Chapter 28 : Philosophy Against the Church

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In 531, in Ephesus, the Monophysites produced a work against their adversaries, placed under the name of a certain Denys the Areopagite, whom the official history (according to Rome) passed off as a follower of Paul and one of the bishops of Athens. The archbishop of Ephesus contested his authenticity. In fact, everything indicates that the author was an Alexandrian philosopher of gnostic inspiration, who wrote during the second half of the Fifth Century. By a singular destiny, and perhaps because they furnished the powerful Monophysite Churches with arguments, the works of the pseudo-Denys the Areopagite were preserved, and they fed a number of mystical visions and the conception known as pantheism, in which God, being everywhere, is in sum nowhere.

Unknown to himself, God [in the doctrine of pseudo-Denys] manifested the material natures that composed the world through the means of a series of emanations that came from spiritual natures or angels. Essence of all things, God gave substance to all that existed.

God did not know evil, because evil possessed neither substance nor creative power, but only resided in the lack of perfection of creatures. It belonged to each to realize the ascension towards the Pleroma of the good according to the ladder of perfection and the destiny of all things, which was to return to the primordial unity. The soul would unite with the one who could only be known through a state of innocence, through a “knowledge beyond all knowledge.”[330] This is what Nicolas of Cues would call “scholarly ignorance.” The partisans of the Free Spirit availed themselves of an innocence in which knowing and non-knowing coincided so as to justify the impeccability of their unhindered lives.

John Scotus Erigena

Around the middle of the Ninth Century, the theories of the pseudo-Denys inspired a philosophy of such brilliant intelligence that it seduced Charles the Bald, who was thenceforth resolved to protect the philosopher against all obstacles to his freedom of conception.

Born in Ireland or Scotland around 810, John Scotus Erigena was around 30 when Charles the Bald invited him to teach grammar and dialectics at the palatial school of Quierzy, near Laon. His De praedestinatione, written in 851 at the request of Hincmar, Bishop of Reims (who was then engaged in a polemic with Gottschalk), drew the condemnation of the Council of Valencia in 855, but without prejudicial consequences for its author.

Charles the Bald begged Erigena to translate the works of Gregoire of Nysse, Maxime the Confessor and the pseudo-Denys from Greek into Latin. Composed between 862 and 866, and written in the form of a dialogue between master and disciple (a dialogue in which the ideas of Amaury of Bene and David of Dinant were reconciled), Erigina’s De divisione naturae would be condemned in 1210 at the Council of Paris, following the Amaurician agitations. Pope Honorius I would ordain the burning of all copies of it in 1225. In 1681, the Oxford edition would still merit an entry in the [Inquisitorial] Index. John himself would die around 877.

In fact, his system excluded theological speculation. According to his De praedestinatione, “the true philosophy is the true religion and the true religion is the true philosophy.”[331]

“Universal nature is divided into four categories: the being who is not created and who creates; the being who is created and who creates; the being who is created and does not create; the being who is not created and does not create. The first and last of these categories are related to God; they are only different in our understanding, following which we consider God as a principle or as final goal of the world.”[332] Such are the main lines of his system.

Following Scotus Erigina, “two intellectual methods lead to God: one by the road of negation, which makes a tabula rasa of all of our representations of the divinity; the other by the road of affirmation, which ascribes to God all of our intellectual conceptions (with no exceptions), all of our qualities and even all of our faults. These two methods, far from being mutually exclusive, unite into one that consists in conceiving of God as the being above all essence, goodness, wisdom, and divinity, as the nothingness inaccessible to intelligence, the subject of which negation is truer than affirmation and which remains unknown to itself.”[333]

The infinite being reveals himself by means of “theophanies,” that is to say, the creatures that emanate from him. These are accessible to intelligence, “in the same way that light, to become perceptible to the eye, must scatter itself into the air.” It is not by virtue of a movement subject to his nature that God created what exists: “to be, to think and to act are confounded for him in a single and self-same state. God created all things, which signifies nothing other than: God is in all things. Of him alone can one say that he exists; the world only exists insofar as it participates in the being of God.”[334]

Mankind finds itself among the supreme causes, an intellectual notion eternally conceived by divine thought. Mankind was made in the image of God and is destined to be the mediator between God and his creatures, the place of union of the creatures in a single and self-same unity. If mankind had not sinned, the division of the sexes would not have been produced: mankind would have remained in the primitive unity of its nature. Moreover, the world would not have been separated from paradise by him, that is to say, he would have spiritually inhabited the unity of his essence; the heavens and the earth would not have been separated by him, because all of his being would have been celestial and without any corporeal element. Without the fall, he would have enjoyed the plenitude of being and would have reproduced in the manner of the angels.

