of St. Leo for the solution of the Christological dilemma, in spite of terminological difficulties. And the great Maximus the Confessor established his solid partnership with Pope Martin in the seventh century, while fighting Monothelitism. However, at the time of Maximus, the intellectual, spiritual, and linguistic gap is already in evidence. Maximus lived in Africa perhaps for two entire decades, but in his voluminous writings, there is not a single reference to Augustine, and there is no evidence that he knew any Latin. Similarly, St. Gregory the Great, a papal representative in Constantinople for seven years (579-586), knew no Greek.

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The gradual estrangement did not, therefore, exclude much good will on both sides, but the good will of a few individuals was insufficient to fill the cultural and intellectual gap which history was creating between the sophisticated and conservative tradition of Orthodox Byzantium and the fresh dynamism of “barbarian” Europe in the Carolingian age. The political antagonism of Charlemagne himself against Byzantium added a new dimension to mutual ignorance on the intellectual level: the anti-Greek polemics of the Caroline Books (Libri Carolini) initiated the fateful controversy on the Filioque addition. This controversy flared up again during the struggle between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius, in the fifties of the ninth century, precisely at the time when John the Scot was active at the court of Charles the Bald, translating the works of Pseudo-Dionysius.

But even this time of crisis did not lack people of good will. The attitude towards the West adopted by Patriarch Photius, the greatest of Byzantine scholars, is a case in point. In his major work refuting the Latin doctrine of the “double procession” of the Spirit, he shows awareness of the fact that his Latin adversaries invoke texts by Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine in favor of the Filioque. His reaction is characteristic: one should not deny the authority of Latin fathers, but hide their individual mistakes by “covering their nudity,” as the good sons of Noah did. At the same time, he shows ignorance of the Latin tradition as a whole, except for some fragmented information which reached him by hearsay. In his famous Bibliotheca, he discusses the question of the sin of nature, which he considers as a heresy introduced by a mysterious author whom he calls Aram, and who is obviously none other than St. Jerome, although the learned patriarch fails to identify “Aram” with the saint venerated universally, and whose authority he himself invokes elsewhere. And he obviously has no knowledge at all of the real role of Augustine in shaping western views on nature, sin, and grace.

Against this background of mutual ignorance, the appearance of a person like Eriugena is truly extraordinary. His enthusiasm for Greek thought and philosophical vocabulary, and his belief in their superiority over the Latin understanding and language, could have been partly a matter of self- promotion, since he was the only available translator of Greek texts in France. Indeed, in his preamble to the translation of the Areopagitica, he praises Charles the Bald for “waking up” sleeping Latin scholars by calling them to the “purest and most numerous Greek sources” (ad purissimos copiosissimosque Graium latices), of which he – John the Scot – was the interpreter.

John was aware of the Filioque controversy, which was embarrassing for him. His contemporaries, Ratramnus of Corbie and Aeneas of Paris, were composing polemical treatises against his beloved Greeks on that particular topic. Not willing to take sides too formally, he clearly recognizes that the Greek position is based on the original version of the creed, and that the addition provoked unnecessary controversy: “Perhaps the reason why it is declared by the Nicene synod,” he writes, “that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone is to prevent public discussion of such a subject.” In the ninth century, the interpolated creed was in use throughout Carolingian Europe – but not in Rome – so John accepts the Latin text but regrets that one cannot consult the (anonymous) Latin fathers who introduced the interpolation to ask them why they did it. He recognizes that there are scriptural proof texts favoring the double procession of the Holy Spirit, and he is aware of the recognition, by the Greek side, of the formula per Filium (procession of the Spirit from the Father through the Son). But when he comes to a detailed discussion of the theological issue itself, he sides with the Greek position. Asked by the Alumnus “whether it is from the essence (οὐσία) or from the substance (ὑπόστασις) of the Father that the son is born and the Holy Spirit proceeds,” he refers specifically to the real difference accepted by the Greek fathers

EIGHTH DAY SEMINARS visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 34 between the common οὐσία and the particular ὑποστάσεις, and unambiguously affirms that the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are to be attributed to the substantia (ὑπόστασις) of the Father alone. This actually the most fundamental point maintained by Photius, and by all Eastern theologians ever since.

