Erigena has elaborated the
teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite. This teaching started from a God
far above the perishable things of sense, and it derived the world
from Him (_Cf._ p. 208 _et seq._). Man is involved in the
transmutation of all beings into this God, Who finally becomes what He
was from the beginning. Everything falls back again into the Godhead
which has passed through the universal process and has finally become
perfected. But in order to reach this goal man must find the way to
the Logos who was made flesh. In Erigena this thought leads to
another: that what is contained in the writings which give an account
of the Logos leads, when received in faith, to salvation. Reason and
the authority of the Scriptures, faith and knowledge stand on the same
level. The one does not contradict the other, but faith must bring
that to which knowledge never can attain by itself.

* * * * *

The knowledge of the eternal which the ancient Mysteries withheld
from the multitude became, when presented in this way by Christian
thought and feeling, the content of faith, which by its very nature
had to do with something unattainable by mere knowledge. The
conviction of the pre-Christian Mystic was that to him was given
knowledge of the divine, while the people were obliged to have faith
in its expression in images. Christianity came to the conviction that
God has given his wisdom to mankind through revelation, and man
attains through his knowledge an image of this divine revelation. The
wisdom of the Mysteries is a hothouse plant, which is revealed to a
few individuals ripe for it. Christian wisdom is a Mystery revealed as
knowledge to none, but as a content of faith revealed to all. The
standpoint of the Mysteries lived on in Christianity, but in a
different form. All, not only the special individual, were to share in
the truth, but the process was that at a certain point man owned his
inability to penetrate farther by means of knowledge, and thence
ascended to faith. Christianity brought the content of the Mysteries
out of the obscurity of the temple into the clear light of day. The
one Christian movement mentioned led to the idea that this content
must necessarily be retained in the form of faith.

NOTES

P. 5--To one who has true perception, the "Spirit of Nature"
speaks powerfully in the facts currently expressed by the
catchword, "struggle for existence," etc.; but not in