GOD RESTS
The loftiest idea of God is the one which assumes that God, after His creation of the human being, withdrew and gave man completely over to himself. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge
God led His creation only to a certain point. From there He let the human being arise, and the human being, by knowing himself and looking about him, sets himself the task of working on and completing what the primal power began. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science IX Goethe's Epistemology
HUMAN FREEDOM
So it is not the human beings business to realize God's will in the world, but his own. He carries out his own decisions and intentions, not those of another being.
Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 10.8 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom
The moral world order is through and through the free work of human beings. The moral laws which the Metaphysician regards as flowing from a higher power, are the thoughts of human beings. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 10.8 (Lindeman) Philosophy Of Freedom
We reject any metaphysical influence beyond the reach of the intellect that cannot be experienced conceptually. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 12.8 (1988 stebbing) Philosophy Of Freedom
LAWS OF NATURE
The divinity has merged with the world. In order to know God, human knowing must penetrate into the world. The laws that our mind recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science XI Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views
Everyone, in so far as he thinks, lays hold of the universal Reality. To fill one's life with such thought-content is to live in Reality, and at the same time to live in God. The world is God. The thought of a Beyond owes its origin to the misconception of those who believe that this world does not have the ground of its existence in itself. Rudolf Steiner, The Consequences Of Monism (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom
THE IDEA
When we speak of the essential being of a thing or of the world altogether, we cannot mean anything else than the grasping of reality as thought, as idea. In the idea we recognize that from which we must derive everything else: the principle of things. What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call: the idea.
Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea. What seems, on superficial examination, to have no part at all in the idea is found by a deeper thinking to stem from it. No other form of existence can satisfy us except one stemming from the idea. Nothing may remain away from it; everything must become a part of the great whole that the idea encompasses. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science IX Goethe's Epistemology
By taking possession of the idea, thinking fuses with the primal ground of world existence; what is at work outside enters into the mind of man: he becomes one with objective reality in its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of man. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge
WORLD UNITY
It is futile to seek any common element in the separate things of the world other than the conceptual content gained by thinking. All attempts to find world unity, other than the coherent conceptual content gained by the conceptual analysis of our perceptions, must fail. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 5.9 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom
No personal God can unify the world, because we experience our limited personality only in ourselves. Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 5.9 (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom
A personal God is nothing but a human being transplanted into a Beyond.
Rudolf Steiner, The Consequences Of Monism (Hoernle) Philosophy Of Freedom
THE END OF RELIGION
Only this is worthy of man: that he seek truth himself, without being led by revelation. When that has been thoroughly recognized once and for all, then the religions based on revelation will be finished. The human being will then no longer want God to reveal Himself or bestow blessings upon him. He will want to know through his own thinking and to establish his happiness through his own strength. Whether some higher power or other guides our fate to the good or to the bad, this does not concern us at all; we ourselves must determine the path we have to travel. Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science VI Goethe's Way of Knowledge
