Steiner and John Paul: A Certain Accord

If you have joined me these last days, you have joined me in listening to Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner has been speaking here of the Expulsion of Spirit from the rationalist and empiricist impulses of naturalism in the last centuries.

The result is a world ever more stripped of Soul and Mystery, in favour of functionalism and utilitarianism – as I have been asserting since this webblog commenced.

Rudolf Steiner forecast that if such a state of affairs were allowed to continue, the result could only be the greatest decadence and bondage of the human spirit in the centuries to come. And what was needed most of all was ‘the Mystery of Golgotha’ the Mystery that **entered** our world two thousand years ago …

As stated, Rudolf Steiner also said in 1920 that Rome ‘alone in fact is awake’ to the tragic social consequences for a civilisation increasingly stripped of Mystery and Christic Mystery. I will return to Steiner tomorrow, but today I am going to pause a moment to listen to the more recent voice of Rome in this regard. A voice, which I think can be heard as resonating with Steiner’s, in many regards, at least.

More specifically, I turn to comments John Paul II offered in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a bestselling book and perhaps the most well read papal document of all time. The fact that John Paul broke all papal precedent to offer his thinking in this groundbreaking format, suggests that he held the contents he selected for this slim volume in the highest importance …

“[Questions of modern doubt regarding God] stem from … purely rationalist … philosophy – the history of which begins with Descartes, who split thought from existence and identified existence with reason itself. ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. (‘I think, therefore I am’).”

Such rationalism, John Paul claims, determines "***the history of European thought after Descartes***. I put Descartes in the forefront because he marks the beginning of a new era in the history of European thought and because this philosopher, who is certainly among the greatest that France has given the world, inaugurated the ***great anthropocentric shift in philosophy***. "I think, therefore I am" … is the motto of modern rationalism.

All the rationalism of the last centuries-as much in its Anglo-Saxon expression as in its Continental expression in Kantianism, Hegelianism, and the German philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to Husserl and Heidegger - can be considered a continuation and an expansion of Cartesian positions.

[In which] only that which corresponds to human thought makes sense. The objective truth of this thought is not as important, as the fact that something exists in human consciousness.

We find ourselves on the threshold of **modern immanentism** and **subjectivism**. Descartes marks the beginning of the development of the exact and natural sciences as well as of the humanistic sciences in their new expression.

He turns his back on metaphysics and concentrates on the philosophy of knowledge. Kant is the most notable representative of this movement.

Though the father of modern rationalism certainly cannot be blamed for the move away from Christianity, it is difficult not to acknowledge that he created the climate in which, in the modern era, such an estrangement became possible. It did not happen right away, but gradually.

In fact, about 150 years after Descartes, all that was **fundamentally Christian** in the tradition of European thought **had already been pushed aside**.

This was the time of the Enlightenment in France, when **pure rationalism held sway**. The French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. On the basis of this, there was a proclamation of **Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity**.

The spiritual patrimony and, in particular, the moral patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. In order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential that these return to that foundation.

Nevertheless, the process of turning away from the God of the Fathers, from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Gospel, and from the Eucharist did not bring about a rupture with a God who exists outside of the world.

In fact, **the God of the deists was always present**; perhaps … in the work of Voltaire and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and even more so in Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which marked the beginning of modern physics.

This God, however, is decidedly **a God outside of the world**. To a mentality shaped by a naturalistic consciousness of the world, a God present in the world appeared useless; similarly, a God working through man turned out to be useless to modern knowledge, to the modern science of man, which examines the workings of the conscious and the subconscious.

***The rationalism of the Enlightenment put to one side the true God - in particular, God the Redeemer***. [i.e. Christ, who is now, since the Mystery of Golgotha as Steiner would say, IN the world …]

The consequence was that ***man was supposed to live by his reason alone, as if God did not exist***. Not only was it necessary to leave God out of the objective knowledge of the world, since the existence of a Creator or of Providence was in no way helpful to science, it was also necessary to act as if God did not exist, as if God were not interested in the world.

****The rationalism of the Enlightenment was able to accept a God outside of the world primarily because it was an unverifiable hypothesis. It was crucial, however, that such a God be expelled from the world****.

(All words that I have emphasized by ***, are in italics in the original).