12. Philosophy and Theosophy

On the other hand, something else developed. Those who wanted to protect faith, so to speak, from the intrusion of thinking that was now focused on itself, developed an aversion, a dislike of the technique of thinking. They were of the opinion that this thinking technique was powerless in the face of the revealed wisdom. If the secular empiricists referred to Aristotle's book, the others referred to something they had taken - admittedly in a misleading way - from another book, the Bible. We see this expressed most strongly at the beginning of the modern era when we hear Luther's harsh words: “Reason is the stone-blind, deaf fool”, which should have nothing to do with spiritual truths; and when he further asserts that the pure conviction of faith can never dawn in the right way through rational thinking, which is based on Aristotle. He calls him “a hypocrite, a sycophant, a stinking goat”. As I said, these are harsh words, but from the standpoint of the new age they seem understandable to us; a deep gulf had just opened up between reason and its thinking technique on the one hand and supersensible truth on the other.