=John Scotus Erigena (810–880): Life and Teaching.= When his contemporaries were only lisping at philosophy and his immediate successors were absorbed in disconnected problems, Erigena worked out a connected system. Like Augustine, Erigena stood far in advance of his age. He was not only the one great thinker of the revival of Charlemagne, but he was one of the most remarkable personalities of the Middle Ages. Born in Ireland, he had the benefit of an education in the schools of that centre of learning, which he could not have obtained on the continent of Europe. In 853 he was called by Charles the Bald to carry on the work begun by Alcuin under Charlemagne. Three centuries after his death the church condemned him as a heretic (1209) on account of his writings on predestination and transubstantiation. His learning was so great that he has been called “the Origen of the North.” He read Greek, and this was a rare accomplishment in those days, for even Alcuin scarcely knew the Greek alphabet. His most notable original work is _De Divisione Naturae_, which was neo-Platonism in Christian dress. His most influential work was his translation of the _pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite._ It proved, in fact, to be one of the most influential books of this period, and was instrumental on account of its large circulation in propagating neo-Platonism in the Middle Ages. Erigena was neither a scholastic nor a dialectical theologian. He neither assailed nor defended church doctrine. He calmly pushed neo-Platonism to the borders of pantheism. He was an Irishman with a Greek mind, a neo-Platonist under the veil of a Christian mystic. No churchman ever expressed neo-Platonism so frankly. The writings from which Erigena got his doctrine are called the _Pseudo-Dionysius_ writings because the authorship was falsely attributed to a companion of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite. They were, however, probably written in the fifth century, for they are essentially neo-Platonic and border on pantheism. Erigena translated them at the request of Charles the Bald, and their appearance produced great astonishment in Europe (858–860). Erigena’s own work, _De Divisione Naturae_, is an extreme pantheistic statement of the doctrine in the _Pseudo-Dionysius_. Briefly stated Erigena’s teaching is as follows. God is an incomprehensible being and can be described only in negative terms (negative theology). (See chapter on Philo.) God is the same as Being or Nature, and He unfolds Himself as a fourfold series. These are: God, the world in God, the world outside God, God after the world has returned to Him. God contains in Himself through the Logos all the primordial types of things formed before creation. Creation is the logical unfolding of particulars from the universal. Immortality consists in the particulars again becoming universal. In the types of things God is creating Himself, and they are graded from God down to concrete objects.