The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Greek Sages before Plato in the Light of Mystery Wisdom

[ 1 ] Numerous facts show us that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks stood on the same ground of thought as mystical knowledge. We can only understand the great philosophers if we approach them with the feelings we have gained from observing the mysteries. With what reverence Plato speaks of the "secret doctrines" in the "Phaedon": "And it almost seems that those who have ordered us the consecrations are not bad people at all, but have long since indicated to us that whoever arrives in the underworld unconsecrated and unhallowed will lie in the mud; but the purified one, and the consecrated one, when he has arrived there, dwells with the gods. For, say those who have to do with the consecrations, Thyrsus bearers are many, but true enthusiasts are few. These, however, in my opinion, are none other than those who have applied themselves in the right way to wisdom, of which I too have not failed to become one in life, but have made every effort to do so." - Thus, only those can speak about the consecrations who have placed their own striving for wisdom entirely at the service of the attitude generated by the consecrations. And there is no doubt that the words of the great Greek philosophers shine a bright light when we illuminate them from the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] From Heraclitus (535-475 BC) from Ephesus, the relationship to the Mysteries is given without further ado by a saying about him which has been handed down and which states that his thoughts "are an impassable path", that he who enters them without consecration finds only "darkness and gloom", but that they are "brighter than the sun" for him whom a Mystic introduces. And when it is said of his book that he laid it down in the temple of Artemis, this also means nothing other than that it could only be understood by initiates. (Edmund Pfleiderer has already provided the historical background to Heraclitus' relationship to the Mysteries. Compare his book "Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee", Berlin 1886.) Heraclitus was called the "Dark One" for the reason that only the key of the Mysteries brought light into his views.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus confronts us as a personality with the greatest seriousness of life. One can literally see from his features, if one knows how to visualize them, that he carried within him intimacies of knowledge of which he knew that all words can only hint at them, not express them. His famous saying "Everything is in flux", which Plutarch explains to us with the words: "One does not step into the same river twice, nor can one touch a mortal being twice. But by sharpness and swiftness it scatters and brings together again, rather not again and later, but at the same time it comes together and subsides, comes and goes. " The man who thinks this has seen through the nature of transitory things. For he has felt impelled to characterize the nature of transience itself in the sharpest terms. One cannot give such a characterization if one does not measure transience by eternity. And in particular, one cannot extend this characterization to man if one has not looked into his inner being. Heraclitus also extended this characteristic to man: "The same is life and death, waking and sleeping, young and old, this changing is that, that again this." This sentence expresses a full realization of the illusory nature of the lower personality. He saws over it even more powerfully: "Life and death are in our living as well as in our dying. " What does this mean other than that from the standpoint of transience alone life can be valued higher than death. Dying is passing away to make way for new life; but in the new life lives the eternal as in the old. The same eternal appears in transient life as in death. Once man has grasped this eternal, he looks at death with the same feelings as he does at life. Only if he is not able to awaken this eternal within himself does life have a special value for him. One can recite the sentence "Everything is in flux" a thousand times; if one does not say it with this emotional content, it is nothing. The realization of eternal becoming is worthless if it does not remove our attachment to this becoming. It is the turning away from the lust for life that urges towards the transient that Heraclitus means with his saying. "How can we say of our daily life: We are, since we know from the standpoint of the eternal: We are and are not" (compare Heraclitus fragment no. 81). "Hades and Dionysus are the same" is the title of one of the Heraclitus fragments. Dionysus, the god of lust for life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysian festivals were celebrated: for Heraclitus he is the same as Hades, the god of annihilation, the god of destruction. Only those who see death in life and life in death and in both the eternal, which is sublime above life and death, can see the shortcomings and advantages of existence in the right light. Even the shortcomings then find their justification, for the eternal also lives in them. What they are from the point of view of the limited, lower life, they are only seemingly so: "It is not possible for people to become better at what they want: Sickness makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, labor rest." "The sea is the purest and most impure water, drinkable and wholesome to fish, undrinkable and corrupting to man. " Heraclitus is not primarily referring to the transience of earthly things, but to the splendor and majesty of the eternal. -Heraclitus spoke harshly against Homer and Hesiod and against the scholars of the day. He wanted to point out the nature of their thinking, which clings only to the ephemeral. He did not want to endow gods with qualities taken from the transient world. And he could not regard a science as the highest, which examines the laws of the becoming and passing away of things. -For him, something eternal speaks out of transience. He had a profound symbol for this eternity. "Returning into itself is the harmony of the world like the lyre and the bow. " What all lies in this image. Unity is achieved through the divergence of forces and the harmonization of the divergent powers. How one tone contradicts the other; and yet how, together with it, it brings about harmony. Apply this to the spiritual world; and you have Heraclitus' thought: "Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the death of those, dying the life of those. "

