Eriugena

This is the synopsis of my new book, which is now available from Stanford University Press, but also Amazon etc/. See further here on the SUP page:
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23207

"A fresh and more capacious reading of the Western religious tradition on nature and creation, Thinking Nature puts medieval Irish theologian John the Scot Eriugena (810-877) into conversation with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Challenging the biblical stewardship model of nature and histories of nature and religion that pit orthodoxy against the heresy of pantheism, author Willemien Otten reveals a line of thought that has long made room for nature’s agency as the coworker of God. Embracing this more elusive idea of nature into a world beset by environmental crisis, she suggests, will allow us to see nature not as a victim, but as an ally in a common quest for re-attunement to the divine. Putting its protagonists into further dialogue with such classical authors as Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and William James, her study deconstructs the idea of pantheism and paves the way for a new natural theology.”

Check also my website for a colloquium on Pantheism, Creation, Emanation and Other Aspects of Nature at the University of Chicago on April 29-30, 2020,: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/willemien-otten-0

In these essays Peter Dronke looks at some of the relations between sacred and profane ideas and images, and Christian and pagan motifs, particularly in the early Middle Ages. The first two parts of the book dwell on aspects of (in the widest sense) Christian Platonism, the one part focussing on themes, the other on some of the greatest thinkers in the Latin world, from Boethius in the sixth century to Thierry of Chartres in the twelfth. The emphasis throughout is on transformations and syncretisms far more than disjunctions. The final group of essays is concerned with poetic texts, Latin and vernacular, in which non-sacred elements make their way into the sacred, the biblical and the saintly realms. A brief Epilogue glances at early medieval profane poetry outside as well as within Europe.

In the hexaemeral part of the Periphyseon, Eriugena reports on two hermeneutical traditions on the first light of creation. According to the first tradition, attributed to Basil, primordial light is corporeal and of fiery nature. According to the second tradition, attributed to Augustine, primordial light is of intelligible, angelic nature. Based on this report and other passages contemporary scholarship assumes a close acquaintance of Eriugena with Basil’s Hexaemeron. The purpose of this article is to put the latter assumption under scrutiny. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I compare Eriugena’s report of Basil in the Periphyseon with Basil’s original text in the Hexaemeron. The comparison shows that the corporeal theory of light attributed to Basil deviates significantly from Basil’s own theory, at least in two respects. In a second step, I investigate whether Eriugena’s report of Basil is mediated through other sources. I here compare the Periphyseon with the theory of light defended by Gregory of Nyssa in his Apology to Basil’s Hexaemeron. The comparison now yields positive results: if one reads the Hexaemeron through the mediation of the Apology, one ends up indeed with the report in the Periphyseon. If my argument is correct, the current scholarly assumption about Eriugena’s knowledge of the Greek patristic corpus in general, and of Nyssen’s corpus in particular, needs to be reconsidered. Gregory of Nyssa’s Apology exercises a tremendous influence on Eriugena’s physical thought, a fact that has up to now escaped scholarly attention.

Convergences between Platonism and the Abrahamic Religions Parts 3, 4 & 5 Adapted for the De Li Non Aliud Reading Group 2021
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.

It is not anachronistic to talk about the Self in medieval philosophy, but it is often a self without subjectivity. I look Boethius on the self as an ideal; Eriugena and the unknowable self; how Anselm avoids Augustinian ideas of self-knowledge; the extinction of the Avicennian self in Ibn Tufayl; and Aquinas's idea of self-knowledge without the self (in which I discuss some recent work by Therese Cory and Alain de Libera).

A smaller version of this paper was published as “Conversion: Ontological & Secular from Plato to Tom Jones”,  Numero Cinq, V: 7, July 2014  and is posted elsewhere on Academia.edu. Its aim is to present some features of conversion as represented over about twenty-five hundred years in the pagan and Christian west in a way which may prove illumining because not expected. Rather than looking at conversion as primarily a religious phenomenon, though not leaving this out, I shall mainly present it as psychic, ontological, and secular.  Moreover, although these three aspects can be seen together at almost every point, in order to bring out differences, I shall stress the psychological through Plato’s dialogues, the ontological through Neoplatonic – Peripatetic systems, and the secular through 18th and early 19th century novels of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. The elements touched on from Plato and his Late Ancient and Medieval successors will largely be determined by what is modified or suppressed by our cast of English novelists.
The major section on Jane Austen's novels is entitled "Secularization Completed and the Beginnings of a Critique." They are not the loss of conversion in the Christian Platonist tradition but rather such a complete passage into the processes of social and individual life, i.e. secularization, that religious forms need not be represented along side them. Jane Austen is a modern Sophocles in his difference from Euripides and Aeschylus. Indeed, there is a sense in which her novels are the deepest treatments of conversion in the genre.

