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THE ROLE OF CAUSALITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ERIUGENA
CATHERINE KAVANAGH

Abstract: The philosophy of Johannes Scottus Eriugena is normally identified with late antique/early
mediaeval Platonism, which has a very distinctively emanationist cosmological model. The concept
of causality, on the other hand, is generally identified with Aristotelianism, which was not at all
common in the early mediaeval West, due, amongst other things, to the lack of most of Aristotles
texts. However, causality is an important concept for Eriugena: it is the link which allows the
creature to know the otherwise utterly transcendent God Who made it. This particular sense of
causality is something Eriugena inherited from Maximus the Confessor, who also uses it as a
structure of participation. This paper examines the background to Eriugenas use of causality, before
examining particular structures of causality, i.e., God as First and Final Cause, the Primordial Causes
as Formal and Efficient Cause, and how they help Eriugena balance a very strong negative theology
with a very strong model of participation.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most important questions arising from the very strong negative theology
of Johannes Scottus Eriugena is that of the linking of the inaccessible, unthinkable,
unknowable God with the creature, who is capable of knowing Him, albeit not of
fully comprehending Him. How is this possible? If God is so remote, how can the
creature say anything about Him? If discourse about God is to be intelligible, there
must be some kind of participative or causal link, which permits a real knowledge of
Him, not mere speculative construction. Knowledge can be mediated symbolically
or analogically; it need not be a matter of providing a deductive demonstration, but
the symbol must have real ontological roots, so to speak it must be based on
something real.
The philosophy of Johannes Scottus Eriugena is normally identified with
late antique/early mediaeval Platonism, which has a very distinctively emanationist
cosmological model.1 Causality is ultimately Aristotelian, arising from his original
work in the Metaphysics, a text unknown to the early mediaeval West, due to the loss
of Aristotles texts to most of the Latin speaking world at that time. However,
causality of a particular kind is an important concept for Eriugena: it is the link
which allows the creature to know the otherwise utterly transcendent God Who
made it. Causality, in this sense, is something Eriugena inherited from Maximus the
1 See, A. H. Armstrong, The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (London:
Cambridge U.P., 1967). It is rather old at this stage, but still a very readable and well-structured
account of the whole movement of Neoplatonism, from Plotinus to the Chartreans. See also, John
Scottus Eriugena and Anselm of Canterbury by Stephen Gersh in Mediaeval Philosophy: Routledge
History of Philosophy, Vol. III, ed. John Marenbon (New York: Routledge, 1998) for a more recent
account of Eriugenas thought by one of the greatest of Eriugenists.

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Confessor, who, following Leontius of Byzantium, makes significant use of

Aristotelian concepts. In spite of the differences, there is an interesting anticipation
of Aquinas cosmology of contingency and analogy here. 2
The concept of causality begins with the four causes of Aristotle: material,
formal, efficient and final.3 To this, later medieval scholasticism added a first cause,
God. Anything at all that exists must have an origin, it must have matter, it must
have a plan or structure of some kind, other things will help to bring it into
existence, and it will also have a reason to exist in the first place. It is not a
statement of the transcendental origins of existence, but simply an analysis arising
from a close examination of how it is the things of our experience come into being.
It is only by an analogy developed by later Christian Neoplatonists that it is applied
to God: Aristotles Unmoved Mover is largely an immanent force rather than a
transcendent God. The Platonist, and in particular the Neoplatonist, account of
origins, on the other hand, is emanationist: the goodness of the Divinity overflows
into Intellect, which in turn gives rise to Soul which ensouls matter, giving us the
world we see.4 In the later Christian variant of this, creation is introduced from
outside the system, so to speak, i.e., the Biblical book of Genesis, but in a writer
such as pseudo-Dionysius, one can see that most of the elements of the original
structure remain. These two accounts are not necessarily contradictory: there is
nothing to prevent Aristotles causally structured world being ultimately a
procession from the One; in fact, final Cause is crucial to the structure of
precession and return. Indeed, one could argue and it was argued that Plato
takes up where Aristotle leaves off, and provides a spirituality which complements
Aristotles metaphysics.5 It is generally maintained that the emanationist and
creationist accounts of origins contradict each other, and that the creationist
account is Aristotelian, and alone employs causality, yet many of the patristic,
fundamentally creationist, accounts of origins also include a certain amount of
emanationism. A purely emanationist system leaves no room for will, however, and
this is a problem for a Christian thinker. The classic metaphor of overflowing
implies an impersonal force exceeding its limits, a kind of universal, impersonal
largesse, like the sun. Judaism, and later Christianity, on the other hand, proclaim a
highly personal God, with a very definite will, who had made the world because He
chose to do so, and who, furthermore, had extended the same capacity to His
creatures, thus introducing a measure of real autonomy into the universe. At this
level, clearly the two systems contradict each other. God is the Cause of the
Universe in any case, but whether He caused it by a kind of inevitable overflowing,