[ 4 ] It is man's guilt when he clings to the ephemeral with his knowledge. He thus turns away from the eternal. Life thus becomes his danger. What happens to him happens to him from life. But this event loses its sting when he no longer necessarily values life. Then his innocence is returned to him. He feels as if he could return to his childhood, out of the so-called seriousness of life. The adult takes everything seriously that the child plays with. But the knowledgeable person becomes like the child. "Serious" values lose their value from the point of view of eternity. Life then seems like a game. "Eternity," says Heraclitus, "is a child at play, the dominion of a child. " Wherein lies the primal guilt? It lies in the fact that what this seriousness should not attach itself to is taken with the utmost seriousness. God has poured Himself into the world of things. He who accepts things without God takes them seriously as "graves of God". He would have to play with them like a child, but use his seriousness to bring out of them the divine that sleeps enchanted within them.

[ 5 ] The contemplation of the Eternal has a burning, even searing effect on the ordinary contemplation of things. The spirit dissolves the thoughts of sensuality; it melts them. It is a consuming fire. This is the higher meaning of the Heraclitean thought that fire is the primordial substance of all things. Certainly this thought is to be taken at first in the sense of an ordinary physical explanation of world phenomena. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think about him as Philo, who lived at the time of the emergence of Christianity, thought about the laws of the Bible. "There are people," he said, "who regard the written laws only as symbols of spiritual doctrines, seek the latter with care, but despise the former; such I can only rebuke, for they should be concerned with both: with knowledge of the hidden meaning and with observation of the open." - If one argues about whether Heraclitus meant sensual fire with his concept of fire, or whether fire was only a symbol of the eternal spirit that dissolves and re-forms things, one is reversing his thought. He meant both, and neither. For for him, the spirit also lived in ordinary fire. And the power that is physically active in fire lives at a higher level in the human soul, which melts sensual knowledge in its crucibles and allows the vision of the eternal to emerge from it.

[ 6 ] Heraclitus in particular can easily be misunderstood. He lets war be the father of all things. But for him it is only the father of "things", not of the eternal. If there were not opposites in the world, if there were not the most diverse conflicting interests, the world of becoming, of transience, would not be. But what is revealed in this conflict, what is poured into it: that is not war, that is harmony. Precisely because there is war in all things, the spirit of the wise man should pass over things like fire and transform them into harmony. From this point a great thought of Heraclitean wisdom shines forth. What is man as a personal being? For Heraclitus, this question receives its answer from this point. Man is a mixture of the conflicting elements into which the Godhead has poured itself. This is how he finds himself. Above this he becomes aware of the spirit within himself. The spirit that comes from the Eternal. But this spirit is born for him out of the conflict of the elements. But this spirit should also calm the elements. In man, nature creates beyond itself. It is the same All-One Power that has created the conflict, the mixture; and which is to wisely eliminate this conflict again. Here we have the eternal duality that lives in man; his eternal opposition between the temporal and the eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite; and out of this definite he is to create something higher. It is dependent and independent. He can only participate in the eternal spirit, which he beholds, according to the mixture that the eternal spirit has worked in him. And this is precisely why he is called to create the eternal from the temporal. The spirit works in him. But it works in him in a special way. He works out of the temporal. That a temporal thing works like an eternal thing, that it drives and forces like an eternal thing: that is the peculiarity of the human soul. This makes it similar to a god and a worm at the same time. Man thus stands in the middle between God and animal. This driving and powerful force in him is his demonic nature. It is that which strives out of him. Heraclitus made a striking reference to this fact: "Man's demon is his destiny". (Demon is meant here in the Greek sense. In the modern sense one would have to say: spirit). Thus, for Heraclitus, what lives in man extends far beyond the personal. This personal is the carrier of a demonic. A demonic that is not enclosed within the boundaries of the personality, for which the death and birth of the personal have no meaning. What does this demonic have to do with that which arises and passes away as personality? The personal is only one manifestation of the demonic. Forward and backward, the bearer of such knowledge looks beyond himself. The fact that he experiences the demonic in himself is a testimony to the eternity of himself. And he may no longer ascribe to this demonic the only vocation to fill his personality. For only one of these manifestations of the demonic can be the personal. The demon cannot close itself off within one personality. It has the power to animate many personalities. It is able to change from personality to personality. The great idea of re-embodiment leaps out of the Heraclitean premises like something self-evident. But not only the thought, but the experience of this re-embodiment. Thought only prepares for this experience. Whoever becomes aware of the demonic in himself does not find it as an innocent, first one. He finds it with qualities. Why does it have these? Why do I have attachments? Because other personalities have already worked on my demon. And what becomes of what I work on the demon if I cannot assume that its tasks in my personality are exhausted? I am working for a later personality. Something interposes itself between me and the world unity which reaches beyond me but is not yet the same as the Godhead. My demon interposes itself. Just as my today is only the result of yesterday, my tomorrow will only be the result of my today: so my life is the consequence of another; and it will be the reason for another. As the earthly man looks backwards to numerous yesterdays and forwards to numerous tomorrows, so the soul of the wise man looks forward to numerous lives in the past and numerous lives in the future. What I acquired yesterday, in thoughts, in skills, I use today. Is it not so with life? Don't people enter the horizon of existence with the most diverse abilities? Where does this diversity come from? Does it come from nothing? - Our natural science takes great credit for the fact that it has banished the miraculous from the realm of our views of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss ("The Old and the New Faith") describes it as a great achievement of modern times that we no longer think of a perfect organic creature as having been created by a miracle out of nothing. We understand perfection when we can explain it through development from the imperfect. The structure of the ape is no longer a miracle if we can assume that prehistoric fish were the forerunners of the ape, which gradually evolved. Let us be comfortable in accepting as fair for the spirit what appears to us to be right for nature. Should the perfect spirit have the same conditions as the imperfect one? Should Goethe have the same conditions as any Hottentot? As little as a fish has the same preconditions as an ape, so little does the Goethean spirit have the same spiritual preconditions as that of the savage. The spiritual ancestry of the Goethean spirit is different from that of the wild spirit. The spirit has become like the body. The spirit in Goethe has more ancestors than that in the wild spirit. Take the doctrine of re-embodiment in this sense. One will then no longer find it "unscientific". But one will interpret in the right way what one finds in the soul. One will not accept what is given as a miracle. I owe the fact that I can write to the fact that I have learned it. No one can sit down and write who has never held a pen in his hand before. But one or the other is said to have an "ingenious eye" in a merely miraculous way. No, this "ingenious eye" must also be acquired: it must be learned. And when it appears in a personality, we call it a spiritual. But this spiritual has also first learned; it has acquired in an earlier life what it "can" do in a later one.

