Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium down to the Accession of Charles the Bald

Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium down to the Accession of Charles the Bald

By Michael McCormick

Eriugena: East and West. Papers of the Eighth International Symposium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenean Studies (Notre Dame University Press: Notre Dame, 1994)

Introduction: The Carolingian context of Eriugena’s thought continues to pose problems for the historian. After Maieul Cappuyns, the studies of John Contreni on Laon or Edouard Jeauneau on Eriugena’s Hellenism have done much to illuminate the immediate cultural background of John the Scot’s achievement. And yet, Eriugena’s broader historical setting as an early medieval intellectual working to interpret and interrelate two cultures lying at opposite ends of the Mediterranean Sea continues to pose a profound historical enigma.

Since the time of Henri Pirenne, economic historians have usually admitted that the Mediterranean changed from the Roman Empire’s royal road of commerce and therefore communication into a war-ravaged no-man’s-land, with the result that direct contacts between Byzantium and the early medieval West withered to minimal levels. Cultural historians have documented a shrinking knowledge of Greek which seems to fit the overall reduction of contacts. Against this vision, how was it possible that an Irishman should discover in Frankland a talent for studying Byzantine thinkers like Ps.-Dionysius, Maximus Confessor, and Gregory of Nyssa? And even more remarkable perhaps, that he should find there the means to accomplish that study: the Greek manuscripts, the linguistic tools, the economic support of a patron willing and able to further the study of abstruse theological masterpieces of Byzantine high culture?

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