SOURCE: Moran, Dermot. “Eriugena's Influence on Later Mediaeval Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, pp. 269-81. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Moran explores the question of the extent of Eriugena's influence on thinkers of the Middle Ages.

How influential was Eriugena in the development of philosophy in the High Middle Ages?

It is notoriously difficult to measure the exact influence of one author on another in the mediaeval tradition. The main intention of mediaeval authors was to represent the truth as they saw it, and they frequently used ideas without crediting them or showing any awareness that they were in fact borrowing from a different (and sometimes conflicting) intellectual system. In the case of Eriugena, his Periphyseon, Homilia, and Dionysius translations seem to have followed different paths and to have been sufficiently separated that...