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 JOHN THE SCOT
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 JOHN THE SCOT 
 
 (ERIGENA) 
 
 A PHILOSOPHER OF THE DARK AGES 
 
 ALICE GARDNER 
 
 LECTURER AND ASSOCIATE OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 AUTHOR OF 'JULIAN THE PHILOSOPHER,' 'SYNESIUS OF CYRENE,' ETC. 
 
 ' Lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae earn non comprehenderunt' 
 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AMEN CORNER, E.G. 
 
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 TO 
 
 L. A. H. 
 
 ' HOC OPUS . . . TIBI ... IN STUDIIS SAPIENTIAE 
 COOPERATORI . . . OFFERO ET COMMITTO. NAM ET 
 TUIS EXHORTATIONIBUS EST INCHOATUM, TUAQUE 
 SOLERTIA, QUOQUO MODO SIT, AD FINEM USQUE 
 PERDUCTUM.' 
 
 JOHN THE SCOT TO BISHOP WULFAD 
 
 (De Divisione Naturae v. 40).
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 8 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 MY apology in publishing these little studies 
 
 of a mediaeval and apparently remote philosopher 
 
 may be given in a few words. Since I began to 
 
 . work at this subject I have been repeatedly struck 
 
 UJ 
 
 Hi by the want of familiarity on the part of the read- 
 i ing public with the very name of John the Scot, 
 
 o whom many educated people still confuse with 
 } his namesake Duns of unhappy reputation. At 
 the same time I have noticed how all students 
 of philosophy, who have made even a slight ac- 
 quaintance with him, have felt the impression of 
 a deep thinker and an original character. And 
 some indications (notably the interest excited in 
 the Bampton Lectures for last year on ' Christian 
 Mysticism ') have led me to think that a good 
 many English people feel, at the present moment, 
 
 437401
 
 vi Preface 
 
 strongly drawn towards those developments of 
 religious thought of which, in Western Europe, 
 my philosopher is one of the earliest exponents, 
 and that if only they obtained some insight into 
 his mind and feelings, they would hail him as 
 a fellow searcher after truth, rather than pass 
 him by as a musty schoolman. 
 
 I probably do not stand alone in having been 
 first attracted to the person and attitude of 
 Scotus by the charming sketch given in Guizot's 
 Civilisation en France. The more thorough works 
 on his philosophy, chiefly in German, are men- 
 tioned in my footnotes. The edition of Scotus 
 to which I refer is that of Floss in the Patrologia 
 of Migne. 
 
 This work does not purport to be a complete 
 account of the Scottian philosophy. Some im- 
 portant branches have been but incidentally 
 touched upon, or perhaps omitted altogether. My 
 object has been to represent as widely as I could 
 some aspects of that philosophy in relation 
 to the thought of those times aspects which 
 had struck me as peculiarly interesting, and which 
 therefore seemed to me likely to interest others.
 
 Preface vii 
 
 At the same time I hope that I have pointed out 
 the chief authorities and guides necessary for any 
 students who desire to give their attention to 
 other topics than those herein treated. 
 
 In the course of my work I have met with 
 much encouragement and many helpful suggestions 
 from colleagues and friends. From my brother, 
 Professor Percy Gardner, I have received help in 
 the correction of the proofs. As, however, most 
 of the assistance I have received has been of a 
 general and informal character, my thanks must 
 also be expressed generally, though not wanting 
 in sincerity. 
 
 If I have seemed, in the eyes of experts in 
 philosophy and theology, to trespass on wide and 
 dangerous fields, I may plead in excuse that to 
 a certain extent every conscious thinker, how- 
 ever slight his powers and however imperfect his 
 training, must be, in a sense, both philosopher 
 and theologian. And I may add that an amateur 
 may be pardoned for trying a piece of work which, 
 in this country at least, has not already been 
 accomplished by an expert. For better and for 
 worse, this little book has been a labour of love,
 
 viii Preface 
 
 and I send it forth with no expectation that it 
 will prove of value to the learned, but with a keen 
 hope that it may attract, stimulate and encourage 
 some spirits akin to that of Scotus himself. If 
 I merit thanks in any quarter, it will be from 
 those who can only find present life tolerable if 
 lived in friendship with the past. 
 
 ALICE GARDNER. 
 
 NEWNHAH COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 March 1900.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FRANCO-ROMAN, THE GREEK, AND THE 
 IRISHMAN 1-23 
 
 Scotus, the Irishman, introducing Dionysius Areopagitica, 
 the Greek, to Charles the Bald, the Franco-Koman, i. Char- 
 acter and historical position of Charles, 2. Works of 
 Dionysius and traditions respecting him, 5. John the Scot : 
 facts and fictions of his life, n. His character as mediator 
 between East and West, 15. Three critical periods in 
 Christian thought, 21. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 24-45 
 
 Theological tone of Scotus and of his times, 24. Semitic 
 and Hellenic ideas of the Divine, 27. Dionysius on the 
 Transcendent God, 28. Scotus considers the categories 
 inapplicable to God, 31. Subjective character of his theo- 
 logy, 32. Nature of revelation, 33. Creation, 37. Four- 
 fold division of nature, 40. Rejection of Pantheism, 43. 
 Acceptance of Christian doctrines in a mystic sense, 43.
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PREDESTINARIAN CONTROVERSY . . 46-72 
 
 Scotus not naturally controversial, 46. Beginning of dis- 
 putes on Dual Predestination, 49. Hincmar of Eheims, 49. 
 Questions involved in that of Predestination, 50. Character 
 of mediaeval controversy, 53. Three conflicting views, 54. 
 Beginnings of Gottschalk, 55. Eabanus Maurus and the 
 Councils of Metz and Chiersey, 58. Confessions, sufferings 
 and death of Gottschalk, 61. Appeal to Scotus, 63. His 
 treatise De Divina Praedettinatione, 64. Opposed by Pru- 
 deutius and Remigius, 67. New articles of Chiersey and 
 of Valence, 69. Bearing of questions on that of ecclesi- 
 astical authority, 70. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SYMBOLISM AND SACRAMENT. PART TAKEN BY 
 SCOTUS IN THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY . 73-96 
 
 Relation of philosophy to theology, 73. Connexion of 
 Eucharistic controversy with that on Predestination, 74. 
 Ideas of Scotus on sacraments and symbols, 76. Interpre- 
 tations of ritual and myth by Hellenes and Christians, 77. 
 Dionysius on the Communion, 81. Scotus on sacramental 
 character of all nature and of Christian ritual, 83. Early 
 beliefs as to change in the consecrated elements, 85. Treatise 
 of Radbertus, 85. Rabanus and Ratramnus oppose, 87. 
 Lanfranc and Berengarius, 89. Did Scotus write a book 
 on the subject ? three theories, 91. Sacramental views of 
 Scotus above those of either party, 93.
 
 Contents xi 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 1'AUK 
 
 SCOTUS AS OPTIMIST 97-114 
 
 Question of optimism and evil more proper than the 
 others to the system of Scotus, 97. Evil only apparent, 99. 
 Theory of cyclic revolutions, 100. Intellectual and moral 
 difficulties, loi. Final return of the sensible world into 
 God, 105. His interpretation of the Fall of Man, 107. 
 The Incarnation of the Logos, 109. Nature of final punish- 
 ment, 109. Steps towards the consummation, H2. Scotism 
 and Nirvana, 113. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SCOTUS AS SUBJECTIVE IDEALIST . . . 115-132 
 
 Scotus and modern thinkers, 115. Discussion as to 
 existent and non-existent, with theory of locus, 118. 
 Matter not conceived apart from mind, 121. The world as 
 existing in and for consciousness only, 122. Time and 
 space as mental conditions, 124. Identification of thought 
 and being, 126. The Divine as realized in human con- 
 sciousness, 128. Relation of Scotus to Nominalists and 
 Realists, 130. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF SCOTUS. CONCLUSION . 133-145 
 
 Influence of Scotus not confined to that of his writings, 
 133. His principles and those of Tauler and the Freumlv 
 Gottes, 135. The Theologia Germanica, 136. His 
 followers persecuted as heretics: Amalric of Bene, 136. 
 David of Dinant, 138. Bull of Honorius III against De 
 Divisione Naturae, 139. It is put on the Index, 140. 
 Contrasts between Scotus and most of his contemporaries, 
 141. Not modern because not historical, 143. His ethics, 
 144. Hi merit as an independent thinker, 145.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 The Franco-Roman, the Greek, and the Irishman. 
 
 ' In quibusdam ... a Latinorum tramite deviavit, dum in 
 Graecos acriter oculos intendit. Quare et haereticus putatus est.' 
 WILLIAM OP MALMESBCRY, writing of John the Scot. 
 
 WHATEVER years we may choose to indicate the 
 beginning and the end of the Dark Ages, that 
 period must include the datejust about the middle 
 of the ninth century of our era, in which Charles 
 the Bald, King of the Franks, grandson of the 
 great restorer of the Roman Empire, himself to 
 be crowned Emperor before his death, gave to 
 John the Scot, his distinguished guest from Ireland, 
 the task of translating from Greek into Latin the 
 works of the mystic Neo-Platonic theologian, who 
 goes by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. 
 
 That an Irishman should take the Greek by 
 the hand and lead him into the presence of the 
 B
 
 2 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Frank who ruled over great part of the Western 
 Empire, seems a by no means incongruous fact 
 to those who have studied the history of those 
 times. To realize its significance, let us glance 
 for a moment at each of the persons or types that 
 figure in the scene before us. 
 
 Charles the Bald is not a noble and commanding 
 figure in mediaeval history. Trained, after his 
 over-indulged boyhood, in the school of adversity, 
 he did not prove himself capable of profiting by 
 its lessons. He was the youngest child, by the 
 clever Suabian lady Judith, of the feeble Emperor, 
 Lewis the Pious. Even before his father's death, 
 his brothers had risen in revolt against his mother's 
 influence and their father's partiality for the child 
 of his old age. After the death of Lewis in 840, 
 we have, as frequently in early Prankish history, 
 a series of fratricidal wars, broken up by insecure 
 treaties and inexplicable changes of side. The 
 partition treaty made at Verdun in 843 is some- 
 times taken as a landmark in history, because by 
 it the territory which, generally speaking, makes 
 up modern France was made into a separate 
 kingdom for Charles, and the oath by which the 
 treaty was confirmed gives us what is taken to be 
 the earliest specimen of the French language. But 
 if Charles might, in a sense, be regarded as the first 
 King of France, and though he had one notable 
 French characteristic an appreciation of the ad- 
 vantages and of the great possibilities of the city
 
 Introductory 3 
 
 of Paris l he neither devoted himself to the task 
 of defending his Western realm, nor confined his 
 ambition within its borders. As unready as our 
 own Ethelred, he repeatedly bribed the Vikings 
 vainly as the sequel showed to retire from the 
 coasts of Gaul, or to turn their arms one against 
 another. He availed himself of deaths and quarrels 
 among brothers and nephews to extend his territory 
 to the north, and even, shortly before the close of 
 his life, to obtain the imperial crown in Rome. 
 His life and death were inglorious and ineffectual, 
 unmarked by great achievements even of a transi- 
 tory nature. Yet in the history of culture he 
 bears another character, and continues the best 
 traditions of his house. 
 
 However much we may allow for the partiality 
 of panegyrists, the fact that the panegyrists were 
 there proves that there was a patron. And the 
 patronage of learning undertaken by the Caro- 
 lingians was, after all, more deserving of laudation 
 than that of Maecenas or of the Medici, in that it 
 was directed not to foster and direct an active 
 literary movement, but rather to strengthen a 
 feeble cause in the dire struggle for existence. It 
 has often been told 2 how Charlemagne laboured no 
 less assiduously for the revival of education than 
 
 1 According to one (not undoubted) copy of the letter of 
 Nicolas I to Charles the Bald concerning Scotus, the latter was 
 head of the School (Studium) in Paris. 
 
 * Especially by Mullinger, Schools of Charles the Great ; and by 
 Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en France.
 
 4 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 for the restoration of order ; how, for him, the 
 championship of Christendom involved the ex- 
 tended sway of Christian and Roman ideas no less 
 than of the imperial arms. His court was a centre 
 of education, such as some of the greater monasteries 
 were to become in later days, till they in turn were 
 superseded in this function by the universities. 
 The story of how the great Emperor commended 
 the boys of humble birth who had made progress 
 in good learning, and sternly reproached the young 
 nobles who neglected such pursuits, is too hackneyed 
 to be repeated here. The education of women seems 
 to have been a part of Charlemagne's idea of civi- 
 lization, or so we should judge from the proficiency 
 in learning attributed to his daughters. If, during 
 the reign of his successor, Lewis the Pious, there 
 was a temporary decline, which drew a despondent 
 wail from some disappointed scholars, such retro- 
 gression seems to have been due rather to the 
 general disorderliness of the times than to any 
 wilful neglect on the part of the Emperor. Of 
 Charles the Bald it may be safely asserted that he 
 followed in the steps of his grandfather, who had 
 summoned Alcuin to his court, in extending hospi- 
 tality to learned men. More than this, he must 
 have had some notion of the particular lines in 
 which his scholarly guests excelled, and some in- 
 tellectual sympathy with them and with their 
 ideas, or he would hardly have taken upon himself 
 to impose so suitable a task on John the Scot, or
 
 Introductory 5 
 
 have appreciated the dedication of the work which 
 he had suggested. 
 
 But what was that work 1 ? If we turn to the 
 Greek philosopher in our group, he seems to be 
 less a man of flesh and blood than a type. Yet 
 like many writers whose . personality has been 
 veiled in obscurity, he has very distinctive features, 
 and has appealed forcibly to the hearts and minds 
 of many men through successive generations. 
 
 The works of Dionysius the Areopagite were 
 now being for the first time presented to the 
 Western world. About' a century before, a copy of 
 them had been given by Pope Paul I to Charles's 
 great-grandfather Pipin. More lately, the Eastern 
 Emperor, Michael Balbus, had given a copy to 
 Lewis the Pious, and an abortive attempt to trans- 
 late them had been made by Abbot Hildwin of 
 St. Denis 1 . But on the present occasion no pope 
 takes any part in the transaction. Relations were x 
 much strained between the Eastern and the Western 
 Churches, the burning question as to the relations 
 of papacy to patriarchate helping to accentuate the 
 distinctions in doctrine which were due to deep- 
 lying differences in the character and modes of 
 thought of Eastern and Western minds. After the 
 work was done, Pope Nicolas I 2 wrote to com- 
 
 1 Christlieb, Joih. Scot. Er., p. 26. A life of Dionysius with 
 a rather inadequate account of his writings, by Hildwin, is published 
 in the Patrologia of Migne, vol. cvi. 
 
 2 See his letter in Floss's edition of John the Scot, pp. 1025, 1026.
 
 6 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 plain to Charles the Bald that a copy had not been 
 sent for his approval. It was not, of course, that 
 he had any suspicions as to Dionysius himself, but 
 the reputation of the translator had become, as we 
 shall see, very dubious. Thus in the introduction 
 of the Greek to the Teuton, the representative of 
 the Roman hierarchy plays the part of a critical 
 outsider. 
 
 But let us turn to the works of Dionysius, which, 
 as has been implied, interest us here as being one 
 of the chief channels by which the ideas and prin- 
 ciples of Greek, and especially of Neo-Platonic 
 philosophy, were conveyed into the stream of 
 Western civilization, though they never became 
 strong enough to dominate its current. 
 
 It may not be superfluous to devote a few words 
 to the traditions concerning Dionysius the Areopa- 
 gite, who is said, in the Acts of the Apostles 
 (xvii. 34), to have followed St. Paul after the 
 address on Mars' Hill. He had already, so runs 
 the story, been prepared to receive the Gospel by 
 having been deeply impressed on beholding the 
 supernatural eclipse on the day of the Passion, 
 when ' it was about the sixth hour ; and there was 
 darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.' 
 He was at that time in the city of Heliopolis, and 
 sought enlightenment from a certain Hierotheus, 
 quoted as his master more than once in the 
 writings. He was made Bishop of Athens by 
 St. Paul, but consorted also with the other Apostles,
 
 Introductory 7 
 
 and was with them immediately after the death of 
 the Virgin Mary. Subsequently he came to Paris, 
 and was martyred there with two companions. 
 This story was believed by John the Scot, who 
 narrates it in the preface to his translation, but 
 for us it seems hardly worth refutation. The 
 chronological difficulties in the way of identifying 
 the original Dionysius with St. Denys of Paris 
 were discovered by the critical mind of Abelard in 
 the twelfth century, and brought down upon him 
 even more wrath than did his deviations from 
 Church doctrine in some really important matters. 
 But the tone of the writings themselves is decisive 
 against the old tradition. The writer, whoever he 
 may have been, was steeped in Neo-Platonism, 
 and may be said to have adapted the Johannine 
 theology and certain of the more mystic elements 
 in the teaching of St. Paul to an essentially Greek 
 system of religion and cosmology, rather than to 
 have merely borrowed certain Greek ideas to eluci- 
 date the doctrine of the Apostles. The system of 
 Church organization which they describe is far too 
 highly developed for the age to which they purport 
 to belong. Then again, we find in them quotations 
 from Ignatius and Clement a patent anachronism 
 which the acuteness of biassed commentators has 
 sought to clear away. Furthermore, if they had 
 been written in the first century, they would have 
 furnished arms for many furious controversies in 
 succeeding days ; whereas we do not anywhere find
 
 8 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 them quoted before 532 A.D. The question of their 
 actual provenance falls beyond our present scope. 
 Vacherot, the learned and delightful historian of 
 the School of Alexandria, and the illustrious 
 Ferdinand Baur would seek for their origin in 
 Athens, because of the affinity shown in them for 
 
 \the doctrines of the Athenian Neo-Platonist Proclus. 
 JDr. Westcott 1 thinks that they came from Syria, 
 .'where the Honophysite heresy (that which denies 
 
 Ithe double nature in Christ) took its rise. Certainly 
 it was a Monophysite sect that first appealed to 
 Aheir authority, though they were early recognized 
 
 /as orthodox both in the East and in the West. 
 
 ( This recognition is at first sight rather puzzling to 
 those who consider not only their positive side 
 their essentially Hellenic character but also their 
 negative or privative aspect the comparatively 
 slight stress laid on those dogmas which in Western 
 Europe have always been regarded as the chief 
 pillars of the Christian religioa In the opinion of 
 Baur, the} 7 derived part of the credit given to them 
 from the support they lent to the hierarchical 
 order, which needed, against the attacks of sacer- 
 dotalists, the arguments to be drawn from the 
 inner meaning given to the hierarchy in the sym- 
 bolic mysticism of the Areopagite. Be this as it 
 may, it is an important fact that these writings 
 were regarded in the Church as of great and 
 ancient authority ; though, as we shall see, as soon 
 
 1 See an interesting paper in the Contemporary Review for 1867.
 
 Introductory 9 
 
 as any thinker, even were he far more Christian in 
 tone than the pseudo-Dionysius himself, applied 
 their principles to the solution of the theological 
 questions which agitated the Western world, he 
 was treated as one who had brought strange fire to 
 burn on the sacred altar. 
 
 The works of the pseudo-Dionysius which John 
 the Scot translated comprise almost all that have 
 come down to us : the treatises on the Celestial 
 Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the Divine 
 Names, and the Mystical Theology, besides a number 
 of letters to notable persons Titus, Polycarp, and 
 others the forgery of which is more palpable than 
 that of the dissertations. The translation is not of 
 a high order, but there is evident a most painful 
 effort to be accurate. Where, as often happens, the 
 text is corrupt, the translator gives the literal 
 equivalent of the words, nobly indifferent to the 
 nonsense produced in his version 1 . This method 
 has the advantage of enabling critics to discover in 
 some cases the actual words which have suffered 
 so grotesque a travesty. 
 
 Besides his translations, John wrote a very 
 lengthy commentary on some of the Dionysian 
 writings, which does not seem to contain much new 
 matter for those who have read the larger original 
 works of Scotus himself. 
 
 1 A good instance of this comes near the end of Epistle VIII, 
 where iraiSf had been written for irate, and John renders 
 ' puer . . . me '
 
 io Studies in John the Scot 
 
 The treatise on the Celestial Hierarchy is a 
 curious combination of the Neo-Platonic doctrine 
 of a series of divine emanations with the later 
 Jewish teaching about angels. Since the writer 
 holds that the passively contemplated is superior 
 to the contemplative, and this again to the active, 
 although every member of the hierarchy receives 
 from those above it and imparts to those below, 
 he can make use both of the Neo-Platonic terms 
 vorjToi and voepoi, and of the names of the three 
 triads which were becoming familiar to Christian 
 minds : Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim ; Dominions, 
 Virtues, Powers ; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. 
 In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy he endeavours to 
 show how the institutions of the Church are 
 modelled on those of the heavens. The bearing 
 of these treatises on the theological and sacra- 
 mental system of the Church as it was at the time 
 when John the Scot made his translation, is an 
 interesting study which will occupy us in the 
 following chapters. It is with the deepest of all 
 theological ideas that the Divine Names and the 
 Mystic Theology are concerned ; as they show how, 
 according to the principles of the higher symbolism, 
 man may legitimately use positive terms as de- 
 scriptive of the Divine Nature, and how, neverthe- 
 less, that Nature can only be accurately spoken of 
 in terms of pure negation. The letters are of 
 varying degrees of interest. In one of them 1 , the 
 1 E P . VIII.
 
 Introductory n 
 
 description of a worthy man gloating over the 
 approaching retribution at hand for notable sinners, 
 till he is reproved by Christ, who comes forward 
 and declares himself ready to suffer once more for 
 the salvation of men, is, perhaps, almost the only 
 passage which shows what modern readers would 
 regard as a distinctly Christian element in his 
 religious philosophy. 
 
 Since these works formed not only the prescribed 
 study, but the chief spiritual and intellectual diet of 
 the man who was set to translate them, our inquiry 
 into the principles of John the Scot will, it is to be 
 hoped, make us more familiar with the Dionysian 
 system. Let us now complete our preliminary 
 survey by looking briefly at the third member of 
 our triad the man by whom the Neo-Platonist 
 was to be introduced to the Western world, John 
 Scotus Erigena 1 . 
 
 That John the Scot was an Irishman there seems 
 little room to doubt, though England, Wales, and 
 Scotland have all set up pretensions to the honour 
 of having given him birth. He may seem a misty 
 figure beside Charles the Bald, though he is cer- 
 tainly more substantial to us than pseudo-Dionysius, 
 for he at least was no pseudo but a vigorous man, 
 
 1 For careful and complete studies of the life and works of John 
 the Scot, see Floss's introduction to his works in Migne's Patro- 
 loffia ; Christlieb's Leben und LeJire des Joh. Scotus Erigena 
 better still, Huber's Johannes Scotus Erigena, and Poole's 
 Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought, besides more 
 general histories of philosophy.
 
 i2 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 however difficult it may be to disengage his life 
 from its legendary wrappings. 
 
 The few facts l of which we can rest assured are 
 that John was born and educated in Ireland ; that 
 he came thence to the court of Charles the Bald, 
 about the year 847 A.D. ; that he lived and wrote 
 at the court, not adorned with any ecclesiastical 
 dignity, but enjoying familiar intercourse with the 
 king, and almost certainly superintending the 
 educational work done in the school of the palace ; 
 and that he was still alive and at court in the year 
 872. Whether he ever lived in Britain we cannot 
 tell. An Irish monastery would have furnished// 
 him with most of the intellectual equipment which 
 he carried with him to France. For generations, 
 the zeal for good learning in the highly monasti- 
 cized, perhaps rather laxly-ruled Irish Church, 
 together with the desire of imparting knowledge 
 to the unlearned, had inspired ' Scots from Ireland 2 ' 
 to set out on intellectual missions to the court of 
 Gaul ; and later on we find complaints of the deluge 
 of Irishmen which resemble all grumblings against 
 alien immigrants, however beneficent the work of 
 such immigrants may be 3 . Here, however, two 
 
 1 In Huber and the other authorities. In Floss's edition of the 
 works of Scotus (pp. 90 et seq.) are given, as arranged by Gale, the 
 chief notices which can be taken as referring to him in mediaeval 
 (by no means always contemporary) writers. 
 
 2 See Geata Kur. Mag. i. i ; Pertz, ii. 731, apud Poole, p. 16. 
 
 1 ' Quid Hiberniam memorem, contempto pelagi discrimine, toto 
 cum grege philosophorum ad litora nostra migrantem?' (Ericus
 
 Introductory 13 
 
 points with regard to John's nationality need to 
 be noticed: the title Bcotus and the cognomen 
 Erigena. The former is given to him in the letters 
 of Pope Nicolas I and of the papal librarian 
 Anastasius, and by other indisputable authorities. 
 We are told by his contemporary, Prudentius of 
 Troyes, who calls him Scotigena, that he came 
 from Hibernia. Of course there is no contradiction 
 here, as the people called Scoti then inhabited the 
 northern part of Ireland, and the purveyors of 
 wisdom, to whom we have just referred, were Irish 
 Scots. The name Erigena by itself would not be 
 decisive, especially as it is not given in the con- 
 temporary documents, although the curious form 
 Jerugena figures in the title to the translation of 
 Dionysius. Setting aside the improbable theory of 
 Gale, that John meant thereby to denote his birth- 
 place, a district called Eriuven, in Herefordshire, 
 and a yet more strange theory as to his Herulian 
 descent, we may well suppose that, sharing as he 
 did in the taste of his contemporaries for fanciful 
 etymologies, he transformed the Land of the West 
 into the Land of Saints \ 
 
 It is not unnatural that early chroniclers should 
 have endeavoured to bring John into connexion 
 with Alfred the Great, and even to connect him 
 
 Altissiodorensis, apud Floss, p. 16). This may be laudatory, but 
 should be compared with the rage of Prudentius against the Celtic 
 eloquence used by John. 
 
