24. On Scotus Eriugena
GA 87/1902-04-26/p012
·1902-04-26
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Auch wenn die Mitschrift noch nicht die später übliche Genauigkeit aufweist» (Even though the transcript does not yet have the accuracy usual later). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 87), which calls the cycle the earliest of which a listener's transcript exists. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
This is the path to the heights of mystical knowledge as opposed to external scientific knowledge. Positive theology, which therefore really says something for man, is only a down payment. This knowledge only becomes negative theology because man is forced to say to himself that there is something hidden in the primal grounds of existence. So where, above all, the realization of inadequacy emerges, where the right to doubt awakens, where the feeling awakens that knowledge is only a support in the effort to advance towards divinity - this is where negative theology arises.
Read this passage in another edition