2. Christ in the 20th Century

We cannot go through all the individual stages of the Christ-ideas, but we can name a few, for example, in the case of the deep thinkers of the Middle Ages. They had the most intense faith, but it was not possible for them to elevate it to Gnostic ideas. It was impossible to think about Christian Gnosticism in the Middle Ages. Such thinking would have appeared to be fantasy. In the Middle Ages, the view was limited to what lies below the sphere of the Gnostics. They drew from Aristotle, [from the world of thought created by him] four hundred years before Christ; Aristotle was then the “tone-setter”. Spiritual flight was attributed to [the realm of] faith. Aristotle said: Everything that underlies the realms of nature is spiritual; only he did not accept the reincarnation of the human soul. He was interested in what can be recognized according to law, he was only interested in a unified God. [According to his view] the human soul separates from the unified divine substance with every birth. But after death, the soul does not return to the divine, but remains in the spiritual world as an individual human being. For Aristotle, the entire transcendental world is purely cognitive. Man looks back on his life on earth [after his death] and then finds his reward or his torment, eternal punishment and reward. This is related to the science of Aristotle – Franz Brentano, [a great connoisseur of Aristotle, has commented on it at length in his works]. The medieval scholars did point to a knowledge of the spiritual world, but for them [the cognitive approach to the spiritual] was excluded – that is the realm of gnosis, which is attained through knowledge.