Written by a natural scientist, this book is an essay on universal consciousness, which the author explores using a comparative approach borrowed from the neurosciences and Physics. A super sentient being, God is relative to a level of organization and is necessarily hidden for sentient beings of lower levels.

“Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” (Genesis 2.19)
PANTOKRATOR, the Cosmic Christ:  A Christian Theology of Nature
Lent Two, March 7, 2004 at Evensong

Last Sunday evening, we left the first Adam poised midway between the angels and the rest of God’s creatures. We discovered that he was made “after the image of God” (Genesis 1.27) by the true and proper Image of God, Christ the eternal Word. This first Adam is “a living soul” in contrast to the Almighty Christ, crucified and resurrected, who is “a life-giving spirit” (Genesis 2.7 and I Corinthians 15.45). Only by growing into conformity with the true and living Word will humanity come into proper likeness to God. This is the end for which “the whole creation [now] groans and travails in pain together” (Romans 8.19-22). Groaning labour is not, however, where humanity begins. In accord with the account in Genesis, the theological artists of Monreale depict Christ Pantokrator leading Adam by hand and placing him in the “garden which God planted east of Eden” (Genesis 2.8). Tonight we must go and visit Adam there.

Before saying anything about the life of Adam in Eden, we should remind ourselves of the significance of this garden. It is the original harmony of God, humanity, and nature; therefore, replanting the garden “east of Eden,” and living in it again, were the Christian hope, the aim of work and prayer. We need go no further than the Benedictine monastery, to which the great Cathedral at Monreale belonged, in order to see this. Remember what Genesis says:  “a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” (Genesis 2.10). Monreale and every Benedictine monastery has at its center this garden, this Paradise, as it is always called, with a central fountain and four paths leading from it. By following Christ, the monastic community is re-established in Paradise, the garden of Eden is reconstructed. We call St Benedict the Father of Europe, because in the West, Christian civilization was built by the numberless monks and nuns who followed his Rule. Everywhere they went, they replanted the garden of Eden, and implanted yearning for the harmony of that lost paradise.

In this article the cosmological and metaphysical dimensions of the Logos concept in the Hellenic and Patristic traditions are explored. Heraclitus initially depicted the logos as the ontological link between the One and the many, with the logos thus serving as the foundation of both rational discourse and natural law. This concept was elaborated and modified by a number of eminent Hellenic and Christian thinkers. Among them count Plato, Philo of Alexandria, the New Testament authors John and Paul, Plotinus, Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and John Scottus Eriugena.

Gottschalk of Orbais (808-867):  His influence upon the transmission of Augustinian theology to the future reformers may make him the de facto source of Protestantism.  His name meant “God’s Servant” (Ussher, Elrington 124) and he was an impressed monk who attained to monastic magister and secular professor (Gillis 154, 156).  He was an accomplished poet and hymnist and missionary among the Balkan Bulgars.  He coined the phrase “the German people (Genke, Lectio 1)” and “confessed that God is sovereign…in election and reprobation (H. Hanko, ‘Martyr’),” “defended by orthodox prelates and provincial synods (Prichard 186).”  Incarcerated for two decades as a yurodivy  hermit forgotten by man, he was “one of the saddest characters of early-medieval German culture (Murdoch, Gottschalk).”  The question whether or not Gottschalk belongs to the category of early reformer hinges upon whether he is more like Fulgentius and Augustine [430 or less years before him] on the one side, or Bradwardine and Rimini [430 years or more after him] on the other (Gumerlock, “Gottschalk” 16).  According to Hans von Schubert , “It is not only our right but also our obligation to regard this German Calvin as one of the first heroes of the history of our faith  (H. Hanko, ‘Martyr’).”

Dionysius in Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas
Oxford Handbook to Dionysius the Areopagite
Edited Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, George Steiris
“Dionysius nearly everywhere follows Aristotle as will be evident to anyone diligently examining his books.”
For this judgement, the great Thomist scholar Marie-Dominque Chenu supposed Aquinas “to have been duped by certain external resemblances.”  However, if, in fact, there are dupes here, the first was Albertus Magnus. From his great teacher, Albert, the Dionysian Peripatetic, Aquinas, for whom the Areopagite remained a quasi-Biblical authority but identified as a Platonist, learned the fundamental congruence of the doctrines of the greatest philosophical authority, Aristotle, and his match in the higher realm of theology, Dionysius.