“Everything falls into nothingness; the end of the fall of nature is the departure point for its recovery.”[335]

“Here-below, mankind possesses in itself two elements that compose universal nature, spirit and matter; he reconciles within himself the two opposed extremities of creation. He is the mediator between God and the world, the point at which all creatures, spiritual as well as material, are brought together in a single unity. Human nature has lost nothing of its primitive purity through the fact of the fall; it has conserved it completely. It isn’t in it that evil is seated, but in the perverse movements of our free will. Like any first idea, it enjoys an imperishable beauty; evil only resides in the accident, in individual will. The image of God continues to exist in the human soul.”[336]

It is through human intelligence that the return of God’s creation takes place. Exterior objects, conceived by us, pass through our nature and are united in it. They find in it the first causes, in which they return through the effect of our thought, which glimpses the eternal essence in passing phenomena and identifies itself intellectually with God. Thus the visible creatures rise with us in God. “The Word [Verbe] is the principle and the final goal of the world; at the end of time, it recovers the infinite multiplicity of its own being come back to it in its original unity,” or to employ the allegorical language that reduces the facts of Christian revelation to the role of symbols and images of the evolution of the divine being: “Christ rose into the heavens in an invisible manner in the hearts of those who elevate themselves to him through contemplation.”[337]

[”]Physical death is the beginning of the return of mankind to God. On the one hand, matter vanishes without leaving any traces; on the other hand, all the divisions successively issued from the divine unity and that co-exist in the human soul return, the one to the other. The first stage of this unification is the return of man to the primitive state of his nature, such as it exists in heaven, without the division of the sexes. The revived Christ preceeded us to the paradise of human nature unified with itself, in which all creatures are one.”[338] All men indiscriminately return in the unity of human nature, because this nature is the communal property of all. But here a triple distinction is established. Those who were students [eleves] during their lives, who contemplated the divine being, will be elevated [s’eleveront] above the unity of their celestial nature, to the point of deification; those who did not surpass the ordinary level of terrestrial existence will remain in the state of glorified human nature; those who delivered themselves to the “irrational movements of a perverse will” will fall into eternal punishment, without human nature, which forms the foundation of their being and must be attained in its ideal happiness through suffering. Individual consciousness alone will be the headquarters of sorrow.

“After the annihilation of the world, there will be no malice, no death, no misery. Divine goodness will absorb malice; eternal life will absorb death; and happiness will absorb misery. Evil will end; it will have no reality in itself because God will not know it.”[339] All of Scotus Erigena’s treatise on predestination is dedicated to the exposition of this same idea. Eternal suffering is absolutely condemned by the logic of his system.[340]

David Of Dinant

If verbose pantheism, which, up to the Twentieth Century, has tended to mobilize God in a world that he has only made, and thus makes up for the declining authority of the various religions, this same conception — at a time when the Church imposed the presence of its divinity with the frightening persuasion of its priests and the weapons of the princes — took on a diametrically opposed meaning.

In 1210, the Council of Paris, Pierre de Corbeil, Archbishop of Sens, and Pierre de Nemours, bishop of the city [of Paris], all had excellent reasons for sending the Amaurians to the pyre and to pell-mell condemn Amaury of Benes, Aristotle, and David of Dinant. As long as they went hither and thither in the Cenacles devoted to scholastic quarrels, these ideas did not seriously threaten the foundations of faith; they served as pretexts or justifications for natural irreligiousity or the frightened hostility stirred up by clerical politics; but they soon became burdened with an importance of which their authors were sometimes not aware.