This position of Eriugena illustrates how deliberate was his dedication to the cause of finding the authentic Christian truth in Greek sources. Of course, at no point is he ready to discard his own western tradition, and particularly St. Augustine. Thus, he introduces the Augustinian psychological image in his discussion of the procession of the Spirit, but his attempt stands rather peripherally in his overall conception of the trinitarian problem, which basically relies upon his reading of the two Gregories and Maximus the Confessor.

Thus, Eriugena was able to take the side of the East on this particular issue of the procession of the Spirit which, he knew, was already in his time a controversial issue between East and West. What is it, then, which led him to that position? What did he discover in the Greek fathers which allowed him to take some distance from the teachings of St. Augustine – not only, as we know, in the area of trinitarian theology, but even more definitely on other central philosophical and theological issues – although St. Augustine was form him, as for the entire Latin Christian world, the theological teacher par excellence?

Quite symptomatically, in his early treatise, On Predestination, composed by request of Hincmar of Rheims to refute the doctrine of double predestination proclaimed by Gottschalk, Eriugena already affirms the theocentric monism which will be at the heart of his system in the Periphyseon. He argues that in God there is no difference between predestination and foreknowledge. God, therefore, cannot be the cause of any evil or punishment. The evildoers are themselves their own punishment, because they separate themselves from God on their own volition. No Eastern fathers are referred to in this context, only Augustine, with the characteristic explanation that the passages where Augustine does allude to double predestination and does affirm divine retribution to sinners are pedagogical teachings for the unlearned, not the intimate circle, endowed with true spiritual knowledge of the mysteries.

Therefore, Eriugena, as he begins his translation of the Areopagitica, St. Maximus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, has already taken a positive stand towards Neoplatonic monism. And it is this monism that he discovers in Greek patristics, or at least in the authors who were accessible to him. He then develops it into a philosophical system, as found in the Periphyseon. He must have realized that Neoplatonism had helped Augustine to overcome (at least partially) the Manichaeism of his youth, but in the Greek authors he discovered an interpretation of the Christian faith in which the Neoplatonic scheme of procession and return was even more widely used, with varied degrees of consistency, to express and interpret the biblical conceptions of creation, salvation, and restoration.

Thus, in St. Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena found what today we call “theocentric anthropology.” The doctrine of the image of God is understood by Gregory as the necessary presence of a “divine spark” in humanity, which makes it impossible to understand human nature without reference to God. It is this divine presence which makes human beings truly human, so that a fall from God is a form of suicide. God is the fullness of goodness (πλῆρωµα τῶν ἀγαθῶν τὸ θεῖον) and the only source of goodness for humanity. Furthermore, the divine image, although it is eminently present in

READING THE BIBLE, FATHERS, LITURGY, & LITERATURE TOGETHER 35 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR the human νοῦς, which is called to control and to “reign over” the rest of the human being (and the created world in general), is not truly realizable in a human individual, but in all of humanity together (ἅπαν τὸ ανθρώπινον), restored in God. Indeed, the “fullness of goodness” can only belong to the fullness of humanity (τὸ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος πλήρωμα). The doctrine of the image of God thus serves as the ontological basis for the doctrine of the universal restoration, or apokatastasis. In his entire approach, Gregory uses the doctrine of the image of God in humanity to explain human nature itself, and not, as Augustine did, to learn about the absolute God from God’s finite reflection in humanity.

What Eriugena finds in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor is a vision of the original humanity in paradise as a purely spiritual nature in communion with God. Humanity is called to return to that state through the process of deification, because relations between God and the world, and between all existing things, are not conceived as external contacts between self-subsisting entities but as mutual participation. For Eriugena, “Everything that is, is either participant, or participated, or participation, or [both] participated and participant at once.” There is no opposition between “nature” and “grace,” because “every perfect creature consists of nature and grace.” It is also in the writings of Gregory and Maximus – not to mention the Areopagitica – that Eriugena found constant references to theosis, or “deification,” expressing the goal of Christian life. “This use of this word, Deification, is very rare in the Latin books,” he bemoans; “…I am not sure of the reason for this reticence: perhaps it is because the meaning of this word theosis (the term which the Greeks usually employ in the sense of the psychic and bodily transformation of the saints into God so as to become One in Him and with Him, when there will remain in them nothing of their animal, earthly and moral nature) seemed too profound for those who cannot rise above carnal speculations, and would therefore be to them incomprehensible and incredible.”