 1 A similar fancy is seen in the classical name for Jerusalem : 
 Hierosoluma.
 
 i 4 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 with the foundation of the University of Oxford. 
 On the other side is the negative fact that he is not 
 mentioned byAsser for the 'John, priest and monk, 
 of the race of the Old Saxons,' of whom Asser writes 
 that Alfred made him Abbot of Athelney, can 
 hardly be the same with our Erigena. William of 
 Malmesbury, writing during the first half of the 
 twelfth century, tells of the coming of John the 
 Scot to Malmesbury, and of his being made master of 
 the monastic school. He is not ignorant as to the 
 chief of John's works, the peculiar character of his 
 writings, and his life at the court of Charles the 
 Bald, concerning which he tells two rather puerile 
 anecdotes which do not very well accord with the 
 character of John as we should picture it from 
 his works 1 . Added to these is the strange story 
 of his end, how his scholars pierced him to death 
 with their pens. His epitaph was to be read at 
 Malmesbury : 
 
 ' Conditus hoc tumulo sanctus sophista loannes, 
 Qui ditatus erat vivens iam dogmate miro ; 
 Martyrio tandem meruit conscendere coelum, 
 Quo semper cuncti regnant per secula sancti.' 
 
 But the date of this account is many centuries 
 after the event it pretends to relate, and the epitaph 
 
 1 Lib. v. de PontlficObus, apud Floss, p. 91. One of these is the 
 well-known repartee : ' Quid distat inter Sottum et Scottum ? . . . 
 ' ' Tabula tantum " ' ; and the other is the argument to justify the 
 division of two big and one small fish among two big and one small 
 man, by giving in fairness the two big fish to the small man and the 
 small fish to the two big men.
 
 Introductory 15 
 
 itself is not of undoubted authenticity. Minor 
 difficulties have been suggested : Would the ortho- 
 dox Alfred have harboured a man under the papal 
 ban? Would John have been made schoolmaster 
 at the advanced age which he must have reached 
 before he came to England, if this story is true ? 
 The term c sanctus sophista ' suits him well enough, 
 but his relations with his pupils, judging from 
 his dialogue with one of them in De Divisions 
 Naturae, were not of such a distressing kind as is 
 supposed in the story of his martyrdom. 
 
 To turn from fiction to fact, from nebulous legend 
 to the man as he reveals himself to us in his books, 
 let us see how far, or in what respects, John the 
 Scot was fit to undertake the task of mediating 
 between Eastern and Western thought. 
 
 In the first place, his tone of mind and feelings 
 was in many respects Greek, more truly Greek 
 than even that of Dionysius himself. For if, as 
 has been sometimes said, the chief characteristic 
 of the Greeks was to be seekers to be always 
 striving after truth and beauty then John the 
 Scot, Irish though he might be, was a Greek of 
 the Greeks. He never seems to rest satisfied with 
 any principle that he has laid down, but follows it 
 on to its utmost conclusions. If his argument is 
 beset with difficulties, he prepares himself to face 
 them. Except in professedly controversial works, 
 where vituperation of an opponent is part of the 
 stock in trade, he is less inclined to denounce than
 
 16 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 to examine, and where he does denounce, it is 
 rather because his adversary's views lead to impious 
 misrepresentations of great truths than because <- 
 they conflict with the established order. 
 
 With this seeking attitude we find naturally 
 a lofty conception of the claims of human reason. 
 Not that Scotus was unwilling to acknowledge the 
 limits of human intelligence in this respect he 
 was, as we shall see, more modest and more far- 
 sighted than most of his contemporaries and 
 successors but he admitted no rights on the 
 part of any external authority to interfere with 
 the legitimate processes of the human mind. 
 'Authority,' he says, 'proceeds from right reason, 
 not reason from authority. . . . Rightful authority ( 
 seems to me nothing else than truth discovered by 
 the power of reason, and committed to writing 
 by the holy Fathers for the benefit of posterity V 
 True, Augustine says something of the same kind 2 ; 
 but Scotus seems to hold this view more strongly 
 than Augustine did. Of course he considers that 
 the Scriptures and the authorized writings of the 
 Fathers ought to be in harmony with the results of 
 rational investigation. Like other commentators, 
 he has no scruple in twisting scriptural texts or 
 citing isolated passages to confirm his own theories. 
 But when there is apparent contradiction, as in the 
 passage which gives rise to the expression of this 
 principle, he boldly follows the light of reason. 
 
 1 De Divisions Naturae, i. 69. 2 De Ordin. ii. 9, 26.
 
 Introductory 17 
 
 Such being his view as to the paramount claims 
 of reason, we are not surprised to find him identi- 
 fying religion with philosophy. ' For what is the 
 study of philosophy other than the explanation 
 of the rules of that religion by means of which 
 God, the highest and principal Cause of all things, 
 is made the object of humble worship and of 
 reasonable inquiry ? l ' Here again he quotes 
 St. Augustine, but he seems in fact to go further 
 than his authority. If his definition or description 
 of philosophy does not accord with that of the 
 ancient Greeks in all respects, it is quite applicable 
 to those later schools with which Christianity was 
 brought into contact, especially the Neo-Platonists 
 and the Neo-Pythagoreans. 
 
 Cognate to these points of common interest 
 between our Irish thinker and the Greek philoso- 
 phers is the high value he places on the contempla- 
 tive life. This appears throughout his writings. 
 In an age in which monasticism was flourishing 
 and was opposing a counteracting influence to the 
 materializing tendencies of a warlike society, our 
 philosopher whether or not a monk himself was 
 not alone in emphasizing the importance of the 
 inner and the intellectual life. But whereas 
 monastic piety was generally more directed to the 
 ascetic and passive aspects of contemplation, Scotus 
 would find in the highest spiritual spheres full 
 scope for the exercise of intellectual energy. 
 
 1 De Praedestinatione, i. i. 
 C
 
 is Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Thinking as he thought and taught to think was 
 hard work, and needed all the aid of the logical 
 methods of the ancients. The impossibility for 
 human beings to attain to any kind of knowledge 
 other than that which is involved in self-knowledge ]/ 
 of the most intimate kind is one of the fundamental 
 principles of his philosophy. 
 
 With this natural tendency to speculative 
 thought, and the loose interpretation of dogma 
 which naturally accompanied it ; with a disposition 
 to soar after ideals rather than to lay down laws ; 
 John the Scot was out of reach of those theological 
 and philosophical tendencies of his time, which 
 were bringing Latinity into the world of ideas at 
 the same time that the Holy Roman Church and 
 the Holy Roman Empire were giving a kind of 
 social Latinity to Western Christendom. Rightly 
 does William of Malmesbury l say of him that ' he 
 deviated from the path of the Latins while he kept 
 his eyes intently fixed on the Greeks ; wherefore 
 he was reputed a heretic.' His regard for Greece as 
 entirely superior to Rome, and as about to supersede 
 the imperial city in honour and power, is expressed 
 very strongly in some lines if they are really 
 his 2 appended to his translation of Dionysius. 
 
 It is, however, almost superfluous to say, that 
 with a ' soul naturally Platonic,' John was not 
 a well-read Greek scholar. He knew, at least, 
 
 1 De Pont. v. apud Floss, p. 91. 
 
 * Christlieb considers that they are not by Scotus, p. 28.
 
 Introductory 19 
 
 some stories from Homer l ; he knew something of 
 Aristotle 2 , but probably only from fragmentary 
 translations, including an exposition of the Cate- 
 gories attributed to St. Augustine 3 ; even Plato, 
 whom he calls ' philosophantium de mundo maxi- 
 mus 4 ,' was perhaps only known to him by means 
 of a Latin translation of the Timaeus. But Platonic 
 doctrines had filtered down into books which were 
 accessible to him, such as those of Boethius, whom 
 he repeatedly quotes ; the Greek Fathers, especially 
 Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen, whom, 
 strange to say, he regards as one person 5 ; and most 
 notably into that great storehouse whence, for 
 very various purposes, theologians of all shades 
 have ever fortified themselves with things new and 
 old the voluminous writings of Augustine. But 
 none of these seem so entirely to have been 
 assimilated into his mental fabric as the works of 
 Dionysius, which he probably first found at the 
 court of Charles the Bald. If it were not too bold 
 a conjecture to make on our very insufficient data, 
 we might suggest that the fame of those writings 
 and the desire to see and handle them had first 
 
 1 As (De Div. Nat. iii. 39) the recognition of Odysseus by 
 his dog. 
 
 2 Whom he calls ' acutissimus apud Graecos . . . naturalium rerum 
 discretions repertor.' 
 
 s See Poole, chap, i, for the Library at York. John may have ,___ 
 seen more Greek books in Ireland, but it is hardly probable. 
 
 4 De Div. Nat. i. 31. 
 
 5 Ibid. iii. 38. But he certainly distinguishes them in ii. 27. Can 
 the ' qui etiam Nazianzenus vocatur ' possibly be a copyist's gloss ? 
 
 C 2
 
 20 
 
 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 attracted him from his ' Land of Saints.' Next to 
 Dionysius, and chiefly valued 1 as throwing light 
 on the thoughts of the Areopagite, come the i 
 treatises of Maximus the Monk, some of which he 
 translated, and which he often quotes. He also 
 speaks with great respect of Origen, who was, like 
 himself, a Hellenic Christian born out of due time. 
 He makes a pathetic and not undignified figure, 
 this eager, slightly-built 2 Irishman, with his subtle 
 mind, his studious habits, his deeply reverent 
 spirit, his almost fanatical devotion to the wise 
 men of former days, Pagan or Christian, who had 
 lived in the light of a wider civilization : called 
 upon to fight the battles of the West with arms 
 forged in the East, and reprimanded even in the 
 hour of conquest for having transgressed the rules 
 of the field. Whether or no the ugly story of his 
 death by his scholars' pens may contain any truth, 
 he had to endure sharp thrusts from the pens of 
 those whom he sought to instruct, and who were 
 not able to appreciate his teaching. He may or 
 he may not have rested beneath a slab on which he 
 was commemorated as a martyr, but assuredly 
 he was a witness for the truth, some aspects of , / 
 which he could see clearly, but could not make 
 manifest to more than a very few, either of his 
 contemporaries or of the men of later times. 
 
 1 See introduction to translation of the Ambigua of Maximus. 
 8 ' Perexilis corporis,' if William of Malmesbury followed a safe 
 tradition.
 
 21 
 
 There have been three critical periods in the 
 world's history in which it has seemed possible 
 that the religious life of a whole society might 
 become inspired by a pure and fervent zeal bounded 
 and directed by a sane and free philosophy, a 
 philosophy rationally eclectic in borrowing from 
 the wisdom of the past, broadly sympathetic and 
 humane in its appreciation of moral excellence in 
 all times and places. The first of these crises was 
 in the reign of Alexander Severus, when the young 
 Emperor's virtuous mother, Mammaea, was in 
 correspondence with the Christian philosopher, 
 Origen ; and it seemed as if Christianity might have 
 been adopted by the Empire disinterestedly and on 
 its own merits, under conditions which might have 
 promised it a healthy, peaceful, and eminently 
 reasonable development through succeeding ages. 
 But this was not to be. Nearly thirteen hundred 
 years later, when the need of a reform in the 
 Church both of head and members in doctrine, 
 discipline, and worship, was evident to every 
 serious-minded person, it seemed as if the men of 
 the New Learning, enthusiastic as John the Scot 
 himself for Greek ideas, attached, some of them, as 
 he was, to the teaching of the Areopagite, might 
 have found a remedy for abuses without making 
 a sharp and final breach with the past ; might have 
 delivered men's minds from one tyranny without 
 subjugating them to another ; might have annihilated 
 superstition without doing violence to any objects
 
 22 
 
 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 worthy of reverential regard. But this again was 
 not to be. And now we see, almost in the middle 
 point of the time between these two great oppor- 
 tunities, another of the ' might-have-beens ' of the 
 spiritual history of Europe. If the intellect and 
 the devotion of the Middle Ages had followed the 
 lines of John Scotus, there would have been no 
 scholasticism, but the growth of a philosophy 
 Christian in its teleology and its ethics, acute and 
 probably, as time went on, critical in its methods, 
 always progressive and turned to the light. The 
 gross materialism, the lurid horror of the unseen, 
 the spirit of persecution, the slavish deference to 
 ecclesiastical authority, which make the darker 
 side of the Middle Ages, would not have been there. 
 But men are not always most readily moved by 
 the highest ideals ; rules are found more necessary 
 for society than aspirations ; statements which seem 
 to be definite are more generally received than such 
 as only pretend to be approximations to an incom- 
 prehensible truth. There have been ' Platonic 
 revivals ' since that day, and there are likely to be 
 others from time to time so long as man moves and 
 thinks on earth ; but if the future is in this respect 
 bound to resemble the past, their influence, if deep, 
 will never be very wide. 
 
 But if, in our own day ] , we see traces in the 
 religious ideas and the general outlook of a good 
 
 1 This thought is emphasized in the last of the Hulsean Lectures 
 for 1898-9, by Archdeacon Wilson.
 
 Introductory 23 
 
 many educated people of a reaction against the 
 definite, juristic, inelastic spirit, and all the influ- 
 ences which are summed up in the word Latinity, 
 and a desire after a free intellectual life with a vast 
 spiritual background such as may be denoted by 
 the words Christian Hellenism it seems natural 
 that some among us should look with interest on 
 the labours and the productions of John the Scot. 
 It is far beyond the scope of the present writer 
 to examine in detail all the works of our author, 
 and to assign to each its place in theological 
 literature ; that task has already been achieved 
 by much abler hands. But if we dwell for a while 
 on a few of the points in which Scotus seems to 
 show philosophic insight, and observe the changed 
 condition of the problems before him when they 
 were subjected to the light derived from his 
 dominant ideas, we may be a little better able to 
 realize the conflict among mental and moral forces 
 in the very early days of European culture. And 
 though it may seem a bold course to take, it will 
 perhaps be the surest way of attaining our end, 
 if we start from the most fundamental and pre- 
 dominant idea in all philosophic thought.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
 'O Thou that in our bosom's shrine 
 Dost dwell unknown because divine ; 
 
 I will not frame one thought of what 
 Thou mayest either be or not ; 
 I will not prate of thus and so, 
 Nor be profane with yes and no ; 
 Enough that in our soul and heart 
 Thou, whatsoe'er Thou mayst be, art.' 
 
 A. H. CLOUGH. 
 
 WHILE it may safely be asserted that in order 
 to understand thoroughly the character of any 
 philosophic school, any social or political combi- 
 nation of persons, even any individual man or 
 woman, we must penetrate to their inmost con- 
 victions and habits of thought on matters to do 
 with religion and theology, this is most evidently 
 the case where a distinctly theological tone pre- 
 dominates in the mental and moral atmosphere 
 wherein such character has its environment. We 
 need not stop to discuss why the theological
 
 2 5 
 
 element in life and thought is more prominent 
 at some times than at others, nor whether the 
 prevalence of theological conceptions always varies 
 with the strength of religious convictions. Cer- 
 tainly, there can be no doubt that both the period 
 in which the writings originated which John the 
 Scot introduced to the Western world, and the days 
 in which he himself stood before Charles the Bald, 
 were distinctly theological in tone. All historians 
 of philosophy have noted the tendency to dwell 
 on the supernatural which marks the later sects 
 of Greek thought. And we have already seen that 
 the intellectual food on which John the Scot was 
 nourished consisted mainly of theological treatises, 
 insomuch that what he knew of the more general 
 and open fields of knowledge had been in great 
 part gleaned from the patristic writings. It was 
 not, for most people, an age of much or of deep 
 thought, this middle part of the ninth century; but 
 it was an age in which whatever thought there 
 was became necessarily directed into theological 
 channels. Art had declined to its nadir ; physical 
 science, poetry, speculative inquiry, had no hope 
 of resuscitation unless they allowed themselves to 
 be pressed into the service of theology and religion. 
 But even apart from the current of his times, John 
 the Scot was one whose mind naturally turned to 
 subjects where there was more scope for lofty 
 speculation than for minute determination. 
 
 It is, then, in his theology, first and foremost,
 
 26 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 that we see the Greek and Eastern tone of John's 
 mind as opposed to the Latin or German and ' 
 Western tendencies of his times. If we try to 
 trace his ideas and those of men who have shared 
 them up to their ultimate sources, we find the task 
 wellnigh impossible. In framing its conception 
 of God, no sect, no human mind, can dare to be 
 either quite original or entirely dependent upon 
 others. Men accept suggestions that come to them, 
 they know not whence, and develop them, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, into forms that may bear 
 a close resemblance to others which they have 
 never met. In times when religion and philosophy 
 are eclectic, the origin and progress of religious 
 ideas are all the more difficult to follow. In reading 
 the works of the Neo-Platonic philosophers, as in y 
 hearing some of the sermons of our own preachers, 
 we are often surprised by a remark that seems 
 striking and original till we have met it, often 
 couched in the same phraseology, in some other 
 region whence it may or may not have come to 
 its more recent propounder probably he himself 
 knows as little as we. 
 
 Yet there are certain broad distinctions between 
 the ways in which man has represented to his 
 mind the idea of the Divine, which may be said 
 to distinguish certain races or certain stages of 
 development. Thus we may say that generally 
 the Jewish idea of God was that of a Creator and 
 Ruler of nature and man, whereas the last, as per-
 
 The Unknown God 27 
 
 haps the first, word of Greek philosophy was the 
 recognition of an all- permeating divine life. Yet 
 history shows that bridges had been built, especially 
 at Alexandria, between the Semitic and the Hellenic 
 conceptions of Divinity. The grandest religious 
 expression of Pagan aspirations the hymn of 
 Cleanthes the Stoic is an address to ' The most 
 glorious of the Immortals, Zeus the many-named, 
 the Ordainer of Nature.' Again, the idea of a 
 transcendent God is sometimes regarded as specially 
 characteristic of Plato. And 1 it was a Christian 
 who felt himself to be a Hebrew of the Hebrews 
 that taught his converts of a ' God and Father of 
 all, which is above all, and through all, and in you 
 all.' The conceptions of a transcendent, of an 
 immanent, and of a creating and ruling God, how- 
 ever inconsistent or even antagonistic they may 
 appear, are often found blended in the conscious- 
 ness of thoughtful and religious minds. Yet no 
 mind can habitually dwell indifferently on each 
 of these several aspects of the dimly apprehended 
 yet intensely realized object of the spiritual con- 
 sciousness. And each man who insists on one 
 aspect is doing service to the world, which cannot 
 afford to lose permanently any portion of truth 
 which may have been temporarily obscured, even 
 for generations. The men who surrounded and criti- 
 cized John the Scot might for they were orthodox 
 
 1 If the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Ephesians 
 be accepted. If not, the above argument is not greatly affected.
 
 28 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 and held the Quicunque vult have acknowledged 
 in words that God is incomprehensible, yet they 
 thought they knew pretty clearly His mind/ 
 towards the world, and were not afraid to attribute 
 to Him many of their own impulses and passions. 
 To Scotus, as to Dionysius and his predecessors, 
 God was the super-essential, super-intellectual 
 principle beyond all being and thought, though, as 
 a thinking man, Scotus was bound to find some 
 relation between that principle and the world of 
 nature and of humanity ; and as a Christian man 
 he was bound to bring his aspiring theological con- 
 ceptions into some sort of accord with the moral 
 and religious teaching of the Scriptures and of the 
 Fathers of the Church. 
 
 To express the idea of the transcendent God in 
 the most uncompromising language we may quote 
 from the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius, who 
 was here closely followed by John the Scot. The 
 writer is maintaining the character of the Athenian 
 worshipper of an Unknown God. Of course there 
 is no reason for connecting the inscription recorded 
 to have been noticed by St. Paul with any expres- 
 sion of philosophic agnosticism. Altars to unknown 
 gods are met with on various occasions ; thus 
 Pausanias saw one at Phalerum 1 , and they were 
 probably dedicated rather to such deities as, though 
 worth conciliating, were sufficiently unimportant 
 to be lost in a crowded pantheon, than to any who 
 
 1 Description of Greece, i. i, 4.
 
 The Unknown God 29 
 
 were too vast to be comprehended within the range 
 of the Olympians. A portentous event might 
 manifest the present power of a god or goddess 
 without giving any clue to the name. But even 
 if grounded on an error in archaeology, the assign- 
 ment of these writings to a worshipper, in apostolic 
 times, of an unknown and unknowable deity, is 
 in complete accordance with their whole tone and 
 character. 
 
 It is in the Mystical Theology that Dionysius, 
 endeavouring to treat of God in Himself, apart 
 from man and nature, is obliged to use terms of 
 the purest negation J . Thus he says : ' He is neither 
 soul nor mind ; He has neither imagination, nor 
 opinion, nor word, nor thought ; nor is He word 
 or thought ; He uttereth no word and thinketh no 
 thought; neither is He number, nor order, nor 
 greatness, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, 
 nor likeness, nor difference ; He standeth not, nor 
 moveth He, neither doth He take rest ; He hath 
 not power, nor is He power, nor light ; He liveth 
 not, neither is He life ; He is not being, nor 
 eternity, nor time ; neither is He within touch of 
 reason; He is not skill, nor is He truth, nor 
 dominion, nor wisdom ; neither one, nor unity, nor 
 divinity, nor goodness, nor yet spirit, as known 
 to us ; neither sonship nor fatherhood, nor any- 
 thing that is known to us or to any other beings ; 
 neither is He of the things that are, nor of those 
 1 De Myst. Theol., end.
 
 30 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 that are not ; neither do the things that are know 
 Him in that He is, nor doth He know the things 
 that are in that they are ; neither doth any word 
 pertain to Him, nor name, nor thought ; He is 
 neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth ; 
 neither is there for Him any place nor any removal ; 
 for when we place and when we remove those that 
 come after Him, we do not so with Him ; for the 
 perfect and unifying Cause is beyond any place, 
 and the excellent Simplicity withdrawn from all 
 things is beyond any taking away, and stands 
 apart from all things.' 
 
 This attempt at entire negation may seem to 
 break down in the use of the word Cause. In 
 a somewhat similar passage in Origen 1 we have 
 the expression Father of truth, of knowledge, and 
 the like. Here at least we are deviating from the 
 purely literal, which, according to Dionysius, must 
 here be equivalent to the purely negative. In 
 fact, the barrenness of these regions of thought 
 must drive men into affirmations of some kind, 
 even if they carefully guard themselves by assert- 
 ing that such affirmations can only have a symbo- 
 lical or figurative meaning. Perhaps the last word 
 of scepticism might be a question as to the literal 
 truth even of such negative statements as those 
 just given. But, leaving this suggestion on one 
 side, we may observe that John the Scot pondered 
 much on the Kara^anKr} and the a-nofyaTiK.-^ of the 
 1 Com. St. Jn., quoted by Vacherot, vol. i. p. 264.
 
 The Unknown God 31 
 
 Dionysian theology, and derived a clearer view on 
 the subject from the works of Maximus the Monk, 
 some of which he afterwards translated into Latin 1 . 
 
 A considerable portion of the first book of Scotus' 
 De Divisione Naturae is taken up with an examina- 
 tion of the ten categories, so as to show that not 
 one of them can be rightly applied to God. That 
 of relation might seem to be implied in the doctrine 
 of the Trinity, but the philosopher shows that 
 any predication of relations such as fatherhood and 
 sonship to the Divine Being can only be figurative. 
 'Locus,' which he makes equivalent to definition, 
 cannot be asserted of that which is not contained 
 in any intelligent mind. As to quality, we cannot 
 ascribe to the Universal even the highest of proper- 
 ties. He is not wise and good, but more-than-wise, 
 more-than-good, and the like. He does not even 
 fall under the category of being, since He is more- 
 than-being. Action and suffering may in Scripture 
 be frequently predicated of God. But such pre- 
 dication is always in a transferred or symbolical 
 sense. 
 
 How then, we may ask, can Dionysius, or Scotus, 
 or any of their followers, believe in anything 
 approximating to a divine revelation? How can 
 such an immeasurably distant Being, or Hyper- 
 being, be brought into the reach of human conscious- 
 ness? How can this doctrine be assimilated to 
 
 1 See prologue to Scot's translation of the Ambigua S. Maximi, 
 Floss, p. 1196.
 
 32 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 those of the Church 1 And how can it satisfy the 
 requirements of a natural religion which seeks for 
 a principle of life and of harmony not beyond, but 
 within the actual and visible world ? 
 