I. Albert, the Dionysian Peripatetic
A. Dionysius and Aristotle juxtaposed in Cologne
Aquinas had been initiated by Albert into what Alain de Libera called “The ‘way’ of Dionysian peripateticism,”  when, from 1245/46  to 1251/52, Thomas was his student, first in Paris and, then, crucially, from 1248, in Cologne. In the advanced studium the Dominicans directed Albert to establish there, “the greatest Dionysian commentator of the XIIIth century,”  exposited the entire Dionysian corpus and began his explanations of the works attributed to Aristotle.  Evidence that Thomas studied both authors with him are manuscripts of Albert’s commentaries on the Dionysian corpus and of his lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle.  For the former, we have Thomas’ autographs, written out for Albert as his assistant.  Thus “he copied the whole set of Albert’s [Dionysian] commentaries by hand” and also inserted annotations.  For the Ethics, we have a reportatio by Thomas. Importantly for the differences which evolved between their ways of thinking, Albert did not start his paraphrastic expositions of the Aristotelian corpus until the one devoted to the Physics in 1251/52. Soon after that, Thomas left for Paris. Burger stresses that “when Albert was commenting on the texts of Aristotle, and finally on the Liber de causis, Thomas was in Paris and in Italy. So their ways, like their thinking, were separated.”
“In the autumn of 1251, or at the latest 1252, [Aquinas] commenced his career of teaching at the University of Paris by cursive reading of two books of the Bible.”  These lectures qualified him to comment on the Sentences, obtain the licentia docendi, the status of magister, and a chair. Thomas’ Sentences Commentary is his largest theological system. Commenting on the second Book Thomas made his observation about Dionysius following Aristotle, “during the academic year 1252-53” or the next,  when he was still strongly under the influence of Albert.

The centrality of natural theology in this period and its inescapable formation of what succeeds are indicated by the multiple forms it takes throughout its extent in Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian philosophies, religious practices, and theologies. Commonly, the term, as used to refer to an apologetic or instrument presupposed by or leading to revealed religion and theology, makes no distinction between the forms of philosophy. Moreover, when those listed as “philosophers” in our histories touch on theological or religious matter, they are usually treated as if what they wrote was all “natural”, in the sense of coming from inherent human capacity, as opposed to what is inspired or gracious. Packing the natural theology of what we are calling “the Patristic Period” into such crudely undifferentiated lumps moulded by later binary schematizing destroys what it most distinctively accomplished. It not only produced the new language of metaphysics and the supernatural,  but also thought through how nature and what is beyond it interpenetrated one another.

After rehearsing the steps through which the mind has passed in its ascent into God he passes to the last where, paradoxically, by looking above itself to intellect and what intellect contemplates, it is properly called «mind» «supra se, secundum quem dicitur mens» (Chapter 1, § 4).  Hellenic philosophy and theology inherits this paradox from Aristotle. In Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, Book 3 of the De Anima, and Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics,  the human becomes what Aristotle exhorts it to be by passing to intellectual contemplation which is proper to God and to the happiness of the immortals. Aquinas makes the human possession of intellect a borrowing from God or a participation in God. This is a participation in uncreated light (God’s knowing) which is,  for Aquinas,  «stamped» on each mind by God (see Summa theologiae I.79.4: «the human soul derives its intellectual light from God, according to Ps. 4:7, "The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is stamped upon us.”») Bonaventure uses Augustine to arrive at this result. ... Anselm’s Proslogion emerged from his dissatisfaction with the inadequacy in the Monologion between the simple notion of the God he was demonstrating and the complexity of his argument, an argument he thought could be judged by those who would read Augustine’s De Trinitate.  In that distress Anselm was graciously granted a way to God in which the form of thought was appropriate to the simplicity of its content. 

Anselm’s new beginning Bonaventure, with speculative insight, assimilates to Dionysius’ primary name for God, so as to bring forth Anselm’s deduction of the Trinity. Crucially the vision of the first Cherub is not lost or erased because the Trinity of persons only appears when the summum bonum is also simple being. Moving from both Cherubic visions  to the Incarnation, Bonaventure then leads the itinerant mind to the Dionysian darkness which is brilliant light and emptiness entirely full.  It is significant that in both authors Augustine is surpassed. Dionysius has become an Augustinian, and Augustine lives within a Proclean systematic cosmos which was not his creation.

