 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode… Much Ado About Nothing – Arijuna's Paraphysion Spare a thought, if you will, for Zepo Marx. He was the not-particularly-famous fourth member of the famous Marx Brothers. I trust you will be familiar with his siblings. Groucho with his quick wit, his cigar and his grease-paint mustache. Chico with his piano-playing pyrotechnics and preposterous accent. And of course Harpo, the greatest silent film star after the advent of sound, and beneficiary of the best-props department since Shakespeare's assistant suggested working a skull into the final act of Hamlet. But what did Zepo have? A reasonable singing voice and a willingness to play straight man to Groucho. Last in alphabetical order and last in the fans' hearts, Zepo teaches us the importance of competitive advantage. To succeed in show business, just like normal business, you need to offer something special, something that makes you stand out from the crowd. The same point applies to the history of philosophy, as nicely illustrated by John Scodas Arijuna. In many respects he was a man of his time. Like his contemporaries, Arijuna's intellectual world was structured by the study of the liberal arts. This is something we can see in his contribution to the debate over predestination that we discussed last time. Arijuna also commented on that classical presentation of the liberal arts, Marcianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology, probably in the course of teaching it to younger scholars. This sort of activity would not have distinguished Arijuna from other scholars of the Carolingian period whose names are nowadays known only to experts. The Zepo of 9th century medieval philosophy was arguably Urbanus Maurus, who joined Hinkmar and Arijuna in attacking Gottschalk's teaching on predestination. He also wrote an encyclopedic work called On the Nature of Things, carrying on the legacy of earlier chroniclers of human knowledge like Isidore of Seville. Arijuna's competitive advantage over scholars like Urbanus was his facility with Greek. This was not entirely unique. Hinkmar's teacher Hilduin, bishop of Saint-Denis, already had a go at producing a Latin version of the works of Dionysius. But in combination with his adventurous turn of mind, Arijuna's access to the works of Dionysius, as well as other Greek theologians like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, made him the most remarkable thinker of the period. His place in history is secured by an enormous treatise to which he pointedly gave a Greek title, Periphuzion, or On Nature. It takes the form of a dialogue told over five long books featuring only two characters, the neutratur, or teacher, and the alumnus, or student. The alumnus is no neophyte. He is steeped in the Latin tradition, especially Augustine, and like the teacher, is able to throw Greek terminology into the discussion. His role is to set problems and puzzles for the teacher to solve, for instance by asking for a resolution of apparent conflicts between authoritative texts. He is also of a more conservative mindset than the teacher. Throughout the dialogue, the student is coaxed away from his traditional understanding of topics in logic, metaphysics, and theology, and brought to accept far bolder, more innovative teachings based on Dionysius and the other Greek sources. The Periphuzion has an alternate Latin title, De Divisione Naturae, meaning On the Division of Nature, and for good reason. The alternate title refers to a division set out at the beginning of the whole work, which, despite many digressions, provides a structure for all that will follow. It is a fourfold division of nature, which for Eriugina means, all things both those that are and those that are not. This maximally general use of the word nature goes all the way back to the Presocratics, whose general inquiries into the world around them were also usually given the title On Nature. The teacher proposes dividing all things in terms of two criteria, whether or not they create and whether or not they are created. This yields four types of thing, creating but not created, both creating and created, not creating but created, and neither creating nor created. The student, apparently having already attended some classes we missed, is quick to understand what the first three types would mean. The first type is what creates but is not created. Pretty obviously, this is God. The third, opposite type is also easy. That which does not create but is created will be the familiar non-divine things in the world around us. The student is immediately able to provide the less obvious identification of the second type, that which is created but also creates. This applies to what Eriugina calls primordial causes, which play roughly the role of the forms in the Platonic tradition or divine ideas in ancient authors from Philo of Alexandria to Augustine. On Eriugina's version of the doctrine, God first creates things within himself by grasping them in his wisdom. The things then proceed into the created world as concrete manifestations of God's intellectual understanding. This is how we get the familiar objects in the world around us, the created but not creating things of the third division. They participate in the primordial causes just as sensible things participate in forms in the ancient Platonist theories. Eriugina puts a distinctively Christian twist on this old idea though. For him, the primordial causes are not just God's ideas but are His Word, also known as the Second Person of the Trinity. The begetting of the Son by the Father is thus identified with the creation of the causes of all things within God Himself. This is more than theological window dressing. An ancient pagan Platonist could easily agree with Eriugina that ideas and a divine mind are the intelligible causes of the physical things that participate in them. But such a Platonist might stop short of Eriugina's idea that the creation of these physical things is simply the manifestation of God in the world. It would not be a stretch to see Eriugina as understanding the whole process of creation through the lens of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. According to that doctrine, the Son is eternally begotten by the Father and then becomes present in the created world by being incarnated as Jesus Christ. Eriugina understands all of creation to follow this sort of two-step procedure. First, things are created within God Himself by being grasped in His Wisdom or Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. they manifest in, or as Eriugina also puts it, descend into, the created world itself. Eriugina is even willing to say that God is in a sense creating Himself within or as the world. Here He is as so often taking inspiration from