The Semiotic Transgression in the Cosmogony of Johannes Scotus Eriugena
In revisiting the magnificent yet often obscured legacy of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, one confronts not merely the convergence of Greek and Christian disputation but a singular instance of metaphysical semiotics that reputedly eluded both his contemporaries and most modern exegetes. Among the manifold intricacies of his Periphyseon (or De Divisione Naturae), scant attention has been accorded to an anomaly within his division of nature—a subtle transgression occurring in the demarcation of “natura quae non creatur et creat,” the realm that both creates and is created. This ambiguity is not mere semantic excess, but a strategic fissure of order, an ontological fissility wherein Eriugena prefigures much later views of an interdependent cosmological co-boundedness.
To recite briefly, Eriugena’s four-fold classification of nature proceeds thusly: (1) that which creates and is not created (God as source), (2) that which is created and creates (the primordial causes), (3) that which is created and does not create (phenomenal nature), and (4) that which neither creates nor is created (God as telos). But in Book II of the Periphyseon, Eriugena makes a curious interpolation: he discusses the λόγοι (logoi)—the divine ideas—as operative within both first and second natures, endowing created things with intelligible form, while themselves eternally preexisting in the divine mind. Here, a rhetorical slippage occurs. The logoi, though ostensibly uncreated, are said to participate in creation. How then do we classify the logoi? Are they not members of a hidden fifth category?
Let us examine this transgression more minutely. The logoi, described as rationes aeternae, are the essential forms through which creation is intelligible. Derived from Augustine’s rationes seminales and clearly echoing the Aristotelian entelecheia, in Eriugena they become instruments of divine self-manifestation—itself a recursive act wherein God knows Himself only through His created appearances. This metaphysical recursion inaugurates a semiotic breach in the traditional Platonic architecture: divine ideas are no longer passive templates but agents in the divine kenosis. Their role is both noetic and cosmogonic—a property that leads us to a vital question: Can that which functions as a cause while emanating from a source fail to be in some sense created?
Indeed, the apparent fixity of Eriugena’s quartet dissolves under the pressure of his own philosophical theurgy. For in positing a God that proceeds to “create Himself” through creation, Eriugena undermines the temporal and causal separation between source and product. This autopoietic God calls into question not only the stability of divine categories but every connotation of the term ‘nature.’ His is an ontological monism so complete it disguises itself as a quadrant.
And it is here, precisely here, that we ought to parse the logoi not merely as ontological forms but as semiotic instruments, each acting as a sign-relation within the God/world dialectic. The Neoplatonists posited the One as ineffable, unknowable, beyond being—but Eriugena’s God, while retaining this apophatic distance, engages in a paradoxical determination of Himself through signs. These signs—the logoi—are necessary for God to be known, not by a detached observer, but by Himself through the multiplicity of creation. Thus, God becomes a text, and the world His exegesis.
The semiotic import of this claim is easily underestimated. To posit that God’s knowledge of Himself depends on the created logoi is to advocate a proto-hermeneutic ontology. This is not the Divine Simplicity of the Scholastics; it is a sacred deconstruction. One may even venture that Eriugena’s treatise contains an implicit phenomenology avant la lettre, wherein the phenomenon is not that which blocks the noumenon, but that which renders it visible—even unto itself.
Moreover, Eriugena’s peculiar locutions on divine ‘descent’—the notion that “God becomes all things” (Deus fit omnia)—must be read in light of this semiotic transgression. When God becomes all things through the logoi, He is engaging in a process of symbolic externalization. We must interpret the logoi not merely as ontic mediators, but as semantic gestures—divine signs shaking off the inertia of ineffability. They are not symbols in the modern structuralist sense but sacramental signs: their meaning is performative as much as propositional. Each creates as it reveals, and in revealing, it veils. Thus, the sign is Janus-faced: it shows forth God while delimiting Him.
In modern parlance, one might say that Eriugena anticipates the reversibility of meaning and being found in the dialectics of Hegel, or the ontosemiotic logics of the later Heidegger. But to render such comparisons is to risk diluting Eriugena’s radical originality. For unlike these descendants, Eriugena did not require history to actualize meaning; rather, history, too, is one of the logoi—and thus part of the code through which the divine self-reading proceeds. In this light, creation is not an act ex nihilo, but a recursive semiogenesis: a perpetual inscribing of the infinite upon the finite, never reducible to either.
A further implication of this reading is theological: the Trinity emerges not as a closed perichoresis of divine persons, but as a semiotic triad composed of Text (the Father), Sign (the Word), and Interpretation (the Spirit). Each subsists not prior to creation but through it, because the act of reading—of decoding the logoi—is intrinsic to the divine life. There is no God, in Eriugena’s schema, behind the signs. The signs *are* God in his knowable modality.
But if God is inscribed and read through the logoi, are we, readers of this cosmic text, not also logoi in ourselves? Here lies the truly scandalous implication. For Eriugena, man is both microcosm and tautology of divinity—not man as homo sapiens, but as the bearer of ratio and sign. To contemplate the divine is, paradoxically, to unveil the contemplator as divine medium. Hence, the mind of man becomes the site where the divine and the created coalesce—a hermeneutic mirror in which source and reflection collapse.
So what then is the fifth category? Perhaps it is the reader himself—the one who both is created and creates by deciphering that which creates. Eriugena, subtle though he is, never articulates this explicitly. He dares not lift the veil entirely. But through the tremor of his terminology, and the self-eroding grandness of his schema, he beckons thought to that brink: the abyss where logos becomes praxis, and creation is not a fact but a readable act.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, semiotics, theology, hermeneutics, Neoplatonism
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1. Eriugena, Johannes Scotus. *Periphyseon* (The Division of Nature), translated by I.P. Sheldon-Williams and John J. O’Meara, Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987.
2. Gersh, Stephen. *From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition*. Leiden: Brill, 1978.
3. Moran, Dermot. “The Coincidence of Opposites: The Unity of Language and Being in Eriugena’s Periphyseon.” *Medieval Philosophy and Theology*, Vol. 3, 1993.
4. Cappuyns, Maïeul. *Jean Scot Erigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée*. Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1933.