Anthroposophy: Piercing the Veil of Maya. Intellectualism versus Spirituality

Rudolf Steiner, June 14, 1921:

Religious life will disappear competely if it cannot represent a reality; it will fade away if it is to be something about which it can be said that everything can be expressed through intellectual thoughts. If this is the case, religious life absolutely cannot be preserved. Through religious experience something must happen; processes and events must exist, which, as such, as processes, have eternal significance not only for human beings but also for the cosmos.

Therefore, we must say to ourselves, everything that we take into our souls intellectually--all that modern science and scientific achievement acknowledges--dies when we die. The living concepts that we form in our soul in childhood, and which transform themselves during our life, do not die, but the intellectual content--even though it extends our understanding of natural laws and has great ramifications--dies when we die.

Do not take this statement lightly. Intellectual knowledge is subject to death just as the human body is, because it is obtained and conveyed entirely through the body. All soul life that is conveyed intellectuallly arises after birth and perishes with death. What is eternal in the soul is found first behind what is intellectual. No abstract concept, but only what we have experienced in life that is beyond the abstract concepts passes through the portal of death with us. Many present-day people will have to lead a long sleep-life after death, because they were fixed only in intellectuality between birth and death. Intellectuality grows dark after death. It will be only after a long time that intellectual people will be able to acquire a content beyond the intellectual, which they can then, in turn, work on for their next earthly life. It is a fact that human beings in their entire development lose much of their present lifetime because of their intellectual lives.

Our contemporaries see this as folly--our theologians, in any case, do--but it is certain, a result of solid spiritual scientific research. To the degree that our entire education today is based only on intellectualism, and because we are so proud of this intellectualism, we deprive human beings of any spiritual, eternal content. From various sides, then, we are inoculating humanity with this intellectualism that is subject to death.





Source: First Steps in Christian Religious Renewal, pp. 75-76