Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/126

 connection two stories of John's lighter mood are told. One is the famous answer to the king's ‘Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum?’—‘Mensa tantum,’ in regard to which it is to be observed that the play upon ‘Scot’ and ‘sot’ was not, even in John's day, much less in William's, a new one. After this William gives an account of his works and his later life, which he repeats almost word for word in his letter to Peter (printed by in Testimonia, ubi supra, and with a collation of a second manuscript by, pp. 317–20) and, more briefly, in his ‘Gesta Regum,’ ii. 122 (i. 131 seq., ed. Stubbs). This narrative has, however, been often suspected because it relates how John was invited by King Alfred to England, and what befel him there; and it has been generally believed that this account has arisen from a confusion with another John, spoken of by Asser, bishop of Sherborne, in his ‘Life of Alfred.’ Asser, in fact, makes two separate statements. In one he says that Alfred sent to Gaul to obtain teachers, and called over two men, Grimbald (who has been mixed up, to the discredit of this notice, with a very late story bringing in the schools at Oxford, which was interpolated by Archbishop Parker in his edition of Asser) and John, ‘Johannem quoque æque presbyterum et monachum, acerrimi ingenii virum, et in omnibus disciplinis literatoriæ artis eruditissimum, et in multis aliis artibus artificiosum’ (‘De Rebus gestis Ælfridi’ in Monum. Hist. Britann. i. 487 B). In the second passage Asser states that Alfred set over his newly founded monastery of Athelney ‘Johannem presbyterum monachum, scilicet Ealdsaxonem genere’ (p. 493 ), i.e. a continental Saxon by descent. The specification has the appearance of intending a distinction from the other John; and mediæval writers uniformly agreed, as is not at all unlikely, that the latter, the companion of Grimbald, was the same with John Scotus. Asser relates that John the Old Saxon was attacked in church by the servants of two Gaulish monks of his house, who wounded but did not slay him.

William of Malmesbury's account of John Scotus has some points of resemblance to this, but more of difference. He says that John quitted Francia because of the charge of erroneous doctrine brought against him. He came to King Alfred, by whom he was welcomed and established as a teacher at Malmesbury, but after some years he was assailed by the boys, whom he taught, with their styles, and so died. It never occurred to any one to identify the Old Saxon abbat of Athelney with the Irish teacher of Malmesbury—with the name John as the single point in common—until the late forger, who passed off his work as that of Ingulf, who was abbat of Croyland towards the end of the eleventh century (‘Descr. Comp.’ in Rer. Angl. Script. post Bedam, p. 870, Frankfurt, 1601); and the confusion has survived the exposure of the fraud. It is permissible to hold that William has handed down a genuine tradition of his monastery, though it would be extreme to accept all the details of what happened more than two centuries before his birth as strictly historical (see an examination of the whole question in, app. ii.) William adds that the body of the ‘Sanctus sophista Johannes’ lay for a time unburied in the church of St. Lawrence, but was afterwards translated to the greater church, where it was placed at the left hand of the altar, with an inscription which he records (Gesta Pontif., Ep. ad Petr. Gest. Reg. ll. cc.). Towards the end of the eleventh century, however, the tomb was removed by Abbot Warin, who destroyed also the monuments of previous abbats, and stowed away in a corner of St. Michael's Church (Gest. Pontif. v. 265, p. 421).

The verses upon the tomb declared John to be a martyr, and he has accordingly been identified with the Joannes Scotus who was commemorated on 14 Nov. But this Joannes Scotus was bishop of Mecklenberg, and suffered martydom on 10 Nov. (, Gesta Hammaburg. Eccl. Pontif. iii. 50; cf., Acta SS. O. S. B., sec. IV. ii. 513). After 1586, in consequence no doubt of this confusion, the name was omitted from the martyrologies (see, p. 327 and n. 48).

John Scotus's principal work, the five books ‘περὶ φύσεων μερισμοῦ, i.e. de Divisione Naturæ,’ written in the form of a dialogue, is of uncertain date, but plainly later than the tract ‘de Prædestinatione’ (851) and the translations from the pseudo-Dionysius. It presents the author's developed system, a system which has been taken for pantheism, but which is really a Neo-Platonic mysticism. John's leading principle is that of the unity of nature, proceeding from (1) God, the first and only real being; through (2) the creative ideas to (3) the sensible universe, which ultimately is resolved into (4) its first Cause. Within this circle the four ‘divisions of nature’ are comprehended. The supreme Nature is expounded by alternate affirmation and negation, ‘the two principal parts of theology’ (καταφατική and ἀποφατική); for that which may be asserted of God may also be denied of him, because he transcends human conceptions. By this means John