9/20/2013 Time and Purpose in Eriugena's Positive Nothingness

by Nathan Turowsky

Johannes Scottus Eriugena (circa 800-circa 877) was an Irish monk and one of the most original thinkers of the Early Middle Ages. Although he saw himself and was seen as a personally devout and orthodox Christian throughout his life, he often found his work censured by Church authorities on account of the sometimes uncomfortable byways down which he went in his attempts to harmonize various Classical philosophers with Christian doctrine (a project undertaken with a much greater degree of institutional support by the later Scholastics, such as Blessed John Duns Scotus (circa 1266-1308)--who actually was from Scotland; in Eriugena's time Scotia Maior referred to Ireland but by Duns Scotus' time the relevant countries had their currently accepted Latin names). Eriugena's major work is called the Periphyseon and was completed around 867.

One of the most arresting aspects of Eriugena's thought is his unusual set of ideas about teleology. Eriugena concluded that the only logical extension of the Christian doctrines of God's absolute self-sufficiency and omnipotence into this realm was that the universe as a whole has no actual purpose, because, as Terry Eagleton has paraphrased, it was created by 'God, Who, if He exists, does so for no particular reason'. For Eriugena, thus, teleology becomes the question of the functions and goals of particular things within the more or less self-contained, basically ludic and conditional self-manifestation of God. He considers that there are two separate streams of time running simultaneously, an unchanging time in which everything is a purposeless Divine theophany and a corrupting time in which movement, change, and purpose can exist. While Eriugena's philosophical justifications for this cosmology derive primarily from the Bible and from the Neoplatonists, his account of time and telos is deeply resonant with Celtic mythology and especially with Hiberno-Saxon visual art, with its emphasis on oddly kinetic forms in motion within clearly-defined, circumscribed borders.

For Eriugena there are two types of nothingness: nihil per privationem (nothingness through privation) and nihil per excellentiam (nothingness through excelling being). Creation is out of, and purposelessness is within, God's surfeit of positive nothingness.