 Eriugena’s cosmological account has been criticized for collapsing the differences between God and creation, leading to a heresy later labeled as pantheism. There is no doubt that Eriugena’s theological intentions are orthodox, but he is a bold, speculative thinker, who believes that philosophy uncovers the true meaning of faith. Eriugena (as does Nicholas of Cusa) gives a unique place to Christ in the outgoing and return of all things. In Christ, the hypostatic union of the divine and the created orders is realized. Christ possesses all the perfections of human nature, since vir autem perfectus est Christus (Periphyseon, IV.743b), and Christ is also one in substance with God. Eriugena recognizes that Christ is unique and that the individual is not collapsed into the universal, even in the return. Humans will always be different from God in that they have been created and God is Creator (Periphyseon, IV.796b). However, a case can also be made for saying that Eriugena really intends his perfected human nature to possess divine attributes in a genuine way. The argument turns on an answer to the following question: To what extent is man made in the image and likeness of God? Eriugena has two answers: an image is not an image unless it is identical to its exemplar in all respects “except number” or “subject” (excepta subiecti ratione, Periphyseon, IV.778a). From this we may conclude that the human being differs from God in subiecto, that is, there is solely a difference in number. But difference in number does not mean that God and man stand apart from each other as two identical billiard balls would occupy different places. Neither God nor man is in space or time; both are incorporeal, and hence numerical difference, or difference in subject, can only have the Neoplatonic meaning that the first will always differ from what comes after the first. God is first, and hence man comes after. But “after” (post) here has no temporal meaning, as Eriugena emphasizes (Periphyseon, IV.808a). A second answer he gives is that God is creator and man is created, but since creation is self-manifestation, that amounts to saying no more than that God manifests himself fully in man. Eriugena sometimes qualifies this by saying that man is by grace (per gratiam) what God is by nature, quoting Maximus Confessor (e.g., Periphyseon, V.879c–880a), but elsewhere, especially in the concept of theophany or divine manifestation, he fuses the notion of nature with that of grace: all natures are theophanies, divine manifestations, so God is the source of both dona (gifts of grace) and data (what are given in nature), both are revelations of the divine nature. Indeed, there are many places where Eriugena cites texts (e.g., Maximus) to suggest that God and man mirror each other. His translation of Maximus includes the proposition: “For they say that man and God are paradigms of each other” (Dicunt enim inter se invicem paradigmata Deum et hominem, PL 122: 1220a). One is at the heart of the other. Similarly, human nature and the angelic nature are mutually mirroring. This notion of the intertwining and merging of minds is at the very core of Eriugena’s mysticism and of his understanding of the relation between human and divine natures and their coming together in the person of Christ. Christ is actually what all human beings can become and that is precisely the promise of salvation for Eriugena. Consider the following passage from Book Two: