‘Vita in omnia pervenit’. Eriugena’s Vitalism and the Influence of Marius Victorinus (part 2)

Abstract

The same passages of Marius Victorinus, Adversus Arium, III and IV, which seem –according to the comparisons proposed in the preceding sections of this study– to have inspired Eriugena the main ideas of vitalism that he supports in his Dionysian Commentary and in Book III of the Periphyseon, have also influenced a page in Book V concerning the life of creatures in the Word of God. Here Eriugena presents an exegesis of John 1:3-4, which, although it borrows several elements from Augustine, is at the same time marked by Marius Victorinus’ conceptions that had been rejected by the Bishop of Hippo. The continuation of the text of Adv. IV, which exposes the ascending scale of the acts of the sublunar world to the supracelestial realities (12:13 ff.), provided, with certain reinterpretations, the basis for another passage in Periph. III, which deals with the eternal existence of all things in the divine Wisdom. Eriugena no doubt also used it to attribute to the human soul, in the Exposition in Ier. Coel. the adjective autokinetos, which he found in Dionysus, referring to the first angelic hierarchy. Finally, this page by Marius Victorinus, some lines of the previous development on universal life and a text from book 1 of the Adv. Ar. on the “descent” of the Logos are the sources of the first part of the Eriugenian poem “Mystica sanctorum” (II, V, Traube). In the conclusion of the work, after a synoptic table of the references of the main comparative texts –whose parallelism has been pointed out for the first time in this study– some general considerations are presented on the very important influence that the work of Marius Victorinus seems to have had on Eriugena and on its consequences for the originality of the Irish thinker and the specific type of Neo-platonism that marked his elaboration of Christian dogma.   [This is the second part of the article. To see the first one: Vol. 7 (1986)]