12. Philosophy and Theosophy

There we have as universalia ante rem that which we must assume to exist first in the Godhead, in the wisdom of God. As a Christian theologian, as a scholastic, we understand it in a similar way, except that we do not go right up to the highest divine. As theosophists, we know that the universalia in re, for example when it comes to animals, mean their group soul, and so we do indeed have in Aristotelianism a foundation for what can really support theosophy conceptually. But there is something else to all that we encounter in Aristotle that has become increasingly unpopular in modern times: it is necessary to be comfortable thinking in sharp, finely chiseled concepts, in concepts that one first prepares for oneself; it is necessary to have the patience to proceed from concept to concept; it is necessary, above all, to have a tendency towards conceptual purity and cleanliness, to know what one is talking about when one uses a concept. If, for example, one speaks in the scholastic sense of the relationship of the concept to what it represents, one must first work through long definitions in the scholastic writings. You have to know what it means when you say that the concept is formally grounded in the subject and fundamentally grounded in the object: what the concept has as its actual form comes from the subject, what it has as its content comes from the object - that is just a small sample. Really only a small one. If you go through scholastic works, you have to wade through thick volumes of definitions, and that is very unpleasant for today's scientist; he therefore regards the scholastics as school foxes and dismisses them as such. He does not even know that true scholasticism is nothing other than the thorough elaboration of the art of thought, so that it can form a foundation for the real comprehension of reality.