PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire

Outside the Roman Empire the world was transformed beyond recognition. The life of the prophet Muhammad came to an end in 633, and within
ten years of his death the religion of Islam had spread by conquest from its
native Arabia throughout the neighbouring Persian Empire and the
Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 698 the Muslims
captured Carthage, and ten years later they were masters of all North
Africa. In 711 they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, easily defeated the Gothic
Christians, and Xooded through Spain. Their advance into northern
Europe was halted only in 732, when they were defeated at Poitiers by
the Frankish leader Charles Martel.
Charles Martels grandson Charlemagne, who became king of the
Franks in 768, drove the Muslims back to the Pyrenees, but did no more
than nibble at their Spanish dominions. To the east, however, he conquered Lombardy, Bavaria, and Saxony, and had his son proclaimed king of
Italy. When Pope Leo III was driven out of Rome by a revolution, Charlemagne restored him to his see. In gratitude the Pope crowned him as
Roman emperor in St Peters on Christmas Day 800a date which, if not
the most memorable in history, is at least the easiest to remember. Thus
began the Holy Roman Empire, which at Charlemagnes death in 814
included almost all the Christian inhabitants of continental western
Europe.
Charlemagne was anxious to improve standards of education and culture in his dominions, and he collected scholars from various parts of
Europe to form a Palatine School at his capital, Aachen. One of the most
distinguished of these was Alcuin of York, who took a keen interest in
Aristotles Categories. The logic textbook which he wrote, Dialectica, takes the
form of a dialogue in which the pupil Charlemagne asks questions and the
teacher Alcuin gives answers. Alcuin retired in the last years of his life to
run a small school in the abbey of St Martin of Tours, of which he later
became abbot. He spent his time, he told the emperor, dispensing to this
pupils the honey of Scripture, the wine of classical literature, and the
apples of grammar. To a privileged few he displayed the treasures of
astronomyCharlemagnes favourite hobby.
When philosophy revived between the ninth and eleventh centuries, it
did so not within the old Roman Empire of Byzantium, but in the Frankish
29

PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

Empire of Charlemagnes successors and in the Abbasid court of Muslim

Baghdad. The leading philosophers of the revival were, in the West, John
the Scot, and in the East, Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
John was born in Ireland in the Wrst decades of the ninth century. He is not
to be mistaken for the more famous John Duns Scotus, who Xourished in the
fourteenth century. It is undoubtedly confusing that there are two medieval
philosophers with the name John the Scot. What makes it doubly confusing
is that one of them was an Irishman, and the other was for all practical
purposes an Englishman. The ninth-century philosopher, for the avoidance
of doubt, gave himself the surname Eriugena, which means Son of Erin.
By 851 Eriugena had migrated from Ireland to the court of Charles the
Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne. This was probably at Compie`gne,
which Charles thought of renaming Carlopolis, on the model of Constantinople. Charles was a lover of things Greek, and the astonishingly learned
Eriugena, who had mastered Greek (no one knows where), won his favour
and wrote him Xattering poems in that language. He taught liberal arts at
the court for a while, but his interests began to turn towards philosophy.
Once, commenting on a text on the borderline between grammar and
logic, he wrote no one enters heaven except through philosophy.9
Eriugena Wrst engaged in philosophy in 851 when invited by Hincmar,
the archbishop of Reims, to write a refutation of the ideas of a learned and
pessimistic monk, Gottschalk. Gottschalk had taken up the problem of
predestination where Augustine had left oV. He was reported to have
deduced from the texts of Augustine something that was generally there
left implicit, namely that predestination aVected sinners as well as saints. It
was, he taught, not only the blessed in heaven whose ultimate fate had
been predestined, the damned also had been predestined to hell before they
were ever conceived. This doctrine of double predestination seemed to
Archbishop Hincmar to be heretical. At the very least, like the monks of
Augustines time, he regarded it as a doctrine inimical to good monastic
discipline: sinners might conclude that, since their fate had been sealed
long ago, there was no point in giving up sinning. Hence his invitation to
Eriugena to put Gottschalk down (PL 125. 845).
Whether or not Gottschalk had been accurately reported, Eriugenas
refutation of his alleged heresy was, from Hincmars point of view, worse
9 See J. J. OMeara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chs. 1 and 2.

