The Dialectics of Divine Negation: A Reappraisal of Johannes Scotus Eriugena’s Emanative Ambiguity
In the shadowy interstice betwixt Neoplatonic effulgence and Christian dogma stands Johannes Scotus Eriugena, the Irish savant of the ninth century whose erudition wove together the last luminous threads of Hellenic metaphysics with the speculative mysticism of early medieval theology. To deem Eriugena a mere transmitter of Greek thought would be to do violence to his singular vision; indeed, within the Latin of his magnum opus, the *Periphyseon* (also known under the more laborious Latin title *De Divisione Naturae*), one detects not the pallid echo of Proclus or Dionysius, but rather the creative ferment of a mind ablaze with a vision that defied even the rubric of orthodoxy.
Therein, in the labyrinth of fourfold divisions and dialectical inversions, lies a subtle yet profound detail largely overlooked by commentators: Eriugena’s use of negative theology not solely as an epistemological limitation, but rather as an ontological strategy—an emanation described through negation. This principle, which I shall call Emanative Ambiguity, reorients the reader’s understanding of creation not merely as a descent from One to many, but as a paradoxical dialectic whereby Being itself reclines into the very Unknowable from whence all multiplicity springs.
To elucidate this feature, one must first apprehend Eriugena’s quadripartite division of nature: (1) that which creates and is not created, (2) that which is created and creates, (3) that which is created and does not create, and (4) that which neither creates nor is created. These distinctions echo Neoplatonic cascades of being, yet Eriugena subtly reforms the schema, allowing each division to function dialectically rather than linearly. This itself bears witness to the influence of Christian Trinitarian dynamics, wherein the procession and return operate simultaneously and without hierarchy.
The fourth mode—nature which neither creates nor is created—demands especial attention, for it is within this conundrum that Eriugena’s doctrine of divine negation attains its most rigorous and unsettling altitude. Put plainly, this nature is synonymous with God qua end, God as that to which all returns in final apocatastasis, yet it is also God in His hiddenness, so transcendent as to escape not only human names but even divine predicates. This nature is “nihil” inasmuch as it is beyond being (*superesse*), yet derives no privation from this negation. It is not sheer empty nullity, but rather the *pleroma* of unconcealed potential unknowable to reason.
What has gone insufficiently remarked is how Eriugena not only negates being to describe God, but subtly allows the very motion of negation to become the vehicle of creation. His is not a static *via negativa*, whose object withdraws ever more deeply into the obscurity of ineffability; rather, Eriugena renders negation an operative act—a kind of theogonic rhythm. “What is beyond being,” he writes, “can be called Non-Being, not because it is nothing, but because it surpasses everything that is conceived as being.”¹ This surpassing is not merely descriptive—it initiates an onto-generative process. From this Non-Being flows being, in an act untraceable to any positive cause, but intelligible only through a self-veiling withdrawal.
Thus, creation—the entire edifice of phenomena—proceeds not from knowledge but unknowing, not from presence but precisely from absence. This is a radical inversion of the Alexandrian approach to the One or Nous, who begets through intellectual superabundance. In Eriugena, it is divine obscurement that gives rise to multiplicity. Negative predication is no longer a device of language, but an ontological gateway through which the Creator emits the cosmos by becoming invisible to Himself. Divine self-negation, then, is not limitation but expansion—a proliferation achieved through concealment.
This Emanative Ambiguity also permeates Eriugena’s Christology. The Logos, described in manifold ways throughout the *Periphyseon*, partakes of this same dialectical negation. Christ is not only the mediator between uncreated Creator and created world, but also the site wherein God negates Himself into visibility. This is mirrored linguistically in Eriugena’s preference for paradoxical formulations, a strategy arguably inherited from the Areopagite but rendered unto an even more dynamic and processual metaphysics. Accordingly, the Logos “becomes” not primarily as an act of divine speech, but as an annulment of divine silence—a silence not of muteness but of overflowing interiority made manifest by its very occlusion.
Eriugena’s Latin brilliance lies in the tension he maintains between the speculative heights and the grammatical earth. His use of privatives such as *ineffabilis*, *incomprehensibilis*, and *incognoscibilis* is not simply a gesture toward theological humility. Rather, they constitute a syntax of ontological birth—words whose negative prefixes serve simultaneously as seals and as portals. The intellect thereby transcends itself not by accumulation of knowledge, but by surrendering the act of comprehension into a divine oblivion wherein all things begin.
It is an error, therefore, to treat Eriugena merely as a systematizer of Neoplatonism under external theological constraint. Far from being a passive conduit of Greek dialectic, he subverts its very grammar. The divinely unnameable is not an endpoint or a limit in his system but an eternally generative source whose creativity is predicated on its refusal to be known. This represents a major shift: from being as fullness to being as reticence. And to grasp this shift is to apprehend the movement of God not as a willful creator standing apart from His creation, but as an invisibilised fecundity pervading all levels of nature.
Eriugena’s analogical cosmos is thus a mirror of divine ambiguity, not divine order. The cosmos comes into being because God ceases to appear. This theological twilight is not a pathology of distance, as in the Gnostic schema, but a positive theophany veiled in its contrary. It is here that Eriugena most departs from scholastic rationalism and merits the mantle of metaphysical radical. He dares to envision negation not as refusal but as *the womb of creation*.
In sum, the oft-overlooked detail of negation as emanation in Eriugena’s system is not a mere stylistic flourish, but the very engine of his speculative enterprise. Creation, for Eriugena, is the progressive exteriorization of a God who, in knowing Himself, becomes invisible. The unfolding of nature is the unweaving of a veiled divinity who speaks through silence and gives through withholding. In that silence reins another kind of thunder—a thrum of metaphysical genesis echoed only in the deepest strata of mystical theology.
This vision, profoundly anti-Aristotelian and heretical to dogmatic literalism, remains buried under scholastic appropriations and modern neglect. Yet in these times of ontological crisis and terminal literalism, the thought of Eriugena may offer an antidote: not by supplying answers, but by detaching questions from their presumed ground. Better a silent God who births all things by unknowing than a loud God chained to the idol of coherence.
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¹ Eriugena, *Periphyseon*, Book I, trans. John Scotus Eriugena, in *The Division of Nature*, ed. and trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams and Ludwig Bieler (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1976).
² Cf. Turner, Denys. *The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism* (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 67–72, for a discussion of how Eriugena radicalizes Dionysian apophasis.
³ See Gersh, Stephen. *Eriugena: East and West* (Brill, 2016), in particular his illuminating treatment of the interplay of emanation and return as a single divine process.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
negative theology, Neoplatonism, Eriugena, apophasis, dialectics, emanation, medieval metaphysics