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-