Eriugena, John Scottus (c. 810-c. 877)

Irish theologian, philosopher, translator, and poet, whose views were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church. From about 845 he was employed at the court of the French king Charles (II) the Bald (823-827) near Laon, as head of the palace school. His mystical theology was based on that of Dionysius the Areopagite (living around AD 500), whose works he translated from Greek into Latin. His attacks on the Eucharist, and his treatise De Predestinatione/On Predestination (851), which defended the existence of free will and denied the reality of evil, were condemned at church councils in 849 and 857, as was the pantheism (a view that God is in everything) of his De Divisione Naturae/On the Division of Nature; the latter was placed on the Vatican's index of prohibited books in 1685.

The surname Eriugena, meaning ‘born in Ireland’, first appears in the 10th century, but most scholars agree that he was Irish.