WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

Dermot Moran
"Eriugena is searching for ways to articulate this insight that reality is in infinite whole in which both Creator and creation are implicated and enfolded, and he enthusiastically adopts the Pseudo-Dionysian strategy of using affirmations and negations to assert the dialectical nature of the relations within this whole.  Indeed, this understanding on the self-development and coming to self-consciousness of the first principle is, I argue, at the very core of Neoplatonic thought.  Hegel and his followers recognized the Neoplatonists as their legitimate forebearers in this regard.  In particular, the Hegelian theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur recognized Eriugena as holding a doctrine which is equally central to German Idealism, namely that what God is, man also is namely "the absolute consciousness of absolute being [Das absolute Bewusstseyn des absoluten Seyns]." (Idealism in Medieval Theology, p. 58)