Far and away the greatest thinker of his age, Johannes Scotus Erigena was born in Ireland and as a youth studied in an Irish monastery, where he learned some Greek. By 850 he had immigrated to the Continent and attached himself to the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks (843-877) and, as Charles II, Holy Roman Emperor (875-877). Erigena's On Predestination (851) defended the reality of freedom of the will but incurred suspicion because of its original interpretation of Augustine of Hippo. Erigena reintroduced the late classical Neoplatonism of Eastern Christianity to the West in translations of Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor as well as in his treatise On the Division of Nature (c. 865). The work was condemned at the beginning of the thirteenth century when Amalric of Bene used it to support his reputed pantheism. Erigena's influence on medieval Platonism was nonetheless significant and his work forms an important point of departure for mystical thought.
