What is the Nature of the Opposition to Anthroposophy?

The opponents of anthroposophical thought claim that it robs man of reverence for the unknowable. This assertion is based on the fact that anthroposophy seeks means of knowledge for the spiritual world. That it wants to build a bridge between faith and knowledge. But, it is said, man's position to the spiritual must not be “dragged down” into the realm of knowledge. The essence of faith must be based on the fact that man professes its content out of free devotion, through childlike trust, while scientific knowledge does not demand such trust, but is satisfied with the recognition of what is spread out before the senses and can be grasped by the universally valid intellect. The objects of knowledge cannot, by their own nature, elevate man above himself. If anthroposophy wants to explore the supersensible, it does not promote religious feeling, but undermines it.

One cannot deny that for many religiously minded people today, these assertions have a great impact. And yet they are only brought about by the state of mind of the materialistically oriented view. Through the self-confidence with which it presents itself, it has fostered the habit of thinking that claims as a matter of course that only it proceeds from secure presuppositions and arrives at its results by logical demonstration. Without examining this approach more closely, religious natures submit to the assertion that approaches them with great certainty. They become apprehensive for their religious sensibilities; and out of this fear they would like to push the supersensible as far away as possible from the knowable. They feel that the materialistic view ultimately obscures the view of the spiritual; and because only it can be scientific, one must resort to something that man recognizes, although he must renounce all scientific insight with respect to it.

Today, anyone who expresses such thoughts is said to be speaking in an outdated way. Real science has, after all, abandoned the materialistic point of view in many of its recognized representatives. And therefore, one should no longer ascribe to them advanced science. But this objection is based on an illusion. Those who make it do not realize that although many have come to understand that the sensory and the intellectual everywhere point beyond themselves to a supersensory reality, they only accept a type of research that has been brought up through materialism. They would like to think beyond the material, but they do not accept thoughts that really break away from the material. The religiously minded cannot be satisfied with what they put forward. Therefore, they prefer to accept the older opinion that science must necessarily be materialistic; the truth about the spirit can therefore only be accessible to a non-scientific faith.

An unprejudiced historical reflection on the origin of creeds must shake this opinion. For it shows that all religious beliefs have their origin in something that mankind has once recognized as knowledge. Science has progressed; and those who have not kept pace with progress have retained an older layer of knowledge than their creed. This has thereby become a belief. Every creed was once considered to be science.

Now, however, every older science had a body of ideas about the supersensible. The older knowledge, which later became creeds, was not opposed to a “modern” “true” science that was directed only towards the sensual and material. This state of affairs has only arisen in the last three to four centuries in the development of humanity. It reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. Science has banished the spiritual from its realm altogether.

Humanity had to come to this point of development. Only through the compulsion to which the human soul must submit by following the strictly necessary course of natural facts with its thinking, could it develop the logical discipline that had to be implanted in it in the course of progress. At this point of development, natural science arose, which knows nothing of the spiritual. It has its justification in the history of human development.

What are accepted today as articles of faith are older layers of knowledge with spiritual content. They now stand in opposition to “modern” science. If one wants to accept them, one must give them a basis in truth that has nothing to do with the science that one recognizes as such.

Anthroposophy now stands in contrast to this. It fully understands the essential character of genuine natural science. It only seeks to show that the latter's turning away from the spiritual arose out of a merely temporal necessity. It takes the strict method of research of modern science as its starting point, but does not stop at the form that has developed in recent times. Rather, it shows that the human being can develop other powers of knowledge just as consciously as sensory observation and the mind that is bound to it, and thus arrive at a science of the spiritual that comes from the same mindset as natural science.

Anthroposophy recognizes how to overcome the prejudice that knowledge hinders man's trusting devotion to the spiritual. It demands that before man approaches the study of the spiritual, he must transcend himself through the development of supersensible powers of knowledge. If he reaches the spiritual in this way, then the religious mood is connected with knowledge. If science were in itself capable of inhibiting this mood, then all creeds should have suffered this result. For they were all once “science”.

This brings us to one of the points on which antagonism to anthroposophy is fuelled. It is particularly suited to show how this antagonism arises from an inadequate appreciation of the facts, from an unquestioned acceptance of what is rooted in ingrained habits of thought. Anthroposophy does not want to be accepted uncritically; but anyone who takes it up into their convictions with full awareness knows that it has nothing to fear from close examination. The opponents think that it can only be based on a belief in authority. They often do not realize that their rejection rests solely on just such a belief in authority.