Semantic search

L’article propose une analyse comparative de la pensée mystique de Jean Scot Érigène (810-877) et de Maître Eckhart (1260-1328). Nuançant les critiques contemporaines relatives au rôle joué par l’expérience dans le mysticisme médiéval, il défend la position selon laquelle il est préférable d’instaurer une comparaison sémantique détaillée de la pensée de ces deux auteurs plutôt que de diviser le mysticisme médiéval en fonction de l’influence mystique augustinienne ou dionysienne décelable chez chacun d’entre eux. L’auteure mène une telle analyse en se reposant sur l’utilisation du concept d’incarnation comme principe sémantique fécond et non comme doctrine théologique. Tandis qu’Érigène utilise ce concept pour engager la conversation avec le divin (utilisation « horizontale »), Eckhart s’en sert pour donner naissance à une vision mystique plus incisive (utilisation « verticale »). Nuançant également l’idée selon laquelle l’apophase est une caractéristique commune de la tradition néoplatonicienne médiévale, l’auteure montre qu’Érigène et Eckhart utilisent l’apophase pour obtenir des effets fort différents. Guidés par leur désir de percer tout mécanisme de la contemplation mystique sans pour autant discréditer l’expérience en tant que telle, Érigène et Eckhart ne conçoivent pas l’apophase en contradiction avec la corporalité, mais l’utilisent pour affirmer l’ordre sous-jacent et le caractère commun de la nature et de la vie.

Burmann Quarto 3, a ninth-century manuscript of the works of Prudentius, is well known to philologists and art historians, to the former (under the siglum E) as a major source for the text of the poems, to the latter for its illustrations of the Psychomachia. This article focuses on the glosses to Peristephanon. First, I describe the hands of the seven main glossators and attempt to identify those who, in addition to glossing, corrected and/or punctuated the poetic text. I then provide the editio princeps of the glosses, in which I arrange the glosses by hand. A comparison of these glosses with those in Paris, B.N. lat. 8086 (P) suggests that the first two glossators of E and the first glossator of P drew on a common source; indeed, the two manuscripts show so many similarities that it looks quite possible that they were written in the same scriptorium. From a comparison of the E and P glosses on Pe. to those found in other manuscripts of approximately the same period, I infer that E and P preserve material from a lost commentary on Pe. composed by Johannes Scotus Eriugena, which, a generation later, became the basis for the extant commentary by Remigius of Auxerre. I find support for this theory in the fact that, in their wording and content, the glosses of E and P on Contra Symmachum sometimes agree with those of John against the corresponding glosses of Remigius.

The unity of nature as a theme in Eriugena’s De diuina praedestinatione has been acknowledged. This essay contrasts it with the idea of nature assumed, adopted or advanced by other disputants in the ninth-century predestination debate. It begins from the fundamental Augustinian anthropology distinguishing the will (uelle) and the ability (posse) to sin. Hincmar of Reims and Lupus of Ferrières offered opposing perspectives on this analysis. Eriugena presented an altogether different configuration of the same elements and makes the human will an important source of continuity between prelapsarian and fallen humanity. The question of what kind of nature was lost at the fall recurred throughout the debate and raised problems of language and metaphor in Carolingian theology. The disputants offer a kind of sliding scale interposing nature at different points between God and humanity. Whereas most of the disputants accepted this stratified model for its capacity to accommodate a moral tropology, Eriugena collapses it : nature cannot be separated from God, nor humanity from nature. Throughout the works, there are explicit binaries of a traditional mold, like natura and gratia, and binaries that may be inferred, like Florus’s natura peccatrix versus Eriugena’s natura creatrix, that give shape to these contrasting models. In the end, Eriugena’s implicit assimilation of God and nature stands dramatically against Gottschalk of Orbais’s more or less explicit identification of God and grace.