PERIPHYSEON

...have different fantasies—the good, of divine contemplations through God’s appearances according to their elevation; the evil, of mortal things, which are false and diverse, according to the motions of their evil thoughts.

The deified will ascend through innumerable steps of divine contemplation, so as to see God in the mirror of divine fantasy. The reprobate will descend through the diverse descents of their vices into the depth of ignorance and exterior darkness. Human nature, however, in which both the just and the unjust participate, will be placed as a kind of medium. It is affected neither by the happiness of the just nor the unhappiness of the unjust; it maintains its own natural goodness alone, holding the substances of all things, and offering itself to all who participate in it.

The return can be divided into seven steps: firstly, there is the change of the earthly body into vital motion; secondly, of vital motion into sense; thirdly, of sense into reason; fourthly, of reason into intellect. Here is fixed the end of the whole rational creation. Body, vital motion, sense, reason, and intellect at this stage form not five things, but one—since the lower is always absorbed into the higher in such a way that, while not ceasing to exist, it becomes one with it.

There follow three more steps of ascent: firstly, the intellect passes into the knowledge of all things after God; secondly, knowledge passes into wisdom, that is, the intimate contemplation of truth insofar as this is conceded to the creature; and thirdly, the highest step: the setting, so to speak, through supernatural power, of the most purified souls in God himself. This is like a darkness of incomprehensible and inaccessible light, a darkness in which the causes of all things are hidden. And then, "the night shall be brightened as the day" Psalm 139:12. This will be the eighth day of blessedness. The first stages of the return are within the limits of nature. The other three are supernaturally and superessentially within God himself. When they are united, only God will appear in anything, just as in the most purified air nothing shines but light alone.

Among other works of Eriugena were Expositions on the Celestial Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius (865–70), a Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (865–70), a Commentary on St. John’s Gospel, and some thirty-six poems. One of these, the Aulae Sidereae ("Starry Halls"), may have been the last thing he wrote, possibly in 877. His exegetical works contain the same doctrine found in the Periphyseon but are written in a more intimate style. The Homily on the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel is particularly appealing.

The poems are written about half and half in Elegiac Couplets and Dactylic Hexameters. Nearly all praise Charles the Bald. Many of them treat of...