Later Medieval

Scotus Erigena, who gave Dionysius the Areopagite to Western theology, though Augustine was not without influence upon him, fully accepted the notion of God as the absolute Inconceivable, above all affirmation and Erigena. all negation, distinguishing from him a world to which divine ideas and primal forms belong. He emphasizes the other side of this view-that true existence belongs to God alone, so that, in so far as anything exists in the universe, God is the essence of it; a practical pantheism, in spite of his attempting to enforce a creative activity on the part of God. The influence of this pantheistic view on medieval theology was a limited one; Amalric of Bena, with his proposition that God was all things, was its main disciple.

In accordance with its fundamental character, scholasticism attempted to reduce the idea of God into the categories which related to the laws of thought, to being, in general, and to the world. It began by adapting the Aristotelian terms to its own purposes. God, or absolute being, was to Aristotle the primum mobile, regarded thus from the standpoint of causation and not of mere being, and also a thinking subject. The ideas and prototypes of the finite are accordingly to be found in God, who is the final Cause. God, in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is not the essential being of things, but he is their esse effective et exemplariter, their primum movens, and their causa finalis. Aristotelian, again, is the definition of God's own nature, that be is, as a thinking subject, actus purus, pure, absolute energy, without the distinction found in finite beings between potentiality and actuality. In opposition to Thomas, Duns Scotus emphasized in his conception of God the primum ens and primum movens, the element of will and free causation. The arbitrary nature of the will of God, taught by him, was raised by Ockham to the most important element of his teaching about God. Upon this abstract conception of the will of God as arbitrary and unconditioned depend the questions (so characteristic of scholasticism from Abelard down) as to whether all things are possible to God.

About the end of the thirteenth century, by the side of the logical reasonings of scholasticism, there arose the mystical theology of Eckhart, which attempted to bring the Absolute near to the hearts of men as the object of an immediate intuition dependent upon complete self-surrender. The Neoplatonic conception of the Absolute is here pushed to its extreme, and Dionysius has more influence than Thomas Aquinas. The view of God's relation to the world is almost pantheistic, unless it may be rather called acosmistic, regarding the finite as naught. This is Eckhart's teaching, although at the same time he speaks of a creation of the world and of a Son in whom God expresses himself and creates. This God is regarded as goodness and love, communicating himself in a way, but not to separate and independent images of his own being; rather, he possesses and loves himself in all things, and the surrender to him is passivity and self-annihilation. The ruling ideas of this view were moderated by the practical German mystics and found in this form a wide currency. On the other hand, pantheistic heretics, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit combined antinomian principles with the doctrine that God was all things and that the Christian united with God was perfect as God.

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