Johannes Scotus Eriugena
c.810-877 · Scholasticism · Prominent
Eriugena was an Irish philosopher at the Frankish court who could read Greek when the Latin West had lost it, and he put Dionysios and Maximus into Latin. His Periphyseon divides all of nature into four: God as the uncreated origin, the primordial causes held in him, the created world, and God again as the end to which all things return. Later readers took that for pantheism and condemned it.
Signature
The position Eriugena is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence
- Beginning of Things
- Emanation
Positions on the 11 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- The Divine
- strongly leans Indescribable (100 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Realism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (100 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (81 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (78 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Ethics
- mildly leans Means (69 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (75 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
9 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Eriugena refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism / Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Idealism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Divine Providence
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Eternal Present
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Rational Expertise
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Logos
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Dialectical Sublation
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Divine Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Union with the One
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?