because he believes that things are more real in their primordial causes than in themselves, and as such he evades the Origenistic apocatastasis whereby the lower grades of reality are annihilated. So, while everything has indeed returned to God in Eriugena's account, material hell is a "pagan superstition", eternal punishment remains as "the supernatural distinction between the chosen and the condemned will remain whole and will persist eternally, but each one will be beatified or punished in his own conscience." Influence Eriugena's work is distinguished by the freedom of his speculation, and the boldness with which he works out his logical or dialectical system of the universe. He marks a stage of transition from ancient philosophy to the later scholasticism. For him philosophy is not in the service of theology. His assertion that philosophy and religion are fundamentally one and the same is repeated almost word for word by many of the later scholastic writers, but its significance depends upon the selection of one or other term of the identity as fundamental or primary. For Eriugena, philosophy or reason is first or primitive; authority or religion is secondary, derived. Eriugena's influence was greater with mystics, especially Benedictines, than with logicians, but he was responsible for a revival of philosophical thought which had remained largely dormant in western Europe after the death of Boethius. Eriugena is generally classified as a neoplatonist, though was not influenced directly by such philosophers as Plotinus or Iamblichus. Jean Trouillard stated that, although he was almost exclusively dependent on Christian theological texts and the Christian Canon, Eriugena, "reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism." St. Bernard of Clairvaux Within the twelfth-century Cistercian Order, alongside William of Saint-Thierry, St. Bernard of Clairvaux's mystical theology was greatly influenced by the work of Eriugena. His influence came to Bernard through two principal texts; i) Eriugena's translation of St. Maximus the Confessor. ii) De Divisione Naturae itself. From both St. Maximus and Eriugena he borrows the Dionysian concept of excessus and a milder version of Eriugena's Neoplatonic reversion and procession but blending it further with the Johannine account of God as Love. "All things move towards God as towards the motionless Sovereign Good. The end of their movement, which is also their own proper good, is to attain this motionless Good. Natural things tend to Him in virtue of their very nature; intelligent beings by way of knowledge