An Irish scholar at the court of Charles the Bald, Eriugena was the most original mind in Europe for three hundred years on either side of him. Knowing Greek, he translated the mystical Dionysius and absorbed a Neoplatonism no one else in the Latin West could reach. His Periphyseon divides all reality into a single unfolding Nature: God as uncreated creator, the eternal causes, the created world, and God again as the end to which all returns. It was too bold for its age — condemned centuries later as pantheism — but it remains one of the great speculative systems, written in a desert of learning.
Born in Ireland when the Latin West had almost lost Greek. He would become the most original mind in Europe for three hundred years on either side.
Words
“We do not know what God is. God himself does not know what he is, because he is not any thing.”