 As we endeavour to indicate the lines along 
 which the solution of the problem is to be found, 
 we may observe that their agnosticism (if this 
 term be taken in its simplest sense) does not 
 preclude these writers from the free use of significant 
 terms found in the speech of ordinary people. If 
 these terms are consciously used by them in a 
 figurative sense, this does not imply unreality to 
 those who have grasped the fact that all our 
 language and thought must necessarily deal in 
 symbols and figures. To this point we shall return 
 in our chapter on symbol and sacrament. Here 
 we may lay stress on the clearness gained by 
 removing our questions from the sphere of the 
 objective into that of the subjective. We have no 
 longer to puzzle ourselves with efforts to prove 
 that God is this or that, but to inquire whether 
 we are justified in thinking of Him under such and 
 such attributes, and denoting Him by such and such 
 names. Dionysius wrote a whole treatise on ' the 
 Divine Names,' and Scotus conceived more clearly 
 than did his master the nature of the mind and 
 its limits in endeavouring to comprehend the 
 Divine. Man can only know what is in his own 
 mind. We can inquire ' not how things are either 
 eternal or created, but for what reason they tnay be
 
 The Unknown God 33 
 
 called both created and eternal.' This reason may 
 not be easy to find, nor is it a light matter to lay 
 down laws as to the symbolism which may be used 
 to illustrate the Divine Nature, but the task is one 
 to which the highest human powers are not so 
 inadequate as they needs must be to assail the 
 great theological questions in direct attack. 
 
 Of course it is insufficient to say that the ad- 
 missible names of God are those given in Scripture, 
 or handed down by holy men, since both Dionysius 
 and John the Scot are very free in their use of 
 Scripture, and quite eclectic in their citations from 
 theologians. But it is plain throughout their 
 writings that no outward voice is regarded as 
 capable of doing more than corroborate that which 
 speaks within the soul. Man can name and can 
 think of God because in his inmost substance he is 
 of God. ' All divine things,' says Dionysius, 'in so 
 far as they are manifested to us, are known only 
 by participation therein.' To the Unknown, Un- 
 named, he feels an affinity, in that he recognizes 
 a ' power by which we are joined, in a way that 
 passes comprehension, to the Unspeakable and 
 Unknowable, in that union which is stronger than 
 any strength of mind or intellect V And similarly 
 Scotus : ' In so far as (man) partakes of divine and 
 heavenly existence, he is not animal, but through 
 his reason and intellect and his thoughts of the 
 Eternal, he shares in celestial being. ... In that 
 
 1 De Div. Nom. i. 
 D
 
 34 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 part of him, then, is he made in the image of God, 
 with which alone God holds converse in men that 
 are worthy V And Maximus 2 , who in many points 
 is to be regarded as a mean term between Diony- 
 sius and Scotus, says: 'As the air illuminated by 
 the sun appears to be nothing but light : not that 
 it loses its own nature, but because light prevails 
 in it : so human nature, joined to God, is said in 
 all things to be God : not that it ceases to be human 
 nature, but that it receives a participation in 
 Divinity so that in it God alone is found.' 
 
 Such participation can never amount to the 
 vision of the Invisible. Against quotations from 
 the Scriptures such as ' I saw the Lord seated,' and 
 those which describe Him as actuated by passions 
 and desires, Scotus could set other passages like : 
 ' Who hath known the mind of the Lord ? ' ' Above 
 all that we can ask or think.' ' The peace of God 
 which passeth all understanding.' Even the pre- 
 diction of the beatific vision to be enjoyed by 
 saints in glory is not to be taken literally. Here 
 Scotus adopts and expands the doctrine of Diony- 
 sius as to theophanies 3 . These are a divine vision, 
 vouchsafed to privileged souls, by which every 
 revelation is made. All recorded visions of the 
 Most High are, if real, to be regarded as theo- 
 phanies, not as an actual beholding by the eye or 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iv. 5. 
 
 a I here quote from Scotus' translation, ibid. i. 10. 
 
 3 Coel. Hier. c. iv.
 
 The Unknown God 35 
 
 even by the imagination. As a commentator on 
 Dionysius says, it was the glory of God, not God 
 Himself, that Moses desired, and was in part privi- 
 leged to see. Maximus has represented theophanies 
 as resulting from a kind of deification of humanity : ' 
 ' As high as the human intelligence rose by love, 
 so low did the Divine Wisdom descend by mercy.' 
 And here Scotus strikes more distinctly the note 
 of subjectivity which marks all his system by 
 making the theophany proportionate to the capacity 
 and the character of each mind, whether angelic or 
 human. He interprets the saying ' In My Father's 
 house are many mansions ' as signifying the revela- 
 tion made to each individual consciousness. As 
 many as are the souls of the saints, so many are 
 the divine theophanies 1 . 
 
 It would seem then that to the individual con- 
 sciousness is left the task of deciding which of the 
 names by which the Nameless One may be denoted 
 is or is not fitting, though the authority of holy 
 men may help in the decision. To this point 
 we shall recur when we examine more closely the 
 subject of symbols and sacraments. Here we may 
 notice which are the chief names of God allowed by 
 Dionysius 2 . These are Goodness, Love, Being, 
 Life, Wisdom, Reason, Faith, Power, Justice, Salva- 
 tion, Redemption ; also to Him have been applied 
 the adjectives great, minute, same, other, like, 
 unlike, stable, moving, equal. More particularly : 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. i. 8, 9, 10. * De Div. Norn. cc. 5-13. 
 
 D 2
 
 36 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Almighty, Ancient of Days, Peace, Holy of Holies, 
 God of Gods, Perfect, and One. God may be cele- 
 brated as 'cause, beginning, being, the awakening 
 and setting up of the fallen, the renewal and restora- 
 tion of the declining, the assurance of waverers, 
 the security of the steadfast, the guidance of those 
 turned towards Him, the light of the illuminated, 
 the perfection of the initiated, the divinity of those 
 conformed to God, the simplicity of the simple, the 
 unity of those that are made one ; dominion above 
 dominion, being of all dominion ; the gracious 
 bestowal, according to fitness, of that which is 
 hidden; the Being of beings, the beginning and 
 cause of life and being, through the goodness by 
 which all things together are fruitful and multiply 
 and hold together in One.' We may also borrow 
 the occasional expressions of prophet or seer as to 
 ' the arm of the Lord,' ' Thy throne,' and the like ; 
 and those derived from the conception of a ruling 
 providence, as ' King of kings,' ' Creator,' and 
 others. In using the name love, we may take it in 
 the sense either of eros or of agape, for we may 
 regard as divine both the passionate longing after 
 the good and beautiful, and also that giving up of 
 self into the power of another, by which the diverse 
 are made one, and the faulty are drawn towards 
 perfection. 
 
 John the Scot, in accepting the names, warns 
 his readers against interpreting them in a literal 
 sense. This may seem to provoke a criticism like
 
 The Unknown God 37 
 
 that made by J. S. Mill against the sophistry and 
 immorality of a philosophy which attributed to 
 God names of moral qualities in another sense 
 from that in which we ascribe such qualities to 
 men. But the likeness between the philosophy 
 of Scotus and that which moved the righteous 
 indignation of the clearest and boldest of English 
 thinkers is only superficial. For to Scotus justice 
 and mercy in man were but an offshoot or reflection 
 of that which, unknown and unnamed, we may 
 call the justice and mercy of God. If God and 
 man do not stand side by side, but the lesser 
 spiritual being is contained in the greater, we can 
 have no comparison, and consequently no difference. 
 We are not making God in our image, with our 
 virtues and vices, but we are looking at ourselves 
 from the point of view of the idealist theologian 
 as made in the image of God. 
 
 But we must pass on to inquire how this philo- 
 sophy of an Unknown God can deal with such 
 a subject as that of the creation of the world and 
 the maintenance of natural laws. Of course, in 
 a literal sense, God is not Creator. The word 
 Creator is among the names assigned by Dionysius 
 to God. ' We hold,' says Scotus a , ' that all things 
 are from God, and that they have not been made 
 at all but by Him, since by Him and from Him 
 and in Him are all things made;' and again 2 : 
 1 When we hear it said that God makes all things. 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iii. 22. 2 Ibid. i. 72. 
 
 437401
 
 38 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 we ought to understand simply that God is in all 
 things ; that is, that He subsists as the Being of 
 all things.' Of a creation in time there can, of 
 course, be no question, since time and space can 
 never be predicated of the Spiritual, neither can 
 we regard the act of creation as a movement on 
 the part of the Immutable. For action and being 
 are in God identical 1 . Nor yet can we regard 
 creation as a making of something out of nothing, 
 for everything has been made from God Himself 2 . 
 Creation is, if we weigh and endeavour to para- 
 phrase the obscure and scattered utterances of 
 Scotus, a self-revelation of the principle of all 
 things to the intelligence which is itself divine. 
 ' In the beginning ' stands in the Vulgate In 
 principio, and this is taken, not by Scotus alone, 
 but by many of the Fathers acquainted with Greek 
 philosophy, as equivalent to in Verbo, in the. 
 Eternal Word. Creation is, in fact, the thinking 
 out of a thought, and all that has been written 
 on the subject by canonical or uncanonical, but 
 yet weighty authorities, may be interpreted in 
 accordance with this conception. 
 
 The severest efforts of the Neo-Platonic philo- 
 sophers had been devoted to the task of forging, 
 so to speak, some kind of chain which should reach 
 from the self-existent to the dependent; and the 
 Greek Christian Fathers took up the work till 
 several series of emanations, borrowed from various 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. i. 72. 2 Ibid. ii. 4.
 
 The Unknown God 39 
 
 philosophies and religions, are found coexisting in 
 their theological systems. To us it may seem as 
 if one such series rendered the others superfluous, 
 and as if the whole attempt were like that of the 
 primitive people who piled brick on brick in 
 the hope of building a tower to reach the sky. 
 The result is confusing, yet the emanations had, 
 for the minds of the highest thinkers, their several 
 and distinct places and functions. It was natural 
 that the Trinity of the earlier Neo-Platonists of 
 Being, Reason, and Life should be accepted by the 
 Alexandrian theologians 1 . It was not unnatural 
 that the original Platonic ideas, or prototypes, 
 should be retained by Neo-Platonists and Christians 
 alike. It was also quite consistent with this that 
 the later Jewish conception of the angelic hierarchy 
 should have been assimilated into the body of 
 quasi-Christian teaching on superior beings. But 
 when we find that the Tiapa^dy^ara are regarded 
 both by Dionysius and by Scotus as more than 
 passive types, or even formative reasons rather 
 as divine wills 2 and by Scotus as the chief agents 
 in creation, the mediation of the angelic hierarchy 
 seems a somewhat superfluous hypothesis. The 
 three hierarchical orders, however, do not appear, 
 
 1 For the curious mixture of Neo- Platonic and Christian ideas in 
 the mind of an interesting and active ecclesiastic of the fourth 
 century, I may be allowed to refer to a study I made some years 
 ago of the life and work of Synesius of Cyrene, published by the 
 S.P.C.K. 
 
 8 De Div. Nom. v. 8 ; De Div. Nat. ii. 2.
 
 40 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 in the Dionysian system, to have a distinctly creative 
 function. The work of each triad is to purify, to 
 enlighten, and to make perfect the souls of those 
 below it, and to each of the angels is assigned 
 as care one of the nations of the earth. The angels 
 figure but little in the cosmogony of John the 
 Scot, though he treats of the angelic life as some- 
 thing superior to that of the reason, while man 
 participates in both 1 . 
 
 It will have been observed that most of the 
 passages to which we refer in order to arrive at 
 John the Scot's view of creation come from his 
 chief work, De Divisione Naturae. In this treatise, 
 which is in the form of a dialogue between a master 
 and his pupil, he makes an investigation of all 
 things which can be comprehended in the expression 
 nature, first dividing them into four classes, thus : 
 
 1. The creating, not created equivalent to the 
 first principle of all things, or God. The cause of 
 all may be regarded as Being, Wisdom, and Life 2 , 
 each of which aspects is to be associated with one 
 of the names of the Trinity. 
 
 2. The both creating and created. These are 
 the prototypes or primordial causes, whence all 
 things come and to which all things must return. 
 
 3. The created, not creating. Under this class 
 come all things belonging to the sensible world. 
 
 1 De Die. Nat. iii. 37. 
 
 2 Another triad given is ovata, Swa/ws, wtp-ytia, or ffsenfia, 
 potestas, operatio (De Dir. Nat. i. 63).
 
 4- The neither creating nor created. This class 
 is, like the first, comprehensive of the Divine only, 
 but it is here regarded under another aspect that 
 of the non-creating rest which arises from the 
 return of all things into the primal unity. 
 
 In dealing with the third class Scotus follows 
 the narrative in Genesis, interpreting it, of course, 
 in a figurative sense throughout, as many of the 
 Fathers, whom he cites at great length, had done 
 before him, though his interpretations are often 
 his own. Thus the fiat lux means the procession 
 of the primordial causes into form and species such 
 as are capable of recognition by the intelligence J . 
 The gathering together of land and water is the 
 imparting of form to unstable matter. The creation 
 of man, though placed last, has the priority over 
 all, and is implied in the fiat lux, since all things 
 are created in man, who is the image of God, 
 by the identification of the Logos with human 
 nature. 
 
 But though at first sight it may seem that the 
 first and fourth of the classes are of divine, the 
 second and third of other than divine beings, 
 Scotus does not hesitate to recognize as divine the 
 members of the intermediate classes. For if God 
 is the beginning, middle, and end of all things, 
 those things which are in the middle are also of 
 Him. In speaking of the primordial causes, Scotus 
 asserts that even the highest angelic nature cannot 
 
 1 De Dir. Nat. iii. 25.
 
 42 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 contemplate them except in a theophany, thereby 
 making them not entirely an emanation from the 
 Invisible One, but in a sense still comprehended 
 therein. And even in the lower parts of creation 
 it is God who is ever beiog made afresh. ' For the 
 Creator, descending into the furthermost produc- 
 tions, beyond which He creates nothing, is said 
 simply to be created, not to create.' Thus Abraham 
 saw Him in the motion of the stars, Moses in the 
 burning bush. The ' vestments white as snow ' 
 which the Apostles beheld surrounding their Lord 
 on the Mount of Transfiguration, should signify to 
 us the visible creation in which the Word of God 
 is made manifest. 
 
 We see here that the Unknown God of Scotus 
 is immanent in nature, while, in a sense, immeasur- 
 ably above nature. Perhaps we ought in this 
 place to consider the question, not a very important 
 one except for critics who desire to affix a label 
 significative of some particular school or mode 
 of thought on every philosopher, whether John the 
 Scot is or is not to be held as a pantheist 1 . The 
 connotation of the word pantheism varies very 
 considerably according as we signify by it the 
 merging of God in nature, or the taking up of 
 nature into God ; or, to put the matter, following 
 the principles of Scotus, in a subjective form, 
 according as our notion of God becomes identical 
 
 1 Christlieb thinks that he was but that he was better than his 
 creed. The dispute seems rather an idle one.
 
 A3 
 
 with our conception of the world, or our conception 
 of the world is resolved into the thought of God. 
 At one point of the dialogue, De Divisione Naturae, 
 the pupil becomes afraid lest their argument might 
 lead to an identification of the world and God: 
 ' " Then God is all and all is God ! " Which would 
 seem to be a monstrous doctrine, even to those 
 who are considered as wise men, if they consider 
 the multiplicity and variety of things visible and 
 invisible ; for God is one V By saving the doctrine 
 of the one in the manifold, he escapes from any form 
 of materialistic pantheism. At the same time, we 
 cannot say that he ascribes personality to God. 
 who is, in Dionysian phrase, ' more than person.' 
 Entire self-consciousness seems not to be predicable 
 of Him. He does not know Himself as this or 
 that, for He is not this or that. We may say of 
 man that he cannot entirely know himself, yet 
 human personality is not thereby denied. But the 
 subject of cognition will concern us later on. 
 
 We have suggested and partly answered the 
 question how Scotus brought his fundamental 
 doctrine of theology into accordance with the 
 established belief of the Church in his day. We 
 have seen that he accepted the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, and used it, in a Neo-Platonic fashion, in 
 his theory of creation. The Father created all 
 things in the Logos, and the work of the Spirit 
 is distributive. Scotus also, after the example of 
 
 1 De Dii: Nat. iii. 10.
 
 44 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 the Greek Fathers 1 , connected that doctrine with 
 the psychologic division of the human mind into 
 animus, ratio, and sensus 2 . He calls the Trinity 
 a reAerapxia iepoOeaia 3 , and is careful, as we have 
 seen, to avoid giving a literal and anthropomorphic 
 interpretation of the relations among the divine 
 Persons. In one point he departs from the ortho- 
 doxy of the West : he declares that the procession 
 of the Holy Ghost is from the Father through the 
 Son 4 . Yet he cannot differ so far from authorized 
 beliefs as does Dionysius, who compares the Father 
 to a stem, of which the Son and the Spirit are 
 offshoots. 
 
 The ideas of Scotus on redemption and the final 
 restitution of mankind will concern us hereafter. 
 With the conception of the incarnation of the Word 
 there goes in close connexion but without con- 
 fusion that of the deification of human nature. 
 
 But it were labour lost to seek for traces of 
 orthodoxy or heterodoxy in the primary theological 
 principles of Scotus. He could cite the Scriptures, 
 the Greek Fathers, Ambrose. Augustine, occasionally 
 a pagan philosopher, where their words could be 
 made to suit his meaning, and he is able to interpret 
 almost any accepted doctrine in a fashion that 
 
 1 According to Vacherot, it was Gregory of Nyssa who fir-i 
 struck out that line of thought. The divisions are not always the 
 same. 
 
 3 De Die. Nat. ii. 24. 
 
 3 In Com. on Coel. Hifr. ii. 
 
 4 De Dir. Nat. ii. 32.
 
 45 
 
 would fit it into his system. Yet it would be 
 unfair to say that he pretended to be what he was 
 not, and to pass as an ordinary Christian while 
 really owning no allegiance to any authority but 
 that of human reason. In the reverent tone which 
 pervades all his writings, in his pious ejaculations, 
 his ardent longing for spiritual knowledge, his 
 gratitude for the beauty of nature and for the 
 wisdom of great men of the past, we see a character 
 and disposition which belong to him as Christian 
 even more than as philosopher. 
 
 If his ideas had been more generally accepted 
 than they were, we should have found, among 
 mediaeval thinkers, less anxiety to define the in- 
 definable, more patient acquiescence in the limita- 
 tions of human faculties. Yet there would have 
 been no less, but rather more and more enlightened 
 reverence for that Unknown of whom we may say 
 that He is, yet never what He is ; whose existence 
 and attributes can never be demonstrated, but who 
 can be found and worshipped in the innermost 
 shrine of the soul.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 SCOTUS AND THE PREDESTINATION CONTROVERSY 
 
 ' Others apart sat on a hill retired, 
 In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high 
 Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 
 And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.' 
 
 Paradise Lost, ii. 557-561. 
 
 IF ever there was any human being placed in 
 a manifestly false position, breathing an element 
 not his own, struggling with tasks at once above 
 and below his powers, it is the eclectic philosopher 
 drawn into the meshes of theological controversy. 
 Accustomed to look for truth on every side, he has V 
 become a partisan, with eyes shut to all that does 
 not lie on the path he has chosen. While fully 
 aware of the inadequacy of language to express the 
 highest thoughts, and of the impotency of the 
 human mind to solve the problems which it persists 
 in attempting, he finds himself convicting of error 
 those whose words 'might be made to bear a meaning
 
 Scotus and Predestination 47 
 
 in which he would fully concur, and to condemn 
 as wickedness a confusion due to human weakness. 
 Whereas he can only think profitably in an atmo- 
 sphere of peace and calm, he has descended into the 
 arena full of dust and of shoutings. The disputa- 
 tious tone he assumes is likely to be more harmful 
 to him than to another, because his clearer vision 
 carries with it an obligation to wider charity. 
 The energy which he should employ in constructive 
 work is expended in efforts which, to him at least, 
 are superfluous. For the most permanent and ever- 
 pressing questions argued by theologians in all ages 
 wear a different aspect to him and to those whose 
 life is not primarily one of thought. Religious 
 mysteries he will reverently acknowledge, but 
 religious puzzles are, for him, meaningless. Such 
 puzzles as disturb the mind of every intelligent 
 child to whom religious ideas are communicated, 
 and of every plain man who has some religious 
 belief, are due in almost all cases to an anthro- 
 morphic view of Deity or to a materialistic view of 
 humanity, and from both these sources of confusion 
 the cultivated thinker not always the bold specu- 
 lator of a primitive culture is comparatively free. 
 Thus, in the case before us, there was no reason why 
 Scotus should have associated himself intimately 
 with those who, in his day, were busying themselves 
 with dreary arguments on the subject of Predesti- 
 nation and on that of the Sacraments. Nay, when 
 he did take up these questions, he found it im-
 
 48 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 possible to disguise from his fellow-combatants the 
 fact that he was not fighting on their level. The 
 curious result, both in the impression he produced, 
 and in the transformation which the contested 
 matters underwent in his hands, lends a peculiar 
 and human interest to what might seem a dull, 
 interminable war of words, waged with a perverted 
 faith, an unjustified hope, and a conspicuous absence 
 of charity. 
 
 The forerunners of Scotus had, in some cases, 
 seen that controversy was not their forte. One 
 letter of Dionysius 1 contains admonitions which 
 his disciple might have followed with advantage to 
 his reputation : ' Do not esteem it a victory, my 
 revered friend, to have poured scorn upon a religious 
 practice or a belief that displeases you. For your 
 confutation, however logical, does not prove you to 
 be in the right. It is possible that both you and 
 other people, amid so much that is false or only 
 apparent, may fail to discern the truth which is one 
 and secret. If anything is not red, it is not 
 necessarily white ; if a creature is not a horse, it 
 need not be a man. If you follow my advice, this 
 will be your line of action : to cease from reviling 
 others, but to speak for the truth in such fashion 
 that what you say can never be refuted.' 
 
 In general, John's exposition of the truths that 
 he had grasped was of this positive kind. But, 
 like other Neo-Platonic philosophers both Pagan 
 
 1 The sixth to Sosipater.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 49 
 
 and Christian like Porphyry, Julian, Origen he 
 was forced, on at least this one occasion, to abandon 
 his usual course. Instead of keeping to his argu- 
 ments, with an occasional side-thrust at his opponents, 
 he directs his discourse at the head of his victim, 
 leaving suggestions of positive doctrine to be ga- 
 thered by the way. The occasion was given by the 
 request of Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, that he 
 would write a refutation of the theory of the monk 
 Gottschalk, on what was called the theory of ' dual ' 
 (gemina) predestination. 
 
 Hincmar of Rheims was one of the most notable 
 men of the century 1 . He held the metropolitan 
 see of Rheims, after a stormy interregnum, from 
 844 to 882, during a period when Church and State 
 alike were in a condition of distraction approaching 
 to anarchy. Church property had been appropriated 
 right and left ; bishops of doubtful pretensions had, 
 by performing sacerdotal acts of uncertain validity, 
 given occasion for strifes and schisms among clergy 
 and laity ; the divisions of the Empire had yet 
 further complicated the relations of the higher 
 bishops under whose control lay districts which, 
 
 1 There are various lives of Hincmar, and his works are in 
 Migne's Patrologia. Noorden's Life (Bonn, 1863) is full, clear, and 
 impartial. A good many of the documents relating to the Gott- 
 schalk controversy are to be found in Migne ; the two Confessions 
 of Gottschalk also in the works of Archbishop Ussher. A very 
 extensive collection was made by the Jansenist Mauguin, who 
 naturally felt attracted to Gottschalk's side of the question. There 
 is much definite information in Hefele's Conciliengeschichte. 
 
 E
 
 5 o Studies in John the Scot 
 
 in secular matters, were subject to independent 
 sovereigns, frequently at war one with another ; 
 finally, the papacy, in the person of Nicolas I 
 (858-867), was putting forth claims as to jurisdic- 
 tion and control wider and more definite than 
 had been announced before, for which justification 
 was found in the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, which 
 probably originated with Hincmar's predecessor at 
 Eheims, the dispossessed Archbishop Ebo 1 . The 
 policy of Hincmar was bold, definite, and on the 
 whole, if not altogether scrupulous, fairly con- 
 sistent. He seems to have been throughout loyal 
 to the cause of the West Frankish kings more 
 faithful to them, certainly, than they proved to 
 him. In his insistence on the rights of the Gallican 
 Church against papal claims, he has been regarded 
 as the forerunner of Bossuet. He is found on the 
 side of order and discipline among the clergy, and 
 is not afraid of asserting a moral censorship over 
 the highest ranks of the laity. Here, however, we 
 are concerned with him in a character which was 
 not the most favourable to the display of his 
 greatest qualities as maintainer of one of the 
 most conspicuous theological controversies of his 
 time. 
 
