A Biography of John Scotus Erigena.

A Biography of John Scotus Erigena.

Nothing is known about Eriugena's place or date of birth or of the circumstances of his early life, but, on the basis of circumstantial evidence and some surviving testimonia (helpfully gathered in Brennan, 1986), it is conjectured that he was born in Ireland around 800 or possibly slightly earlier (c. 790). His Irish provenance is confirmed by the fact that he self-consciously signed his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ works with the neologism ‘Eriugena’ (meaning ‘Irish born’).

Eriugena first came to historical notice when he was commissioned by two French bishops — Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims and Bishop Pardulus of Laon — to refute a treatise by a Saxon monk, Gottschalk (806-68), a priest of Orbais in the diocese of Soissons, who interpreted St. Augustine as teaching a ‘twofold’ or ‘twin predestination’ (gemina praedestinatio) of the elect to heaven and of the damned to hell.

Hincmar was worried that Gottschalk’s side was attracting powerful supporters and he engaged Eriugena to write a strong rebuttal. Eriugena's response, De divina praedestinatione (On Divine Predestination), a treatise of nineteen chapters, which survives in a single manuscript, is a robust rebuttal of Gottschalk. Eriugena rejects any divine predestination to evil by an appeal to God's unity, transcendence and goodness. While purporting merely to interpret Augustinian texts, this early theological treatise is philosophically significant for its rationalistic, dialectical analysis of key theological concepts and its reliance on argument rather than scriptural citation. In this treatise, Eriugena, citing Augustine's De uera religione 5, 8, claims ‘that true philosophy is true religion and conversely that true religion is true philosophy’. As one gloss in the Annotationes in Marcianum attests: ‘no one enters heaven except through philosophy’.

Eriugena argues in De divina praedestinatione that God, being perfectly good, wants all humans to be saved, and does not predestine souls to damnation. God's being is His willing and ‘no necessity binds the will of God’. On the contrary, humans damn themselves through their own free choices: ‘Sin, death, unhappiness are not from God’. Since God is outside time, He cannot be said to fore-know or to pre-destine, terms that involve temporal predicates. Furthermore, if God's being is His wisdom, God can be said to have but a single knowledge and hence a ‘double’ predestination cannot be ascribed to Him. Human nature, on the other hand, was created rational, and rationality requires freedom. Human nature is therefore essentially free: ‘For God did not create in man a captive will but a free one, and that freedom remained after sin’.