Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/81

Rh ness, in the progress toward perfection; but there is a certainty of the final victory of good. If it be otherwise, if there be a sensible world of torments, then have we laboured in vain, and the sentences of the holy writers which we have alleged will be turned into derision: which God forbid.

The third question involved in John Scotus s view of the return of creation into the Creator concerns the immortality of the individual. He answers it by analogies. a The air is still air though it appear to be absorbed into a cap. the light of the sun and to be all light. The voice of man, or of pipe or lyre, loses not its quality when, several by just proportion make one harmony in unity among themselves. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that man will subsist in a spiritual state without a bodv. b The body of our present humanity will disappear, but it will be exchanged for the spiritual body inseparable from the idea of man, the body which he had before he entered into the world of matter. The whole man is eternal. This therefore is the end of all things visible and invisible, when all visible things pass into the intellectual, and the intellectual into God, by a marvellous and unspeakable union; but not, as we have often said, by any confusion or destruction of essences or substances. It is here, in the profoundest and the most original part of his scheme, that the Scot shows most evidently how impossible it would be for him to rest in a purely pantheistic belief. His nature forced him to hold that those virtues, that will, which make man the image of God upon earth, those qualities which exalt one man above his fellows, will not become perfect by 'remerging in the general soul.' Perfection implies their survival 'unconfounded and undestroyed.’

His entire conception of the recovery of all things, of a unity into which the trinity of nature is resolved, is certainly the most original feature in the system of the Irish thinker. In dividing up theology on a philosophical basis he achieved a greater discovery than he was perhaps conscious of. He discovered that the doctrine of