"What the code of Manu was to the ancient Indian people
And the Law of Moses for the ancient Israelite people,That are Rudolf Steiner's Statutes of the Christmas Conference 1923For the reestablishment of the Anthroposophical SocietyAs the form of the true Christianity of the future 6th cultural age."
Herbert Witzenmann's 13-part introduction to Rudolf Steiner's book Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity [1] was, together with the book itself, first published in 1998 by the Gideon Spicker Publishing House in Germany as Volume 7 of Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Work Edition, followed by a second edition in 2005. This working translation-in-progress of it will include in the Appendix two essays by Herbert Witzenmann from 1968 (see here for the first one). They elaborate on his spiritual-scientific motives for not assenting to the majority decision of his colleagues on the Council at the Goetheanum on January 9, 1968 to publish the editions of the Rudolf Steiner Literary Estate without the so-called "Annotation of the Free School" indicated in the central middle paragraph 8 of the foundingstatutes of the Anthroposophical Society. In the history of the Anthroposophical Society this controversy has become known as the “Book question” although, as this introduction makes clear, it should really be seen as an issue of the Free School which is, as has been maintained, far from being resolved.
In this reproduction of
his weekly introductory lectures on anthroposophy, which Herbert Witzenmann
gave at the Goetheanum as a member of the Council of the General
Anthroposophical Society from February 5 to July 1, 1968, the words "Book
question" do not occur and the word "Christmas Conference"
only a few times, but an attentive reader can clearly gather from these profound introductions that it is not entirely inappropriate to say that with this book
decision a kind of modern mystery treason was committed. The author himself
writes about this in a letter dated January 11, 1968: "January 9, 1968 is a date
of negative world historical significance. On this day, after the decision had
already been made, it was finally decided, against my vote, to sell the
editions of the [Rudolf Steiner] Literary Estate at the Goetheanum starting
next week and to announce this in the next issue of the News Bulletin. When I
communicated this to N.N., he immediately urged on his own accord a gathering
of friends who clearly see what is going on and are willing to act
anthroposophically, since one cannot inactively watch the decline
of the Anthroposophical Society that has now been decided upon ..."
In other words, a deep
Anfortas-like wound was struck in the social corporeality of the
Anthroposophical Society by this book decision, which brought about a split in
the necessary fusion of externalization (exotericism) and internalization (esotericism) created by the Christmas
Conference that has been possible since the Mystery of Golgotha, i.e. on the one hand, revelation outwardly of the knowledge of the
new Christianity through the esoteric work of
Rudolf Steiner in a deified world under the condition of the moral protection
paragraph of the Annotation of the Free School, and, on the other hand, by the
inward formation of a new knowledge community as a vessel of common
consciousness for the indwelling of higher beings as the contemporary
metamorphosis of the primordial Christian congregation of faith, a split, which
only can be resolved by answering the pressing Parzival question "Oh
Society, what ails thee?"
My motivation for
translating this work and publishing it as an internal manuscript and online (in Dutch) was to make a further contribution to answering this Parzival question, which I
had already begun here in The Netherlands in 1990 by co-organizing a national Michael work
conference "Anthroposophy and the Art of Social Renewal" in Den
Bosch, with study materials including the very first working translation of
the pioneering research of Herbert Witzenmann, former leader of the Social Sciences
Section and that of the Youth Section at the Free School of Spiritual Science
at the Goetheanum, on the dynamic threefold structure of what used to be called the Principles
and now the founding statutes of the General Anthroposophical Society and their
relation to Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation (available in English
as Charter of Humanity – The
Principles of the General Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and Path
of Training and followed by To Create or to Administrate - Rudolf Steiner's Social Organics/ A New Principle of Civilization).
After translating and presenting (online) several other works (also in English) by Herbert Witzenmann, such as his handbook for the new nobility of the spirit The Virtues - Seasons of the Soul and The Philosophy of Freedom as a Basis of Artistic Creation, and twice running in vain for the presidency of the Dutch Society in 2012 and 2014, I began in 2018 to yearly submit thoroughly substantiated motions to and requests of the General Assembly of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, the last one being this spring a motion entitled “The Cross of the Christmas Conference” with a request not to discharge the Council for, in general, its failure to carry out the only task that Rudolf Steiner allotted to it at the Christmas Conference, namely to realize the all-encompassing foundations statutes of freedom. For of these 15 all-encompassing statutes of freedom, namely no less than 9, as Reto Andrea Savoldelli has shown in his essay “The Gradual Loss of Social-Aesthetic Qualification in the General Anthroposophical Society and Ongoing Attempts to Restore It” have been dismembered and thus need to be restored in a contemporary manner. But more specifically the motion was motivated by the fact that the Council, in spite of repeated requests to do so, did not honor its promise to work out the said motion in the so-called colloquiums it has organized for the last three years and which recently came to an end.
What lies at stake here can be gathered by this translation-in-progress, which is being made available as study material for the trilingual international Pentecost conference “The New Knowledge Christianity – The Christmas Conference as the Emergence into the 6th Cultural Age and What Has Become of It” held on May 27, 28 and 29 in the Elisabeth Vreede House in The Hague. It can also give an answer to the questions posed by Elly Beeren and Margaret van den Brink as members of the Dutch working group "One Hundred Years of Christmas Conference" in the September 2021 issue of Motief, the internal organ of the Dutch Society, "Are we as members aware of what act of mystery was accomplished by Rudolf Steiner at that time?" Because, I know of no other work which, in connection with the work of Rudolf Steiner and the mysteries of antiquity, not only makes clear how and why Christ Jesus through His suffering, death and resurrection enacted the mystery of Golgotha for a new earth and a new humanity but which, moreover, can bring to consciousness that the Christmas Conference is a contemporary metamorphosis of the events of this mystery of Golgotha. This "Mystery of Dornach was an act of divine magic, in which the will of the spiritual world under the direction of Michael was united with the will of humanity, gathered on the "Blood Hill" in Dornach under the direction of Rudolf Steiner. We as active members of the Anthroposophical Society can better understand this momentous event called “The Beginning of a Turning of Point in the World” by Rudolf Steiner through this work by Herbert Witzenmann and thereby try to restore and realize the Christmas Conference impulse with united forces. This connection to be created between humanity to the spiritual world can be seen as the vertical line of the "Cross of the Christmas Conference," while "the corresponding relationship" which, according to Rudolf Steiner, had to be created from “the real ground of the Statutes with the "organically active" anthroposophical organizations, such as the Goetheanum Building Society, forms the horizontal line of this cross. May this work help to ensure that by the celebration of the centenary of the Christmas Conference next year in 2023, the members will have come at least as far as to recognize this and carry it out as a task for the next 100 years.
Update: This wish has not come to fruition. In my article "Creating Future with Vidar - Pesonal and Superpersonal Reflections on the Turn of the Century of the Anthroposophical Society and the Working Visit of Are Thoresen in Jannuary 1924 to the NetherlandsCreating Future with Vidar - Pesonal and Superpersonal Reflections on the Turn of the Century of the Anthroposophical Society and the Working Visit of Are Thoresen in Jannuary 1924 to the Netherlands" I state some of the reaons why this is so and moreover why the transformation of the threefold nature of the social organism to a fourfoldness, as taught by Vidar through the mediation of Are Thoresen, necessitates a revaluation of the threefold structure of the principles of the General Anthroposophical Society.
_________________________
[1] Of this book there are three online translations, the first one dating from 1914 edited by H. Collison, the second by one by E. A. Frommer, Gabrielle Hess and Peter Kändler dating from 1961 and the third one dating from 2007 by Andrew Welburn.
Robert Jan KelderWillehalm Institute,
June 6, 2022, updated February 21, 2023
* * *
Foreword to the 2nd edition of the German Publishers
The following introduction to Rudolf Steiner's book Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity was given
by Herbert Witzenmann in the period from February to July 1968 as part of the
so-called Monday lectures at the Goetheanum. These lectures presupposed that
the listeners and readers of the manuscript were already familiar with Rudolf
Steiner's book. On this basis, this introduction aims to draw attention to more
intimate connections of this work and to its significance for the modern
knowledge community.
The transcript goes back to a participant at that time (Wilhelm Hühn). It is partly incomplete and only inadequately reflects the linguistic shape of these introductions. Nevertheless, the mere content of this commentary is a significant help for understanding this still little-understood work by Rudolf Steiner.
Herbert Witzenmann
begins his lectures with an interpretation of the chapter "The Egyptian
Mystery Wisdom." In this chapter,
which is the centerpiece of the work, Rudolf Steiner himself elaborates on
Christianity for the first time by explaining the transition from the ancient
mysteries and their initiatory form to the new one initiated by Christ Jesus
through the sacred life of Buddha and Christ Jesus. Starting from this chapter,
which he interprets in its seven sections, Herbert Witzenmann proceeds to open
up the entire text by elaborating on five of the thirteen chapters.
The reason for Herbert
Witzenmann to occupy himself in 1968 with Rudolf Steiner's publication Christianity as Mystical fact and the
Mysteries of Antiquity is on the one hand to be seen in the two 33-year
periods that had elapsed since the book was first published in 1902. On the
other hand, Rudolf Steiner's explanations of "the greatest
publication" are concentrated on the process of new community building,
the mystery of Golgotha and the congregational forming that results from it ("To
Christ Jesus, the initiate, the uniquely-great initiate, the congregation has committed
itself. To the latter He has proved that the world is a divine one.");
these explanations, therefore, have a forward-looking relation to Rudolf
Steiner's publication of the knowledge of the spiritual world and the community--building he has inaugurated, the re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society,
and the establishment of the Free School at the Christmas Conference 1923/24.
The contextual meaning
of publication and community-building also applies to the new mysteries that
must be connected with the modern knowledge community of anthroposophy. Herbert Witzenmann elaborates on this in the
introductory lectures. The metamorphosis of the faith community to a knowledge
community, whose bond is not only cemented by its communal content but also by
the "thinking together" of its members, the small and great exchange-of-being,
means that also the paths of error mentioned by Rudolf ) in the
Apocalypse must be brought to the fore.
The reason for the
introduction is thus not only to take up a suggestion from Rudolf Steiner, which
could hope for a greater understanding after twice thirty-three years in an
advanced state of general consciousness, but to deal with the foundations of
spiritual community building, which could be recognized and initially practiced
within the community founded by Rudolf Steiner.
This edition of Rudolf
Steiner's book Christianity as a Mystical
Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity is intended to provide those who wish
to study Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science in greater depth with a text that
enables them to acquire a high-quality introduction to the current state-of-the-art in the treatment of this subject within a knowledge community.
This book is dedicated to the friends of Herbert Witzenmann on the occasion of his 100th birthday on February 16.
Introduction by Herbert Witzenmann to the book
Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity
I
One of the great themes that run through the text is the remarkable, great interplay of eternalness and transience. It is precisely because of his transience, i.e., the ability to transform and develop, that man becomes
ever more intimately and gloriously aware of the eternal. One can never speak
of transience without asking himself: What eternality is
behind it? and never of eternality without asking: What kind of transience does it want to become?
Further: The individual and the community (the theme also connected with the
secret of number); and the great grounding theme is indeed the world drama
repeated in individual human drama. The book is a kind of mystery drama: the
dismemberment and hiding of the divine in the ephemeral and the reappearance of
the eternal in the ephemeral, after it has been given a new possibility for
that which it meets from the ephemeral. This cosmic drama repeats itself in the
microcosmic event, in the knowledge and development event - this taking of
one's own higher nature out of the grave of transient existence, in which the
higher is initially sunk, in order to gain new opportunitie for its own
activity by the explosion of this coffin.
Already the title of
the chapter "The Egyptian Mystery Wisdom" raises a question, namely,
whether it cannot be made complete, since other and more significant things are
still involved. In each chapter, a new view of the essence of Christianity will
be found through its grounding theme.
By what event of
Egyptian mystery wisdom, then, will something significant in the nature of
Christianity now be referred to?
"When thou
ascendest free from thy body into the free ether, thou shalt be an immortal
God, escaping death." (V) [1] Man becomes an Osiris himself after undergoing the judgment of the dead.
Compare
this not figuratively but conceptually with what Aristotle expressed: Man becomes
a true man by participating with other men in the highest Man, in the divine Man; and this divine Man can himself complete his mission and his fullness of
being only by living through the many and rising from them. Thus: the many in
the one and the one in the many, the coherence of individuality and communality.
