 This clearly implies that humanity as a whole, that is, resurrected human nature in its perfected state, will be truly illuminated and merged with the divine, for human nature itself in its true essence is the intellectus omnium. Furthermore, the use of the future tense here is somewhat misleading, since time itself is a function of our fallen state and the perfected state is timeless so there is a sense in which perfected human nature already is one with God and always has been one with God. Eriugena, then, has a dialectical understanding of the relation of God and man which can be viewed as orthodox from one point of view, but which is always transgressing the boundaries of orthodoxy in the direction of a view which has God and man mutually contemplating themselves and each other, in an endless, eternal play of theophanies. Thus, a kind of mystical humanism is celebrated in Periphyseon Book Four, a humanism unfolded through the dialectic of self-knowledge and ignorance.