He addressed a capitular to the bishops of his kingdom, questioning them on their opinions as to the immateriality of the soul; and he placed at the head of his royal school a scholar more famous for the subtlety of his intellect than the orthodoxy of his views. John Scotus Erigena, an Irishman by birth, had early applied himself to the study of the Greek language and philosophy, and had embraced the chief doctrines of the Neo-Platonic school. He astonished the Western world by his translation of the works of St. Denys the Areopagite, an achievement which the Roman scholars, who still regarded their Transalpine neighbours as essentially barbarians, could hardly be brought to credit, and which exhorted compliments from Anastasius, the papal librarian, and some complaints from Pope Nicholas I., who would have been better pleased had the work been first submitted to ecclesiastical approval. Erigena’s free opinions won him no disfavour with Charles the Bald; nevertheless certain controversies, of which we shall have to speak hereafter, and in which he took an active part, drew from him the expression of heterodox sentiments which excited no little scandal. This was increased by the publication of his philosophical treatise, “_De Natura Rerum_,” in which he plainly put forth the doctrines of the Greek Platonists, and represented the Creator and the creature as essentially one and the same. Besides this radical Pantheistic error, which runs through all his works, his views on the subject of the supremacy of reason over authority are liberal in the extreme.[89] “Authority,” he says, “emanates from reason, not reason from authority; true reason has no need to be supported by any authority. We must use reason first in our investigations and authority afterwards.” He also affirmed that the substance of man was his will. The only punishment of sin, he says, is sin; there is no eternal fire; even the lost enjoy a certain happiness, for they are not deprived of truth. These, and a thousand equally unsound passages, raised him a crowd of adversaries, all of whom he treated with that supercilious contempt which would seem necessarily to enter into the character of the scholastic heretic. “They are all deceived,” he writes, “owing to their ignorance of liberal studies; they have none of them studied Greek, and with a knowledge of the Latin language alone it is impossible for them to understand the distinctions of science.”