What Eriugena also found in Gregory of Nyssa is a specific, neoplatonizing interpretation of theosis, with a strong sense of incompatibility between participation in divine life and all forms of materiality and animality. This applies particularly to the conception of humanity before the fall and the ultimate return to that glorious state of “angelic” life in God. The problem here resides not in the very fact of a spiritual, transfigured existence which was prepared by God for Adam and Eve in paradise and is the future hope of Christians in heaven, but in the nature of this transfiguration. What is involved is not only the nature of matter and materiality, including human bodies, which are seen as a “concourse of accidents,” and as having no substance except on the intelligible plane, but whether visible, historical existence, human achievement and creativity in this world has any permanent value, or whether the entire “process” out of God has no other goal and meaning than its ultimate return to exactly the same point in God from where it originally proceeded. The issue of human gender is the most obvious case in point, and the best illustration of the problem. Eriugena adopts from Gregory of Nyssa the notion that the gender distinction was originally created by God only in view of the forthcoming fall. For Gregory, man and woman possessed, in paradise, another “angelic” method of reproduction, foreign to animality. Eriugena goes further. For him, the Genesis account of creation and the fall does not involve time at all, so there is no need to speculate on the matter: “When we say ‘before and after sin,’ we are demonstrating the multiplicity of our thought processes which is due to the fact that we are still subject to temporal conditions; but to God the foreknowledge of sin and the consequence of sin itself are contemporaneous.” The problem therefore is not only with sexual animality, but with the value of human qualities and achievements in time and history. According to the traditional teaching of eastern Christianity, those

EIGHTH DAY PILGRIMAGES visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 36 who despise marriage are condemned by the Church. The use of Ephesians 5 to justify the existence of a sacrament of marriage implies that the gender distinction has a content and a dimension transcending animality, that it belongs to human nature – not only to its fallen state – and that it will be maintained in the eschatological kingdom. But, beyond the specific issue of gender, the Neoplatonic understanding of deification deprives human activity, human creativity, and therefore the exercise of human freedom in this world of ontological meaning. Paradoxically, Neoplatonic monism, which denies an ontology of evil, and Manichaean dualism, which affirms it, practically coincide in their negative approach to the realities of history in the fallen world.

Finally, Eriugena also invokes the Greek fathers, particularly the book On the Divine Names of Dionysius, to justify his understanding of the doctrine of divine ideas and creation. He uses the Dionysian terminology to describe his overall conception of the relationship between the transcendent uncreated Mind of God and created realities. It is on this point that his basic monistic philosophy appears most clearly. God creates “from noting,” but, according to the apophatic theology of Dionysius, God Himself “is nothing,” because He is “superessential” (ὑπερούσιος). It is therefore possible, and even necessary, to say that God creates out of Himself. Indeed, God is an absolute Intellect, who cannot be perceived through any category of cognition, but whose eternal ideas constitute the very reality of all being. Relative to God, these ideas are “created and creating nature.” Relative to visible, perceptible realities, divine ideas are eternal, and, in that sense, uncreated. There is, therefore, a basic contradiction in Eriugena’s view of creation, and he himself recognizes his inability to solve the dilemma created by his initial premise, that there is being only through participation in the Being:

If all things that are, are eternal in the creative Wisdom, how are they made out of nothing? For how can that be eternal which before it was made was not, or how can that which begins to be in time [and with time] be in eternity? For nothing that participates in eternity either begins to be or desists from being, whereas that which was not and begins to be will of necessity desist from being what it is. For nothing that is not without a beginning can be without an end. Therefore I cannot discover how these opinions do not contradict each other.

