Being.  There may be Goodness without Being, but not Being without Goodness; for Evil is the negation of Being.  “The Scripture openly pronounces this,” says Erigena; “for we read, God saw all things; and not, lo, they were, but, lo, they were very good.”  All things are, in so far as they are good.  “But the things that are not are also called good, and are far better than those which are.”  Being, in fact, is a defect, “since it separates from the superessential Good.”  The feeling which prompts this strange expression is that since time and space are themselves onesided appearances, a fixed limit must be set to the amount of goodness and reality which can be represented under these conditions.  Erigena therefore thinks that to enter the time-process must be to contract a certain admixture of unreality or evil.  In so far as life involves separateness (not distinction), this must be true; but the manifold is only evil when it is discordant and antagonistic to unity.  That the many-in-one should appear as the one-in-many, is the effect of the forms of time and space in which it appears; the statement that “the things which are not are far better than those which are,” is only true in the sense that the world of appearance is permeated by evil as yet unsubdued, which in the Godhead exists only as something overcome or transmuted.

Erigena says that God is above all the categories, including that of relation.  It follows that the Persons of the Trinity, which are only “relative names,” are fused in the Absolute.[215] We may make statements about God, if we remember that they are only metaphors; but whatever we deny about Him, we deny truly.[216] This is the “negative road” of Dionysius, from whom Erigena borrows a number of uncouth compounds.  But we can see that he valued this method mainly as safeguarding the transcendence of God against pantheistic theories of immanence.  The religious and practical aspects of the doctrine had little interest for him.

The destiny of all things is to “rest and be quiet” in God.  But he tries to escape the conclusion that all distinctions must disappear; rather, he says, the return to God raises creatures into a higher state, in which they first attain their true being.  All individual types will be preserved in the universal.  He borrows an illustration, not a very happy one, from Plotinus.  “As iron, when it becomes red-hot, seems to be turned into pure fire, but remains no less iron than before; so when body passes into soul, and rational substances into God, they do not lose their identity, but preserve it in a higher state of being.”

Creation he regards as a necessary self-realisation of God.  “God was not,” he says, “before He made the universe.”  The Son is the Idea of the World; “be assured,” he says, “that the Word is the nature of all things.”  The primordial causes or ideas—­Goodness, Being, Life, etc., in themselves, which the Father made in the Son—­are in a sense the creators of the world, for the order of all things is established according to them.  God created the world, not out of nothing, nor out of something, but out of Himself.[217] The creatures have always pre-existed “yonder” in the Word; God has only caused them to be realised in time and space.