For his part, Erigena confines himself to listing the following fifteen ideas in the following order: (1) goodness in itself, (2) essence, (3) life, (4) reason (rationality), (5) intelligence, (6) wisdom, (7) power, (8) bliss, (9) truth, (10) eternity, (11) greatness, (12) love, (13) peace, (14) unity, (15) perfection. He indicates the basis of this order in a greater or lesser degree of the commonality of the manifestations of this or that idea: the idea of goodness has a wider manifestation than the idea of being; the latter is broader than the idea of life, etc. But it is not they themselves that are placed in this order, but those spheres of being which represent their realization, or which participate in one or the other of the ideas. To what extent and how exactly this principle of distribution is applicable to all the ideas enumerated above, the philosopher does not indicate this, making only the general remark that on careful examination one can find "the same rule in relation to all or many ideas." Nor does Erigen indicate why he confines himself to enumerating precisely the fifteen named ideas. In general, in all this teaching he wants to follow Dionysius[739].

3. The Doctrine of the World

For the divine consciousness, only ideas exist directly; already in them and through them God thinks of the finite world. But this world in itself is nothing but a further, if I may say so, moment in the process of divine thinking, and can be imagined as the revelation of divine ideas. The same divine mind that creates ideas is manifested in everything else. And although in reality it is very difficult and very few have been able to know God in the phenomena of the sensible world, yet for the philosopher there is no doubt that in these phenomena also the mind of the Godhead is manifested, which is identical in the simple essence of the Godhead with the will and being itself, just as the human mind, being itself invisible, manifests itself in words and writings, and in visible signs in general. To know and to do for God is one and the same. Divine knowledge of things constitutes the very essence of things, and everything must be wholly resolved into the thought of the Divine, as Dionysius also says.

Here Erigena is confronted with the most difficult question for his system, which necessarily follows from his fundamental point of view. If everything is only a manifestation of the divine intellect, the thought of the Godhead, and therefore a manifestation in the life of God Himself, what is the difference between God and the finite world? Is it not completely destroyed? When it came to ideas, it was not difficult to recognize them as having a divine, so to speak, nature, since they undoubtedly proceed from the divine mind and exist in it. But how should we think about the created world and its relationship to God? The human mind, when it manifests itself or its ideas outwardly, finds ready matter for its manifestation; but when God creates the world, He has nothing outside of Himself; God creates the world out of nothing. But what does this expression "out of nothing" mean? Does this not mean from the divine being, or rather from a supersubstantiality (superessentialitas) that transcends all being and non-being? However, almost all the interpreters of the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures, Erigena notes, understand "nothing" in the sense of deprivation or absence of being.

He himself decisively inclines to the side of the first opinion and rebels against the latter in defense of the interests of reason. "Nothing," in the sense of absolute non-being, cannot, according to the philosopher, explain anything. It can be said that the whole system of the philosopher is aimed at expelling non-being from the universe, leaving only being in it. In the exile of non-being, in so far as he, following his predecessors in the field of theology, not only Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus, but also Augustine, he understands evil as non-being, from an objective point of view, the whole essence of the world process. The philosopher firmly assimilates and consistently carries out the thesis that "only that exists, and that which does not exist does not exist," or, at least, should not exist. Reason can only state the absence of being as a pure negation, but must never introduce it in order to explain anything; this would mean for him to renounce all explanation and even the very possibility of explanation, i.e., rationality itself.

True, the concept and term of non-being, in contrast to being, are very often used in speech. But it is necessary to distinguish between non-being in the absolute sense and non-being in the relative sense; The latter is not non-being in the proper sense, but only non-being for consciousness, i.e., being only outside consciousness. The establishment of these concepts seems so important to Erigena that he begins his work "On the Division of Nature" with it, when, defining nature as the totality of being and bearing, he discusses the modes of essendi and non essendi, and then applies these concepts in the doctrine of God, of creation, and of evil. According to him, God, His ideas, the essences of things, and matter can also be called non-being in the latter sense, since in themselves they can never be revealed to consciousness, but always in some manifestations; But this does not mean that they do not exist; on the contrary, their manifestations necessarily presuppose their existence. More specifically, the concepts of being and non-being can be applied to the different orders of created nature, since the affirmation or negation of one order is the negation or affirmation of another, so that, for example, for the consciousness of beings of a lower order, there does not exist that which exists for beings of a higher order, but does not exist only for them, and not in itself. Ordinary consciousness, furthermore, calls non-existent that which already exists in its cause, only in a latent form; This is the potential existence of all human beings, including animals and plants. Philosophical consciousness does not recognize the transitory, spatial, and temporal existence of material objects as the true being. From the point of view of the Christian religion, non-existence is the state of an unregenerate person outside of Christianity.