This chapter on later Platonic traditions focuses on Denys, otherwise known as Ps-Dionysius the Areopagite. A late fifth- to early sixth-century theologian dependent on Plotinus, Damascius, and, above all, Proclus, assumed to have been converted by St Paul and possessing his spiritual wisdom, Denys was influential throughout  Catholic theology. The chapter places Denys’s innovations against the background of Christian engagement with Neoplatonism after Augustine. After tracing Denys’ influence from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, his role in modernity via Pierre de Bérulle and neo-scholasticism is considered. We conclude with his importance for some postmodern Catholic thinkers.

The central logic of Origen’s De Principiis rests upon the axiom that “the end must be like the beginning.” Despite the importance of this principle, Origen never elaborates upon it, but simply asserts it as the incontrovertible ground of his philosophical and theological system. This thesis is an attempt to unravel this enigmatic axiom with the help of Aristotelian philosophy. While Origen is typically regarded as a “Platonist”, I argue for the equally important Peripatetic character of Origen’s thought. It is this latter element, I maintain, that holds the key as to why “the end must be like the beginning.” In sum, I argue that, as simultaneously the “activity of being” and the “actuality of existence,” God is both the archē and the telos of the created cosmos. As actuality (ἐνέργεια), God eternally creates the world and leads it to perfection; as eternally-being-actualized, the world is eternally created and moved towards perfection – the realization of eternal wellbeing. Despite the shared activity (ἐνέργεια) of Creator and creation, the two remain importantly distinct. Like iron in the fire, the latter becomes ‘like’ (ὁμοίωσις) the former while remaining substantially itself.

Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos
for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference
June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College
Wayne J. Hankey
DRAFT
Please send comments and suggestions to me at hankeywj@dal.ca
INTRODUCTION
This paper has two parts. In the first I bring out, almost exclusively from the Confessions, how God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos; in humans God, as the structure of our being, is that by which we are, know and love; the power by which we do good and do evil. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity  by the some of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.

This paper represents my first thoughts in developing a broader project that will question unexamined assumptions regarding gender essentialism within the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the contemporary roles of men and women within the Orthodox Church. The paper was presented as a portion of my qualifying exams.

In this book, the author presents a novel thesis regarding apophatic philosophy. He traces the roots of "De Mystica Theologia" by Dionysius Areopagite (pseudo Dionysius) in the poem of Parmenides "peri physeos". As a secondary theme, the author explores the ineffable in Greek philosophy.

This paper has two parts. In the first I bring out, almost exclusively from the Confessions, how God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos; in humans, God, as the structure of our being, is that by which we are, know and love; the power by which we do good and do evil. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity  by a few great philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Eckhart’s possible reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropology, whose radical theory of the divine image reached the West probably since the times of Ambrose of Milan. Subsequently, Gregory’s De opificio hominis became widely known by means of two different Latin versions, one by the great canonist Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century and another by the Carolingian philosopher Eriugena in the 9th century, who quoted his version extensively in the Periphyseon. But since there seem to be no obvious direct links between Gregory of Nyssa’s De opificio hominis and Eckhart’s texts, I will be analysing and comparing some of the main elements in their respective interpretations of the divine image in humanity, trying to identify and account for some of their notorious philosophical and terminological parallels. We will begin with the idea of an unmediated relationship between the divine archetype and the human image, which hence implies for both authors a sort of self-portrait of God, of his own form and activity. Next, I will point out their associations of the divine image with the intellect and their uses of the dynamic metaphor of the mirror. Finally, I will compare their understandings of the ratio imaginis, that is, the true significance of the biblical dictum of the ‘image of God’, to what extent the image is equal to its divine model and in what sense it differs from it. However indirect Gregory’s influence might have been, I believe it could help us understand some of the most intriguing aspects of Eckhart’s concept of bild or imago.

AUGUSTINE’S TRINITARIAN COSMOS
for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference, June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College
This paper and my “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” concern the Divine Trinitarian life, in itself, and as the reality of everything else. If Being is Trinitarian and Incarnational for Aquinas, then, for him, as much as for Augustine, God is everyday and everywhere. Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa both move to God as Trinity from incomplete manifestations of the fundamental Trinitarian structure of reality. For them, the totality of the self-differentiation in the divine self-conversion must be revealed step by step. That self-othering, and the co-relative gathering-return back into the originating self, are not seen immediately. The disclosure of real opposition in God, constructing three infinite divine subsistences, “persons”, requires the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, as Dr Diamond’s paper last evening showed, because both are Aristotelian in their doctrine of God as self-thinking, they share a philosophical trinitarianism which is common to pagans, Jews, and Muslims.
The ways Aquinas and Augustine treat the Trinity are related as the Way Up and the Way Down, in the manner Aquinas understood Heraclitus: “The way up and the way down are the same”. Yesterday I exhibited this structure in its outward emanation in Aquinas’ Summa. In complementary contrast now, with the hope of illumining both, I look at the upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of the fundamental trinitarian constitution of the whole in “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”.
My  paper is largely devoted to bringing out how, in the Confessions, God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere. By way of conclusion, I convey the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by a few great French philosophical theologians of the 20th-century.