the pseudo-Dionysius, who had spoken of theophany, literally God's showing Himself or appearing to us in the things He has created. At this point, the student in Eriugina's dialogue is like someone trying to remember the names of the Marx Brothers. He has easily managed the first three items on the list, but the fourth presents more difficulty. The student has to ask the teacher to explain what sort of nature might be neither creating nor created. So far, all three of the divisions of nature have turned out to be in some sense identical with God. The creating Father, the created and creating Son, or primordial causes, and the created manifestation that is the world. The same is true of the fourth division. For Eriugina, all created things are designed and destined to return to their divine source. Of course, God remains a creator, but if we think about Him as the final cause, or goal, for the things He has created, then we are not thinking of Him in this way. He is not source, but destination, not starting point, but finish line. Again, Eriugina is here taking over a traditional Platonist thesis, but rethinking it in Christian terms. Late ancient Platonists thought of reality as coming forth from a single divine principle and then returning to it. This dynamic of precession and return could take many forms. For instance, pagan Platonists saw the human soul as an effect of a universal intellect and then understood philosophy itself as the soul's attempt to return to its cause by achieving intellectual knowledge. Eriugina's version of this circular dynamic is that the emergence of things from God is mirrored by an eventual return to Him. In the end, the distinctions between created things will be eliminated as all things are received back into God. Eriugina is quick to point out that his beloved discipline of dialectic, one of the liberal arts, itself embodies this process with its procedure of division and synthesis, a procedure that is, of course, on show in the paraphysion itself. At a more theological level, the Christian story of humankind's fall and redemption fits perfectly into the Platonist pattern of precession and return. Having fallen away from God through sin, human nature is renewed and made whole again. For Eriugina, this means that we will ultimately be gathered back into the divine primordial causes. This is a rather daring version of the Christian narrative of sin and redemption since it seems to imply that everything will ultimately just become identical with God. Suggestions in this direction were already present in Eriugina's work on predestination, but our future unity with God emerges as a major theme only in the paraphysion. It's easy to get the impression that Eriugina foresees a complete reversal of the original creation and holds that in the end, there will be nothing at all other than God. But in fact, his eschatological theory is more nuanced than that. He says that things will indeed be changed into God, but even so will preserve their own natures. While this may sound paradoxical, it exemplifies a fundamental aspect of Eriugina's thought. He understands the world, now and at the end of time, to be both separate from God and the same as him, since created beings are simply an expression of what God is. Despite the access we have to God through the created world that is his manifestation, Eriugina thinks that God in himself remains utterly beyond our grasp. It is on this point that Dionysian influence becomes really unmistakable. Unlike the divine names of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugina's paraphysion offers a detailed exploration of the two theological paths, positive and negative, called in Greek kataphatike and apophatike. The positive, or kataphatic, approach is to transfer to God words that are appropriate for created things. Above all, there are the many names and descriptions applied to God in Scripture. For Eriugina, these are to be taken in a metaphorical sense. Even highly complementary names like truth or goodness are not to be used of God in a straightforward sense, since God is rather the cause of truth and goodness. For this reason, Eriugina repeats a linguistic trick first proposed by Dionysius, who added the Greek prefix hupa to words when applying them to God. In English, the corresponding prefix would be super, in the sense of above or beyond. We would not, for instance, call God essence, but rather super-essential. Not call him wise, but rather beyond wise, not loving, but more than loving. What Eriugina likes about this is that it combines the virtues of positive and negative theology. The surface grammar of a statement like God is super good is positive, it seems to offer a description of God, assigning to him the attribute of super goodness, whatever that might mean. But as soon as we start to think about what that would in fact mean, we see that the force of the prefix super is negative. Using it involves denying that God is good, not because he falls short of goodness, but because he transcends goodness entirely. The apparently positive statement is in fact a concealed negation. But even a purely apophatic, or negative theology, undersells God's transcendence. You can't just add negations to all the positive attributes, even sneaky negations like the prefix super. If you stop there, you remain within the realm of language, which is applicable to created things but not to God. Eriugina has a nice argument for this, which begins from the observation that any description we can give of something will always have some other opposing description. As soon as we use language to describe something, we imply that there is something else that has the opposed feature. If I say that Zeppo Marx looks good in a suit, then I am contrasting him to other people that don't look so good in a suit. But nothing can be opposed to God, since there is nothing else that stands alongside him, as an internal principle. This means that not only positive predicates, but also the negations, or opposites of those predicates are going to be inappropriate to God. Eriugina refuses to take no for an answer, and urges us to place God beyond the reach of language entirely, whether that language is positive or negative. In a remarkable section found in the third book of the Periphyseion, Eriugina applies his radical metaphysics to an issue that had bothered several of his predecessors—the problem of non-being or nothingness. Back in classical antiquity, Parmenides had proposed a radical metaphysics of his own, by banning all talk of non-being, including even the non-being involved in differentiating between things. Parmenides's argument was that non-being just isn't the sort of thing one can talk or think about, so we are left with nothing but being, which must be unchanging, undifferentiated, and