In any case, and in spite of his honest acknowledgment of the difficulty, Eriugena’s own conviction is not only that creation is, indeed, an eternal act, inherent to the divine being, but that there is ontological continuity between God and creatures: “We should not understand God and the creature as two things removed from one another, but as one and the same thing. For the creature subsists in God, and God is created in the creature in a wonderful and ineffable way, making Himself manifest, invisible making Himself more visible.” In fact, for Eriugena, the creative act consists in making eternal, divine ideas perceptible and visible. In God’s simple being, there is no difference between volition and vision. So creatures are not other than theophanies, and “it is from Himself that God takes the occasion of His theophanies … since all things are from Him and through Him and in Him and for Him.”

These are just a few examples of how Eriugena uses the eastern patristic tradition, and how references to the Areopagitica, to Gregory of Nyssa, and to Maximus fit into his own original philosophical system. A discussion of how he made his selections and how he used the particular views of some eastern fathers should lead to an interesting discussion, not only about Eriugena, but also about the eastern Christian tradition itself. For Eriugena did not use Greek patristic authors simply to find proof texts: he did understand and adopt for himself the internal logic of Christian

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Neoplatonism, without, however, giving full credit to the overall context of doctrinal development in the East, where the Neoplatonic vision of reality was always in the process of being qualified, critically modified, and channeled through the mainstream of a Christian tradition, defined in terms of Trinitarian and christological criteria.

In the Greek fathers, Eriugena discovered what indeed constitutes a justified common ground between Christianity and Neoplatonism – that which is broadly referred to today as “theocentric anthropology.” The human being simply does not exist as “pure nature” – independent and autonomous from divine presence – and that communion with God is not a mystical donum superadditum, but a constitutive element of true humanity, as it was originally created and as it is destined to be restored in the eschatological kingdom. This is a conception quite common in the East since Irenaeus and provides the general context for the interpretation of Genesis 1:26, on the creation of man and woman in the “image and likeness” of God. In Greek patristics, however, there was not only Neoplatonism. Side by side, and often in close conjunction with the neoplatonizing authors, who tended to identify the “image” with the intellect (νοῦς), monastic literature developed a conception of the “heart,” as the “meadow of the Spirit.” Maintaining more closely than the Neoplatonists a vision of the human being as a psychosomatic whole, this conception remained more biblical, and also more trintarian in its spirituality, because of its pneumatological dimension. If Eriugena had had broader access to the theology of the Cappadocian fathers, he would have experienced more difficulty in using them as he did, within an exclusively Neoplatonic – and therefore somewhat biased – context. As a case in point, one can refer to the parallelism established by Werner Jaeger between Gregory of Nyssa and the writings attributed to Macarius the Great – a parallelism which is not so apparent in Gregory’s treatise On the Creation of Man, translated by Eriugena, but which is quite significant for the more general understanding of anthropology not only in Gregory but certainly also in Basil. In any case, the common Neoplatonic background of both Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus – which made those authors so particularly appealing to Eriugena – was, in fact, already very much qualified by these authors themselves, and is certainly not coextensive with the eastern spiritual tradition as a whole.

Even more significant are the basic Trinitarian and christological options taken in the East, which were known and accepted by the very eastern authors used by Eriugena, particularly in their view of creation.

A first and most important point is the distinction beween nature (φύσις) and will (θέλημα) in the anti-Arian argument of St. Athanasius in favor of the Nicene homoousios. By nature, God generates the Son and makes the Spirit to proceed; by will, God creates the world, and this creative action is conceived as optional, precisely because it does not involve God’s nature and excludes ontological continuity between God and creation. This distinction between nature and will was a major argument against the idea that the Logos was a creature. Creation’s preexistence in the mind of the Logos did not imply real existence, but was seen as a pure potentiality. Therefore, as distinct from the Son, who comes from the essence, or nature, of the Father, “the nature of creatures which came into being from nothing is fluid, impotent, mortal, and composite” (Athanasius, Contra Gentes 41). God, therefore, is what He is, and is not determined by what He does. The familiarity of both Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus with this basic postulate of Athanasian anti-Arianism made it quite impossible for them to approach the problem of creation as Eriugena did, and indeed they both are very clear

THE ACADEMY visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 38 in affirming the creating act as a creation from nothing and in time. For God, creation was not a matter of natural necessity, but an act, in a sense arbitrary, of a loving, personal God.

