The true mark of a Soviet Truth-Hater would be one who attempts to pretend that a Father didn't say, what he quite obviously did say -- and then accuses anyone who simply quotes the Father's express beliefs, of having Lied about that Father's express beliefs.
Johannis Scotus Erigena argues in De divina praedestinatione that God, being perfectly good, wants all humans to be saved, and does not predestine souls to damnation. God's being is His willing and ‘no necessity binds the will of God’. On the contrary, humans damn themselves through their own free choices: ‘Sin, death, unhappiness are not from God’. Since God is outside time, He cannot be said to fore-know or to pre-destine, terms that involve temporal predicates. Furthermore, if God's being is His wisdom, God can be said to have but a single knowledge and hence a ‘double’ predestination cannot be ascribed to Him. Human nature, on the other hand, was created rational, and rationality requires freedom. Human nature is therefore essentially free: ‘For God did not create in man a captive will but a free one, and that freedom remained after sin’.
Eriugena had a justified reputation among his contemporaries as a man of considerable learning. Florus calls him scholasticus et eruditus (PL CXIX 103a) and Anastasius, the Vatican librarian of the day, marveled at the fact that this ‘barbarian’ (vir barbarus) from a remote land knew Greek.
Nothing is known about Eriugena's place or date of birth or of the circumstances of his early life, but, on the basis of circumstantial evidence and some surviving testimonia (helpfully gathered in Brennan, 1986), it is conjectured that he was born in Ireland around 800 or possibly slightly earlier (c. 790). His Irish provenance is confirmed by the fact that he self-consciously signed his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ works with the neologism ‘Eriugena’ (Patrologia Latina, hereafter PL, CXXII 1236a) meaning ‘Irish born’, a word possibly modelled on the Virgilian ‘Graiugena’ found in one of his poems and also in Columbanus’ Ad Filiolum 119..
Eriugena's uniqueness lies in the fact that, quite remarkably for a scholar in Western Europe in the Carolingian era, he had considerable familiarity with the Greek language, affording him access to the Greek Christian theological tradition, from the Cappadocians to Gregory of Nyssa, hitherto almost entirely unknown in the Latin West. He also produced a complete, if somewhat imperfect, Latin translation of the Corpus Dionysii, the works of the obscure, possibly Syrian, Christian Neoplatonist, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a follower of Proclus. In addition, Eriugena translated Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio and Maximus Confessor's Ambigua ad Iohannem, and possibly other works, such as Epiphanius' Anchoratus.
Eriugena's thought is best understood as a sustained attempt to create a consistent, systematic, Christian Neoplatonism from diverse but primarily Christian sources. Eriugena had a unique gift for identifying the underlying intellectual framework, broadly Neoplatonic but also deeply Christian, assumed by the writers of the Christian East. Drawing especially on Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus Confessor, as well as on the more familiar authorities (auctores) of the Latin West (e.g. Cicero, Martianus Capella, Augustine, Boethius), he developed a highly original cosmology, where the highest principle, the ‘the immovable self-identical one’ (unum et idipsum immobile, Periphyseon, Patrologia Latina CXXII I. 476b), engenders all things and retrieves them back into itself. Contrary to what some earlier commentators supposed, it is most unlikely that Eriugena had direct knowledge of the original texts of Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, or other pagan Neoplatonists, but he did have some direct knowledge of Plato (a portion of Timaeus in the translation of Calcidius) as well as familiarity with the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem.
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OP, The words of a giant of the Orthodox church in the West was twisted to suit others needs and his words were taken out of context. The Orthodox say the following:
For the first thousand years of Christian history, when the Church was visibly one and undivided, the holy gifts of the Body and Blood of Christ were received as just that: His Body and Blood. The Church confessed this was a mystery: The bread is truly His Body, and that which is in the cup is truly His Blood, but one cannot say how they become so.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries brought on the scholastic era, the Age of Reason in the West. The Roman Church, which had become separated from the Orthodox Church in A.D. 1054, was pressed by the rationalists to define how the transformation takes place. They answered with the word transubstantiation, meaning a change of substance. The elements are no longer bread and wine; they are physically changed into flesh and blood. The sacrament, which only faith can comprehend, was subjected to a philosophical definition. This second view of the Eucharist was unknown to the ancient Church.
Not surprisingly, one of the points of disagreement between Rome and the sixteenth-century reformers was the issue of transubstantiation. Unable to accept this explanation of the sacrament, the radical reformers, who were rationalists themselves, took up the opposite point of view: the gifts are nothing but bread and wine, period. They only represent Christ's Body and Blood; they have no spiritual reality. This third, symbol-only view helps explain the infrequency with which some Protestants partake of the Eucharist.
the Orthodox tradition does use the term "symbols" for the eucharistic gifts. It calls, the service a "mystery" and the sacrifice of the liturgy a "spiritual and bloodless sacrifice." These terms are used by the holy fathers and the liturgy itself.
The Orthodox Church uses such expressions because in Orthodoxy what is real is not opposed to what is symbolical or mystical or spiritual. On the contrary! In the Orthodox view, all of reality -- the world and man himself -- is real to the extent that it is symbolical and mystical, to the extent that reality itself must reveal and manifest God to us. Thus, the eucharist in the Orthodox Church is understood to be the genuine Body and Blood of Christ precisely because bread and wine are the mysteries and symbols of God's true and genuine presence and manifestation to us in Christ. Thus, by eating and drinking the bread and wine which are mystically consecrated by the Holy Spirit, we have genuine communion with God through Christ who is himself "the bread of life" (Jn 6:34, 41).
The mystery of the holy eucharist defies analysis and explanation in purely rational and logical terms. For the eucharist -- and Christ himself -- is indeed a mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven which, as Jesus has told us, is "not of this world." The eucharist -- because it belongs to God's Kingdom -- is truly free from the earth-born "logic" of fallen humanity.
-------------- That is what Johannis Scotus Erigena was saying in Greek and in Latin but the Protestants removed from the original tradition can no longer comprehend that what Johannis Scotus Erigena was talking about was as explained above - they took the richly textured words and made them flat.
At your scholarly service always.