This motive lights up
again in a new way in Christianity - individual religious path of development and
community-building. Becoming Osiris is the path of man, but the actual becoming
of Osiris in the sense of Egyptian mystery wisdom, man can, unless he is a
high initiate, only after passing through the judgment of the dead, of course
on the basis of a certain preparation in the preceding incarnation. The
experience of the one in the many is available to the Egyptian only after
death. Osiris is cut to pieces by Typhon in the expanse of the cosmic world and
rises from the tomb of the human single soul, whereby the cosmic and the
individual permeate each other. The typical feature of the Egyptian path of initiation
recurs in every initiate at all times. Each initiate passes through this
dramatic world event of emerging from the transitory and then emerging again in
an individual and at the same time exemplary manner. The glorification is with
Christ Jesus, not a completion, as with
Buddha, but only the introduction to a next greater initiation (which does not
happen with Buddha), which is at the same time the foundation of community-building.
Personification of the Logos in the individual being [of man] - this goes beyond the Buddha initiation which is completed with the reunion with the divine-spiritual primal ground. It is this connection of the highest divine-spiritual with the fully individual-personal that emerges in Christianity in a historically decisive new phase. In fact, it is also the theme of Egyptian culture, because it has to do with embodiment in a decisive way, which again is connected in a decisive way with individuation. For through our body, after all, we have the element within us that grants us a separate existence. The reunification of what has been lifted out of our body with the highest divine takes place in the so-called Egyptian culture either behind the veil of the mysteries or after death.
"What took place, therefore, before the
ancient mystery cult, in the interior of the Mystery Temple, this has been
taken up by Christianity as a world-historical fact. The congregation has confessed itself to Christ Jesus, the initiated one, the one initiated in the
unique-greatest way. To the latter, He proved that the world is a divine one.
The mystery wisdom became for the Christian congregation indissolubly connected
with the personality of Christ Jesus.
That He lived and that His confessors belonged to Him: that belief took
the place of what had previously been sought to be achieved by the Mysteries.
Henceforth, some of what could only be achieved by mystical methods could be
replaced by the conviction that the divine was given in the Word that was
present on earth. Not that for which the spirit of each individual had long to be
prepared was henceforth decisive alone, but instead what those who were around Jesus
heard and saw; and what was handed down by them. ‘What has been done from the beginning, what
we have heard, what we have touched with our hands from the Word of life ...
what we saw and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may also have community
with us.’ Thus reads the first epistle of John.
As a living bond, this immediate reality should encompass all
generations; it should continue to strand itself as church mystique from
generation to generation. Thus the words of Augustine can be understood: ‘I
would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not
move me to do so.’ So it is not in themselves that the Gospels have a mark of
recognition for their truth, but one must believe them because they are founded
on the personality of Jesus and because the Church mysteriously derives from
this personality the power to make the Gospels appear as truth. The Mysteries have transmitted by tradition
the means to arrive at the truth; the Christian community itself propagates
this truth. During initiation, trust in the mystical forces that shine forth
from within a person must come from the One, the Ultimate Initiator. The
Mysteries sought deification; they wanted to experience it. Jesus was deified, one had to adhere to Him;
then, within the community founded by Him, one is a participant in deification
oneself: that became Christian conviction. What was deified in Jesus was
deified for His whole community. 'Behold, I am with you all the days until the
consummation of the world.'" (Matt. 28:20) (V)
This is the goal toward
which this chapter is striving: a new relationship between individuality and communality and therefore a new relationship to the divine-spiritual world.
Through the minor initiation, the initiator's own inner self experiences a
spiritual enlightenment that also appears for his disciples. The major
initiation is much less important to the initiate than the others who look up
to him, who live with Him and with whom He lives. The great initiation is to give them a new possibility for their own development. Christ Jesus reveals
Himself to His own in the resurrection that He suffers not for Himself
in the first instance, but for His flock. The major initiation is actually an initiation of the congregation, not simply in the sense that the congregation
is given a great example through the precedence of the initiated one and everything else taken away, but in such a way that a new real basis is created for the
congregation.
"In Jesus the Logos itself has become personal." (V) This sentence is actually at the core of the argument. He has assumed the manifestation of the personally human, as occurs only in the incarnation in the external sensory world, and thus that which originally took place in the secrecy of the mysteries had entered the stage of world history, by virtue of a mystery event being made public.
But this publication meant not only that one could know about it, but that a real new basis of community-building was thereby given. What the Egyptian can normally only experience after death, this unity of individuality and communality, the Christian can, since the major initiation of Christ Jesus experience in the life taking place in the sense world, through congregation-building; now, of course, through the power of faith, through something which corresponds to the state of consciousness of mankind at that time. Faithful devotion to the revealed mystery event can be experienced: Each individual human being is on the way to the highest divine and thereby on the way to the highest community, simultaneously with the highest fulfillment of one's own personality.
This highest mystery
event is something to which the congregation can look up and believe. And
through this belief in the revealed mystery event, which is a fact of life in
physical bodies, something arises in the believing souls that rises above their
personality in the community. In the community of faith, a presence of the
spiritual can occur, such as was otherwise possible only on the path of
initiation into the mysteries. In their religious community life, people can
become aware of the experience of the highest divine, which in the past was
only available to the initiate in the Mysteries or to the deceased after the
judgment of the dead.
Congregation -building as a prospect and thus at the same time preparation for the initiatory experience is represented here as the very meaning of the Christ Mystery. And with this community-
.building, which thus leads to the deepest core
of the experience, is also connected a step into the utmost publicness. For it
is in the life of Jesus that what otherwise takes place only in the mysteries,
takes place before all eyes. But only the coherence of congregational formation
as a condition for the highest spiritual experience, on the one hand, and the
disclosure of the mystery secret, on the other, only both together as the two
sides of the same issue, makes sense.
Only under the
protection of the congregational experience is the disclosure of the Christian
religion in its spiritual content at all existent and capable of being existent.
"Do this to My memory, remember My name, never separate it from the act
done in public, that in your imperfection you may become aware of the supreme
divine" What separates man from his actual being and from the goal of his
path is sin. Christ takes the sin of the individuals in the community of faith
into Himself. The highest spiritual dimension could not be experienced in a
community unless a real basis had been provided for overcoming this sinful
effect. That is why the initiate who enters into public life with his mystery
experience bears the sins of those for whom he reveals heaven in their common
faith. Therefore, the guilt of His
sufferings and wounds carries those who do not recognize how it belongs
together in the life of the congregation.
"But the life of Jesus contains more than the life of Buddha. Buddha's life concludes with the glorification. The most important thing in the life of Jesus begins after the glorification. In the language of the initiates, one should translate that as follows: Buddha has come to the point where in man the divine light begins to shine. He stands before the death of the earthly. He becomes the light of the world. Jesus goes further. He does not die physically at the point when the light of the world shines through Him. He is at that moment a Buddha. But He also at that moment enters a stage that is expressed in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. The earthly disappears, but the spiritual, the light of the world does not disappear. His resurrection takes place. He reveals Himself as Christ before His congregation. Buddha, at the moment of his glorification, merges into the blissful life of the All-Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens this All- Spirit once more in human form in the present existence. This was accomplished with the initiate at the higher ordinations in a manner that was expressive. The initiates in the sense of the Osiris myth had come to such a resurrection in their consciousness as in a pictorial experience. This great initiation, not as a pictorial experience but as a reality, was thus added to the Buddha initiation in the life of Jesus. Buddha proved with His life that man is the Logos and that He returns in this Logos, in the light, when the earthly dies in Him. In Jesus, the Logos itself has become personal. In Him the Word became flesh." (5,6)
What is reflected in
the chapter about the significance of the great initiation for congregation-building
and about the experience of the spiritual by the members of the congregation is
reflected with a view to that special historical situation, in which this community-..building was accomplished by the power of faith (not by cognition). Are there
metamorphoses, a continuation of this event, which took place at the time
through the power of faith, into our time where people live by the power of cognition?
In his work, Rudolf Steiner set himself the task of renewing this experience,
which was decisive for the congregation of faith, for the community of knowledge.
According to Aristotle
(4th book of his Physics), the conception of the passage of time based on
visual facts is mired in contradictions: One believes one can divide time into
past, present and future. But this is not so obvious. After all, the past is no
more, has no being. Future is not there yet, therefore has no being. And the
present is the bare boundary between both non-existent constituents of time.
After all, a boundary has no existence of its own either, but arises from the
connection of the non-being of the past and the non-being of the future. Both
have no being, the present even has a potentiated non-being. Non-being can only
give birth to a potentiated non-being.
Time is also conceived
as a great stream that in its bed throws with it the debris of all being things.
But these being things again have a being neither in the past (which is after
all past) nor in the past, but only in the present which is only a boundary
between two non-beings. So what remains of the being of things occurring in
time? Solution request of Augustine (Confessions): Instead of one present, one should speak of three. When we recall the past, then at
the moment of recollection the past is nevertheless present; there is therefore
(in the recollection) a past-present. And because in the expectation something
future becomes present, there is also a future-present. Moreover, there is a
present-present. With this, Augustine believes he got rid of the difficulty.
But: in the present of the past only a non-present becomes present, in the
present of the future also. And since the present of the present can only be
formed by the collision of the past and the future, Augustine's present division into three is no better than Aristotle's one present.
When time is considered only from the point of view of temporality, which Aristotle wants to show from the point of view of its ephemerality, one entangles oneself in insoluble contradictions. These are only resolved when we see that, in reality, the transient is always illuminated by something eternal. The temporality of the eternal is time; it is not this rolling forward of the past into the present and future. Time can have beingness only by virtue of the eternal in the world in man that grounds and carries all that becomes visuele..
Rudolf Steiner speaks
in his anthroposophy of knowing this eternal ground in man and in the world.
How the ephemeral and the eternal meet in man is the question of a new
possibility of community-building that Rudolf Steiner develops.
[1] The Roman numerals after the translated passages refer to
the chapter of Rudolf Steiner’s book.
* * *
II
As a motto may serve Rudolf Steiner's note in a copy (of his book Christianity as Mystical Fact):
"The author of
this book seeks to investigate the nature of the spirit as the natural explorer
seeks to investigate the spirit of nature."
This connection of
mysticism, as represented in this book, with the natural -scientific path of
knowledge forms its starting point and is the methodical leitmotif that runs
throughout the book. In connection with
this methodical motif of the natural-scientific path of knowledge, we find at
the outset very succinctly expressed in the Foreword to the 2nd edition:
"Only those who
allow 'mysticism' to apply in the sense that exactly such clarity can prevail in it as in the true representation of
natural-scientific facts, will appreciate how here the content of Christianity
as mysticism is also described in a mystical way." (Preface to the 2nd Ed.)
"Thus there can be
no doubt: the natural scientific mode of thinking is the greatest power in the
spiritual life of modern times." (Points
of View)
(To the connection of
natural science with "mysticism", the Goethean "mysticism",
Rudolf Steiner devoted an entire book: Goethe's
Worldview.) What unites the natural scientist with the mystic in their
mode of cognition? The natural scientist has made it a kind of ascetic
principle for himself to use concepts only insofar as they are accepted by
observations. To conclude anything from concepts is not scientific: The sun as
the perfect eye of God cannot have spots: thus the telescope is unreliable when
it establishes such a thing. Logically flawless. But this scholastic connects concepts to concepts without
concerning himself whether he enters
into that which perception offers. The natural scientist does not want to climb
the rope ladder of concepts in this way, but in full confidence wants to use
thinking as an instrument with which he converts what the senses offer into
judgments. Likewise the mystic. He wants to experience in inner experience a
unification with reality and is convinced that this unification is possible,
not through conclusions but only through the enhancement of the power of
perception. After all, the natural scientist looks for refined, manifold perceptness as material for his instruments; he only
overlooks the fact that the finest instrument is man himself, especially when
he discovers that he is not fixed in his perceptual capacity after all, but can
expand it through inner development. The
natural scientist has only explained something when he has explained it
genetically. This is another remarkable
characteristic of the natural scientific method and the natural-scientific way
of research, and it is also, in principle, an ideal of the mystical experience,
because the mystic wants to become one with the flow of world events by growing
together with the reality that his heightened powers of observation offer him.
This factor of self-development in unification with reality is, of course,
still largely overlooked by natural scientific knowledge. After all, the
natural scientist performs a natural scientific experiment only if he observes
how he transforms himself in the process (like the mystic).
The esoteric experience
of the Egyptian initiate is to be characterized above all by the secret of
number. (V) De Egyptian hierophant wants to become Osiris, is on the way to
Osiris and at the same time to himself, to his own highest being, but in such a
way that he knows: I am the many and the many are the one. For this secret of
number, the Egyptian hierophant prepared himself behind the veil of the mystery places;
full realization of it can come to him after the preparation only after death,
but even then as an experience of a single person elevated above the community
of other people.
"Thus the eternal
part of man is addressed in the eternal world order itself as an Osiris."
