Anthroposophical Guidelines

The Supposed Extinguishing of Spiritual Knowledge in Modern Times

In order to correctly judge Anthroposophy in its relation to the evolution of the Consciousness Soul, one must again observe the spiritual constitution of civilized humanity, which began with the advent of natural science and reached its peak in the nineteenth century, and compare its character with that of previous ages. In the [previous] ages of conscious evolution of humanity, knowledge was seen as what brought man together with the spirit-world. Knowledge was considered to be what related man to spirit. In art and religion knowledge lived.

This changed with the advent of the Consciousness Soul. Knowledge began to have little to do with a large part of human soul-life. It was used to investigate the development of man's relation to existence when he concentrated his senses and his intellectual judgment toward “nature”. But people no longer wanted to use it to determine how man develops his relation to the spirit-world when he uses his capacity for inner perception as opposed to his senses.

Thus the necessity arose to associate human spiritual life to past knowledge, to tradition, instead of to the present. Human soul life was torn in two. Striving for knowledge of nature in the present was the goal on the one hand. On the other hand was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, from which knowledge flowed from olden times. All understanding of how this relation came about in previous times was gradually lost. Humanity possessed the tradition, but no longer the way in which the traditional truths had become known. One could only believe in the tradition.

Someone who considered the spiritual situation around the middle of the nineteenth century with complete presence of mind, would have to recognize that humanity had come to the point where it could only be considered capable of developing cognition which had nothing to do with the spirit. Humanity of previous times was able to investigate the spirit; however, the capacity for this kind of investigation had been lost. The consequences of this attitude was not taken into account. Rather it was said: knowledge about the spiritual world is simply not attainable; it can only be an object of faith.

In order to shed some light on this fact, let us look back to the times when Grecian wisdom had to retreat before a Christianized Rome. When the last Grecian philosophy schools were closed by the Emperor Justinian, the last keepers of the old wisdom migrated out of the region where European spirituality was meant to develop. They found a home in the Gondishapur Academy in Asia. This was one of the places in the east where, through Alexander's actions, the old knowledge was preserved in the form Aristotle had been able to give it.

But it was then taken over by the oriental stream which could be called Arabism. On the one hand, Arabism was a premature unfolding of the Consciousness Soul. It offered the possibility of a premature soul-life working in the direction of the Consciousness Soul to spread like a spiritual wave from Asia to Africa and southern and western Europe, and filled certain Europeans with an intellectualism which should only have appeared later on. In the seventh and eighth centuries southern and western Europe received spiritual impulses which should not have appeared before the Consciousness Soul epoch. That spiritual wave could awaken the intellectual in man; not, however, the more profound experience through which the soul enters into the spirit-world.

Although the human being activated his intellectual ability from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, he could only reach a profundity of soul which did not touch the spiritual world. The Arabism which entered into European spiritual life held man's intellect back from the spirit-world. It brought the intellect - prematurely - into an activity that could only grasp the natural world.

And this Arabism proved itself to be very powerful. Whoever absorbed it began to feel - mostly unconsciously - pride in his soul. He felt the power of intellectualism; but not the incapability of the mere intellect to penetrate reality. Thus he gave himself over to the external reality of the senses, but it did not occur to him to approach spiritual reality.

This was the case for spiritual life during the middle ages. It had the vast traditions of the spirit-world; but the mind was so intellectually impregnated - one might even say secretly - by Arabism, that knowledge had no access to the sources from which these traditions derived.

From the early middle ages on, a battle went on between what man felt instinctively as a relation to the spirit, and the form thinking had absorbed through Arabism. One felt the world of ideas within. He experienced it as something real. But he didn't find the strength in his soul to experience the spirit in the ideas. Thus realism arose, which felt that reality existed in the ideas, but could not find this reality. Realism heard the cosmic word speaking in the world of ideas, but was incapable of understanding its language.

Nominalism, opposed to this view, denied that the speaking even existed because it could not be understood. According to nominalism, the world of ideas was only a sum of formulas in the human mind without roots in a spiritual reality.

This current continued into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the mode of thinking for knowledge of nature. It constructed a magnificent system for the observation of the natural world, but destroyed insight into the essence of the world of ideas. Realism experienced a lifeless existence. It knew about the reality of the world of ideas, but could not attain to it with living knowledge.

We will attain to it when Anthroposophy finds the way from the ideas to the spiritual experience in the ideas. Truly progressive realism, as a path of knowledge, must stand side by side with natural scientific nominalism, thereby showing that knowledge of the spiritual in humanity is not extinguished, but can be renewed in human evolution by newly opened sources in the soul.

Goetheanum, March 1925

177. Observing the development of humanity in the natural-scientific age initially offers a sad perspective. Human knowledge with respect to the outer world is brilliant. One the other hand, a kind of consciousness has arisen which considers that knowledge of the spirit-world is no longer even possible.
178. It seems as though man possessed such knowledge only in ancient times and that as regards the spiritual world one must be satisfied accepting the old traditions and making them objects of faith.
179. Due to the resulting uncertainty in respect to the relation of man to the spiritual world during the middle ages, a disbelief in the spiritual content of ideas arose in nominalism, the continuation of which is the modern view of nature; and as the awareness of the reality of ideas in realism which, however, can only find its realization through Anthroposophy.