 The great paradox of foreknowledge and free- 
 will has led to disputes of different character 
 
 1 The part probably taken by Ebo in the drawing up of the 
 forgeries is discussed at length by Noorden in his Hincmar Erz- 
 lischofvon Sheims, chap. i.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 51 
 
 according to the dogmatic or the speculative 
 tendencies prevalent at different ages. Some of 
 the cycle of questions, if we may so call them, 
 which revolve around it are philosophical, and have 
 no connexion with either theology or religion. 
 Such is the problem of moral and responsible 
 human action in a determining environment, which 
 writers on ethics generally feel bound to meet ; and 
 such, again, is the coexistence of a uniformity of 
 sequence in nature with apparently arbitrary acts 
 on the part of individual living creatures. Other 
 questions are suggested by a theistic but not neces- 
 sarily a Christian view of life. Such are the 
 difficulties which men have ever experienced in 
 a world full of wrongdoing, and of merited or 
 unmerited suffering, when they try to reconcile 
 the three attributes they must needs ascribe to the 
 Deity of omnipotence, foreknowledge, and good- 
 will. To Christians, again, belongs the task of 
 inquiring into the very bases of their faith and 
 practice. For as the history of this controversy 
 in the ninth century shows the strictest interpre- 
 tation of the doctrine of predestination precluded 
 the belief that Christ died for all, or that moral 
 living and the use of the Sacraments are of any 
 effect. It has been suggested that this connexion 
 of the whole question with that of the efficacy of 
 the Sacraments was the main cause of the intense 
 interest taken in it by the higher clergy of our 
 period, who were not, as a rule, men of great 
 E 2
 
 52 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 philosophical or theological acumen, but who felt 
 it incumbent on them to keep the ecclesiastical 
 system free from assaults, either of erratic indivi- 
 dualism in doctrine or of license in action. 
 
 The controversy with which we have to deal 
 was almost entirely confined to the religious 
 aspects of the question. It is, perhaps, not a 
 singular feature in it that both sides claimed to 
 derive their chief support, after the Scriptures, 
 from the writings of Augustine. Yet there can be 
 little doubt that the really Augustinian spirit 
 prevailed in the opponents, not in the allies, of 
 Hincmar. It is a significant fact that it is mainly 
 to the labours of a great Jansenist a that we owe 
 the greatest collection of documents bearing on the 
 controversy, since Jansenists, as well as Lutherans 
 and Calvinists, drew their inspiration from the 
 same church Father whose doctrine, in its most 
 uncompromising form, was confidently appealed 
 to by Gottschalk when he expounded his theory 
 of double predestination. 
 
 It is almost superfluous to state that a mediaeval 
 controversialist did not regard it as part of his 
 duty to make himself thoroughly acquainted with 
 his opponent's meaning, or to realize all the bear- 
 ings of the opposite point of view. Attack and 
 defence are alike partial, or rather defence is often 
 
 1 Gilbert Mauguin, who wrote about the middle of the seventeenth 
 century. On the Jesuit side is the great compilation of Pere 
 Cellot.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 53 
 
 little more than a series of isolated counter-attacks. 
 The result of this method or no-method is to 
 make it almost impossible to comprehend the views 
 of any party, especially when the principal works 
 of the heretic have been safely committed to the 
 flames. In this case there is the additional diffi- 
 culty that when either party feels a distant sus- 
 picion that he is going against St. Augustine or 
 certain current phrases of Scripture, he begins to 
 eat his own words and to utter palpable incon- 
 sistencies. He may be too dull to see that he is 
 inconsistent, yet it is easy enough for his adversary 
 to show that sortie of his statements tend to subvert 
 all morals and all disinterested or even inter- 
 ested observance of religion. If the question is 
 put in the form it generally, at that crisis, assumed : 
 ' Does God predestinate both to evil and to good ? ' 
 the ordinary critical reader of St. Augustine would 
 be forced to set the authority of that Father on 
 the affirmative side, though he would acknowledge 
 that in many passages Augustine repudiates the 
 notion of a divine incitement to evil or of a neces- 
 sity which the human will cannot escape. The 
 point on which the whole controversy turns seems 
 to be the identity or heterogeneity of foreknowledge 
 and predestination; and it is just on this point that 
 most of the controversialists, Scotus himself in- 
 cluded, seem to contradict themselves. If we could 
 venture, without seeming unfair, to ascribe to each 
 party a maxim which nobody frankly adopted, we
 
 54 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 might divide the attempts to answer the question 
 into three types, each representing, in general, the 
 kind of opinion maintained respectively by Gott- 
 schalk, by Hincmar and his adherents, and by 
 Scotus and his philosophic friends. 
 
 The first view is that foreknowledge and pre- 
 destination are practically coextensive in appli- 
 cation, and that as divine wisdom foreknows both 
 good and evil, so divine power, from the beginning 
 of things, apportions what is good to the elect, 
 what is evil to the non-elect. 
 
 The second view is that foreknowledge and pre- 
 destination are quite different in meaning and in 
 sphere of operation. God foreknows good and evil 
 alike, but He predestinates what is good only. 
 
 The third view is that, since we are compelled 
 to associate in the closest connexion our idea of 
 divine wisdom and that of divine power, we cannot, 
 except figuratively and for purposes of convenience, 
 separate the whole scope of foreknowledge from 
 that of predestination. But that nevertheless God 
 does not predestinate evil, for He does not even 
 know or foreknow it, since it has no real being. 
 One cannot think of even omniscience as knowing ]/ 
 the non-existent. 
 
 A more or less enlightened view is taken by the 
 upholders of any of these theories according as 
 they are able or unable to grasp as Augustine 
 certainly did the relativity of all notions of time, 
 and to consider as apparently Gottschalk could
 
 Scotus and Predestination 55 
 
 not that the futurity of the knowledge was not 
 an essential element in the problem. Again, the 
 identification, in the highest existence, of con- 
 sciousness and activity, was a Neo-Platonic concep- 
 tion l which did not commend itself to an untrained 
 Western mind. But perhaps, though our object is 
 not to go further into the question than is necessary 
 to illustrate the attitude of Scotus to the men and 
 the thought of his time, a brief chronological 
 survey of the most decisive moments in the con- 
 troversy may be conducive to a clearer appre- 
 hension of our general bearings. 
 
 Gottschalk was the son of a Saxon nobleman, 
 and being early intended for a clerical life, was 
 sent in childhood to the monastery of Fulda, where 
 he was instructed in theological learning, and in 
 due time received the tonsure. It may seem sur- 
 prising that this man, who was accused afterwards 
 of proclaiming doctrines inconsistent with free-will, 
 first made himself conspicuous by protesting against 
 the binding character of the vows which had been 
 forced upon him apart from his own will. He 
 succeeded in bringing his complaints before a synod 
 held at Mentz in the year 829, and obtained the 
 desired release. This proceeding was, however, 
 very obnoxious to the recently appointed abbot 
 of Fulda, Rabanus Maurus, a man of great repu- 
 tation for learning and for strength of will. It is 
 not clear how an able superior should fail to see 
 
 1 See it especially in Julian, Oration IV, 142, D.
 
 56 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 the bad policy of retaining in the monastery a man 
 to whom the clerical profession was distasteful ; 
 nor how it came about that Gottschalk, who, what- 
 ever he was, seems assuredly to have been no man 
 of the world, should feel so impatient of a life 
 which, better than any other, allowed scope for 
 the exercise of such literary and argumentative 
 tastes and high-strung religious sensibilities as he 
 undoubtedly possessed. The fact is undoubted, 
 however, that Rabanus applied to the Emperor 
 Lewis the Pious for a revision of the sentence of 
 the synod, and secured a decision confirming the 
 validity of Gottschalk's vows. It was not the first 
 time that this question as to the possibility of 
 a parent's devoting his child to the service of 
 God had been argued before a provincial synod 
 and authoritatively affirmed. Gottschalk was, of 
 course, obliged to submit. He soon afterwards 
 removed to Orbais, in the diocese of Soissons and 
 the province of Rheims, and consoled himself for 
 his disappointment by plunging deep into patristic 
 lore. Augustine, Fulgentius, and Isidore seem to 
 have been his favourite authors, and from their 
 writings he derived the material for his theory of 
 predestination. He showed no reticence in pro- 
 claiming his views as soon as he had reached them, 
 and by his intellectual activity and powers of per- 
 suasion seems to have gathered round him a small 
 body of admiring friends. 
 
 The next step by which Gottschalk incurred still
 
 Scotus and Predestination 57 
 
 more disapproval in high quarters 1 was the accep- 
 tance of priest's orders, apparently without the 
 sanction of his superior, at the hands of the chor- 
 episcopus of Rheims, Richhold. The chorepiscopi 
 were an inferior rank of non-localized bishops, 
 whose functions some of the higher prelates, notably 
 Hincmar, were endeavouring to curtail. The 
 normal course would have been for Gottschalk to 
 seek ordination from Rothade, Bishop of Soissons, 
 but for reasons that we cannot now discover 
 certainly not from any evident devotion on the 
 part of Rothade to the ideas of Hincmar he pre- 
 ferred to take a different line of action. His object 
 in seeking ordination seems to have been a desire 
 to obtain the use of pulpits whence to proclaim his 
 views, since we find his activity as a preacher 
 mentioned in connexion with his journeys. He 
 had long been an eager correspondent of some of 
 the most learned churchmen of the time, especially 
 with Servatus Lupus, who was later involved in 
 the controversy, and who was ready to warn him 
 when he saw that he was going beyond his depth 2 . 
 
 1 Hincmar (De Praedestinatione Dissertatio Posterior, cap. ii), 
 in narrating Gottschalk's subsequent degradation, says : ' honore 
 presbyteriali quern per Righoldum Rhenorum chorepiscopum, cum 
 esset Suessoniciae parochiae monachus, inscio civitatis suae episcopo, 
 usurpaverat potius quam acceperat, abiectus.' It seems to be 
 generally supposed that the ordination took place during the 
 vacancy in the episcopate of Rheims, during which the chorepiscopi 
 exercised administrative functions, and which ended with the appoint- 
 ment of Hincmar in 845. 
 
 2 We find letters from Lupus to Gottschalk in Migne's Patro-
 
 58 Studies in Jo/in the Scot 
 
 He made a journey, possibly two journeys 1 , into 
 Italy, and it was on his return from his travels, 
 which he had undertaken without asking the leave 
 of his superior, that his new troubles began. He 
 enjoyed for a time the hospitality, at Friuli, of 
 Count Eberhard, and seems to have had oppor- , 
 tunities of spreading his opinions in these regions. 
 One of those who heard them with inward oppo- 
 sition was Noting, Bishop designate of Verona, 
 who shortly afterwards happened to meet Gott- 
 schalk's early opponent, Rabanus Maurus, and 
 arranged with him a plan of campaign. Rabanus 
 wrote a little treatise to Noting, and another to 
 Count Eberhard, neither of them, of course, designed 
 solely for the perusal of those to whom they were 
 addressed. In part, his arguments are those of the 
 plain man, who sees in the doctrine of predestina- 
 tion to evil, as well as to good, an effectual check 
 to all human efforts in the direction of a moral 
 life ; in part, those of a subtle theologian who 
 would mark out the distinctions between prescience 
 and predestination, and would discern a radical 
 difference between the assertions that punishment 
 had been preordained to man and that man had 
 been preordained to punishment. 
 
 Unfortunately for Gottschalk and for the peace 
 
 logia. In Ep. XXX there is a warning against superfluous subtlety 
 in speculation. 
 
 1 See Van Noorden's arguments as to what happened during the 
 first and second journey : ii. 56 et seq.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 59 
 
 of the Church, Rabanus did not rest content with 
 verbal refutation. He had lately been raised to 
 the important see of Mentz, and there, in the year 
 848, he presided over a synod of bishops chiefly 
 from the kingdom of Lewis the German, though 
 there seem to have been some Lorrainers among 
 them before whom Gottschalk had to appear. 
 Unabashed by the rebuffs he had received in Italy, 
 whence, according to his opponents, he had been 
 driven with shame, the accused monk appeared 
 and presented a confession of faith. We have it 
 as reported by Hincmar, but it probably represents, 
 without any qualifications, the views that Gott- 
 schalk proclaimed, or at least those which he led 
 his followers to adopt : ' I, Gottschalk, believe 
 and confess, profess, and testify in the name of 
 (ex] God the Father, by God the Son, in God the 
 Holy Ghost, and affirm and approve in the presence 
 of God and His Saints, that predestination is tu-o- 
 fold, both of the elect to bliss and of the reprobate 
 to death; that as God, who changes not, before 
 the foundation of the world by His gratuitous 
 grace predestinated His elect unchangeably to life 
 eternal, in entirely like manner the same un- 
 changing God predestinated by just judgement 
 to eternal death, according to their merit, all the 
 reprobate who in the Day of Judgement are to be 
 condemned on account of their own evil deeds.' 
 Besides stating his own belief and refusing to sur- 
 render it, Gottschalk seems to have gone so far as to
 
 60 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 bring a countercharge of heresy against his learned 
 and famous superior and judge, Eabanus himself. 
 His condemnation followed, as might have been 
 expected, and he was sent back into the diocese of 
 Hincmar,towhom at the same time a letter was writ- 
 ten byRabanus, setting forth the dangerous character 
 of Gottschalk's doctrine and behaviour, and com- 
 manding in the name of the synod and of King 
 Lewis, that means be taken to keep the mischief 
 from growing. The result of this was that at 
 a Council held at Chiersey in the course of the 
 next year, Gottschalk was again charged with 
 his heresies and irregularities, severely scourged 
 without thereby being brought to a better mind 
 and forced to throw into the fire that treatise 
 setting forth his notions which the historians of 
 the controversy would now be exceedingly glad 
 to possess. He was subsequently sent into strict 
 custody under the care of the Abbot of Haut- 
 villiers, since Hincmar did not feel sufficient con- 
 fidence in Rothade, Bishop of Soissons, to entrust 
 Gottschalk to his episcopal supervision as he 
 would have had to do if Gottschalk had been 
 sent back to Orbais. At first Gottschalk was 
 treated with comparative lenity. He was ad- 
 mitted to communion at Easter, and allowed to 
 correspond with his friends. Efforts were made to 
 induce him to renounce his opinions, but without 
 success. 
 
 During the earlier part of his captivity, Gott- 

 
 Scotus and Predestination 61 
 
 schalk drew up two confessions of faith l . These 
 are practically all, with the exception of some 
 slight poetical works, that we have straight from 
 his hand ; and whatever their logical consequences 
 may be, they do not lay him open to all the 
 charges of his opponents. In the first and shorter 
 document, he endeavours to support the doctrine 
 that some men are predestined to salvation and 
 others to damnation by citations of St. Augustine 
 and Pope Gregory the Great. He borrows the- 
 term ' gemina praedestinatio ' from St. Isidore of 
 Seville. But there is no trace of a necessity which 
 binds even the divine activity nor yet of predestina- 
 tion to sin. The larger confession is in the form 
 of a prayer not very conducive to clearness of 
 argument and calmness of tone 2 . The main 
 idea seems to be : that only what is good is 
 predestinated, but that the good may take the 
 form of benefits or of judgements a doctrine 
 which may safely be regarded as Augustinian. 
 Furthermore, he considers that if the reprobate 
 were not predestined to damnation, even before 
 their periods of probation were over, the divine 
 intention concerning them would be convicted of 
 mutability. There is something hysterical and 
 declamatory about the whole piece, which culmin- 
 
 1 These have been reprinted in Migne, and are also, as stated above, 
 to be found in Archbishop Ussher. 
 
 2 We have curious expressions such as ' lam tempus est, Domine, 
 veridica divinorum subiici testimonia libroruin,' &c.
 
 62 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 ates in the eager desire expressed to test his 
 professions by the fourfold ordeal of boiling water, 
 oil, pitch, and fire. 
 
 Before continuing this word-war, which was 
 being transferred to wider fields, we may in a few 
 words dismiss the unhappy beginner of the fray. 
 He not only resisted all attempts to make him 
 recant, but brought a curious countercharge against 
 Archbishop Hincmar. This prelate had lately 
 changed the words of a hymn, substituting ' summa 
 deitas ' for * trina deitas.' Gottschalk accordingly 
 accused Hincmar of Sabellianism. His mind 
 was probably brooding on the ' gemina praedesti- 
 natio,' and as he and his friends denied that the 
 phrase implied two predestinations, they might 
 equally well assert that 'trina deitas' was not 
 tritheistic, but strictly orthodox. Of course Hinc- 
 mar was equal to the task of defending himself. 
 Meantime he had composed a form of faith to 
 which Gottschalk was to subscribe on pain of 
 exclusion from all the sacraments. Gottschalk 
 refused it, and died, an excommunicated captive, 
 in 868 or 869. 
 
 Meantime, others had taken up his cause, or 
 at least the defence of some of his expressions. 
 Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes, wrote a long epistle 
 to Hincmar and his adherent and suffragan, 
 Pardulus, Bishop of Laon, in which he pointed out 
 the inconsistency of holding that God desires the 
 salvation of all men, that God is almighty, and
 
 Scotus and Predestination 63 
 
 that not all men are saved. Servatus Lupus, the 
 quondam friend and mentor of Gottsclialk, wrote 
 a letter to King Charles the Bald, in which he 
 pointed out the inapplicability of time-duration 
 to the conception of divine knowledge. Ratramus, 
 the learned monk, in an ' epistola ad amicum/ 
 justified the ' gemina praedestinatio,' and dwelt on 
 the inseparability in the divine nature of thought 
 and action. Hincmar and Pardulus looked abroad 
 for partisans. Among others, they thought of 
 John the Scot. 
 
 Two reasons may be assigned for the request of 
 Hincmar to Scotus that he should write something 
 against Gottschalk. In the first place, he was 
 anxious to have Charles the Bald on his side, and 
 Scotus was known to stand high in the king's 
 favour. At the same time he may have known of 
 John's studies in Dionysius through Hildwin, of 
 St. Denys, under whose patronage he had made 
 the earliest steps in his career, and who had, as 
 we have seen, done some work on the same subject. 
 Hincmar doubtless knew of John as an acute 
 dialectician, and possibly as a liberal thinker 
 above the limitations of a fanatic like Gottschalk. 
 It is evident from the sequel that he had very 
 little notion of what John's philosophical views 
 really were. As to Scotus, he expressed pleasure 
 at being asked to write in defence of catholic 
 doctrine, and tried vainly enough to ward off 
 possible misunderstandings.
 
 64 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 The treatise of Scotus, De Praedestinatiorte, is 
 not really a confutation of Gottschalk, with whose 
 views he seems to have been very imperfectly 
 acquainted. If it is said that he was nevertheless 
 right in attacking the immoral and impious con- 
 sequences that naturally flowed from Gottschalk's 
 opinions, we must allow that, in dealing with these 
 high subjects, the most virtuous and reverent 
 of men have often laid down principles which the 
 dullest mediocrity would shrink to apply in 
 practice. Scotus himself fences and garbles, and 
 shows himself no better than an ordinary con- 
 troversialist, while his pen is dipped in gall, more, 
 we may well believe, from fashion than from 
 feeling. Nevertheless, he certainly brought new 
 elements into the discussion. 
 
 Scotus begins his treatise, De Divina Praedesti- 
 natione, by insisting on the use of the dialectic 
 methods of philosophy (8iaiperiK^, opicmK-q, a7ro5ei/c- 
 riKTj, and di-aAuriKTj) in confuting heretics. He goes on 
 to argue against the doctrine of two predestinations, 
 which he seems to regard as involving the eleva- 
 tion of necessity into a force controlling even the 
 action of God. He distinguishes between prescience 
 and predestination, not exactly according to the 
 Augustinian line of thought, but from his own 
 subjective point of view. Though the being of 
 God is simple, the human mind can only consider 
 it in multiform fashion, distinguishing wisdom, 
 knowledge, activity, and the like. Yet each of
 
 Scotus and Predestination 65 
 
 these is one, and predestination is one a ' divine 
 name,' as Dionysius would have said. There is no 
 necessity above God, therefore what is true of the 
 divine will is true of predestination. Now what 
 is good cannot be the cause of evil, nor can the 
 sum of all being be the cause of what is destruc- 
 tive of being sin, misery, and death. The term 
 ' gemina ' must imply partition ; and since divine 
 predestination is the indivisible being of God, 
 contemplated in a particular aspect, it cannot 
 possibly be divided into parts. 
 
 Scotus goes on to accuse Gottschalk of combin- 
 ing Pelagianism with the opposite heresy. Pela- 
 gianism exalts free-will so as to leave no scope 
 for grace. The opposite heresy denies free-will 
 altogether. Gottschalk allows no room either for 
 grace or for free-will. But man has free-will as 
 part of his nature, whereby he is made in the 
 image of God. He has not lost it by his lapse into 
 sin. The gift of God, which comes from the divine 
 bounty and may be withdrawn, is the motion by 
 which the human will turns to the divine. Free- 
 will, though a great good, is capable of abuse. It 
 errs when it turns to itself, to the outward, and the 
 lower, rather than to God, to the inward, and 
 the higher. This motion to evil is not of God. It 
 has no real cause or existence, as Augustine him- 
 self, in his treatise, De Libero Arbitrio, clearly 
 states. The perverted motion belongs to the will, 
 and to it alone. All sin is from free-will. Of 
 
 F
 
 66 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 course Scotus is able to see that he has only 
 pushed the difficulty a step or two further back, 
 since men will always ask : Why was human nature 
 made capable of falling 1 ? He can only give the 
 well-worn answer that without possibility of falling 
 there could be no free-will, and without free-will 
 no honourable and reasonable service. 
 
 It is quite impossible for the casual reader of 
 St. Augustine to resist the impression that many 
 passages in that Father do distinctly assert 
 predestination to misery, and that some of the 
 harshest features in the doctrine of predestination, 
 such as the damnation of non-elect infants, from 
 which alike the Greek and the modern mind have re- 
 coiled, are to be found in his writings. Scotus has 
 to explain away statements that seem to represent 
 man as having lost free-will by his fall, and others 
 that would bring evil within the range of pre- 
 destination. In the latter case, he boldly declares 
 that Augustine is using the figure of speech called 
 by logicians an enthymeme that all his words are 
 to be interpreted ' a contrario ' or * translative.' This 
 may seem to us an abuse in transferring to the field 
 of definite controversial theology the method of 
 symbolic interpretation, a method quite applicable 
 in regions acknowledged to be far above all 
 argument. 
 
 Scotus insists that temporal relations can only 
 be figuratively applied to any divine action, and 
 dwells briefly on punishment as being closely
 
 Scotus and predestination 67 
 
 bound up with sin, not an arbitrary infliction which 
 follows it. He does not, however, enter as fully 
 here, as in the last book of De Dlvisione Naturae, 
 into his optimistic view of the final beatification of 
 all existing creatures and the destruction of that 
 which has only the semblance of being. He seems 
 to regard the eternal fire as only corporeal in 
 nature, though very subtle, and the spiritual bodies 
 of the wicked as capable of suffering everlasting 
 tortures. But he is evidently more consistent with 
 himself when he takes a purely spiritual view of 
 the final dispensations of divine justice, and regards 
 as the real and bitter punishment of the evil will 
 an eternal necessity of accomplishing the service 
 which it has vainly striven to reject. But if we 
 seem to find him, when he is trying hard to make 
 his doctrine agree with that of Augustine, guilty 
 of some disingenuousness, there is nothing out of 
 character with his general range of ideas in his 
 indignant protest against any doctrine which may 
 seem to refer the existence of evil to the will and 
 the nature of the Supreme Good. 
 
 This treatise, as might have been expected, 
 caused a small earthquake. We are less surprised 
 that it made men indignant than that it was treated 
 in some quarters with supreme contempt. c Per- 
 versity ' and ' insanity ' were among the mildest 
 terms applied to its doctrine by Prudentius, Bishop 
 of Troyes 1 , who wrote a lengthy treatise against it, 
 
 1 His work is in Migne's Patrologia, vol. cxv. 
 F 3
 
 68 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 accusing the author of seventy-seven distinctly 
 heretical utterances. Prudentius represents the 
 plain man who is irritated with Scotus for twisting 
 St. Augustine into accordance with his own views, 
 and is justly vexed with expressions and ideas that 
 are beyond his range of comprehension. He could 
 not take in the conception of God as identical with 
 His predestination, nor that of the retention of 
 free-will by fallen man as being engrained in his 
 substance, nor that of the negative character of pain 
 and evil. He can only make up for feebleness in 
 argument by violence in denunciation. The second 
 attempt to refute Scotus came from the Church of 
 Lyons, probably from the pen of the Archbishop 
 Remigius. In this work the counts of heresy 
 mount up to one hundred and six. The regard in 
 which Scotus is held may be judged from the 
 following extract l : ' Who (Scotus) as we learn from 
 his writings, has no knowledge even of the words 
 of Scripture. And so full is he of fantastical 
 inventions and errors, that not only is he of no 
 weight in questions of faith, but even worthy 
 considering the contemptible character of his 
 works unless he speedily turns and amends him- 
 self, either to be pitied as a madman or to be 
 anathematized as a heretic/ 
 
 Hincmar did not see fit to support the reputation 
 of the champion he had summoned to his aid, but, 
 with more prudence than generosity, cited the 
 
 1 ' De tribus epistolis.' Migne, vol. cxx.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 69 
 
 words of the Wise Man 1 , that ' he that passeth 
 by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to 
 him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.' 
 The conflict, however, went on, and for a time 
 the Anti-Gottschalkian party was triumphant. 
 Possibly the alliance with Charles the Bald had 
 stood Hincmar in better stead than the less mun- 
 dane assistance of John the Scot. In 853 another 
 council was held at Chiersey, where, by the 
 management of Hincmar and at the express 
 command of Charles the Bald, four articles in direct 
 opposition to Gottschalk's doctrines were drawn 
 up and signed. They ran thus: (i) That there is 
 only one predestination of God ; (2) That the free- 
 will of man is restored by grace ; (3) That God 
 wills all men to be saved ; (4) That Christ suffered 
 for all. To each of these an explanatory comment 
 is added. Thus under the first, predestination is 
 distinguished from prescience ; under the second, 
 man is said to have lost his free-will by Adam, but 
 to have recovered it by Christ ; under the third it 
 is explained that some men through their own 
 fault are lost ; under the fourth, that the healing 
 cup could cure the woes of all, but that some 
 refuse to drink of it. 
 
