Dual Forms of Cognition in the Middle Ages

The spiritual life of the Occident (and this is, to begin with, our present subject of study) obtained its contents above all during the centuries which followed the first four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha. It obtained its contents through what had been handed down traditionally from a Christian direction and had gradually acquired the form of dogmas, that is to say, of intellectual forms of thought. Nevertheless these dogmas were connected with contents which had once been experienced in super-sensible vision and which now existed merely in the form of memories. It was no longer possible to gain an insight into man's connections with these super-sensible contents; that is to say, it was not in any way possible to convey to the human beings the significance of these super-sensible contents. For this reason, the education of humanity took on an essentially intellectual character in the following centuries, up to the fifteenth century.