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De Divisione Naturae ("The Division of Nature") is the title given by Thomas Gale to his edition (1681) of the work originally titled by 9th-century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena Periphyseon. [1]
The work was probably carried out beginning in the early 860s and completed around 866–67. This is based on a dedication in the book identifying as frater (brother) Wulfad, who was made a bishop in 866, making it unlikely that Eriugena would have used so casual a reference after that elevation. The work was not widely circulated in the author's lifetime. Eriugena was assisted by one, possibly two other persons in writing the book, based on the presence of margin notes indicating the penmanship of two separate persons. One of these is believed to have been Eriugena himself, while the script indicates that the second writer was a fellow Irishman.
The work is arranged in five books. The original plan was to devote one book to each of the four divisions, but the topic of creation required expansion. The form of exposition is that of dialogue; the method of reasoning is the syllogism. Natura is the name for the universal, the totality of all things, containing in itself being and non-being. It is the unity of which all special phenomena are manifestations.
Eriugena develops a Neoplatonic cosmology according to which the infinite, transcendent and 'unknown' God, who is beyond being and non-being, through a process of self-articulation, procession, or 'self-creation', proceeds from his divine 'darkness' or 'non-being' into the light of being, speaking the Word who is understood as Christ, and at the same timeless moment bringing forth the Primary Causes of all creation... He treats of the essentially dialectical relation between Creator and created, where God expresses Himself in creation and creation culminates in return to the divine. [2]
Within this nature, Eriugena distinguishes four species, although he theorizes that the distinction between beginning, middle and end is a result of the limits of human comprehension, and that the three are essentially one eternal process. [2]
The first of Eriugena's natures is God as the ground or origin of all things. Eriugena describes the "creation" of the world as really being a theophania, or showing forth of the Essence of God in the things created. Creation, for Eriugena, is a process of unfolding of the Divine Nature, wherein God reveals himself to the mind through the intellect, and to the senses through the created world. [3]
Eriugena's second nature is the Platonic realm of primordial causes or ideas. These include goodness, wisdom, intuition (insight), understanding, virtue, greatness, power, and so on. [3]
Eriugena holds that God the Father "created" these in God the Son, and that they in turn "create" by determining the generic and specific natures of concrete visible things. He describes them as, although created, identical with God, with their locus in God the Son, and therefore as being operative causes and not merely static types. Some critics interpret Eriugena as saying that the primordial causes are identical with God the Son; others, like the Catholic Encyclopedia, disagree. [3]
Eriugena describes his third nature as the place where the stream of reality, having set out from the first nature and passed through the second, enters the realm of space and time. Here the pure ideas take on the burden of matter and produce the appearance of reality, becoming subject to multiplicity, change, imperfection, and decay. In this, Eriugena attempts a reconciliation of Platonism with Aristotelean notions.
The last of Eriugena's natures is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns. Eriugena describes the return to God as proceeding through the previous three steps in inverse order: elements become light, light becomes life, life becomes sense, sense becomes reason, reason becomes intellect, intellect becomes ideas in Christ, the Word of God, and through Christ returns to the oneness of God from which all the processes of nature began. For Eriugena, this "incorporation" in Christ takes place by means of divine grace in the Church, of which Christ is the invisible head.