one. Plato conceded that Parmenides had a point, but only as concerns absolute non-being. In his dialogue The Sophist, he argued that we can make sense of non-being if it means difference rather than the unrestricted negation of being. If I say that Harpo is not well-dressed, this doesn't require me to say that there is such a thing as non-being, it just means that Harpo is different from people like Zepo, who are well-dressed. Centuries later, Augustine, too, made much ado about nothing. In his dialogue On the Teacher, he raised the problem that if words are signs that refer to things, then we apparently need something for the word nothing to refer to. But that clearly makes no sense, since the word nothing refers to, well, nothing. Closer to the time of Ariugina, Alcuin student Fredegisus had written a little treatise with the cheerful title On Nothing and Darkness. Fredegisus wanted to solve Augustine's worry about the referent of the word nothing in light of the notion that it was God who assigned names to things. God created an object for every word he instituted so that there are no empty words, words that fail to refer at all. Hence, even the words nothing and darkness do refer to existing things. Ariugina likewise approaches the topic of nothing within the context of creation. He is out to explain the meaning of the by-now traditional claim that God created the universe from nothing, in Latin ex nihilo. When the teacher and student in the Paraphysion first broached this issue, there seems to be, if you'll pardon the expression, nothing to worry about. It seems that the word nothing in the phrase creation from nothing simply means the absence of all things. The point of talking of creation ex nihilo, then, would simply be that God did not create the universe out of anything else that was already present, for instance, pre-existing matter. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. The student reminds the teacher that they accepted not just a temporal creation of bodies out of nothing, but the eternal creation of all things in God's wisdom, in the form of the primordial causes. How can things be eternally made in this fashion, yet also be created from nothing? A first step towards an answer is to realize that temporal priority is not the only priority in town. God is eternally prior to the things he creates by being their cause, rather than by existing before they do. As we know from Arijuna's earlier discussion of the primordial causes, things are created within God and exist eternally and virtually in him before becoming manifest in the physical universe. But as far as the present problem goes, this sounds more like a step backwards than a step forwards. Aren't we now saying that the things around us were in fact created from something, namely the primordial causes? Well yes. So the only possible conclusion is that the phrase creation from nothing applies to the way the primordial causes themselves are produced by and within God. The word nothing simply indicates that God is beyond all being, or as Dionysius would say, he is super essential. God himself is the nothingness from which all things come, an unknowable nothingness or darkness that transcends even things he creates within himself. This account of unknowable darkness sheds further light on the division of four kinds of nature at the beginning of the Paraphysion. As the first creating and uncreated nature, God the Father is utterly transcendent, an unknowable source of the things he fashions within himself in an act of begetting. What is begotten within him is the word which contains within it the causes of created things. So this word is the second nature both created and creating. Yet the second nature is still transcendent, because it lies beyond the created and not creating third nature of the physical universe we see around us. Our language and thought are at home only with this third nature, with physical reality. This becomes clear in Erigena's treatment of the ten Aristotelian categories, which shows how he was inspired not just by the exotic Greek texts he was able to read, but also by the works of Latin logic that were standard fare in the Carolingian period. Of course the ancient classification, which divides predications or descriptions of things into ten types, is familiar from Aristotle's categories, throughout late antiquity used as an introductory textbook on logic. The early medieval's know it too, thanks to the translation and commentary of Boethius. But the Carolingians were actually more interested in a different related work called On the Ten Categories, because it was falsely believed to be a work of Augustine's. This supposedly Augustinian work is a major source for the first book of Erigena's Periphyseion. Under its influence, he argues that the physical objects we see around us are mere collections of accidental features, like qualities and quantities, which have been joined to the first category of substance. Yet substance itself lies beyond the things we can see and touch. It is simple, whereas bodies are composites of these accidental features. And in fact, even though things around us have qualities and quantities, like Zeppo's handsome features and his being a certain height, the categories of quality and quantity in themselves are also beyond physical things, invisible principles that have visible effects. All this is fully consistent with Erigena's metaphysical scheme, which makes the physical universe a mere manifestation or visible appearance of invisible, intelligible principles. We're going to return to this sort of hyper-realist understanding of substance and the other categories in the next scripted episode, which will be looking at early medieval thinkers who make even Zeppo Marx look like a household name. Actually, some of these thinkers don't even have names, or at least not names we know about. All the more reason to highlight their contribution, and to say something more general about the importance of anonymous scholars in the medieval period, when so much philosophy appeared in the context of marginal notations and comments on manuscripts. But since it's been more than a thousand years since these unheralded scholars lived, it won't do any harm if you have to wait a few more weeks to hear about them. In two weeks, you'll instead be hearing from Steven Gersh, as we take Erigena as the launching point for a chat about Platonism in the medieval age. But even before that, we have some celebrating to do as we reach a major milestone on the podcast. I'll be joined by two scholars who are anything but anonymous, John Maronbon and Jill Cray. They will be helping me answer an overdue question, what is medieval philosophy anyway? Here on the 200th episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.