The second and very significant factor which had a decisive significance, if not for Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius, at least for Maximus, is the refinement of christological thought and christological terminology on the basis of the Chalcedonian definition and the controversies which followed it. The union of two natures in one hypostasis – the preexisting hypostasis of the Logos – implied that Jesus, being God hypostatically and fully divine in His divine nature, possessed also the fullness of a willing and dynamic humanity, without being a human hypostasis, or person. This doctrine implied that the hypostasis was neither the expression of a nature nor was it part of nature, because if hypostasis is a part of nature, Christ was not fully man. In the case of the humanity of Jesus, the hypostasis could not, for example, be identified with His human intellect, because the intellect is part of human created nature. The ultimate “self,” the “actor” of His human nature, being thus the divine Logos, He nevertheless lived a fully human life and possessed “energy” and a human “will.”

Eriugena seems to have understood the specific importance of the very distinct concept of hypostasis in trinitarian theology, as promoted by the Cappadocians. This he shows in his discussion of the procession of the Spirit, which I mentioned earlier. But his monistic approach to reality prevents him from giving full credit to the proper dynamism – we can say creativity – of created nature: the “movement” (κίνησις) – in the person of Christ and, by implication, in created nature in general. Since created nature, including the humanity of Jesus, is in fact, for Eriugena, an expression of the divine being, his Christology had necessarily a monophysitic outlook. Created history had no value in itself, except within the framework of the “procession-and-return” scheme.

It is true, however, that when he discusses the process of return, developing his discussion very much in accordance with Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius, through various steps of purification and illumination, he uses a terminology which is not Augustinian, but assumes the eastern concept of “synergy” between nature and grace: “Resurrection,” he writes, “is effected by the cooperation of both agents, nature and grace.” Indeed, “the human nature possess naturally the power of resurrection.” But since “created nature” is but the manifestation of divine ideas, the significance of “synergy” in Eriugena may not be the same as in patristic authors, for whom created being is clearly distinct from God, exists only by His will, but possesses also – as Maximus shows so well – its own distinctive “movement” and “energy,” which are called to act in communion with God but without ever being identified with divine energy.

A third element, certainly implied in the first two, which draws a distinctive line between Eriugena and the Greek fathers whom he admired so much, is their respective attitudes towards what can be broadly called “Origenism.” In fact, it is mostly through Origen that the Cappadocian fathers appropriated their Christian Platonism. However, they were already aware of the one major issue where Origen’s system could hardly be incorporated in the Christian tradition, especially the Nicene faith defended by Athanasius. This issue, as I said earlier, is the issue of creation. Indeed, for Origen – as also, in fact, for Eriugena – creation is God’s natural act, an expression of His eternally subsisting ideas. Implicitly disavowed on this point, by the Cappadocians, Origen was eventually condemned by the Fifth Council (553), and this condemnation, which followed specific controversies in the sixth century, was well known and fully taken into account by Maximus. In any case, no one in the East would refer to the “blessed” or “great” Origen, as Eriugena does. Of

A VISION FOR CLASSICAL, CATECHETICAL & ECUMENICAL EDUCATION 39 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR course, John the Scot was not a conscious Origenist. He knew Origen only in the corrected Latin translation of Rufinus. But he liked the echoes of the Origenistic approach, which he could discern in Gregory and Maximus, without taking into account the radical modifications of Origenistic views which were introduced by the same authors in their version of Christian Neoplatonism. The echoes of “unredeemed” Origenism include the doctrine of “double creation” and the apokatastasis in Gregory of Nyssa, but both Gregory and Maximus conceive the relationship between Creator and creatures in a way clearly different from that of Origen and Eriugena.

