John Scotus Eriugena

Eriugena's name means 'John the Irishman'. He came to the court of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald around 845 and headed the palace school. He knew Greek, almost a miracle in ninth-century Western Europe. Charles had him translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, which introduced him to Neoplatonic negative theology, and he went on to translate Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa.

His main work, On the Division of Nature, sorts all that is into four kinds: what creates and is not created (God as source), what is created and creates (the primordial causes or Ideas), what is created and does not create (things in space and time), and what neither creates nor is created (God as the end to which all returns). The universe is God's self-manifestation; all things flow from God and return to God, and evil and hell are not realities but states of the soul.

The system was too bold. Where reason and authority agree, he said, reason is the standard, since authority derives from reason and not the reverse. The Church condemned his book as pantheism in 1210 and again in 1225, but manuscripts kept circulating and influenced Nicholas of Cusa and the German mystics. The story that his students stabbed him to death with their pens is probably a confusion with another John.