2 There is currently some very interesting work in progress on the Orthodox reception of Aquinas in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at Byzantium. For a general overview, see, Lvy, Antoine, Le
cr et lincr : Maxime le confesseur et Thomas dAquin : aux sources de la querelle palamienne (Paris: Vrin,
2006); also, Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy : Transfiguring the World Through the
Word, ed. by Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Farnham, England; Burlington, VT : Ashgate,
2009); also, Tommaso dAquino e il mondo bizantino, ed. by Angelo Molle (Venafro (Isernia) : Eva, 2004).
3 See Aristotle, Physics, Book II, also Metaphysics.
4 This account of the nature of the world originates largely with the work of Plotinus in the Enneads.
See, in particular, Ennead V.
5 See Armstrong, The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy.

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or whether He caused it by willing it is fundamentally the issue that divides the

creationists from the emanationists.6
When we come to Eriugenas account of causality, we find a generally
participationist, Neoplatonic system, but one which incorporates the Christian
thinking on will mentioned above. He divides the nature of cause into two
fundamental categories: the Cause of all, which is God, in the sense that God
maintains all things in being (largely following the account of this that Maximus the
Confessor gives in Ambigua 37), and the Primordial Causes, a structure he gets
from Augustine, going back ultimately to the spermatikoi logoi of the Stoics.
In order to understand his account of God as Cause, it is necessary to
understand certain ideas of his about the nature of Being and what it is we mean
when we say God. That created being and God are fundamentally different is for
Eriugena a fundamental insight. Being means what Aquinas calls contingent being,
and it is always composite: it is essence working itself out in place and time. Place
and time are the two things without which nothing can be, the necessary conditions
for the real existence of an essence. Prior to place and time, there is no existent,
although there may be a condition of possibility, a potential essence, which,
however, can only be actualized in place and time. He simply does not think of
pure, unlimited existence in terms of Being. He is aware that there is, at the very
least, a terminological problem here: if being is confined to contingent being, then
what are we to use for God? In the end, he describes it as a linguistic convention:
For whatsoever of these causes through generation is known as to matter and form, as to
times and places, is by a certain human convention said to be, while whatsoever is still held
in those folds of nature and is not manifest as to form and matter, place or time, and the
7
other accidents, by the same convention referred to is said not to be.

What actualises this essence in space and time is the Will of God, which
makes Gods Will the ultimate cause of all in the Universe: nothing comes into
existence unless God wills it. Generation as we know it, which is a form of
motion, is thus a manifestation of Gods Will. Eriugena tells us: the motion of the
Divine Nature is to be understood as nothing else but the purpose of the Divine
Will to establish the things that are to be made. This also makes God present to
space and time, and, incidentally, raises the interesting question which was to a
certain extent neglected by Aquinas of Gods maintenance of being through
time; according to this, nothing could go on existing unless God willed it.8 This Will
works through the Primordial Causes. Therefore, Eriugena talks about God calling
6 See Origen, Contra Celsum, for an early, very important debate on this topic; the master of the
subject is of course Maximus the Confessor; see, Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator : The
Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, foreword by A.M. Allchin, 2nd edn (Chicago, Ill.:
Open Court, 1995) for Maximus thought on this matter.
7 Periphyseon, I, 452A (Henceforth, abbreviated as PP).
8 See also Periphyseon, I, 452A: God [] Who, since He alone is creates all things, is understood to
be anarxos, that is, without beginning, because he alone is the principal Cause of all things which are
made from Him and through Him, and therefore He is also the End of all things that are from Him,
for it is He towards Whom all things strive. Therefore He is the beginning, the Middle and the End:
the Beginning because from Him are all things that participate in essence; the Middle, because in Him and through
Him they subsist and move; the End, because it is towards Him that they move in seeking rest from their
movement and the stability of their perfection. Emphasis mine.

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things into being from the hidden folds of nature, i.e., from His ultimately
unknowable self, things that he foreknows, but which do not, as yet, exist in being.
This foreknowledge is described by Eriugena as hiddenness:
Thus, since God in that first and one man whom He made in His image established all men
at the same time, yet did not bring them all at the same time into this visible world, but
brings the nature which He considers all at one time into visible essence at certain times
and places according to a certain sequence which he himself knows, those who have already
become visibly manifest in the world are said to be, while those who are as yet hidden,
9
though destined to be, are said not to be.

