The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Christianity and Pagan Wisdom

[ 1 ] In the period in which Christianity also had its first beginnings, world views emerged within the ancient pagan culture which can be seen as a continuation of the Platonic way of thinking and which can also be understood as an internalized, spiritualized mystery wisdom. They originated with the Alexandrian Philo (25 BC to 50 AD). He seems to have transferred the processes that lead to the divine completely into the interior of the human soul. One could say that the mystery temple in which Philo seeks his consecration is solely his own inner self and its higher experiences. He replaces the procedures that take place in the mystery sites with processes of a purely spiritual nature. According to his conviction, sensory perception and logical understanding do not lead to the divine. They only deal with the transient. But there is a way for the soul to rise above these forms of knowledge. It must step out of what it calls its ordinary "I". It must be removed from this "I". Then it enters a state of spiritual elevation, enlightenment, in which it no longer knows, thinks and recognizes in the ordinary sense. For it has grown together with the divine, merged with it. The divine is experienced as something that cannot be formed in thoughts, cannot be communicated in concepts. It is experienced. And he who experiences it knows that he can only communicate it if he comes to give life to the words. The world is the image of this mystical entity that is experienced in the deepest recesses of the soul. It has emerged from the invisible, unthinkable God. A direct image of this deity is the wisdom-filled harmony of the world, which is followed by sensual phenomena. This wisdom-filled harmony is the spiritual image of the deity. It is the divine spirit poured into the world: the world reason, the Logos, the offspring or Son of God. The Logos is the mediator between the world of the senses and the unimaginable God. By imbuing himself with knowledge, man unites himself with the Logos. The Logos is embodied in him. The personality developed into spirituality is the bearer of the Logos. God lies above the Logos; below it lies the transient world. Man is called to close the chain between the two. What he experiences within himself as spirit is the spirit of the world. Such ideas immediately remind us of the Pythagorean way of thinking. The core of existence is sought in the inner life. But the inner life is aware of its cosmic validity. It has essentially emerged from a way of thinking that is similar to that of Philo, which Augustine says: "We see all things that are made because they are; but because God sees them, they are." - And about what and where through we see, he adds significantly: "And because they are, we see them outwardly; and because they are perfect, we see them inwardly." The same basic idea is present in Plato. Philo, like Plato, saw in the destinies of the human soul the conclusion of the great world drama, the awakening of the enchanted god. He described the inner deeds of the soul with the words: the wisdom within man "imitates the ways of the Father and, looking at the archetypes, forms the figures". It is therefore not a personal matter when man forms shapes within himself. These forms are the eternal wisdom, the cosmic life. This is in line with the mystery concept of folk myths. The Myst seeks the deeper core of truth in the myths. And what Myste does with the pagan myths, Philo accomplishes with the Mosaic accounts of creation. For him, the accounts of the Old Testament are images of inner soul processes. The Bible tells of the creation of the world. Anyone who takes it as a depiction of external processes knows it only halfway. It is certainly written: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was upon the face of the waters." But the true, inner meaning of such words must be experienced in the depths of the soul. God must be found within, then he appears as the "primordial radiance that emits innumerable rays, not sensually perceptible, but all in thought". This is how Philo expresses himself. Almost exactly as in the Bible, Plato says in the "Timaeus": "But when the Father, who had created the universe, saw how it was animated and moved and had become an image of the eternal gods, he was pleased with it." In the Bible we read: "And God saw that everything was good." - To recognize the divine means, as in Plato, as in mystery wisdom, also in the sense of the Bible: to experience the course of creation as one's own spiritual destiny. The history of creation and the history of the divinizing soul thus merge into one. According to Philo's conviction, Moses' account of creation can be used to write the story of the God-seeking soul. All things in the Bible thus take on a deeply symbolic meaning. Philo becomes the interpreter of this symbolic meaning. He reads the Bible as a story of the soul.

[ 2 ] It can be said that Philo's way of reading the Bible corresponded to a trend of his time, which was drawn from the wisdom of the mysteries; after all, he was able to report the same way of interpreting ancient writings from the therapists. "They also possess works of ancient writers who once directed their school and left many explanations of the method used in the allegorical writings . . . Their interpretation of these writings is directed towards the deeper meaning of the allegorical narratives". Thus Philo's intention was directed towards the deeper meaning of the "allegorical" stories of the Old Testament. Consider what such an interpretation could lead to. One reads the account of creation and finds in it not only an external narrative but the model for the paths that the soul must take in order to reach the divine. The soul must therefore - only in this can its mystical striving for wisdom consist - microcosmically repeat in itself the ways of God. The drama of the world must take place in every soul. A fulfillment of the model given in the creation account is the soul life of the mystical sage. Moses wrote not only to recount historical facts, but to illustrate in images the paths the soul must take if it wants to find God.