(V,1)
When you clarify this
contemplation graphically it is actually
a double-flow event, an outflow of the original Osiris into the multitude of
those who are on their way to him and thus to themselves, and an inflow of the
many into his body, becoming a vine in the vineyard. The contemplation is led toward Christian
congregation-building from the consciousness level of the early Christian congregation-building to the
possibilities of a ritual community experience in the present. To the Osiris
motif a new motif is connected as a greater developmental progression in the
age of Christianity:
"What was formerly
divided over the whole world: that was now united in a single personality.
Jesus has become the only one God-man. In Jesus there has thus once been
present something which must appear to man as the highest ideal, with which he
must unite himself more and more through his repeated lives in the future.
Jesus has taken upon Himself the deification of all mankind." (X)[1]
Two motifs intertwine
here: Metamorphosis of the soul into the divine by of reincarnation and
the new personality element that emerges with Christianity: the transition to
personal immortality belief. Under the veil of mysteries, the mysten
experienced their metamorphosis into the divine which they carried in their
souls. Now this appears on the plan of world history. With this, no new power of however exalted kind enters into the souls, but a new power of personal
immortality which becomes the unifying force with the historically revealed Ideal
of humanity. This is the personal immortality experience.
In the time before
Christ, immortality was the experience of union with the divine in one's soul
through her metamorphosis. Now the divine is lifted from the soul. It is,
however, given the miraculous power of unification with the historically emerged
Ideal of humanity, and this power is the guarantor of personal immortality and
a new community experience That is namely the great public secret that occurs
in the experience of this new individual power of man as a power of faith that
the believer feels his individual immortality to be guaranteed and that through
the guarantor of his individual immortality, which he shares with the other
believers, he grows into the historically emerged community body. Individual
immortality power and experience in the community of faith belong together in a
certain sense.
So that this connection
of individual immortality power and participation in an etheric community body
(the etheric faith experience) became possible, not only the minor but also the
major initiation was necessary, the passing through death, the major initiation
event, through which in the individual souls the immortality power was grounded
and the etheric community body came into being in which they could participate
in the faith community.
The meaning of the experience in the community of faith, in
which individual immortality power and the etheric community body permeate each
other, could not be cognitively interpreted by the Christian community of
belief. They experienced it with all the intimacy of their hearts, but the interpretation
of the meaning of this event is the contingency and task of our present time.
Rudolf Steiner characterizes this faith community from several sides.
"What took place
before the ancient mystery cults in the interior of the mystery temple has been
comprehended by Christianity as a
world-historical fact. The congregation has acknowledged Christ Jesus, the
initiated one, the one initiated in the unique-greatest way. For the congregation
He proved that the world is a divine one. The mystery wisdom became for the
Christian congregation indissolubly connected with the personality of Christ
Jesus. That He lived and that His
confessors belonged to Him: this belief replaced what had previously been
sought to be achieved by the Mysteries. Henceforth, some of what could
previously only be achieved by mystical methods could be replaced by the
conviction that in the Word present on earth, the divine was given. Not that
for which the mind of each individual had long to be prepared was henceforth alone
decisive, but what those who were around Jesus heard and saw; and what was
handed down by them. ‘What has been done
from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have touched with our hands
from the Word of life ... what we saw
and heard we proclaim also to you,
that you also may participate in our community.’ Thus reads the first epistle
of John. As a living bond, this
immediate reality should encompass all generations; it should continue to
strand itself as church mystique from generation to generation. Thus the words
of Augustine can be understood: ‘I would not believe the Gospel if the
authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.’ Not in themselves,
then, do the Gospels have an identifying mark for their truth, but one must
believe them because they are grounded in the personality of Jesus and because
the Church mysteriously derives from this personality the power to make the
Gospels appear as truth. - The mysteries
have transmitted by tradition the means to arrive at the truth; the Christian
community itself propagates this truth. During initiation, trust in the
mystical forces that shine forth from within a person must come from the One,
the Ultimate Initiator. The Mysteries sought deification; they wanted to experience it. Jesus was deified, one had to adhere to Him;
then, within the community founded by Him, one is a participant in deification
oneself: that became Christian conviction. What was deified in Jesus was deified
for his whole community. ‘Behold, I am with you all the days until the
consummation of the world.'(Matt. 28:20)”
The community of the
Christian believers in immortality experiences the empowering presence of the
divine that towers over it.
"'Write to the
angel of the community at Ephesus: This writes the One who holds the seven
stars in His right hand Who walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know
your deeds and what you have endured, and also your perseverance, and that you
will not support the evil ones, and that you have called to account those who
call themselves apostles and are not, and that you have known them to be false.
And ye have persevered, and ye have built your works upon My name, and ye are
not paralyzed thereby. But I desire you
to show your supreme love. Remember what you have fallen away from,
repent and do the most excellent deeds. But if not, I will come and take away
your light unless you repent. But this you have, that you despise the works of
the Nicolaitans,
which I also despise. He who has ears may hear what the Spirit says to the
communities: to the victor I will give food from the Tree of Life which is
in the Paradise of God.' This is the message addressed to the angel of the
first community. The angel, who is to be imagined as the community spirit, is
on the path outlined in Christianity. It is able to distinguish the false
professors of Christianity from the true ones.
It wants to be Christian, and it has founded its work on the name of Christ.
But it is required from the angel that it should not let any error bar the way
to the love supreme.'' (VIII)
Thus the angel, the
community spirit, can still go astray, e.g. be prevented in its development to
the major Christ initiation by the wrong of those who unite around it.
"This is not how you are," says the great community being to the
small community spirit. Only through "supreme love" does
one come from the minor community initiation experience to the true one, the major initiation experience that shows us the
goal of our path through our incarnations.
"And the Son of Man
'had seven stars in His right hand.'"(Rev. 1:16) (VIII)
Seven possibilities of the minor initiation through the immortality power of the faith community.
"The communities
are the paths to the divine in imperfection; and the community souls had to
become the leaders on these paths. To this end, they themselves had to become
such that the leader for them is the Being who is said to have had 'seven stars'
in His right hand. ‘And out of His mouth came a two-edged sharp sword; and the
radiance of His countenance was like the shining sun.’ This sword also appears
in the mystery wisdom. The initiant is frightened by a ‘drawn sword’. This
indicates the situation in which the one enters who wants to come to the
experience of the divine so that for him the 'face' of wisdom will light up
with a radiance of the sun'. John also
goes through such a condition. Thus his strength is tested. ‘And when I saw
Him, I fell as though dead at His feet; and He laid His right hand upon me, and
said, Fear not.’ (Rev. 1:17) Through experiences the initiant had to go through
which man undergoes only otherwise at the transition to death."(VIII)
On
the one hand, the soul has become something completely new, revealing itself at
first as the intimate power of faith of the individual. What should count as
the goal of development now stands before the faithful who have drawn their belief
from their immortality powers, as the angels of their communities themselves
moving toward the major initiation as long as the members of this community do
not detract from supreme love. "The communities are the paths to
the divine in imperfection." In the ancient mysteries, one could find the path
to the divine only in perfection. Now the miracle happens that the imperfect
through their immortality powers and in faith to the angelic communities come
together and practice "supreme love," so that above their
imperfection the sunshine begins to beam on their perfection. However, all of
this is characterized under the aspect of the consciousness level of that time:
under the aspect of the faith community.
Our current
consciousness is characterized by a very different shade of brightness. Through
Rudolf Steiner's deed of knowledge, a new kind of esoteric community life among
human beings has been founded. We are now no longer capable of only building faith
communities but also knowledge communities since this can be done on the basis of
the wonderful observational
possibilities for the resurrection
process that Rudolf Steiner possessed. In his science of knowledge, this wondrous
process takes place in the clear light of sobriety. Through him, we have
learned to observe the thinking and cognitive process in a way that was not
possible in the past. When we observe how we stand in relation to thinking and
its forms, the concepts and ideas, we then make the following observations that are well known to you from Rudolf Steiner's science of knowledge; to our
discomfort, thinking does not take place within us of its own accord, but only
when we do it. Thoughts, flashes of thought one can have, thoughts that unfold and connect vividly, which lead us on
to the great sea of spiritual universal existence, appear in our minds only on
the basis of our own actions.
Therefore, they are also troublesome for us, but they are also precious. Since they only appear on the basis of our
own actions, they leave us free. After
all, something that would not come about by our actions would influence us.
However, what we give ourselves through our innermost activity, we are ourselves. There we do not undergo
something but do it; and by virtue of this doing, we are fused with the
thought-content of the world into a oneness of being, a consubstantiality. We are no longer separate from that which we
think. Thinking and the thought are one
being; here a miraculous change-of-being takes place. The thinking thinks us as
we think the thinking. [German: Das Denken denkt uns, wie wir das Denken denken]. Here is this
miraculous origin on the one hand of individuality and on the other hand of communality. Only from this innermost power, which belongs to us alone, can we
swing inward in thinking. With that which belongs to ourselves, rocking
ourselves inwardly in thinking, we rock ourselves into eternity. When we become
aware of the eternal indestructible self-built cohesiveness, we become one with
something greater. The power of knowing is immortality power and most intimate
unifying power and thereby also the power by which we create the small
communities among us humans.
As we unite with the
spiritual in the souls of fellow human beings, this becomes an innermost
presence in us; I and thou are one. From there on we can understand and love
the human being experienced in the thou even to the extent of his aberrations.
This small exchange-of-being, in which immortality power and knowingness are permeated,
this small indication of an initiation is irradiated by the great sun of an
initiation-like experience, if we do not depart from the "supreme love." In the thinking experience, we can become one with other beings on
the basis of the unifying experience of thinking only because we are irradiated
by the sun of spiritual existence in general, by the experience that we live through
our immortality power in a universal spirit world. We experience both the small and the great community
experience. On the basis of the spirituality experienced in the thinking process,
we know that immortality power and community experience (the power rising in us
and the power radiating over us) meet and permeate each other continuously.
From these experiences, we can enter the path of nurturing a new community
experience. When we come together from these cognitive experiences in the joint efforts for the sake of
spiritual-scientific contents, we may be certain, if we do this in the love suoreme, that we will thereby become aware of the presence of a
community spirit that towers over us.
Such is the progression of the Christian community of faith to the
modern community of knowledge.
[1] See Part II “Christ is the Most
Lightful and the Most Meaningful Ideal of the Whole of Mankind” from the essay “Christ
as Judge – Man as the Religion of the Gods” by Valentin Tomberg:
“So
we come now to our second question: Is it at all possible under consideration
of the human freedom to exercise such an influence on Man that would be
stronger than the violent influence of Evil? If this were possible, then
mankind can be saved, if it were not, then mankind is lost.
From the outset, it must be said
that those not recognizing such a possibility can only do so because their
starting-point is false. They namely represent this effect on the human
will, be it as a push or a pull, purely mechanically or naturalistically and
consider the human will as an object of this mechanical effect. And yet there
is another sort of impact on the will that is not mechanical but spiritual. The
influence on the human will can also happen in the manner of insight and not
simply in accordance with a natural process. Not the relation between cause
and effect, but the relation between object and subject, will in this case be
decisive.
An effect on the human will that
respects human freedom must happen in this cognitive manner so that the
spiritual world can thereby not appear as a cause conditioned by the will,
but as an idea, as an idea that triggers the will.
But what is an idea that fires
the will? It is the ideal, namely an ideal that everyone can
call his own and that therefore is all-encompassing and all-human because
everyone recognizes in himself his own best, his own future.
If reason is a meaningful dark,
if the outer sun is a meaningless light, then the ideal is a higher synthesis of
both, i.e. a meaningful light that is brighter than the outer light of the sun
and a lightful meaning that is wiser than the meaning of reason. It overcomes
the meaninglessness of light and the lightlessness of meaning. It is only in
the spatial instant of the moment that its original unity is split: The meaningless light of the sun shines on the
outside world; the lightless meaning of reason enlivens the inner
world. The object lacks meaning, the subject lacks light.
Both
long for each other from the vague feeling of a common origin. Yet only when
the outer light is wedded to the inner meaning does Man rise to his ideal: to
the meaningful light, to the lightful meaning, to Christ. Christ is
the most lightful and the most meaningful ideal of the whole of mankind.
But Christ is not only the
meaningful light and the lightful meaning of the world. He is also the eternal
life, the eternal love of the world, who embraces all beings in Himself and
prevails in all. This living ideal of mankind is related to it in a cognitive
manner in the sense that this ideal does not affect mankind mechanically as a
natural cause, but spiritually as an example."
III
The Modern Metamorphosis of the Christian Community of Faith
The initiates of pre-Christian times sought to regain the divine in
their souls through inner transformation and to unite themselves with the lost Eternal One. The state of consciousness of this union is
not an individual one in the sense as it becomes possible through Christianity. By this
retrotransformation into the Eternal in the soul the proceeds of the individual
personality are carried into this Eternal, but she still experiences herself
only out of the Eternal and not from what she goes through on her earthly path
in isolation. This is precisely what gets erased.