[ 7 ] This, and only this, is how Heraclitus and other Greek sages envisioned the idea of eternity. They never spoke of the continuation of the immediate personality. Compare a speech by Empedocles (490-430 BC). He says of those who accept the given only as miracles:

[ 8 ] Foolish are they, for they do not reach far with their thoughts,
who imagine that something that has not existed before can become,
or that something can die and disappear completely.
It is quite impossible for something that does not exist to come into being;
It is also quite impossible for something that exists to disappear completely;
for it always remains wherever it is displaced.
No one who is instructed in this will ever think so,
That they only live for 50 years, which is now called life,
Only as long as they are, and receive sufferings and joys,
But before they became men and when they died, they
are nothing.

[ 9 ] The Greek sage did not raise the question of whether there is something eternal in man, but only the question of what this eternal consists of and how man can nurture it within himself. For it was clear to him from the outset that man lives as a middle creature between the earthly and the divine. There was no question of a divine that is outside and beyond the worldly. The divine lives in man; it lives there only in a human way. It is the power that drives man to make himself ever more divine and more divine. Only those who think like this can speak like Empedocles:

[ 10 ] When you leave the body, swinging to the free ether,
You will be an immortal god, escaped from death. -

[ 11 ] What can happen to a human life from such a point of view? It can be initiated into the magical circular order of the eternal. For in it must lie powers which the merely natural life does not bring to development. And this life could pass by unused if these powers were to lie fallow. The task of the mysteries was to open them up, to bring man closer to the divine. And this was also the task of the Greek sages. This is how we understand Plato's saying that "he who arrives in the underworld unconsecrated and unsanctified comes to lie in the mud, but the purified and consecrated, when he arrives there, dwells with the gods". Here we are dealing with a concept of immortality whose meaning is decided within the world as a whole. Everything that man undertakes to awaken the eternal in himself, he does in order to increase the existence value of the world. As a cognizer, he is not an idle spectator of the world as a whole, who makes images of what would also be there without him. His power of cognition is a higher, creative force of nature. What flashes forth spiritually in him is a divine that was previously enchanted, and which without his cognition would lie fallow and have to wait for another disenchanter. Thus the human personality does not live in itself and for itself; it lives for the world. Life expands far beyond individual existence when it is viewed in this way. Within such a view, one understands sentences such as Pindar's, which gives a view into eternity: "Blessed is he who has seen those and then descends below the hollow earth; he knows the end of life, he knows the beginning promised by Zeus."

