CHAPTER II.
JOHN SCOTUS.
The dispute about predestination had long perplexed the Frankish world when Hincmar, the great archbishop of Rheims, applied to John Scotus[1] for help. Gottschalk had received his sentence from the council of Quierzy, and died after a long confinement in the monastery of Haut-villiers. But the controversy had failed, as controversies usually fail, to secure conviction to either side, and John gladly assumed that the fault lay in the incompetence of theology by itself to decide the profound questions involved. He began his book on the subject[2] by the announcement that true philosophy and true religion are identical; a solution of religious problems can only be effected by the aid of philosophy; and true philosophy rests on the basis of the unity of God. The oneness of his essence implies also a oneness of will, a will that can tend only towards good. To conceive a predestination to evil is to conceive a duality, a contradiction, in the divine nature. But predestination of any sort can only be
- ↑ The biography of John Scotus, which resolves itself mainly into a criticism ol scanty and conflicting materials, was first attempted by F. A. Staudenmaier, a catholic professor at Giessen, whose Johannes Scotus Erigena und die Vissenschaft seiner Zeit, Frankfort 1834, was left unfinished. Its biographical conclusions are for the most part reproduced in the Leben und Lehre des Joh. Scotus Erigena, Gotha I860, of Dr. Theodor Christlieb, of Bonn. A more sceptical criticism is applied, in the biography, Johannes Scotus Erigena, Munich 1861, by Dr. Johannes Huber, well known for his spirited action in connexion with the oecumenical council of 1869-1870. [See also my article in the Dictionary of National Biography, 51 (1897) 115-120.]
- ↑ Of the tract De praedestinatione, to which I had not access when 1 wrote the present chapter, Huber has given an elaborate analysis in his work cited above, 60-92. See also the summary in F. C. Baur s posthumous Christliche Kirche des Mittelalters 50-55, Tübingen 1861; and Gfrorer, Kirchen-geschichte 3. 867 sqq.
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