Erigena John Scotus, also called John the Scot, Eriugena, and Scottigena (c.810–77), Irish-born scholar and theologian. He taught grammar and dialectics at the court of Charles the Bald near Laon from 845 on. In a controversy in 851, John argued that there was only one predestination, to good, since evil was strictly nothing. Thus no one is compelled to evil by God’s foreknowledge, since, strictly speaking, God has no foreknowledge of what is not. But his reliance on dialectic, his Origenist conception of the world as a place of education repairing the damage done by sin, his interest in cosmology, and his perceived Pelagian tendencies excited opposition. Attacked by Prudentius of Troyes and Flores of Lyons, he was condemned at the councils of Valencia (855) and Langres (859). Charles commissioned him to translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor from the Greek. These works opened up a new world, and John followed his translations with commentaries on the Gospel of John and Pseudo-Dionysius, and then his chief work, the Division of Nature or Periphyseon (826–66), in the Neoplatonic tradition. He treats the universe as a procession from God, everything real in nature being a trace of God, and then a return to God through the presence of nature in human reason and man’s union with God. John held that the nature of man is not destroyed by union with God, though it is deified. He was condemned for pantheism at Paris in 1210. J.Lo.