Judas amice instead of inimice, and as lucus is called a non lucendo. Sin lies outside of God, and
does not exist for him at all; he does not even foreknow it, much less foreordain it; for knowing
and being are identical with him.^698 But God has ordered that sin punishes itself; he has established
immutable laws, which the sinner cannot escape. Free will is the very essence of man, and was not
lost by the fall; only the power and energy of will are impaired. But Erigena vindicates to man
freedom in the same sense in which he vindicates it to God, and identifies it with moral necessity.
His pantheistic principles lead him logically to universal restoration.^699
This appears more clearly from his remarkable work, De Divisione Naturae, where he
develops his system. The leading idea is the initial and final harmony of God and the universe, as
unfolding itself under four aspects: 1) Natura creatrix non creata, i.e. God as the creative and
uncreated beginning of all that exists; 2) Natura creatrix creata, i.e. the ideal world or the divine
prototypes of all things; 3) Natura creata non creans, i.e. the created, but uncreative world of time
and sense, as the reflex and actualization of the ideal world; 4) Natura nec creata nec creans, i.e.
God as the end of all creation, which, after the defeat of all opposition, must return to him in an
. "The first and the last form," he says, "are one, and can be understood only of
God, who is the beginning and the end of all things."
The tendency of this speculative and mystical pantheism of Erigena was checked by the
practical influence of the Christian theism which entered into his education and personal experience,
so that we may say with a historian who is always just and charitable: "We are unwilling to doubt,
that he poured out many a devout and earnest prayer to a redeeming God for his inward illumination,
and that he diligently sought for it in the sacred Scripture, though his conceptual apprehension of
the divine Being seems to exclude such a relation of man to God, as prayer presupposes."^700
Hincmar had reason to disown such a dangerous champion, and complained of the Scotch
"porridge."^701 John Scotus was violently assailed by Archbishop Wenilo of Sens, who denounced
nineteen propositions of his book (which consists of nineteen chapters) as heretical, and by Bishop
Prudentius, who increased the number to seventy-seven. He was charged with Pelagianism and
Origenism, and censured for substituting philosophy for theology, and sophistical subtleties for
sound arguments from Scripture and tradition. Remigius thought him insane. Florus Magister
likewise wrote against him, and rejected as blasphemous the doctrine that sin and evil were
nonentities, and therefore could not be the subjects of divine foreknowledge and foreordination.
The Synod of Valence (855) rejected his nineteen syllogisms as absurdities, and his whole book
as a "commentum diaboli potius quam argumentum fidei." His most important work, which gives
(^698) God knows only what is, and sin has no real existence. "Sicut Dem mali auctor non est ita nec praescius mali, nec
praedestinans est." Cap. 10 (col. 395). "Ratio pronunciare non dubitat, peccata eorumque supplicia nihil esse, ac per hoc nec
praesciri nec praedestinari posse; quomodo enim vel praesciuntur, vel praedestinantur, quae non sunt?" Cap. 15. The same
thought occurs in his work, De Divis. Nat. He refers to such passages of the Scriptures where it is said of God that he does not
know the wicked.
(^699) The predestination theory of Scotus has some points of resemblance with that of Schleiermacher, who defended the
Calvinistic particularism, but only as a preparatory stage to universal election and restoration.
(^700) Neander, III. 462. The same may be said still more confidently of Schleiermacher, who leaned with his head to
pantheism, but lovingly clung with his heart to Christ as his Lord and Saviour. He keenly felt the speculative difficulty of
confining the absolute being to the limitations of personality ("omnis definitio est negatio"), and yet sincerely prayed to a
personal God. We cannot pray to an abstraction, but only to a personal being that is able to hear and to answer. Nor is personality
necessarily a limitation. There may be an absolute personality as well as an absolute intelligence and an absolute will.
(^701) "Pultes Scotorum."