The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Plato as a mystic

[ 1 ] What the mysteries meant within Greek intellectual life can be seen in Plato's world view. There is only one way to understand him fully: One must place him in the light that radiates from the Mysteries. Plato's later disciples, the Neoplatonists, ascribe to him a secret doctrine in which he only allowed the worthy to participate, under the "seal of secrecy". His teaching was regarded as mysterious in the sense that mystery wisdom was. Even if the seventh of the Platonic letters does not originate from him, as is claimed, this says nothing for the purpose pursued here: for whether he or someone else speaks in this way about the attitude expressed in the letter, we can be indifferent. This attitude lay in the very essence of his world view. It says in the letter: "I can say this much about all those who have written and will write, as if they knew what my aspirations are, whether they have heard it from me or from others or have thought it up themselves, that they are not to be believed in anything. There is no writing by myself on these subjects, nor is there likely to be; such things cannot be put into words in any way like other teachings, but require long occupation with the subject and living in it; but then it is as if a spark leaped forth and kindled a light in the soul, which now sustains itself." - These words could only indicate an impotence in the use of words, which would only be a personal weakness if one could not find the sense of mystery in them. That which Plato did not write about and never wanted to write about must be something against which writing is futile. It must be a feeling, a sensation, an experience that is not acquired through instantaneous communication, but through "living in". The intimate education that Plato was able to give to the chosen ones is indicated. For them, fire leapt out of his speeches; for the others, only thoughts leapt out. - It is not indifferent how one approaches Plato's conversations. Depending on the mental state you are in, they are less or more important to you. Plato passed on to his students even more than the literal meaning of his explanations. Where he taught, the participants lived in an atmosphere of mystery. The words had overtones that resonated. But these overtones needed the mystery atmosphere. Otherwise they would fade away unheard.

[ 2 ] The personality of Socrates is at the center of the Platonic world of conversation. There is no need to touch on history here. What matters is the character of Socrates as found in Plato. Socrates is a person sanctified by death for the truth. He died as only an initiate can die, for whom death is only a moment of life like others. He goes to death as to another event of existence. He had behaved in such a way that even his friends did not awaken the feelings that usually arise on such an occasion. Phaedon says this in the "Conversation on the Immortality of the Soul": "Indeed, for my part I felt quite strange about it. I felt no pity at all, as one who is present at the death of an intimate friend; so blissful did the man appear to me in his behavior and in his speeches; so steadfast and noble did he end, that I trusted that he would not go to the underworld without a divine mission, but would also be well there, if ever anyone else. That is why I did not feel any soft-hearted emotion, as one would think in such a case of mourning, nor, on the other hand, any cheerful mood, as is usually the case in philosophical occupations, although our conversations were of this kind; but I found myself in a wonderful state and in an unusual mixture of pleasure and sadness when I considered that this man was about to die." And the dying Socrates teaches his pupils about immortality. The personality, which has experience of the unworthiness of life, acts here as a completely different proof than all logic, all rational reasons. It is as if it were not a man speaking, for this man is just a passing one, but as if the eternal truth itself were speaking, which has taken up its abode in a perishable personality. Where the temporal dissolves into nothing, there seems to be the air in which the eternal may sound.

