Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/66

48 the common church tradition. But these strains are actually those which give colour to a web of thought quite different in texture. Its material, indeed, is only partly—Christian, and this, as we find it in his matured system, is drawn from the Greek fathers, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, more than from the Latins,—but most of all it comes from the heterogeneous manufacture of the latest Neo-Platonists, the men who sought to combine a religion which failed to satisfy the speculative instinct with the noblest philosophy of which they had information. The result was in any case a medley—'the spurious birth,' it has been called, 'of a marriage between philosophy and tradition, between Hellas and the East'—but the attempt was so plausible, so enticing, that it has never wanted defenders from the beginnings of Christianity, from Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, to our own time.

Among these Johannes Scotus, called lerugena or Erigena, is a figure unique not so much for the originality of his views as for the confidence with which he discovered them latent in Christianity. He is unrestrained by the habits of thought of his own age, in which he appears as a meteor, none knew whence. The mystery which surrounds him is appropriate for his solitary person. From the schools of Ireland he drifted, some time before the year 847, to the court of Charles the Bald, like those former 'merchants of wisdom' with whom tradition