French journalist and author Jean-Jacques Gabut says "Moreover, a certain pantheism, or rather pandeism , emerges from his work where Neo-Platonic inspiration perfectly complements the strict Christian orthodoxy." [4] According to William Turner, professor of philosophy at Catholic University of America, the doctrine of the final return of all things to God shows very clearly the influence of Origen. In general, the system of thought outlined is a combination of neo-Platonic mysticism, emanationism, and pantheism which Eriugena strove in vain to reconcile with Aristotelean empiricism, Christian creationism, and theism. "The result is a body of doctrines loosely articulated, in which the mystic and idealistic elements predominate, and in which there is much that is irreconcilable with Catholic dogma." [3]
Eriugena himself denied explicitly that he was a pantheist. "God is all in all. All things that are in God, even are God, are eternal...the creature subsists in God, and God is created in the creature in a wonderful and ineffable way, making himself manifest, invisible making himself visible...But the divine nature, he finally insists, because it is above being, is different from what it create within itself." [5] Although Eriugena asserts the identity of God and creation, he explicitly rejects the view that God is the 'genus' or 'whole' (totum) of which the creatures are 'species' or 'parts'. Only metaphorically can it be said that God is a 'genus' or a 'whole'. Assertions concerning the immanence of God in creation are always balanced in Eriugena's writings by assertions of God's transcendence above all things." [2]
De Divisione Naturae was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), for promoting the identity of God and creation, and by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. In 1681, the long-lost work was found at Oxford University, and was immediately placed on the 'Index of Forbidden Books', a turn of events which likely actually spurred its popularity. Despite this result, Turner noted of Eriugena that "there can be no doubt that he himself abhorred heresy, was disposed to treat the heretic with no small degree of harshness..., and all through his life believed himself an unswervingly loyal son of the Church." [3] Étienne Gilson also argued that Eriugena's alleged pantheism derived from a misunderstanding of the nature of "division" in the Periphyseon. [6] Gilson writes that Eriugena's "nature" is not meant as a totality of which God and creatures are parts; or as a genus of which God and creatures would be species. He argues that God is not all things, nor are all things God, and that Eriugena explicitly calls such a division a monstrosity. [7] (III, ro; 650 D). The division of nature signifies the act by which God expresses himself in hierarchical declension, and making himself known in a hierarchy of beings which are other than, and inferior to, him by being lesser grades of reality; "yet, in point of fact, Erigena only means that each and every creature is essentially a manifestation, under the form of being, of what is above being. The esse of a being is but a light radiated by the superesse, which is God." [8]
In Main Currents of Marxism , the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski identifies De divisione naturae as the archetype of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind . [9]
The Division of Nature has been called the final achievement of ancient philosophy, a work which "synthesizes the philosophical accomplishments of fifteen centuries and appears as the final achievement of ancient philosophy." [10] It is presented, like Alcuin's book, as a dialogue between Master and Pupil. Eriugena anticipates Thomas Aquinas, who said that one cannot know and believe a thing at the same time. Eriugena explains that reason is necessary to understand and interpret revelation. "Authority is the source of knowledge", but the reason of mankind is the norm by which all authority is judged. [1]
Amalric of Bena was a French theologian, philosopher and sect leader, after whom the Amalricians are named. Reformers such as Martin Luther considered him to be a proto-Protestant.
Monism attributes oneness or singleness to a concept, such as to existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:
Pantheism is the philosophical religious belief that reality, the universe, and nature are identical to divinity or a supreme entity. The physical universe is thus understood as an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time. The term pantheist designates one who holds both that everything constitutes a unity and that this unity is divine, consisting of an all-encompassing, manifested god or goddess. All astronomical objects are thence viewed as parts of a sole deity.
Panentheism /pænenˈθiːɪzəm/ is the belief that the divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828 to distinguish the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) about the relation of God and the universe from the supposed pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.
Predestination, in theology, is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God, usually with reference to the eventual fate of the individual soul. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the paradox of free will, whereby God's omniscience seems incompatible with human free will. In this usage, predestination can be regarded as a form of religious determinism; and usually predeterminism, also known as theological determinism.
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches God or the Divine by affirmations or positive statements about what God is.
Nontrinitarianism is a form of Christianity that rejects the mainstream Christian theology of the Trinity—the belief that God is three distinct hypostases or persons who are coeternal, coequal, and indivisibly united in one being, or essence. Certain religious groups that emerged during the Protestant Reformation have historically been known as antitrinitarian.
In Christian theology, divinization, or theopoesis or theosis, is the transforming effect of divine grace, the spirit of God, or the atonement of Christ. Although it literally means to become divine, or to become God, most modern Christian denominations do not interpret the doctrine as implying an overcoming of a fundamental ontological difference between God and humanity; for example, John of the Cross indicated that while "God communicates to it [the individual soul] His supernatural Being, in such wise that it appears to be God Himself, and has all that God Himself has", yet "it is true that its natural being, though thus transformed, is as distinct from the Being of God as it was before".
Naturalistic pantheism, also known as scientific pantheism, is a form of pantheism. It has been used in various ways such as to relate God or divinity with concrete things, determinism, or the substance of the universe. God, from these perspectives, is seen as the aggregate of all unified natural phenomena. The phrase has often been associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, although academics differ on how it is used. Natural pantheists believe that God is the entirety of the universe and that God speaks through the scientific process.
David of Dinant was a pantheistic philosopher. He may have been a member of, or at least been influenced by, a pantheistic sect known as the Amalricians. David was condemned by the Church in 1210 for his writing of the "Quaternuli", which forced him to flee Paris. When and where he died is unknown; all that can be ascertained is that he died after the year 1215, as he was condemned again in the council of 1215.
