God as Nothing

Victorinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena

Much of my professional life has been lived in the medieval ‘Celtic’ world – that is the world of people who spoke Gaelic or (to a lesser extent) Welsh, between the fifth and twelfth centuries.  I have worked as a historian in Scottish universities for nigh-on thirty years, teaching and researching in departments of Celtic or of Medieval History. Admittedly, a lot of my work has related to ecclesiastical history, belief and culture and literature in Gaelic-speaking monasteries, but I have been employed as a historian, not as a theologian.

But I have this other life too. Since I studied theology in Oxford and Edinburgh (three times – BD, MTh, STL) back in the 1980s, I have been haunted by the question “Why is there anything, rather than nothing?”, and the ways that Christian answer that question: the answer is, “It is a mystery.”  Not really an answer at all, then. It is unknown and unknowable.  It is not a ‘cause’, nor a ‘being’ of any sort, nor any existent entity in the world. I first wrestled with this idea while studying Thomas Aquinas with Herbert McCabe in Oxford, and vividly remember looking at In Peri Hermeneias with him and that passage about God being omnino extra ordinem entium – ‘completely outside the order of beings’. Since then I have found this idea in several other writers, and have written a book – God as Nothing – to explore it in more depth.

What I didn’t really expect was for my two worlds to collide in the way they have recently in the person of John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irishman who ended up in northern Francia (Reims, Soissons, Laon, Compiègne) partly in the service of the king. This remarkable scholar seems to have left Ireland and first appears in Francia around 851 AD, by which time he must have been about 40 years old. Within a short time he was very much in demand for his scholarship – for the refutation of Gottschalk’s teaching on double predestination, for example, and for his knowledge of Greek. This latter skill was very unusual in western Europe at the time, but Eriugena was most accomplished as a Greek scholar.  This enabled him to translate into Latin several works of important Greek theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor.

We might ask where Eriugena had learned Greek. It seems that Irish monasteries were studying Greek as early as the late sixth or early seventh century, as a note about the fourth abbot of Bangor attests: ‘Mo Sinu maccu Min, scribe and abbot of Bangor, was the first of the Irish who learned the computus by memory from a certain wise Greek’ (Mo Sinu maccu Min scriba et abbas Benncuit primus Hibernensium computum a Graeco quodam sapiente memorialiter didicit).[1] David Howlett has shown other aspects of Greek scholarship in Ireland prior to the ninth century, and also points to the presence of Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek-speaker and scholar, as archbishop of Canterbury – a place to which students flocked in the late seventh century where they learned both Latin and Greek ‘as well as they know their own native tongue’.[2]

Quite what Eriugena had read in Greek in his native Ireland is impossible to say, but in around 860 the king, Charles the Bald, asked him to translate the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the probably late fifth- or sixth-century writer whose extraordinary writings offered Eriugena a vision of God as utterly unknown, unspeakable, beyond all description or utterance.[3] This tradition of ‘apophatic theology’ – a way of talking about God which stresses the unspeakability of the divine – was to shape Eriugena’s own theology quite radically, as is well known. For a discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius and his view of God as ‘nothing’, completely beyond being and non-being, see God as Nothing Chapter 6: ‘Pseudo-Dionysius: Two Ways of Talking’. For him to encounter God meant ‘renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belong completely to Him who is beyond everything’.  And again, ‘He is called “King of the Ages”, for in him and around him all being is and subsists. He was not. He will not be. He did not come to be. He is not in the midst of becoming. He will not come to be. No. He is not. Rather he is the essence of being for the things which have being.”

All this kind of language is taken up enthusiastically by Eriugena in his own Periphyseon. Here God is discussed as ‘the negation of all things’ (negatio omnium). Because ‘all things’ only exist because they are created, ‘God’ cannot be the name of an existent thing. God therefore cannot literally (proprie) be said to be substance or essence, not have any quantity, quality, relation, place or time. You may want to use the word ‘being’ of God, but it cannot mean simply ‘a being’ in the sense that we refer to existing things as ‘beings’. So Eriugena says (following Pseudo-Dionysius) that ‘the being of all things is the superbeing of divinity’ (esse omnium est superesse divinitatis).  God is not a being of any sort, but above being, and beings merely derive their being from him. God is in fact a ‘nothingness’ (nihilum), and is unknown and beyond all comprehension.

All this – the relationship between Eriugena and Pseudo-Dionysius – is well known and has been explored at length by numerous scholars. But there is another significant apophatic theologian who has had much less exposure, but who was also known to Eriugena and who influenced him.  Please welcome Gaius Marius Victorinus – otherwise known as Victorinus Afer (‘Victorinus the African’) – to our discussion.  Living more than two centuries before Pseudo-Dionysius, he was an African by origin spent much of his adult life in Rome. His own writings, drinking from the same neo-Platonic well as Pseudo-Dionysius, would later, be read by Eriugena.  He shows that same determination to pursue apophatic theology as the best way to speak of God.  To know God is to speak of what he is not, by negation (per privantiam), or to speak of how far above all beings he is (per supralationem).  What God is is completely unknown to us (incognoscibile omne quod Deus est). So he says:

‘We say of God not only that his being and living and knowledge is incomprehensible, but that it is above or beyond all things: God is called non-existent (anhyparktos), non-being (anousios), unintelligent (anous) and lifeless (azōn), without existence, without essence, without intellect, without life, not through absence or privation (per sterēsin vel privationem), but by virtue of his being above (per supralationem). For everything, that is expressed in words, is after him. Therefore he is not Being (nec on), but is rather Before-Being (proon).[4]

Of course, we cannot take ‘Before-Being’ literally as if there could be a ‘before’ of being. For time itself only exists within the order of being. ‘Before time’ is a self-contradictory notion, since there can be no ‘before’ in relation to time itself.

There is no doubt that Pseudo-Dionysius is generally far better known than Victorinus, but it is exciting to find an Irish scholar reading and using Victorinus’s work – a much earlier expression of that radical apophatic tradition – in the ninth century. Given that some of the works of Victorinus were known in early medieval Ireland (his commentaries on Paul’s epistles – Galatians, Ephesians, Philipppians – for example, and some of his grammatical and logical works ), it makes me want to ask: was his more radically apophatic theological work known in Ireland too, such as his Adversus Arium cited above? Was Victorinus’ apophaticism not only part of Eriugena’s theological inspiration in Francia, but part of his early training in Ireland? And if so, who else was reading it in Ireland?

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.
For North American readers, the same book is published
under a different title, Presence and Absence: God as Nothing in Christian Tradition
and is available here

---

[1]  D. Ó Cróinín, ‘Mo-Sinu Mocch Min and the computus of Bangor’, Peritia 1 (1982), 281-95: 283-84. Mo Sinu died in 610.

[2]  Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica iv, 2. It is not clear how many Irish students went there, but there was a good deal of scholarly exchange between Ireland and England at the time. See D. Howlett, ‘Hellenic learning in Insular Latin: an essay on supported claims’, Peritia 12 (1998), 54-78.

[3]  Is it possible that Charles thought it necessary to have the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (or Pseudo-Denis) because he imagined that the author was to be identified with Saint Denis, the patron saint of France?

[4]  Migne (ed.) Patrologia Latina VIII, 1129 (Adversus Arium IV, 23. See also Alexey Fokin, ‘Elements of Apophatic Theology in Writings of Marius Victorinus’ (on line, English), published in Russian in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik (History of Philosophy Yearbook), 2011, no. 2010, 53-68.