Being, therefore, is never said to be of God, since God in Himself is eternal, beyond
place and time, and so, beyond being. To be is to be created, and He is ultimately
not created.
We have already seen that Eriugenas terminology of being causes him some
trouble, but what of the term God? He tells us:
The cause of all things, which surpasses all understanding, does not become known >@ to
any created nature for who has known the intellect of the Lord?[however, ] It is not
only the divine essence that is indicated by the word God, but also that mode by which
God reveals Himself in a certain way to the intellectual and rational creature, according to
the capacity of each, is often called God in Holy Scripture.(Periphyseon 446 C-D)

Clearly, he feels the need for an analogical term for distinct but related realities, as
did Aquinas several hundred years later, but whereas Aquinas has Being as the
overall term, which is used analogically, of contingent being, which we can
comprehend, and of Absolute being which we cannot, Eriugena is indicating here
that God is the term which is used analogically, of God as He is in Himself, and of
created being, which is God insofar as it demonstrates his action. God as such
the divine essence is not knowable in Himself, since the creatures mind cannot
literally comprehend Him, but he gives the creature certain means of access, and by
these means, He is known in a certain way. Because these means are divine, they
too, are called God. One can easily see why Eriugena was considered pantheistic:
there is very little which cannot be called God in this sense, since most good things
can serve in some way as a means of access to the Divine, and that he appears to be
speaking analogically, a point which his strong negative theology would support,
does not always appear to be noticed.
(i) God as First and Final Cause
The most striking element which Eriugena took from his Greek sources was
a very radical negative theology, far more pronounced than it is in the Augustinian
Western tradition he inherited, which balances and corrects a certain tendency
towards monism. Again and again, he tells us that God is beyond our imagination
and comprehension, that He cannot be known in Himself and that none of our
language is adequate to describe Him. This does seem to beg the question as to
9

Ibid.

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whether, God being so utterly transcendent, it is possible for human beings to say
anything rational at all about Him. How could human beings, mere creatures, even
know about God, if the difference between them is so fundamental? The answer to
this lies in the fact that God is the cause of the world, and causes are known from
their effects. The logic of this argument is actually taken from Boethius
development of Ciceros work on rhetoric, which he combined with Aristotles
work on Topics, or commonplaces of argument. The fundamental unit of this
type of argument is the maximal proposition, or axiomatic statement. There are a
number of maximal propositions which deal with cause and effect: a) those things
whose efficient causes are natural are tKHPVHOYHV DOVR QDWXUDO IRU WKH FDXVH RI
DQ\WKLQJ HIIHFWV WKH WKLQJ LW FDXVHV ; b) where the cause is, the effect cannot be
absent ; c) where the effect is, the cause cannot be absent. These particular
propositions clearly deal with efficient causes, but material, formal and final causes
can likewise all be instances of the topic from causes.
At 487B, Eriugena writes: even the Cause of all things, which is God, is
only known to be from the things created by Him, but by no inference from
creatures can we understand what He is, and therefore only this definition can be
predicated of God: that He is Who is More-than-Being.
This answers the
fundamental question as to whether, or not, one can know God at all. Given that
an intelligible universe exists, we can know it had a cause: where the effect is, the
cause cannot be absent, and the cause of the effect which is the universe is God.
He is not himself the effect; therefore, if we say that being is characteristic of the
universe, from the highest to the lowest element, then God must be more than
being, and so the transcendence of God is asserted. Thus we see that the notion of
God as cause both establishes the existence of a relation between God and the
universe and affirms the distinction between God and the universe, and so, holds
immanence and transcendence in a kind of balance.
Everything else that is said of God, other than that he is the Cause of all, is
said by means of a kind of metaphor: These names [rest and motion], like many
similar ones also, are transferred from the creature by a kind of divine metaphor to
the Creator. Not without reason, for of all things that are at rest or in motion, He is
the Cause.10 The fact that God is the Cause of all, as regards origin, as regards
maintenance in being and as final end is the justification for using this kind of
metaphor. Ultimately the metaphor itself is given by Him: He makes all thing run
from a state of non-existence into one of existence.11 The existence that comes
from God is described in terms that can be applied analogically to Him: just as that
which is not itself divine is nonetheless analogically called God, since it comes from
God as formally, efficiently and materially causing it (once we take on board his
activity through time), likewise that which is properly speaking a description of
categorical being can also be applied analogically to God, since the kind of being
which it describes comes ultimately from God, and thus there is a similarity which
Periphyseon, Bk I, 453AB. The citation continues, explaining the application of the metaphor as
follows: For from Him they begin to run, in order that they may be, since He is the Principle of
them all, and through Him they are carried towards Him by their natural motion so that in Him they
may rest eternally and immutably and eternally since He is the End and Rest of them all [...] beyond
Him there is nothing that they strive for, since in Him they find the beginning and end of their
motion []. He makes all things run from a state of non-existence into one of existence.
11 Ibid.
10

