The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Life of Thought from the Beginning of the Christian era to John Scotus or Erigena

[ 1 ] In the age that follows the flowering of the Greek worldviews, these are submerged in the religious life of this age. The worldview current disappears, so to speak, into the religious movements and only reappears at a later point in time. This is not to say that these religious movements are not connected with the progress of worldview life. Rather, this is the case in the most comprehensive sense. But it is not the intention here to say anything about the development of religious life. It is only intended to characterize the progression of worldviews insofar as this results from the experience of thought as such.

[ 2 ] After the exhaustion of the Greek life of thought, an age enters the spiritual life of mankind in which religious impulses become the driving forces of the intellectual worldview. What his own mystical experience was for Plotinus, the inspiration for his ideas, became the religious impulses for the spiritual development of mankind in a more widespread life in an age that began with the exhaustion of the Greek world view and lasted until about the time of Scotus Erigena (d. 877 A.D.). The development of thought did not come to a complete standstill in this age; in fact, magnificent, comprehensive thought structures unfolded. However, the powers of thought do not draw their sources from themselves, but from religious impulses. 86 In this age, the religious mode of imagination flows through the developing human souls, and the world views flow from the impulses of this mode of imagination. The thoughts that emerge are the Greek thoughts that continue to have an effect. These are taken up and transformed, but they are not brought to any growth out of themselves. World views emerge from the background of religious life. What lives in them is not the unfolding thought; it is the religious impulses that urge to find expression in the thoughts that have been attained.

[ 3 ] This development can be observed in individual significant phenomena. On European soil, we see Platonic and older conceptions struggling to understand what the religions proclaim, or fighting against it. Important thinkers try to justify what religion reveals in the light of the old world views. This is how what history calls gnosis comes about, in a more Christian or more pagan coloration. Personalities who come into consideration for gnosis are Valentinus, Basilides and Marcion. Their thought creation is a comprehensive idea of the development of the world. Recognition, gnosis, when it rises from the intellectual to the super-ideological, leads to the conception of a supreme world-creating entity. This being is far above everything that is perceived by man as the world. And also far superior are the beings which it lets emerge from itself, the eons. But these form a descending series of development, so that an aeon as a more imperfect one always emerges from a more perfect one. The Creator of the world perceptible to man, to which man himself also belongs, is to be regarded as such an aeon at a later stage of development. An aeon of the highest degree of perfection can now connect with this world. An eon that has remained in a purely spiritual, perfect world and has developed there in the best sense, while other eons have produced imperfections and finally the sensual world with man. Thus for Gnosis the connection of two worlds is conceivable, which have undergone different paths of development, and of which the imperfect one is then at one time stimulated by the perfect one to a new development towards the perfect one. The Gnostics, who were inclined towards Christianity, saw in Christ Jesus that perfect aeon who had united with the earthly world.

[ 4 ] Personalities such as Clemens of Alexandria (died around 211 AD) and Origenes (born around 183 AD) stood more on dogmatic Christian ground. Clement takes the Greek worldviews as a preparation for Christian revelation and uses them as an instrument to express and defend Christian impulses. Origen proceeds in a similar way.

[ 5 ] As if flowing together in a comprehensive stream of ideas, the life of thought inspired by religious impulses can be found in the writings of the Areopagite Dionysius. These writings are mentioned from the year 533 A.D., are probably not written much earlier, but in their basic features, not in the details, they go back to earlier thinking of this age. The content can be outlined as follows: If the soul withdraws from everything that it can perceive and think as being, if it also goes beyond everything that it is able to think as non-being, then it can spiritually sense the realm of the supersubstantial, hidden God-being. In this, the primordial being is united with the primordial goodness and the primordial beauty. Starting from this primordial trinity, the soul sees a hierarchy of beings descending in hierarchical order up to the human being.

[ 6 ] Scotus Erigena adopted this world view in the ninth century and expanded it in his own way. For him, the world presents itself as a development in four "natural forms". The first is the "creating and uncreated nature". It contains the purely spiritual primordial ground of the world, from which the "creating and created nature" develops. This is a sum of purely spiritual entities and forces which, through their activity, first bring forth the "created and non-created nature", to which the sense world and man belong. These develop in such a way that they are absorbed into the "uncreated and non-creating nature", within which the facts of salvation, the religious means of grace, etc. operate.

[ 7 ] In the world views of the Gnostics, of Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, the human soul feels its root in a world ground on which it does not place itself through the power of thought, but from which it wants to receive the world of thought as a gift. The soul does not feel secure in the intrinsic power of thought; yet it strives to experience its relationship to the world ground in thought. It allows thought, which lived from its own power among the Greek thinkers, to be enlivened by another power, which it draws from religious impulses. In this age, thought leads, as it were, an existence in which its own power slumbers. This is also how we can think of pictorial imagination in the centuries that preceded the birth of thought. The imagination of images probably had an ancient flowering, similar to the experience of thought in Greece; then it drew its strength from other impulses, and only when it had passed through this intermediate state did it transform itself into the experience of thought. It is an intermediate state of thought growth that presents itself in the first centuries of the Christian era.

[ 8 ] In Asia, where Aristotle's views spread, the endeavor arose to express the Semitic religious impulses in the ideas of the Greek thinker. This was then transplanted to European soil and entered European intellectual life through thinkers such as Averroes, the great Aristotelian (1126-1198), Maimonides (1135-1204) and others. In Averroes we find the view that the existence of a special world of thought in the personality of man is an error. There is only one world of thought in the divine primal being. Just as one light can be reflected in many mirrors, so the one world of thought reveals itself in the many human beings. Although a further development of the world of thoughts takes place during human life on earth, this is in truth only a process in the spiritual unifying primordial being. If the human being dies, the individual revelation through him simply ceases. His thought life is only present in the one thought life. This world view allows the Greek thought experience to continue in such a way that it anchors it in the unified divine world reason. It gives the impression that it expresses the fact that the developing human soul does not feel within itself the intrinsic power of thought; therefore it transfers this power to an extra-human world power.