The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Worldviews in the Middle Ages

[ 1 ] A new element emerges from Augustine (354-430) like a premonition, only to flow on imperceptibly in the religious imagination that covers it and only emerge more clearly in the later Middle Ages. In Augustine, the new is like a recollection of Greek thought. He looks around and within himself and says to himself: "Even if everything that the world reveals is uncertain and deceptive, there is one thing that cannot be doubted: the certainty of spiritual experience itself. This is not granted to me by any perception that can deceive me; in this I am in it myself; it is, because I am in it, in that its being is attributed to it.

[ 2 ] We can see something new in these ideas compared to the Greek life of thought, even though they initially resemble a recollection of the same. Greek thought points to the soul; Augustine points to the center of the soul's life. The Greek thinkers consider the soul in its relationship to the world; Augustine contrasts the life of the soul with something in it and considers this life of the soul as a special, self-contained world. One can call the center of the life of the soul the "I" of man. The relationship of the soul to the world is a mystery to Greek thinkers; the relationship of the "I" to the soul is a mystery to more recent thinkers. With Augustine this was only just beginning to emerge; the subsequent efforts to develop a world view still had too much to do to harmonize world view and religion for them to become clearly aware of the new thing that had now entered spiritual life. And yet, more or less unconsciously, the endeavor to look at the riddles of the world in the way demanded by the new element lives on. With thinkers such as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas of Aquino (1227-1274), this still emerges in such a way that although they ascribe to human thinking, which is based on itself, the ability to investigate world processes to a certain extent, they limit this ability. For them there is a higher spiritual reality to which thinking left to itself can never come, but which must be revealed to it in a religious way. In the sense of Thomas Aquinas, man's soul life is rooted in the reality of the world; however, this soul life cannot recognize this reality in its full extent by itself. Man could not know how his being stands within the course of the world if the spiritual being, to which his cognition does not penetrate, did not lean towards him and communicate to him by way of revelation what must remain hidden to cognition based only on its own power. Thomas Aquinas builds his world view from this premise. It has two parts, one consisting of the truths that are accessible to our own thought experience of the natural course of things; this part leads into another, which contains what has come to the human soul through the Bible and religious revelation. Something must therefore penetrate the soul that is not accessible to its own life if it wants to feel itself in its full essence.

[ 3 ] Thomas of Aquino familiarized himself completely with Aristotle's worldview. He became like his master in the life of thought. Thomas is thus the most outstanding, but nevertheless only one of the many personalities of the Middle Ages who based their own ideas entirely on those of Aristotle. For centuries, Aristotle became "the master of those who know", as Dante expressed his reverence for Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas strove to comprehend in the Aristotelian manner what is humanly comprehensible. Aristotle's worldview thus became his guide to the limit to which the human soul can penetrate with its own powers; beyond this limit lies what, in Thomas' view, the Greek worldview could not achieve. For Thomas Aquinas, therefore, human thought needs another light to illuminate it. He finds this light in revelation. However the following thinkers approached revelation, they could no longer accept the life of thought in the Greek way. It is not enough for them that thinking understands the world; they presuppose that there must be a way to give thinking itself a foundation to support it. The endeavor arises to fathom the relationship of man to his soul life. Man thus sees himself as a being that is present in his soul life. If we call this "something" the "I", then we can say that in more recent times the consciousness of the "I" is being awakened within the life of the soul, just as the thought was born in the Greek worldview. No matter what different forms the worldview endeavors take in this age, they all revolve around the exploration of the I-entity. But this fact does not clearly enter the consciousness of thinkers everywhere. Most of them believe that they are devoted to completely different questions. One could say that the "riddle of the ego" appears in the most diverse masks. Sometimes it lives in the world-views of thinkers in such a concealed way that the assertion that one or the other view is concerned with this enigma appears to be an arbitrary or forced opinion. In the nineteenth century, the struggle with the "ego riddle" is expressed most intensely, and the worldviews of the present live in the midst of this struggle.

[ 4 ] This "world enigma" is already alive in the dispute between nominalists and realists in the Middle Ages. Anselm of Canterbury can be called a bearer of realism. For him, the general thoughts that people have when they look at the world are not mere descriptions that the soul makes up, but are rooted in a real life. If one forms the general concept of "lion" in order to designate all lions with it, then certainly only the individual lions have reality in the sense of being sensual; but the general concept of "lion" is not a mere summarizing designation that only has meaning for the use of the human soul. It is rooted in a spiritual world, and the individual lions of the sensory world are manifold embodiments of the one "lion nature", which expresses itself in the "idea of the lion". Such a "reality of ideas" was opposed by nominalists such as Roscellin (also in the eleventh century). For him, the "general ideas" are only summarizing designations, names which the soul forms for its use, for its orientation, but which do not correspond to any reality. Only the individual things are real. The dispute is characteristic of the mood of its bearers. They both feel the need to investigate the validity and meaning of the thoughts that the soul must form. They have a different attitude towards thoughts than Plato and Aristotle had towards them. The reason for this is that something took place between the end of the Greek development of the world view and the beginning of the modern one, something that lies beneath the surface of historical development, but which is clearly noticeable in the way the personalities relate to their thought life. Thought approached the Greek thinker like a perception. It appeared in the soul as the red color appears when a person confronts the rose. And the thinker received it like a perception. As such, the thought had a very direct power of persuasion. The Greek thinker had the feeling, when he confronted the spiritual world with his soul receptively, that an incorrect thought could no more penetrate into this soul from the spiritual world than the perception of a winged horse could come from the sense world with the correct use of the senses. For the Greek it is a matter of being able to draw thoughts from the world. These themselves testify to their truth. Neither sophistry nor skepticism speaks against this fact. Both have a completely different shade in antiquity than they have in modern times. They do not speak against the fact, which is particularly evident in the actual characters of thinkers, that the Greek felt thought to be much more elementary, more substantive, more alive, more real than the man of modern times can feel it. This vitality, which in Greece gave thought the character of perception, is no longer present in the Middle Ages. What has taken place is this: Just as in Greek times thought moved into the human soul and eradicated the old pictorial imagination, so in the Middle Ages the consciousness of the "I" moved into souls; and this dampened the vitality of thought; it took away its power of perception. One can only realize how the life of world-view progresses if one sees through how the thought, the idea, was in fact something quite different for Plato and Aristotle than for the personalities of the Middle Ages and the new age. The thinker of antiquity had the feeling that the thought was given to him; the thinker of later times has the feeling that he forms the thought; and so the question arises for him: What meaning for reality can that have which is formed in the soul? The Greek felt himself as a soul separated from the world; in thought he sought to connect himself with the spiritual world; the later thinker feels alone with his thought life. This is how research into the "general ideas" arises. One asks: What have I actually formed in them? Are they only rooted in me, or do they point to a reality?