Among leading contemporary Western philosophical and theological phenomena is making the ineffable immediately incarnate, i.e. the immediate union of the extreme ends of Platonist systems. The ineffable first is immediately joined to the material; intellect is pulled within soul, or life, spirit is bodily, and body has the attributes of mind. The shift from hierarchy of reality and value with graduated mediations as the all but exclusive paradigmatic structure for understanding the Platonic tradition has many consequences for philosophy, spirituality, and religion. It challenges the dominant misrepresentations which come close to making Platonism a quasi-Manichean dualism, a source of hatred and fear of body and the physical world, needy matter the cause of evil. Radically incarnational Neoplatonism goes with a reconsideration of past Platonisms which it enables and necessitates. My Chapter points at some of this work, especially some undertaken in my writing and that of several of my students. 1 Although it looks at some causal connections between philosophers over the last one hundred and fifty years, it mainly treats the results of a change in perspective or mental climate and follows my interests without attempting any completeness. I begin with the mystical vitalism of Henri Bergson, both instance and precursor, and move to one of the most original and authentic Neoplatonic philosophic theologians of the 20 th century, Jean Trouillard. 2 From this Sulpician priest and his little group of Neoplatonic radicals, I go on to treatments of Proclus and Iamblichus they inspired. Trouillard and his associates are critical of Augustine, but others, more sympathetic, give relief from the slander that his Platonism was a continuation of his Manicheism, not a conversion from it. Boethius appears differently when seen in the sillage of a reconsidered Proclus and Iamblichus. I look at a recent retrieval of the corporeal in treatments of his Consolation of Philosophy. 3 Finally, a more Procline Aquinas can be rescued from the idea that his is a Platonist rationalism with the Trinity and Incarnation as external additions. With such a liberation I conclude. 4

This paper was presented to the “God Everyday and Everywhere” Conference in June 2017 the day after I delivered “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and Incarnational Self Disclosure” to the “Wisdom Belongs to God” Colloquium. Both papers concern the Divine Trinitarian life, in itself and as the reality of everything else and, therefore, bridge the Conference and the Colloquium. If Being is Trinitarian and Incarnational for Aquinas, then, for him, as much as for Augustine, God is everyday and everywhere. As well as having this characteristic of metaphysical theology in common, Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa share structural forms. Both move to God as Trinity from incomplete manifestations of the fundamental Trinitarian configuration of reality. For them both, the totality of the self-differentiation in the divine self-conversion must be revealed step by step. That self-othering, and the co-relative gathering-return back into the originating self, are not seen immediately. The disclosure of real opposition in God, constructing three infinite divine subsistences, “persons”, requires the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, because both are Aristotelian in their doctrine of God as self-thinking, they share a philosophical trinitarianism which is common to pagans, Jews, and Muslims, which Dr Diamond’s paper at the Conference explicated.
When writing the two papers, I saw that they are related as the Way Up and the Way Down, more or less in the manner Aquinas understood the ancient law. Heraclitus had declared: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή (Diels, B60), “The way up and the way down are the same”. Without citing its source, Aquinas quotes the formula with approval at the beginning of the last Part of his Summa contra Gentiles: “eadem est via qua descenditur et ascenditur.”
Confronting the inadequacy of the human intellect for “seeing the divine substance in itself,”  St Thomas tells us we can get to the knowledge we need and desire starting from creatures, from “the things themselves”, because the way up and the way down are the same. There is a common structure at work whether the mind moves from God or from creatures. The starting and ending points differ, but, because of the universal return to source, they too are the same ultimately. The same fundamental figure is discernable and at work in the beginning, the mediation, and the conclusion.
Aquinas finds “the most perfect unity, in God, the highest summit of things”, from this emerges a greater and greater “diversity and variation in things.” So, “the process of emanation from God must be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.”  The emanation, or going out, is seen in God in a simple form, the one proper to its nature as cause. The same structure must be visible, opened up and multiplied, in the various creatures which are the end terms of the divine creative activity. This inclusive opening and multiplication is the mediating process. I aim to exhibit this common structure in its downward emanation in “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” and in its upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of its fundamental constitution in what follows on  “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”. In consequence, I hope that they will illumine each other and make reading both useful.
“Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos” is largely devoted to bringing out how, in the Confessions, God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere. By way of conclusion, I draw Augustine’s Trinitarian understanding of reality into current discussions through the radical and deeply serious criticism of it by a few great French philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. By this means I point to what most importantly differentiates Augustine and Aquinas, Proclean Neoplatonism as continued by Dionysius and Eriugena. Thereby. I raise the question of its necessity, as well as its presence, as a corrective and counterbalance to Augustine in constructing Latin Western philosophical theology and in moving us beyond that.

