Truth and falseness in the work of Aristotle

Metaphysics‘Since being and not being are said on the one hand in accordance with the figures of the categories and on the other in accordance with the potentiality or actuality of these or of their opposites, and by third as what is in the most proper way true or false, and since this as regards […]

Aristotle about evil

For Aristotle, ‘actuality’ is the true good; ‘potentiality’ contains, besides the good, also the possibility of all error. Here follows a quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book Theta. In a pure thinking way he develops the idea of the perfect, of the good and, arising from this perfect, the potentiality, which bears in it the several […]

Creation in Plato’s work

According to Plato, all human creatures had the same qualities at the beginning. But because the coming together of soul and body leads to uncertainty and chaos, all beginning is difficult. It is a great learning-process, to become ‘the most religious of soul-given creatures’. And it is placed in the hands of the created human […]

The tree of knowledge – Our wandering away from the Garden of Eden

In ancient times Pythagoras described the sound of the cosmos as a harmony of the spheres, in relation to the arithmetic composition of the cosmos. He felt God as a Master Arithmetist and Geometrist. Johann Sebastian Bach became a master composer, he founded the technique of harmonies in fugues, and we can sense in them […]

Evil in the Old Testament – Genesis 3 The Fall

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the […]

The completion in infinity

I quote Rudolf Steiner about the teaching of Zarathustra: ‘The teaching was not abstract but very concrete. Even when people of our time have a certain feeling for the Spiritual behind the physical world it is very difficult to make them realise that there must necessarily be more than one central spiritual power. But just […]

The evil in the teaching of Zarathustra

In Anthroposophy we learn that Zarathustra was the great teacher in the Persian culture period. We must realise that Zarathustra didn’t live a few centuries before Christ, but far earlier, eight thousand years ago. I quote here from a lecture of Rudolf Steiner from 1911. He gives a clear impression of this doctrine of Zarathustra. […]

The division between the Divine and the Demoniacal

Bhagavad Gita, chapter 16 Krishna describes a status quo, the division between the divine and the demoniacal as a fact. This fact is the starting point for a development toward the divine, or being bound in the demoniacal. 6. There are two types of beings in this world—the divine and the demoniacal; the divine has […]

Evil in the Bhagavad Gita

‘We live in the best of all possible worlds that are presently possible…’ But this best of all possible worlds must also be a result of its ingredients. What we experience as ‘world’ has very much to do with what human beings actually do in this world. If we have the view that human beings […]

Evil

Last year in January I wrote about evil. Now this theme comes up again, through the questions of a good friend. If we watch the events on the world stage and try to feel what people have to suffer who are in less comfortable circumstances than we are in Europe – despite all the problems […]