Erigena himself usually uses the terms "being and not being," or "being and non-being," as equivalent to the expressions "comprehensible and incomprehensible," borrowing this mode of expression from Eastern apophatic theology. And in this case, in relation to the question of the creation of the world, he is convinced that by the "nothing" from which God created the world, one must understand the "ineffable and incomprehensible and unapproachable to all minds the brightness of divine goodness," since everything that exists could receive existence only from the truly existing and transcending all understanding of being. To the ideas themselves, according to him, one can apply the question: where are they from, or what are they made of? If from nothing, and it is nothing in the Word, then it is no longer nothing, but something great; if it is outside the Word, then the doctrine is Manichaean. Meanwhile, the finite world and matter itself are nothing but the manifestation of divine ideas.

But this is precisely where the difficulty is encountered. If everything exists in ideas co-eternal with God and in God Himself, and is even nothing but a manifestation of eternal ideas and an eternal God, then everything must be eternal from this point of view. However, the form of its temporal existence seems to be completely inconsistent with the idea of the eternal existence of the world in God. Let the world exist in one way or another from all eternity in the divine mind, let there be no place for the "nothing" out of which, according to some, the world must be created, either in God or outside of God, and let the world be a manifestation of the divine mind itself. But the present form of the accidental existence of the world had a beginning and will have an end, therefore, "it was when there was not" all created things in the form in which they appear now. In this sense, it can be said that everything was created out of nothing, although at the same time everything was always in the Word. How, then, can we reconcile the eternity of the world and its creation in this sense? The eternal can have neither beginning nor end in any respect, and that which has a beginning and an end is no longer eternal. Meanwhile, the world is both eternal in the divine mind, and at the same time it is temporary.

Asking the essentially insoluble question how eternal creative ideas could be transformed, so to speak, into a finite world, while at the same time being a phenomenon in the inner life of the Godhead, Erigena understandably does not solve it; He both begins and ends his discourse with a simple statement of the fact that the finite world really exists as created, being eternal in ideas, however persistently the question haunts him: how can this be understood? and however important this question may seem to him, above which there is no need for students of truth to seek any other question. In order not to be accused of negligence, he does not refuse to try to consider it. But the attempt acquires the significance only of a more vivid formulation of the question, leading in the end to the recognition of the insolubility of the antinomy it represents. The philosopher has in mind, as he himself says, a special goal, namely, to affirm in particular the first half of the antinomy that everything is in God and even is God.

On the basis of reason and authority, the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures and Augustine, as well as Dionysius, and first of all the fact is established that everything is eternal in the Word, or even is the Word itself. Nothing can be assimilated to God as an accident, and therefore the creation of the world is for Him an eternal act; He does not precede creation temporarily, but only as a cause; therefore, all things are eternal for Him and in Him[749]. The Apostle says that in God "we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28), i.e., insofar as in Him are found the eternal ideas of our being, which do not differ from this being. In the words of Augustine, in the constitution of the Word, all things are "not created, but eternal"—in Him all things are unchangeable, and all things are one—"otherwise there exists under Him that which is created through Him, otherwise there exists in Him that which is Himself," not because the two are different, according to Erigena, but because the same nature of things is otherwise contemplated in the eternity of the Word. otherwise in the temporality of the world[751]. In the words of Dionysius, the One or God is everything and contains and embraces everything in Himself in advance[752].

But, on the other hand, the Scriptures say that everything came into being, created through the Word (John 1:3; Col. 1:16). "Containing in Himself from eternity the causes (or ideas) of what has happened, God, according to Maximus, produced from them from non-existent things a visible and invisible creature" [754].

Thus, everything is eternal in the Logos, and everything is created. But how to reconcile the two? [755]

In order to clarify the question, the philosopher turns to the concept of the Logos, which is the Word, the rational foundation, and the cause of everything. One and the same Logos is also the unity of all, in so far as everything exists in Him in an inseparable unity, and at the same time He contains in Himself the multiplicity of all created things. Considered on the one hand, He is unity (simplex), considered on the other, multiplex. Dionysius says that the Perfect, God, without any limitation, extends into everything, and that everything that exists exists by participation in the divine being, for "being for everything is the Divinity that transcends [all] being"; that Divine Providence (πρόνοια) is the cause of all being, and proceeds into everything, and is in everything, and embraces everything; that the Author of all things, through the abundance of goodness, appears in everything, as if coming out of Himself; that the Divinity of Jesus fills and embraces the parts of the universe[756].

Thus the Word, or the Wisdom of the Father, is also the eternal creative cause of all things, and at the same time creates Himself in all created things, so that the creature, considered in itself, is nothing, as Augustine says; in other words, one and the same divine nature of the Logos is the common, so to speak, substratum both for the second form of being, ideas, and for the third, the finite world. And what is said of the Cause may also be said of its effects: since the Cause itself, which is manifested in everything, is eternal and created, all things may be called both eternal and created.