The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

aristotle
strove to find within his soul the experience of the certainty that the entelechy
is immortal. In this sense he became a prophet of that other teaching which in
his days it was not yet possible to give and which entered the world with the
advent of Christ. 198
Just when he had reached the age of sixty-three—October 14, 322 bc—he
died, the most versatile of the Hellenic philosophers. Demosthenes, his lifelong
rival and antagonist, died shortly after in the same year, at the same age; he,
too, had to flee from Athens; he took poison which he had carefully carried in
a ring on his finger.
Immediately after Aristotle’s death the great misinterpretation, stultification,
destruction and corruption of his work began. Even his death was soon
misinterpreted as suicide. His writings on meditation, on the inner mystical
experience of the soul, the esoteric details of his natural science, his teaching
about the heart of man as the central organ of all the senses which sends the
fire of etheric life towards the brain—all these revelations were falsified.
Aristotle died and yet he died not. For what is more significant of his
triumph than the fact that he virtually never had a renascence. He lived so
much as a part of mankind that he was never lost to its memory for a single
year.
With Aristotle ended the history of Hellas just as with him had begun the
story of philosophy. All the previous thinkers before Plato were influenced by
mysteries, myths, cults, oracles or last remnants of clairvoyance. In Aristotle,
the first modern man on earth, these faculties came to a definite end. Certainly
there are many of his sentences which are only understandable through a
knowledge of the mysteries, especially in his natural science, which he received
through Plato from Eleusis. He speaks, for instance, of the souls of the stars
and the gods of the planets. But all these statements are results of logical
discriminations and judgments; he clearly repudiates all atavistic powers of
ancient clairvoyance: “The power of foreseeing the future and of having vivid
dreams is found in persons of inferior type, which implies that God does not
send their dreams ... dreams are not sent by God nor are they destined for this
purpose.” 199
What was the destiny of Aristotle’s writings? It was Plato’s good fortune