John Scotus Eriugena Puns

John Scotus Eriugena (815-877)

Background

John Scotus Eruigena was a philosopher-theologian educated in Ireland -- his likely birthplace -- and a noted scholar of Greek. At the invitation of King Charles the Bald, Eriugena moved to France at age 30 to take over the Palace School. The school had been set up during the Carolingian Renaissance, and France at this time was friendly to speculative scholars. He became embroiled in a growing predestination controversy with the monk Gottschalk, who supported double predestination. Eriugena wrote an opposing view supporting single predestination in De divina praedestinatione, but his reasoning made his orthodoxy suspect. Eruigena continued to write many works and to translate many Greek writings, the most well-known of which were the works of pseudo-Dionysius. Some stories state that Eruigena left France for England at the request of King Alfred the Great, historians believe this was a different Johannes and that John Scotus Eruigena spent the rest of his life in France. Although he is generally considered orthodox, many of his works were condemned by church councils after his death.

Theology

Eruigena is often listed as a neo-Platonist philosopher. However, he was also influenced by Saint Augustine and many Greek theologians, including the Cappadocian fathers. In De divina praedestinatione, which was commissioned by Himcar to defend free will, Eruigena defended a form of single predestination, arguing that God only predestined good to happen. However, to defend this, he went back to the neo-Platonic idea that evil is non-existent, which led to the work being condemned in later councils.

His greatest work was Periphyseon: De divisione naturae (“On the division of nature”), which tried to reconcile the neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation with the Christian doctrine of creation. Eruigena argued that there were four classes of nature: (1) that which creates but is not created, (2) that which is created and creates, (3) that which is created but does not create, and (4) that which is neither created or creates. The first species is God as the beginning and ground of all things, the fourth is God as the endpoint of all creation, the second is the world of ideas or causes (a neo-Platonic idea), and the third is Nature as we experience it. As first this sounds pantheistic: all nature is a part of and returns to God. However, at the same time, God Himself is portrayed as being utterly transcendent and

So this is a bit dense but I think it's important and relevant for affirming Catholics, especially when responding to philosophical arguments.

In the article that was posted in this sub yesterday, Fr. Daniel Horan notes that "when approaching sensitive questions of identity and existence, we would do well to heed the wisdom of medieval Franciscan theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus, who argued convincingly of the primacy of 'intuitive knowledge' over 'abstractive knowledge'."

"The way bishops talk about truth is with Platonic abstractionism that does not bother to take into consideration the multiplicity of experiences of actual people living in the world."

Indeed, I have noticed before that the alleged "harm" of homosexuality in and of itself is entirely theoretical, and largely based on those philosophical assumptions which the bishops put forth as objective truth (and which the Wijngaards Institute does a great job of specifically dismantling here). The love we see between many same-sex couples is clearly genuine and admirable. I think for most reasonable and good-hearted people, our intuition tells us there is nothing inherently wrong with same-sex relationships.

Thus we have this confrontation between the intuitive knowledge in our hearts, and the abstract arguments we hear from the hierarchy and its defenders. I was very interested to read in Fr. Horan's article about Bl. John Scotus' advocacy for the superiority of intuitive knowledge. I dug deeper and found that "Scotus understands intuitive cognition by way of contrast with abstractive cognition...my intelligible species of dog only tells me what it is to be a dog; it doesn't tell me whether a particular dog actually exists. Intuitive cognition, by contrast, 'yields information about how things are right now'."

So put simply, we can see clearly, in real-world statistics and the stories of so many, that the hierarchy's current teaching is harmful (TW for link: suicide). The research i