“Thought and Action are identical in God.”  “He sees by working and works by seeing.”

Man is a microcosm.  The fivefold division of nature—­corporeal, vital, sensitive, rational, intellectual—­is all represented in his organisation.  The corruptible body is an “accident,” the consequence of sin.  The original body was immortal and incorruptible.  This body will one day be restored.

Evil has no substance, and is destined to disappear.  “Nothing contrary to the Divine goodness and life and blessedness can be coeternal with them.”  The world must reach perfection, when all will ultimately be God.  “The loss and absence of Christ is the torment of the whole creation, nor do I think that there is any other.”  There is no “place of punishment” anywhere.

Erigena is an admirable interpreter of the Alexandrians and of Dionysius, but he emphasises their most dangerous tendencies.  We cannot be surprised that his books were condemned; it is more strange that the audacious theories which they repeat from Dionysius should have been allowed to pass without censure for so long.  Indeed, the freedom of speculation accorded to the mystics forms a remarkable exception to the zeal for exact orthodoxy which characterised the general policy of the early Church.  The explanation is that in the East Mysticism has seldom been revolutionary, and has compensated for its speculative audacity by the readiness of its outward conformity.  Moreover, the theories of Dionysius about the earthly and heavenly hierarchies were by no means unwelcome to sacerdotalism.  In the West things were different.  Mysticism there has always been a spirit of reform, generally of revolt.  There is much even in Erigena, whose main affinities were with the East, which forecasts the Reformation.  He is the father, not only of Western Mysticism and scholasticism, but of rationalism as well.[218] But the danger which lurked in his speculations was not at first recognised.  His book on predestination was condemned in 855 and 859 for its universalist doctrine,[219] and two hundred years later his Eucharistic doctrine, revived by Berengar, was censured.[220] But it was not till the thirteenth century that a general condemnation was passed upon him.  This judgment followed the appearance of a strongly pantheistic or acosmistic school of mystics, chief among whom was Amalric of Bena, a master of theology at Paris about 1200.  Amalric is a very interesting figure, for his teaching exhibits all the features which are most characteristic of extravagant Mysticism in the West—­its strong belief in Divine immanence, not only in the Church, but in the individual; its uncompromising rationalism, contempt for ecclesiastical forms, and tendency to evolutionary optimism.  Among the doctrines attributed to Amalric and his followers are a pantheistic identification of man with God, and a negation of matter; they were said to teach that unconsecrated bread was the body of Christ, and that