The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Apparent Extinction of Knowledge of the Spirit in Modern Times

[ 1 ] Those who wish to judge anthroposophy correctly in its relation to the development of the consciousness soul must always direct their attention anew to that spiritual constitution of cultural humanity which begins with the blossoming of the natural sciences and which reaches its climax in the nineteenth century.

[ 2 ] Put the character of this age before the eye of the soul and compare it with that of earlier ages. In all times of the conscious development of mankind, knowledge was regarded as that which brings man together with the spirit world. What one was in relation to the spirit was ascribed to knowledge. Knowledge lived in art and religion.

[ 3 ] This changed when the dawn of the age of consciousness began. That is when knowledge began to stop caring about a large part of human soul life. It wanted to investigate what man develops as a relationship to existence when he directs his senses and his judgmental intellect towards "nature". But it no longer wanted to concern itself with what man develops as a relationship to the spirit world when he uses his inner perceptive faculty in the same way as the senses.

[ 4 ] So the necessity arose to connect the spiritual life of man not to the knowledge of the present, but to knowledge of the past, to traditions.

[ 5 ] Human spiritual life was split into two. In front of man stood the knowledge of nature, always striving further on the one side, unfolding in the living present. On the other side was the experience of a relationship to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding knowledge had flowed in older times. For this experience, all understanding of how the corresponding knowledge came about in the past was gradually lost. One had the tradition, but no longer the way in which the traditional truths were recognized. One could only believe in the tradition.

[ 6 ] A person who thought about the spiritual situation in full reflection around the middle of the nineteenth century should have said to himself: Humanity has come to consider itself capable only of developing a knowledge that has nothing to do with the spirit. What can be known about the spirit could have been explored by an earlier mankind; but the capacity for this exploration has been lost to the human soul.

[ 7 ] The full extent of what actually existed was not presented to the soul's eye. - One limited oneself to saying: Knowledge does not reach as far as the spiritual world; this can only be the object of faith.

[ 8 ] To shed some light on this fact, look back to the times when Greek wisdom had to retreat before Christianized Romanism. When the last Greek schools of philosophy were closed by the Emperor Justinian, the last keepers of ancient knowledge also migrated away from the area in which the European intellectual system was now developing. They found refuge at the Academy of Gondishapur in Asia. It was one of the places where the tradition of ancient knowledge had been preserved in the East through the deeds of Alexander. It lived there in the form that Aristotle was able to give this ancient knowledge.

[ 9 ] But it was seized by the oriental current that can be described as Arabism. Arabism is, on the one hand, a premature development of the soul of consciousness. Through the soul life working too early in the direction of the consciousness soul, it offered the possibility that a spiritual wave poured out in it from Asia via Africa, Southern Europe and Western Europe, which filled certain European people with an intellectualism that was only allowed to come later; Southern and Western Europe received spiritual impulses in the seventh and eighth centuries that should only have come in the age of the consciousness soul.

[ 10 ] This spiritual wave was able to awaken the intellectual in man, but not the deeper experience through which the soul dives into the spirit world.

[ 11 ] When man in the fifteenth to the nineteenth century brought his cognitive faculty into activity, he could only submerge to a depth of soul in which he had not yet encountered the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] The Arabism that entered European intellectual life kept the cognizing souls back from the spiritual world. It brought - prematurely - the intellect into effect, which could only grasp external nature.

[ 13 ] And this Arabism proved to be very powerful. Whoever was seized by it, an inner - for the most part quite unconscious - arrogance began to take hold of his soul. He felt the power of intellectualism; but he did not feel the inability of the mere intellect to penetrate reality. So he left himself to the external sensuous reality, which presented itself to man through itself; but he did not even think of approaching the spiritual reality.

[ 14 ] This was the situation faced by medieval spiritual life. It had the mighty traditions of the spirit world; but its soul life was so intellectually impregnated by the - one might say: secretly - working Arabism that knowledge had no access to the sources from which the content of this tradition ultimately came.

[ 15 ] From the early Middle Ages onwards, what was instinctively felt in people as a spiritual connection struggled with the form that thought had assumed through Arabism.

[ 16 ] One felt the world of ideas within oneself. One experienced it as something real. But one did not find the strength in the soul to experience the spirit in the ideas. This gave rise to realism, which perceived reality in ideas but was unable to find this reality. Realism heard the speaking of the world word in the world of ideas, but was unable to understand the language.

[ 17 ] The nominalism that opposed it denied that speech existed at all because it could not be understood. For him, the world of ideas was merely a sum of formulas in the human soul without a root in a spiritual reality.

[ 18 ] What surged in these currents lived on into the nineteenth century. Nominalism became the way of thinking about the knowledge of nature. It built up a magnificent system of views of the sensory world, but it destroyed insight into the nature of the world of ideas. - Realism lived a dead existence. It knew of the reality of the world of ideas; but it could not arrive at it in living cognition.

[ 19 ] It will be reached when anthroposophy finds the path from the ideas to the experience of spirit in the ideas. In truly advanced realism, a path of knowledge must stand alongside scientific nominalism that shows that the knowledge of the spiritual in humanity has not been extinguished, but can re-enter human development in a new ascent from newly opened human soul sources.

Goetheanum, March 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 177 to 179
(March 29, 1925)

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Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding consideration: the apparent extinction of spiritual knowledge in novelty)

[ 20 ] 177. Whoever casts a glance at the development of humanity in the scientific age is initially presented with a sad perspective. Man's knowledge of everything that is external becomes brilliant. On the other hand, a kind of consciousness sets in as if knowledge of the spirit world is no longer possible at all.

[ 21 ] 178. It seems as if people had only had such knowledge in ancient times, and as if, with regard to the spiritual world, one had to be content with taking up the old traditions and making them an object of faith.

[ 22 ] 179. From the uncertainty that arises from this towards the relationship of man to the spiritual world in the Middle Ages, the disbelief in the spiritual content of ideas arises in nominalism, the continuation of which is the modern view of nature, and as knowledge of the reality of ideas a realism, which, however, can only find its fulfillment through anthroposophy.