Steiner's name for the engineered split between science and belief, first forced on humanity by post-primeval initiates and working in reverse in the modern age.
The Schism of Knowledge and Faith in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the split between science and belief as an engineered event in occult history, not a natural boundary of the human mind. In Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197, lecture of 21 September 1920, Stuttgart), Steiner traces the schism to an association of post-primeval initiates who pressed an outdated divine knowledge on humanity after the mystery centres had begun guiding people toward earthly knowledge and freedom. By drowning human minds in a revelation they had outgrown, this association tried to stop free, self-won knowing at its root. In the present age, Steiner says, the same intention works in reverse: institutions that call themselves representatives of the supersensible confine certain knowledge to sense observation and experiment, leaving the spiritual world to a vague faith. Anthroposophy answers the schism with a science of the spirit held to the same standards as natural science.
The Schism of Knowledge and Faith names one of Steiner's most startling claims: the wall between what we can know and what we may only believe was built, on purpose, twice. Once in deep antiquity, when initiates forced stale divine wisdom on a humanity meant to outgrow it, and again in modern times, when the guardians of faith declared the spirit unknowable and handed certainty to the laboratory alone.
In Steiner's Own Words
Today the intention is to keep people tied to that mission on earth to prevent their further development, for which the earth would provide the basis. The very people who are now supporting materialism call themselves ‘spiritualists’, or priests of some faith or other, representatives of the supersensible world. In those ancient times the people offering a life in the spirit that was no longer justifiable called themselves materialists. They did so from the point of view which I have characterized. Today a large number of people who really wish to keep humanity bound to the material world call themselves representatives of the spiritual world. The most powerful source of materialism today does not lie in the ideas put forward by Buechner, Moleschott or Vogt. The most powerful source is Rome and anything that is in any way connected with this centre of materialism.
What it Means Today
In 1997 the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould published an essay in Natural History magazine titled Nonoverlapping Magisteria, expanded in 1999 into the book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. Gould offered a peace treaty for the science-and-religion wars: science holds the magisterium of empirical fact, religion holds the magisterium of meaning and moral value, and the two never overlap. NOMA became the polite consensus of textbooks and courtrooms because it asks nothing of either party. Read beside GA 197, NOMA is the schism of knowledge and faith given a diplomatic constitution. Steiner described the same settlement in 1920 and refused to sign it. He saw a science confined to sense observation on one side, a faith stripped of any claim to certainty on the other, and behind the arrangement an old intention: keep human beings from knowing the supersensible world with the same conscience they bring to botany, physics, and chemistry.
The Thalira synthesis: NOMA notarizes the divorce of knowledge and faith, while Steiner reads the divorce papers as evidence of the original act, a separation engineered so that neither party would ever ask whether the spirit can be known with scientific rigour. In practice, the answer to the schism is method. Treat a spiritual question the way a chemist treats an assay: state the procedure, train the instrument (here, one's own thinking), and accept only what survives repetition. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is Steiner's laboratory manual for that work, and the reason anthroposophy calls itself spiritual science rather than a creed.
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