Seven months ago (Why Bother, Sept. 2021) we noted a time when humankind experienced spiritual beings as a matter of course, as part of their everyday life. In other posts, we’ve talked about angels and archangels as those beings in the spiritual hierarchies that are closest to us. Somehow, though, accepting the idea of karma and reincarnation has been easier for many of us than the idea of beings who exist outside our physical senses. What changed?
All cultures have origin stories. No culture was godless at its roots. Why? Though we may be tempted to call the people of our ancient past childlike or gullible, if we focused only on their achievements in astronomy, we would have to admit someone was thinking albeit quite differently. We were those people back then, and we changed. Over the course of centuries, our pursuit of knowledge stopped aiming toward the spiritual world and focused almost entirely upon the natural world we can observe through our senses. Since the spiritual world cannot be experienced with our senses, we lost our connection with it.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
… We must turn our gaze again and again to the particular mental condition of civilized mankind which began with the blossoming forth of the Natural Sciences and reached its climax in the nineteenth century.
One should place the character of this age vividly before the soul’s eye, comparing it with that of preceding ages. In all ages of the conscious evolution of mankind, Knowledge was regarded as that which brings man to the world of Spirit. To Knowledge, man ascribed whatever relationship to Spirit he possessed. Art and Religion were none other than the living life of Knowledge.
All this became different when the age of the Spiritual Soul* began to dawn (1400s). With a very great part of the life of the human soul, Knowledge now concerned itself no more. Henceforth, it sought to investigate that relation to existence which man unfolds when he directs his senses and his intellectual judgment to the world of ‘Nature.’ It no longer wanted to concern itself with that which man unfolds as a relation to the world of Spirit, when he uses—not his outer senses—but his inner power of perception.
Thus there arose the necessity to connect the spiritual life of man, not with any living present Knowledge, but with Knowledge gained in the past—with Tradition.
The life of the human soul was rent in twain. On the one hand there stood before man the new science of Nature, striving ever onward and unfolding in the living present. On the other side there was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding Knowledge had arisen in the ages past. All understanding of how the Knowledge, corresponding to this side of human experience, had been gained in ages past, was gradually lost. Men possessed the Tradition, but they had lost the way by which the truths of Tradition had been known—discovered. All they could do now was to believe in the Tradition.
A man who had consciously reflected on the spiritual situation, say about the middle of the nineteenth century, would have been bound to admit: mankind has come to a point where it no longer feels itself capable of evolving any Knowledge beyond that science which does not concern itself with the Spirit. Whatever can be known about the Spirit, a humanity of earlier ages was able to investigate and discover, but the human soul has lost the faculty for such discovery.
But men did not place before themselves the full bearing of what was taking place. They were content to say: Knowledge simply does not reach out into the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.
Letter from: Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: The Apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Times, by Rudolf Steiner, March 25, 2025. Dornach, Switzerland.
For years now, those who accept a spiritual world, a world they can accept on faith alone, are seen as misguided if not pathetic by many of their peers. Yet faith and tradition play a big role in science, too. For example, cosmology assumes that the speed of light and the laws of gravity are constants throughout the universe, so we make all sorts of theories based on these assumptions. But what if they aren’t universal? Maybe all our ideas about the natural world are theoretical.
At our current stage of evolution, we need to pursue knowledge of the spiritual world once again purposefully—out of freedom—to understand ourselves as whole human beings. “What in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort.” (Steiner) This knowledge, once acquired, will augment what we have learned in all fields of the natural world.
In future posts, we will continue to investigate the other beings inhabiting the spiritual world including those beings who are determined to lead us into error. We need to realize we are not alone, and now more than ever it is necessary to understand who we’ve been, who we are, and who we may become.
*Spiritual Soul is a stage of human development preceded by that of the Sentient Soul (our lower soul nature) and then the Intellectual Soul (higher soul nature). We will talk more of this in subsequent posts. Or, if you can’t wait, please read the book: Theosophy, Chapter entitled: The Essential Nature of the Human Being.