Original Goodness and the Monist Heritage

From the Erigena to Finn

1. John Scotus Erigena’s Monism: The Divine Circulation of Being

Erigena’s Periphyseon proposed a radically unitary cosmos: all that exists is theophany—God’s self-manifestation through creation. Nature (natura) divides into four modes:

1. That which creates and is not created (God as cause).

2. That which is created and creates (the primordial causes or divine ideas).

3. That which is created and does not create (the manifest world).

4. That which neither creates nor is created (God as end).

All these together form a single process: the emanation of God into multiplicity and the return of multiplicity into divine unity.
Evil, therefore, cannot have independent reality—it is privatio boni, a local defect in participation. Since God is good, the created world, being God’s self-revelation, is good by nature. Erigena thereby anticipated, albeit in a theological register, what Finn will later secularize as Original Goodness.

Yet Erigena remained a theologian: he still retained the teleology of return, a metaphysical “homecoming” in which difference dissolves into unity. In Finn’s view, this is the fatal concession. For if all must re-merge into the One, individuality is merely a temporary accident; and freedom, in any operative sense, is illusory.

2. Finn’s Procedure Monism: From Creation to Emergence

Finn’s Procedure Monism rewrites Erigena’s circular metaphysics in the language of contemporary physics and systems theory.
Reality, for Finn, is not a continuous emanation but a quantized serial procedure: discrete energy packets (quanta) engage in contacts, generating transient realness and identity, i.e. realistic emergence.

There is no underlying continuous substance (no ousia), only procedure: the Universal System of constraints that converts, indeed arranges random motion into locally coherent form.
Each emergent—atom, organism, consciousness—is a local iteration of this universal procedure:

“Everyone is God in their space.”

Hence, the ground of being is not moral, not even “good” in the evaluative sense, but procedurally good: everything that exists is a successful outcome of natural constraint; it has worked. Existence itself testifies to Original Goodness understood as successful emergence.

“Sin,” in this frame, is not moral guilt but procedural error: a failed coherence, an aborted iteration. The Augustinian inheritance—where failure is blameworthy and requires redemption—is replaced by a neutral thermodynamic reading: success and failure as local states in the evolutionary play of order and entropy.

3. The Case for Original Goodness

From Erigena through Finn, goodness ceases to be a moral evaluation and becomes an ontological description.

· For Erigena, the world is good because it is the self-manifestation of the Good (God).

· For Finn, the world is good because it is manifested at all—because it functions.

In both cases, evil or “badness” is not a positive force but the name for incompletion or failed coherence. Thus, Original Goodness is the basal condition of being; it precedes every moral dualism.

Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, by contrast, moralizes the ontological situation. He posits an initial corruption inherited by all, necessitating external (suggested as supra-natural) grace and authority, hence control. The Augustinian cosmos is hierarchical and juridical; the monist cosmos is procedural and self-consistent.
Where Augustine sees dependence, Finn sees autonomy.
Where Augustine finds guilt, Finn finds chance.
Where Augustine demands salvation, Finn demands comprehension.

4. Freedom and Monism

Monism, properly understood, offers unlimited freedom only in a paradoxical sense.

If all is one process, then nothing is external to that process. Each emergent acts according to its internal logic, which is itself a local expression of the Universal Procedure. Thus:

· Freedom = self-causation within one’s constraint set.

· Necessity = the operation of the same procedure across all iterations.

Erigena’s version offered metaphysical reconciliation: the soul’s freedom is realized when it freely wills what God wills—when micro-procedure and macro-procedure coincide.
Finn’s version offers procedural autonomy: every emergent, as “God in its space,” operates its own (local) rule-set, bounded by contact with others. Freedom is local, conditional, non-transcendent—but real.

There is no external Judge, only the continuous negotiation of contacts. Ethics becomes cybernetics: maintaining coherent operation within a sea of other procedures.

Thus, while Augustine’s system enslaves the emergent to divine law, Finn’s releases it into natural law.
Freedom is not infinite will, but unrestricted participation in the universal procedural play.

5. Critique and Synthesis

Erigena’s strength: he perceives that being is fundamentally one, and that evil has no independent reality.
His weakness: he preserves a mystical teleology of return that nullifies individual autonomy.

Finn’s strength: he preserves the unity of being while affirming the autonomy of every emergent—the procedural democratization of divinity.
His weakness: his monism risks becoming ethically indifferent; if all is “procedurally good,” then no emergent failure can be judged as evil, only as a natural malfunction.

Yet perhaps this is precisely his point: that “evil” is an anthropic fiction projected by emergents anxious about their inevitable finitude.
In a purely procedural cosmos, there is no sin, only signal; no fall, only friction; no damnation, only decay.

Conclusion

‘Original Goodness’, in the monist lineage from Erigena to Finn, names not moral innocence but ontological sufficiency: that whatever exists is justified by its existence.
Against Augustine’s malevolent theology of human defect and dependence, the monist asserts the adequacy and goodness of being itself.

Finn radicalizes Erigena: where Erigena’s God manifests the world, Finn’s world is the manifestation mechanism itself—the universal procedural engine endlessly generating (random) emergent, automatically and blindly.

In that engine, every emergent is free to operate as itself, bounded, constrained only by contact with others and its own survival state.
Freedom, therefore, is not an uncaused liberty but the capacity to exist procedurally as oneself.
That, for Finn, is the natural form of grace—the only salvation a universe of quanta requires.

On the condemnation of Augustine

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