For Eriugena, the divine ideas – “nature created and creating” – are coeternal with God and also constitute the real substance of all that is. Although he recognizes that there exists here an insoluble antinomy, he affirms: “Let us believe and, so far as it is given us, contemplate with the keenness of our mind how all things visible and invisible, eternal and temporal, and the eternal itself and time itself, and places and extension, and all things which are spoken of as substance and accident, and, to speak generally, whatever the totality of the whole creature contains, are at the same time eternal and made in the only begotten Word of God, and that in them neither does their eternity precede their making nor their making precede their eternity.” There is, therefore, nothing really external to God, because God not only will be “all in all” at the end of time, but always was and is “all in all,” as foundation and essence of all things.

For the Greek authors, the created world is, indeed, ontologically external to God. It is rooted in His will, which is different from His nature. Therefore they recognize a distinction within God Himself between His totally transcendent and unknowable essence and His presence ad extra, that is His uncreated energy and will. The personal, Trinitarian, uncreated, divine being is therefore both totally transcendent and truly immanent. The preexisting ideas of creation were indeed in Him, before time, but they did not belong to His essence. The deification of humanity and the ultimate eschatological transfiguration of the entire creation imply that God will be “all in all,” but not by essence (κατ᾽οὐσίαν), which would imply pantheism, but always through His will and uncreated energy, because ontologically and eternally only the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are “God by essence” (κατ᾽οὐσίαν), whereas deification of creation, while fully real, occurs “by energy” (κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν), or “by grace” (κατ᾽ χάριν), although it is a participation in the uncreated being of God. The paradox and the antinomy are, therefore, located within God Himself and are not reducible to philosophical notions like the Neoplatonic Monad, or “divine simplicity.”

This doctrine of “energies” appears in different contexts. In the Cappadocian fathers, it serves to formulate the Orthodox position against Eunomius: “While we affirm,” writes Basil, “that we know our God in His energies, we scarcely promise that He may be approached in His very essence. For although His energies descend to us, His essence remains inaccessible” (Basil, Letter 234 to Amphilochios). And Gregory of Nyssa expresses very clearly the same antinomy of the divine being: “Wherefore it is true both that the pure heart sees God and that no one has ever seen God. In fact he who is invisible by nature becomes visible by His energies, appearing to us in some surroundings of His nature” (ἔν τισι τοῖς περὶ αὐτὸν καθορώμενοις; Gregory of Nyssa, De beatitudinibus, Oratio VI). In St. Maximus, the doctrine of the energies becomes a necessary aspect of Christology. Each of Christ’s two natures expresses itself in an “energy” and a “will.” The two energies and wills remain distinct, although the human will follows the divine, and the energies are “penetrating” each other (περιχώρησις), so that on the mount of transfiguration, or after the resurrection, the humanity of Jesus appears “deified,” i.e., it is penetrated with divine life, anticipating the

EIGHTH DAY SYMPOSIUM visit us at www.eighthdayinstitute.org CELTIC CHRISTIANITY 40 eschatological glory of all those who are “in Christ.” Both the unity of Christ’s being and the distinction of natures and energies are possible because of the hypostatic union, i.e., the unity of the person of the incarnated Logos, who acts in both fully divine and fully human ways within the mystery of redemption. Finally, in the fourteenth century, Byzantium became the theater of a fierce debate on the reality of mystical experience, which involved different interpretations of the apophatic theology of Dionysius and of his use of symbolism. Monastic, or “hesychast” theologians, led by Gregory Palamas, affirmed the possibility of communion with God and deification, because divine transcendence, expressed through apophatic theology, applied to the divine essence (οὐσία) only, whereas the “descending” energies – uncreated and truly divine – make possible real communion with God. There is no doubt that Eriugena’s philosophical and religious vision would tend in the direction of Palamism in that he stood for the full reality of deification. But the absence, in his system, of the distinction between essence and energy inevitably leads him to Neoplatonic monism.

Among the other bridge builders between the eastern and the western Christian traditions, Eriugena occupies a unique position. He is different from earlier predecessors, like Jerome and Cassian, who had been in the East personally and had transmitted the ascetic traditions of eastern monks to their own Latin compatriots. In the age of Eriugena, times were different and direct communications more difficult. While we cannot be sure he had any direct contacts with living Easterners, he nevertheless became personally enthusiastic with what he found in the writings of the Greek fathers. His enthusiasm, however, was only an aspect of his broader philosophical commitment to the Neoplatonic worldview.

