John Scotus Eriugena
Irish Catholic philosopher and theologian (c. 800 - c. 877) · Academics · Died at 77
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Something wrong?An Irish monk who knew Greek when almost no one in the West did, and who used it to rebuild Neoplatonism from Christian texts alone - producing a ninth-century metaphysics so strange and total that Bertrand Russell called him the most astonishing person of his century.
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, One man stands head and shoulders above his contemporary scholars: head and shoulders, some hold, above the Middle Ages: John Scotus Erigena.
Synthesizing as it does the philosophical accomplishments of fifteen centuries, this book appears as the final achievement of ancient philosophy.
About this person
Born around 800, John Scotus Eriugena studied Greek in Ireland at a time when the language had nearly vanished from Western Europe. He succeeded Alcuin of York as head of the Palace School at Aachen and translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His major work, De Divisione Naturae, set out to unfold the entire structure of reality from the concept of physis - "all things which are and which are not" - through a dialectical method that wove together the human mind and the divine logos. Scholars have called it the final achievement of ancient philosophy, a synthesis of fifteen centuries, and noted that Eriugena reinvented most of Neoplatonism's core theses while drawing almost exclusively from Christian sources. He died around 877; a later legend claims his students stabbed him to death with their pens at Malmesbury, though this is likely allegory.
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