John Scotus Eriugena, also known as Johannes Scotus Erigena, John the Scot, or John the Irish-born was an Irish Neoplatonist philosopher, theologian and poet of the Early Middle Ages. Bertrand Russell dubbed him "the most astonishing person of the ninth century". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that he "is the most significant Irish intellectual of the early monastic period. He is generally recognized to be both the outstanding philosopher of the Carolingian era and of the whole period of Latin philosophy stretching from Boethius to Anselm".
Generally speaking, Buddhism is a religion that does not include the belief in a monotheistic creator deity. As such, it has often been described as either (non-materialistic) atheism or as nontheism, though these descriptions have been challenged by other scholars, since some forms of Buddhism do posit different kinds of transcendent, unborn, and unconditioned ultimate realities.
The Summa Theologiae or Summa Theologica, often referred to simply as the Summa, is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a scholastic theologian and Doctor of the Church. It is a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Catholic Church, intended to be an instructional guide for theology students, including seminarians and the literate laity. Presenting the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, topics of the Summa follow the following cycle: God; Creation, Man; Man's purpose; Christ; the Sacraments; and back to God.
In religion, transcendence is the aspect of existence that is completely independent of the material universe, beyond all known physical laws. This is related to the nature and power of deities as well as other spiritual or supernatural beings and forces. This is contrasted with immanence, where a god is said to be fully present in the physical world and thus accessible to creatures in various ways. In religious experience, transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence, and by some definitions, has also become independent of it. This is typically manifested in prayer, rituals, meditation, psychedelics and paranormal "visions".
Conceptions of God in classical theist, monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist traditions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:
In Christianity, the Logos is a name or title of Jesus Christ, seen as the pre-existent second person of the Trinity. In the Douay–Rheims, King James, New International, and other versions of the Bible, the first verse of the Gospel of John reads:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The term monad is used in some cosmic philosophy and cosmogony to refer to a most basic or original substance. As originally conceived by the Pythagoreans, the Monad is the Supreme Being, divinity or the totality of all things. According to some philosophers of the early modern period, most notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, there are infinite monads, which are the basic and immaterial elementary particles, or simplest units, that make up the universe.
Pandeism is a theological doctrine that combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. Unlike classical deism, which holds that the creator deity does not interfere with the universe after its creation, pandeism holds that such an entity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity. Pandeism purports to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and pandeism seeks to explain the origin and purpose of the universe.
The belief that God became the Universe is a theological doctrine that has been developed several times historically, and holds that the creator of the universe actually became the universe. Historically, for versions of this theory where God has ceased to exist or to act as a separate and conscious entity, some have used the term pandeism, which combines aspects of pantheism and deism, to refer to such a theology. A similar concept is panentheism, which has the creator become the universe only in part, but remain in some other part transcendent to it, as well. Hindu texts like the Mandukya Upanishad speak of the undivided one which became the universe.
A number of Christian writers have examined the concept of pandeism, and these have generally found it to be inconsistent with core principles of Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, condemned the Periphyseon of John Scotus Eriugena, later identified by physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein as presenting a pandeistic theology, as appearing to obscure the separation of God and creation. The Church similarly condemned elements of the thought of Giordano Bruno which Weinstein and others determined to be pandeistic.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain ."What is left but to declare what particularly worries me, namely, how all things are eternal and made, how those things which are without beginning and end are limited by beginning and end. For these are in mutual conflict, and how they should be reconciled I do not know if you do not tell me; for I thought that only God is άναρχος, that is, without beginning — for He is the Beginning and the End which arises out of no beginning and concludes in no end — whereas all other things begin and tend each to its proper end, and therefore are not eternal but made. And incomparably more profound and wonderful than all this seems to me the assertion you made on the authority of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, namely, that God Himself is both the Maker of all things and is made in all things; for this was never heard or known before either by me or by many, or by nearly all. For if this is the case, who will not at once break out and exclaim in these words: God is all things and all things God? But this will be considered monstrous even by those who are regarded as wise when the manifold variety of things visible and invisible is considered — for God is one —, and unless you support these arguments by illustrations from things which the mind can comprehend there is no alternative but either to pass over subjects which have been merely raised without being discussed — which could not be done without my mind regretting it; for those who, being plunged in thickest darkness, hope for the rising of the light to come are not completely overwhelmed by sorrow; but if the light they hope for is taken away from them they will sit not only in darkness but in great torment, for the good which they had hoped for is taken away from them —, or everything that you have said about these things is to be judged by those of limited understanding to be altogether false, and for them to relapse into their former opinions, which they were already abandoning only with reluctance, as being true, and rejecting these. [P.III, 650C-651A]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "John Scotus Eriugena". Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company.