John Scotus Eriugena was born and raised in Ireland during the early ninth century. Neither monk nor priest but a "holy sage," he carried to France the flower of Celtic Christianity. His homily, The Voice of the Eagle, is a jewel of lyrical mysticism, theology, and cosmology, containing the essence of Celtic Christian wisdom. He meditates on the meaning and purpose of creation as revealed by the Word made flesh, distilling into twenty-three short chapters a uniquely Celtic, non-dualistic fusion of Christianity, Platonism, and ancient Irish wisdom.
Christopher Bamford's "Reflections" make up the second half of this book, unfolding some of the life-giving meaning implicit in Eriugena's luminous sentences. Inspired both by a personal search for a living Christianity and by a sense of the continuity of Western culture, these "Reflections" offer a contemporary, meditative encounter with the Word, or Logos, as mediated by both St. John's Prologue and Eriugena's Celtic homily.
This favorite of Celtic Christianity, unavailable for several years, has been revised and includes a new foreword by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul.
From the foreword to the book by author and psychotherapist Thomas Moore (via Google Books):
PRECISELY NOW, at the very edge of a new millennium, reflection inspired by all the sciences-astronomy, physics, archaeology-suggests that a return to theological thinking is a possibility. Our empirical methods are reaching their limits, and it's remarkable how much the languages of the sciences, of literary criticism, and of certain branches of theoretical psychology, are beginning to move ever so slightly in the direction of masters like John Scotus Eriugena. It will still take a while to catch up to him, if indeed we are ever able to shed the pseudo-theological categories of our secularism.
Christopher Bamford, whose translation of Eriugena offers a brilliant clarity and beauty, places this wonderfully daring and cautious theology in the context of the Irish sensibility, where the veil between the holy and the ordinary is thinner than elsewhere on earth. Certainly Eriugena's delicate hermeneutic of the Gospel remains on a slender ledge, never falling into the merely human landscape, but teetering toward the side of the divine. Reading this commentary is like listening to the tender and juicy words of a poet, like Rilke or Emily Dickinson, who sees the subtleties of human life with a refined eye.
This kind of theological writing will appear almost psychotic to the average modern person who has learned only how to be pragmatic, empirical, and materialistic in all things-particularly with regard to the interpretation of experience. After all, we live in a psychological era, in which we suppose that there is no meaning beyond emotion and the personal situation. How can Eriugena go on and on about God without mentioning our existential anxieties, our problems with human love? How can he prove any of his outrageous assertions?
A clue is to be found in the way Christopher Bamford, with equal and appropriate delicacy, unfolds the method and meaning of Eriugena. He makes it clear that what is at work is a kind of theopoetics-not reducing theology to imagery and fiction, but, in the ancient way, noticing that there are many levels at which theological statements can be read. And these various levels don't cancel each other out. Both the Evangelist's words and the commentary wind around each other in a resonance that reaches us polyphonically. And the music moves more deeply because the book in our hands is a commentary on a commentary. Christopher Bamford dreams Eriugena's vision further, taken up in the Irish theologian's own spirit and method. The two writers are like twins, and it's possible to read Christopher Bamford's commentary as the primary statement, with Eriugena's as a commentary on him. In the end, of course, with St. John's voice, it is a three-part counter-point; with the reader's, it makes a complete fugue.
Commentaries often seem to muddle the material on which they comment. Certainly they often grow more dense and complicated than the original text. But not here. John the Evangelist is mystical and appropriately hazy, while Eriugena's clarity comes through as a bright mystical light-indeed, like the very light discussed in the commentaries, a light that penetrates our habitual darkness.
Much is made in these commentaries of the deification or theosis of the human being-another idea unimaginable to even the pious believer of today. Eriugena describes it as the saints passing into God. One of my favorite Renaissance theologians, Nicolas of Cusa, writes about humanus deus, about the human being becoming divine. This is not self-actualization or therapy or "happiness." It is a transformation in the fundamental attitude of a person, a development far beyond the capacity of psychology to grasp or appreciate. It is an idea that lies at the heart of Eriugena's theological vision. For we are continually moving in two directions, passing from God into life and returning from life into God.
I don't think that we appreciate either movement much today. To put it in the most concrete terms, we don't see the divinity of children, though we do seem to grasp that they are not altogether human. Still, we tend to consider them as less, rather than more, than adult humans. At life's other end, we don't appreciate the movement into death as passing into God, but see it merely as the failure of life. In the ordinary view, there is only one movement and one direction: we are evolving, entering more and more into life, not from a divine origin but from ignorance. Anything that contradicts that movement is a threat and an obstacle. Eriugena's theology could help us revise this fundamental shortsightedness. If we could reimagine our mortality with a sophisticated theological vision, I believe we would better accept our imperfections and mortifications. We might slip more gracefully into God, rather than fight the process as a mistake on the part of creation or a failure in management on the part of society.
Video Title: The Metaphysics of St. John Scotus Eriugena - Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson. Source: J. MacLugash. Date Published: Dec 28, 2019.
