The ninth-century Irish philosopher Steiner uses to show that the pre-modern soul thought with the etheric body, not the brain.
John Scotus Erigena was a ninth-century Irish theologian whose treatise Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) divides all reality into four kinds of nature. In Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy (GA 204, 1921), Rudolf Steiner reads Erigena as the last great representative of an older constitution of the human soul, a mind that still cognised with formative life-forces rather than the brain, standing just before the great turning point of Western thinking.
John Scotus Erigena in Anthroposophy is the ninth-century Irish philosopher whose treatise Periphyseon Rudolf Steiner reads as proof that the pre-fourteenth-century soul thought with the etheric body rather than the brain. In Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy (GA 204, 1921, Dornach), Steiner treats Erigena as the last great mind of an older soul-constitution: a thinker who divided nature into four kinds, who described the human being as perceiving like an angel, and whose grand yet chaotic cosmology marks the long turning point of Western civilisation that began in the fourth century and moved cognition toward an intellect bound to the physical body. This reading places Erigena before the 1413 threshold, when humanity began to think wholly with the physical brain. Because his writings were later judged heretical and burned, anthroposophical study uses Erigena to recover a vanished way of knowing the world.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality. Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain.
What it Means Today
The scholar who did most to restore Erigena to serious study was Dermot Moran, whose The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989) argued that the Periphyseon is a coherent idealist system, not the muddled heresy its medieval condemners took it for. Moran traced how Erigena, working from the Greek of Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, built a fourfold division of nature in which the human being holds a central, mediating place. Academic readers reach the same border Steiner named: the Periphyseon reasons in a register that modern philosophy finds alien, where existence, wisdom, and life are read as veils of the Trinity and where the human being is said to perceive as an angel. Where Moran restores the text as a monument of early medieval idealism, anthroposophy asks a further question about the knower behind it. Thalira synthesis: the very strangeness that academic commentators register as Erigena's logical difficulty is, in Steiner's reading, the fingerprint of a soul still thinking through the etheric body, so the scholar's puzzlement and the seer's diagnosis describe one and the same historical fact from two sides. A reader who holds both accounts gains a sober frame, the Cambridge scholarship, and a developmental one, the change in human cognition that Steiner dates to the fifteenth century.
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