What in pre-Christian
times was considered a predisposition to be fulfilled later on, merely as a
possibility, only becomes the actual bearer of soul development in Christian
times. The significant difference lies in the fact that with the foundation of
Christianity the permanent transformation is not decisive for soul development,
but the new individual experience of immortality. Tragic is that the new
individual experience of immortality, which became possible with the founding
of Christianity, only really comes into its own from the 15th century onward
and can only enter into the soul because she must now give away the
eternal-divine, which she previously carried within herself. The pre-Christian
paths of initiation were only possible because the soul knew the divine to be
residing within herself; she had only hidden it from herself by her imperfections.
The more she cleared these, the more she became herself. Now, however, with the
founding of Christianity, this Eternal One as an inalienable possession was
actually snatched from the soul, exits the plan of world history and moves into
a human body, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Thereby the soul is left with only one thing: the
impulse of loneliness; she has remained alone with her innermost soul needs,
since her most precious possession has been snatched away from her. And because her innermost need is fulfilled
by that for whom she faithfully strives as a Being entered the public sphere of
world history, she experiences individual immortality.
This power of faith, in
which the soul experiences individual immortality as a unique, self-shaped
being and not as the being that can reunite itself with the primordial and all-divine,
but in its uniqueness and solitude in its passage through the earthly vale of
tears, this power of faith is at the same time the power of community-building.
The new individualness and the new power of communalization belong together.
The powers of faith can strive together in believing in that one sublime being
in which they initially find fulfillment in that which this individual power of
faith and immortality power have in mind. Out of the individual power of
immortality consciousness arises a new initiation experience, but precisely one
that is not made by the individual on a path of soul transformation, but which
the devoted community can have in the flowing together of the powers of faith,
through which the fulfillment of its essential nature can become present.
Although the people of that time are intimately aware of what is occurring there
as a great novelty, as new individualization and communalization all at once,
they cannot consciously account for the meaning and context of the fulfillment
of that experience they have in the faith community. The interpretation, the conscious
comprehension of what occurred in the faith community is given in the modern knowledge
community. In the knowledge community, which anthroposophy makes possible among
people, lies the awareness of what happened at the beginning of our era.
This new community experience is based on the discovery and disclosure of entirely new fields of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner's science of knowledge makes for the first time the course of consciousness that takes place in cognition completely transparent. We cannot take a step or move a hand towards an object without continually imbuing all that surrounds us in the sense world with structural elements which bring about cohesion. We make them available to us through spiritual activity from a whole of ideational ordering elements with which we are constantly connected through self-active participation. However, in ordinary consciousness the self-active co-experiencing of this spirituality is something only dreamt of. We dream the order-creating elements into the sense world. What we only perceive through the senses, touch, hearing, etc. is at first without structure and order, thus not a full reality. In this still unordered world, colors, shapes, etc. cannot be spoken of: we do not see them, touch them, etc., but think them! Only through the ideational ordering elements of thinking does the sense world acquire structure and real objectivity.
The orderings lying in
reality flow in by the fact that we connect our own dreamily accomplished
activity with the ideational ordering content of the world. What lies beneath this dream in "pure percept"
is completely disordered and random, remains in deep sleep and only
becomes clear when through our thinking
activity we add cohesion and relations, relations which for the most part
in the sense-world we only dream in. In
a state of waking consciousness are then the conglomerates drawn from deep
sleep and dreams which we call things and objects. Rudolf Steiner demonstrated for the first
time the possibility of fully consciously observing the emergence of this
wonderful fabric of deep sleep, dream and waking. To see that we are connected with thinking,
which is the contextualizing element in the world, not by passive reception but
by inner activity, is one of the greatest observations we can make. It is our
innermost source of activity through which we arrive at thoughts, but not at
thought connections. For when we think
the concepts and ideas out of our activity, we are always swinging ourselves
with innermost activity into a realm grounded in its own laws. We can do it,
yes must do it, cannot however change the laws.
When we think "whole" and "part," these concepts
order themselves according to their due coherence, so that we would not be
thinking exactly if we said: the part is greater than the whole; then they
would be mere "word sounds", “buzz”. However, when we really think
the concepts "whole" and "part", we see how they order
themselves according to their indwelling logical relationship. But to this
perspective we come only by seeing: we are connected with them through our
activity; only when we actively penetrate them do we stand in the light and
clarity inherent in them, so that they connect untouched by our
arbitrariness.
We connect concepts on
the basis of our understanding of their own immutable laws, thus never doing so
compulsively. One speaks, of course, of "coercive logic," but we are
nevertheless connected with our very
being to that which appears before us in thinking through our most intensive activity. With the innermost core of our being
we are connected with an eternal world of order, and this is so precisely
because it is built on its own laws, although it is accessible only to our own
most individual activity. This eternal world of order is on account of its own
autonomy a communal world. This world, of which we become initially aware in
the form of concepts and ideas, is not different in the various heads, but has
its being in itself, as it were, above
the heads. Of course, there are different provinces of this vast empire which
are more or less accessible to individuals, but a basic current of coherence
and heavenly order nevertheless pervades all sectors which is the same for all
separate provinces. These are also intimately related, because what connects
them belongs to the ideational heaven of spirituality. In our innermost,
individual activity we belong to this self-constructed eternal ordering realm.
What belongs in us to this eternal realm is what we are.
When we enter the path
of inner observation shown to us, one makes the wonderful experience possible
in the thought-experience that one says to oneself: What in the most individual
activity is connected with this eternal realm, that is what I am. Of course,
this innermost activity only comes to expression in us if we overcome and repress everything in us that wants to draw us away from the union with this
kingdom of eternity. We must repress our physical organism which only
provides us through the senses with incoherent fragments of a disordered world
of percepts. We have the strength for this repression because we can always
stand inside the universal realm of eternal spirituality through individual
experience. This is the modern metamorphosis of the Christian community of
faith. In it also lived the individual power of immortality. It looked up to
the revealed Logos, the cosmic wisdom and cosmic spirituality having become
individuality. The conviction and substantiation that we are connected through
our innermost individual being with a universal being that far surpasses us can
only be obtained on the path of inner soul-observation.
This experience that I
belong to a universal being with my most individual power gives me at the same
time the awareness that to be a human being does not mean to be closed off and
separated from other beings, as is generally believed, if one takes the concept
of being from the experience of the nervous and sensory systems: Yes, there is
a being that is closed off by its bodily wall; that would be a being which does
not yet create the basis of its beingness from itself. The true being creates
the basis of its beingness in a process of exchange and unification with the
universal. The actual fulfillment of being is precisely exchange and not
closure. This ability to exchange is the second
thing that I experience on the path of soul observation. The first: that in our innermost individual power
we belong to an eternal self-constructed being and therefore possess a
certainty of the immortality spark that sparkles in our being: the state of
being enveloped by the universal. The third: the exchange actually occurs in
two phases, two metamorphoses. There is a great and a small exchange-of-being.
The major one takes place in the sense that the innermost immortal power is
exchanged with the universal power. But in this exchange, precisely as the essence
of our being, the power of exchange is as such pre-disposed, for wherever this
being, creating out of this universality places itself in the world and carries
something spiritual into the sense-world, there it carries spirituality into
the sense world with this power of exchange with which it originally found
access to this spirituality.
When we comprehend a thing
in the outer world, no matter how simple or complex, we comprehend it by
becoming more or less perfectly clear in our awareness of the spiritual that
lies therein. We then develop in us,
what lies therein as a spiritual formative power outside of us, even when we only
recognize that a circle is a line equidistant from a center. Our eyes do not
tell us this; no eye can see that the distance is the same everywhere; for
"distance" is a spatial relation; one cannot see it but only think
it. When we perceive such a thing with
our thinking, see it in ourselves spiritually, we find it again in the essence
of the external world in which it fits, and thereby unite ourselves with that
which slumbers in the essence of the sense-world, but cannot be expressed by
its own mouth. That must be done through the mouth of our knowledge.
The "creature [of
nature] yearns” to become aware of its being in such a way that it can speak in
us. The pronunciation takes place through the mouthpiece of man. His knowledge
resolves "the sighing of the creature" into the well-sounding word.
This is the third experience on the inner path of soul development in self-observation
of the soul: Connection of our immortality power with the universality of the
spiritual, which is the great experience of exchange and enclosed in it the
ability of the exchange-of-being with all other beings and especially with our
fellow human beings in the power of cognition; thus again the experience of
super-individuality and the experience of communality, namely of the universality,
with which this individualness is intimately connected from the beginning, but
also the experience of the exchange with all other beings who live to some
extent under the wings of this universal.
Quasi with the gaze of our
immortality power, our innermost activity, we look at the horizons of being or communities capable of engendering beingness: at a supreme universal one in which all converge, and
at a small community form in which the larger and smaller communities converge
through the use of common forms of knowledge. This small one is surpassed and
irradiated by the universal community form.
Just here I want to connect once more to something that was considered
in the second contemplation.
"'Write to the
angel of the community at Ephesus: This writes the one who holds the seven
stars in his right hand who walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know
your deeds and what you have endured, and also your perseverance, and that you
will not support the evil ones, and that you have called to account those who
call themselves apostles and are not, and that you have known them to be false.
And ye have persevered, and ye have built your works upon My name, and ye are
not paralyzed thereby. But I desire you
to come to your most excellent love. Remember what you have fallen away from,
repent and do the most excellent deeds. But if not, I will come and take away
your light unless you repent. But this you have, that you despise the works of
the Nicolaitans, which I also despise. He that hath ears may hear what the
Spirit saith unto the communities: the victor I will I give to eat of the
Tree of Life which is in the paradise of God.'" (VIII)
There a distinction is
made between the community and "the Spirit" who turns to many
communities in the plural, many angels. "This is the message addressed to
the angel of the first community. The angel, which is to be imagined as the
community spirit, is on the path foreshadowed in Christianity." (VIII)
Thus the spirit, i.e.
the great number of spirits of the community. The people come each time together
in the smaller community spirituality, there the power to exchange is active which
is the nature of knowledge. But this power to exchange finds its fulfillment
only in that great goal in which the smaller pre-formed communities come
together in communion with the spirit, the spirit of humanity. Smaller
communities are on the way to the great one.
"He is able to
distinguish the false confessors to Christianity from the true ones. He wants
to be Christian; and he has founded his work on the name of Christ. But it is
demanded of him that he should not let any error bar the way to supreme love.''(VIII)
Thus the abilities to exchange
by which individuals unite with others – then by their power of faith but now
in our time by their power of cognition – are in both cases nourished in their community-building
power by the greater one, in the community-building power which man experiences
upon realizing how his immortality is grounded in universality. Although the
smaller communities are on the way to community, they can forget their true
being and thus become dangerous to their own angel when they fall away from “supreme
love” that wants individuality to be fulfilled in universality.
"In the right hand
of Him who sat on the throne is the book in which the way to the highest truth
is set forth (Rev. 5:1). Only one is worthy to open the book: '[...] behold,
the Lion from the tribe of Judea, the root of David, has overcome to open the
scroll and its seven seals.'(Rev. 5:5). Seven seals the book has. Sevenfold is
the wisdom of man. That it is
characterized as sevenfold is again connected with the holiness of the number
seven. As a seal, Philo's mystical wisdom characterizes the eternal cosmic
thoughts that express themselves in things. Human wisdom seeks these thoughts
of creation. But only in the book sealed
thereby does divine truth appear. First the basic ideas of creation must be revealed
and the seals broken, then what is contained in the book will be revealed.
Jesus, the lion, is able to break the seals. He has given the thoughts of
creation a direction that leads through them to wisdom." (VIII).
The new idea of the
book in the sense of Christianity, which was not there before, is the entry,
the inscription of cosmic reason into an individual consciousness. The book is something that lies before the
eyes of the public. But this publication, this incarnation of flesh and substance
has its meaning in the possibility of a new mode of community formation, of building
communities of faith and later of knowledge. Through publication, the
possibility of forming the knowledge community is given and only as the
expression of this new publication does the book have any meaning.
Consequently, the Logos can address Jesus Christ as the book, because He is the
revelation of cosmic reason for the sake of a new community formation. The book is essentially the Logos as the
revealed and individualized cosmic reason, as the source of a new communality.
Only in conjunction with communalization does the book, publication make any
sense at all.
In a grandiose manner, the
idea of the book, publication, is connected with the formation of a new community
and an initiation into a community event. After all, the incarnation of Christ
is also a publication. Its underlying meaning is to enable man to attain a
new individual consciousness of immortality and thus a new community consciousness,
and the book (Christ Jesus) is the content of the new community consciousness,
and only in the raising of this community consciousness and in connection with
Him can it live.