This paper will argue that the order and the unity of St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways can be elucidated through a consideration of St. Thomas’s appropriation of an Avicennian insight that he used to order and unify the wisdom of the Aristotelian and Abrahamic philosophical traditions towards the existence of God. I will begin with a central aporia from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle says that the science of first philosophy has three different theoretical vectors: ontology, aitiology, and theology. But how can all three be united into a single Aristotelian science? In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna resolved the impasse by taking the ontological vector as the subject of metaphysics. He then integrated the question of the four first causes into the penultimate stage of his demonstration for the existence of God, thereby placing aitiological and theological questions among the ultimate concerns of a unified Aristotelian metaphysics. In the five ways, St. Thomas integrated Avicenna’s Aristotelian search for the first four causes into the last four of his five ways, by showing that each of the four aitiological orders terminate in an ultimate first cause that we call God. Finally, by appending the proof from the Physics to the beginning of the five ways, St. Thomas was able to show that the ultimate aim of both natural philosophy and metaphysics is the divine first principle, which is the beginning and subject of sacra doctrina.

Per Lumina Vera ad Verum Lumen: The Anagogical Intention of Abbot Suger
Symmeikta: Collection of Papers Dedicated to the 40th Anniversary of the Institute for Art History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, 2012

This academic paper critically reexamines the conventional interpretation of the inscription on the bronze doors at St-Denis, and proposes to frame the inscription in the context of the influence Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite on medieval theology and spirituality.

Il presente lavoro intende ricostruire, nelle sue tappe salienti, l'evolversi storico-concettuale di quella particolare modalità di “riflessione filosofica intorno al principio primo della realtà” nota come “teologia negativa”, enucleandone i risvolti tematici principali e mettendo in risalto alcuni tra gli autori che ne segnarono le sorti, ponendo a questo scopo particolare attenzione alla differenza, precipua del periodo in esame (tarda antichità-medioevo alto e centrale), di accesso alla cultura, di tendenze teoretiche e di contingenze storiche tra mondo bizantino e mondo latino.
Scaturigine diretta della tradizione platonica, la teologia negativa e, più in generale, il metodo apofatico (da apophasis=negazione) si inquadrano all’interno dell’interpretazione dogmatica degli scritti di Platone. Dalla tendenziosa interpretazione metafisica del Parmenide, Plotino e i neoplatonici avrebbero ricavato la scansione di una gerarchia ontologica con al vertice un Principio primo absolutos, l’Uno – concetto di chiara matrice pitagorica –, di natura non-ontologica. Quest’ultimo aspetto, cioè la rivoluzione del concetto di trascendenza in chiave me-ontologica, oltre a segnare una profonda spaccatura con la tradizione di riferimento, rese necessario un nuovo dispositivo concettuale per approcciarsi alla Causa del tutto, non più comprensibile attraverso una dialettica discendente di segno positivo (tipica del platonismo) ma piuttosto, sull’esempio della celebre prima ipotesi del Parmenide, tramite un’analitica ascendente (dal principiato al Principio) che negasse sistematicamente la positività ontologica degli enti per giungere all’Uno, inteso come l’assolutamente altro rispetto alle cose.  Ponendo infatti il Principio primo al di là dell’essere e del pensiero, avvertiva Plotino, non può in nessun caso dirsi ciò che il “principio è”, risultando questo ineffabile, ma solo ciò che non è; in questo senso, dell’Uno prima, del Dio cristiano poi, era possibile solo una tematizzazione negativa.
Se in Occidente la speculazione neoplatonica dovette ridimensionarsi in chiave sostanzialistica, come esemplificato dal pensiero di Agostino, in Oriente invece attraverso la figura dello ps.-Dionigi la teologia negativa assunse pregnanza teoretica, poiché capace di indagare “correttamente” gli ineffabili misteri divini a differenza del metodo metaforico-catafatico che, a scopo di divulgazione religiosa, attribuiva le più degne espressioni dell’esperienza finita all’infinito sovrasostanziale, in maniera sì utile ma congenitamente impropria. Il merito di Dionigi, però, fu principalmente quello di rendersi conto della parzialità dell’apofasi stessa che, fedele al suo intento de-ontologizzante, doveva trascendersi nella propria negazione, sulla scia di quanto già capito da Proclo, e culminare nel silenzio mistico, nella dotta ignoranza di Dio. Ad accogliere e sviluppare questi risultati, nella Francia dei carolingi, sarà Giovanni Eriugena, pensatore unico nel suo tempo, capace di coniugare la razionalità del metodo ermeneutico della Scrittura, indagata attraverso gli strumenti delle arti liberali, con la necessaria istanza di sovra-razionalità che richiedeva un Dio concepito neoplatonicamente unitario ed assolutamente semplice. Attraverso una lucida concezione simbologica della Parola e del mondo sensibile, l’Irlandese ribadiva la preminenza dell’apofasi come “guida” alla comprensione del divino, nella sua apparenza teofanica sì indagabile con le categorie della logica tradizionale ma in ultima analisi totalmente ineffabile e “sovrabbondante non-essere”. In questo senso si comprendono la critica delle categorie aristoteliche, l’attenzione dedicata all’antifrasi e l’entimema e l’esasperazione della “simbologia del dissimile” dionisiana in chiave teratologica da parte del pensatore palatino, tematica, quest’ultima, intimamente legata agli sviluppi del metodo apofatico. Alla teratologia intesa alla luce della teologia negativa è infatti dedicato il Prologo del presente lavoro.

