The fundamental mystery of Christianity is centred on the Incarnation, on the Person of He who is both true God and true man (Council of Chalcedon in 451AD).
Indeed, under the impetus of the development of Christological doctrine, there emerged a philosophy of the person from which we derive our ideas about the unique dignity and status of the human person today. During the early Christian centuries, the philosophy of being took centre stage, whether it was the being of God on the one hand, or the being of man on the other. Ontology, be it theological or philosophical, was seen as the apex of discourse upon the nature of existence. What was overshadowed was the broader discourse on the nature of being as such, and the question of being and non-being.
Yet meontology, the study of non-being, is a very real theological pursuit. If we are to accept the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in a real and meaningful sense, and not as some unscientific and mystico-mythical notion of a pre-or ir-rational religion, then the nature of being and non-being must necessarily be addressed. This order of discourse is assumed to have continued in the Greek and Oriental East, with their apparent emphasis on the cosmic dimension of the Incarnation, and to have withered in the West, which developed along a different line, with an increasing focus and emphasis upon the person and humanity of Christ.
Standing contrary to this rather generalised review, we find the lone voice of the ninth century monk, Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c 815 – c 877AD). Criticised for being too much the philosopher by theologians, and too much the theologian by philosophers, what is clear is that, drawing from both Eastern (hitherto unknown in the West) and Western (primarily St Augustine) sources, Eriugena assayed a creative synthesis of Eastern and Western thought; of Platonism and Aristotelianism, of theology and philosophy, of ontology and meontology, of apophatic and cataphatic theology … in short an all-encompassing dialectic that marks his genius and explains why he was so thoroughly misunderstood by his critics in either camp. Eriugena towered above them all.
That is not to say he disappeared entirely. Condemned for his views in De Pradestinatione, that evil is ontologically non-existent, by the Councils of Valencia (855AD), Langres (859AD), for his views on the Eucharist by the Council of Vercelli (1050). It was not until the thirteenth century that his Periphyseon, De Divisione Naturae” was formally condemned. The Council of Paris (1225) coupled the condemnation of Eriugena’s work with the previous condemnations (1210) of the pantheistic doctrines of Amalric of Chartres and David of Dinant, Eriugena disappeared from the scene. His works survived however, his influence is visible in the theology of Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart. Never exonerated nor rehabilitated, he remains an obscure object of interest, yet his thinking predates the philosophy of phenomenology by a thousand years. He has been spoken of, not uncritically in Christian circles, as a precursor to German idealism, yet in his work (I will argue) one can trace a far-reaching and thoroughly Christian metaphysic which deserves more attention that it receives.
Eriugena, inspired by Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite, stands among a very few in the West who regard the mystery of non-being as equally as important as the mystery of being in the understanding of the Christian Cosmos. For Eriugena, classical ontology was not the fundamental discipline many supposed it to be. He developed a dialectic method which counterbalanced ontological and cataphatic affirmation with a radical apophatic meontology, one that is infused, illuminated and directed by his Christian faith.
Eriugena anticipated many of the features of later philosophical modernism begun by Descartes (1596-1650AD). Following St Augustine, he developed a profound dialogue of the cogito, a deep appreciation of inwardness, enriched by the apophatic theology of St Denys, and the anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa. From there he went on to articulate, in his own terms, a philosophy of subjectivity that counter-balances the over-arching emphasis on objectivity that influences Christian as it does almost every metaphysical system centred on spiritual realisation.