[ 5 ] In the times that lie between the old worldview current and the newer one, Greek thought life dries up; beneath the surface, however, the human soul is approached as a fact by the I-consciousness; from the middle of the Middle Ages onwards, man faces this accomplished fact, and through its power the new kind of life puzzle develops. Realism and nominalism are the symptom of man's perception of the accomplished fact. The way in which both speak about thought shows that it was as dulled and muted in relation to its existence in the Greek soul as the old pictorial conception was in the soul of the Greek thinker.

[ 6 ] This refers to the driving element that lives in the newer worldviews. A force is at work in them that strives beyond thought for a new reality factor. One cannot perceive this striving of the newer age as the same as the striving beyond thought in ancient times with Pythagoras and later with Plotinus. These also strive beyond thought, but they imagine that the development of the soul, its perfection, must attain the region that lies beyond thought. The newer era assumes that the reality factor lying beyond thought must be given to the soul from outside, that it must come to it.

[ 7 ] In the centuries following the age of nominalism and realism, the development of the worldview becomes a search for the new reality factor. One path among those that show themselves to the observer of this search is that taken by the medieval mystics: Master Eckhard (d. 1327), Johannes Tauler (d. 1361), Heinrich Suso (d. 1366). This path is most vividly illustrated by a consideration of the so-called "Theologia deutsch", which originates from a historically unknown author. These mystics want to receive something into the I-consciousness, to fill it with something. They therefore strive for an inner life that is "completely serene", that surrenders itself in peace, and that expects the soul's interior to be filled with the "divine I". In later times, a similar mood of the soul with more momentum of the spirit appears in Angelus Silesius (1624-1677).

[ 8 ] Nicolaus Cusanus (Nikolaus Chrypffs, born in Kues on the Moselle in 1401, died in 1464) took a different path. He strives beyond the knowledge that can be attained intellectually to a state of mind in which this knowledge ceases and the soul encounters its God in "knowing ignorance", docta ignorantia. On the surface, this is very similar to Plotinus' quest. However, the state of the soul is different in the two personalities. Plotinus is convinced that there is more to the human soul than the world of thought. When the soul develops its own power outside of thought, it perceptively reaches where it always is, without knowing it in ordinary life; Cusanus feels alone with his "I"; this has no connection with his God. He is outside the "I". The "I" encounters him when it reaches "knowing ignorance".

[ 9 ] Paracelsus (1493-1541) already had the feeling towards nature that developed more and more in the newer world view and which is an effect of the soul feeling lonely in the ego consciousness. He directs his gaze to the phenomena of nature. They cannot be accepted by the soul as they present themselves; but even thought, which in Aristotle's case unfolded in calm communion with natural phenomena, cannot be accepted as it appears in the soul. It is not perceived; it is formed in the soul. Paracelsus felt that one must not let the thought speak for itself; one must presuppose that there is something behind the phenomena of nature which reveals itself when one brings oneself into the right relationship with them. One must be able to receive something from nature that one does not form oneself in the sight of it, like thought. One must relate to one's ego through another factor of reality than through thought. Paracelsus seeks a "higher nature" behind nature. The mood of his soul is such that he does not want to experience something in himself alone in order to arrive at the reasons for existence, but that he wants to bore himself, as it were, with his ego into the processes of nature in order to have the spirit of these processes revealed to him beneath the surface of the sensory world. The mystics of antiquity wanted to penetrate into the depths of the soul; Paracelsus wanted to undertake that which would lead to an encounter with the roots of nature in the outer world.

[ 10 ] Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), who as a lonely, persecuted craftsman formed a world view as if out of inner enlightenment, nevertheless carries the basic character of modern times into this world view. Indeed, he even develops this basic character particularly impressively in the solitude of his soul life, because the inner duality of soul life, the contrast between the ego and the other soul experiences, appears before his mind's eye. He experiences the "I" as it creates the inner contrast in his own soul life, as it is reflected in his own soul. He then finds this inner experience in the processes of the world. He sees in this experience a dichotomy that runs through everything. "In such contemplation one finds two qualities, one good and one evil, which are in this world in all forces, in stars and elements, as well as in all creatures in each other." The evil in the world also stands opposite the good as its reflection; the good first becomes aware of itself in the evil, just as the ego becomes aware of itself in its soul experiences.