"If we could look
into the initiation temple in which the people were subjected to the Osiris
metamorphosis, we would see that the events microcosmically reflect the genesis
of the world. Man who descended from the ‘Father’ had to give birth to the
‘Son’ within himself. What he in reality carries within him, the enchanted God,
had to become manifest in Him." (V)
Once again we are
talking about a publication which, of course, in the time of ancient Egypt was
only pre-disposed, potentially present, and of which the content first became public with the
foundation of Christianity and which was also there only experienced in the community of faith, but could not be understood.
Today, however, the meaning of this publication can be understood.
"And after it has been shown how everything that depends too much on the ephemeral to come to true Christianity has died, the strong angel appears with the opened book and gives it to John: 'And he said unto me, Take it and devour it, and it shall be bitter in the stomach, but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey.'" (Rev. 10:9) (VIII)
Whatever in us wants to detract from the love supreme experiences the book, the Logos of cosmic reason, as "bitter". However, when we commit ourselves to the path of supreme love, we experience sweetness. Sweetness is that which unites in our individuality with the great community being. Immortality consciousness and great community consciousness stand under the sublime light of this togetherness of the smaller communities. They are in danger of falling away from the love supreme. If they do not fall, they then get the true relationship to publication. This only makes sense as an expression of the union of immortality consciousness with community consciousness. Dissolved from this mystery process they have no meaning and no spirit.
* * *
IV
The Christmas Conference as a Metamorphosis
Of the Early Christian Community Of Faith
,
"... But we make ourselves known in all as God's ministers - by
much forbearance, under oppression, in distress, in fear, in suffering blows,
in imprisonment, in persecution, in hard labor, in waking nights, in fasting,
in prolonged suffering and kindness, in the holy spirit in love unfeigned, in
the words of truth, in the power of God, with the weapons of righteousness in
right and left hands, in honor and disgrace, in bad rumors and good rumors, as
seducers yet true, as the unknown yet known, as dying and behold: we live; as
the testified and yet not slain, as sorrowful, yet always cheerful; as poor,
yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet having everything.” (2nd Cor. 6:4-10)
This book is a book
about the revelation of the secret, of the secrets of the mysteries that were
brought forward in a grandiose manner through the mystery of Golgotha. What
formerly would be treason is now no more, because by means of this publication, this public disclosure a whole new, never before existing mystery current was ushered in through two
facts: It becomes possible for the human
being wanting to join this mystery current and able to do so (and this now
includes all and not only those chosen and prepared) through a new soul force,
which did not exist before in this sense, although of course it was also
prepared: the individual power of immortality.
The path through the
mysteries did not lead to this end, but to a union with the supra-individual
eternal divine in the soul. This supra-individual divine is at first taken away
from the soul and carried into the public domain; that is to begin with a
passage through death. The soul thereby finds itself in poverty and loneliness,
but is blessed with the supreme good: with the individual power of immortality;
this can only arise from loneliness, from the experience of being segregated
from the spiritual, where the individual soul at first dies. The power of
immortality leads the believers in the early Christian community to come
together. The community of faith that emerges from the converging individual power
of immortality forms a new mystery site - both made possible by the mystery of
Golgotha.
The old mystery path
presupposed the purification of individual imperfections; the new one
incorporates them. To this end, the following passage can be considered from
the accounts of the Apocalypse:
"And the Son of
man 'had seven stars in His right hand.” (Rev. 16). 'The seven stars are the
angels of the seven communities.'(Rev. 20). The ‘guiding spirits’ (daemons)
known from mystery wisdom have here become the guiding angels of the
‘communities’. These communities are thereby represented as bodies for
spiritual entities. And the angels are the souls of these ‘bodies,’ just as the
human souls are the guiding powers of the human bodies. The communities are the
paths to the divine in imperfection; and the community souls were to become the
leaders on these paths." (VIII)
The individual
imperfection is incorporated because the experience of immortality finds its
starting point precisely in the individual imperfection.
The immortality
experience of the early Christian faith community with its conviviality has
assumed a form corresponding to the natural scientific mindset in our age of the
consciousness soul through anthroposophy: Instead of faith intimacy, it is
called there very soberly, but no less wonderfully, "regression of the
organism" (The Philosophy of Freedom,
Ch. IX, 4). The Philosophy of Freedom,
in fact, teaches its readers something equivalent to the sense of balance. We
have long been able to use it, but without knowing how it functions. (The sense of balance has its organ in the
ear.) Thinking is something people could already do, at least within certain
limits; how and what, however, is involved, was not known before the advent of The Philosophy of Freedom.
The gaze of thinking
into itself and to thereby seize a whole new nuance within thinking consciousness
one learns only on the path of observation of The Philosophy of Freedom. One starts from simple observations. One
of these, which must always be vindicated anew is that everything which our
senses convey to us is indeed given
to us. There we are receptive, there we
can produce nothing, not even the smallest grain of sand in the world of
percepts. No color, no sound can be produced
by us in its originality. If we knock, for example, then that is only
the occasion; but it is the configuration of the world which exists without us,
from which the sound actually springs in its audio content; we can play on the
keyboard of the world which, however, we have not created.
In its basic substance,
everything we perceive is given to us, is without our intervention yet
completely disordered. We need this daily bread not only for teeth, tongue and
palate, but for our whole organism, which is nothing more than a composite of
senses that perceive the world, yet without its aggregation and order. To help distinguish
right from left, for example, touching is of no use; right and left are not
sensations of touch but concepts. No percepts are formed from frameworks and
structures. We can only organize and shape percepts, if our organism remains
silent. This organism constantly needs percepts and withers immediately, if not
nourished from this inflow. But only one thing feeds itself from itself: that
is the thinking that flares up in us as soon as we ignite our very own
activity.
When we repress our physical
organism, that which is mortal and in need of nourishment, it comes to a
resurrection from the grave of this organism. It is this power of resurrection by
which we partake in thinking. At first, it is still poor in content, but
thinking in its heavenly universality makes it its own. Thinking lets itself to
be brought forth willingly, but its orderings exist independently of our will.
When, we repress and overcome our organism with the power of resurrection, we then
enter a certain realm whose luminous creatures are self-supporting. Unlike the
heavy things of the earth they need no support by anything from somewhere or
other. The concepts are self-supportive and constitute a realm that
irrepressibly merges into an ever-increasing totality to which we ourselves belong
through our power of immortality, yet in such a manner that we are connected to
this realm not as sensitive but as co-active beings. Something that one co-creates
and experiences oneself, although built on its own laws, is of course nothing
that is opposed to one’s own being; rather, it is made up of what we truly do ourselves.
It is something in which we are mentally active as doers, nothing distinct from our own being,
but something in a mutual state of exchange-of-being. Because we stand doingly
in it, we are done ourselves by the spiritual world. The repression of our
organism by the power of resurrection and immortality makes us aware of the
exchange with the eternal in indicative experiences, because the experience of
the exchange-of-being is necessarily connected with the immortality experience
of the repression of our organism. Therefore, it has become completely clear
here that two things, which seem to be the two greatest of opposites, are only
two sides of the same coin: the most individual one that attains immortality and
the most universal one, the cosmic coherence of the spiritual world. For the
experience of exchange is precisely that through which we definitively rise
above ourselves and connect ourselves with other beings.
And because the
exchange-of-being experience is connected with the modern immortality
experience as the resurrection from the subdued organism, the seed of the new
mystery site has been laid therein, so that we can be certain: When we exert
ourselves with the immortality power of clear, distinct thinking, then we
receive a common share in a spiritual content and do so with the powers by virtue
of which we are from the very beginning within that Being that infinitely
surpasses all of us. We immerse ourselves in a communal consciousness
infinitely surpassing us. Therefore, at the center of the Christmas Conference
is the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society. The community is based
on the communal experience of immortality and the experience of ethical
individualism.
That includes yet
another world-historical event in the field of publicity, for the Christmas Conference,
which may be characterized as a metamorphosis of the early Christian community
of faith, is connected with the unrestricted public disclosure of the spiritual
heritage that Rudolf Steiner gave to the members [of the reconstituted Anthroposophic
Society] and which was initially kept within the confines of a separate
consciousness. It is accessible to all,
although this publication only makes sense as an expression of a new mystery
formation, as I have characterized it as a metamorphosis of the early Christian
religious congregation of faith, which is now precisely becoming a knowledge
community. Only in connection with a new mystery formation does publication
make any sense. You can imagine this clearly when you consider that now a new
element is added to the incorporation of individual imperfections in the early
Christian faith congregation. In the early Christian religious congregation, a
Pentecostal outflow of consciousness beyond its direct presence arose in the
individual members. In connection with the formation of the knowledge community
and the unified consciousness centered within it, something new has now once
again been given, namely accessibility to the spiritual world and spiritual
facts from the realm of ordinary day-consciousness. Here we must distinguish
two things: the realm of ordinary day-consciousness and the soul attitude of
ordinary day-consciousness. The latter is, of course, for present-day humanity largely
an unspiritual one, but can in itself be transformed to such an extent that
from that point on the way into the spiritual world can be opened. Rudolf
Steiner has shown that grasping the thought experiences directly from the realm
of ordinary day-consciousness opens the way into the spiritual world. That is
the new great incorporation, which again characterizes the grandiose
metamorphosis, in which not only the individual imperfections are incorporated
into the great mystery event, but also the ordinary day-consciousness, so that
from there on the first steps into the spiritual world can be made. This is the
grandiose deed by Rudolf Steiner.
There are, of course,
many reasons for publication; however, what is said here contains an inner interpretation of the meaning of
publication. Potent wisdom lies in the fact that the step into the spiritual
world can and must be made from ordinary day-consciousness. But this is only truly
and really valid, if it remains in connection with the interpretive fact of the
formation of a new mystery event from the starting point of ordinary day-consciousness.
Publication requires precisely in view of the Christmas Conference an
all-important interpretation. What, then, is the most significant publication,
the most grandiose disclosure that has ever existed in world and human history?
Of course, publication of the essential nature of the mysteries, whereby this disclosure
is at the same time a metamorphosis: the stepping out of the mystery Being [i.e.
Jesus Christ] before the veil of the temple into the mystery of Golgotha. What
was previously hidden wisdom now became public wisdom which, however, was
immediately taken back as a secret, in the sense that it has sense and
significance only if it remains in connection with the formation of a new
mystery site that arises from the cooperation of the powers of immortality. The
wisdom that was hidden in the spiritual world enters the plan of the physical
world before the eyes of human beings with their individual imperfections and
becomes visible in human form. What had previously been inscribed with star script
in the heavens now appears before human beings, as it were encased in the
substance of the outer world, in a transient body. Therefore Philo can say that
thereby actually the fact of the book has been in a grandiose primal fashion
placed before man; for the book is not secretly closed, but accessible to all.
"As the 'Son of
God,' Philo, of whom it was said that he was the reborn Plato, mentioned the
wisdom born of man which lives in the soul and has as its content the reason
present in the world. This cosmic reason, the Logos, appears as the book in which ‘all the existence of the world
is inscribed and recorded.’ The cosmic
reason further appears as the Son of God 'following the ways of the Father He
shapes, beholding the primordial images, the forms.'" (III)
The disclosure of the wisdom
in the mystery of Golgotha is actually the primal fact of the book. The
contents of the hidden book enter into the public domain, becomes legible to
those who by their own behavior realize and keep alive the meaning of this
publication. This public disclosue is already pre-disposed in the secrecy of
the pre-Christian mysteries, prepared to some extent, although in essence they
are opposites (for they rest on secrecy).
"If we could look
into the temple of initiation in which men were subjected to the Osiris
metamorphosis, we would see that the events microcosmically represent the
genesis of the world." (V).
This already is the
preparation for stepping out into the physical plan, the microcosmic-becoming
of the macrocosmic. But this has only then come to a conclusion when it comes
out in an individual being on the physical plan.
"Surely it is to
be taken literally what Jesus is in
John's Gospel. He is the 'Word' made flesh. He is the Eternal that was in the
primal beginning. If He is really the resurrection, then the 'Eternal, Original'
is resurrected in Lazarus. Thus one has to do here with a revival of the
eternal ‘Word’. And this 'Word' is the life to which Lazarus has been
resurrected. So here one has to do with an ‘illness’. But with an illness that
does not lead to death, but that serves to 'honor God', i.e. the revelation of
God. Has the 'eternal Word' been resurrected in Lazarus, then truly the whole
process serves to make God appear in Lazarus. For Lazarus has become a
different person through the whole process. Before, not the 'Word', the Spirit
lived in him, now this Spirit lives in him. This Spirit is born in
him."(VII)
From the illness of
mortal life and from the withdrawal into this mortal bodily shell arises
precisely the resurrection power of individual immortality. This power is
expressed in a book that can be experienced and read in the physical world.