Neoplatonism and Trinitarian Difference in Aquinas, John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion and John Zizioulas

The position of Postmodern Christian theology vis a vis philosophy is strikingly ironic.  The totality with which it asserts its right and need to proceed independently of philosophy is, in fact, philosophically situated and determined.  Heidegger above all defines the problem and the project for theology and sets the terms within which it proceeds.
The problematic is set up by his narration of Western Fate as a history of Being, or rather, of its progressive hiding.  In this story of ontological closure, he gives the leading role to onto-theology.  Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank and others now define this category more strictly than Heidegger did, and efforts are made to limit those theological positions to which it is supposed to apply.  Their enthusiasm for ancient and medieval Christian Neoplatonism lies in its subordination of being and its limitation or elimination of ontology or metaphysics autonomous in respect to theology.  However, despite the limitations and exceptions, the use of this category by contemporary Christian theology to describe and judge its own history is determinative.
So far as the primary trinitarian difference requires the passage of divinity into infinite indeterminacy, into an endless finitude, which as a principle of divinity prevents theoretical completion, Aquinas’ self-differentiating Trinity and a postmodern one are incompatible. However, if trinitarian difference requires only that difference is essential to divinity and not just once but twice, then Thomas’ trinitarian theology is fuller and richer than an antiphilosophical and anti-Greek polemic can think.
If, however, its rich logic be set in opposition to the Aristotelian actus purus, and if an opposition to onto-theology be also required, we are in a bad way.  For this would exclude from view the continuity between Aristotle’s ontological theology and the systematic henological theology in which it was conveyed to Thomas.  It is just these which make difference fundamental, all pervasive, and understandable in Thomas’ trinitarian theology.

Ezra Pound's sustained use of ancient and medieval philosophical sources, particularly those within the Neoplatonic tradition, is well known. Yet the specific influence of the ninth-century theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena on Pound's poetry and prose has received limited scholarly attention. Pound developed detailed plans to publish a commentary on Eriugena alongside his translations of two of the books of Confucianism, plans that ultimately went unrealised. Drawing on unpublished notes, drafts and manuscripts amongst the Ezra Pound papers held at Yale University, this book investigates the pivotal role of Eriugena in Pound's thought and, perhaps surprisingly, in his deployment of non-Western philosophical traditions.

ENGLISH

In the 12th century European context, predominates the iconography of Christ placed in a light mystic mandorla holding an open book containing inscriptions concerning a special theology of light.

The Maiestas Domini iconography strongly arises together with the historical fact of the agustinian liturgical movement. The so called agustinian canonigas were originally born in saint Ruph of Avignon and saint Victor of Marseille holding the spirituality of the Rule written by saint Agustin himself and later moved into Cataluña renewing his original idea of neoplatonic mystical beauty.

The arrival of collections of manuscripts into Catalonia containing the Homily to the Prologus of saint John by Scotus Eriugena is enough to proof the relationship between the theology of light iconography and the neoplatonic traditions originated in the 9th century Carolingian Court.