[ 3 ] We hear no evidence in the logical sense about immortality. The whole conversation is aimed at leading the friends to where they see the eternal. Then they need no proof. How should we have to prove that the rose is red to those who see it? How should one still have to prove that the spirit is eternal to him whose eyes are opened so that he may see this spirit? - Experiences, experiences are what Socrates refers to. First it is the experience of wisdom itself. What does the one who seeks wisdom want? He wants to free himself from what the senses offer him in everyday observation. He wants to seek the spirit in the world of the senses. Is this not a fact that can be compared to dying? "Those" - this is Socrates' opinion - "who occupy themselves with philosophy in the right way may well, without the others realizing it, strive for nothing other than to die and be dead. If this is true, then it would be strange if they spent their whole lives striving for nothing else but this, but if they themselves were to be unwilling to do what they have striven and labored for so long." - Socrates asks one of his friends to confirm this: "Does it seem to you that it is proper for a philosopher to make an effort for the so-called sensual pleasures, such as delicious food and drink? Or the pleasures of the sexual instinct? And the other cares of the body; do you think that such a man pays much attention to them? Like having beautiful clothes, shoes, and other kinds of adornment of the body, do you think that he will regard or despise them to a greater degree than the extreme necessity of having them? Does it not seem to you, then, that the whole occupation of such a man is not directed towards the body, but is turned away from it as much as possible and turned towards the soul? In this, then, the philosopher shows himself first: detaching his soul from communion with the body in preference to all other men." According to this, Socrates can say one thing: the pursuit of wisdom is the same as death, that man turns away from the body. But where does he turn to? He turns to the spiritual. But can he want the same thing from the spirit as from the senses? Socrates speaks about this: "But what about rational insight itself? Does the body stand in the way or not, if one accepts it as a companion in the pursuit of it? I mean like this: Do sight and hearing grant man some truth? Or is it only the poets who always sing that we neither hear nor see anything clearly? ... So when does the soul encounter the truth? For when it tries to observe something with the help of the body, it is obviously deceived by it. " Everything that we perceive with the senses of the body comes into being and passes away. And this coming into being and passing away causes us to be deceived. But if we look deeper into things through rational insight, then we are granted the eternal in them. Thus the senses do not offer us the eternal in its true form. They are deceivers the moment we trust them implicitly. They cease to deceive us when we confront them with thinking insight and subject their statements to the scrutiny of this insight. But how could thinking insight sit in judgment on the statements of the senses if it did not contain something that goes beyond the perceptions of the senses? Thus, what is true and false about things is decided by something in us that opposes the sensory body, that is, that is not subject to its laws. Above all, this something must not be subject to the laws of its becoming and passing away. For this something has the true in itself. But the true cannot have a yesterday and a today; it cannot be this once and that the other time, like sensual things. Thus the true itself must be eternal. And by turning away from the sensual and transient and towards the true, the philosopher simultaneously approaches an eternal that dwells within him. And if we immerse ourselves completely in the spirit, then we live completely in the true. The sensual around us is no longer merely present in its sensual form. "And he can accomplish this most purely," said Socrates, "who approaches everything with his mind alone as much as possible, without turning his face when he thinks, nor drawing in any other sense when he thinks, but using pure thought alone, and also seeks to grasp each thing purely for itself, separated as much as possible from eyes and ears, and, to put it briefly, from the whole body, which only disturbs the soul and does not allow it to attain truth and insight when it is present. Is not death the redemption and separation of the soul from the body? And it is only the true philosophers who strive most to solve it; so this is the business of the philosopher: Liberation and separation of the soul from the body. It is therefore foolish for a man who has prepared his whole life to be as close as possible to death, to be unruly when death comes . . . Indeed, the true seekers of wisdom strive to die, and death is the least fearful to them of all men." Socrates also bases all higher morality on liberation from the body. He who follows only what his body commands is not moral. Who is brave? asks Socrates. He is brave who does not follow his body, but follows the demands of his spirit even when these demands endanger his body. And who is prudent? Does not being prudent mean "not to be carried away by desires, but to be indifferent to them and modest; does not prudence also belong only to those who hold the body in the lowest esteem and live in the love of wisdom? " And so, according to Socrates, is it with all virtues.

