Periphyseon: Division of Nature [Paperback]

I. P. Sheldon-Williams (Translator), John J. O'Meara (Translator)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Pub Service (June 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0884021734
• ISBN-13: 978-0884021735
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,042,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A towering work of Christian mystical philosophy, October 20, 2006

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Greg (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Periphyseon: Division of Nature (Paperback)

John Scotus Erigena lived in the 8th century, a time when scholarship and learning were deeply quiescent in the West. Strangely, this monk who lived in Ireland and later became a court scholar for Charles the Bald, became one of the most immense and profound philosophical thinkers in the West.

Unfortunately his work was condemned as heretical in the 1220's by Pope Honarius, probably because much of Eriugena's work sounds like Spinoza's pantheism. Indeed, in many places Eriugena's works read like a form of pantheism, since the God-world relation in his system is very close.

However, his merits as a philosopher are not negated by the heretical nature of his thought (if indeed it can be said to be heretical) and the depth of his system is being recovered by valuable philosophical work by scholars such as D.Carabine and Dermot Moran.

Periphyeson is Eriugena's masterpiece, though he wrote other works. The Periphyseon outlines a grand metaphysical scheme of God, the universe and everything. Eriugena divides the entirely of reality into God, what is not God, nature or the cosmos, and humanity. All four are closely interlinked at the deepest levels, and this is where the charge of pantheism occurs.

Eriugena first imports Eastern Christian theology and philosophy into his method, which is deeply Augustinian. However, rather than focusing on God as the supreme Being, as Augustine did, Erigena instead defines God as 'beyond-being'. Indeed, at one point Eriugena calls God 'nothingness', borrowing a term from Pseudo-Dionysius (on who Eriugena wrote commentaries) and proceeds to develop a deeply complex analysis of what this 'nothingness' is.

In essence though Eriugena is not saying God is a empty void like intergalactic space but rather God's super-essential Being is indeterminate and beyond all categories. Because of this God is not a Being and the concept of Being is inadequate to describe God, but the concept of non-being is because it more accurately says what God is by saying what God is not. This may seem like sophistry and perhaps it is, but despite this Eriugena proceeds to devise a bold picture of the cosmos, God and human nature.

For Eriugena, the universe is divided into what is (that which is created) and what isn't (that which is uncreated). What is comes from what is not, which is essentially to state that whatever exists (atoms, molecules, people, planets) have their roots in the infinite nothingness or One at the heart of Reality. This sounds bold but Eriugena even makes a more daring proposal. He states that the universe is God himself making himself from a nothing into a something, from an undifferentiated One into a plurality of different things. This for Eriugena is not unusual, since this follows naturally from God's infinity, which also implies God is infinitely rich potentiality and possibility which actualises itself in infinitely many different concrete ways of manifestation. He has the maxim God is all things but none, and in another part of the dialogue he says all things are the infinite becoming finite, the eternal becoming temporal, the changeless becoming change, and so on. As with other Neo-Platonists, the cosmos moves from its origin back to the One in a sort of circular cosmic cycle.

Eriugena's philosophy of mind and human nature are equally fascinating. For Eriugena, the fall was not an event which occured in an Earthly paradise, but occured somehow in the realm of the spirit. Even more boldly, he states the fall was necessary for man's true potential to be realised; that potential being the change from physical being back to spiritual being and back into the essence of God, which will occur at the end of time. Eriugena adopts the concept of 'theophany' or 'manifestation' of God and then states that at the end of all things, the blessed will rise to experience God as an endless series of theophanies of ever richer reality, while the damned will experience an eternal torment of empty visions as they sink into nothingness, while the blessed will experience an obscure union with God, in a way which is not expressible.

Also since man is in the image of God, man himself contains infinite non-being at his centre, and through his choices man can explore this not-being and make all things come into being. Eriugena is essentially an idealist who believes our mind creates all things, and by doing so we engage in a creative process along with God.

This version of the work unfortunately is out of print and may only be found in some libraries. However, it is one of the magesterial works of Western philosophy, and is of interest to any philosopher studying the medieval period.