[ 3 ] This all remains resolved within the spirit in Philo's world view. Man experiences in himself what God has experienced in the world. The Word of God, the Logos, becomes a soul event. God led the Jews out of Egypt to the promised land; he let them go through torment and hardship in order to then give them the land of promise. That is the outward process. Experience it on the inside. One goes from the land of Egypt, the transient world, through the hardships that lead to the suppression of the sensual world, into the promised land of the soul, one reaches the eternal. For Philo, this is all an inner process. The God who was poured out into the world celebrates his resurrection in the soul when his word of creation is understood and imitated in the soul. Then man has given birth in himself to God, the Spirit of God made man, the Logos, Christ, in a spiritual way. In this sense, for Philo and for those who thought along his lines, knowledge was a birth of Christ within the world of the spiritual. The Neoplatonic worldview, which developed at the same time as Christianity, was also a further development of this Philonic way of thinking. See how Plotinus (204 to 269 AD) describes his spiritual experiences:

[ 4 ] "Often, when I awaken from the slumber of corporeality, come to myself, turn away from the outside world and enter into myself, I behold a wondrous beauty; then I am certain that I have become aware of my better part; I experience true life, am united with the divine, and founded in it, I gain the strength to move myself even beyond the overworld. When, after this resting in God, I descend again from the spiritual vision to the formation of thoughts, then I ask myself how it happened that I now descend, and that my soul has entered the body at all, since it is in its essence as it had just shown itself to me," and "what may be the reason that souls forget the Father, God, since they come from the beyond and belong to him, and thus know nothing of him and themselves? For them, the beginning of evil is daring and the lust for value and self-alienation and the desire to belong only to themselves. They lusted after self-importance; they romped about according to their senses, and so they went astray and progressed to full apostasy, and with it the knowledge of their origin from the beyond disappeared from them, just as children, early separated from their parents and brought up in the distance, do not know who they and their parents are. The development of life that the soul should seek is described by Plotinus: "Let its bodily life and its waves be pacified, let it see everything that surrounds it pacified: the earth and the sea and the air and the sky itself, without emotion. She learns to observe how the soul pours itself from outside into the dormant cosmos, as it were, and flows in, penetrates and radiates from all sides; just as the sun's rays illuminate a dark cloud and make it shine golden, so the soul, when it enters the body of the heaven-embraced world, gives it life and immortality."

[ 5 ] It turns out that this worldview has a profound similarity with Christianity. The confessors of the Jesus church say: "What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard and seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have seen, what our hands have touched of the Word of Life ... this we report to you"; this could be said in the sense of Neoplatonism: What has happened from the beginning, what cannot be heard or seen: that must be experienced spiritually as the Word of Life. - The development of the old world view thus takes place in a split. It leads to an idea of Christ, which refers to the purely spiritual, in Neoplatonism and similarly oriented world views; and on the other hand to a confluence of this idea of Christ with a historical phenomenon, the personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of John can be called the connector of the two world views. "In the beginning was the Word." He shares this conviction with the Neoplatonists. The Word becomes spirit within the soul: that is the conclusion of the Neoplatonists. The Word became flesh in Jesus, concluded the writer of the Gospel of John, and with him the Christian community. The closer sense of how the Word alone could become flesh was given by the entire development of the ancient world view. Plato tells the macrocosmic story: God has stretched the world soul over the world body in the form of a cross. This world soul is the Logos. If the Logos is to become flesh, he must repeat the cosmic world-process in his fleshly existence. He must be crucified and resurrected. As a spiritual concept, this most important idea of Christianity had long been outlined in the old world views. The Myste went through it as a personal experience at the "initiation". The "Logos made man" had to go through it as a fact that is valid for all mankind. Something that was therefore a mystery process in the ancient development of wisdom became a historical fact through Christianity. Thus Christianity not only became the fulfillment of what the Jewish prophets had foretold, but it also became the fulfillment of what the mysteries had foreshadowed. - The cross on Golgotha is the mystery cult of antiquity condensed into one fact. We first encounter this cross in the ancient world views; we encounter it at the starting point of Christianity within a unique event that is supposed to apply to the whole of humanity. It is from this point of view that the mystical in Christianity can be understood. Christianity as a mystical fact is a stage in the development of mankind; and the events in the Mysteries and the effects caused by them are the preparation for this mystical fact.