[ 4 ] Socrates proceeds to characterize rational insight itself. What does cognition actually mean? We undoubtedly arrive at knowledge by forming judgments. Well, I form a judgment about an object; for example, I say to myself: this thing standing in front of me is a tree. How do I come to say that to myself? I will only be able to do so if I already know what a tree is. I have to remember my idea of the tree. A tree is a sensual thing. If I remember a tree, then I remember a sensual object. I say of a thing that it is a tree if it resembles other things that I have perceived before and that I know to be trees. Memory gives me the knowledge. Memory enables me to compare the manifold sensory things with one another. But this is not the end of my knowledge. When I see two things that are the same, I form the judgment: these things are the same. Now in reality no two things are ever quite the same. I can only find equality everywhere in a certain respect. The idea of equality thus arises in me without being in sensory reality. It helps me to a judgment, just as memory helps me to a judgment, to knowledge. Just as I remember trees in the case of the tree, so I remember the thought of equality in the case of two things when I look at them in a certain relationship. So thoughts and memories arise in me that are not acquired from sensory reality. All knowledge that is not borrowed from this reality is based on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists only of such thoughts. He would be a bad geometrician who could only bring into mathematical relationships what he could see with his eyes and grasp with his hands. So we have thoughts that do not originate from transient nature, but that arise from the spirit. And it is precisely these that bear the mark of eternal truth. What mathematics teaches will be eternally true, even if the entire world structure were to collapse tomorrow and a completely new one were to be built. Such conditions could apply to another world structure that the present mathematical truths would not be applicable; but they would still remain true in themselves. If the soul is alone with itself, only then can it produce such eternal truths from itself. Thus the soul is related to the true, the eternal, and not to the temporal, the apparent. Hence Socrates says: "When the soul contemplates through itself, it goes to the pure and ever existing and immortal and equal to itself, and as related to it, it holds itself to it when it is for itself and is granted it, and then it has rest from its error and is also always equal to itself in relation to that, because it touches just such a thing, and this its state is called reasonableness. Now see if it does not follow from all that has been said that the soul is most like the divine, immortal, rational, monotonous, indissoluble, and always the same and like itself; and that the body is most like the human and mortal and unreasonable and multiform and dissoluble, and never the same and like itself. So when this is the case, the soul goes to the formless that resembles it and to the divine, immortal, rational, where it then attains to being blissful, freed from error and ignorance, fear and wild love and all other human evils, and then, as the initiates say, truly lives the rest of the time with God. "It cannot be the task here to show all the ways in which Socrates leads his friends to the Eternal. They all breathe the same spirit. They should all show that man finds another when he walks the paths of transient sense perception, and another when his spirit is alone with himself. And Socrates points out this intrinsic nature of the spiritual to those who listen to him. If they find it, then they see for themselves with the eyes of the spirit that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove immortality; he simply shows the nature of the soul. And then it turns out that becoming and passing away, birth and death have nothing to do with this soul. The essence of the soul lies in the true; but the true cannot become and pass away. The soul has as much to do with becoming as the even has to do with the uneven. Death, however, belongs to becoming. So the soul has nothing to do with death. Must it not be said of the immortal that it accepts the mortal as little as the even accepts the odd? Is it not necessary to say, says Socrates on this basis, that "even if the immortal is imperishable, the soul cannot possibly perish when death comes to it. For, according to what has already been shown, it cannot accept death, nor can it have died, just as the three can never be straight."

[ 5 ] Consider the whole development in this conversation, in which Socrates leads his listeners to see the eternal in the human personality. The listeners take in his thoughts; they search within themselves to see whether there is anything in their own inner experiences that enables them to say "yes" to his ideas. They make the objections that come to them. What has happened to the listeners when the conversation has come to an end? They have found something in themselves that they did not have before. They have not just absorbed an abstract truth; they have undergone a development. Something has come alive in them that was not there before. Is this not something that can be compared to an initiation? Does this not shed light on why Plato presented his philosophy in the form of a conversation? These conversations are supposed to be nothing other than the literary form for the events in the Mystery Places. What Plato himself says in many places convinces us of this. As a philosophical teacher, Plato wanted to be what the initiate in the Mysteries was; as good as one can be with the philosophical way of communication. How Plato knows himself to be in accordance with the nature of the Mysteries! How he considers his way to be the right one only when it leads to where the Mystic is to be led! He speaks about this in the Timaeus: "All those who are somewhat right-minded invoke the gods in small and great undertakings; but we, who intend to teach about the universe, how it came into being and how it did not come into being, must especially, if we have not gone completely astray, invoke the gods and goddesses and pray to them to teach everything first in their spirit and then in accordance with ourselves." And to those who seek such a path, Plato promises "that the deity as savior will let the confused and so far off investigation find its conclusion in a plausible teaching".

