120. Otto Willmann: The Science of the Face of Catholic Truth

A penetrating examination of all modern scientific thinking, as was already the case with “The History of Idealism”: One must find that Catholicism preserves an ancient wisdom. Insofar as one accepts that the Church is the embodiment of this wisdom, and insofar as one accepts that this is present in the Church and nothing of it can be rediscovered, the individual must feel secure with all his life, his knowledge, etc. as a member of the positive ecclesiastical organism that embodies the inviolable spiritual heritage.

In addition, scholasticism, in so far as it was realism, recognized the reality of ideas in things, and thus points to the spiritual world with this knowledge. All newer “knowledge” has lost this insight.

Thus Willmann is quite consistent: inviolable teaching material, embodied in the church; the most far-reaching insight in ecclesiastical philosophy.

He is just not able to see how time progresses by not just making a sensual institution the carrier of the spiritual on earth, but by bringing the spiritual world itself into the earthly. This spiritual world is not just “reason”, which, because of its abstractness, cannot in fact be the basis of a catholicity, which Willmann quite rightly sees – this spiritual world is a living thing. It all comes down to humanity absorbing an understanding of the real spiritual world and not getting stuck at the formal, as if the human spirit were just a kind of summary naming of sensory perceptions.

Thus Willmann's book is a great force as an advance for Catholicism - for it is superior to all schools of thought of the present day, except for the one, the anthroposophical, which is still struggling for the very first seed of an understanding of its true nature. —