PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH Empire of Charlemagne’s successors and in the Abbasid court of Muslim Baghdad The leading philosophers of the revival were, in the West, John the Scot, and in the East, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) John was born in Ireland in the Wrst decades of the ninth century He is not to be mistaken for the more famous John Duns Scotus, who Xourished in the fourteenth century It is undoubtedly confusing that there are two medieval philosophers with the name John the Scot What makes it doubly confusing is that one of them was an Irishman, and the other was for all practical purposes an Englishman The ninth-century philosopher, for the avoidance of doubt, gave himself the surname Eriugena, which means Son of Erin By 851 Eriugena had migrated from Ireland to the court of Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne This was probably at Compie`gne, which Charles thought of renaming Carlopolis, on the model of Constantinople Charles was a lover of things Greek, and the astonishingly learned Eriugena, who had mastered Greek (no one knows where), won his favour and wrote him Xattering poems in that language He taught liberal arts at the court for a while, but his interests began to turn towards philosophy Once, commenting on a text on the borderline between grammar and logic, he wrote ‘no one enters heaven except through philosophy’.9 Eriugena Wrst engaged in philosophy in 851 when invited by Hincmar, the archbishop of Reims, to write a refutation of the ideas of a learned and pessimistic monk, Gottschalk Gottschalk had taken up the problem of predestination where Augustine had left oV He was reported to have deduced from the texts of Augustine something that was generally there left implicit, namely that predestination aVected sinners as well as saints It was, he taught, not only the blessed in heaven whose ultimate fate had been predestined, the damned also had been predestined to hell before they were ever conceived This doctrine of double predestination seemed to Archbishop Hincmar to be heretical At the very least, like the monks of Augustine’s time, he regarded it as a doctrine inimical to good monastic discipline: sinners might conclude that, since their fate had been sealed long ago, there was no point in giving up sinning Hence his invitation to Eriugena to put Gottschalk down (PL 125 84–5) Whether or not Gottschalk had been accurately reported, Eriugena’s refutation of his alleged heresy was, from Hincmar’s point of view, worse See J J O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chs and 30