SCOTUS
461
SCOTUS
imaginable — the impalpable and inapprehensible which lies beyond the present sphere of the existent or of the conceivable. This fourth nature might be altogether rejected, but it would make a fatal breach in this rare- tied scheme of philosophy. Erigena justifies and pro- vides for it in his first and most general division of things — into those which are and those which are not. There is a very marked Erigenism, or Hibernicism, in the second category. It is necessary, however, to the doctrine; for he declares that even tiod is, in a certain sense, non-existent. He is, and he is not. Absurd and blasphemous as such a proposition appears, it finds a parallel, as M. Caraman points out, in a similar utterance by Fenelon. What is meant is simply, as the context in both cases reveals, that all language is inadequate — all known qualities, perfections, characteristics, terms, im- proper— for the definition of the Divinity ; that beyond all utterance, beyond all imagination, is everything ap- pertaining to the Divine Essence. So far as this perfect nature lies without the apprehensible realm of the cre- ated and of the uncreated, it is for us non-existent, since esse and sch-e are one and correlative. There may be extravagance of conception and exaggeration of ex- pression in such a thesis, but it is not necessarily either irreverent or absurd in its import. The fourth nature, then, as it is only in ]}Osse, belongs to the Divine Nat- ure, or to the yet unmanifested operations of its re- served will and power.
The tendencj' of this quadrifid nature is evidently to pantheism, if it is not already pantheistic. The tenden- cy is apparently pressed to its consummation in the de- velopment of the scheme, which is controlled in form and ill statement by the text of Dionysius and the spirit of Neo-Platonism. Hence flow these tenets: "God, who alone truly exists, is the essence of all things; as Di- onysius the Areopagite says, ' God is the beginning, the middle, and the end: the beginning, because all things come from him and participate in his essence; the mid- dle, because all things subsist in him and by him ; the end, because all things move towards liim to attain re- pose, the limit of their motion, and the stability of his perfection,'" etc. " Nothing subsists outside of the Di- vine Nature; it alone properly and truly exists in all things, and nothing properly and truly exists which it is not. . . . Creation is the jirocession of (iod through primordial causes to the invisible and visible effects of such causation. . . . Matter is only ajiparent; there is no real substance but the Divine Essence." It is not sur- prising that Scotus Erigena has been frequently regard- ed as the precursor of Spinoza, though Hrucker distin- guishes between the pantheism of the former and the atheism which he erroneouslv attributes to the latter.
If the language which Scotus employed is received literally; if the phraseology which he borrows from Neo-Platonic sources or from the shaping influences of Neo-Platonic mysticism is alone considered, it is impos- sible to regard his philosophy as anything else but pan- theism. His writings were, of course, accepted literally by his contemporaries so far as they were understood. The hazardous consequences of his doctrine were the more readily apprehended, as certain explicit dogmas were obviously at variance with tlie teachings of tlie Church, such as the denial of transubstantiation and the subordination of authority to reason. Tiiat such shoidd be the censure of the 9th century is much more pardon- able than that metaphysicians of the 19th should rarely see in The Dirision o/ Na/ure anything but crude and unmitigated pantheism. Crude it is not, for it is char- acterized throughout by acute penetration and vigorous thought. Unmitigated it is not, for there is a cautious asseveration of the restrictions and im potency of the human mind and of language. The Divine Nature, in regard to which he boldly speculates, is declared by him to be unutterable, ineffable, incomprehensii)le, superes- sential, supersubstantial, superdivine. In his struggles to grasp the inapprehensible, he invents terms transcend- ing all human appreciation, like a Byzantine emperor
devising titles of hypersiq:ierlative dignity. Some palli- ation may be ottered even for the a[)parcnt pantheism, which is, perhaps, more in the framework and ])hraseol- ogy of the doctrine — in the inevitable vagueness of the expression — than in the actual contemplation of the au- thor. It must, indeed, be acknowledged that all inac- curacies or imbecilities of language react upon those from whom they proceed, modify all subsequent deduc- tions, and infect the mind of the propounder without his cognizance and contrary to his design. But, while the immediate and derivative consequences of such aberra- tions should be fully recognised, they should be treated as aberrations, and, therefore, as undesigned. Such tenderness of consideration is merited by Scotus Erige- na, an earnest thinker, and the first original thinker in philosophy in mediteval Christendom, when the mate- rials of thought and the materials of exjiression were as yet loose and indeterminate. Examining the De Di- visione NaUirce with the caution and reservations which such tenderness prescribes, it may be conjectured that, when Erigena speaks of God being all things and of all things being God, he really means little more than is implied in the Scripture phrase : " in whom we live, and move, and have our being;" that when he speaks of all things proceeding from God, and of all things returning to him, he does not intend to assert the mere evolution of Deity into shifting phenomenal forms, or the reab- sorption into his essence of the emanations which have streamed out from his nature, but only that the divine power of creation, in its eternal operation, accompanies all the developments of creation and attends the latest modes of change. Erigena asseverates creation through- out; he does not identify the Divinity with created forms, nor does he deny the separable character of such forms in any of their stages. These views are incon- sistent with intentional pantheism. These considera- tions can, however, only be suggested, not explained or developed.