 If these articles had been presented to Scotus, 
 he could, no doubt, have subscribed the principal 
 theses simply, the commentaries only ' translative.' 
 For as we have seen, he did not hold the distinction 
 
 1 Prov. xxvi. 17.
 
 70 Studies in Jo/in the Scot 
 
 between predestination and foreknowledge ; he did 
 not believe that the first man had forfeited free-will 
 for the race ; he could not have agreed that the 
 Eternal Will ever failed of its object, or that for 
 any men Christ had died in vain. Yet this belief, 
 or clumsy compromise, as it may seem to us, 
 between predestination and a more human theory of 
 life, was all that the Gallican Church could oppose 
 to the uncompromising fatalism of Gottschalk. 
 
 The Synod of Chiersey did not have the last 
 word. An opposition was organized by Prudentius 
 of Troyes, and vigorously led by Remigius of Lyons. 
 In 855 another synod was held at Valence under 
 the auspices of King Lothaire. A dispute between 
 rival princes was curiously intermixed with decisions 
 on the most recondite of theological questions. The 
 four articles of Chiersey were reversed; nineteen 
 propositions from the work of Scotus were pro- 
 nounced heretical ; and the partisans of his belief 
 were censured in no measured terms *. 
 
 The decentralized character of the Church at this 
 time cannot be more distinctly seen than iu the 
 diametrically opposite decisions of two independent 
 synods. Hincmar made an effort to obtain a papal 
 
 1 ' Ineptas autem quaestiunculas et aniles pene fabulas, Scotorum- 
 que pultes puritati fidei nauseam inferentes, quae . . . usque ad 
 scissionem caritatis miserabiliter et lacrymabiliter succreverunt . . . 
 penitus respuimus.' Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, voL iv. 456. 
 Other mentions of Scotus in the decrees of this Synod may be seen 
 in Ussher, chap, xii, and in Floss's Introduction to Scotus' De 
 Praedestinatione, p. 354.
 
 Scotus and Predestination 71 
 
 decision on his own side, but Hincmar and his 
 policy with regard to the authority of metropolitans 
 were not in favour at Rome, and no quite distinct 
 utterance seems to have come from the papal chair. 
 After more tumultuary synods and more persistent 
 efforts on the part of Hincmar, who composed 
 during the latter part of the controversy two 
 voluminous works on the subject, the Synod of 
 Toucy, in 860, reaffirmed the Articles of Chiersey, 
 and for a time, at least, the conflict seemed to have 
 abated. 
 
 The Gottschalkian controversy did not lead to 
 any schism in the Church, though it brought to 
 light seeds of discord which might have rent 
 asunder a more consolidated body than the Church 
 of the ninth century. Wearisome enough in its 
 plentiful crops of bad arguments and half-sincere 
 interpretations, the dispute has some interest for 
 our present purpose in marking out clearly the 
 fundamentally different standpoints of the detached 
 philosopher and the professional theologian. But 
 besides this, it is important to the student of 
 mediaeval history in suggesting the question : 
 Where, at this period, lay the supreme authority in 
 matters of faith and doctrine ? In the papal see, 
 the Isidorian decretals might declare. But the 
 views which they embodied were not universally 
 accepted. Hincmar is accused of respecting or 
 discarding them according to temporary motives 
 of policy. In national synods, the metropolitans
 
 72 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 might affirm. But as yet nationalities were only 
 in course of formation, and boundaries were always 
 shifting. Even if it seemed right and fitting that 
 Lorraine should accept double predestination while 
 France held that it was single, what were Christians 
 to think who lived on the frontier ? Gottschalk 
 and Scotus were, from opposite points of view, 
 more thorough-going than the others in their tests 
 of truth. Each proposed a fourfold way : Gottschalk 
 the ordeal of boiling water, boiling oil, boiling- 
 pitch, and fire ; Scotus, the logical methods of 
 diaeretic, horistic, apodictic, and analytic. Perhaps 
 neither way would seem to us quite adequate to the 
 occasion, but that of Scotus is, at least, the more 
 civilized of the two.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SYMBOLISM AND SACRAMENT. PART TAKEN BY 
 SCOTUS IN THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY 
 
 BX7TO/i6i' yctp dpn 81' faonrpov fv alviy/^an. 
 
 THE predestinarian controversy had served as 
 an interesting illustration of the principle laid 
 down by Scotus that religion and philosophy are 
 fundamentall^Jjhe same. It may be regarded as 
 a conBnnation or as a refutation of that principle 
 according to our point of view. For while it had 
 shown that a want of familiarity with philosophical 
 terms and abstract conceptions rendered incoherent 
 all utterances and arguments on the deepest prob- 
 lems of religion, it had also shown that an attempt 
 to deal with such problems in the light of Greek 
 philosophy, and to solve them by the approved 
 dialectic methods, was not only unintelligible to 
 those engaged in building up the fabric of mediaeval 
 theology, but was regarded by them as being in the 
 highest degree presumptuous and unsafe. The 
 results arrived at on both sides might seem to be 
 capable of expression in phrases by no means
 
 74 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 mutually contradictory. Even the literary style 
 and the nature of citations from approved writers 
 might seem to have points of strong resemblance ; 
 yet below any superficial likeness was the deep- 
 seated division between two conflicting tendencies, 
 two essentially incompatible views of reason and 
 authority, of the strength and the weakness of the 
 human intellect. 
 
 No less do these remarks apply to the other great 
 controversy of the century, that relating to the 
 nature of the Eucharist. In one sense this dispute 
 may be thought to lie on a different plane from the 
 former, in that it belongs exclusively to theological 
 and religious ideas, and can never, apart from such 
 ideas, occupy the mind at all. Yet, like the question 
 of predestination, this one has narrower and also 
 wider bearings. Those who argued for single or 
 double predestination saw, or might have seen, that 
 they were only on the fringe of the great mystery 
 of man's relation to his environment, a mystery far 
 older than the religion they professed ; and similarly 
 those who disputed as to the kind of change 
 effected in the sacramental elements by priestly 
 consecration showed, by the ground they took, 
 how they conceived of the proper functions of 
 symbolism in helping towards the least inadequate 
 conception of transcendental objects. 
 
 From this point of view, the ancient controversies 
 of the Greeks as to the use and abuse of the popular 
 mythology are connected with the question before
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 75 
 
 us. Plato, as every one knows, would have elimi- 
 nated all stories which gave an unworthy notion 
 of divine beings from the education of the young 
 citizens in his ideal state. The Alexandrians 
 would have retained them, and explained away 
 or reinterpreted in a moralized sense their seeming 
 incongruities. Yet both would press symbolism 
 into the service of truth. Indeed, though questions 
 as to symbols and sacraments may not belong to 
 philosophy apart from religion, any philosophy 
 which takes account of the religious consciousness 
 still more any practical philosophy which seeks 
 to regulate in harmonious co-operation the con- 
 flicting forces of mind and character must be 
 constantly occupied in distinguishing the legitimate 
 from the overstrained action of the symbolizing 
 faculty in man. 
 
 There are other points of resemblance between 
 this controversy and the one lately considered. 
 Here, as there, the material and the spiritual are 
 opposed ; our philosopher, of course, taking the part 
 of the spiritual, but at the same time going so far 
 beyond the others on his side as to spiritualize 
 matter itself, and so put himself out of sympathy 
 with both parties. It seems hardly necessary to say 
 that here, as before, we have St. Augustine quoted 
 on both sides, though in this field he may seem to 
 be more fairly appealed to by the allies of Scotus 
 than by his opponents. And once more we have 
 very tangible, practical, worldly questions, com-
 
 76 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 plicated with those naturally belonging to a high 
 region of thought. For as a strict view of pre- 
 destination had seemed to tend to a disparagement 
 of ecclesiastical rule, sacramental efficacy, and 
 sacerdotal authority, still more did any theory 
 which, in the mind of the ordinary Christian, seemed 
 to diminish the astounding change made in sacra- 
 mental bread and wine by priestly consecration 
 threaten to relax the hold of clerical authority on 
 the life of the laity. It seems more natural, even, 
 that Hincmar of Rheims should oppose John the 
 Scot in this controversy than that he should have 
 appealed for his aid against the strict predes- 
 tinarians. 
 
 Yet for the student of the controversy, and es- 
 pecially of the part taken in it by Scotus, there is 
 a great practical difference, in that we have no work 
 of Scotus written with the direct object of refuting 
 the opposite side. If he ever wrote such a book 
 a much disputed question, to which we shall have 
 to return it has hopelessly perished. Those who 
 have studied the controversial work of Scotus in 
 the previous dispute, and compared it with what 
 we should have gathered as to his opinions on the 
 subject from his utterances in his more constructive 
 treatises, will by no means regret this fact. ^ In his 
 various works, especially his Commentaries on 
 Dionysius, his De Divisione Naturae, and his 
 fragment on the Gospel of St. John, we have ample 
 material for constructing his views on sacraments
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 77 
 
 and symbols, without the difficulty of having to 
 allow for the conscious or unconscious warping 
 of the mind necessary in any who holds a brief for 
 a case, while he reserves some private opinion of 
 his own. 
 
 But, indeed, if Scotus had been less explicit, we 
 should have been able to conjecture his general 
 attitude from his relation to the Neo-Platonic 
 philosophy in general, and toDionysius in particular. 
 From what we have said as to the Neo-Platonic 
 conception of the Deity as unknown and unknow- 
 able, yet communicating something of itself to the 
 human mind by virtue of the divine element in 
 man and in nature, it follows that all knowledge of 
 the supersensuous must necessarily be clothed in 
 symbolic form must be presented in such incom- 
 plete and fragmentary ways as render it capable 
 of being grasped by the receptive soul. And every 
 soul will derive more or less knowledge and 
 strength from symbolic utterance and sacramental 
 usage as its own individual position in the upward 
 path to purity and light is advanced or backward. 
 It may be said that if the Neo-Platonists had found 
 no sacraments ready to hand, they would have had 
 to invent some. But such were already in existence, 
 and growing in influence ; first, among the Hellenes, 
 the various mysteries, especially the newer ones of 
 oriental origin ; later, the two, or three, or seven 
 Sacraments according to the yet undefined method 
 of reckoning in the Christian Church.
 
 78 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 All recent inquirers into the history of Pagan 
 ritual 1 have dwelt on the peculiar importance 
 attached to the ancient mysteries during the later 
 phases of Hellenic and of Imperial times, and the 
 readiness with which foreign rites of mystic sig- 
 nificance were adopted in the Graeco-Roman world. 
 The developments which they describe are con- 
 sidered as a response to the needs of an age which 
 had grown cosmopolitan in its culture, philanthropic 
 in its ethics, and eclectic or pantheistic in its 
 religious beliefs ; which retained the old national 
 cults from patriotic and conservative feelings, but 
 sought the satisfaction of its private religious 
 aspirations in a more exciting ceremonial, and in 
 doctrines involving a wider hope. At the same 
 time, writers on the early history of the Christian 
 Church 2 have shown how, at a quite early period, 
 the conceptions, and even the language, applied to 
 the Pagan mysteries were transferred to the most 
 sacred observances of Christianity. Of course the 
 mystic element in all cults is but loosely con- 
 nected with the authentic history of their origins, 
 or rather, the real historic origin is often obscured 
 by the aetiological myths invented to explain 
 pieces of ancient ritual. But whereas in the Pagan 
 mysteries, the old-world superstitions interesting 
 
 1 See, among many other authorities, Percy Gardner on ' The 
 Mysteries ' in the Manual of Greek Antiquities, by Gardner and 
 Jevons ; and Jean ReVille in the fifth chapter of Part I of La Religion 
 a Rome sous les Severes. 
 
 2 Notably Dr. Edwin Hatch, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1888.
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 79 
 
 enough to the modern anthropologist which first 
 gave rise to the secret rites practised at Eleusis 
 or at Pessinus, were overlaid or lost to the later 
 worshipper, the original actions and intentions 
 of the earliest celebrants of the Christian sacra- 
 ments, though in matters of detail they leave wide 
 scope to the archaeologist and the historian, are 
 sufficiently well known to afford some touchstone , 
 for checking the accretion of superstitious fancy 
 and for limiting the field of legitimate development. 
 Thus the power of symbolism is not much 
 lessened by the growth of a rationalism that brings 
 its unsparing light into the obscure corners of 
 pseudo-historical origins or pseudo-scientific uses. 
 Its danger in so far as, in a natural and healthy 
 state, it is a power for good lies rather in the 
 ignorance which overlooks symbolic meaning and 
 can only distinguish between the tangible and the 
 unreal. And if the mysterious is reduced to the 
 tangible it descends to the rank of the magical. 
 Tho~se who believe in the necessity of symbolism 
 for all religious worship and religious thought can 
 only save it from a childish degradation by enlarg- 
 ing the sphere of the symbolic till it comprehends 
 all material things in so far as they bear witness 
 to the spiritual, and by refusing to regard as a I 
 reality any phenomenon by which such witness 1 
 cannot be borne. 
 
 1 For the distinction between mystery and symbol proper see / 
 Scotus' Comment, on St. Jn., Floss, pp. 344, 345.
 
 8o Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Now, according- to Scotus, a sacrament or mystery 
 is an expression of hidden truths by actions as 
 well as by words. A symbol pure and simple 
 is an expression by words only, as an allegorical 
 phrase, or a parable like that of Dives and Lazarus. 
 The difference, however, does not seem to lie very 
 deep, for the eye accustomed to symbolic views 
 finds a sacramental significance in every part of 
 nature and of human history. A curious illustra- 
 tion of the close resemblance to be traced between 
 the Pagan Neo-Platonists in their treatment of 
 mysteries, and the Christians like Dionysius in their 
 view of symbols and sacraments, is seen in the 
 similar attitude taken up by both towards in- 
 congruous or grotesque comparisons. Thus Julian 1 , 
 in his Oration in honour of the Mother of the Gods, 
 justifies the repetition of the strange story of 
 Cybele and Atys, commemorated in Syrian rites, 
 by showing how far more likely such stories are 
 to stimulate a search for occult wisdom, and to re- 
 main withdrawn from any superficial and material 
 significance, than those which are clothed in more 
 sedate form. And Scotus 2 , following Dionysius, 
 dwells in very similar fashion on the value of 
 the avonoiov in the ascription to the Deity of the 
 passions of humanity and the properties of the 
 material creation. 
 
 This view is worked out, with regard to the 
 
 1 Or. v. 170. 
 
 2 Commentary on De Cod. Hier. ii, par. 3.
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 81 
 
 several sacraments, in the treatise of Dionysius, 
 De Ecclesiastica Hierarchies. First, he gives in 
 each case an account, of great interest to the anti- 
 quarian, of the rites and ceremonies attending the 
 celebration of each in turn. Then he proceeds to 
 give a mystic meaning to every part of the ritual 
 practised. The commentaries of Scotus, so far as 
 they are extant, do not comprise this work ; but 
 it wag^tran si ated by Scotus, and there is no 
 reason" to suppose that he did not agree with its 
 contents. 
 
 We may take as bearing most distinctly on our 
 subject his description of the communion or synaxis 1 , 
 which latter word he explains, not in its usual 
 interpretation of a gathering of Christians to cele- 
 brate the Eucharist, but as a bringing together 
 of the scattered, discordant elements of human 
 nature into the divine unity. In his opening 
 remarks he shows with what deep reverence he 
 regards this ' rite of rites/ without which no other 
 is complete. This superiority is, however, not due 
 to miraculous change in any material objects, but 
 to the fact that in it is commemorated the central 
 idea of his religion, the communication of divine 
 life to the human soul. 
 
 The parts of which the ritual consists are as 
 follows: the priest ( = iepdpxr)s) offers a prayer 
 before the altar, where incense is burned, and 
 makes a procession round the choir of the church ; 
 
 1 De Eccles. Hierarch. iii. 
 G
 
 82 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 he then begins a psalm, in which all the clergy 
 (the whole ecclesiastical order, not the laity) join; 
 next comes the reading of a portion of Scripture 
 by the deacons ; afterwards all catechumens, ener- 
 gumens, and penitents depart ; the doors are shut, 
 and the bread and wine are placed on the altar 
 while another hymn is sung ; the priest offers 
 another prayer, sends the pax round to be kissed, 
 and recites certain sacred words ; then he and all 
 the clergy wash their hands, and after a prayer 
 of thanksgiving he consecrates the elements and 
 displays them to the people ; he then communicates 
 himself, and invites the faithful to do the like ; 
 then follows the giving of thanks, and the con- 
 gregation regard the mysteries, while the priest 
 himself is rapt in holy contemplation. 
 
 To each part of this ceremonial Dionysius pro- 
 ceeds to attach a religious significance, the central 
 action of the whole corresponding to the partici- 
 pation in the divine nature, which is possible to 
 man through the Incarnation of the Logos. 
 
 While we cannot trace in the description by 
 Dionysius any foreshadowing of the doctrine of 
 Transubstantiation, he seems equally remote from 
 the conception of the Mass of a sacrifice offered 
 by the priest on behalf of the people. True, we 
 find germs of two of the three kinds of sacrifice 
 distinguished by Robertson Smith and by all who 
 have since written on the subject of the thank- 
 offering, and of the mystic union with the victim
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 83 
 
 but not so much, perhaps, of the piacular gift for 
 atonement. The various parts of the service the 
 prayers, the sacred reading, and the commemoration 
 of living and dead are not treated as if wholly 
 subsidiary either to the consecration or to the 
 oblation of the elements. 
 
 If we turn from Dionysius to Scotus, we find 
 the samesa^ramental theory,_based on a similar 
 conception of the relation of the divine to the 
 natural and to the human. In one sense, all nature 
 is mysterious and of sacramental meaning : ' there 
 is, I consider, nothing in the visible and material 
 world which does not signify somewhat immaterial 
 and reasonable 1 .' The institutions and doctrines 
 of the Church show forth symbolically what cannot 
 be shown in any other way. Baptism and the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation are thus taken together. 
 ' When any faithful persons receive the sacrament 
 of baptism, what happens but the conception and 
 birth in their hearts of God the Word, of and through 
 the Holy Ghost? Thus every day Christ is con- 
 ceived in the womb of faith as in that of a pure 
 mother, and is born and nourished V His opinion 
 as to the necessity of sacraments is not entirely 
 clear, since he regards their material element as 
 merely temporary, though closely connected with 
 their spiritual significance. He calls baptism ' the 
 sacrament by which we are reborn,' yet insists 
 on the need of faith for the efficacy of that sacra- 
 1 De Dii: Nat. v. 3. * Ibid., ii. 33. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 Studies- in John the Scot 
 
 ment l . And of the Eucharist he says : ' For we 
 also, who after His incarnation and passion and 
 resurrection have believed in Him, and understood 
 His mysteries, as far as is possible for us, do both 
 in our spirits sacrifice Him, and in our minds not 
 with our teeth eat of Him 2 .' And again 3 , 'Of 
 these things (i. e. the sacrifice and triumph of 
 Christ) the sacred symbols are now celebrated, 
 while what was formerly known to our minds 
 appears to our eyes, since the pious mind tastes 
 inwardly the body of Christ, the stream of sacred 
 blood, and the ransom-price of the world (pretium 
 mundi).' This last passage does indeed seem to 
 point to the idea of a piacular sacrifice, but there 
 does not seem to be any reference to the eucharistic 
 celebration as the actual offering of a sacrifice. 
 The extract is from an Easter hymn, in which 
 Christ is regarded as the self-offered Paschal lamb 
 of which the celebrants figuratively partake. 
 
 Having obtained some notion of the general 
 teaching of Scotus and his school as to the sacra- 
 ments, and especially as to the Eucharist, let us 
 pass on to inquire into the aspect in which this 
 subject was viewed by the men of his time, and 
 the reasons why his opinions came to collide with 
 those of Hincmar and other great churchmen of 
 his day 4 . 
 
 1 Comm. Ev. sec. loh., Floss, pp. 315-318. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 311. 
 
 * De Paschate, u. 61-4, p. 1226 in Floss. 
 
 4 Of course the growth of the Catholic conception of the Eucharist
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 85 
 
 The question of the day .was as to the change 
 made in the sacred elements by consecration. The 
 term transubstantiation was not yet current, but 
 the result of this controversy ^ was to cause the 
 prevalence of the conception involved in that word. 
 The belief that a change (/xera/3oA?/) took place in 
 the bread and wine was generally held, but the 
 specific nature of the change was for centuries left 
 indefinite. In 496, Pope Gelasius declared : ' esse 
 non desinit substantia vel natura panis et vini.' 
 At the same time, the sacrament is spoken of both 
 by Greek and Latin Fathers as a sacrifice. This 
 language, however, seems to be figurative and 
 somewhat vague. It seems to be agreed that the 
 celebration of masses to ransom the souls of the 
 departed was not practised before Gregory the Great. 
 
 The sacramental controversy of the ninth cen- 
 tury is generally taken to begin with a treatise 
 published by the monk Paschasius Radbertus, who 
 was Abbot of Corbie from 844 to 85 1 ; and therefore, 
 most probably, a senior contemporary of John the 
 Scot. In his treatise, De Corpore et Sanguine 
 Domini 1 , he expounded what may be called the 
 ultra- sacramentarian view, and prepared the way 
 
 fills a large part in all the Church Histories. For a clear account 
 I may especially refer to Kurtz, translated by Edersheim, vol. i, 
 p. 227 et seq., and p. 361 et seq., and to Gieseler, vol. ii, English 
 translation, p. 48 et seq., and to Noorden as before ; also to 
 Cheetham's Church History, pp. 374, 375. 
 1 It is published in Migne's Patrologia, vol. cxx, pp. 1267-
 
 86 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 for the doctrine which the Church of Rome after- 
 wards authorized, and has ever since maintained 
 as the corner-stone of her fabric. He insists that 
 the change in the elements at consecration is that 
 of complete transformation into the body and blood 
 of Christ, the very same body that was born of the 
 Virgin Mary, and the same blood that flowed in its 
 veins. The change has not been made apparent to 
 the outward senses, because the consumption of 
 the body and blood would be impossible if there 
 were no disguise in the form. Not being patent 
 to the unfaithful, the change differs from a miracle, 
 and is more correctly called a mystery. Neverthe- 
 less, for the conviction of infidels, the change has 
 more than once been made in palpable form. 
 Visions have been seen of a new-born babe under 
 the hands of the consecrating priest, and an un- 
 believing Jew was once nearly choked in trying 
 to swallow the holy bread. Some of the details to 
 which the application of the principle leads are 
 materialistic to a degree which may to moderns 
 seem disgusting, and others are exceedingly puerile, 
 yet the inward action of the received elements is 
 described as purely spiritual ; the participation is 
 'per fidem,' not 'per speciem,' and the opposite 
 school might agree in the definition of sacramentum 
 as 'quidquid in aliqua celebratione divina nobis 
 quasi pignus salutis traditur,' though they might 
 demur to what follows: 'cum res gesta visibilis 
 longe aliud invisibile intus operatur, quod sancte
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 8 7 
 
 accipiendum sit.' We may observe that a trace is 
 seen of the vagueness still surrounding the number 
 and nature of the Sacraments, in that both the 
 Incarnation and the instruction by Scripture had, 
 as with Dionysius and Scotus, a sacramental 
 character ascribed to them. 
 
 But in spite of this generality and vagueness, 
 and of the denial of any miracle in the mystic 
 change, there seemed to many of Radbertus's con- 
 temporaries, as to writers of a later day, something 
 materialistic and superstitious in the main prin- 
 ciple of the treatise. At the same time, the ex- 
 ceeding importance which it would give to the 
 function of the officiating priest, and the increased 
 importance it assigned to sacramental observance 
 on the part of the laity, would naturally commend 
 it to those who saw, not merely their own pro- 
 fessional interest, but the order and well-being 
 of Christendom bound up in the maintenance of 
 a strong, dignified, and venerated hierarchy. We 
 are not, therefore, surprised to find Hincrnar of 
 Rheims on the side of Radbertus. At the same 
 time Rabanus Maurus, the great opponent of 
 Gottschalk, wrote on the opposite side. Another 
 controversialist who had taken part in the other 
 dispute, Ratramnus the Monk 1 , opposed the doc- 
 trines of Radbertus, and is therefore apparently, this 
 time, on the same side as John the Scot. He is, 
 
 1 His book : De Corpore et Sanguine Domini is in Migne's 
 Patrologia, vol. cxxi, p. 103 et seq.
 
 88 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 however, not so bitter as to shrink from giving the 
 appellation ' quidam fidelium ' to those who hold 
 opposite views from his own. 
 
