I dunno and I haven’t really thought about it much, but my first inclination is that it would be both.

Photios

How would Euthyphro’s Dilemma factor into this?

(1) St. Photios said that dialectic and philosophy is competent in its own sphere in the evaluation of “sensible things” and I believe St. Gregory of Nyssa said the same. In other words, the sciences, but its competence is only an evaluation of a fallen world not paradise, which leads to point 2.

(2) The fall according to the Fathers left us with burden of sensible analysis and the seduction of the mind by sense.

Your question also reminds me, I need to do a post on Monophysitism and how it’s Christology of aspects of Christ as “nature” or “miracle” (depending on which aspect is in view) renders Science impossible since it renders a wholesale surrender of “nature” and lies outside the Logos (Rational Principle) (following Dr. Farrell here).

Photios

(1) What are the ‘proper domains’ of reason & language?
(2) Is the misuse of the dialectical tools supposed to be an effect of the darkened eye of the soul?

That is correct, the only caveate is that when Eriugena (or his predecessors) starts using language of the divinity (i.e. the divine essence) in contradictory terms (e.g. “the divinity: nothing”; “the being of beings is the divinity beyond being”), he is moving beyond the realms of empirical theology (i.e. the ordo theologiae of asking questions) and into mystical theology, apophaticism, and devotion. For Eriugena, the divine essence is radically unknowable and undefinable in the same way that it is for Sts. Maximus and Dionysius. The both/and dialectic takes on a “function” of the ultimate inadequacy of all language applied to God. The event horizon of rational speech has exhausted itself at that point. For Eriugena, this is the method, this is how God has revealed Himself, and how we as human can speak of Him.

Photios

Thanks, now let me take my analysis a few steps further.

The only reason that Eriugena is able to predicate this ‘both/and’ dialectic of the same object is that he has started with the person, not attempted definitions of the essence, not even the ‘how’ of the operation(s). Contemplation & empirical description of the encounter with the ‘who’ must precede all other questions & assertions. The Augustinian order of theology makes the above text completely unreadable for it would have to made to look something like this:

“For just as [The Divine Essence] is both beyond all things and in all things — for He Who only truly is…”

Of course, this is wholly nonsensical since two contrary attributes cannot inhere or be predicated of the same ‘what.’ In this altered text, the categories of essence, energy and person have been irredeemably confused: (1) the operations of the Person have been made the definition of the essence, (2) the essence has been made the subject of the operations, and (3) the Person has been turned into an operation of the essence.