(See VIII) The seven
stars are the souls of the human communities who, for their part, are initially
on the way back to the highest community shapers, to the Christian
community. The "two-edged"
sword means: The people and the community souls are placed before the decision
whether to practice “supreme love” or to abandon that "love supreme"
which never forgets that it has meaning and significance only in connection
with the emergence of a new mystery being. Deprived of this meaning,
publication becomes an agony.
"In the right hand
of Him who sat on the throne is the book in which the way to the highest truth
is prescribed." (Rev. 5:1). Only one is worthy to open the book: “Behold,
the Lion from the tribe of Judea, the Root of David, has overcome to open the
book and its seven seals.'(Op. 5:5) Seven seals the book has. Sevenfold is the
wisdom of man. That it is characterized
as sevenfold is again connected to the holiness of the number seven. As a seal,
Philo's mystical wisdom characterizes the eternal cosmic thoughts that express
themselves in things. Human wisdom seeks these thoughts of creation. But only in the book sealed thereby does
divine truth appear. First the basic ideas of creation must be revealed and the
seals broken, then what is contained in the book will be revealed. Jesus, the
lion, is able to break the seals. He has given the thoughts of creation a
direction that leads to wisdom through them. - The lamb, who was strangled and
whom God bought with his blood, Jesus, who brought the Christ into himself, who
thus passed through the mystery of life and death in the highest sense of the
word, opens the book (Rev. 5:9-10)" (VIII)
The opening of the book
is actually the self-book-making of the former cosmic wisdom into an individual
being that steps out onto the physical plane. And precisely this opening of the
book, the self-disclosure-book-making has meaning only in the fact that thereby a new power arises in human
beings to find the spiritual world, this individual power of immortality which
is the main basic power of the faith community and the main cognitive power of
the knowledge community. And again, this disclosure only makes sense in
conjunction with the formation of a new mystery site, which as a community
formation initially incorporates the individual imperfections, after which the
formation of the knowledge community which starting from ordinary day-consciousness
finds its way into the spiritual world.
"And after it has
been shown how everything that depends too much on the perishable to come to true
Christianity has died, the strong angel appears with the opened booklet and
gives it to John (Rev. 10:9), 'And he said onto me, Take it and devour it, and
it shall become bitter in the stomach, but in your mouth it shall be sweet as
honey.' John should not only read in the little book, he should take it all in,
he should imbue himself with its contents." (VIII)
This all-inclusive absorption means pain for the death-soaked organism. But this turns into the taste of honeyed sweetness, into the taste of unification with the spiritual world and becoming one with those who want to commune with the spiritual world. The book takes a stand against the most modern of problems in a downright shocking way. For what could be more topical than the question: How does in this world of uninhibited and shameless publication live in people that, which from the innermost part of their being lets them experience their immortality in such a way that this most individual of experiences is at the same time a community experience? An amazingly clear answer is given to this question: It contains the fact of publication, which reads that the path into the spiritual world begins from ordinary day -consciousness. And publication makes sense only as the outer side of something that is most arcane, namely the emergence of a new mystery site and a new mystery consciousness.
* * *
Every publication [in the sense of revelation, disclosure, note by the trans.] is created from the book of wisdom, from the source of
wisdom that nourishes the sensible world and in whose nature it is to publish
itself and to allow itself to be published. This publication is only meaningful,
however, if it remains connected to its origin which moves into it, so that a
new inwardness may arise in individual souls and a new community may be formed. Publication is one of the main themes of our
book, for it deals with the greatest publication in the spiritual history of the
world: with the mystery of Golgotha. The meaning of this publication is the
emergence of a new inwardness in individual souls and a new community, this
pendulum stroke, this rhythm of breathing in and out. Exhaling, so that an all the stronger and
more innate inhalation may take place and vice versa. Exhalation is only true
as one half of the whole rhythm. In ever new twists and enrichments it is shown
that the very source of Christianity is the marvelous spiritual publication of
the mysteries of antiquity, that is, of that which originally belonged to the
innermost secret of souls as well as to the sacred hiddenness of the temple.
There is the same rhythm again, the revelation of the secret, so that there may
be a new inwardness.
Rudolf Steiner describes
this in a method for which he explicitly claimed the term "natural
scientific method". The essence of this method is, on the one hand, that
one forms concepts, especially concepts for the supersensible, only in
connection with observations, that one must not fall into that old scholastic
deduction, where one spins out concepts from the pen and believes that by doing
so one can say something about reality. In this way, one arrives at sentences
(which are not logically wrong) such as: The sun cannot have spots, because it
is the eye of God. Or one draws from the purely spiritual existence of beings (which
thus cannot be grasped with our own perceptual skills) all kinds of possible
consequences about their condition and behavior. This is in contrast to the
natural scientific method, which strives to develop its concepts, insights and
knowledge only in transparency. It wants after all to see how that which
underlies the outer world as imperceptible forces, as morphological, cohesive
forces, reveals itself in this outer world and how precisely then in its
realization one understands it all the better, the more faithfully one can
follow it in its revelation in the outer world.
The natural scientific
method also places itself in this pendulum swing of externalization and
internalization or publication for a deeper heartiness of the life of soul. With this we have something else in view,
namely, that this natural scientific method can only do justice to the nature
of man, if one tries to survey this nature of man in terms of his cognitive
process. This nature of man is also nothing
else than the goal in this great rhythm of externalization and internalization.
For what man is in essence, we learn to know only from his deeds, by what he
actively performs in the external world. And he has not yet become himself,
when he has not yet put his conviction into action. He internalizes himself
only when and insofar as he is able to realize himself in his deeds and from
the vision he offers himself in order to learn to understand himself inwardly
all the better. This is in general the motive of the course of life, that we
draw the strength of internalization, which becomes the strength of
externalization in a new course of life. The metamorphosis of externalization and internalization is the primal
rhythm of the world. It is the great feature
that passes through the world and renders it dramatic. It is the great breath
of the world drama which is mentioned here again and again. This “Christianity as Mystical Fact” is
actually a symphony about this world drama, this world rhythm of
internalization and externalization. The world drama is the immersion of the
spiritual in the sensory-external, the enchantment in nature, also in the lower
regions of the human being. There the divine enchants itself in order to be
enchanted out of it and after passing through the externalization in the
enchantment to obtain a new higher level of inner being.
That is this great
primal dramatic rhythm that pervades the world and underlies world events,
appearing in ever new metamorphoses and ever new possible places. Wherever we
may direct our contemplative gaze, it falls upon a metamorphosis of this primal
motif which, in imperishable freshness, forms the blowing breath of the world.
We detect something of it again precisely where we experience the arrival of
rigidity. To experience this great breath of externalization and
internalization in ourselves, to accomplish this disenchantment of the God externalized
and enchanted in the world of nature, that is the primal task of the human
soul. All that it achieves are initial efforts to this enchantment, exercises
in the preliminary school of this great dramatic art, in which man is poet and
actor in one. The greatest event of disenchantment takes place in human
knowledge. Therein becomes conscious of itself that which otherwise underlies world
phenomena, the natural phenomena and the appearances of the human being only as
an unconscious creative force. To make
this power conscious, there were two paths in pre-Christian times, one
proceeding more in the inner world and the other more in the outer. The inner
path of this consciousness-raising of that which is otherwise unconsciously
shaped is that of the mystics, the other is that of the Greek philosophers.
Rudolf Steiner
describes how the Greek philosophers went basically, though with slightly
changed means, the same way as the mystics: the way of the reliberation of the
soul enchanted in externalization. It is the path of internalization from externalization,
a re-internalization that draws new strength precisely from externalization. In
this sense Plato (see Chapter 4 "Plato as mystic") describes the
philosopher as the great leader and benefactor of mankind, who, to the one who
wants to follow him on the path, makes clear how there is a self-movement of
the soul in cognition, through which she frees herself from the prison of the
body and resurrects from the grave of the body in the cognitive process with
the reborn strength, which is also the impulse of its morality in community
life. The philosopher is able to lead man along this path, which is a path of
entering into manifestation and liberating oneself from it with newly gained
strength. The philosopher can point to this path and draw strength from it
himself, because once again the great breath of the world drama permeates his
research efforts. About this familiarity with the world drama as the primordial
ground of things and knowledge speaks for example the wonderful dialogue
"Timaeus" by Plato.
“In Timaeus the drama
of the creation of the world is staged. Whoever searches for the traces that
lead to this world evolution, comes to an inkling of the primal force
from which everything has become. 'Now
it takes much effort to find the creator and Father of this universe, and when
one has found Him, it is impossible to speak of it in such a way that it
is comprehensible to all.' The mystic knew what was meant by this
impossibility. It points to the drama of God. For him He is not available in
the sensual-intellectual realm. There He
is present only as nature. He is enchanted in nature. Only the one can approach
Him, according to the view of ancient mystics, who awakens the divine in
himself. Thus, He cannot be made
comprehensible to all without difficulty. But even to those who can approach
Him, He does not Himself appear. Thus, it is written in Timaeus. Out of a world
body and world soul, the Father made the world. Harmoniously, in perfect
proportions, He mixed the elements that came into being when, pouring Himself
out, He offered His own special being. Thus, the world body came into
being. And stretched upon this world
body in the form of a cross is the world soul. She is the divine in the
world. She has undergone the death of
the cross so that the world might be. The grave of the divine, so Plato
may call nature. However, not a grave in
which something lies dead, but something eternal, for which death only offers
the opportunity to express the omnipotence of life. And that human being
discerns this nature in the right light, who steps before it to redeem the
crucified world soul. The world soul should
resurrect from death, from her enchantment. How can she arise again? Only in
the soul of the initiate. Wisdom thus
finds its proper relation to the cosmos. The resurrection, the redemption of
God: that is what knowledge is. From the imperfect to the perfect, the world
development is continued in Timaeus. An ascending process is shown in the presentation
[of the world drama]. The creatures are developing. Evolution is a resurrection of God from the
grave. Within this development, man appears. Plato shows that something special
is happening with man. It is true that the whole world is something
divine. And man is no more divine than
the other creatures. But in the other beings God is present in a hidden way, in
man in a public way." (III)
Publicly present in so
far as he becomes a man willing to participates in the great rhythm of publication
and re-internalization. In this he comes to know the meaning of the book as
expressed by Philo (III): The meaning of the book is to be published, so that
there may be more inwardness in individual souls and in the community. The
great publisher, "the Son", can himself be characterized as a book.
He publishes Himself.
After Rudolf Steiner
has described how the sources of Christianity flow into the pre-Christian
Mysteries and how therein the great breath of the world is recognizable, after
he has shown how the Greek philosophers made themselves comprehensible and how this
philosophical comprehension reached its climax in Plato, he recounts in the
next chapter the relationship between mystery wisdom and popular myths. For
this we have given a certain preparation in the preceding reflections: In the
natural world, in the published world, the divine-spiritual has been poured
out; also in man in so far as he has a natural part in his being. This seed of
the divine-spiritual, spread in nature, offers physical and soul nourishment to
man. Man forms representations by
soulfully absorbing that which is enchanted in the world around him as a
nourishing force, without being aware of this enchantment. And he himself
participates in this enchantment of forces in structures that are shaped and
built up by these forces, e.g. as a creator of myths. There this unconscious
creative force also works in man and creates structures in a heightened state
of nature which are reflected in myths and offer nourishment to the soul.
But man can not only show
what is expanded in him as nourishment and works through him, he can bring it on
a second level in his own soul to a new development. Since this seed power, which is spread out in
him and even expanded in the mystic figures created by him, he can not only
digest and nourish himself with this seed power, but also develop it in his own
soul. He then acquires the creative
forces underlying nature and also the myths, and the innermost kinship of the
soul with these creative forces when they awaken in his soul in a new form.
This is what the mystic, on the one hand, and the philosopher, on the other, do
when they thread the path indicated by Plato. But in this experience of the
awakening of the seed power that has poured out into the world down to one's
own soul, man does not yet have an original individual consciousness of his own
soul. She is, however, the ground in which these seed powers of the spiritual
can bring about a new development which then fills the soul with images of the
mystic, with the knowledge of the philosophers, who in Plato's sense also go
the way of the mystics. The soul becomes filled with seed powers that were
previously consumed. With the figures that arise from the seed powers, the soul
can fulfill herself without obtaining full consciousness of her own being. In
Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, the aim is to create an understanding of the
immortal in the soul from this experience of her being fulfilled. But Greek philosophy arrives here at a border
point where it cannot break through certain barriers.
