SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY FOR EVALUATION OF ERIUGENA'S DOCTRINE

This article considers the phenomenon of the philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (c.800 - c.877) as a source of modern philosophical systems. The author has undertaken to determine the unique place of this medieval philosopher's ideas in the context of ontological semantics. Comparative, concrete historical, typological, and systematic textual analytic methods of research were applied to understand and provide a scientific evaluation of the events and facts that triggered Eriugena's philosophical choices in respect to medieval thought. It was found that the philosophical categories developed by Eriugena were later used in the pantheistic systems of Spinoza and Schelling. Eriugena's ideas were rooted in Neoplatonism, which prevailed in Byzantine theology, and in the language of Hermeneutics. They transformed Western philosophy and created a special kind of 'natural' definition - logical and grammatical structures through which our language, engaged in the totality of all that exists, conveys a sense of things being. As a result, the 'grammatism' of Eriugena became a constructive principle in his theological reasoning and in his teachings on the division of Nature, or God. As a consequence, medieval thinking became full of cogitative content, which was still relevant to modern and postmodern philosophers (Berkeley and the idealist tradition, Emerson's natural theology, Husserl's phenomenology as a transcendental idealism). This article is useful in helping specialists find out how early medieval philosophy was able to anticipate the logical tendency of the late Middle Ages and the speculative natural philosophy of the modern era. The author's approach makes it possible to elicit the true meaning of the grammatical interpretation of the 'Book of Nature' as an existential challenge in current Philosophy.