Eriugena: East and West: Papers of the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Chicago and Notre Dame, 18-20 October, 1991 ed. by Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten

Abstract

Eriugena: East and West: Papers of the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Chicago and Notre Dame, 18-20 October, 1991. Edited by Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten. [Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, Number V] (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 290. $39.95.) Since 1970 scholars interested in Eriugena, an Irish master who came to the Continent probably in the 830's, have gathered to share their research. The 1991 colloquium focused on the central, if not unique, feature of scholarship, his command of Greek patristics. The volume's lead essay, Michael McCormick's Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium Down to the Accession of Charles the Bald, documents extensive contacts between the Franks and the Byzantines before John the Scot first set foot on the European continent (p. 24). The late John Meyendorff's Remarks on Eastern Patristic Thought in John Scottus resuscitates the image of Eriugena as lonely, isolated genius (p. 66) whose work failed to bridge the gap between the Byzantine and Frankish intellectual communities. Willemien Otten's Eriugena's Periphyseon: A Carolingian Contribution to the Theological Tradition, also swims against the current of East-West encounter when she concludes that anthropological optimism roots him deeply in the Western, specifically Carolingian, tradition. Both J. C. Marler (Dialectical Use of Authority in the Periphyseon) and Giulio d'Onofrio (The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Toward Hermeneutic of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot's Periphyseon) explore stance toward in theological discourse. Eriugena, according to Marler, inspired by Pseudo-Dionysius and by Maximus the Confessor, developed theory of auctoritas that saw Eriugena bend authority to reason in way that renews the influence of Plato in Latin Christianity (p. 108). D'Onofrio cautioned that Eriugena in his search for truth in the face of divergent authorities was not proposing a solution based on the autonomy of critical reason of an Abelardian type (p. 120). D'Onofrio, with Otten, views Eriugena in western, specifically Augustinian tradition of philosophical probabilism, but tradition that, in Eriugena at least, was enhanced by the Neoplatonic possibility ofsuprarational unification of the multiple and the particular (p. 129). Deirdre Carabine also reveals the multiple strands of Eastern and Western thought in Eriugena in Eriugena's Use of Symbolism of Light, Cloud, and Darkness in the Periphyseon. Carabine finds that Augustine's light-dominated imagery influenced the expression of thought, but that Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa influenced the content of his thinking. …