John Scotus Eriugena: Salus nostra ex fide inchoat

"What is philosophy but an expounding of the rules of religion whereby man humbly adores and rationally seeks God, the highest cause and the source of everything? (De predestinatione)

"No one enters heaven except through philosophy." (Annotationes in Martianum Capellam)

The Holy Father's general audience on Wednesday (June 10, 2009) was devoted to John Scotus Eriugena. Born in Ireland in the early years of the ninth century, he left his native land to join the French court of Charles the Bald, a center of cultural and intellectual life at the time. The date of his death is not known with certainty, but is thought to have been around 870.

Well-versed in both Greek and Latin, John had a particular interest in Maximus the Confessor and above all, in Dionysius the Areopagite. Throughout the Middle Ages, this author was identified with the disciple of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (17:34), but he is now known to have been a Syrian living and writing in the fifth century. His works were translated by John the Scot, and so were made accessible to later theologians like St. Bonaventure. Convinced of the apostolicity of his writings, John devoted his life to deepening and developing his thought, to such an extent that sometimes it is hard to distinguish where we are dealing with the ideas of Scotus Eriugena and where he is merely transmitting the reflections of the Pseudo-Dionysius.

The theological work of John Scotus did not escape the censure of ecclesial authorities, on account of a radical Platonism that sometimes seems to draw too near to pantheism, even if his intentions were always orthodox. Among his many works, the Pope singled out De divisione naturae ("On the divisions of nature") and De hierarchia caelestia ("An Exposition on the celestial hierarchy of St. Dionysius").

Our author says: "Salus nostra ex fide inchoat", our salvation begins with faith. We cannot speak about God proceeding from our own conceptions, but from what God says concerning Himself in Sacred Scripture. But, seeing as God speaks only the truth, Scotus Eriugena is convinced that scriptural authority and reason can never contradict each other; he is convinced that true religion and true philosophy coincide. From this perspective he writes: "Any sort of authority that is not confirmed by true reason should be considered weak... There is in fact no true authority that does not coincide with the truth discovered by the power of reason ... Let no authority intimidate you or distract you from what right reasoning and contemplation lead you to understand. In fact, authentic authority never contradicts right reason, nor does the latter ever contradict true authority. Both without any doubt stem from the same source, which is the divine wisdom." We have here a courageous affirmation of the power of reason, founded on the certainty that true authority is reasonable, because God is creative reason. Erigena's profound passion for truth is clearly evident, as it also is in a passage not mentioned by Pope Benedict, where he claims that at the last judgment the wicked will suffer the worst punishment possible -- ignorance of the truth.

John Scotus repeats a point made earlier by St. John Chrysostom, that Scripture itself, though coming from God, would not have been necessary if man had not sinned. We must therefore deduce that Scripture was given by God with a pedagogial intent and out of condescension, so that man would be able to recall all that had been impressed on his heart at the moment of his creation "in the image and likeness of God" and which original sin had made him forget. Eriugena writes in the Expositiones: "Man was not created for the Scriptures, of which he would have had no need if he had not sinned, but rather the Scriptures -- woven of doctrine and symbol -- were given for man. Thanks to them, our rational nature can be introduced into the depths of pure and authentic contemplation of God." The words of Sacred Scripture purify our reason, a reason that has been a little blinded, and help us return to the memory of what we, inasmuch as we are the image of God, carry in our hearts, wounded as it is by sin.

Certain hermeneutical consequences with respect to Scriptural interpretation follow from this, and still today they can point out the right path for a correct reading of Sacred Scripture. It is a matter of uncovering the sense hidden in the sacred text and this supposes a particular interior exercise by which reason opens itself up to the sure route towards the truth. This exercise consists of cultivating a constant disposition to conversion. In order to arrive at a view into the depths of the text it is necessary to progress simultaneously in conversion of the heart and in conceptual analysis of the words. In fact it is only from the constant purification both of the eyes of the heart and the eyes of the mind that we can attain an exact understanding.

This path leads the thinking being to the very threshold of the Divine Mystery, where all our notions acknowledge their own weakness and incapacity and oblige us for that reason, with the simple power, free and sweet, of truth to always go beyond everything that has been and is continually being acquired. The adoring and silent recognition of the Mystery, which leads into a communion that makes one, is thus revealed as the one road to a relationship with the truth that is at the same time the most intimate possible and the most scrupulously respectful of God's otherness. John Scotus, making use of a vocabulary dear to the Greek Christian tradition, has called this experience towards which we are tending "theosis" or divinization, with so ardent an affirmation that it is possible to suspect him of heterodox pantheism. It is hard to avoid that feeling when faced with texts like this: "Just as iron becomes red-hot and molten in the fire so as to give the appearance that there is only fire present, and yet the two substances remain distinct, one from the other, so also we must accept that at the end of this world all of nature, corporeal and incorporeal, will manifest only God and yet remain integral in such a manner that God can in some way be comprehended while remaining incomprehensible and creation itself will be transformed, with ineffable wonder, into God."

In reality, the whole of John's theological thought is more evidently the demonstration of an attempt to express in words the inexpressible truths of God, based solely on the mystery of the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. All the metaphors he uses to indicate this ineffable reality shows how much he was aware of the absolute inadequacy of the terms we use in speaking of these things. And for all that there remains the charm and a certain atmosphere of authentic mystical experience that we can every so often reach out and touch in his writings. As proof of that, it is enough to cite a page from De divisione naturae which touches in the depths of our souls even we believers in the 21st century: "Nothing is to be desired", he writes, "other than the joy of the truth that is Christ, nor is anything to be avoided other than His absence. Indeed, this ought to be considered the one and only cause of total and eternal sadness. Take Christ away from me and no other good remains to me, nor does anything terrify me so much as His absence. The greatest torment of a rational creature is the privation and the absence of Christ."