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Eriugena's Intervention in the Debate on Predestination

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Eriugena's Intervention in the Debate on Predestination Chapter 10 Eriugena’s Intervention in the Debate on Predestination Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi 1 Introduction The theme of predestination, with its various and conflicting interpretations that have emerged during the history of theology, illustrates the difficulties in defining the mode of interaction between human freedom and divine Grace in the path toward salvation, and, more, the compatibility between human freedom and divine omnipotence and omniscience. For the Latin West the ul- timately unresolved reflections of Augustine of Hippo on these problems have constituted an unavoidable touchstone, which the theologians were called to deal with on several occasions. The bishop of Hippo’s results were in fact dictated by the urgency to contrast the heretical readings spread in his time, which offered unilateral solutions to the question of the relationship between human freedom and divine order. When called to face Manichaeism and its establishment of a principle of evil as equivalent and opposed to a principle of good, which, determines the subordination of human actions to necessity, (relying upon the opposition of the two principles of good and evil) Augustine set a particular emphasis on the freedom of choice. Years later, he was called to contrast the heresy of Pelagianism, which diminished the role of Grace in salvation, by emphasizing the importance of asceticism and free will. Against the Pelagian perspective, the African doctor developed a theology of Grace, which arrived at the conviction that it is impossible for man to resist sin, since the human will lost its freedom to do good after having committed original sin, without the help of Grace. The Carolingian culture, interested in the arrangement of the theological knowledge within a frame of normative understanding, centered on the ques- tion of the relationship between sin, the human freedom and the order estab- lished by God in a dispute about predestination that involved several authors of the second and the third generation of magistri active in the Frankish kingdoms, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004399075_01� �4� Mainoldi in the West, under king Charles the Bald, and in the East, under Louis the German, as well as in the South, in Lotharingia.1 The debate was engaged by Gottschalk of Orbais, a Saxon monk, who occu- pied a prominent role in several theological debates of this age.2 Among these, the dispute about predestination lasted longest and is the only one in which the intervention of John Scottus is ascertained. Tonsured in Fulda in the year 822, Gottschalk settled in Orbais, where he was ordained as priest. Later he traveled to Italy, where in Verona in 840, he proclaimed his thesis of the double predes- tination, according to which the righteous are predestined by God to eternal reward, and sinners to punishment. The bishop of Verona, Noting, alarmed by the heterodoxy of this thesis, called on Rabanus Maurus to reply. The influ- ential abbot of Fulda responded with a treatise on predestination, where he argued, against the thesis of Gottschalk, that God has not predestined anyone to eternal punishment. Because of the insistence with which Gottschalk con- tinued his teaching on double predestination, in Friuli in 846, and in the mon- astery of Fulda, where the Saxon monk returned in 848, Rabanus, archbishop of Mainz, convoked a synod in the same city; here he condemned Gottschalk as a heretic, rejecting his teachings on the double predestination. The Saxon monk then returned to Orbais, but since this monastery was un- der the jurisdiction of the Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, he was summoned by the latter – who had been warned by Rabanus – to appear in the synod of Querzy, at Charles the Bald’s palace, in February 849. After having exposed his thesis, Gottschalk was once again condemned as a heretic, defrocked and imprisoned in the monastery of Hautvillers, in the diocese of Reims. Neverthe- less, the Saxon recluse continued to assert his position on the gemina praedes- tinatio through letters such as the treatise entitled Confessio brevis. At this point, Hincmar, assisted by his suffragan bishop, Pardulus of Laon, appealed to other theologians of the Frankish kingdoms to find a solution on the issue. Prudentius of Troyes, answering this appeal in a letter addressed to Hincmar and Pardulus, referring to the judgment of a synod held in Paris in 849, insisted 1 For a historical reconstruction of the debate see Ermenegildo Bertola, “Libertà umana e pre- destinazione nel secolo ix: Godescalco d’Orbais, Rabano Mauro, Floro di Lione e Incmaro di Reims,” Archivio di filosofia 54 (1986): 779–97; Eriugena, De praedestinatione liber: Dialettica e teologia all’apogeo della Rinascenza carolingia (edizione critica, traduzione e commento), ed. Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi (Florence: 2003), ix–xli; Victor Genke and Francis x. Gumerlock (eds.), Gottschalk and a Medieval Predestination Controversy: Texts Translated from the Latin, mptt 47 (Milwaukee, WI.: 2010), 27–60. 2 For an updated overview on the Carolingian theological debates see Armando Bisogno, Il metodo carolingio: Identità culturale e dibattito teologico nel secolo nono, Nutrix 3 (Turnhout: 2008)..
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