Into the theological plan of his gospel John the evangelist draws
John the Baptist; deep calls to deep at the utterance of divine
mysteries. We hear the evangelist relating the story of the
forerunner, the man whose gift it was to know the Word as he was in
the beginning, speaking to us of the one who was commissioned to go
ahead of the Word made flesh.
This he said in order to distinguish the man who shared only the humanity of the one he heralded from the man who came after him, the man who united godhead and manhood in his own person.
The evangelist’s intention was to differentiate between the
fleeting voice and the eternally unchanging Word. The one, he would
suggest, was the morning star appearing at the dawning of the
kingdom of heaven, while the other was the Sun of Justice coming in
its wake.
He distinguished the witness from the one to whom he testified, the
messenger from him who sent him, the lamp burning in the night from
the brilliant light that filled the whole world, the light that
dispelled the darkness of death and sin from the entire human
race.
So then, the Lord’s forerunner was a man, not a god; whereas
the Lord whom he preceded was both man and God. The forerunner was a
man destined to be divinized by God’s grace, whereas the one
he preceded was God by nature, who, through his desire to save and
redeem us, lowered himself in order to assume our human nature.
A man was sent. By whom? By the divine Word, whose forerunner he
was.
To go before the Lord was his mission. Lifting up his voice, this
man called out: “The voice of one crying in the
wilderness!” It was the herald preparing the way for the
Lord’s coming.
John was his name; John to whom was given the grace to go ahead of
the King of Kings, to point out to the world the Word made flesh, to
baptize him with that baptism in which the Spirit would manifest his
divine sonship, to give witness through his teaching and martyrdom
to the eternal light.
Homily on John’s Prologue 15: SC 151:275-77
John Scotus Erigena (c. 810-77) received his
early education, which included some Greek, in Ireland, the
country of his birth. Having won the patronage of Charles the
Bald, he became head of the palace school at Laon. He was not a
monk, and probably never became a priest.
Erigena translated into Latin the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, the
Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, and the
De Horninis Opificio of Gregory of Nyssa. His greatest
work was De Divisione Naturae or Periphyseon.
The first medieval theological synthesis, it shows a strong
influence of the Greek theological tradition.
Erigena was a profoundly original thinker. His obscure and
paradoxical language has at times been misunderstood and led to
accusations of heresy, and his Neoplatonism did lead him into
error on some points. He was, nevertheless, the greatest
theologian of his time in East or West.
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Journey with the Fathers
Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels
- Year B, pp. 14-15.
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