30

PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

than the disease. Eriugenas arguments were weak, and in attacking the
predestination of the damned, he emasculated the predestination of the
blessed. There could not be a double predestination, he said, because God
was simple and undivided; and there was no such thing as predestination
because God was eternal. The Wrst argument is unconvincing because if a
double predestination threatens Gods simplicity, so too does the distinction between predestination and foreknowledge, which was the favoured
solution of Gottschalks opponents. The second argument does not provide the desired incentive to the sinner to repent, because whatever
temporal qualiWcation we give to the divine determining of our fate, it is
certainly, on the Augustinian view, independent of any choice of ours
(CCCM 50. 12).
The Frankish kingdom was torn by doctrinal strife, and both Gottschalk
and Eriugena found themselves condemned by Church councils. The
Council of Quierzy in 853the third of a seriesdeWned, against
Gottschalk, that while God predestined the blessed to heaven, he did
not predestine others to sin: he merely left them in the human mass of
perdition and predestined only their punishment, not their guilt. The
condemnation of Eriugena, at Valence in 855, aYrmed that there was
indeed a predestination of the impious to death no less than a predestination of the elect to life. The diVerence was this: that in the election
of those to be saved the mercy of God preceded all merit, whereas in
the damnation of those who were to perish evil desert preceded just
judgement. The Council fathers were not above vulgar abuse, saying
that Eriugena had deWled the purity of the faith with nauseating Irish
porridge.
Despite his condemnation, Eriugena remained in favour with Charles
the Bald and was commissioned by him in 858 to translate into Latin three
treatises of Dionysius the Areopagite: the Divine Names, the Celestial Hierarchy,
and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. He found the Neoplatonic ideas of Dionysius
congenial and went on to construct his own system on somewhat similar
lines, in a work of Wve volumes called On Natureor, to give it its Greek
title, Periphyseon.
There are, according to Eriugena, four great divisions of nature: nature
creating and uncreated, nature created and creating, nature created and
uncreating, and nature uncreating and uncreated (1. 1). The Wrst such
nature is God. The second is the intellectual world of Platonic ideas, which
31

PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

creates the third nature, the world of material objects. The fourth is God
again, conceived not as creator but as the end to which things return.
Eriugena tells us that the most important distinction within nature is
that between the things that are and the things that are not. It is disconcerting to be told that God is among the things that are not; however,
Eriugena does not mean that there is no God, but rather that God does not
Wt into any of Aristotles ten categories of being (2. 15). God is above being,
and what he is doing is something better than existing. One name that we
can give to the ineVable and incomprehensible brilliance of the divine
goodness is Nothing.10
Eriugenas third division, the material world, is the easiest to comprehend (3. 3). Like Philoponus, he believes that heaven and earth are made
out of the same elements; there is no special quintessence for the heavenly
bodies. The cosmos, he tells us, consists of three spheres: the earth in the
centre, next to it the sphere of the sun (which is roughly 45,000 miles
away), and outermost the sphere of the moon and the stars (roughly 90,000
miles away). While Eriugena thinks that the sun revolves around the
world, he takes some steps towards a heliocentric system: Jupiter, Mars,
Venus, and Mercury, he believed, were planets of the sun, revolving
around it.
Where do human beings Wt into Eriugenas fourfold scheme? They seem
to straddle the second and third division. As animals, we belong in the
third division, and yet we transcend the other animals. We can say with
equal propriety that man is an animal and that he is not an animal. He
shares reason, mind, and interior sense with the celestial essences, but he
shares his Xesh, his outward self, with other animals. Man was created twice
over: once from the earth, with the animals, but once with the intellectual
creatures of the second division of nature. Does this mean that we have two
souls? No, each of us has a single, undivided, soul: wholly life, wholly mind,
wholly reason, wholly memory. This soul creates the body, acting as the
agent of God, who does not himself create anything mortal. Even when
soul and body are separated at death, the soul continues to govern the
body scattered throughout the elements (4. 8).
As the creator of the body, the soul belongs to that division of nature
which is both created and creative. This second division consists of what
10 Eriugenas theology is discussed at greater length in Ch. 9 below.

32

PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH

Eriugena calls the primordial causes of things, which he identiWes with the
Platonic Ideas (2. 2). These were pre-formed by God the Father in his
eternal Word. The Idea of Man is that in accordance with which man is
made in the image of God. But that image is deformed in fallen humans.
Had God not foreseen that Adam would fall, humans would not have been
divided into male and female; they would have propagated as angels do.
Their bodies would have been celestial and would have lacked metabolism.
After the resurrection, our bodies will resume their sexless and ethereal
form. When the world Wnally ends, place and time will disappear, and all
creatures will Wnd salvation in the nature that is uncreated and uncreating.
Eriugena was one of the most original and imaginative thinkers of the
Middle Ages and built the ideas of his Greek sources into a system that was
uniquely his own. Reading him is not easy, but his text can cast a fascinating spell on the reader. He has a fanatical love of paradox: whenever he
writes a sentence he can hardly bear not to follow it with its contradictory.
He often displays great subtlety and ingenuity in showing that the two
apparent contradictions can be interpreted in such a way as to reconcile
them. But sometimes his wayward intellect leads him into sheer nonsense,
as when he writes In unity itself all numbers are at once together, and no
number precedes or follows another, since all are one (3. 66).
Though Eriugena constantly quotes the Bible, his system is closer to
pagan Neoplatonism than to traditional Christian thought, and it is unsurprising that On Nature was eventually condemned by ecclesiastical authority.
In 1225 Pope Honorius III ordered all surviving copies of the work to be sent
to Rome to be burned. But legend was kind to his memory. The story was
often told of Charles the Bald asking him, over dinner, what separates a Scot
from a sot, and being given the answer only this table. And at one time the
University of Oxford implausibly venerated him as its founder.11

Muslim and Jewish Philosophers

The Christian Eriugena was a much less important precursor of Western
medieval philosophy than a series of Muslim thinkers in the countries that
are now Iraq and Iran. Besides being signiWcant philosophers in their own
11 See OMeara, Eriugena, 21416.

33