12. Philosophy and Theosophy

Aristotle remained the leading philosopher in later times. His achievements not only flowed into the post-Aristotelian period of antiquity up to the foundation of Christianity, but it was precisely in the first Christian period up to the Middle Ages that he was the thinker who was followed in the development of all worldview endeavors. This is not to say that, especially in the Middle Ages, when people did not have the original texts, they had Aristotle before them as a system, as a sum of dogmas; but they had become accustomed to the way in which knowledge, right up to the highest divine knowledge, was arrived at using the ladder of pure conceptual technique. And so it came about that Aristotle became more and more the logical teacher. In the Middle Ages, people said something like this: Let the positive factual knowledge of the world come from wherever, let it come from the fact that man examines external reality with his senses or that a revelation takes place through divine grace as through Christ Jesus - these are things that are simply to be accepted, on the one hand as statements of the senses, on the other as revelation. But if you want to justify something given in this or that way through pure concepts, then you have to do it with the technique of thought that Aristotle justifies.