and love. Hence the ecstatic movement which bears them on towards Him... the effect of this excessus is to make him who loves fiat totum in toto amato (op. cit., 1 202 A), in such a way that there now remains nothing for him to will of his own will. Circumscribed by God on all sides, he is as air flooded with light, or as iron liquefied in the fire." And like Eriugena, the liquefaction and fusion of the soul in ecstasy does not involve its annihilation, but rather keeps the soul's essence perfectly intact and perfects it further. St. Hildegard von Bingen St. Hildegard's Ordo Viritutum and Scivias express much of an influence from Eriugena. Following in the Irish theologian's footsteps, Hildegard boldly admits the possibility of an individual who is raised above the angel, implying an intersubjective contact within the Godhead. In this unique medieval interpretation of the ontological scale, the Platonic mean serves not as a lower reflection but as a type of interface linking divine and sublunary worlds within the mind of its user. A common theme which she borrows from him also is the notion of cosmological, top-down hierarchies that both contain, and are transcended by, the human as Imago Dei. Hildegard also follows Eriugena on his account of intersubjectivity as well as his view of the soul's return through the cosmos to God. "The networked centricities in the Ordo allow distant tonalities to be drawn close, collapsing linear progressions into folded, synoptic structures. In this way, Eriugena's intersubjective proximity through spherical absorption... becomes one of the organizing principles of the Ordo Virtutum as a whole, and its expression of what we might today call the phenomenological aspects of a spiritual pilgrimage, the soul's navigatio through the chaos of the world, its re-ordering, and return to the One, i.e., the celestial city Ordo Virtutum 86 (celestem Ierusalem)." Nicholas of Cusa As Catà argues, the philosophical relationship between John Eriugena and dialectician Nicholas of Cusa, connecting directly two different thinkers through six centuries, is a fundamental moment in the history of Christian Neoplatonism. Cusanus is the most significant interpreter of Eriugena's thought, between Eckhart and the German Idealism. "The strong influence of the Irish philosopher on Cusanus’ work is decisive. The idea of God as the infinite One wherein all beings are contained; and the conception of the universe as a self-creation of God, elaborated by