Erigena, JOHANNES SCOTUS, a famous philosopher of the 9th century, according to one account was born at 'Ergene,' in Herefordshire, to another at Ayr, but was more probably a Scot of Ireland, and born there between 800 and 815. His residence at the court of Charles the Bald, in France, where he was from 843 the head of the 'court school' (schola palatina), is the only part of his history that is certainly known. He came (851) to the help of Hincmar in the Predestination controversy with the doctrine, hitherto unknown in the West, that evil is simply that which has no existence, and that therefore damnation is not a positive punishment by God, but only consists in the consciousness of having failed to fulfil the divine purpose. The Council of Valence condemned this pultes Scotorum ('Scots porridge') as 'an invention of the devil.' The tradition is that, after the death of Charles the Bald (877), Erigena was forced to leave France under the suspicion of heresy, was called to England by Alfred the Great, and died about 880, as abbot of Malmesbury, a violent death at the hands of his scholars. But this tradition seems unsupported, and good authorities have convinced themselves that he never left France, but died there about 877. Erigena translated only too literally, into Latin (860), the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and afterwards the Greek scholia of Maximus to the writings of Gregory Nazianzen. His chief work, De Divisione Naturæ, lib. v. (854), was condemned by a provincial council at Sens, and by Pope Honorius III. (1225), who described the book as 'swarming with worms of heretical perversity.' It was published by Gale (Oxford, 1681), and by Schlüter (Münster, 1638), and was placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum by Gregory XIII. in 1685. (There is a German translation by Noack, 1872-76.) In this work Erigena develops a speculative system on the basis of the gnosis of Origen, the theosophy of the Areopagite, and the dialectic of Maximus Confessor. His aim was to reconcile the fundamental truths of Christianity with human reason, but his system is simply Pantheism, in which God and the world are merged in the higher unity of 'Nature.' Nature—to Erigena the sum of all being and not-being (the necessary complement of being)—has a fourfold form of existence: (1) Natura creans non creata—i.e. God, as the uncreated Creator of all things; (2) Natura creata creans—i.e. the Word from God, by whom all things are made (the Son); (3) Natura creata non creans—i.e. the world, creation, or nature in the narrower sense; (4) Natura non creans et non creata—i.e. God, as the final goal of all creation, to whom everything created returns in a universal Apocatastasis (q.v.). Recent writers have shown that Erigena is to be regarded not as an independent thinker, but as a skilful reproducer of Greek speculations.
The complete edition of the works of Erigena, edited by H. T. Floss, forms vol. cxxii. (Paris, 1853) of the Patrologia of Migne. His Life has been written by Staudenmaier (1834) and Hermens (1868). See the monographs by St. René Taillandier (1843), Christlieb (1860), Huber (1861), Hoffmann (1876), and Buchwald (1884); the Sketch in Maurice's Medieval Philosophy (1856); and Alice Gardner's John the Scot (1900).