when it is only known that it is, and not known what it is; and, if I may so put it, what it is, is denied in it, and only that it is, is affirmed. Nor is this unreasonable. For if it were known to be something, then at once it would be limited by some definition, and thereby would cease to be a complete expression of the Image of its Creator, Who is absolutely unlimited and contained within no definition, because He is infinite, beyond all that may be said or comprehended, superessential. Alleged pantheism De Divisione Naturae was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), for appearing to promote the identity of God and creation, and by Gregory XIII in 1585. According to Max Bernhard Weinstein, Eriugena argued on behalf of something like a panentheistic definition of nature. Lutheran theologian Otto Kirn severely criticised Weinstein, claiming sweeping generalisations and shallow assertions pertaining to Eriugena and other such Neoplatonic theologians. Eriugena maintained that for one to return to God, he must first go forth from Him and so Eriugena himself denied that he was a pantheist. Étienne Gilson also argued that Eriugena's alleged pantheism derived from a misunderstanding of the nature of "division" in the Periphyseon. Gilson writes that when we read Eriugena, "nature" is not meant as a totality of which God and creatures are parts; or as a genus of which God and creatures would be species. God is not all things, nor are all things God and Eriugena explicitly tells us that such a conception is a monstrosity. The division of nature signifies the act by which God expresses himself in hierarchical declension, and making himself known in a hierarchy of beings which are other than, and inferior to, him by being lesser grades of reality; "yet, in point of fact, Erigena only means that each and every creature is essentially a manifestation, under the form of being, of what is above being. The esse of a being is but a light radiated by the superesse, which is God." Historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston summarized the matter thus: If one takes a particular set of isolated statements of John Scotus one would have to say that he was either a pantheist or a theist. For example, the statement that the distinction between the second and third stages of Nature is due only to