Aristotelians and Platonists

The evolution of the Michaelic streams has taken us from ancient Greece into the times and lives of Steiner and Schröer. Before proceeding to the present we can review the stages of incarnation of the Michaelic impulses, up to the time in which they can work together, and no longer in succession. In ancient Greece the oracles were followed by the Mysteries. The state of union of inner world and nature still held sway at the time in which the oracles spoke to the ancient Greek and offered indications about the life of the individual and of the social body. The ancient Greek of that time had not developed a life of thought; he experienced the surrounding world in images, and felt himself a part of the life of nature. He experienced what Steiner called the “wonders of the world.” From this original state of union of microcosmos and macrocosmos Greece moved into the time of the “trials of the soul.” This meant moving from oracles to Mysteries, with the transi-tion most clearly played out in the sanctuary of Delphi with its oracle of the Sun and its Dionysian Mysteries. Dionysus opened the way for a more indi-vidualized connection to the spiritual world through the stages of trials that found the individual worthy of being initiated into the spirit. Along this path Dionysus himself was the hierophant, first in the body, then as a disincar-nated entity. The life of the Mysteries came to a state of decadence roughly around the 6th century BC. It was then Plato, the reincarnated Dionysus, who led the way out of the Mysteries and disciplined the faculties of think-ing from which philosophy developed its early rudiments. Plato still acted like the hierophant of the new faculty of thinking. He helped in the transi-tion from the culture of the Mysteries into the newly evolving faculties of the intellect. Aristotle perceived that the human being needed a complete sever-ance from the realm of the Mysteries. He turned his gaze to the life between birth and death. In his categories, or in his logic, lived concepts that mirror the reality of both spiritual and physical worlds, and can be confirmed through clairvoyance. Nevertheless one need not be clairvoyant in order to elaborate such concepts, and anyone with healthy thinking could verify their lawfulness. Here we may see a first gesture/contrast between Plato and Aristotle. Plato gathers everything from the past. He carries memories from his life before birth, centuries after these had faded from the experience of most Greeks. He gathers all the wisdom of the Mysteries, both from Greece and from Egypt, and makes it available to the pupil. In the process some of this knowledge is corrupted and can no longer be entirely trusted; it is like a long-gone memory. Through Platonism, conditions are gathered for the en-vironment to take on a new evolutionary step. The Athenian polis, of which Plato is the proud son, can soon become the cosmopolis under Alexander the Great and Aristotle. The fruits of Plato’s Academy, and especially of Aristotle’s Lyceum, can now be disseminated from the West to the East. They have reached ripeness in a thinking that can apprehend the reality of both the natural world and the soul, a thinking that can even reflect upon itself. After Aristotle no philosophy reaches the pinnacles of the master for centuries to come. Plato gathered the fruit of the past and created a space in which a solid platform for the future could be built. Aristotle alone, at the time of Michael’s last regency before the present age, could sow the seeds of the future and create the conditions for a cosmopolitan and universal culture. The Middle Ages recreate and metamorphose this gesture anew. The School of Chartres gathers the fruits of the Mystery traditions of the Middle East and of Europe. Chartres recapitulates and extracts the essence of the past, and most of all it recaptures the impulses of Plato and Christianizes them. Chartres’ teachers live in a condition of consciousness that has long disap-peared from the immediate environment. They can perceive the cosmic In-telligence and communicate it with enthusiasm to their pupils, who can lift themselves to a higher level of perception and live in the imaginations their masters have conjured up. The teachers offer their pupils glorious echoes of the past. Chartres and the Cistercians do something else: they tame the land-scape of Europe, they reclaim the wetlands, they put untamed lands under cultivation, they increase agricultural yields and help prevent famines. Theirs is an eminently social impulse. In essence the Platonic impulse once more prepares the ground and the conditions for a momentous change, and no more fitting image could be mentioned than that of the great cathedrals, whose secret dies with the end of the Chartres impulse. The teachers of Chartres live anonymous lives; they do not yet feel the impulse towards stronger individualism that comes from the cosmic Intelligence turning earthly. This is also why they cannot repulse the dangers looming in the near future, especially in the cultural realm—they who live in conditions rather reminiscent of the past. The School of Chartres also brought to its end a great revival. It pre-served everything from the past that was worth saving. It linked Christianity with the philosophy of Plato. It created the social conditions under which new evolutionary steps could be taken. Just imagine the landscape of Eu-rope without the cathedrals and without the network of economic activity created by the Cistercians. The Dominicans show an essentially different gesture. Their sphere of activity moves from the frontiers of nature, dear to the masters of Char-tres and the Cistercians, to the growing urban environments. They want to place themselves center-stage in the growing culture of the Middle Ages. They live in the cities and promote the cultural life of the emerging univer-sities. They tackle the questions of knowledge that are so central at a time in which the cosmic Intelligence, growing earthly, runs the risk of falling prey to Ahriman. The Scholastics’ role in the Michaelic movement is less conspicuous, but more critical for the future. They fight cultural battles on two fronts. They fight a return to the past in the Arabism of Averroes, who predicates a human intelligence deprived of individuality, and who distorts the heritage of Aristotle and directs it to purposes it was never devised for. They fight against Nominalism, that tendency to see a world devoid of meaning, a dis-sociation between the world of the senses and the concepts used to under-stand it. Nominalism would have created many of the negative conditions for the Consciousness Soul, visible at present, before its time. Thomas Aquinas resurrects the thought of Aristotle and preserves the realms of rea-son and faith in a manner that still allows their reunification in modern times. In this second stage we see again the gesture of collecting every-thing from the past, even if for a short interlude, and creating the cultural and social conditions for a more cosmopolitan future. This is what the Pla-tonists can offer to culture. On this solid foundation a truly cosmopolitan cultural impulse can take root that sets the tone for the culture of the Con-sciousness Soul and averts the main threats to its blossoming. We now come to the 19th and 20th centuries, to the doorstep of our own world. German idealism leads the way, but one should not forget Great Britain’s Romantic literature, and the transcendentalist movement in the United States, among others. The German Platonists counter the rising ma-terialism and scientific outlook of the age with the innate feeling that the human soul can find from within answers to the world riddle, that nature need not live at odds with the human soul. Each of the German Platonists knows he can reach this goal, even from very different points of departure.