 Meantime a royal theologian had appeared, at 
 least as spectator of the combat. The treatise of 
 Radbertus had been addressed to Charles the Bald, 
 and that of Ratramnus was an answer to two 
 questions which Charles had put to him on two 
 salient points of Radbertus's teaching. These were 
 (i) do the elements, after consecration, contain an 
 occult power recognized by faith but not by sight ? 
 and (2) is the body of Christ, of which the congre- 
 gation partake, the actual body that was born and 
 died ? To the former of these questions Ratramnus 
 seems to return an affirmative answer, to the latter 
 a very emphatic negative. Yet some of his ex- 
 pressions seem compatible with very high sacra- 
 mentarian views : ' The body and blood of Christ, 
 which are in the Church received by the mouth of 
 the faithful, are figures according to visible form, 
 but according to their invisible substance, that is, 
 to the power of the Divine Word, they are in truth 
 the body and blood of Christ.' But again he says : 
 ' What the Church celebrates is the body and blood 
 of Christ, but as it were a pledge, an image.' ' A 
 pledge and an image have reference, not to them- 
 selves, but to something else.' And he calls atten- 
 tion to the other signification of ' corpus Domini ' 
 in which it stands for the whole company of the 
 faithful.
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 89 
 
 These extracts are sufficient to show that on 
 neither side was the doctrine held in a form which 
 has prevailed through the centuries, and that it is 
 futile alike for Protestants to adopt Ratramnus as 
 their forerunner and for Roman Catholics to appro- 
 priate Radbertus. Nevertheless, there is a real 
 difference of view between the opponents. One 
 cannot help regarding the conflict as being waged 
 between idealism and materialism, though the 
 idealists appeal to occult changes which seem 
 almost to savour of magic, and the materialists 
 maintain the spiritual aspect in so far as they 
 confine sacramental efficacy within the dominion 
 of faith. 
 
 For a time, the rival views were maintained in 
 smouldering hostility, but they broke out into 
 energetic conflict in the middle of the next century. 
 The views of Ratramnus were upheld by Beren- 
 garius of Tours ; those of Radbertus by Lanfranc, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury. Berengarius considered 
 himself to be a follower of John the Scot : ' If,' he 
 wrote to Lanfranc *, ' you make a heretic of John, 
 whose opinions on the Eucharist we approve, you 
 will also make heretics of Ambrose, Jerome, and 
 Augustine, not to mention others.' But the Church 
 was now under the more centralized government 
 of the great reforming popes who were carrying 
 out the ideas of Clugny. In 1050 Berengarius 
 was condemned, though not present, in a council 
 
 1 The passage is quoted by Gieseler, vol. ii. p. 399.
 
 90 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 held by Leo IX in Rome, and later in the same 
 year by one at Vercelli. In spite of the favour in 
 which, for a time, he believed himself to stand 
 with Hildebrand, it was under the pontificate of 
 Gregory VII that he was again condemned at a 
 synod held in Rome in 1 059. Here he consented 
 to subscribe the following recantation: 'I, Beren- 
 garius, do anathematize every heresy, particularly 
 the one by which, hitherto, I have brought shame 
 on myself. ... I agree with the Holy Roman 
 Church that the bread and wine which are placed 
 on the altar are, after consecration, not only the 
 sacrament, but the real body and blood of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ; and that sensibly, not merely as 
 sacrament, but in reality, it is handled by the 
 hands of the priests, broken and ground by the 
 teeth of the faithful.' From this confession, how- 
 ever, Berengarius took flight as soon as possible. 
 Another war of words and documents followed, 
 and in 1079 there was another condemnation at 
 Rome, and another confession extracted from Beren- 
 garius, which, however, he abjured with all speed. 
 He met, nevertheless, with a very lenient treatment 
 at the hands of Hildebrand, and was allowed to 
 retire to the island of St. Come, near Tours, where 
 he lived in respect and honour till his death in 
 1088, and was afterwards revered as a kind of 
 local saint, an annual feast being celebrated in 
 his memory. 
 
 The last word had not yet been said, but the
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 9 i 
 
 most salient doctrine of the Roman Church had 
 been declared in a council held by the greatest 
 pope of the Middle Ages. And here, again, the 
 philosopher John is on the side of the retrogrades, 
 who are cited in favour of Greek mysticism by the 
 last opponents of mediaeval and Latin sacra- 
 mentalism. 
 
 This last decision, however, was not made till 
 a hundred years after Scotus was dead. To what 
 extent was his influence, actual or posthumous, 
 felt during the contest ? 
 
 Two facts are patent : that Scotus did not think 
 of the Sacraments as did those whose opinions 
 finally prevailed ; and that he was appealed to 
 as an authority by one set of controversialists, 
 vehemently denounced by the other. But there is 
 a narrower question, of literary interest and very 
 much disputed : Did Scotus actually write a book 
 on the Eucharist Controversy ? 
 
 Three answers may be propounded to this 
 question: (i) that he wrote a book which has not 
 come down to us ; (2) that he wrote the treatise 
 commonly attributed to Ratramnus ; and (3) that 
 we have no reason to suppose that he wrote any 
 book at all ; while it is probable that both friends 
 and foes took the treatise of Ratramnus as his. 
 
 The chief reasons for supposing that Scotus 
 wrote a separate work on the subject are the 
 following : In the first place we have the words of 
 Hincmar in the second treatise, De Praedesti-
 
 92 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 natione J , that according to the opinion of John 
 the Scot, the ' sacrament of the altar is not the 
 real body and the real blood of the Lord, but only 
 a memorial of His real body and real blood.' 
 It is said 2 that this expression does not exactly 
 coincide with anything to be found either in the 
 extant works of Scotus or in that of Ratramnus. 
 Whether conscious or unconscious manipulation 
 might produce such a form of words is a question 
 to be left to experts. 
 
 Then again we have a treatise by a certain 
 Abbot Adrevaldus who was alive in 870: 'De 
 Corpore et Sanguine Christi, contra ineptias Scoti 3 .' 
 This, however, is merely a jejune exposition com- 
 posed almost entirely of quotations from Scripture 
 and the Fathers, and equally adapted to refute 
 the ' ineptiae ' of Scotus, of Ratramnus, or of any 
 one else who had written on that side. More to 
 the point, in the judgement of competent critics, is 
 the evidence derived from a treatise De Corpore 
 et Sanguine Domini, in which is expressed, without 
 direct reference to Scotus, the view of those who 
 regard the elements as ' signa corporis et sanguinis,' 
 a more mystic conception than that of Ratramnus. 
 Then we know that a book purporting to be by 
 Scotus was condemned at Vercelli, and that 
 
 1 De Praed. Diss. Post, c. xxxi. 
 
 2 By Noorden, who treats the whole question in a very careful 
 note, p. 104. 
 
 3 Printed in the Spicilegium of D'Achery, vol. 5. p. 150 et seq.
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 93 
 
 Berengarius regarded himself as a follower of 
 Scotus, with whose other writings, however, he 
 may have had some acquaintance. 
 
 No one familiar with the style and the thoughts 
 of Scotus can believe that the treatise bearing the 
 name of Ratramnus was really the work of our 
 philosopher. In an uncritical age, however, it is 
 not impossible that men two generations removed 
 from the controversy, or even some late contempor- 
 aries of those who had begun it, may have been 
 misled into the notion that Scotus had written 
 the book, especially if Ratramnus and his friends 
 wished at first, from prudential motives, to keep 
 the authorship secret 1 . Whether there were two 
 distinct works or not we must regard as an open 
 question. But we cannot doubt that if there were 
 two, they must have been very dissimilar in tone 
 and contents. 
 
 We see, then, that in this, as in the predestin- 
 arian controversy, the ground occupied by John 
 the Scot was beyond the reach of both conflicting 
 parties. He seems equally beyond the reach of 
 parties that have striven against one another in 
 disputes of a somewhat similar character in later 
 days. Neither Jansenists nor Jesuits, Calvinists 
 nor Arminians, can claim him as an ally in their 
 polemics on predestination ; neither those who 
 
 1 This argument is used by Gieseler, vol. ii. p. 286. But I fail 
 to reconcile it with the fact that it was written in answer to questions 
 asked by Charles the Bald.
 
 94 
 
 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 exalt nor those who disparage the efficacy of the 
 Sacraments can find consistent support in his 
 pages. With paradoxes which his opponents called 
 ' ineptiae ' he warded off the attacks of foes and the 
 misunderstanding of friends. ' This wicked man,' 
 some might aver, ' would limit the powers of the 
 Almighty by saying that He has no knowledge of 
 evil.' ' How,' we imagine him to reply, ' can power 
 be limited by absence of knowledge of the non- 
 existent ? ' ' He denies that there is such a thing 
 as sin or its punishment, and thereby removes 
 the terrors which restrict men from wrongdoing.' 
 ' But what can be more terrible than privation of 
 the only real good ? What more fearful punish- 
 ment than hopelessness of ever attaining to the 
 vision of God ? ' And in the second controversy : 
 ' This profane man says that the holy sacrament is 
 a mere sign and pledge, not a divine substance.' 
 ' But what is the glorious sun in heaven but a type 
 of the divine glory? This whole universe, in its 
 beauty and harmony, is but a sign and symbol of the 
 beauty and harmony which lie beyond all sensual 
 perception.' Yet if those who attach no great 
 value to external ordinances would claim the Scot 
 as a forerunner, they would find even less sympathy 
 from him than he showed for their opponents. 
 When reformers had done their utmost to weed out 
 superstitions and to make the doctrines and rites of 
 the popular religion as simple and as intelligible as 
 possible, they would find that Scotus and his friends
 
 Symbolism and Sacrament 95 
 
 still regarded those doctrines as symbolic in ex- 
 pression, those rites as mysterious in purport. 
 For to such thinkers a religion without symbolism 
 and mystery would be a contradiction in terms. 
 To the pious mind of this type, all life becomes 
 sacramental, not by the degradation of the institu- 
 tions in which the sacramental idea is concentrated, 
 but by raising all the acts and passions and experi- 
 ences of humanity into an intimate relation with 
 the supersensual life. The Sacraments, like the 
 whole hierarchical order, serve to bring the lower 
 into communion with the higher. But the degree 
 of participation depends on conditions which are 
 individual and subjective. ' As many as are the 
 souls of the faithful, so many are the theophanies.' 
 It might be easy to show that religious symbolism 
 in the Middle Ages did not always wear so sublime 
 an aspect. Allegory run wild is destructive to clear 
 thinking and to critical interpretation of words and 
 thoughts. The strained interpretations of Scrip- 
 ture, the unscientific explanation of ancient usages 
 to which Scotus and his school continually resorted, 
 are apt to blind us to some of their strongest 
 merits. For, after all, their system allowed more 
 free scope for the development and exercise of re- 
 ligious thought and feeling than any other current 
 in their own or possibly in any other time. It pre- 
 cluded alike a slavish attachment to mechanical 
 observance and a scanty ritual without suggestions 
 to stimulate the spiritual imagination. While
 
 96 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 attributing supreme importance to theological 
 knowledge, it was quite free from the trammels of 
 a doctrine that, professing to be perfectly clear, and 
 to hint at nothing beyond its own categorical state- 
 ments, must needs become unintelligible or even 
 absurd to minds that realize the limits of definite 
 assertion. In sacrament and symbol there is, as 
 Scotus said, both a temporary and a permanent 
 element, and the perennial life can most safely be 
 embodied in forms that favour the periodical re- 
 discovery of half-forgotten truths.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SCOTUS AS OPTIMIST 
 
 ' But yet we trust that somehow good 
 Will be the final goal of ill.' TENNYSON. 
 
 IT has already been sufficiently pointed out that 
 the principal ecclesiastical controversies with which 
 the name of Scotus is associated were none of his 
 own seeking, nor were they concerned with problems 
 which he had set himself to solve. The questions 
 whether predestination is single or double, and 
 what is the precise change undergone by the 
 sacramental elements in the process of priestly 
 consecration, would probably never have troubled 
 his mind if they had not been directly presented 
 to him for solution. But there were other diffi- 
 culties, some of them quite beyond the ordinary 
 mental walk of his ecclesiastical contemporaries, to 
 which he felt himself obliged to devote the full 
 powers of his intellect and many hours of toilsome 
 effort. It was not, as a rule, the greatest of all 
 
 H
 
 98 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 questions, in an undisguised form, that drew 
 controversial works from the pens of Hincmar, 
 Prudentius, or Florus. To them, for instance, 
 there would not have been much difficulty in 
 trying to conceive how an unchangeable Deity 
 could have brought into existence a mutable world, 
 or how that world should fail to reveal in every 
 part the trace of its divine origin. The plain man 
 knows that if he were in the place of the Almighty, 
 he would very much like to create a universe, and 
 that if, by any slip, some adverse element should 
 have intruded, he would be ready with some device 
 for its expulsion. He may think it a puzzling 
 matter to decide why, in this world, merit often 
 meets with scant reward and vice goes unpunished ; 
 but his feeling of justice is satisfied by the assurance 
 that some day all cases will be reheard and many 
 dooms reversed. The ancient problems concerning 
 the one and the many, rest and motion, the material 
 and the spiritual universe, do not torment him. 
 The plainest man, who has any religion at all, is 
 bound to have a teleology and a theodicy of some 
 kind or another, but it is likely to be crude and 
 inconsistent. The philosopher must have his in 
 more subtle form, yet it would be rash to say that 
 he, more than his humble neighbour, has ever 
 attained to consistency. 
 
 The difficulty which Scotus felt in approaching 
 the problem as to the final goal of all things, and 
 the way in which it is reached, appears plainly in
 
 Scotus as Optimist 99 
 
 that part of his dialogue between master and pupil ' 
 where they pass to the consideration of the un- 
 created, non-creating, into which all things are 
 finally to be resolved. The master gives warning 
 of the dangerous sea, strewn with wrecks and abound- 
 ing in unseen dangers, on which they are embark- 
 ing, and the pupil, who presents throughout the 
 type of the indefatigable inquirer, declares himself 
 ready to venture, and prepared to eat the bread 
 of wisdom in the sweat of his brow. It seems that 
 Scotus considered the whole subject of creation, in 
 relation to its first cause, to the primordial ideas, 
 and to the microcosm man, as quite easy to deal 
 with in comparison with that of the final con- 
 summation. 
 
 We have already seen how the philosophic stand- 
 point occupied by Scotus involved an optimistic 
 vie w_ of the universe generally. For he held that 
 the ground and substance of all things is good 
 that what we call evil is merely a privation of 
 good, and has no positive existence. This is not 
 what is commonly signified by the term optimism, 
 which may roughly be defined as a belief in the 
 ultimate triumph of good over evil. Some such 
 belief is very earnestly maintained and worked out 
 in detail in various parts of Scotus' writings. But 
 the nature of the ultimate triumph expected must 
 differ with the way in which the difference between 
 good and evil is regarded. If evil is only apparent, 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iv. 2. 
 H 2
 
 ioo Studies in John the Scot 
 
 the victory of good consists only in the clear 
 manifestation of the good as being alone possessed 
 of reality. This is practically asserted by Scotus 
 when he speaks of the moment of final consumma- 
 tion as the time of the appearance of truth : ' ilia 
 die, hoc est in apparitione veritatis V 
 
 Perhaps it might be possible to reduce all the 
 processes which Scotus traces as leading to the 
 purification and perfection of the whole creation into 
 the manifestation of hidden truth. Even now, 
 according to his fundamental principle, God is all 
 in all, but God is not realized as being all in all 
 except by a few highly privileged souls 2 . The 
 annihilation of evil, then, from this idealistic 
 standpoint, is nothing but the clearing away of 
 intellectual or spiritual obscurity. Even the 
 eternal punishment of wilful sin seems to lie in 
 the revelation of its futility. 
 
 But besides the Christian or theistic need 'to 
 justify the ways of God to man,' or the more 
 vaguely human desire to show that this universe 
 is the best possible of universes, Scotus feels the 
 necessity of bringing into his philosophy the old 
 theory of cyclic revolutions. The ideas of moral 
 restitution and of a completed harmony are blended 
 in his mind. The motion and return of the heavenly 
 bodies, the regular recurrence of tides and seasons, 
 the tendency of all things in nature towards some 
 end which is also a beginning, symbolizes or is 
 1 De Div. Nat. v. 32. 2 Ibid., iii. 20.
 
 Scotus as Optimist 101 
 
 identical with the strivings of man towards a 
 blessed and eternal life. Even in the arts the 
 same tendency is manifest. Dialectic revolves 
 around being, arithmetic around the monad, 
 geometry around the figure. The resolution of all 
 things into their original elements is the whole 
 process of nature. Applied to man, it signifies the 
 return of his being into God. But since, for man, 
 to participate in God is to live in perpetual con- 
 templation of the Divine glory, and since the 
 substance of all things is eternal, the vision of 
 the beatified universe with which Scotus presents 
 us is not that of a vast sea in which the peculiar 
 qualities of all things are absorbed in a never- 
 ending monotony, but of a perfectly harmonious 
 composition in which all creatures live in unity 
 yet without confusion of individual being. 
 
 If we were in the position of the ' Discipulus ' 
 there is a question we might desire to ask. Granted 
 that all things move in cycles and return to their 
 original elements, yet their return does not result 
 in a perpetual quiescence, but rather in renewed 
 movement. Following the analogy, when all things 
 are resolved into the primary cause of all, will 
 there be again a fresh departure, a new creation, 
 perhaps another apparent reign of evil, only to be 
 overcome by another procession or incarnation of 
 the creative Logos 1 ? But we may imagine the 
 
 1 I have known a clever child who asked whether, if the planets 
 were inhabited, a Christ had died in each.
 
 102 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 ' Magister ' replying, with scornful wrath, that we 
 had not yet diverted our niinds from temporal and 
 even spacial relations, which have no application 
 in speculations of this kind. Or he might tell us 
 that this was a mystery into which we were not 
 able to penetrate. 
 
 Another difficulty might arise from the very fact 
 that time is no more than a condition of our cogni- 
 tion of material things. It may seem to us that 
 as no series however numerous of intermediate 
 beings could bridge the distance between creator 
 and created, the infinite one and the finite many, 
 so no number of aeons of perfectly and evidently 
 harmonious order could obliterate the fact that 
 there was ever, even in semblance, an element of 
 discord. If, for one second, any man or demon felt 
 one unsocial instinct or performed one malicious 
 act, that moment would be as destructive of the 
 theory of the ' best possible universe ' as if the 
 world had lain for ages in the power of the Wicked 
 One. This objection might seem to be met by 
 assigning a purely negative character to evil, but 
 to some of us it may appear that the difficulty is 
 thereby only pushed one step back. 
 
 One other interesting point in connexion with 
 sin and its annihilation, as expounded by Scotus, 
 may be pointed out here before we take up the 
 main line of his theory. It is well known that 
 the later Graeco-Romans, who drew from their 
 philosophy maxims for daily practical life, especially
 
 Scotus as Optimist 103 
 
 the Stoics, such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, 
 sought to soften the resentment naturally aroused 
 against unsocial and unreasonable people by in- 
 sisting on the involuntary character of all wrong- 
 doing. ' Thou art injuring thyself, my child,' says 
 Marcus in imagination to a man who is seeking to 
 injure him. For if the worst of men could realize 
 the beauty of goodness, he would, by his innate 
 desire for happiness, seek it alone, and not deprive 
 himself of so great a good. Now Scotus, following 
 the words of St. Augustine, shows how all men, 
 bad and good, desire being, happy being, and 
 perpetual being, and avoid death and pain. If they 
 fall into death and pain, it must be by error, to 
 which he assigns a large, though not the whole 
 share, in human depravity. But though, in a sense, 
 he would make error the source of evil, no one can 
 be stronger than Scotus in asserting that sin comes 
 of self-will, of a turning from the true principle of 
 man to self as goal and centre \ There is, perhaps, 
 no contradiction here. Sin may be chiefly due to 
 ignorance, yet that ignorance may be voluntary. 
 
 In the part of his treatise De Divisione Naturae, 
 which deals with the restitution of all things, 
 Scotus transcribes, even more freely than in other 
 parts of his writings, copious quotations from the 
 Fathers chiefly from the Greeks Gregory of 
 Nyssa, Maximus, Epiphanius, Origen (with whom 
 he is here in intimate sympathy), and others, 
 1 De Div. Nat. ii. 25, and De praedentinatione, 6.
 
 104 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 though in two places where he quotes Ambrose J , 
 he seems to show an almost nervous fear of be- 
 traying his preference for the Greeks. Augustine, 
 of course, is frequently cited. Yet we constantly 
 feel, especially with the more lengthy quotations, 
 that they are rather employed to illustrate than to 
 support the philosopher's views. Many causes 
 other than philosophic necessity had led the early 
 Christian writers, and those of the fourth century, 
 to dwell on the topic of the Last Judgement, and of 
 the new heaven and new earth wherein righteous- 
 ness should dwell. And as it is impossible to dwell 
 on such subjects without a plentiful employment of 
 imagery, we may often feel that in transcribing or 
 even expanding their words, Scotus is interpreting 
 them ' translative.' This may account for some, 
 though certainly not for all, of the inconsistencies 
 which we find in treatises designed for men who 
 set a high value on authority by one who was 
 endeavouring to weld together material employed 
 by the various authorities of Scripture, patristic 
 tradition, and the principles of the later Greek 
 philosophies. 
 
 It is impossible, in examining this part of the 
 doctrine of Scotus, to distinguish clearly between 
 the restoration of the Creation to primitive unity 
 and simplicity and the recovery by fallen human 
 nature of its pristine dignity. But, indeed, his 
 conception of man as the microcosm, as an epitome 
 
 1 De. Die. Nat. iv. 17; and also v. 8.
 
 Scot us as Optimist 105 
 
 of that thought of God which constitutes the whole 
 creation, renders any such distinction superfluous. 
 Restitution in the wider sense is comprised in the 
 redemption of mankind and the purification of 
 human souls from sin. If we ask why such resti- 
 tution is required, what signs there are of imper- 
 fection in the universe as we know it, we do not 
 obtain such an answer as a modern thinker might 
 give, in the prevalence of pain among animals, the 
 apparent loss of noble types, and the like. Rather 
 the imperfection is seen in the manifold character 
 of things since the one is ever superior to the 
 many and in what is regarded as the merely 
 contingent existence of material things, since sub- 
 stance is superior to accident. ' We believe,' he 
 says, 'that the end of this sensible world will be 
 nothing else than a return into God and into its 
 primordial causes, in which it naturally subsists V 
 And again 2 : ' It (the creation) begins in a sense 
 to be, not in that it subsists in its primordial 
 causes, but in that it begins to appear from 
 temporal causes. For temporal causes I call the 
 qualities and quantities and all else that come to 
 belong as accidents to substances in time by 
 generation. And thus of these substances it is 
 said " there was a time when they were not " ; for 
 they did not always appear in their accidents. 
 In like manner they may even now be said to be, 
 and they are, and shall be in truth and for ever. 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. ii. n. 2 Ibid., iii. 15.
 
 io6 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 But in so far as they are said to be in their 
 accidents, which come to them from without, they 
 have no real nor perpetual being. Therefore they 
 shall be dissolved into those things from which 
 they were taken, in which in truth and eternally 
 they have their being, when every substance shall 
 be purged from all corruptible accidents, and shall 
 be delivered from all that does not belong to the 
 condition of its proper nature ; beautiful in its 
 peculiar native excellences, in its entire simplicity, 
 and, in the good man, adorned with the gifts of 
 grace, being glorified through the contemplation 
 of the eternal blessedness, beyond every nature, 
 even its own, and turned into God Himself, being 
 made God, not by nature, but by grace.' In this 
 passage Scotus seems unconsciously to slide off 
 from the consideration of the greater to that of 
 the lesser world, and finally to touch on the idea 
 to which we shall return that for the chosen 
 among mankind something better even than 
 restoration to primitive purity is in store. 
 
 Before we pass to consider the manner in which 
 human nature is to be restored, we may notice that 
 Scotus has a notable tenderness for the animal 
 creation, and refuses to accept the authority of 
 those teachers who would deny an immortal soul 
 to beasts. He is inclined to think 1 that the 
 intelligence and the social qualities of the nobler 
 animals are due to some measure of participation 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iii. 39.
 
 Scotus as Optimist 107 
 
 in the divine life, which they cannot eternally 
 lose, and that the contrary opinion has only been 
 preached as a warning to men prone to degrade 
 themselves and become like ' the brutes that 
 perish.' 
 
