g without Goodness; for Evil is the
negation of Being. "The Scripture openly pronounces this," says
Erigena; "for we read, God saw all things; and _not_, lo, they were,
but, lo, they were very good." All things are, in so far as they are
good. "But the things that are not are also called good, and are far
better than those which are." Being, in fact, is a defect, "since it
separates from the superessential Good." The feeling which prompts
this strange expression is that since time and space are themselves
onesided appearances, a fixed limit must be set to the amount of
goodness and reality which can be represented under these conditions.
Erigena therefore thinks that to enter the time-process must be to
contract a certain admixture of unreality or evil. In so far as life
involves _separateness_ (not distinction), this must be true; but the
manifold is only evil when it is discordant and antagonistic to unity.
That the many-in-one should appear as the one-in-many, is the effect
of the forms of time and space in which it appears; the statement that
"the things which are not are far better than those which are," is
only true in the sense that the world of appearance is permeated by
evil as yet unsubdued, which in the Godhead exists only as something
overcome or transmuted.

Erigena says that God is above all the categories, including that of
relation. It follows that the Persons of the Trinity, which are only
"relative names," are fused in the Absolute.[215] We may make
statements about God, if we remember that they are only metaphors; but
whatever we deny about Him, we deny truly.[216] This is the "negative
road" of Dionysius, from whom Erigena borrows a number of uncouth
compounds. But we can see that he valued this method mainly as
safeguarding the transcendence of God against pantheistic theories of
immanence. The religious and practical aspects of the doctrine had
little interest for him.

The destiny of all things is to "rest and be quiet" in God. But he
tries to escape the conclusion that all distinctions must disappear;
rather, he says, the return to God raises creatures into a higher
state, in which they first attain their true being. All individual
types will be preserved in the universal. He borrows an illustration,
not a very happy one, from Plotinus. "As iron, when it becomes
red-hot, seems to be turned into pure fire, but remains no less iron
than before; so when body passes into soul, and rational substanc