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justifies the application. So, if we describe God as rest (to take Eriugenas example
here), we do so on the basis that we know what rest is, that what it may be in God
we dont know fully, but since the rest that we do know comes ultimately from
God, we do know something, and we can trust the metaphor.
The idea of cause, then, is used by Eriugena to balance his negative
theology, and to give it a working epistemology. On the one hand, there is nothing
we can say or know of God, properly speaking; on the other, since He is the Cause
of everything, and causes are known from their effects, everything that we know is
in some respect a mirror of its Cause, which is God. Therefore, we are justified in
using the terms we have, necessarily taken from this world, to refer to God. Such
reference is neither inappropriate nor purely fanciful, since a) the things themselves
thus properly described come from God; b) God is (for Eriugena) an analogical
term itself, in that it is also used of what comes from God, therefore c) the terms
that describe what comes from God can be used metaphorically. It should be noted
that this is a metaphor, however, with a strongly analogical framework. Through
this metaphor, which we understand to be incomplete, we can know something of
God, and, paradoxically, we also know that we do not know God, since the
metaphor is, obviously, metaphorical.
What is clearly at work here is the extension of the Dionysian Divine
Names from Scripture to ontology, or metaphysics. In the De Divinis Nominibus,
pseudo-Dionysius analyses all the names applied to God in the Bible, in particular
the more outlandish ones, coming to the conclusion that, in fact, all the names are
appropriate to God, in particular the more outlandish ones, since the seemingly
inappropriate names (e.g., a worm and no man am I) emphasize the distance
between God and his creation. However, the fact that they are used tells us
something about God, and, indeed emphasizes His presence to every level of his
creation. However, De Divinis Nominibus is clearly a work of hermeneutics: it gives us
a key to reading the Bible, and it gives us a method for resolving particular
difficulties of interpretation that arise with it, but Dionysius does not make the
jump from the Bible to the world in this text. It remains hermeneutical possibly,
he felt that given the all-encompassing nature of Scripture, it was not necessary to
make such a jump. However, when we come to Eriugenas Categorial analysis of
being, and his application of that by a kind of metaphor to the Book of Nature, in
other words reality, it is clear that he has taken Dionysius Biblical hermeneutics and
transformed them into a method of doing metaphysics. Whereas Dionysius
confined his analysis to Biblical names, Eriugena runs with it, taking every element
of reality as a kind of name of God, and then applying the Dionysian hermeneutic
to it. Thus any kind of being (in Thomistic terms, contingent being), will tell us
something about God, since being is itself a kind of divine name. Eriugenas
justification for doing this is clearly St Pauls assertion that the pagans ought to have
known God from the things that He has made: St Pauls point here is precisely that
such pre-revelatory knowledge of God could only have been very partial, yet it was
possible, and should have been there. One does not need a special revelation in
order simply to know of Gods existence, and therefore metaphysics, into which
Eriugena has slipped here, is justified.
God is also the end towards which creatures are carried by their natural
motion; therefore, He is the final cause of all things, the reason for which they
come into existence. The identification of first and final cause is found in
Eriugenas division of the things that are into four types: the uncreated which

