12. Philosophy and Theosophy

The basic idea that initially applied to the highest realms for Thomas Aquinas, for example, and which could have developed in such a way that the boundaries of human research could have been extended ever higher into the supersensible realm, was distorted to the point of caricature and now lived on in the conviction: The highest spiritual truths are entirely beyond the reach of purely human thought activity, of elaboration in terms to which man can bring it out of himself. This has caused a rift in human spiritual life. Supersensible knowledge was presented as something that absolutely eluded all human thought, that could not be achieved through subjective acts of cognition, that could only arise from faith. [At most, one can approach these areas with a kind of emotional conviction, with mere faith. This abyss between faith and knowledge thus opened up became a powerful impulse for later times]. This had already been the case earlier, but it was taken to an extreme towards the end of the Middle Ages. The distinction between faith, which must be achieved through a subjective emotional conviction, and that which can be processed through logical activity as the basis of a secure judgment, became increasingly clear.