- Length
- 750 pagesSheldon-Williams and O'Meara, Periphyseon: The Division of Nature, Bellarmin, 1987
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Periphyseon
The one large philosophical system produced in Latin Europe between Boethius and Anselm, written by an Irishman at a Frankish court who could read Greek when almost nobody in the West could. It was condemned twice and put on the Index seven centuries after it was written.
- Date
- c. 867
- Author
- John Scotus Eriugena
- Region
- West Francia
- Language
- Latin
- 1976 English, Sheldon-Williams Begun in the Scriptores Latini Hiberniae series Attested
- 1987 English, Sheldon-Williams and O'Meara The standard complete version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Dialogue
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 367 years
Condemned twice in the thirteenth century and placed on the Index in 1585, having been the most ambitious philosophical work written in Latin Europe for six hundred years.
What the book says
Five books of dialogue between a master and a pupil, dividing the whole of reality into four and following it out from God and back again. The division is made by two questions crossed: does a thing create, and is it created? That yields nature which creates and is not created, which is God as source; nature which is created and creates, the primordial causes or eternal patterns of things; nature which is created and does not create, the world of particular things we inhabit; and nature which neither creates nor is created, which is God again, now as the end to which everything returns. The scheme is not a taxonomy of objects but a single movement described from four positions, and the last division is the one that unsettled readers: it makes the world's return into God as necessary as its procession out of him. Around this Eriugena works through creation, the human person as the workshop where all creation meets, evil as having no substance of its own, and a final restoration in which everything that exists is gathered back without remainder.
What it argues
That everything proceeds from God and returns to him, and that the return is not a reward for some and a punishment for others but the structure of reality. The fourfold division is the instrument, and its force comes from the fourth term: if God is both the source that creates without being created and the end that neither creates nor is created, then the whole of nature is one movement rather than a maker and a made thing standing apart. Eriugena draws conclusions from this that his readers found alarming. Evil has no substance and therefore no permanent place, since nothing that exists can fail to return. The human person is the workshop of creation, containing every level of being, so what happens to humanity happens to everything. And God's unknowability extends to God: there is no definition of him available even to him, because a definition would make him a thing among things.
What it answered
Dionysius on where negative theology ends, and the Latin theological tradition on how far reason may go. Eriugena had been drawn into a bitter controversy about predestination and had produced a treatise that was itself condemned, arguing that a God who is goodness cannot predestine anyone to evil; the Periphyseon is the systematic position that dispute exposed him as needing. Behind both is his conviction, unusual for the ninth century and repeatedly stated, that true philosophy and true religion are the same thing and cannot conflict.
How it argues
By dialogue, and at very great length. The master-and-pupil form is doing real work rather than decorating the argument: the pupil objects, misunderstands, and forces distinctions, and several of the book's positions are arrived at only under pressure from him. Eriugena reasons by division and by syllogism, quotes Greek fathers most of his readers could not check, and is willing to follow an argument to a conclusion that will cost him - which is why it is both the most rigorous work of its century and the one that got condemned.
The moment
The court of Charles the Bald, where Eriugena arrived around 851 and stayed for the rest of his life teaching in the palace school. He was Irish, which is how he came to read Greek: the Irish monastic schools had preserved a competence that had almost vanished on the continent, and it made him the one man in the Frankish world who could translate Dionysius. Pope Nicholas I complained that the translation had been published without being submitted for approval and asked Charles to send him to Rome or dismiss him. Nothing suggests either happened.
How it travelled
Through a paraphrase, then a condemnation, then an index. Its immediate influence was at Laon, Auxerre and Corbie; in the twelfth century it became genuinely popular, mostly through Honorius Augustodunensis' paraphrase, and shaped Hugh of Saint Victor and Alan of Lille. In the thirteenth century it was associated with the condemned Parisian theologians David of Dinant and Amaury de Bène and went down with them, condemned in 1210 and again in 1225, when Honorius III described it in terms about worms of heretical perversity. Gregory XIII placed it on the Index in 1585. It survived anyway, in the mystics - Eckhart, Tauler, Ruusbroec, Cusa and Bruno - and was printed at last in 1681.
The strongest objection
That the system's own logic leaves nothing outside it, which is exactly what his condemners saw. If God is the source and the end, if evil has no substance, and if everything returns without remainder, then the distinction between God and creation is doing less work than orthodoxy requires - and the charge of pantheism, made in the thirteenth century and repeated since, is not obviously unfair to the text even if it is unfair to the man. Eriugena's defenders reply that the return is a return of natures and not an absorption, and that he distinguishes carefully between God being all things and all things being God. The distinction is drawn in the book, and whether the fourfold division can support it is precisely what has been argued about for eight hundred years.
Why read it
Book One, which sets out the fourfold division and the account of divine unknowing and is self-contained. The whole is very long, technical, and available only in a specialist edition that is not easy to obtain. Read Dionysius first; this book is unintelligible without knowing what it is continuing.
- First printed
- 1681
- First in English
- 1976
- Digitised
- Partial
Circulated in the twelfth century through William of Malmesbury's edition and through the paraphrase by Honorius Augustodunensis known as the Clavis physicae, which reached readers who never saw the original.
Written in Latin. The Sheldon-Williams and O'Meara English is the standard and is in copyright; the Latin is public domain.
Where it stands
Revived. Eriugena has been the subject of sustained scholarly work since the mid-twentieth century, the critical edition and the English translation are recent, and he is now read seriously in medieval philosophy and in the history of Neoplatonism rather than treated as an isolated curiosity.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain but the only complete English translation is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the position is pantheist is the standing question and the condemnations turned on it. How much Greek Eriugena really commanded, and how far his translations shape his readings, is examined by specialists with varying conclusions. Whether the fourfold division is a genuine metaphysical scheme or a pedagogical device is argued. And the story that he was stabbed to death by his own students with their pens is a late legend with no early support, repeated in reference works for centuries.