b. The return of all things to God considered according to their temporal principles, or the
doctrine of salvation. There are only a few scattered remarks upon this subject in Scotus Erigena.
Christ is the Saviour by what he is in himself, not by what he does. His death is important as the
means of resurrection; which began with the resurrection and exaltation of Christ, because then all
things began to return to their union in their primordial causes, and this return constitutes salvation.
The consequences of salvation are therefore felt by angels as well as men, and even by inanimate
things.^1468 Salvation, as far as we are concerned, consists in speculative knowledge. We unite
ourselves with God by virtue of contemplation.^1469
c. The return of all things to God considered according to their future completion. All things
came out from God, all things go back to God. This is the law of creation. The foundation of this
return is the return of man to the Logos. The steps are, 1st, deliverance from the bodily forms; 2d,
resurrection and the abrogation of sex; 3d, the transformation of body into spirit; 4th, the return to
the primordial causes; 5th, the recession of nature, along with these causes, into God. But this, of
course, implies that God alone will exist forever, and that there can be no eternal punishment.
Scotus Erigena tries in vain to escape both these logical conclusions.^1470
His Philosophy.
Ueberweg thus states Scotus Erigena’s philosophical position and teachings:^1471 "The
fundamental idea, and at the same time the fundamental error, in Erigena’s doctrine is the idea that
the degrees of abstraction correspond with the degrees in the scale of real existence. He hypostasizes
the Tabula Logica. The universals are before and also in the individual objects which exist, or rather
the latter are in the former: the distinction between these (Realistic) formulae appears not yet
developed in his writings .... He is throughout a Realist. He teaches, it is true, that grammar and
rhetoric, as branches of dialectic or aids to it, relate only to words, not to things, and that they are
therefore not properly sciences; but he co-ordinates dialectic itself with ethics, physics and theology,
defining it as the doctrine of the methodical form of knowledge, and assigning to it in particular,
as its work, the discussion of the most general conceptions or logical categories (predicaments);
which categories he by no means regards as merely subjective forms or images, but as the names
of the highest genera of all created things ....
"The most noteworthy features in his theory of the categories are his doctrine of the
combination of the categories with each other, and his attempt to subsume them under the conceptions
of motion and rest; as also his identification of the categories of place with definition in logic,
which, he says, is the work of the understanding. The dialectical precepts which relate to the form
or method of philosophising are not discussed by him in detail; the most essential thing in his regard
is the use of the four forms, called by the Greeks division, definition, demonstration and analysis.
Under the latter he understands the reduction of the derivative and composite to the simple, universal
and fundamental; but uses the term also in the opposite to denote the unfolding of God in creation."
His Influence and Importance.
(^1468) "Nonne Verbum assumens hominem, omnem creaturam visibilem et invisibilem accepit, et totum, quod in homine
accepit salvum fecit." De div. Nat. V. 25 (col. 913).
(^1469) "Commune ommium, quae facta sunt, quodam veluti interitu redire in causas, quae in Deo subsistunt; proprium vero
intellectualis et raitonalis substantiae, unum cum Deo virtute contemplationis, et Deus per gratiam fieri. " V. 21 (col. 898).
(^1470) II. 6, 8, V. 7, 8, 3-6. Cf. Christlieb, l.c. p. 802.
(^1471) I. pp. 360, 363, 364.