CHAPTER VIII John the Scot
JOHN THE SCOT, or Johannes Scotus, to which is sometimes added Eriugena or Erigena, * is the most astonishing person of the ninth century; he would have been less surprising if he had lived in the fifth or the fifteenth century. He was an Irishman, a Neoplatonist, an accomplished Greek scholar, a Pelagian, a pantheist. He spent much of his life under the patronage of Charles the Bald, king of France, and though he was certainly far from orthodox, yet, so far as we know, he escaped persecution. He set reason above faith, and cared nothing for the authority of ecclesiastics; yet his arbitrament was invoked to settle their controversies.
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* This addition is redundant; it would make his name ” Irish John from Ireland.” In the ninth century “Scotus” means “Irishman.”
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To understand the occurrence of such a man, we must turn our attention first to Irish culture in the centuries following Saint Patrick. Apart from the extremely painful fact that Saint Patrick was an Englishman, there are two other scarcely less painful circumstances: first, that there were Christians in Ireland before he went there; second, that, whatever he may have done for Irish Christianity, it was not to him that Irish culture was due. At the time of the invasion of Gaul (says a Gaulish author), first by Attila, then by the Goths, Vandals, and Alaric, “all the learned men on their side the sea fled, and in the countries beyond sea, namely Ireland, and wherever else they betook themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous advance in learning.” * If any of these men sought refuge in England, the Angles and Saxons and Jutes must have mopped them up; but those who went to Ireland succeeded, in combination with the missionaries, in transplanting a great deal of the knowledge and civilization that was disappearing from the Continent. There is good reason to believe that, throughout the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, a knowledge of Greek, as well as a considerable familiarity with Latin classics, survived among the Irish. †Greek was known in England from the time of Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury ( 669-690), who was himself a Greek, educated at Athens; it may also have become known, in the North, through Irish missionaries. “During the latter part of the seventh century,” says Montague James, “it was in Ireland that the thirst for knowledge was keenest, and the work of teaching was most actively carried on. There the Latin language (and in a less degree the Greek) was studied from a scholar’s point of view. . . . It was when, impelled in the first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they had already learnt to value.” ‡ Heiric of Auxerre, about 876, describes this influx of Irish scholars: “Ireland, despising the dangers of the sea, is migrating almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all the most learned doom them-
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* Cambridge Medieval History, III, 501.
â This question is discussed carefully in the Cambridge Medieval History, III, Ch. XIX, and € the conclusion is in favour of Irish knowledge of Greek.
â
€ Loc. cit., pp. 507-08. ¡
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selves to voluntary exile to attend the bidding of Solomon the wise” –i. e., King Charles the
Bald. *
The lives of learned men have at many times been perforce nomadic. At the beginning of Greek philosophy, many of the philosophers were refugees from the Persians; at the end of it, in the time of Justinian, they became refugees to the Persians. In the fifth century, as we have just seen, men of learning fled from Gaul to the Western Isles to escape the Germans; in the ninth century, they fled back from England and Ireland to escape the Scandinavians. In our own day, German philosophers have to fly even further West to escape their compatriots. I wonder whether it will be equally long before a return flight takes place.
Too little is known of the Irish in the days when they were preserving for Europe the tradition of classical culture. This learning was connected with monasteries, and was full of piety, as their penitentials show; but it does not seem to have been much concerned with theological niceties. Being monastic rather than episcopal, it had not the administrative outlook that characterized Continental ecclesiastics from Gregory the Great onwards. And being in the main cut off from effective contact with Rome, it still regarded the Pope as he was regarded in the time of Saint Ambrose, not as he came to be regarded later. Pelagius, though probably a Briton, is thought by some to have been an Irishman. It is likely that his heresy survived in Ireland, where authority could not stamp it out, as it did, with difficulty, in Gaul. These circumstances do something to account for the extraordinary freedom and freshness of John the Scot’s speculations.
The beginning and the end of John the Scot’s life are unknown; we know only the middle period, during which he was employed by the king of France. He is supposed to have been born about 800, and to have died about 877, but both dates are guesswork. He was in France during the papacy of Pope Nicholas I, and we meet again, in his life, the characters who appear in connection with that Pope, such as Charles the Bald and the Emperor Michael and the Pope himself.
John was invited to France by Charles the Bald about the year
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* Ibid., p. 524.
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843, and was by him placed at the head of the court school. A dispute as to predestination and free will had arisen between Gottschalk, a monk, and the important ecclesiastic Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims. The monk was predestinarian, the archbishop libertarian. John supported the archbishop in a treatise On Divine Predestination, but his support went too far for prudence. The subject was a thorny one; Augustine had dealt with it in his writings against Pelagius, but it was dangerous to agree with Augustine and still more dangerous to disagree with him explicitly. John supported free will, and this might have passed uncensured; but what roused indignation was the purely philosophic character of his argument. Not that he professed to controvert anything accepted in theology, but that he maintained the equal, or even superior, authority of a philosophy independent of revelation. He contended that reason and revelation are both sources of truth, and therefore cannot conflict; but if they ever seem to conflict, reason is to be preferred. True religion, he said, is true philosophy; but, conversely, true philosophy is true religion. His work was condemned by two councils, in 855 and 859; the first of these described it as “Scots porridge.”
He escaped punishment, however, owing to the support of the king, with whom he seems to have been on familiar terms. If William of Malmesbury is to be believed, the king, when John was dining with him, asked: “What separates a Scot from a sot?” and John replied, “Only the dinner table.” The king died in 877, and after this date nothing is known as to John. Some think that he also died in that year. There are legends that he was invited to England by Alfred the Great, that he became abbot of Malmesbury or Athelney, and was murdered by the monks. This misfortune, however, seems to have befallen some other John.
John’s next work was a translation from the Greek of the pseudoDionysius. This was a work which had great fame in the early Middle Ages. When Saint Paul preached in Athens, “certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite” ( Acts XVII, 34). Nothing more is now known about this man, but in the Middle Ages a great deal more was known. He had travelled to France, and founded the abbey of Saint Denis; so at least it was said by Hilduin, who was abbot just before John’s arrival in France. Moreover he was the reputed author of an important work reconcil-
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ing Neoplatonism with Christianity. The date of this work is unknown; it was certainly before 500 and after Plotinus. It was widely known and admired in the East, but in the West it was not generally known until the Greek Emperor Michael, in 827, sent a copy to Louis the Pious, who gave it to the above-mentioned Abbot Hilduin. He, believing it to have been written by Saint Paul’s disciple, the reputed founder of his abbey, would have liked to know what its contents were; but nobody could translate the Greek until John appeared. He accomplished the translation, which he must have done with pleasure, as his own opinions were in close accord with those of the pseudo-Dionysius, who, from that time onward, had a great influence on Catholic philosophy in the West.
John’s translation was sent to Pope Nicholas in 860. The Pope was offended because his permission had not been sought before the work was published, and he ordered Charles to send John to Rome–an order which was ignored. But as to the substance, and more especially the scholarship shown in the translation, he had no fault to find. His librarian Anastasius, an excellent Grecian, to whom he submitted it for an opinion, was astonished that a man from a remote and barbarous country could have possessed
