the common church tradition. But these strains are actually those which give colour to a web of thought quite different in texture. Its material, indeed, is only partly—Christian, and this, as we find it in his matured system, is drawn from the Greek fathers, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, more than from the Latins,—but most of all it comes from the heterogeneous manufacture of the latest Neo-Platonists, the men who sought to combine a religion which failed to satisfy the speculative instinct with the noblest philosophy of which they had information. The result was in any case a medley—'the spurious birth,' it has been called, 'of a marriage between philosophy and tradition, between Hellas and the East'—but the attempt was so plausible, so enticing, that it has never wanted defenders from the beginnings of Christianity, from Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, to our own time.
Among these Johannes Scotus, called lerugena or Erigena,[1] is a figure unique not so much for the originality of his views as for the confidence with which he discovered them latent in Christianity. He is unrestrained by the habits of thought of his own age, in which he appears as a meteor, none knew whence. The mystery which surrounds him is appropriate for his solitary person. From the schools of Ireland he drifted, some time before the year 847, to the court of Charles the Bald, like those former 'merchants of wisdom' with whom tradition
- ↑ As for the name the following facts may be accepted as ascertained: (1) he was known to contemporaries as Ioannes Scottus, Scotus, or Scotigena; (2) in his translation of Dionysius, and there only, he designates himself Ioannes Ierugena; (3) Ierugena is the oldest form that appears in the manuscripts, but it soon alternates with Erugena (in a copy of the beginning of the eleventh century, Saint John's college, Oxford, cod. cxxviii) and Eriugena; (4) Erigena does not make its appearance until later, while (5) the combination of the three names cannot be traced before the sixteenth century. See Christlieb 15 sq. On its meaning it is difficult to form a decided opinion. Probably it is derived from Erin or Ierne and modulated so as to suggest ἱερός. In any case Gale's notion (Testimonia, prefixed to his edition of the De divisione naturae, p. 8) that its bearer came from Eriuven or Ergene in the Welsh marches is to be rejected.
