Reference to the Logos as developed by Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Maximus, for many if not most just means the development of Neoplatonism, so it is no surprise that John Scotus Eriugena, who specifically takes up the mantle of Origen, Gregory, and Maximus is also read as a Neoplatonist. What may be refused by this insistence, is that Christianity is introducing a new way of thinking, a different logic, or a new order of understanding, which Eriugena will refer to and explain as “dialectics.” It is impossible to correctly read his understanding, and its constructive use of “contradiction,” through a Neoplatonic lens, which has no notion of contradiction as the means of breaking through to a unified understanding, devoid of duality.[1] For Eriugena, dialectic is not simply a mechanism of understanding, but is at once an epistemology and ontology which unifies being and non-being (his “fundamental division”). This is not just more Neoplatonist metaphysics. As Sergei Sushkov, notes, “no matter how attractive a metaphysical schematism might seem to be, it is in fact utterly irrelevant to a dialectically coherent way of thinking of the living whole, and for this reason can hardly be imposed upon Eriugena’s discourse.”[2]
Of course, neither Origen nor Maximus can be reduced to Neoplatonism either, as both are specifically developing an alternative to a Greek metaphysics, while like Eriugena, each deploys Greek resources. Origen identifies Christ as a unique and new order of understanding. “All who believe and are assured that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, I am the truth, derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ.”[3] Christ is the singular source of this Truth. Origen notes specifically, that his principle is a departure from a Greek understanding and is a turn to Christ as first principle (see my blog on Origen here): “For just as, although many Greeks and barbarians promise the truth, we gave up seeking it from all who claimed it for false opinions after we had come to believe that Christ was the Son of God.”[4] Origen is clearly working within a Christological frame. He is setting forth an alternative world-view, a Christ centered logic, or a Christian metaphysic. The problem is that very few may have been up to the task of following the subtlety of Origen.
Beyond the fact that the name of Eriugena’s major work, Periphyseon, is taken directly from Origen, he is developing Origen’s apokatastasis or the notion of a universal return and divinization. According to Ilaria Ramelli, The noun ἀποκατάστασις, related to the verb ἀποκαθίστημι, “I restore, reintegrate, reconstitute, return,” bears the fundamental meaning of “restoration, reintegration, reconstitution.”[5] She argues that “this doctrine was abundantly received throughout the Patristic era, up to the one who can be regarded as the last of the Fathers: John Eriugena.”[6] She considers Eriugena “to have been the last great Patristic philosopher, whose thought was nourished by the best of Greek Patristics.”[7] There was nothing heretical about apokatastasis. It was deployed by Origen, Gregory, and Eriugena to combat the heresies of the Gnostics, Marcionites, and predestinationists.[8] As she explains, Eriugena is consistent with Origen’s idea “that precisely participation in the three Persons of the Trinity will bring every rational creature to its restoration. For rational beings receive their existence from the Father (who is the Being par excellence and the Good, so that progress toward the Good is also a greater and greater acquisition of being and existence), their rationality from the Son-Logos, and holiness from the Holy Spirit (Princ. 1,3,8).”[9] Book V of the Periphyseon, demonstrates the deep continuity between Origen and Eriugena, as here he deals with the reditus of all beings to God. As Daniel Heide argues, Origen is the greatest ancient advocate of apokatastasis and Eriugena its greatest mediaeval proponent.[10]
Eriugena is also developing Maximus’ picture of Christ being “all in all”, which is thematic for him. Jordan Daniel Wood has laid to rest the notion that participation, in the Greek sense, adequately encompasses Maximus understanding of divinization, and it is Maximus notion (for the most part, along with Augustine) that Eriugena is developing (see my blog on Maximus here). [11] The logic of Origen’s apokatastasis is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). The union of divinity and humanity, the bringing together of the contrary pairs, God/man, or hypostasis, involves a new order of understanding grounded on total identity between God and human. This is not just true in the case of Christ, but according to Maximus, the Christian becomes Christ: “they will be spiritually vivified by their union with the archetype of these true things, and so become living images of Christ, or rather become one with Him through grace (rather than being a mere simulacrum), or even, perhaps, become the Lord Himself, if such an idea is not too onerous for some to bear.”[12] He “draws near to us in his humanity” while bearing the fulness of his divinity, and “having given the whole of Himself, and assuming the whole of man” he witnesses to perfection of humanity and deity “bearing witness within His whole self—by the perfection of the two natures in which He truly exists—to the unchangeable and unalterable condition of both.”[13]
