The Redemption of Thinking is a compact cycle of three lectures that Rudolf Steiner delivered in Dornach, Switzerland, on 22, 23, and 24 May 1920, published in the collected works as GA 74. The subtitle Steiner gave the cycle, "A Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas," names its subject exactly. Across these three sessions Steiner traces the rise of High Scholasticism, sets the thought of Thomas Aquinas against the personal struggle of his great predecessor Augustine, and follows the medieval quarrel over universals into the philosophical questions that still shape how we understand knowing itself. The printed volume gathers the lecture texts together with supplementary essays on Thomism and its afterlife, making it one of Steiner's most concentrated statements on the history of Western philosophy.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1920 Steiner had already built the philosophical foundation of his life's work in earlier books such as The Philosophy of Freedom, where he argued that thinking is not a passive mirror of the world but an active spiritual deed. GA 74 returns to that conviction and reads the whole medieval period through it. The occasion was pointed. Pope Leo XIII had made Thomism the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, and Steiner wanted to show what the Scholastic achievement really was before it hardened into doctrine. He treats Aquinas not as a museum figure but as a thinker who confronted a genuine crisis, namely how the human mind, working from its own inner resources, can reach truth about a world it did not create.
The cycle therefore sits at the meeting point of Steiner's philosophical and historical interests. It belongs with his other lectures on the evolution of consciousness, yet it stays unusually close to the technical vocabulary of academic philosophy. Readers who know Steiner mainly through his esoteric lectures often find GA 74 surprising for its patience with the fine distinctions of the medieval schoolmen and its respect for their intellectual honesty. The lectures reward slow reading, because Steiner is asking his audience to think their way back into a state of mind that modern habits make hard to reach.
The timing also matters for Steiner's own movement. In 1920 he had recently founded the first Waldorf school and was giving practical shape to anthroposophy as a cultural force. Turning to Aquinas in that moment was a way of showing that his teaching stood in continuity with the great tradition of European thought rather than apart from it. He wanted to demonstrate that the questions the Scholastics raised were not settled by modern science but merely set aside, and that a genuine spiritual science had to take them up again. GA 74 is, in this sense, a bridge Steiner builds between the cloister and the laboratory, insisting that the medieval effort to think about thinking was a real cognitive achievement and not a superstition to be outgrown.
Themes and Structure
The three lectures move in a clear arc. The first sets the stage, distinguishing the impersonal, church-shaped philosophy of Aquinas from the intensely personal wrestling of Augustine, whose thought carried the last living warmth of Neo-Platonism and the vision of Plotinus. Steiner shows how Augustine, feeling the newly awakened sense of the single responsible individual, was driven toward the harsh doctrine of predestination precisely because he still thought of humanity as one whole rather than as a community of separate souls.
For Augustine, humanity was a whole; for Thomas, each individual human being was an individuality.
The second lecture turns to the substance of Thomism itself. It asks how Aquinas, drawing on a filtered inheritance of Aristotle that had traveled back to Europe by way of Arabia, tried to reconcile revealed faith with reasoned knowledge. Here Steiner examines the doctrine of the universals, the general concepts such as "humanity," "lion," or "wolf" that the mind forms and that the Scholastics called universalia. The great question was whether these concepts are merely names we invent or whether they answer to something real in the world. Steiner is careful to show that this was no dry academic puzzle for the medieval mind. It touched the deepest questions of salvation and the soul's place in creation. He also traces the older stream that fed this thinking, the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and the vision of John Scotus Eriugena, whose living sense of a spiritual order stood behind the more formal work of the schoolmen and was slowly draining away in their time.
To feel the weight of that question, Steiner uses homely examples. When we see many lions and form the single thought "lion," or see many wolves and form the thought "wolf," where does that thought live? A wolf does not become a lamb no matter how long we feed it lambs, so the type "wolf" is not simply the matter in front of us. Yet we never meet the type walking about in the world either. We meet only this wolf and that wolf. The universal seems to arise inside us from our own individuality, and still it appears to reach out and grasp something true about the things themselves. For the Scholastics, standing at the lowest border of a spiritual world they could still faintly sense, this was a matter of the soul's whole standing in creation, not a game of definitions.
The third lecture follows that question forward. Steiner reads the dispute between the realists, who held that universals are real, and the nominalists, who held that they are only names, as the decisive fork in the road for European thinking. With Franciscan thinkers such as Duns Scotus, and later with the nominalists, the problem grew too large for even the finest Scholastic technique, and thinking was gradually cut off from the spiritual reality it had once touched. Once universals are reduced to mere words, the mind is left alone with its own labels and the world outside becomes mute, a change whose long consequences reach all the way to the skepticism of the modern age.
Steiner's diagnosis is that modern thought inherited this severance without noticing it, which is why he calls his cycle a redemption of thinking. The aim is to restore to human reasoning the living, spiritual dignity the Scholastics still half remembered and the modern age has largely forgotten. For Steiner this is not a call to return to the thirteenth century but to carry its unfinished task forward, so that thinking may once again be experienced as a real activity of the spirit rather than a shadow cast by the brain. The supplementary essays, on the essence of Thomism and its survival in the present day, extend the argument into the neo-Thomism of Steiner's own time, showing how the medieval questions live on, transformed but unresolved, inside contemporary philosophy.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 74. This volume is a primary source for how these ideas are defined and connected in Steiner's thought:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures online at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation of the cycle alongside the original German. For a printed edition, search the publisher's catalog through SteinerBooks, the North American publisher of Steiner's collected works in English.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas this volume raises, follow these threads:
- Begin with the two entries above, then explore the full Thalira glossary for related terms in epistemology and the history of thought.
- Compare Aquinas with his forerunner by reading the glossary treatment of Augustine and Neo-Platonism, and notice how the awakening sense of the individual soul reshapes the whole question of knowledge.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this cycle among Steiner's other philosophical lectures and see how the themes of freedom and thinking recur across his collected works.