[ 6 ] It is the "Timaeus" in particular that reveals to us the mystery character of the Platonic world view. Right at the beginning of this conversation there is talk of an "initiation". Solon is "initiated" by an Egyptian priest into the becoming of the worlds and into the way in which eternal truths are figuratively expressed in traditional myths. "Many and various exterminations of men have already taken place (so the Egyptian priest teaches Solon) and will continue to take place, the most extensive by fire and water, but others, lesser ones, by innumerable other causes. For what is also told among you, that Phaeton, the son of Helios, once mounted his father's chariot and, because he did not know how to drive in his father's way, burned everything on earth and was himself struck dead by lightning, sounds like a fable, but the truth of it is the changed movement of the heavenly bodies orbiting the earth and the destruction of everything on earth by much fire, which occurs after the passage of certain great periods of time." - This Timaeus passage contains a clear indication of how the initiate relates to the myths of the people. He recognizes the truths that are veiled in their images.

[ 7 ] The drama of becoming a world is presented in the Timaeus. Whoever wants to follow the traces that lead to this becoming-world comes to the suspicion of the primordial power from which everything came into being. "Now it is difficult to find the Creator and Father of this universe; and when one has found him, it is impossible to speak about him in a way that everyone can understand." The Myste knew what was meant by this "impossibility". It points to the drama of God. For him, God is not present in the sensible-understanding. There he is only present as nature. He is enchanted in nature. Only he who awakens the divine in himself can approach him, according to the old mystical opinion. So it cannot be made comprehensible to everyone without further ado. But even for those who approach him, he does not appear himself. This is what the Timaeus says. The Father made the world out of the body and soul of the world. Harmoniously, in perfect proportions, he mixed the elements that came into being when he gave himself, shedding his own special being. Thus the world body was created. And stretched over this world body in cross form is the world soul. It is the divine in the world. It has found the death of the cross so that the world may be. Plato may therefore call nature the grave of the divine. But not a grave in which a dead person lies, but an eternal one, for which death only gives the opportunity to express the omnipotence of life. And that person sees this nature in the right light who steps before it to redeem the crucified soul of the world. It is to be resurrected from its death, from its enchantment. Where can it be resurrected? Only in the soul of the initiated human being. Wisdom thus finds its right relationship to the cosmos. The resurrection, the redemption of God: that is knowledge. From the imperfect to the perfect, the development of the world is traced in the Timaeus. An ascending process is depicted in the imagination. The beings develop. God reveals himself in this development. Becoming is a resurrection of God from the grave. Man appears within the development. Plato shows that there is something special about man. The whole world is indeed divine. And man is not more divine than the other beings. But in the other beings God is present in a hidden way, in man in a revealed way. At the end of the Timaeus it says: "and now we would also like to claim that our discussions about the universe have reached their goal, for after this world has been equipped and filled with mortal and immortal living beings in the way described, it has (itself) become a visible being of this kind, which encompasses everything visible, an image of the Creator and a sensually perceptible God, and has become the greatest and best, the most beautiful and most perfect (that could exist), this one and only world."

[ 8 ] But this one and indigenous world would not be perfect if it did not also have the image of the Creator Himself among its images. Only out of the human soul can this image be born, not the Father himself, but the Son, the offspring of God living in the soul, who is like the Father: man can give birth to him.