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creates, or first cause, and the uncreated which does not create, or final end, are
both of them identified with God. He also tells us that God is the Middle; that
through Him the things that are subsist and move. This is an instance of the
rather broad use of the word God mentioned above: because it is true to say that
God sustains all existence, this sustaining is also called God. However, the patterns
of the things that are, their individual essences, are found in the Primordial Causes,
described by Eriugena as that which is created and creates.
(ii) The Primordial Causes
The Primordial Causes are the essences of creatures, before they have come
to exist, that is, before God calls them into in space and time; they correspond
approximately to Aristotles Formal Cause, but the idea is developed in a great deal
more detail in Eriugenas work, and it is strongly modified by elements which are
distinctly un-Aristotelian. The idea of primordial cause is also found in Augustine,
where he talks about the seminal reasons of things, and ultimately it goes back to
the spermatikoi logoi of the Stoics, which have been combined with the Platonic
Forms. They are not the things themselves, but prototypa, a kind of blueprint.
Eriugena also refers to them as predestinations, i.e., what it is the things will
become, rationes, or reasons, and paradigms, a word he also uses in his translation of
De divinis nominibus,12 where the paradigmata are identified with the rationes or
praedestinationes. These terms have, as mentioned, a strongly Augustinian
resonance, ultimately referring back to Augustinian ideas about the Logos. They are
the pre-existing examples of things that exist, not only in terms of the pattern
according to which they will be formed in space (what we would normally think of
as a pattern or a blueprint), but as the word praedestinationes indicates, also in terms
of the scheme according to which they will act out their existence in time; i.e. the
paradigm of a thing in God is already fully dimensional, including all the
dimensions of space and the dynamic of time: its temporal destiny is part of what it
is. A paradigm is the eternal fullness of a thing which can be experienced only
partially in the spatio-temporal world, since we experience time sequentially.
Eriugena writes:
Now these primordial causes of things are what the Greek call Prototupa, that is, primordial
exemplars, or Proorismata, that is , predestinations, or predefinitions. They are also called

Dionysius Aeropagita sec. Iohannem Scotum De diuinis nominibus, pag. 375, col. 1. Principia et
media et fines exsistentium immensurate et remote in semetipso praeambiens, et omnibus esse iuxta
primam et superunitam causam incontaminate declarans.Si enim iuxta nos sol sensibilium essentias et
qualitates et quidem multas et discretas exsistentes, tamen ipse unus ens et uniformis illuminans lux
renouat et nutrit et custodit et perficit et discernit et unit et refouet et fecunda esse facit et auget et
mutat et collocat et plantat et remouet et uiuificat omnia, et omnium unumquodque proprie sibi
eumdem et unum solem participat, et multorum participantium unus sol causas in seipso uniformiter
praeambit, multo magis super terrae et ipsius et omnium causalis praetexisse ipse omnium
exsistentium paradigmata secundum unam superessentialem unitatem concedendum, deinde et
essentias adducit iuxta ab essentia egressionem. Paradigmata autem dicimus esse ipsas in deo
exsistentium substantificas et uniformiter praetextas rationes, quas theologia praedestinationes uocat,
et diuinas et optimas uoluntates exsistentium discretiuas et factiuas, secundum quas ipse
superessentialis exsistentia omnia praedestinauit et adduxit

12

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>@ Divine volitions. They are commonly called ideai also, i.e. species or forms in which
the immutable reasons of things that were to be made were created before (the things
themselves existed).13

As causes, the primordial Causes are most similar to the Aristotelian formal cause,
as mentioned above, but they also function to some extent as efficient causes. They
are a combination of being and non-being, i.e., of potentiality and actuality: For
whatsoever of these causes through generation is known as to matter and form, as
to times and places, is by a certain human convention said to be, while whatsoever
is still held in those folds of nature and is not manifest as to form and matter, place
or time, and the other accidents, by the same convention referred to is said not to
EH >@ WKRVe who have already become visibly manifest in the world are said to be,
while those who are as yet hidden, though destined to be, are said not to be.
(Periphyseon 444D-445B) Clearly this is a reference to things which actually exist in
space and time, and things which are only potential remember, for Eriugena, as
for all philosophers up to Aquinas, being is that which exists in space and time;
space and time are the indispensable conditions of being, which is contingent being.
Therefore, things which are merely potential, not having actuality, must be said not
to be, even though God foresees them. Thus, human nature was created instantly,
in the image and likeness of God, although the individuals in which this nature
becomes manifest will only exist in certain times and places:14 human nature can be
said to exist, and not to exist, because not all human individuals have yet lived this
a necessary consequence of being as only contingent being. Eriugena is well aware
that he is talking about actuality and potentiality here; he concludes this section by
observing:
[This] is found in those which partly are still hidden in their causes, partly are manifest in
their effects, of which in particular the fabric of this world is woven. To this mode belongs
the reasoning which considers the potentiality of seeds, whether in animals or in trees or in
plants. For during the time when the potentiality of seeds is latent in the recesses of nature,
because it is not yet manifest, it is said not to be; but when it has become manifest in the
birth and growth of animals or of flowers, or of the fruits of trees and plants, it is said to
be.( Periphyseon, 444D-445B)
The coming to be of things in this visible world is, according to Eriugena, a
matter of the coming together of certain accidents in place and time for
Eriugena, matter is a coincidence of immaterial forces but this coming together
is not arbitrary, but proceeds according to a certain fore-ordained pattern. Here we
have something very different from the Aristotelian conception of matter as that
which gives differentiation and yet Gergory of Nyssas definition of matter,
which underpins Eriugenas, need not contradict Aristotles. If to be means to be
in space and time which it does here, then anything which has become actual has
thereby extension in other words proceeding into being does for Nyssan thought
what hylomorphism does for Aristotelian: for Aristotle, for a contingent thing to be,
it must have form and matter, i.e., definition and extension; therefore, it will exist in
space. For Eriugena, following Nyssa, in order for a thing to be, it must likewise