Maximus (and Eriugena) will deploy Origen’s notion of logoi, which makes Christ the ground of the developing dialectic:
The logoi stemming from the Body of Logos will concur anew according to the divine administration in order to form new souls (i.e. the logoi will be ‘embodied’ afresh), in accordance with the Universal Causality which originates in the Body of Logos (i.e. in the will and judgement of Logos) and determines what the new cosmic setting will be for the drama of History (i.e. the dialectical relationship between creaturely and divine will) to take place.[14]
This dialectical exchange is no mere rhetoric, but is descriptive of the taking place of cosmic theosis. Sushkov explains, “According to the dialectical understanding of unity (with a strong appeal to a dialectically coherent treatment of contradiction) that Eriugena does adhere to, the reality of creation cannot be thought of, and therefore known, otherwise than in the way of being inseparable from the universal Principle of all.”[15] The universal principle of the logoi, stemming from the body of Christ, is the ontological ground of this dialectic. As Eriugena claims, “a logical dialectic can lead us to a clear knowledge of spiritual things.”[16]
Eriugena, like Hegel, recognizes that God is in no way excluded from finitude (which would be a form of finitude), but God’s eternality is inclusive of the finite. For Hegel, “God becomes man generically, universally, essentially.”[17] Likewise for Eriugena, “God cannot be known as a finite being, and cannot therefore be thought of by means of predicating attributes of His essence.”[18] Rather, “The infinite is only conceivable by means of contradiction dialectically treated.”[19] Knowing the infinite involves a complete transformation of the mind through which the unity with God restores human integrity, and dialectic pertains to entering this reality. “The combination of dialectic interpreted as a science of being, capable of expressing truths about the sensible world as well as about discourse, with an ontological interpretation of logical concepts allows Eriugena to develop his metaphysical theory, a strong realism.”[20]
One of the examples Eriugena deploys of dialectic contradiction is “man is an animal” and “man is not an animal.” “When taken together in their integrity as the two inseparable aspects of a truly simple (undivided) and therefore really subsisting human nature, in which the inner and the outer cannot be severed, these predicates are to be rightly understood as mutually complementary or, as Eriugena himself puts it, ‘entirely suitable’ (755b).”[21] There is a real contradiction residing in human nature, where man is in one instance bound by an animal state, but he surpasses himself through a dialectical exchange. It is not simply a negation or denial of the body or animality but a revealing or coming to his true nature, in which God Himself is revealed, not through a disconnection but an integration with the flesh. According to Eriugena, “For everything which her Creator primordially created in her” (i.e. human nature) “remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, ‘awaiting the revelation of the sons of God.’”[22] As John puts it, humans were made to be born of God to become “children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1, 12-13). People are to be twice born, of the flesh and the spirit.
Just as Christ is divine and human, so too the apparent duality in human nature – the “contradictory and mutually opposed predicates” taken separately are contradictory but this contradiction describes a potential wholeness so that each is said to be “everywhere a whole in itself.”[23] Humans are both animal and not animal. “This finally means that man’s proper nature can neither be conceived in its truth nor actually affirmed in reality without the negation, which in fact is but the negation of the one-sided finitude of his being, leading to the restoration of its proper wholeness.”[24] “Not animal” must be understood along with “animal” as both true, but neither of which alone captures the fulness of the truth.
The dialectical treatment of the opposition arrives at a new logic: “This is the reality which is embraced by the contraries and is therefore approached when coherently thought of by means of contradiction, aimed at overcoming all dichotomies between the opposites, including the ultimate ones of being and non-being.”[25] This dialectic logic which accords with a dialectic reality enables a restoration of the mind and human nature as a whole, unified with divine reality. The person “becomes at the same time one with the whole of the substantial reality of God’s creation, where the universal contains the particular, and the cause gives rise to the effects, but not vice versa.”[26] The dialectically shaped mind is restored to the reality of the image by which it was created.