The self-discovery of
the soul within her own individual original powers cannot only be acquired by
an inner fulfillment with contents no matter how great they may be. The soul can
be fulfilled with them, but it is precisely the most marvelous contents that
erase the soul also within herself. Self-discovery of the soul is only then possible
when the seeds that have been elevated on a second level in the soul die again.
For what develops from a seed as a
wonderful formation can also die again.
Only when the soul experiences that what has been formed also dies and
then leaves it (third step), can she also find herself again from the
experience of this death in an event that not only fulfills her, but in which she
is actively involved with her power in an entirely new way; with her immortal power
which she develops from the experience of death. It is this power of immortality
which, rising again from the experience of death, flows into the faith
community of the first Christians and there, from the experience of
immortality, causes a new miraculous awakening because now – as in its mystery site
- the highest divine essence can become present. This experience of the
Christian community of faith finds a new development in our present time in the
community of knowledge.
"The mystic sought
within himself powers, he sought within himself entities, which remain unknown
to man as long as he is stuck in the ordinary conception of life. The mystic
asks the great question of his own spiritual forces and laws that extend beyond
his lower nature. Man with the ordinary,
sense-logical conception of life creates gods for himself or, when he reaches
an understanding of this creation, he denies them. The mystic recognizes that
he creates gods, why he creates them; he has discovered, so to speak, the
natural law of divine creation. It is the same with him as with a plant that
suddenly became knowledgeable and
learned the laws of its own growth, its own development. The plant develops in graceful
unconsciousness. If the plant knew its laws, it would have an entirely
different relationship to itself. What the lyricist senses when he sings the
praises of the plant, what the botanist thinks when he examines its laws: that
is what a knowing plant would have in mind as an ideal of itself.” (IV)
The creation of folk
myths is characterized as a kind of continuation of unconscious creation, just
as we observe it in nature and its forms. There also miraculous forces are
active in stones, plants, animals and in the natural part of man, forces that
are morphologically and creatively active, but do not comprehend
themselves. In a similar way, these
operate on a higher level in the myths from which the people, forming them in a
kind of graceful and fantastic unconsciousness, originate these pictorial figures,
without being able to account for the creation of the morphological figures or
even wanting to do so. It is only said here, "The mystic recognizes that
he creates gods, why he creates them; he has come to know, so to speak,
the natural law of the creation of gods. (IV)
He creates them at
first in unconscious execution of the formative forces lying within him, and as
long as he remains unconscious of this creative power in him as such that takes
place in his soul, he believes in these pictorial figures. As soon as he
recognizes, however, that he himself is actively connected with the formation
of these myths, this belief falls away and he sees them only as phantasms. At a higher level, the mystic becomes aware
of the involvement of the creative power of his own soul. The soul reveals that
which lies within her own faculties as something true and connected with the
general state of the world. This reveals itself to the mystics as the formative
power in the myths.
"So it is with the mystic with regard
to his laws, of the forces working in him. As a knower, he must create
something beyond himself, something divine. And so also the initiates stood
toward that which the people had created beyond nature. In that way they took a
stance towards the world of gods and myths of the people. They wanted to recognize this divine and
mythic world. There where the people had a god-like figure, they sought a
higher truth."(IV)
The mystics tried to
make themselves aware of the forces in the human soul that had produced from her
the divine and mythic figures, but now in a special form.
"An example: The
Athenians had been forced by Minos, the king of Crete, to deliver seven
boys and seven girls every eight years. These were thrown to Minotaur, a
terrible monster. When such a sad consignment was to go to Crete for the third
time the king's son Theseus went with it. After his arrival in Crete, Ariadne,
the daughter of King Minos, took care of him. The Minotaur lived in a
labyrinth, a maze, from which no one who entered could find a way out. Theseus
wanted to free his home town from the defamatory tribute. He had to enter the
labyrinth, into which loot was always thrown before the terrible beast. He
wanted to kill the Minotaur. He overcame the terrifying foe and, with the help
of a tangle of thread, handed to him by Ariadne, was set free again. - The
mystic needed to clarify how the creative human spirit comes to formulate such
a story. Just as the botanist spies on plant growth to find its laws, so the
mystic wanted to spy on the creative spirit. He sought a truth, a content
of wisdom where the people had placed a myth. Sallustius tells us how a mystic
sage viewed such a myth: ‘One could call the whole world a myth, which encloses
the bodies and things in a visible way, the souls in a hidden way. If the truth
about the gods were taught to everyone, the unwise would disparage it, because
they do not understand it, and the more able would take it lightly; if,
however, the truth is given in the cloak of a myth, it is protected from
disparagement and provides an occasion for philosophizing.'
When one sought the
truth content of a myth as a mystic, one was aware that one was adding
something to that which was present in popular consciousness. One knew that one
was putting oneself above this folk consciousness as the botanist puts himself
above the growing plant. One said something quite different from what was
present in mythic consciousness, but one considered what one said as a deeper
truth, which expressed itself symbolically in myth." (IV)
At this point one will
wonder what method the mystic applied in order not to remain in the state in
which from a far-reaching unconsciousness myths arise. A distinction is shown
between myth-making and the experience of the mystic. The former is compared to
the creation of nature. This is also something that arises from creative, i.e.,
spiritual forces. But these forces do not comprehend themselves. In the human
soul, we can also observe a kind of naturalness in shaping, insofar as it
concerns the formation of myths which well up from the soul in a profound
unconsciousness, without the soul being able to account for them. In contrast,
what does the mystic adept do? He is dealing with something similar, but in
doing so he is conscious, whereas unconscious formative forces underlie the
formation of myths. It is the method of making conscious that which is also at
work in the soul before it becomes conscious, but is overlooked by it because
it remains unconscious. The soul thus
conjures up something from within herself which is already at work within her,
but which she can make conscious through inner effort.
Can we with our present-day soul life still put ourselves in the position of this two-thousand-year-old experience and in the method of the mystics? “The Philosophy of Freedom” is indeed nothing more than the experience of a modern mystery. Only in another metamorphosis, in another place of development of consciousness the same thing is done what thousands of years ago occurred behind the front curtains of the Mystery Temple: raising to consciousness that which is unconscious in ordinary soul life. The unconscious element in the ordinary soul life of man is thinking. We constantly weave thinking into the world around us. We form the myth of the concrete world of objects surrounding us. Only, compared to the great Greek myths, that is something long-winded. We form straw myths. And we do form the myth of the world that surrounds us with unconsciously enduring forces, because we are constantly dreaming inwardly that which orders the world. What is clear in the sense of present consciousness are the objects. The consciousness of present-day man is objective consciousness. He faces chairs, trees, people as sensory objects in ordered and shaped form, of this we are aware in our waking state. But how is it that objects exist? Their brightness is composed of two less bright layers of consciousness: So that the brightness of the objects is possible in good order (insofar as this good order is still there despite human efforts to disturb it), you constantly dream in the objects their ordering relations. The objects are clear, but their relations we dream. That the objects have an "above" and "below", a "right" and "left", an "earlier" and "later", is not as clear as the objects as such. But nevertheless, we dream-consciously experience the orderly arrangement of the objects in their environment. That they are actually arranged in such a way as to have an "above" and "below" etc., to mean something "greater " or "lesser", you dream all that and you must bring it out of this dream with careful effort. These proportions are dreamed inwardly in deep sleep; that is what occurs in our senses. There, only dark, dull stimuli occur, which only light up and are clarified because you are dreaming arrangements inwardly. Because you are constantly mixing deep sleep and dream, objective wakefulness comes into being. Nowadays, wakefulness is a state of constant dreaming. To become aware of this and to "disendarken" deep sleep is the task of modern mystics.
VI.
"Only with the mysterium of Golgotha does the possibility begin of recognizing
one’s own activity-consciousness of the soul as immortality-consciousness."
The fourth chapter reveals quite clearly the method used by Rudolf
Steiner: A book dealing with "Christianity as mystical fact" employs the
natural scientific method! This is,
among other things, a genetic method. It attempts to grasp the world's
phenomena and processes genetically, i.e. to understand something that follows
from something which precedes it, so that in confidence to thinking one tries
to penetrate with this activity that which is perceptible in each case of
preceding states (not only for the senses, but also for what is perceptible
within the soul), and through this penetration to experience a change in one's
own cognitive faculties, which directs one to penetrate and understand
subsequent contents again. The natural scientific method as a genetic method
thus develops itself in the genetic penetration of the known facts and
processes. It actually lies at the heart of this natural scientific method that
the one who maintains it truly unbiased - as it is according to its own
innermost nature and cannot be otherwise - himself goes through a soul
development. Man changes himself in the process, because in penetrating the
phenomena of the world he increases his powers of knowledge and gives himself a
higher level in his own spiritual personality. Therefore, a book which deals
with a mystical fact can quite rightly make use of this natural scientific
method, if by mystical knowing and understanding one means living and growing
together with the subject on the basis of an inner soul development. This "mystical", as the word is
used here, means that what is developed in the soul as the capacity to know
remains not only an inner experience, but at the same time also a kind of
realization in the double sense of the word, that in the natural scientific-mystical
experience man changes himself and through this development penetrates deeper
into worldly reality.
In a certain sense,
this can be particularly clear from Chapter 4 "Mystery Wisdom and Myth",
where in maintaining this natural-scientific-mystical-genetic method,
Christianity is understood as a metamorphosis occurring in a great development
since primeval times in an inner spiritual logic. This appearance of
Christianity or the mystery of Golgotha was preceded by long periods of not only
human but also cosmic developments. In general, human consciousness as it was
then before the mystery of Golgotha, the tremendous cosmic developments were
expressed in the creations of myths with their fantastic images which, the more
one goes back in time, are more cosmological. In the progress of the
mythological history, more and more such creations emerge which, in the
firmament of mythological-cosmological images, form in a certain sense the
stage for a development of the human soul. But what develops there out of the
folk consciousness as cosmological myth and stage of the inner soul myth, is something
that stems more or less from the instinctive genius of the human soul of a folk
consciousness. This was certainly always instigated by special personalities,
who were the conscious, all-embracing carriers of this development. But it
generally emerged as a form of myth from the instinctive, though impelled,
genius of popular consciousness. This instinctively genial folk consciousness
is not aware of its own abilities in its myth-making activity. It is
characteristic of instinctive, unconscious productivity that it can make forces
play, of which it itself cannot become conscious. And it is precisely the
characteristic of progress in relation to this instinctive-genius myth-making
consciousness, like every consciousness of progress, that the forces which
become conscious of themselves only in the results, can also become
conscious of themselves with regard to their own liveliness in the play
of their execution and get a grip on it.
This is part of the essence of all consciousness development. In
principle, all development is consciousness development. The forces active within the development and
in the self-developers become more and more self-aware in progressing mutually
supporting, ascending steps. When we
look from the myth-forming consciousness to the conscious soul development in
the inner nature of myths, we are dealing there with a consciousness formation
and schooling that in the myth-forming consciousness is by and large
unconsciously and involuntarily active.
The mystery adept,
after corresponding preparation, learns to become aware of the forces that are
previously unconsciously active in the myth-forming consciousness, thus in a
similar way that the natural scientist, in maintaining his natural scientific
method, becomes aware of what is unconsciously active in the world phenomena
and on the basis of this awareness is able to raise himself to higher levels of
consciousness. This consciousness-raising of the unconscious formative forces
and their maintenance in this process is characteristic of the training of the
mystery student. Thus, as a continuation
of the myth-forming consciousness, the conscious awareness within the mysteries
joins it, and although running chronologically more or less parallel, it is
nevertheless a consciousness development built on myth-forming. Something very important is connected with
the awakening of the forces that were previously unconsciously active. The
myth-forming folk fantasy, and this is again characteristic of this similar
instinctivity, is only very vaguely aware of its creative part in myth-forming
and actually experiences what it spins out of itself more as something received
and revealed from outside, to which it only lends its expressive power and voice.
The decline of the
originally instinctive consciousness of myth is accompanied by a conscious-raising
of previously unconscious forces and with it the loss of belief in the reality
and essentiality of the mythic contents.
The mystic becomes aware of inner activity and he experiences that it is
precisely this that is the setting for the appearance of independent, objective
spiritual entities. Thus, the conscious awareness
of his own inner active part does not entail the loss of the conviction of the
objectivity of the previously mythically depicted, but an increase of the
consciousness of reality. However, in the pre-Christian era this awareness was
not yet so far advanced that in this experience of being actively connected
with the figures of the spiritual world and with the spiritual world in general
that it could become aware of individual immortality. Although this
consciousness of activity is the consciousness of something spiritual, in
pre-Christian times it does not yet lead to an individual immortality-consciousness,
even though it is prepared by it. Only with the mystery of Golgotha does this further
possibility of experiencing the soul's own activity-consciousness as
immortality-consciousness begin. At
first, this still takes place in the cradle of the consciousness of faith and
the communities formed by it and finds its fulfillment today in the formation
of communities of knowledge, to which the development [of humanity] since the 15th century is
leading.