The question which might be tentatively asked is: What is the major source of his knowledge of Christian Neoplatonism? The standard answer has often been: his acquaintance with the writings of Dionysius, which he translated into Latin. One wonders, however, whether this answer is fully accurate. Eriugena’s admiration for Dionysius as “the highest theologian” and “most famous bishop of Athens” (summus theologus, praeclarissimus Athenarum episcopus) is, of course, obvious. Constant also in Eriugena is the use of the very specific Dionysian vocabulary and terminology. But the key concepts of Eriugena’s system, such as his notion of an eternal creation of ideas and of creatures being thus eternal manifestations of the divine being, do not come from Dionysius but are akin to basic Origenism. It is also the more Origenistic aspects of the anthropology and cosmology of Gregory of Nyssa which are picked up by Eriugena, as I have noted earlier. It is difficult to say – because references to Origen in Eriugena are rare, though always respectful – whether there is direct inspiration, or borrowing, or whether the obvious parallelisms are to be understood in the context of a common Platonic inspiration. In using and discussing apophatic theology, Eriugena is, of course, quite dependent upon Dionysian terminology, but in substance, the apophatic approach is fully expressed in the Cappadocian fathers and Maximus as well, so Eriugena did not need Dionysius to learn about apophatic theology. But for the Cappadocian fathers and for the many interpreters of Dionysius, starting with Maximus the Confessor, the apophatic, negative expressions in designating God mean to indicate the gap between Him, as Creator or Cause of beings, from the creatures whose very existence is caused by Him. This radical character of apophaticism in Dionysius is what makes His God different from the “One” of Plotinus, and allows us to classify him among those Greek fathers who hold to the idea of God as the true Creator from nothing, while using Greek apophatic terminology to express the Hebrew biblical idea of creation from nothing. Since on this point Eriugena holds to an ontological continuity between Creator and creatures – following Clement and Origen – one wonders whether his apophaticism does not, rather, tend in

A MERE CHRISTIAN GATHERING 41 EIGHTH DAY SEMINAR the direction which it will acquire in Thomism, as a way of simply expressing the “more sublime” character of the divine names, or qualities, when they are compared with the lower and imperfect manifestations of the same names and qualities among creatures.

Considering the work of that extraordinary man, one can only regret that he was so lonely in his interest and commitment to the Greek Christian tradition. If knowledge of that tradition had been more widespread, Eriugena could have more easily given a more “catholic,” or more “orthodox” shape to his system, without abandoning what is so precious in it: his “theocentic anthropology” and his understanding of spiritual life as a free ascent to theosis. He is obviously sincere when he writes, “It is most clear that our sole quest should be joy in the Truth, which is Christ; and our soul dread the deprivation of it, for that is the one and only cause of all eternal suffering. Take Christ from me, and no good is left for me, nor is there any torment left to terrify me. For I hold that the deprivation of Christ and His absence are the sole torment for every rational creature and that there is no other.”

In concluding, allow me to quote Etienne Gilson: “one can imagine the astonishment of contemporaries in the face of this immense metaphysical epic …, supported, at each step, by Dionysius, Maximus, the two Gregories, Origen, Augustine, or some other among the twenty authorities which our author could invoke with his astonishing erudition. Things happen as if Eriugena had fulfilled a pledge to affirm all the propositions, put forward by Doctors of the Church when they were not speaking as Doctors of the Church.” Thus, in Eriugena’s time, his system did not succeed in bridging the intellectual and spiritual gap between the two worlds, which continued to move on their separate ways. But today, as we know more about the problems which separated them, Eriugena deserves to be rediscovered, as a lonely, but prophetic and powerful, voice, searching for the right solutions, but hardly succeeding in a task much too vast to be handled by his lonely, isolated genius.

*Article originally appeared in Eriugena: East and West edited by Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 51-68.

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