 The two outstanding Latin thinkers of the time shared to some extent this style of thinking and yet were in many respects complete exceptions to it.  John Scottus Eriugena,  an Irishman who worked at the court of Charles the Bald in northern France from c. 850–c. 870, learned Greek, translated pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor and absorbed their ideas. His masterpiece, the Periphyseon, systematizes and takes to its rational conclusion the line of thought they drew from Proclus (and ultimately Plotinus and Plato). Eriugena uses his contemporaries’ favourite logical textbook, a Latin paraphrase of Aristotle’s Categories, to argue that God is not among the things that exist, before showing how he is manifest, never in himself, but in the appearances that make up the story of the world’s creation, the Fall, and the final Return of all things.