It is difficult to re-present the doctrine of Dinant with precision, because nothing other than extracts from his work exist. Nevertheless, he seems to have advanced a formula that, in the Eighteenth Century, under Spinoza’s hand, would still cause scandal in the religious milieux: Deus sive natura, God is nothing other than nature.[341]

According to the Chronicle of the Monk of Loudun, Dinant was born in the Mosan country, lived in the entourage of Pope Innocent III, who was a clever politician, jurist and man of learning.

The Compilatio de novo spirito, attributed to Albert the Great, specified that Dinant fled France at the time of the 1210 Council, because “he would be punished if he were caught.”

Albert cities extracts from Dinant’s Liber de tomis sive divisionibus, also known as Liber atomorum.

According to David, everything is simultaneously matter, spirit and God. These three terms formed a unique substance from which the indissociable components of the body, the intellect and the soul, that is to say, matter, spirit and God, had their source.[342]

In Jundt’s opinion, David knew about a work written by Avicembrun, an Arab philosopher and contemporary of Avicenne, called Fon vital (Fountain of Life), which supported the thesis of a material substance endowed with different modes of expression, going from the simple to the complex.

From the evidence, [such] metaphysical subtitlies were invested with less interest than the book’s conclusion, to which many people subscribed, even if they couldn’t read or augment it: there is only terrestrial life, and each person can construct his or her destiny within it. This was in fact the lesson propagated by the Amaurians.

Thomas Scoto, Hermann De Rijswijck

The name Thomas Scoto has disappeared from the memory so carefully purified by the Church that it isn’t even found at the heart of the clergy of executioners who [typically] perpetuated the memories of their victims. The Inquisitor Alvaro Pelayo accorded Thomas Scoto a notice in his Collyrium contra haereses, published in 1344.

First a Dominican and then a Franciscan, Scoto taught at the Decretales’ school in Lisbon in the first half of the Fourteenth Century.

After having a dispute with him in Lisbon, Pelayo threw Scoto in prison and then, in all probability, burned him.

What doctrine triggered the inquisitor’s accusations? Contrary to the opinion that accredits the absence of atheism from the Middle Ages, Scoto’s conception suggested the thesis of an eternal and uncreated world. Scoto rejected the sacraments, the virginity of Mary, the miracles of the Christ, his divine nature, and the authority of the Church. Four centuries before Isaac of Pereyre, Scoto held that mankind existed before Adam. He estimated that the world would be better governed by philosophers than by theologians, and had little respect for people like Augustine of Hippone and Bernard de Clairvaux.

Is it deceptive to conjecture that Thomas Scoto was [just] one example among other thinkers whose dangerous opinions prudence has required one not to publish? Pelayo, one of the leaders of the prosecution, noted: “Three impostors have deceived the world: Moses deceived the Jews; Jesus deceived the Christians; and Mohammed deceived the Saracens.” This was the celebrated title of a book attributed to Frederic II or his chancellor, Peter of the Vineyard, of which no trace has been found, other than an edition from the end of the Seventeenth Century, thanks to the Protestant priest Meslier. But the text, real or fictional, cast a scandalous shadow from the Eighth to the Seventeenth Century, due to the concision with which it summarized an opinion that many professed secretly, and that was expressed in the universities and among the wandering Goliard clerics, but was prevented from being discussed openly by the omnipresent suspicions of the clergy.

At the end of the Fifteenth Century, well before the appearances of Geoffrey, Vallee, Vanivi and Bruno, another free spirit (named Hermann of Rijswijck) was placed on the pyre in 1512 as a relapser, after having escaped from prison, to which a trial of 1502 had condemned him. Hermann’s works, since disappeared, affirmed that the world had existed for all eternity and did not begin with creation, “which was an invention by stupid Moses.” Hermann denounced the “buffoonery of the Scriptures.” Faced with the inquisitor, a notary and a witness, he added to the end of the accusatory act: “I was born a Christian, but I am not a Christian [any longer] because the Christians are perfectly stupid.” David of Dinant, Thomas Scoto, Hermann de Rijswijck — no, these were neither the first nor the only atheists before the Renaissance who inflicted upon the Church of Rome, in particular, and religion, in general, injuries that no scar tissue will ever heal.[343]