A survey, like this one, of Carolingian philosophy without Eriugena is very much a case of Hamlet without the Prince. But history follows different rules from fiction. The real Story of Hamlet is just the story that Shakespeare told, in which, because he so designed it, Hamlet plays a role so centraL that none of the other elements in the play would make sense without his presence. Although, from the Standard Histories of philosophy, it would seem as if Car-olingian philosophy without Eriugena is not so much lacking in sense as absent altogether, what the paragraphs above suggest is a very different conclusion. Although Eriugena had a very definite influence on a circle of followers (Marenbon 1981:88-115), the greatest achievement of ninth-century philosophers may have been that, in general, they did not follow him. His bold theology and imaginative but sometimes less than fully worked-out Neoplatonic metaphysics were largely ignored, and instead, scholars worked carefully over the ancient textbooks, absorbing the rudiments of the Aristotelian tradition of logic. In doing so, they set the mould for eleventh and twelfth-century philosophizing and that, in its turn, for how philosophy developed even after the assimilation of the whole Aristotelian corpus in the thirteenth century.
This judgment, however, must, like any judgment about philosophy in this period, be qualified by two notes of caution, which are, in fact, the most important points that are made in this article. First, there is no good reason to choose Carolingian philosophy or philosophy of the Caro-lingian Renaissance as constituting a distinct period in the history of philosophy. The gloss traditions, which are central to the story of early medieval philosophy, run on into the tenth and eleventh centuries. Second, outside the writings of Eriugena, philosophy in the late eighth and ninth centuries (and indeed in the tenth) remains a mostly unstudied field (cf. Marenbon 2009). Scholars are only now beginning to understand the complexity of the major gloss traditions, and they are still a long way from being in a position to start to assess the philosophical achievements of these Years. An encyclopedic synthesis, such as this one, is therefore premature: there is nothing in the above paragraphs Which more thorough study may well not show to be inaccurate, wide of the mark, or plain false.
See also: > John Scottus Eriugena
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