fearlessness equally foreign to its spirit. Another Greek writer, the monothelete monk Maximus, supplemented the Scot's knowledge of the ultimate forms of Neo-Platonism, and from him too he translated a commentary on Saint Gregory which was likewise destined for the royal study. It should be remarked in passing that John, unlike the men to whom our attention has hitherto been given, addressed himself to a very select company; it might be to the king, whose intellectual sympathies were inherited from his father and grandfather, or it might be to his own hearers in the palace school. Twice only did he emerge into public view, and the estrangement, the public condemnation, which his utterances then on the subject of predestination[1] and of the nature of the Eucharist[2] provoked may have naturally confirmed his previous reserve. Of his further life little certain is recorded. He appears to have been in France in the year of the emperor's death.[3] The following year saw peace reestablished in England, and it is
- ↑ His predestination tract was twice condemned by church councils, at Valence in 855 and at Langres some years later. See Huber 97 sq. and the notes. To the former was due the contemptuous description of John's arguments as 'ineptas quaestiunculas et aniles pene fabulas, Scotorumque pultes' (Scots' porridge): cap. vi. Mansi, Cone. 15. 6 d.
- ↑ That John took part in the controversy raised by Paschasius Radbert is certainly to be inferred from the title of the work of Adrevald, De corpore et sanguine Christi contra ineptias Ioannis Scoti, printed in d'Achery, Spicilegium 1. 150 sqq.; ed. 1723. The conclusion is not invalidated but confirmed by the fact that in after years the book of Ratramnus on the subject was attributed to the Scot. It was known that he had written a treatise, and therefore the only appropriate treatise that came to hand was fathered upon him. This obvious argument seems to have escaped nearly all the modern writers who decide the point in the negative. The penetration of Noorden has further discerned certain peculiarities in the views ascribed by contemporaries to John Scotus which are inapplicable to Ratramnus: see his Hinkmar Erzbischof von Rheims 103, n. 2.
- ↑ This is inferred from a poem in which John commemorates the foundation of a church dedicated to the Virgin, which from several points of correspondence is believed to be that at Compiègne which Charles began in 877 on the model of his grandfather's church at Aix-la-Chapelle. As however the actual building was delayed by the emperor's death John seems to describe not what was really existing but the plan on which it was to be built. See the quotation in Huber 120 n.
