For Steiner, Thomas Aquinas is the high-water mark of Western thinking, the philosopher whose defence of the reality of thought spiritual science continues today.
Thomas Aquinas in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the Dominican philosopher (1225 to 1274) as the summit of European thinking rather than a closed chapter of Catholic theology. Steiner gave three lectures on him at Dornach, 22 to 24 May 1920, published as The Redemption of Thinking (GA 74). They present Aquinas as the heir of Augustine's unresolved questions of evil and grace, as the thinker who rescued the reality of thought against nominalism by holding that universals live both in things and in the human mind, and as the architect of the boundary between reason and revelation that still shapes Western knowledge. Steiner's claim is exact: Thomism honestly continued cannot mean repeating the thirteenth century; it must pass through Goethe's science and become spiritual science, a thinking strong enough to follow the soul into the body and the spirit into nature.
When Steiner names Thomas Aquinas, he means a deed of thinking, not a museum piece. The 1920 Dornach lectures honour the scholastic master who proved that concepts are realities, then turn the tables on his modern admirers: the only faithful Thomism left, Steiner argues, is one that redeems thinking itself, freeing it to perceive spirit as exactly as the senses perceive colour.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thomas could only bring it to the abstract statement that the soul-spiritual really works down to the last activities of the human organs. Thomas Aquinas expressed this in abstract form: Everything that lives in the human body, down to the vegetative activities, is directed by the soul and must be recognized by the soul. Goethe initiates the change of front in his “Theory of Colors,” which is therefore not understood at all; Goethe initiates it with his “Morphology,” with his teachings on plants and animals. However, the complete fulfillment of this Goetheanism will only be achieved when we have a spiritual science that, through its own power, produces enlightenment about the facts of natural science.
What it Means Today
The twentieth century produced two rival answers to the question of what to do with Aquinas. Rome's answer began with Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which made Thomas the official philosopher of the Catholic Church and launched the neo-Thomist revival: Jacques Maritain teaching in Paris and later Princeton, Etienne Gilson founding the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in 1929, both rebuilding the thirteenth-century synthesis with scholarly devotion. Steiner, lecturing at Dornach in May 1920 while that revival was in full stride, gave the opposite answer. To restore Thomas exactly as he wrote in 1270, Steiner says, is to study the root while ignoring the plant that grew from it.
The honest continuation of Thomism takes what Thomas held in the abstract, that the soul works down into every organ of the body, and makes it concrete knowledge through schooled spiritual perception. Where Maritain and Gilson treated the reason-revelation boundary as permanent architecture, Steiner read it as a historical stage that thinking itself can outgrow: redeemed thinking climbs into the territory Thomas reserved for revelation. The Thalira synthesis: neo-Thomism preserved Aquinas the way amber preserves the insect, while anthroposophy asks the insect to fly, completing scholastic realism as a path of cognition rather than a system of propositions. A reader who wants to test the difference can set Gilson's The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy beside GA 74 and watch the same texts open in two directions, backward into reconstruction, forward into practice. What the scholastics fought over had descended from Michael; see cosmic intelligence.
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