[ 9 ] Philo, who was said to be the resurrected Plato, described the "Son of God" as the wisdom born of man, which lives in the soul and contains the reason present in the world. This world reason, the Logos, appears as the book in which "all the world's existence is recorded and drawn". It further appears as the Son of God: "imitating the ways of the Father, he forms the figures, looking at the archetypes". The Platonizing Philo addresses this Logos as the Christ: "Since God is the first and only King of the universe, the way to him has rightly been called the royal way; but philosophy considers this to be the way which the choir of the ancient ascetics walked, turned away from the beguiling magic of pleasure, devoted to the worthy and serious cultivation of beauty; this royal way, which we call true philosophy, is called the law: God's Word and Spirit."

[ 10 ] Philo feels like an initiation when he enters this path to meet the Logos, who is the Son of God to him: "I am not afraid to share what has happened to me countless times. Sometimes, when I wanted to write down my philosophical thoughts in the usual way and saw quite clearly what could be established, I found my mind barren and stiff, so that I had to desist without accomplishing anything and felt caught up in vain imaginings; but at the same time I marveled at the power of the thought-real, by which it stands to open and close the womb of the human soul. At other times, however, I began empty and came to fullness without further ado, in that the thoughts came flying down invisibly from above like snowflakes or seeds, and it seized and inspired me like divine power, so that I did not know where I was, who was with me, who I myself was, what I was saying, what I was writing: for now the flow of representation was given to me, a blissful brightness, sharp vision, clear mastery of the material, as if the inner eye could now recognize everything with the greatest clarity. " - This is the description of a path of knowledge which is held in such a way that one sees that he who walks this path is aware that when the Logos comes to life in him, he flows together with the divine. This is also clearly expressed in the words: "When the spirit, seized by love, takes its flight into the holiest, joyful momentum, God-winged, it forgets everything else and itself, it is only filled with and nestled against the one whose satellite and servant it is, and to whom it offers the holiest and most chaste virtue as an incense offering." - For Philo, there are only two paths. Either one follows the sensual, what perception and understanding offer, then one limits oneself to one's own personality, one withdraws from the cosmos; or one becomes aware of the cosmic all-power; then one experiences the eternal within the personality. "He who wants to avoid God falls into his own hands; for there are two things in question: the All-Spirit, which is God, and his own spirit; the latter escapes and flees to the All-Spirit; for he who goes beyond his own spirit says to himself that it is nothing and ties everything to God; but he who avoids God abolishes this primordial ground and makes himself the ground of everything that happens."

[ 11 ] The Platonic worldview aims to be a form of knowledge that is religion in its entirety. It relates knowledge to the highest that man can achieve with his feelings. Plato is only able to accept this knowledge when feeling can satisfy itself most completely in knowledge. It is then not figurative knowledge; it is the content of life. It is a higher man in man. The person of whom the personality is only an image. The superior, the human being is born in the human being himself. And this again expresses a mystery secret in Platonic philosophy. The church father Hippolytus refers to this secret: "This is the great secret of the Samothracians (the guardians of a certain mystery cult), which cannot be spoken and which only the initiated know. But they know in detail about Adam as their original man."

