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John Scottus Eriugena was a ninth-century Irish writer in Latin on theology and philosophy known for his rare ability in that era of the West to translate Greek patristic writings into Latin, as well as for a philosophy of nature that has had influence on current environmental philosophy. His translation works included texts by St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. [[Maximus the Confessor]]. His masterpiece, the Periphyseon, attempted a synthesis between Latin and Greek Fathers on issues of cosmology and soteriology. Long labeled a [[heretic]] and pantheist or proto-Scholastic by Roman Catholic scholars, and kept out of the community of [[patristic]] writers by 20th-century scholars of the Orthodox diaspora, more recent studies have recognized his alleged [[heresy]] and eccentricity in the West as a reflection of his likely early Irish [[monastic]] educational background combined with his involvement with the Greek Fathers. His approach recently has been called one of "energeia entis," a focus on the "energy of being," an experiential sense of noetic life rooted in Orthodoxy, rather than the later Roman Catholic Scholastic "analogia entis," or emphasis on [[Creation]] as a conceptualizable analogy to the divine. His definition of Nature as a mystery incorporating "that which is" and "that which is not" highlights what has been described as his iconographic view of Creation, in a theophanic cosmology paralleling Orthodox teachings on the uncreated energies of God. For such recent Orthodox scholarly reflections on Eriugena, see the source list sources listed under "further reading" at the end of this article.
Although much of his work was done in Carolingian school and court environments, he likely received his Greek education in Irish monastic contexts, and according to later accounts (viewed skeptically by many modern historians but difficult either to prove or disprove) he became abbot of a monastic community at Malmesbury in his last years, after being summoned to Anglo-Saxon England by King Alfred the Great to help with the establishment of Oxford University. William of Malmesbury wrote of how Eriugena was stabbed to death by the pens of disgruntled students, although this also has been interpreted as use of a symbolic trope derived from the life of an early martyr, St. Cassias of Imola, killed by apostates. Such a purported end could resonate with Eriugena's position as perhaps the last prominent Orthodox writer on theology in the West, given later Roman Catholic Church strictures on his work as heretical and accusations against him in his own time alleging that he was Semi-Pelagian or worse. His early cosmopolitan milieu of ascetic monasticism combined with scholarly scriptoria around the Irish Sea, expressing parallels and connections with the Byzantine East and especially the desert fathers, was by Willliam of Malmesbury's era seemingly an ancient lost world amid the expansion of Norman religious establishments in the British Isles.
*[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Johannes_Scottus_Eriugena&oldid=62230906 Referenced Wikipedia version - John Scotus Eriugena]
*[http://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/bri/view.cgi?n=17355 Johannes Scotus Erigena entry in the 1911 ''Encyclopedia Britannica''] via StudyLight.org
==For Further Reading==*Alfred Kenntigern Kentigern Siewers, Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape , The New Middle Ages series (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, The Green Otherworlds of Early Medieval Literature. Chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Literature, ed. Louise Westling (Cambridge, 2013).
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, "Eriugena, the Irish Otherworld, and Early Medieval Nature," in Eriugena and Creation, ed. W. Otten and M. Allen (Brepols, 2014).
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “Eriugena’s Irish Backgrounds," in Bill Companion to Eriugena, ed .Stephen Lahey and Andrew Guiu (Brill, forthcoming 20162019).
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “Orthodoxy and Ecopoetics: The Green World in the Desert Sea.” In Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz. (Fordham University Press, 2013).
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “The Early Irish Sublime as Reflection of Sophia,” in Beauty and the Beautiful in Eastern Christian Culture, ed. Natalia Ermolaev, (Theotokos Press 2012). 212-224.
*Alfred Kentigern Siewers, “Desert Islands: Europe’s Atlantic Archipelago as Ascetic Landscape.” In Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, ed. Benjamin Hudson, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 35-64.