13

Periphyseon, Lib. II, 529B-C. See, also, 560 C.

445A.

14 Periphyseon,

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have extension, not only in space, however, but in time also he adds the
dimension of time to Aristotles space, in this demonstrating an awareness of the
problem of time not often present in classical thought. He is acutely aware of the
problems that confining being in this way raises, problems which do not arise for
Aristotle since he really does not have to cope with transcendence. The Unmoved
Mover sits outside the world it moves, but it does not radically transcend the world
in its very nature, in the same way as God does in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
By identifying being with space and time, and placing God beyond this
realm, which he has to do, he runs up against the problem of the logical
consequence of this move: God is not being, therefore, he does not exist, or have
any actuality at all. This is absurd, of course: it amounts to saying that something
spontaneously comes from nothing, and Eriugena does not want to do that. He
settles for recognizing it as essentially a semantic problem, describing this language
of being and non-being as a certain human convention, but it is clear that this does
not satisfy him.
Eriugena, then, has a tendency to reduce the efficient cause to the formal
and first causes, and this is very different, not only from Aristotlelian thought but
also from contemporary scientific method, which recognizes the efficient as the
most important of causes. For Eriugena, the power that brings a thing to being is
not clearly distinguished from the pattern of the thing in its formal cause, but is
inherent in it, and this potentiality is actualised by Gods calling it into existence in
its effects in space and time, whilst it remains simultaneously with God:
The principal Causes then, both proceed into the things of which they are the causes, and
at the same time do not depart from their Principle, that is, the Wisdom of the Father, in
which they are created, and, if I may so express it, just as remaining in themselves invisible
by being eternally concealed in the darkness of their excellence, do not cease to appear by
being brought forth into the light, as it were, of knowledge in their effects. (Periphyseon,
552A)

Thus we end up with a strongly participatory cosmological model. Participation

alone can account for both the separate existence of things in space and time and
the transcendence of God whilst maintaining a link between them. It is the only
model of unity which does not become pantheism.
In conclusion: when we analyse the Eriugenian doctrine on causality, we
find a couple of elements which are reminiscent of the Aristotelian doctrine, but we
also find that this doctrine has been altered in startling ways. First and Final Cause
are present, but identified with each other in the First and Final Division of Nature.
Exact parallels to formal, material and efficient cause are not there, but space and
time fulfil the requirements of material cause, by providing for extension, and the
Primordial Causes provide the structures of Formal and Efficient Cause, which on
the whole are identified in the Primordial Causes. The dynamism necessary to the
Universe, which for Aristotle is provided by the sequence of Efficient Causes, is
given by Gods continual creative activity in space and time by Eriugena: without
Gods continual direct causal activity, the Universe would simply cease to exist. The
unfolding of a seminal reason into being, by the power of God, is teleological, as
efficient cause is for Aristotle. Even for Aristotle, causality is teleological; the goal is
inferred inductively: this is what the world we live in seems to point to. Eriugena
struggles to keep a balance between radical negative theology, on the one hand, and
a near approach to monism, on the other: he wants what both imply, both the

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immanence of God in His creation and His utter transcendence. What he uses to
hold these ideas in balance, preventing either Parmenidean monism or the complete
Derridean rupture with divinity, is the Primordial Causes. They both are, and are
not, things as we know them: we never fully understand the essence of anything,
but the things of our knowledge do participate in the transcendent causes, so we
can trust our perceptions. There is a causal link there. Unlike the Derridean infinite
deferral, which does acknowledge the mystery at the heart of things, but falls into
nihilism because it will not go beyond that, the Eriugenian version does not lead to
absurdity, because the element of synthesis, linking the unknowable essence with
the actual thing which participates in it, is present.

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