From Aristotle via Galileo to Steiner’s ‘Spiritual Science’

Western theological science coming full circle

A bust of Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers ever to walk our planet.

The first spiritual scientist in the history of Western thought was arguably Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the most talented pupil of Plato and founder of the Lyceum. He states that 'There are three kinds of science - theology, physics and mathematics.'

Aristotle’s works were lost to the West for a thousand years and remained unknown until the twelfth and thirteenth century when important texts – with the natural books at the core (e.g., On the Heavens, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology) were translated into Latin from Greco - Arabic documents. Access to this knowledge was a decisive factor in the founding of the first universities in Europe with academic masters using these texts as the basis of new curricula, preparing the way for the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.

Aristotle understands the soul as a nested hierarchy of functions or activities, the nutritive (or plant-like) soul is related to growth and reproduction, the sentient (or animal-like) soul to movement and perception, and the rational soul characterized by thinking that is unique to human beings. These are nested in the sense that a being with a higher level of soul has all of the lower levels within it. The plant-like soul connects with the idea of the aether ‘ether’ as a formative force, the sentient soul is related to the astral world of the stars ('astral' comes from the Greek word asterah) and the rational soul meshes into the mental world which Plato understood as the realm of eternal Ideas. Aristotle’s theory of causality recognizes four causes (Physics II.3 and Metaphysics V.2): the material cause is related to the physical world, the formal cause to living forces of the etheric world, the efficient cause to the astral world, and the final cause to the rational world.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the intellectual giant who realized that the teachings of Aristotle had run their course. By the seventeenth century this brilliant system had degenerated into doctrines taught parrot-fashion without understanding what they mean, and the method of deductive logic from first principles relied on his authority. A philosopher and experimenter, Galileo founded a new empirical philosophy that developed into what we call science. Joseph Pitt has reconstructed four methodological rules or principles underpinning his approach:

Quantification: Wherever possible replace qualitative arguments with

mathematical demonstrations.

Abstraction: Abstract from individual differences among observables and

generalize results.

Universality: Similar effects have the same cause.

Evidential Homogeneity: All empirical evidence is of the same general kind on the

order of things terrestrial.

(Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, pp. 68,73,97,113)

A portrait of the Italian philosopher and scientist Galileo Galilei.

With audacity and great intellectual force Galileo classified the formal, efficient and final causes of Aristotle as ‘occult causes’ and elegantly eliminated them from the domain boundaries of his new empirical science. This cleared the decks for asking simple questions that could be answered with the aid of mathematics, concentrating on material causes operative in the phenomena of the physical world. In the words of Pitt:

The focus then is on method, not the world, not on what we say about the world. In this view the most important feature of knowledge is success in achieving our objectives, not a metaphysical assumption about the way the world must be. … He rejected metaphysics in favor of a secure method of generating knowledge (ibid., p. 4).

Along similar lines Stillman Drake says, ‘The substitution of methodology for metaphysics is the key to the open system which Galileo offered as a rival to the closed systems of the ancient philosophers’ (The Controversy of the Comets of 1618, translators Drake and C. D. O’Malley, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960, p. xxv). The Aristotelian system of higher worlds was replaced by the discipline of natural science truncated to study the phenomena of matter configured in space and changing over time.

The new system could only treat quantitative questions but it did so with remarkable explanatory power using mathematics, employing a method that consisted of hypothesis, design of experiments, and observation supported by taking careful measurements. The high cost of this certainty of knowledge, though, was that qualitative matters were excluded from the province of natural science. Galileo distinguished between primary qualities, like spatial extension, that were included in the system and secondary ones such as colour, sound, beauty and ugliness that were excluded. However, in the wake of Galileo all qualities came to be defined as secondary and were assigned to subjective human experience. What was left was an objectified world devoid of life and consciousness that could be studied by physicists using mathematical models.

These qualitative aspects involving being, ethics and aesthetics came to be studied in the humanities, or human-centred disciplines, that were redefined to include theology as a de facto appendix. This was a big demotion for theology because in the medieval curriculum it had been the crowning discipline that gave coherence to the seven liberal arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy). This fracture became entrenched in the course of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and by the mid-twentieth century it was institutionalized in what C. P. Snow calls the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and humanities in Western society (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1959). So Galilean science practised today is based on the tunnel vision of a worldview limited by what can be known through the five senses and scientific instruments, leaving the three higher worlds largely unexamined. The upshot is that we are currently facing enormous challenges around the globe due to the one-sidedness and reductionism of ‘value-neutral’ science pursued without philosophical and ethical foundations.

The faith-science fracture has led to numerous books and university courses since the 1960s, a veritable industry (e.g., the Templeton Foundation) devoted to accommodating theology and natural science as separate disciplines in modern Western thought. Synthesists like Ian Barber, Arthur Peacocke and Alister McGrath want to establish a dialogue between theology and natural science. In this paradigm the disciplines are regarded as virtually independent with some commonalities in terms of the application of rational thought, use of models, and so on. But wanting to establish a dialogue presupposes that theology and science are separate enterprises.

The irony is that synthesists perpetuate the faith-science fracture running through Western society that was created by Galileo (with rhetorical help from Bacon and Kepler) for political reasons, namely, wanting the freedom to pursue scientific research without ecclesiastical interference. In his polemical letter to the Florentine duchess Galileo cites an eminent member of the clergy:

That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes (‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’ (1615), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, tr. by Stillman Drake, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957, p. 186).

This letter is the first document devoted to the theme of scientific knowledge in relation to the Bible. Galileo’s rhetoric has proved extremely powerful down to the present. This old chestnut that theology deals with religious questions related to ‘why?,’ whereas science handles the nuts and bolts issues of ‘how?’ has been repeated ad nauseum in recent literature. Yet there is absolutely no substance to the contention that theology and science need to be practised as separate disciplines with different domain boundaries, provided science is properly configured within a larger theological and metaphysical whole.

On the contrary Edward Grant argues that one of the prerequisites for the scientific revolution 'was the emergence of a class of theologian-natural philosophers’ who adopted ‘Greco - Arabic science and Aristotelian natural philosophy.’ Further, ‘some of the most noteworthy accomplishments in science and mathematics during the Middle Ages came from theologians’ (The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 174f.).

In the first decades of the twentieth century the Austrian seer and philosopher, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), introduced spiritual science (synonymous with what I call ‘theological science’) as a system that can be characterized as neo-Aristotelian. I am convinced that this holistic science will be able to meet the demands of the future since it values the empirical method of Galileo, but reinstates a metaphysic consistent with supersensible perception. As discussed in the previous post, the metaphysic consists of three higher worlds of the etheric, astral and mental folded into Euclidean space. I am indebted to the pioneering work undertaken by Steiner and my knowledge and practice of spiritual science have been enriched by his remarkable contribution to the ongoing adventure of human knowledge.