[ 12 ] One understands the proud features and the solitary nature of such wise men as Heraclitus was. They could proudly say of themselves that many things were obvious to them; for they did not attribute their knowledge to their transient personality, but to the eternal demon within them. Their pride had as a necessary addition the stamp of humility and modesty which the words express: All knowledge of transitory things is in eternal flux like these transitory things themselves. Heraclitus calls the eternal world a game; he could also call it the highest seriousness. But the word seriousness is consumed by its application to earthly experiences. The play of the eternal leaves in man the certainty of life that the seriousness that has sprung from the transient deprives him of.

[ 13 ] A different form of worldview to that of Heraclitus emerged on the basis of the Mystery System within the community founded by Pythagoras in the sixth century BC in Lower Italy. The Pythagoreans saw the reason for things in the numbers and figures, whose laws they explored through mathematics. Aristotle says of them: "They first carried on mathematics, and being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it to be the beginnings of all things. Since, then, numbers are by nature the first thing in mathematics, and since they believed that numbers had much in common with things and things that come into being, and indeed more in numbers than in fire, earth and water, they regarded one property of numbers as justice, another as the soul and the spirit, yet another as time, and so on for everything else. They also found in numbers the properties and relationships of harmony, and so everything else, in its entire nature, seemed to be the image of numbers and numbers the first thing in nature."

[ 14 ] The mathematical-scientific consideration of natural phenomena must always lead to a certain Pythagoreanism. If a string of a certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numbers, different tones are always produced. Pitches can be expressed by numerical ratios; physics also expresses color ratios by numbers. When two bodies combine to form a substance, it always happens in such a way that a very specific quantity of one substance, which can be expressed once and for all by numbers, combines with a similar quantity of the other substance. The Pythagoreans' sense of observation was directed towards such orders of measure and number in nature. Geometric figures also play a similar role in nature. Astronomy, for example, is mathematics applied to the celestial bodies. What became important for the imaginative life of the Pythagoreans is the fact that man investigates the laws of numbers and figures entirely for himself, merely through his mental operations; and yet, when he then looks out into nature, things follow the laws which he has established for himself in his soul. Man forms for himself the concept of an ellipse; he establishes the laws of the ellipse. And the celestial bodies move according to the laws that he has established. (Of course, the astronomical views of the Pythagoreans are not relevant here. What can be said of theirs can also be said of the Copernican ones in the respect under consideration here). From this it follows directly that the activities of the human soul are not a drifting apart from the rest of the world, but that in these activities is expressed that which pervades the world as a lawful order. The Pythagorean said to himself: the senses show man the sensual phenomena. But they do not show the harmonious order that things follow. Rather, the human spirit must first find these harmonious orders within itself if it wants to see them outside in the world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which rules in it as an eternal, lawful necessity: that comes to light in the human soul, that becomes present reality in it. The meaning of the world emerges in the soul. This meaning does not lie in what one sees, hears and feels, but in what the soul brings to light from its deep shafts. The eternal orders are therefore hidden in the depths of the soul. Descend into the soul and you will find the eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the world, is in the human soul. The soul is not limited to the physicality that is enclosed in the human skin. For what is born in the soul are the orders according to which the worlds in heavenly space revolve. The soul is not in the personality. The personality merely provides the organ through which that which pervades the world space as order can express itself. There is something of the spirit of Pythagoras in what the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa said: "Only something small, they say, limited is human nature, but infinite is the Godhead, and how can the infinite be encompassed by the tiny? And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was enclosed in the bounds of the flesh as in a vessel? For not even in our life is the spiritual nature enclosed within the limits of the flesh; but the mass of the body is indeed limited by the neighboring parts, but the soul, through the movements of thought, spreads itself freely throughout all creation. " The soul is not the personality. The soul belongs to infinity. From this point of view it must have been true of the Pythagoreans that only the "foolish" could imagine that the soul is exhausted by the personality. - For them, too, it had to be a matter of awakening the eternal in the personal. For them, knowledge was contact with the eternal. The more man brought this eternal into existence within himself, the higher he had to be regarded by them. Life in their community consisted of cultivating contact with the eternal. To lead the members of this community to such contact was the Pythagorean education. This education was therefore a philosophical initiation. And the Pythagoreans could well say that through this attitude to life they were striving for the same thing as the mystery cults.