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  4. Otten (Willemien) 2014a

Otten, Willemien, “Eriugena and Emerson on nature and the self”, in: Willemien Otten, and Michael I. Allen (eds), Eriugena and Creation: proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Eriugenian Studies, held in honor of Edouard Jeauneau, Chicago, 9–12 November 2011, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. 503–538.

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“Eriugena and Emerson on nature and the self”
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503–538
Year
2014
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Abstract (cited)
In this article I try to gain deeper insight into Eriugena’s mysteriously attractive concept of nature as developed in the Periphyseon. The article attempts to gain this deeper insight by performing a series of steps. In the first of these I see anthropology and physiology as inseparably connected in the Periphyseon but refuse to see their integration as representing a case of premodern idealism. In search of both a modern parallel for and an alternative explanation of Eriugena’s integration of nature and self I turn to R.W. Emerson’s Nature and his discussion, followed by a dismissal, of idealism, as for Emerson nature only comes into itself at the command of spirit. Seeing an analogous evasive playfulness undergirding both Emerson’s circular thinking and Eriugena’s prolixity, serving in each case the goal of protrepsis, I develop in the third part of the article a new reading of Eriugena’s natura. This new reading casts the role of the Periphyseon as that of the first western natural theology, a theology that Augustine could have developed based on his theory of signs but never actually did. Whereas Augustine is the first master of self-analysis and introspection in the history of western thought, it is fitting to see Eriugena as the first master not just of natural theology but of the eloquentia rerum, as in the end nature for him is not just about conversation, but is itself conversation with the divine.
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Dennis Groenewegen
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May 2015, last updated: January 2019
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