What pervades this
whole development since pre-Christian times is the manifestation of the spiritual
in the sensory, in the unspiritual. The
spiritual increasingly steps outside and into the non-spiritual, into the
sensory and thus enters a path of suffering and sacrifice in order to
experience an even greater inwardness precisely by this stepping outside onto the
theater of outwardness, the sensory. This is followed by a penetration of the
hidden, universal spiritual with the individuality-principle of which, however,
is at the same time a community-principle.
This is in fact the fundamental secret of evolution, that the spiritual,
a secret, comes out into the non-secret, the sensory in order to permeate
itself with the new individuality-principle. This disclosure of the spiritual
is thus a primal and fundamental motif, not only of soul development but of
world development in general.
As with all his other treatises,
Rudolf Steiner says what he says here also simultaneously twice, namely through
the content as well as through the form.
(It is part of the truth that the form does not hide the content but
reveals it.) The form can be permeated by the content in such a way that it is
the revelation thereof and thereby absorbing the content ever more deeply. That
is also the secret of true beauty that it reveals itself in the form.) Therefore, one has not understood Rudolf
Steiner, if one has only understood the content of his work. It belongs to the
nature of language that the content is at the same time formative. This is the
very essence of language, this grandiose principle with which Wilhelm von
Humboldt in particular was concerned.
The content underlying language is the penetration of something we
encounter, an object, with inner participation, with a sweet understanding and
comprehension, a penetration of the outer and the inner, of two polarities.
This linguistic formative principle, which permeates language in all
appearances, is the Logos of language as such. Here again the principle of the
permeation of externalization and internalization, which I explained more
precisely on another occasion (when we read Rudolf Steiner’s lecture from February
2, 1918, "The Sensible-supernatural in its Realization Through Art").
Consequently, language builds itself in its sound stature from vowels and
consonants, and builds itself in its grammatical arrangement in the wondrous
play of these two polarities, which in the metamorphosis of the grammatical
appearance generate this miraculous building of the word. As such as a true speaker, who is connected
in his innermost being with the Logos, Rudolf Steiner speaks and can say therefore
nothing at all but everything simultaneously twice.
It is no coincidence
that a series of mythical images has been developed in this chapter (altogether
there are nine). In it, that which is also said in a way which reflects the
content/understanding is once again unfolded in the course of the inner soul
development for the reader who examines this series of images with inner
awareness. What is said and explained more conceptually in this chapter,
namely the principle of myth formation as a principle of soul development, is
at the same time represented in the form of the chapter as a series of
images. Whoever follows and
experiences this in consideration of the inner soul movement, will see: What is
said in terms of content and understanding takes place in it as soul
development and unfoldment. With this we become at all attentive to a principle
that we need if we want to read Rudolf Steiner.
One might think, for example, and this is also not wrong but one-sided,
that one should grasp, understand and make one's own the basic idea or basic
ideas of a unit of text and try to connect that which is related to it or
contradicts it. This is a view that is based more on thinking and
understanding. Another possibility, however, is that one pays more attention to
the compositional context, i.e., to how each subdivision is introduced into a
text unit which has an artistic structure. One makes wonderful observations
about the artistic inspirations. But
also this way of dealing with a text is hardly less one-sided than the first.
However, the two, the compositional and the containment of something
fundamentally archetypal, are only connected when one sees how Rudolf Steiner
encourages, through the formal presentation of the text, an inner journey
through the soul. By being led with understanding from one consciousness to
another, one is able to experience a change in oneself. This observation and
shaping of a developmental path, on which Rudolf Steiner wants to lead us
through content and composition, is actually the essence of dealing with his texts.
Here again for
reflection the first sentences of the chapter:
"The mystic sought within himself forces,
he sought within himself essentials that remain unknown to man as long as he is
stuck in the ordinary conception of life. The mystic asks the great question of
his own spiritual forces and laws extending beyond is lower nature. Man with the ordinary, sense-logical
conception of life creates Gods for himself or, when he comes to the
understanding of this creation, he denies them. The mystic recognizes that he
creates Gods, why he creates them; he has come to know, so to speak, the
natural law of divine creation." (IV)
Since it is we
ourselves who generate the mythical images with our own powers, no objective
truth is ascribed to them anymore. The mystic initially experiences the same
thing. Only with his own inner activity can he connect with the spiritual
world. But precisely from the awareness
of this activity he becomes aware of their objectivity. This is a direct
experience at that time. Why this is so, we can actually only gather today on
the basis of Rudolf Steiner's science of knowledge. "The forces working in
him" are at the same time the forces of his own soul, as are the forces of
the divine beings who enter the setting of this soul. The sequence of the nine
myths is not accidental but express once more in the form what the content
wants to express, e.g., to urge the attentive reader to develop the images in
this sequence and to observe himself in the development of this graphic sequence
what kind of inner observational course, what kind of a knowledge-eurhythmics
he goes through in cognizing these graphic gestures and in transferring one graphic
gesture to another. The chapter closes with an argument about the Eleusinian
mysteries.
"As the botanist
spied on plant growth to find its laws, so the mystic sought to spy on the
creative spirit. He sought a truth, a truthfulness where the people had placed
a myth." (IV)
Here is again an
allusion to the genetic method, in the practice of which one not only
penetrates more deeply into the phenomena of the world, but also strengthens
the soul to find in itself its own nature. Sallustius says that the world in
its essence and development has the primal form of a myth, namely the primal
form of the disclosure of a secret such that a deeper secret may arise. The
same primal image of secret formation and disclosure, which is a world motif,
is also a soul motif says Sallustius in this remark.
"Sallustius betrays to us how a mystical
sage stood towards such a myth: 'One might call the whole world a myth, which
encloses bodies and things in a visible way, souls in a hidden way. If the
truth about gods were taught to everyone, the unwise would disparage it because
they do not understand it, and the more able would only take it lightly; if,
however, the truth is given in the cloak of a myth, it is immune from
disparagement and offers an occasion for philosophizing.'" (IV)
This again says
something very fundamental about myth and the principle operating in it. If one
simply explains in memory-like repeatable representations what underly myth as
a content of ideas, it could very easily be disparaged. The concealment of the myth, however, which
is revealed through one's own soul development, reveals precisely that which
belongs to its essence, namely, to set the soul in motion.
"When one sought
the truthfulness of a myth as a mystic, one was aware that one was adding
something to that which was present in popular consciousness."(IV)
There again the saying
about the method of cognitive development is pronounced, the mystic makes himself
aware of that which remains largely unconscious in popular fantasy. This
elevation of something largely unconscious in conscious areness belongs to the
method of mythic development in the mysteries.
"One knew that one
set oneself above this folk consciousness as the botanist sets himself above
the growing plant."
You always hear the
loving, ironic undertone: You present-day people formed by natural scientific
consciousness are actually modern mystics if you would but understand
yourselves in the right way, for the essence of the natural scientific method
is, after all, to penetrate deeper into the natural phenomena through a process
of awareness and to ascend higher into one's own soul level.
"Man faces
sensuality as a hostile monster. He sacrifices to it the fruits of his
personality. The monster devours it. It does so as long as needs be, until in
man the liberator (Theseus) awakens." (IV)
"Monster" is
an allusion to the Minotaur myth. The mythical hero Theseus is the developer of
Athens, through which actually in the consciousness of the Greeks the history
of the city of Athens and thus Greek culture in general was founded.
"His knowledge spins him the thread by
which he finds his bearings again, when he goes into the maze of sensuality to
kill his enemy. The mystic knows this mysterium. It points to a force in the
human personality. Ordinary consciousness is not aware of this force. But it is
nevertheless active in it. It produces the myth which has the same structure
as the mystical truth. This truth is
expressed symbolically in myth." (IV)
This again referred to
the principle of myth-making mentioned throughout the chapter under various
points of view; that a real process in the soul is the formative force which
produces from itself graphic gestures through which is expressed that which the
soul experiences within itself. Myth is thus a vivid graphic formation of the
soul from original formative forces, and not in the sense of an allegory or a
symbol which establishes a sense of something already existing in the world.
This is the important fundamental principle for the understanding of which of
which we must exert ourselves. Myth is
the emergence of a graphic form and graphic sequence from real inner soul driving
forces and not the addition of an image for something already present in the
external world, as the rationalistic mythology interpretation claims, which Plato
has already rejected.
The Boreas myth (IV)
leads Plato precisely to reject an allegorizing rationalist mythicization,
according to which the robbery of the nymph is mistaken only as a fanciful
beautiful image for an external occurrence: that someone would have been
plunged into an abyss by a violent gust of wind. That would only be a fanciful
image for something already present in the external world. That is precisely not the essence of myth,
but that inner soul-spiritual forces yearn to obtain a sensuous form, because
the development of the soul depends on this penetration of sensuality and on
detaching itself from the penetrated sensuality again. What is represented in
myth in a separate image is only the variation on the basic theme of the
penetration of sensuality by something soul-spiritual, i.e., the revelation of
the soul-spiritual in the sensory world and the retrieval from this revelation.
The primal myth, the mother of all myths, is the mysterium of human knowledge [*].
This is expressed in the victory over sensuality. This victory but at the same time the
necessity of sensuality is expressed in the myths in ever new images. What runs through these images as the
unifying principle is the remarkable correspondence of the spiritual
penetration of the outer and inner.
___________________________________
[*] As already mentioned in my introduction to these essays, this “Mysterium of human knowledge” is further articulated in the three-part essay “Knowledge as Mysterium” by Valentin Tomberg (Note by the translator.)
* * *
VII.
2. The Myth of Boreas (IV): The force roaring in the wind is the striving force placed in the sensory and the spiritual world. This is actually, according to its own nature, towards something higher, something spiritual, but is tempted by that which rises from the sensory, from its own sense organism, to rob the higher and drag it into the lair of self-interest.
3. Plato's myth (IV): The soul experiences itself further between the two horses, the good and the stubborn one, and it comes down to whether the soul between the two horses is the right driver, that she neither lets herself to be misled by the stubborn horse nor allow herself to be led only by the non-stubborn one, but finds the right middle between the two. This experience of finding the middle between both forces, the balancing force, is the third step on the path of the mystic, to which Rudolf Steiner leads us here.
4. The parable of Buddha (IV; V): The multiplicity of the senses can enthrall man, gag him; the soul's basic longing for the sensory world tries to cut off his head. But in overcoming these dangers, he gathers life experiences (straws, leaves and branches for braiding a basket) that become individual skills and carry him with the acquired powers into the spiritual world.
(The paragraphs on Empedocles [IV] need special consideration.)
5. Osiris (IV): Through development of the power of immortality within himself and victory over his own death-related nature, man can connect with the spiritual in the whole world and redeem it in this connection within himself. What previously emerged from the experiences of life and the world as the individual self of the mystic now reveals itself in his experience as the immortality of his own soul, through which he connects himself with the immortality in the whole world and redeems it as much as he redeems it in himself.
6. Heracles (IV): Each of the 12 works is again an inner victory of the soul, and in the twelveness of these victories the soul is placed in the eternal universality of the world. They are twelve victorious entrances into the universality of the universe. Each victory is victory over a shackle, a bondage, and thus the liberation of a unifying power. This twelvefold power of world unification flowing to some extent from twelve broken-up exits is what the soul experiences on these steps.
7. Argonauts (IV): Again, a new step of the inner soul experience and attainment, but again and again it is the same motive of the soul between the sensory and spiritual world, however, only with the consciousness which man acquires in the physical. Overcoming its temptations and dangers he can reach his higher being and make it his own. He can make himself aware of this spiritual force, which he develops unconsciously in the background of his consciousness bound to the senses, and begins to become aware of his own higher being. What kind of power is that which slumbers in the background of the sense-bound consciousness, but which can be awakened? The power of imagination.
8. Prometheus (IV): On this path of inner soul-development, which is described for us in this mythical series of images, immortality-consciousness appears in a certain place, namely in the myth of Osiris and already indicated in the myth of Boreas. Now it is not the consciousness of immortality that is spoken of but the immortality within the soul. This is the secret which Prometheus not only knows about, but he experiences this immortality event which takes place within the soul when she obtains the power of inspiration.
9. Odysseus (IV): The myth of man who makes a worldly journey, the great world and self experience, which leads him to develop the highest of all powers within himself: the power of union and wedlock with the divine spirit represented in the form of Penelope, from whom he was long separated. She does not, like the sensory world face the world outwardly, but is capable of creating the innermost exchange-of-being with it (the power of intuition).
When we concur with the characterized soul movements, we are walking on the "Holy Road," It is the sacred path that leads to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which are mentioned in the next chapter. (IV)
(To be continued.)
