separated and within the nature of God, but rather they are not God at all but our thought of God because we are compelled, by the very constitution of our minds, to think of a beginning and an end. The second and the third divisions, however, do not merely exist in our thought, but in things themselves and are the things in themselves, in which causes and effects are actually divided. The second division represents the primordial causes, of which the Logos is the unity and the aggregate. All that we see divided and a multiplicity in nature is one in the primal causes. The third division represents the created universe; it is all that is known in generation, in time and in space. These divisions of Nature do not mean that God is the genus of the creature, or the creature a species of God, though Gregory Nazianzen does say, pars Dei sumus, which is a metaphorical use of language, to express the truth that in God we live and move and have our being, which Eriugena himself follows. The four divisions are an example of analysis descending from the most general to the most special, and then reversing the process, and resolving individuals into species, species into genera, genera into essences, and ‘essences into the wisdom of the Deity, from where all these divisions arose and where they end. Modes of non-being Next in importance to the fourfold division of Nature for the understanding of Eriugena's philosophy, is his fivefold division of non-being. It is fundamental to Erigena's scheme that Nature, as the general name for all things, comprises both the things which are and the things which are not. All that is perceived by the senses or understood by the intellect is said to be (esse). The five modes of non-being are as follows: Non-being as the ineffable Godhead: All that by reason of the excellence of its nature (per excellentiam suae naturae) escapes the reach of the senses and of the intellect. The essence of all things belongs to this category. Whatever is known is a kind of accident of the underlying, unknown and unknowable substance. We know anything by quality and quantity, form, matter, difference, time and space. But the essence of it, to which these attach themselves, we cannot know. Since this essence cannot be known by us, it does not exist for us.