24. On Scotus Eriugena
GA 87/1902-04-26/p027
·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.
He therefore distinguishes between four natural powers. Under the first he understands God as the reason for creation, under the second the Platonic world of ideas, under the third the world of bodies, under the fourth God as the final purpose of creation. This is why he calls the process return, "reversio", "deificatio. To him, the whole process is the return of unity to unity, which only transforms from a creative to a non-creative one.
Read this passage in another edition