[ 12 ] The Platonic "Symposium", the "Discussion on Love", also represents an "initiation". Here, love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the eternal word (Logos) is the son of the eternal creator of the world, then love has a maternal relationship with this Logos. Before even a bright spark of the light of wisdom can shine in the human soul, there must be a dark urge, a pull towards this divine. Unconsciously, man must be drawn to that which later, raised to consciousness, constitutes his highest happiness. What appears in Heraclitus as the demon in man is associated with the idea of love. - In the "Symposium", people from a wide range of backgrounds and with different views on life talk about love: the everyday man, the politician, the scientist, the comic poet Aristophanes and the serious poet Agathon. They each have their own views on love according to their experiences in life. The way they express themselves reveals the level of their "demon". Through love, one being is drawn to another. The manifold, the multiplicity of things into which the divine unity has merged, strives through love towards unity, towards harmony. Love therefore has something divine about it. Everyone can therefore only understand it to the extent that they themselves are partakers of the divine. After people of different levels of maturity have presented their thoughts on love, Socrates takes the floor. As a man of knowledge, he considers love. For him, it is not a god. But it is something that leads man to God. Eros, love, is not a god for him. Because the god is perfect, so he has beauty and goodness. But Eros is only the desire for the beautiful and the good. It therefore stands between man and God. He is a "demon", a mediator between the earthly and the divine. - It is significant that Socrates does not claim to give his thoughts when he talks about love. He says he is only telling what a woman gave him as a revelation about it. It is a mantic ^{1In ancient mysticism, "mantics" refers to everything that relates to knowledge through "spiritual eyes"; "telestics", on the other hand, is the indication of the paths that lead to initiation.} art through which he has arrived at an idea of love. Diotime, the priestess, has awakened in Socrates the demonic power that is supposed to lead him to the divine. She has "initiated" him. - This feature of the "Symposium" is very telling. One must ask: who is the "wise woman" who awakens the demon in Socrates? One cannot think here of mere poetic disguise. For no sensual-real wise woman could awaken the demon in the soul if the power for this awakening were not in the soul itself. We must also look for this "wise woman" in Socrates' own soul. But there must be a reason that makes that which brings the demon into existence in the soul itself appear as an external, real being. This force cannot work in the same way as the forces that can be observed in the soul as belonging to it, as being at home in it. You see, it is the power of the soul before receiving wisdom that Socrates presents as the "wise woman". It is the maternal principle that gives birth to the Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The unconsciously active power of the soul, which allows the divine to enter consciousness, is presented as the feminine element. The still wisdom-less soul is the mother of that which leads to the divine. This leads us to an important concept of mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. Unconsciously it leads man to the divine with the necessity of a natural force. - From there, a light shines on the mystery view of Greek mythology. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man sees what he himself creates in images as his gods. But he must advance to another conception. He must also transform the divine power within himself, which is active before the creation of the images of the gods, into images of the gods. Behind the divine appears the mother of the divine, who is nothing other than the original human soul-power. Next to the gods, man places the goddesses. Consider the myth of Dionysus in the light that has been gained. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus snatches the still immature child from his mother, who has been struck dead by lightning, and hides it in his own hip until it reaches maturity. Hera, the mother of the gods, incites the Titans against Dionysus. They dismember the boy. But Pallas Athena rescues the beating heart and brings it to Zeus. He then creates the son a second time. This myth reveals a process that takes place in the innermost part of the human soul. And whoever speaks in the spirit of the Egyptian priest who instructs Solon about the nature of a myth could speak like this: What is told among you, that Dionysus, the son of the god and of a mortal mother, was born, dismembered and born again, sounds like a fable, but what is true about it is the birth of the divine and are its destinies in one's own human soul. The divine unites with the temporal-earthly human soul. As soon as only this divine, Dionysian, stirs, the soul feels a strong longing for its true spiritual form. Consciousness, which again appears in the image of a female deity, Hera, becomes jealous of the birth from the better consciousness. It incites the lower nature of man - (the Titans). The still immature child of God is dismembered. Thus it is present in man as fragmented sensual-understanding science. But if so much of the higher wisdom (Zeus) is present in man that it is effective, then it nurtures and cares for the immature child, which is then reborn as the second son of God (Dionysus). Thus from science, the fragmented divine power in man, is born the unified wisdom that is the Logos, the son of God and a mortal mother, the transient human soul that unconsciously strives for the divine. As long as one sees in all this only a pure soul process and understands it as a picture of such, one is far removed from the spiritual reality that takes place there. In this spiritual reality, the soul does not merely experience something within itself; rather, it has become completely detached from itself and experiences a world process that in truth does not take place within it at all, but outside of it.

[ 13 ] Platonic wisdom and Greek myth merge; likewise mystery wisdom and myth. The created gods were the subject of popular religion; the story of their creation was the secret of the mysteries. No wonder it was considered dangerous to "betray" the mysteries. After all, one was "betraying" the origin of the folk gods. And a correct understanding of this origin is salutary; misunderstanding is pernicious.