The text of the Vox Spiritualis Aquilae involves a reception of the Theology of light within the Maiestas Domini iconography. It is a new way of representing God, man and world in art.
SPANISH
En el contexto del siglo XII europeo, se impone la iconografía del Cristo Luz aureolado por una almendra mística, sosteniendo un libro abierto con inscripciones alusivas a una teología de la luz.

La proliferación de la iconografía de la Maiestas Domini se produce en el contexto histórico de la reforma litúrgica canóniga agustiniana, cuyo origen se encuentra en san Rufo de Avignon y san Víctor de Marsella. Cataluña, se hace depositaria de la Regla se san Agustín, que propugna un ideal renovado de belleza mística neoplatónica.

La llegada al Principado de manuscritos de la Homilía al Prólogo de Juan, escrita por Juan Escoto Eriúgena, es una prueba, en pleno siglo XII, de la relación entre una iconografía teológica de la luz y una tradición neoplatónica originada en el siglo IX en la corte carolingia.

El texto de la Vox spiritualis aquilae representa la recepción de la teología de la luz en la iconografía de la Maiestas Domini y, con ella, una nueva forma de representar a Dios, al hombre y al mundo en el arte.

The main aim of this work is to investigate the logics of negation and the concept of 'nothing' in three works of medieval philosophical theology: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names, and John Scottus Eriugena's the Periphyseon. We find that the implications of the use of apophaticism in Pseudo-Dionysius' works and in Eriugena's work draw boundaries around the possibilities of human thought, and thus amount to instances of Eugene Thacker's concept of the 'horror of philosophy'. Relevance to contemporary philosophical explorations, both religious and secular, analytic and continental, are also discussed.

John Scottus Eriugena: Treatise on Divine Predestination. trans. Mary Brennan, with an introduction to the English translation by Avital Wohlman.    University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
The Medieval Review 2000 <http://www.hti.umich.edu/t/tmr/>. 00.10.02

In this essay we discuss the teaching on the creation of the world and humankind by three of the greatest Christian thinkers of the first millennium. Two of them came from North Africa and one from Ireland; two wrote in Latin and one in Greek. All three were devout Christians who would after their lifetimes be misunderstood and/or condemned. We also touch upon the compatibility of their thought, if any, with evolutionary theory.

Reproduced with kind permission from 'Theofilus' Vol. 8, n 1, 2016

The theological sensibility of Radical Orthodoxy in its quest to return to traditional sources of orthodoxy for a ‘radical’ critique of secular thought has particularly privileged the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) as the pinnacle of the ‘ancient way’ prior to the nominalistic ‘fall’ which entered with Duns Scotus. This paper however questions whether Radical Orthodoxy has been radically Thomistic enough in its metaphysics and particularly highlights the importance of first principles of knowledge such as the law of non-contradiction to Thomas Aquinas. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God cannot break the law of non-contradiction, key RO writers have argued that this law is somehow suspended in God. This paper argues that compromising the law of non-contradiction weakens RO’s critique of secularism and opens up the possibility of nihilism.

Participatio divini luminis, la doctrine de Thomas d'Aquin sur l'Intellect Agent : Notre capacité à la contemplation
En 2001 deux travaux en Anglais sont revenus sur l'enseignement de Thomas concernant la lumière intellectuelle de l'homme pour tenter une réconciliation entre sa fidélité consciente d'elle-même à Aristote d'un côté, et l'intuition intellectuelle augustinienne de l'autre. Les deux travaux soulignent que la lumière humaine est une participatio divini luminis, mais leurs méthodes et leurs buts sont différents. Nous allons les utiliser pour les compléter l'un par l'autre. Le premier par John Milbank et Catherine Pickstock relève des possibilités nouvelles et importantes pour l'interprétation de Thomas d'Aquin, mais sa représentation postmoderne de la doctrine de l'Aquinate est fort déficiente. La seconde de Houston Smit donne une analyse prudente des textes de Thomas que requiert sa nouvelle interprétation et mérite d'être considérée en son entier . Toutefois, une analyse ne suffit pas pour notre propos, nous cherchons aussi des sources et Smit n'a pas regardé de leur côté. La troisième et la quatrième partie de notre article vont suggérer certaines d'entre elles, à commencer par les origines latines et arabes de l'enseignement de Thomas. Ensuite nous plongerons plus profondément dans les sources néoplatoniciennes grecques qui alimentent les rivières dans lesquelles nagent les théologiens médiévaux. Pour conclure, je considèrerai les conséquences de cette recherche pour la question de la continuité entre notre connaissance naturelle et la contemplation béatifique de Dieu.