Along with other medieval scholastics, Eriugena takes the “image” in Genesis to refer to the natural capacities and the “likeness” to refer to the supernatural endowment, and concludes that through dialectic man is both the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26).
For just as God is both beyond all things and in all things – for He Who only truly is, is the essence of all things, and while He is whole in all things He does not cease to be whole beyond all things, whole in the world, whole around the world… – in the same way human nature in its own world (in its subsistence) in its own universe and in its visible and invisible parts is whole in itself….[27]
For Eriugena there is not a Neoplatonic hierarchy, but “even the lowest and least valuable part, the body, is according to its own principles whole in the whole man, for the body, in so far as it is truly body, subsists in its own reasons which were made in the beginning of creation; and since human nature is so in itself, it goes beyond its whole.”[28] We are made to “cleave” to God, as Eriugena explains. As the Gospel tells us, “Where I am there is My servant also” (Jn. 12:26).“But He is above all things: above all things therefore is the man who cleaves to Him, and above himself in so far as he is in all things.”[29]
Through a dialectic very similar to that of Hegel, Eriugena pictures how it is that Christ is “all in all” or why “incarnation is creation.” As Sushkov concludes, “All this convinces a careful reader of the Periphyseon that the logic Eriugena is pursuing is all about the transformation of the entire human being (brought about through the cardinal change of the way the mind operates) and bringing it into the substantial reality of creation as it truly is in union with God.”[30] He argues that Eriugena’s dialectic through contradiction, which does not seek a Neoplatonic harmony (a mere difference), marks this new order of logic and reality, through which a true uniformity of subject is realized.
Eriugena’s purpose is not to abolish the Greek logic of non-contradiction, but his aim is to escape the finitude of this thought. Contradiction is not a sign of error but a way of thinking and realizing wholeness spread between being and non-being. “Understood like this, contradiction becomes for the human mind nothing other than an effective instrument of uncovering the infinite nature of things as they genuinely are beyond their one-sided appearance, while belonging to proper (unconfined) being and actually participating in it.”[31] Or the way Eriugena puts it, “Let it then not trouble you that it is said of human nature that it is everywhere a whole in itself, that the Image is whole in the animal, and that the animal is whole in the Image. For everything which her Creator primordially created in her remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, awaiting the revelation of the Sons of God.” Through this dialectic is realized “the unity of substance with Him.”[32]
[1] See the dissertation by Sergei N. Sushkov, Being and creation in the theology of John Scottus Eriugena: an approach to a new way of thinking (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2015)
[2] Sushkov, 11-12.
[3] Origen, On First Principles, trans, John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Preface, 1.
[4] Ibid, 2.
[5] Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013), 1.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 2.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 140.
[10] Daniel Heide, Ἀποκατάστασις: “The Resolution of Good and Evil in Origen and Eriugena,” Dionysius, Vol. XXXIII (Dec. 2015, 195-213) 195.
[11] Jordan Daniel Wood, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” (Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy, Boston College, 2018).
[12] Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Maximos Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014), 21.15.
[13] Ambigua 31: paragraph 8.
[14] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 358.
[15] Sushkov, 2.
[16] John Scoturs Eriugena, Periphyseon: The Division of Nature, Trans, John O’Meara (Saint-Laurent: Bellarmin, 1987), Book V, 865B.
[17] James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (State University of New York Press, 1983) 120.
[18] Sushkov, 39.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Christophe Erismann, “The Logic of Being: Eriugena’s Dialectical Ontology,” Vivarium (45 (2007) 203-218) 203.
[21] Sushkov, 150.
[22] Periphyseon, 761b. Cited in Sushkov, 151.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Sushkov, 152.
[25] Ibid, 153.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Periphyseon, 759a-b. Cited in Sushkov, 154,
[28] Periphyseon, 759b. Cited in Sushkov, 154.
[29] Periphysion, 760a.
[30] Sushkov, 154.
[31] Sushkov, 159.
[32] Periphyseon, 761a.