 To come to man the microcosm, the human 
 trinity, made in the image of God, but fallen from 
 its original glory, we have already seen that Scotus 
 attributes that fall to a self-willed turning away 
 from man's proper nature and first principle of 
 being. In following the story in Genesis, he gives 
 an allegoric interpretation to its several parts, 
 following in general the commentaries of the 
 Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus 
 the Monk, though sometimes showing how the 
 authorities differ and which view he personally 
 prefers. It may seem superfluous to say that the 
 Fall is not regarded as an event in time, nor 
 Paradise as a definite locality. Again and again 
 he recurs to the idea, on which Maximus also 
 liked to dwell, that man before the Fall, or man 
 according to his divine nature, was sexless. The 
 division into male and female is a defect in 
 humanity. The story of the forbidden fruit is 
 interpreted as the leading away of the mind 
 (= the man) by sensibility ( = the woman), so as to 
 seek pleasure in the things of sense and not in pure 
 wisdom l . The punishments inflicted have a hidden 
 meaning : ' In sorrow shalt thou bring forth 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iv. 18 et seq.
 
 io8 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 children,' points to the efforts necessary for attain- 
 ing knowledge ; ; thy desire shall be to thy husband, 
 and he shall rule over thee,' promises the ultimate 
 subjugation of sense by reason. The labours 
 imposed on the man have a purgatorial end, and 
 ' thou shalt return ' is spoken in hope. The return 
 is not by way of new creation, but through a 
 cleansing process, such as that which purifies from 
 leprosy. When man can contemplate the Divine 
 Goodness, he attains restoration, for the image 
 remains in his nature even after the Fall l . 
 
 It is evident that Scotus is not among those who>, 
 regard matter as the one cause of evil, but he 
 partly agrees with them in that he regards the 
 preference of the material to the spiritual as being 
 at the root of all mischief, and also holds the 
 absorption of body in spirit as a necessary step 
 towards rectification. Nevertheless he affirms, in 
 his peculiar sense, the doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the body, by which he would imply 2 not the 
 perpetuation of what is merely sensible and 
 fictitious, but the resolution of all that has any 
 being at all into purer elements. The ' death of 
 the saints ' which is ' precious in the sight of the 
 Lord ' is the absorption of the human soul in the 
 Divine 3 , for the death of the body is the first step ' 
 towards the liberation of the soul 4 . 
 
 The means by which the general restitution is 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. v. 6. 2 Ibid., v. 25. 
 
 * Ibid., v. 21. * Ibid., v. 7.
 
 Scotus as Optimist 109 
 
 effected is, of course, the incarnation, or, more 
 properly, the humanizing of the Logos. The 
 doctrine is set forth in several forms. Christ is to 
 be regarded as a sacrifice which has been effectual 
 for all \ as a priest and mediator, as the Ark of the 
 Covenant full of sacred treasures. But generally 
 it is as the Logos entering into human nature, and 
 thereby into the nature of all things which have 
 been created in man, and then returning to the 
 Father or First Principle, that He is regarded as 
 bringing about the final union. 'He went forth 
 from the Father and came into the world, that is, 
 He took upon Him that human nature in which 
 the whole world subsists ; for there is nothing iii 
 the world that is not comprehended in human 
 nature ; and again, He left the world and went 
 to the Father, that is, He exalted that human 
 nature which He had received above all things 
 visible and invisible, above all heavenly powers, 
 above all that can be said or understood, uniting 
 it to His deity, in which He is equal to the 
 Father 2 .' 
 
 If we ask whether the restoration of human 
 nature carries with it the salvation of every human 
 soul, we cannot obtain a perfectly clear answer, or 
 rather, we obtain answers which seem mutually 
 contradictory. For the doctrine of the eternal 
 punishment of the wicked is even harder to 
 reconcile with the teleological principles of Scotus 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. v. 36, p. 981. " Ibid., v. 25.
 
 no Studies in John the Scot 
 
 than is that of a corporeal resurrection. We have 
 already seen, in considering his part in the 
 predestinarian controversy, how Scotus had given 
 great offence in some quarters by practically 
 eliminating the arbitrary and also the material 
 element in the final punishment. Yet, on the other 
 hand, he seems to spoil the harmony of his own 
 system, by admitting as forms, or perhaps illustra- 
 tions of divinely inflicted penalties, both a tardy 
 and too late repentance and a consuming vexation 
 at the thought of complete failure in life. For if 
 repentance is purgatorial in character, as Scotus 
 seems to admit, and if it is accompanied by 
 acquiescence in a just doom, it falls far short of the 
 notion of eternal torment. And the anger at 
 having failed in evil projects, such as he ascribes 
 to tyrants like Herod, who are reluctantly com- 
 pelled to serve a good purpose, is surely a species 
 of that malitia which, we are told, is with miseria 
 to be utterly destroyed. There can be little doubt 
 that these suggestions are of an apologetic character, 
 and do not fit into the scheme as a whole. And 
 indeed, elsewhere, Scotus speaks of the parable of 
 Dives and Lazarus as being of the nature of an 
 allegory. What he contemplates, as far as, in 
 these highflown speculations, he can be said to 
 have a clear notion of the looked-for goal, is a 
 perfectly ordered universe, in which no sin or 
 desire to sin remains, and wherein each living 
 being enjoys that proportion of divine wisdom and
 
 Scotus as Optimist m 
 
 happiness for -which it is fitted. The home is of 
 ' many mansions.' All are saved, though not all 
 are deified. Again and again the doctrine is 
 insisted upon that no substance can ever be lost. 
 ' The thoughts of the wicked ' perish, because they 
 are but vanity. But in their innermost being even 
 the devils are good in that they are, and a sugges- 
 tion is made, though not followed up, that Origen 
 may be right as to the final conversion of Satan 
 and his ministers. 
 
 The consummation of all things involves, how- 
 ever, for man, or rather for chosen spirits among 
 men, something far exceeding the blamelessness of 
 the first Paradise. For though, in many passages, 
 it is made clear that final restoration is to comprise 
 the return of all things into God, there is a special 
 sense in which holy men, after the discipline of 
 life, are to be deified and brought to perpetual 
 contemplation of the highest theophany, or perhaps, 
 even above it. In a chapter near the end of the 
 treatise De Divisione Naturae, we have the steps 
 of the ascent summarized by way of recapitulation. 
 There are three steps in the progress by which 
 effects generally are brought back to their causes, 
 four by which restored humanity is brought into 
 perfect unity, three more by which the perfected 
 and unified soul is brought into the incomprehen- 
 sible light 1 . First is the change of all bodies 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. v. 39 ; cf. the fivefold theoria of the rational 
 creation in v. 32, and also v. 8.
 
 H2 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 capable of sensual perception into their spiritual 
 causes 1 . Next comes the restoration of human 
 nature to its primitive condition, by the divine 
 mercy, through the saving work of Christ. Thirdly 
 comes the sevenfold way by which the divinely- 
 chosen are to reach their ultimate goal. There are 
 four processes of unification of a lower kind : the 
 changes of earthly body into vital motion ; of vital 
 motion into sense ; of sense into reason, and of 
 reason into soul. The three higher changes are 
 of soul into knowledge of all things posterior to 
 God ; of knowledge into wisdom, or close contemp- 
 lation of the truth ; finally the absorption of the 
 purified souls thus identified with purest intellect,'' 
 into the obscurities of impenetrable light, wherein 
 lie hidden the causes of all things. The octave is 
 then complete, and the consummation attained 
 which was signified by the resurrection of the 
 Lord on the eighth day. 
 
 The final absorption of soul, apparently of all \ 
 consciousness, in the Supreme Unity, has struck/^ 
 many writers as being originally an Indian, or at \ 
 least an Oriental conception. There is, however, 
 no reason to suppose that Scotus borrowed, even 
 indirectly, from Indian sages, and possibly their 
 Nirvana, however differently interpreted from 
 different points of view, would be found dissimilar 
 
 1 In v. 8, in the case of human bodies, the dissolution of body 
 into the four elements and its resurrection are made to precede this 
 change.
 
 Scotus as Optimist 113 
 
 in many respects from his. It certainly cannot be 
 confused with annihilation, rather is it to be re- 
 garded as an entering into real existence. It should 
 be taken, perhaps, in consistency, to involve the 
 elimination of all personal qualities and individual 
 life. But in all his works, Scotus guards against the 
 assumption that any confusion of separate existences 
 is implied in the ultimate union of all things. It 
 is harmony, not monotony, that seems to him the 
 starting-point and the goal of creation. The seventh 
 step seems to go further than any ever taken, in 
 the Dionysian system, by the most exalted member 
 of the divine hierarchy ; since contemplation, and 
 that not directly of the divine, but of a theophany, 
 is the occupation of the first order, and if there is 
 an advance beyond the contemplative life into that 
 which is ' dark from excess of light,' man must 
 have risen immeasurably above all other creatures. 
 Probably Scotus would not have admitted such 
 a conclusion. In any case, with the enraptured 
 description of the apotheosis of the glorified soul, 
 the 'Magister ' ends what he calls the recapitulation 
 of this work a description in which his readers 
 can by no means concur without listening to any 
 more questions from his pupil. He only adds, by 
 way of apology, that his task has been a very 
 difficult one, that in this dusky life human studies 
 must always be imperfect, that truth is ever liable 
 to be misunderstood, and that all we can do is to 
 wait. 'Let each one make the most of his own 
 
 I
 
 H4 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 view, until that light shall come which turns into 
 darkness the light of those who deal falsely in 
 wisdom and turns to light the darkness of those 
 who discern things rightly V 
 
 1 DC Die. Nat. v. 40.
 
 8COTUS AS SUBJECTIVE IDEALIST 
 
 ' Cogito, ergo sum.' DESCABTES. 
 
 ' Dnm ergo dico intelligo me esse . . . et me esse, et posse intelli- 
 gere me esse, et intelligere me esse demonstro.' 
 
 SCOTUS, De Division e Naturae, i. 48. 
 
 EVEN those who make but a slight acquaintance 
 with the literature relating to John the Scot become 
 impressed with the fact that in so far as he is 
 generally regarded by students and historians of 
 philosophy with respect and interest, it is because 
 of the analogy that may often be traced between 
 his views and those of quite modern thinkers. We 
 have already seen how in some ways he figures as 
 a link in the chain between Greek philosophy and 
 mediaeval thought. We have seen how the neces- 
 sities of his position forced him to take up a decided 
 
 1 For Scotus' theory of cognition, and his bearings towards con- 
 temporary and later thought, see the books mentioned before, 
 especially Christlieb, the Histoire de la Philosophic Scolastique of 
 Haureau ; the Geschichte der LogiJc im Abendlande by Prantl, vol. ii ; 
 the History of Philosophy by Ueberweg, &c. 
 
 I 2
 
 n6 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 attitude in some of the great theological controver- 
 sies of his day. To follow his doctrines down into 
 later times, and see how far they anticipate the 
 principles of transcendentalists or of sceptics belong- 
 ing to our own times, has been a fascinating task to 
 some writers 1 . But as no one would suppose Scotus 
 to have directly influenced any modern school, that 
 task may seem rather a field for speculative in- 
 genuity and for practical reflection than an essential 
 part of an historical sketch. The philosophic dis- 
 putes of the centuries which immediately succeeded 
 that of Scotus might well come within the field 
 of any student of the man and his times, but even 
 here it is not easy to see exactly how far his in- 
 fluence extended. For in metaphysics as in theo- 
 logy, he was strangely misunderstood and accused 
 of spreading doctrines exactly opposite in tenor to 
 those which he was incessantly proclaiming. 
 
 The great danger in trying to realize the stand- 
 point in logic and metaphysics of a man who lived 
 not only in a distant age, but in an age which seems, 
 in a sense, off the path of continuous human pro- 
 gress, is lest we should read the present into the 
 past, and attribute to the words of an ancient sage 
 meanings which did not belong to them till a mil- 
 lenium later. Still, the essential problems are there, 
 and it is impossible not to feel a rush of sympathy 
 towards those who have thought our thoughts, or 
 
 1 Notably to Christlieb, who traces analogies between Scotus and 
 Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, &c.
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 117 
 
 something like them, long before. If the analogy 
 between Scotus and Hegel is only evident to a few 
 select minds, the resemblance to Descartes as in 
 the words printed at the head of this chapter must 
 strike the most casual reader. Yet we can hardly 
 fail, on further inspection, to see that the meaning 
 of Scotus and that of Descartes are not identical. 
 
 Still if, without drawing a close comparison 
 between Scotus and any particular philosopher of 
 modern times, we collect our general impressions 
 from a perusal of his writings, we find much that, 
 without any violence or perversion, seems to lend 
 itself to modern modes of thought and expression. 
 We read of an unknown God and an unknown self, 
 the existence of which is postulated in every thought 
 and act, yet respecting which nothing can be 
 asserted. We have a phenomenal world, which 
 has reality in so far, and only so far, as it is the 
 object of cognition by intelligence. We see recog- 
 nized a principle of relativity in all knowledge, 
 which ever and anon checks us in saying ' this is 
 so,' to make us add ' or so it is to me.' But we 
 are only safe, in our attempt to sketch, however 
 roughly, the views of Scotus as to the mind in re- 
 lation to a world of actual or possible experience, 
 if we keep as closely as possible to his own words 
 and to definite citations from his works 1 . 
 
 1 If on the metaphysical side Scotus is claimed by the German 
 Transcendentalists, he might, in his religious symbolism, seem to 
 foreshadow the present-day school of liberal French Protestantism, 
 especially as represented by Dr. Sabatier.
 
 n8 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Now there is a curious passage near the be- 
 ginning of De Divisione Naturae l which seems 
 to be taken by commentators as a theory of 
 cognition. He has begun his dialogue by giving 
 a very wide interpretation to Nature, so as to make 
 it include things which are not as well as things 
 which are. He then goes on to discuss the difference 
 between the existent and the non-existent. It is 
 to be noticed that he seems to include in ' Nature ' 
 that only which has at least potential or phenomenal 
 existence. At first sight he may seem to be clearing 
 the ground by getting rid of Non-being altogether, 
 but this is evidently not the case, as some of the 
 highest objects of thought are included under those 
 of which existence cannot be predicated. Neither 
 is he giving us a cross-classification to be used 
 alternately with that into creating - uncreated, 
 creating-created, created-non-creating, and uncre- 
 ated-non-creating. For there is no homogeneity 
 in his new principles of distinction. It is not five -> 
 classes, but five modes of regarding things, with 
 respect to being and non-being, that he is giving 
 us. These sections are therefore much cited by 
 those who treat Scotus from the metaphysical 
 point of view. They do not seem, however, to con- 
 stitute an important part of the treatise, and are 
 not, I think, ever referred to again. 
 
 In the first place, we distinguish as being all that 
 can be an object of corporeal sensation or of intellec- 
 
 1 i. 3-61 with which cf. iii. 2. 

 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 119 
 
 tual perception. This would exclude on the one 
 hand God, who cannot be comprehended by mind 
 or sense, and to whom, following Dionysius, we 
 assign superesse ; and on the other hand, any 
 absence or privation of discernible qualities (such 
 as blindness, or, he would probably add, sin), unless 
 we consider them as somehow included in those 
 things of which they are the privations or opposites. 
 The second distinction is harder to grasp. It 
 is based on the arrangement of all things in 
 a hierarchical order (for which we are again 
 referred to Dionysius) according to their partici- 
 pation in the universal life, from the highest 
 spiritual intelligence to the lowest degree of 
 nutritive and productive activity. If we define 
 any of these ranks which come in consecutive 
 order, we deny with regard to the superior what 
 we affirm of the inferior, and vice versa. For 
 example, if we distinguish a man from an angel, it 
 is by making definitions of each and affirming in 
 each case of the one what we deny of the other. 
 Thus at the very top, and again at the very bottom 
 of the scale, we come to the end of the region of 
 being, since what is affirmed or defied of the order 
 cannot be denied or affirmed of a higher order in 
 the one case, of a lower order in the other. Now 
 the higher can comprehend the lower and also itself, 
 but the lower cannot comprehend the higher. The 
 comprehension of self as one of a series, differing 
 alike from those above and those below, seems to
 
 120 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 be taken as equivalent to self-consciousness. The 
 capability of being defined in a particular way 
 seems to imply a condition of being in which any 
 creature is contained within intelligible limits. We 
 shall return to Scotus' conception of definition, or 
 locus, later on. Meantime, we may take this mode 
 as a distinction between cognized and cognizable 
 on the one hand, and neither-cognized-nor-cogniz- 
 \ able on the other, and observe how thought and 
 \ being are never dissociated in his mind. 
 
 The third mode of distinction is between the 
 actually and evidently existing and that of which 
 the being is as yet only potential as all men were 
 potentially created in Adam, and the plant exists 
 potentially in the seed. 
 
 The fourth way is that of philosophers who 
 attribute real existence to that which is intellec- 
 tually discernible, immutable, and incorruptible, 
 and deny the actual being of what is material and 
 subject to change and decay. 
 
 The fifth is a theological distinction. Any creature 
 which, like man, has fallen away from the divine 
 type in which it was created, has, in a sense, lost 
 its being, though restoration of the type and of 
 essential being have, for man, been made possible. 
 
 Though these distinctions are not entirely free 
 from obscurity, they seem generally to be con- 
 sistent with the principle that we are to acknow- 
 ledge, as having some measure of existence, all 
 that of which, with or without the medium of the
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 121 
 
 senses, the mind can take cognizance. And we 
 also seem to have, though not so clearly stated 
 here as elsewhere, the identification of real existence 
 with self-consciousness. The views here set forth 
 would not enable us to call Scotus a subjective 
 idealist unless we could proceed to show that he 
 considers all that we call the world of things as 
 not only existing for the mind, but as being ac- 
 tually in the mind, and having no kind of being 
 except in relation to mind. 
 
 We have pointed out that Scotus taught the 
 doctrine of an unknown God and of an unknown 
 self, both of which are in a sense objects of human 
 consciousness, though neither is circumscribed by 
 human intelligence. Let us notice here that he 
 does not acknowledge a third unknown in Matter 
 existing apart from Mind. The ' nothing ' out of 
 which, according to the Fathers, all things have 
 been made, is only to be taken as meaning negation 
 or privation of being 1 . Formless matter is not 
 perceptible by sense or intelligence, and the forms 
 by which it becomes apparent are themselves in- 
 corporeal in nature. The four elements, by the 
 admixture of which all bodies are created, pro- 
 ceed from the primordial causes which have their 
 being in the Word or Wisdom of God 2 . Or again, 
 what we call matter or body is recognized and 
 differentiated by means of a concourse of accidents, 
 and the accidents which make up the categories, 
 1 De Die. Nat. iii. 5. 2 Ibid., 14.
 
 122 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 as well as the categories themselves, which are 
 accidents of owia, are incorporeal and intelligible. 
 Therefore in any interpretation or description of 
 the sensible world, we have not to do with anything 
 beyond the limits of pure mind. This may help to 
 explain how Scotus, as well as the Greek Fathers, 
 could speak of the change of body into soul. They 
 did not hold the grotesque notion that really 
 existing bodies might be transmuted into really 
 existing souls. The change was only from one! 
 form of mind into another, or perhaps from the - 
 mode in which things had been regarded into 
 another mode. 
 
 The ascription of all reality in the external world 
 to mind is hardly intelligible unless we mean to 
 say that, for us at least, the external world is 
 resolved into modes of our own consciousness, that 
 is, of the consciousness of each individual creature 
 possessing consciousness. Scotus seems to leave 
 the question unanswered whether the world exists 
 for or in the particular or the universal intelligence ; 
 whether, that is, we are right in applying to the 
 individual mind what is said concerning mind in 
 general. Would he allow a plurality of universes, 
 seeing that each mind, by taking cognizance of 
 things, confers on these things somewhat of its own 
 reality? He would probably have excluded any 
 such conception by insisting, as he so often does, 
 on the essential unity of all mind, and the unity 
 of that human nature which, as we have already
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 123 
 
 seen, he regarded as a notion in the mind of God. 
 The pupil 1 in his dialogue finds some difficulty 
 in reconciling the latter statement with the assump- 
 tion of self-consciousness as the essential element 
 in human nature, and that difficulty will probably 
 occur to modern readers. Without attempting to 
 explain it away, we may illustrate it by comparing 
 it with another part of Scotus' philosophy. We 
 have already cited his words as to the realization 
 of God by man: 'As many as the souls of the 
 faithful, so many are the theophanies V This 
 principle would seem not only to make all religion 
 subjective, but to establish a kind of polytheism. 
 Yet we know that his belief in a plurality of theo- 
 phanies did not prevent Scotus from being a mono- 
 theist ; and similarly the manifold appearances of 
 the external world to the varieties of human con- 
 sciousness do not seem to contradict the supposition 
 of one world to which cohesion and harmony are 
 given by the action of the human intellect. His 
 views seem to be in the main derived from Diony- 
 sius. From him the words are quoted 3 : ' Cognitio 
 eorum quae sunt ea quae sunt est.' Perhaps the 
 
 1 DC Div. Nat. iv. 7. 
 
 a May I be allowed to cite the words of an idealist who was also 
 a preacher? 'Talk of God to a thousand ears, each has his own 
 different conception. Each man in this congregation has a God 
 before him at this moment, who is, according to his own attainment 
 in goodness, more or less limited and imperfect.' F. W. Robertson, 
 Sermons, i. 117. 
 
 3 De Div. Nat. ii. 8.
 
 i2 4 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 old idea of Protagoras : ' Man, the measure of all 
 things,' had vaguely floated down to him, and be- 
 come combined with the conception of man who 
 has been made in the image of God, and therefore 
 is endued with creative intellectual power. 
 
 We may observe here that it is the notions or 
 conceptions of things, not things themselves exist- 
 ing independently of mind, that make up the 
 universe which the human mind ordains and unites 
 that it may use it as a dwelling-place. The word 
 notion was coming to have its modern meaning 1 , 
 and the way was being paved for a compromise 
 between the Realists and Nominalists, whose con- 
 troversies had not yet begun. But to this point 
 we shall have to return later. 
 
 However much obscurity, then, we may find in 
 the ontology of Scotus, a few points stand out 
 clearly, and allow us to call him a subjective 
 idealist and this quite independently of any 
 theory we may have as to his anticipation of the 
 ' Ding an sich,' or of the distinction between ' Seyn 
 und Daseyn.' Things in general exist only as 
 belonging to the mind which cognizes them, and 
 that mind supplies to them the attributes by which 
 they are distinguished from one another, or are 
 made to fall into genera and species. Time and 
 space are conditions in the mind of the thinker or 
 observer, not properties of the things conceived or ' 
 observed. The power of the mind thus to order 
 
 1 See De Dii: Nat. iv. 7 ; p. 768 and elsewhere.
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 125 
 
 its universe of phenomena is due, in some inex- 
 plicable way, to its having its own existence in 
 what it may call (though accurate denomination 
 is impossible here) the Highest Intellect to its 
 being made in the image of God. This implies a 
 threefold existence of man the human trinity 
 as being, power, and activity; and therein his self- 
 consciousness consists. For he is conscious that 
 he has being, that he has power to recognize his 
 being, and that he actually does recognize it. The 
 world to which he gives intellectual unity is not 
 formed according to his own will, but by the 
 operation of the primordial causes or prototypes, 
 which are to be thought of as volition and reason 
 at the same time ; and which, being of divine origin 
 and character, communicate life and being to all 
 creation, man himself included. The whole creation 
 is a revelation of God to those minds that desire to 
 contemplate Him but can only do so indirectly. 
 ' But these things may be thought upon more 
 nobly and truly than they can be expressed in 
 language, and more nobly and truly understood 
 than they can be thought upon, for more noble 
 and more true are they in reality than in our 
 understanding V 
 
 Bearing in mind these general principles, espe- 
 cially the close connexion of thought and being, 
 which seems generally to amount to a complete 
 identification, let us attend to a few utterances of 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. ii. 35.
 
 126 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Scotus on the subject of knowledge, and of the way 
 in which man can obtain it. 
 
 Since the intelligence of man is * man, and the/ !x^ 
 things which he knows exist in his intelligence] 
 the communication of knowledge from one man to 
 another is neither more nor less than the absorption 
 of one mind, to a certain limited extent, by the 
 other. ' Whoever, as I have said, entirely [? pure] 
 
 understands, becomes that which he understands 
 
 We, while we discuss together, alternately become 
 one another. For if I understand what you under- 
 stand I become your understanding, and in a certain 
 unspeakable way I am made into you. Similarly, 
 when you entirely understand what I clearly un- 
 derstand you become my understanding, and from 
 two understandings there arises one, by reason of 
 that which we both sincerely and without hesita- 
 tion understand 2 .' If this passage were taken to 
 prove that Scotus had no clear notion of the pro- 
 found isolation of every human being regarded as 
 a conscious self, it would save us from the trouble 
 of looking for any marks of clear and deep thought 
 in any part of his system. But the stress which 
 he always lays on self-consciousness would lead 
 us to think that in this place he was not confused, 
 but sensible of that profoundest of all enigmas, 
 
 1 This view may seem inconsistent with the stress laid by Scotus 
 on the Will and its freedom. Perhaps the power of volition is not 
 ignored but rather implied in that of understanding. 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iv. 9.
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 127 
 
 the practically realized intercommunion of two 
 beings, each of which is a cosmos to itself, and 
 knows of nothing outside. 
 
