Wednesday, November 9, 2011

John Scotus Eriugena


[under construction -- please add any useful intelligence you have on Eriugena or what PKD knew/thought about the philosopher]

We have an incorrect idea of the nature of the void, and an equally incorrect one as to the nature of objects—which are only phenomena, constructs our brain makes out of sense impressions. "Literally, God is not," Erigina said.24 Claudia, on this day we must count our cursings. Psychologically, this mental transformation is the radical combining (not reconciliation but combining) of opposites. From then on everything is understood in terms not of "Is it this or that—" but "Both this and that." Each attempt I make to understand and explain and express my experience and the process following has to come at last to that: it is what I already thought and what I now think.
-Philip K. Dick in a Dear Claudia letter


"Eriugena had successfully pushed Platonism about as far as it could go without turning into a theosophy. Everything in Eriugena's cosmos was a manifestation of God, but it was a product of creation rather than emanation. Its consideration led to contemplation of the God beyond being, rather than to a theosophical and theurgic approach to the world of sense experience." Daniel Merkur, Gnosis p.241

Eriugena article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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