770 FOUETH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
Hell is in the rebellious will. Predestination is, in brief, the eternal law and the immutable order of nature, whereby the elect are restored from their ruin and the rejected are shut up in their ruin.1
b. The return of all things to God considered according to their temporal principles, or the doctrine of salvation. There are only a few scattered remarks upon this subject in Scotus Erigena. Christ is the Saviour by what he is in himself, not by what he does. His death is only important as the means of resurrection; which began with the resurrection and exaltation of Christ, because then all things began to return to their union in their primordial causes, and this return constitutes salvation. The consequences of salvation are therefore felt by angels as well as men, and even by inanimate things.2 Salvation, as far as we are concerned, consists in speculative knowledge. We unite ourselves with God by virtue of contemplation.3
c. The return of all things to God considered according to their future completion. All things came out from God, all things go back to God. This is the law of creation. The foundation of this return is the return of man to the Logos. The steps are, 1st, deliverance from the bodily forms ; 2d, resurrection and the abrogation of sex ; 3d, the transformation of body into spirit ; 4th, the return to the primordial causes; 5th, the recession of nature, along with these causes, into God. But this, of course, implies that God alone will exist forever,
1 " Sicut enim Deus electorum, quos prsedestinavit ad gratiam, liberavit voluntatem, eamque caritatis suse affectibus impl'vit, ut non solum intra fines setcrnse legis gaudeant contineri, sed etiam ipsos transire nee velle. nee posse maximum suse glorix munus esse non dubitent; ita reproborum, guns prsedestinavit ad pcenam turpissimam, coercet voluntatem, ut e contrario, quicquid illis pertinet ad gandium beatse vise, istis vertatur in snpplicium miserise." De div. Prscd. XVIII. vii. (col. 434), cf. XVII. i. v.
2 " Nonne Verbum assumens hominem, omnem creaturam visibilem et invisibilem zcccpit, et totum, quod in homine accepit salvum fecit." De div. nat. V. 25 (col. 913).
8 " Commune ommium, qwzfacta sunt, quodam veluti interitu redire in causas, quce in Deo subsist unt ; prnprium vero intellectual™ et raitonalis substantive, unumcum Deo virtute contemplation™, et Deus per gratiam fieri." V. 21 (col.
^176. JOHANNES SCOTUS ERJGENA. 771
and that there can be no eternal punishment. Seotus Erigena tries in vain to escape both these logical conclusions.1
HIS PHILOSOPHY.
Ucberweg thus states Seotus P>igena's philosophical position and teachings:2 "The fundamental idea, and at the same time the fundamental error, in Erigena's doctrine is the idea that the degrees of abstraction correspond with the degrees in the scale of real existence. He hypostasizes the Tabula Lor/ica. The universals are before and also in the individual objects which exist, or rather the latter are in the former: the distinction be tween these (Realistic) formula) appears not yet developed in his writings. . . . He is throughout a Realist. He teaches, it is true, that grammar and rhetoric, as branches of dialectic or aids to it, relate only to words, not to things, and that they are therefore not properly sciences; but he co-ordinates dialectic itself with ethics, physics and theology, defining it as the doc trine of the methodical form of knowledge, and assigning to it in particular, as its work, the discussion of the most general conceptions or logical categories (predicaments); which cate gories he by no means regards as merely subjective forms or images, but as the names of the highest genera of all created things
" The most noteworthy features in his theory of the categories are his doctrine of the combination of the categories with each other, and his attempt to subsume them under the conceptions of motion and rest; as also his identification of the categories of place with definition in logic, which, he says, is the work of the understanding. The dialectical precepts which relate to the form or method of philosophising are not discussed by him in detail; the most essential thing in his regard is the use of the four forms, called by the Greeks division, definition, demonstra-
1 II. 6, 8, V. 7, 8, 3-6. Cf. Christlieb, /. c. p. 802.
2 I. pp. 360, 363, 364.