 Knowledge, then, is a kind of mental assimila- 
 tion, and the modes by which knowledge is built 
 up are the same as those by which the universe 
 is created. Analysis and resolution are logical 
 processes, yet they are also the means by which 
 the several parts of creation are brought down 
 from the Supreme Unity into multiplicity, and 
 finally restored to that Unity as their final end. 
 Dialectic is the greatest of the liberal arts, but as 
 it deals with being, genera, and species, it was 
 founded by God when He said: 'Let the earth 
 bring forth the living creature after his kind V 
 Definition again, while it shows the locus (in a non- 
 spacial sense) of things and explains what they are, 
 is also taken to be the boundary and circumscrip- 
 tion of the thing. God cannot be defined because 
 He cannot be circumscribed. The higher nature 
 can always comprehend the lower ; thus the capa- 
 bility of defining, which in one sense is an art 
 belonging to the evepyeia ( = operatio) of the soul ? 
 and akin to dialectic, may from another point of 
 view be regarded as the power of ascending in the 
 spiritual scale, so as to obtain a wider and ever 
 wider range over which the faculty may be 
 exercised 2 . 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iv. 4. 
 
 8 A large part of Book i of De Div. Nat. is devoted to locus.
 
 i28 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 Thinking is, of course, to Scotus, the highest 
 occupation of man, unless we exclude from its 
 sphere the contemplation of the unthinkable. What 
 creation is to God, that is thought to man. Scotus 
 takes as lawful and necessary means to the attain- 
 ment and ordering of knowledge all that tradition 
 had handed down the seven liberal arts and the 
 four logical methods though, as we have seen, he 
 gave to some of these a peculiar significance. We 
 have already dwelt on the fact that he did not 
 believe in the possibility of coming, by the use of 
 any kind of argumentation, to definite theological 
 knowledge. All that can be directly stated about 
 the Divinity must be negative. Yet a fruitful 
 suggestion is made that while we cannot say how 
 it is that some beings aje eternal and others are 
 made, we can say on what principle we may call 
 them either eternal or made l . This would resolve 
 the science of theology into the study of human 
 thoughts about the Divine, and would probably 
 include the determination as to which symbols 
 might be used, in theological language, without too 
 much violence to truth. Free as is his use of 
 scriptural and patristic statements, he is not here 
 entirely subjective, but would interpret according 
 to the 'fourfold division of wisdom' practical, 
 physical, theological, and logical 2 . 
 
 The connexion between the logic of Scotus and that of Boethius may 
 be studied in Prantl, vol. ii. 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iii. 16, p. 670. 2 Ibid., 29.
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 129 
 
 Yet beyond all knowledge, properly so-called, is 
 the realm of faith, and here, as in the case of more 
 strictly cognizable things, the object of contem- 
 plation must actually come within the human 
 rnind, and be assimilated, before its being can be 
 realized \ ' God is also said to come into being in 
 the souls of the faithful, since either by faith and 
 virtue He is conceived in them, or in a certain 
 fashion, by faith, begins to be understood. For, in 
 my judgement, faith is nothing else than a certain 
 principle from which the recognition of the Creator 
 arises in a reasonable nature.' We seem to have 
 here the doctrine of the Incarnation, presented 
 from an entirely subjective and individual stand- 
 point 2 . 
 
 We have endeavoured to focus together sundry 
 passages from the works of Scotus many of which 
 we had already cited so that they might throw 
 some light on his views as to the great mysteries 
 of existence, thought, and knowledge. The result 
 has not been a quite coherent picture, but possibly 
 those who think it worth while to familiarize them- 
 selves with the thoughts that teemed in the mind 
 of this earnest thinker will gradually find more 
 and more links by which the various parts of his 
 cosmology and theology are bound together. If, 
 after much study, they still find him obscure, they 
 would do well to see whether the darkness is due 
 if we may use a favourite expression of Dionysius 
 1 De Div. Nat. i. 71. " See above, p. 83. 
 
 K
 
 130 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 and of Scotus himself to absence or to excess of 
 light. In either case they must acknowledge that, 
 whether self-consistent or not, he is always abun- 
 dantly suggestive. 
 
 But whether we of the nineteenth century are 
 capable or not of comprehending his philosophic 
 attitude, it certainly was puzzling to the men of 
 the tenth and eleventh centuries. The further 
 posthumous charges of heresy and the successive 
 condemnations which went far towards depriving 
 us of his writings altogether will be considered in 
 our concluding chapter. Here it seems desirable 
 to say a few words as to the bearing of his works 
 on the question of Universals, which began to be 
 agitated some time after his death. 
 
 Now here we are met with an unexpected fact. 
 In a chronicle of the early tenth century, certain 
 well-known teachers Robert of Paris, Roscelin of 
 Compiegne, and Arnulf of Laon are mentioned as 
 having taught that the art of dialectic had to do 
 with words, and that in that respect they were fol- 
 lowers of John, who ' eandein artem philosophicam 
 vocalem esse disseruit V Now of course we can- 
 not be secure in identifying this John with our 
 Scotus, and at first sight it would seem quite absurd 
 to do so, since many of the passages we have quoted 
 prove him to have been a realist of realists. We 
 have seen that he regarded dialectic as a divine art, 
 
 1 On the questions raised by this passage, see Poole, App. II, and 
 cf. Prantl and Haure"au.
 
 Scotus as Subjective Idealist 131 
 
 concerned with ovo-ta, and if he varies the descrip- 
 tion of it so as to define it in another place as * 
 ' The study which investigates the common rational 
 conceptions of the mind,' we have here no nomin- 
 alism, but a form of conceptualism. Nevertheless, 
 Scotus lays so much stress on the importance and 
 significance of names, that some historians notably 
 Prantl are inclined to range him among the earliest 
 of the Nominalists. Thus he speaks of grammar 
 and logic as being subordinate parts of dialectic, 
 and yet as being concerned with words and expres- 
 sions rather than with realities 2 . Again, in alle- 
 gorizing the story of Adam giving names to all the 
 beasts of the field 3 , he says : ' If he did not under- 
 stand them, how could he rightly name them? For 
 what he called everything, that was its name ; that 
 is to say, such is the notion of the living soul 4 . 
 He goes on to say that the notion of things in the 
 human mind is to be taken as the substance of 
 those things, and that similarly the notion of the 
 universe in the mind of God is to be regarded as 
 the substance of the universe. Here, however, he 
 seems to have broken loose from names altogether, 
 except in so far as they are a necessary part of 
 notions. And elsewhere he says, 5 ' Whatsoever 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. i. 27. 2 Ibid. 
 
 3 Ibid. iv. 7. 
 
 * In the Vulgate the reading of Gen. ii. 19 is ' omne enim 
 (autem apud Scotuni) quod vocavit Adam animae vicentis ipsum est 
 nomen eius.' 
 
 5 De Div. Nat. i. 14. 
 
 K 2,
 
 i32 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 we recognize in names, we must needs recognize in 
 the things signified by names.' 
 
 It will probably be agreed that if the various 
 doctrines as to Universals, and the long controversy 
 between Realists and Nominalists form the chief 
 element in the Scholastic Philosophy, Scotus is not 
 to be regarded as the first of the Schoolmen. He 
 is free from the imputation of multiplying meta- 
 physical abstractions as well as from that of attach- 
 ing undue significance to names. As in the other 
 disputes with which we have seen his name mixed 
 up, he has his home in neither party. His ' soul , 
 was like a star, and dwelt apart' ; and because he 
 stands apart from his contemporaries and immediate 
 followers, he seems to find his natural place among 
 the free and lofty thinkers of all times.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF SCOTUS. CONCLUSION 
 
 ' A contemplative life is raised above all that is temporal and 
 only an enjoyment of eternal things ; whoever, therefore, wishes to 
 lead such a life must needs leave all that is temporal.' TAULEU. 
 
 THE influence of a mediaeval mystic on his con- 
 temporaries and successors is liable to be both over- 
 rated and underrated by critics of later times. For 
 on the one hand, as we have already had occasion 
 to suggest, the chief ideas of the mystic are gener- 
 ally developed within his individual consciousness, 
 or, as he might prefer to say, revealed to his own 
 soul, not learned from an instructor, though any 
 suggestions made by those who are going through 
 a similar process of enlightenment fall into his 
 mind as into a congenial soil wherein to grow and 
 fructify. Still, when we find mystics all over the 
 world and all through the centuries expressing 
 their ideas in similar language, we learn to be 
 cautious in saying that this man derived his prin-
 
 134 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 : 
 
 ciples from that source, unless, of course, he tells 
 us so himself. On the other hand, we in these days 
 of many books are apt to underrate the personal 
 influence of masters and teachers in the early days 
 of Western European culture. Rabanus, Ratramnus, 
 and other learned men whose names have become 
 familiar to us in connexion with the fortunes of 
 Scotus, were prolific writers. Yet probably the 
 power they wielded from the teacher's desk was 
 greater than that exercised in solitary writing. 
 The dialogues of Alcuin with the young Carolingian 
 princes may roughly indicate the kind of stimulus 
 imparted by oral teaching. The ' Discipulus ' of 
 De Divisions Naturae is not the sort of youth 
 that can have been common in those days, and is 
 even more advanced in learning than ' Macaulay's 
 schoolboy.' The choice of the dialogue form to set 
 forth his profoundest doctrines may be merely due 
 to acquiescence on the part of Scotus in the notions 
 of his time. Yet his contemporaries may not have 
 been wrong in regarding actual conversation with 
 pupils as the natural means for communicating in- 
 struction. 
 
 And again, such communication of instruction by 
 no means exhausts the influence of a thinker like 
 Scotus. Those who came under his teaching, even 
 if none of them may have been as clever as 
 ' Discipulus/ must have acquired something of his 
 method of arguing, his ways of using scriptural and 
 patristic quotations, and his general tone of mind.
 
 The Influence of Scotus 135 
 
 "We do not know how long ho remained at the head 
 of the School of Paris, but the anxiety of his 
 opponents to displace him, and the demand of the 
 Pope for his expulsion testify to the importance of 
 his direct and indirect influence. 
 
 Thus while we may doubt whether Scotus ever be- 
 came the founder of any set of thinkers, and refrain 
 from attributing to a knowledge of his writiDgs those 
 mystic utterances of thoughtful and unconventional 
 minds, whether orthodox or heterodox, which, in the 
 following centuries, frequently recall his principles 
 and doctrines, we may well admit that a certain 
 underground influence worked on without recogni- 
 tion of its provenance till it found its purest ex- 
 pression in the religious life of the Freunde Gotten 
 and its authoritative exposition in the writings of 
 Eckhart and Tauler. The thought of God as the one 
 reality, of Evil as mere negation of Good, of Sin as 
 Selfishness, and of Selfishness as the one distracting 
 influence that keeps man from realizing his great 
 capacities, of the individual and personal signifi- 
 cance of the doctrine of the Incarnation these 
 ideas are translated from philosophical into popular 
 and practical form in the works of the Dominican 
 Tauler and in the anonymous Theologia Germanica. 
 The writings of Scotus, except, perhaps, some of his 
 translations of Dionysius, were, for reasons which 
 we shall see directly, unknown to the men of the 
 fourteenth century. Yet Scotus had helped to keep 
 the eyes of the more spiritually-minded fixed on
 
 136 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 great realities and indifferent to mechanical obser- 
 vance. If but very indirectly, still in some measure 
 Scotus may thus have contributed to form the re- 
 ligious ideas of many German Lutherans, with 
 whom the Tkeologia Germanica l and the works of 
 Tauler have always been favourite books of religious 
 reading. But we must return towards the days 
 less remote from his lifetime, and to what we can 
 safely regard as the direct fruits of his teaching. 
 
 During the later part of the twelfth and the 
 earlier of the thirteenth century, two independent 
 teachers arose whose doctrines were opposed as 
 heretical and publicly condemned. These were 
 Amalric of Bene, near Chartres, and David of 
 Dinant. We know something of what they taught 
 chiefly from those who in the next, or a later genera- 
 tion, narrated their condemnation or combated their 
 views 2 . Amalric had taught in Paris, incurred 
 suspicion among his colleagues, lost his chair, and 
 after a vain appeal to Pope Innocent III made his 
 submission to the Church. It was not till 1209, 
 three or four years after his death, that his doctrines 
 were formally condemned in a synod at Paris. Of 
 them Henry of Ostia writes : * The dogma of the 
 
 1 The Theoloffia Germanica and some of Tauler's sermons have 
 been very well rendered into English by Miss Susanna Winkworth. 
 
 a A very good account of these two men, with full citations from 
 authorities is given by Huber, p. 434 et seq. Of Amalric we know 
 chiefly from Cardinal Henry of Ostia and Martinus Polonus ; also 
 from Gerson : of David of Dinant from the controversial writings 
 of Albertus Magnus.
 
 The Influence of Scotus 137 
 
 wicked Amalric is comprised in the book of the 
 Master John the Scot which is called periphysion 
 (i. e. De Natura), which the said Amalric followed ; 
 . . . and the said John in the same book cited the 
 authority of a Greek Master named Maximus. In 
 which book many heresies were contained, ... of 
 which three may suffice as examples. First and 
 chief, that all things are God. . . . The second is 
 that the primordial causes which are called ulea# 
 create and are created. . . . The third is that in 
 the consummation of the ages there will be a union 
 of the sexes, or there will be no distinction 
 of sex, which union he says to have begun in 
 Christ.' 
 
 A closely similar account of the doctrine as con- 
 demned by Pope Innocent III is given by Martinus 
 Polonus, who lived about a hundred years later, 
 and affords a monument of bad Latin and of pre- 
 sumptuous stupidity. ' We condemn that Amalric 
 has declared that the ydeas [sic] which are in the 
 Divine Mind create and are created, whereas accord- 
 ing to St. Augustine nothing that is not eternal and 
 immutable is in the Divine Mind. He has declared 
 also that God is called the end of all things. . . . 
 That God is the essence of all creatures and the 
 being of all. He has said also that to those in 
 charity no sin is imputed. Under which strength 
 of piety [or appearance? ope for specie 1] his fol- 
 lowers freely commit all manner of iniquities. He 
 says that if man had not sinned he would not have
 
 138 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 fallen into duplicity of sex, ... all which errors 
 are found in the book which is called periphysion.' 
 Martinus also quotes as among the heresies of 
 Amalric what looks like a travesty of some remarks 
 about human and divine parenthood in Scotus *. 
 A far greater man, John Gerson. of Paris, refers to 
 Amalric and his errors, and knows, as Polonus 
 seems not to know, that the book Trepi <uo-eW was 
 that of Scotus. 
 
 The charge of antinomianism brought against 
 Amalric, and indirectly against Scotus, seems singu- 
 larly inappropriate, since that strange doctrine was 
 with more reason regarded as a natural consequence 
 of extreme necessitarianism, and of the tone of mind 
 found in Gottschalk and denounced perhaps even 
 too vigorously by Scotus. 
 
 David of Dinant, who is not known to have been 
 a pupil of Amalric, taught, what he could hardly 
 have derived from Scotus, a system of materialistic 
 pantheism. He was condemned in good company, 
 as along with his works were prohibited some of 
 the recently introduced treatises of Aristotle. 
 
 This led to a more formal censure passed by 
 papal authority on the works of Scotus. We have 
 seen that long before, Hincmar had tried to bring 
 him into ill favour at Home. We have also referred 
 to the letter of Nicolas I to Charles the Bald, 
 written after John had completed his translation of 
 Dionysius. The king is requested to send John to 
 1 DeDiv. Nat. i. 16.
 
 The Influence of Scotus 139 
 
 Rome 1 , or at least away from Paris, lest he should 
 mix tares with the wheat, and give the people 
 poison for bread, a mixture of metaphors probably 
 due to imperfect knowledge of agriculture. 
 
 But it was not till 1225, soon after the affair of 
 Amalric and David, that the final condemnation 
 came, by a bull of Honorius III. It begins with 
 the same complaint as that of Nicolas, that an 
 enemy had been sowing tares among the wheat. 
 The pope had heard from the Archbishop of Paris 
 that a book called Periphysis had been justly con- 
 demned in a provincial council, as teeming with the 
 worms of an abominable heresy. ' And since,' the 
 pope goes on to say, ' the book, as we have heard, 
 is to be found in various monasteries, and other ' 
 places, and several monastic and scholastic persons, 
 being unduly attracted by novelty, give themselves 
 eagerly to the study of the said book, thinking it 
 a fine thing to utter strange opinions though the 
 Apostle warns us to avoid profane novelties we, 
 in accordance with our pastoral duty, endeavouring 
 to oppose the power of corruption which a book of 
 this kind might exercise, command you all and 
 several, straightly enjoining you in the Holy Ghost, 
 that you make diligent search for that book, and 
 wheresoever you shall have succeeded in finding 
 the same, or any portion thereof, that you send it, if 
 it may be done with safety, without delay to us, to 
 
 1 According to another copy of the letter, only the book is to be 
 sent to Rome, and there ia no mention of Paris. Floss, p. 1026.
 
 140 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 be solemnly burned ; or if this is impossible, that 
 you do yourselves publicly burn the same, and 
 that you strictly exhort all who serve under you, 
 that whosoever of them has or is able to have in 
 whole or in part any copies of the said book, and 
 shall delay in giving them up to us, shall, in case 
 they have knowingly presumed to retain all or part 
 of the said book for fifteen days after this order 
 and denunciation shall have come to their know- 
 ledge, have thereby incurred the sentence of excom- 
 munication, nor shall they escape the charge of the 
 abomination of heresy. Given at the Lateran, 23 
 February, 1225.' 
 
 ' As lief kill a man as kill a good book.' Yet 
 after all a good book has more chances of resusci- 
 tation. De Divisione Naturae fell into oblivion so 
 deep that it did not seem worth the trouble to put 
 it on the Index drawn up at the Council of Trent. 
 It was discovered later, and printed by an Oxonian, 
 Thomas Gale, in 1681. But this led to its being 
 definitely placed on the Index of prohibited books 
 by Innocent XI, in 1685. 
 
 It may seem strange that a work thus condemned 
 should find its place in the great patrological series 
 edited by Migne. It is, however, not given without 
 a warning. In a short preface by Floss, we are 
 warned of the curiously double character of the 
 book how it is profitable in some parts, hopelessly 
 erroneous in others and the bull of Honorius III 
 is printed in extenso.
 
 If the dread of John's doctrines felt by the 
 divines of the Middle Ages, and even by the 
 Catholics of the Counter-Reformation seems to us 
 unreasonable, and perhaps a little superstitious, 
 we should recollect, and reckon as a partial excuse 
 for this intolerance, what we have lately pointed 
 out : that the influence of a writer like Scotus 
 generally works underground, not by introducing 
 new doctrine, but by forming a new tone of mind. 
 The objections to his actual statements look puerile 
 on paper, and are often based on gross mis- 
 understandings, but the fact remains that the 
 whole spirit which animated Scotus was out of 
 harmony with that which prevailed in the Roman 
 Church, and would not have tended to foster a 
 tone of submissive acquiescence to constituted 
 authorities, whether in matters of ritual, faith, or 
 speculation. 
 
 In his theology and in his ethics Scotus, as we 
 have seen, stands apart from most of the question- 
 ings which began even before his day, and have 
 gone on into our own. We have seen how far re- 
 moved from his system, for example, is any attempt 
 to prove the existence of a God. The ontological 
 proof of Anselm that a conception of the Perfect 
 would be incomplete unless there existed the reality 
 of which it is a conception might possibly have 
 been allowed by him, but all modern logicians re- 
 gard it as no proof at all. Theologians have only 
 succeeded in composing some kind of argument for
 
 i4a Studies in John the Scot 
 
 the being of God by first exiling Him from the 
 world and from humanity. 
 
 By Scotus, God is neither proved by argument 
 nor accepted as a hypothesis, but recognized as 
 necessary to the being of anything whatsoever. It 
 is the same with the Self, recognized in its acts, 
 judgements, and volitions, not proved by means of 
 them. It may seem, perhaps, rather to overstrain 
 his words, though it would, I consider, be a legiti- 
 mate development of his principles, to say that Self 
 is cognized in every act of thought, and God is cog- 
 nized in every act of worship. This is not, per- 
 haps, a firm basis on which to build a Summa 
 Theologiae. The term attributes as applied to God 
 is to Scotus pure nonsense. But we are, he would 
 think, on safer ground when we discuss the appro- 
 priateness of marking such-and-such attributes as 
 implied in our conception of Him. In so doing we 
 are only discussing the structure and character of 
 our own mind, which must needs impose certain 
 characteristics or names on all that it in any sense 
 conceives or believes in. 
 
 The essentially subjective character of John's 
 religion has already been dwelt upon, and we have 
 seen that it was inconsistent with the dogmatic 
 and the sacramental system of the mediaeval 
 Church. But while we recognize an inward 
 sympathy among the devout souls of all ages that 
 find the ultimate resort of truth in the depths of 
 personal consciousness, we must not overlook one
 
 The Influence of Scotus 143 
 
 great difference between the religion of Scotus and 
 that of the most spiritual teachers of the present 
 day : with him the historical element in religion 
 was reduced to a minimum. It seems hardly too 
 much to say that the historical Jesus of Nazareth 
 scarcely existed for thousands of mediaeval Chris- 
 tians. Christ was the Second Person of the Trinity, 
 enthroned on high ; or the Bread which had been 
 changed in substance in the hands of the Priest ; 
 or especially to Scotus the inspiring and creative 
 Word, which brought order out of chaos in each 
 Christian soul. Religious minds have not found these 
 three conceptions mutually exclusive, nor does any 
 one of them prevent the recognition of one Man as 
 having, at one moment in history, appeared in the 
 world and begun a new religious era. It would be 
 as idle to blame Scotus for wanting a philosophic 
 conception of historical Christianity as it would be 
 to complain of his not discerning the principle of 
 evolution in the physical world l . But it is con- 
 ducive to general clearness of thought to recognize 
 the fact that the mystic point of view needs to be 
 accommodated to the historical at least as much as 
 to the dogmatic. 
 
 In ethics, no less than in theology, Scotus stands 
 apart from most philosophers, and may seem to 
 
 1 We might illustrate these remarks by aaking, What was the 
 mediaeval conception of Alexander or of ' il buono Augusto ' ? They 
 were vivid enough, but essentially unhistorical. The absence of 
 a real historic sense in the mediaeval mind is shown in most of the 
 early attempts to condense universal history.
 
 144 Studies in John the Scot 
 
 modern thinkers to be deficient. He nowhere 
 inquires after a criterion to distinguish right action 
 from wrong. He certainly would not regard any 
 consequences of actions as affording such a criterion. 
 And he has not much to say about a supreme - 
 moral law. His morality is one of ideals rather j 
 than of laws. He recognizes an art of practical 
 wisdom, by which vices may be eradicated and 
 supplanted by virtues l . He follows Maximus in 
 saying that the contemplation of virtue actually 
 turns the soul into that which it contemplates 2 . 
 And, as we have seen, he regards the growth of 
 virtues as the incarnation of the divine word 
 within the soul 3 . In so far as he has a theory, it 
 seems to be that virtues increase in the soul through 
 perpetual attention to that which is recognized as 
 good and neglect of what is superficially attractive. 
 This theory, of course, implies the superiority of 
 the contemplative life over every other. 
 
 And it is as a man of contemplation, not a 
 dreamer, but a thinker, that John the Scot most 
 chiefly commands our respect and attracts our 
 sympathy. We are, perhaps, ready to acknow- 
 ledge the merits of the contemplative character 
 when we can see that by the influence of man on 
 man contemplation often results in action. But 
 we do not always fully realize that the man who 
 thinks, and does nothing but think, is a benefactor 
 to his race, in that he is a standing witness to the 
 
 1 De Div. Nat. iii. 29. a Ibid. i. 9. 3 Ibid. iii. 9. ,
 
 The Influence of Scotus 145 
 
 superiority of the spiritual over the material. John, 
 of course, not only thought, but wrote. Yet if he 
 had never written a line his work might have been 
 as profitable as that of Hincmar, with all that 
 great prelate's efforts to reorganize anarchic 
 societies and bring the moral law to bear in high 
 places. Little as we know about Scotus, we can 
 frame a picture of him which it is well to look at 
 from time to time. He possessed the energy of 
 mind to think out a spiritual theory of the universe 
 in a grossly materialistic age ; earnest in his 
 pursuit of truth, he made no impatient efforts to 
 force the human reason to tasks that were beyond 
 its capacity ; fearless and sceptical in his inquiries 
 (though cautious at times in announcing their 
 results), yet capable of ardent belief in a spiritual 
 world that lay beyond all possible investigation, 
 he stands before us a devout agnostic, an eclectic 
 philosopher, a recipient of the influences of the 
 past, who in many ways anticipated the most 
 fruitful ideas of the present age. The world has 
 wondered at him, condemned him. forgotten him. 
 Yet possibly the world is better for the fact that 
 he and a few men of his stamp have lived and 
 thought apart from the main stream of human 
 progress. For these isolated thinkers have helped 
 by the travail of their souls, and by the sacrifice 
 of all lesser joys, to keep before men's minds these 
 eternal ideas, in the light of which alone any real 
 progress can be achieved. 
 
 L
 
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