The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Augustine and the Church

[ 1 ] The full force of the struggle that took place in the souls of Christian confessors during the transition from paganism to the new religion can be seen in the personality of Augustine (354-430). The soul struggles of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome and others can be observed in a mysterious way when one sees how these struggles came to rest in the spirit of Augustine.

[ 2 ] Augustine is a personality in whom the deepest spiritual needs develop out of a passionate nature. He goes through pagan and semi-Christian ideas. He suffers deeply from the most terrible doubts that can befall a person who has tested the powerlessness of many thoughts in the face of spiritual interests, and who has tasted the devastating sensation of: Can man know anything at all?

[ 3 ] In the beginning of his endeavors, Augustine's ideas clung to the sensual and transient. He could only visualize the spiritual in sensual images. He felt liberated when he rose above this level. He describes this in his "Confessions": "The fact that, if I wanted to think of God, I had to imagine masses of bodies, and believed that nothing could exist but such things, was the most important and almost the only reason for the error that I could not avoid." With this he indicates where the person who seeks true life in the spirit must come to. There are thinkers who maintain - and these thinkers are not a few in number - that it is impossible to arrive at a pure conception free from all sensual material. These thinkers confuse what they believe they must say about their own soul life with what is humanly possible. The truth is rather that one can only arrive at a higher knowledge when one has developed into a thinking free from all sensual material; into such a soul life whose ideas no longer cease when visualization through sensual impressions ceases. St. Augustine tells how he ascended to spiritual vision. He asked everywhere where the "divine" was. "I asked the earth and it said: 'It is not I, and what is on it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the abysses, and what of living things they hold, and they answered: We are not your god; search above us. I asked the blowing air, and the whole misty circle and all its inhabitants said: The philosophers who sought the essence of things in us were mistaken: we are not God. I asked the sun, moon and stars, and they said: We are not God whom you seek." And Augustine realized that there was only one thing that could answer his question about the divine: his own soul. She said: "No eye, no ear can tell you what is in me. I can only tell you myself. And I will tell you in an unquestionable way. "Whether the life force lies in the air or in the fire, people could be doubtful about that, but who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows and judges? If he doubts, he lives, he remembers, why he doubts, he understands, that he doubts, he wants to make sure, he thinks, he knows, that he knows nothing, he judges, that he should not assume anything prematurely." The external things do not defend themselves when we deny them essence and existence. But the soul defends itself. It could not doubt itself if it were not. Even in its doubt, it confirms its existence. "We are and we recognize our being and love our being and recognition: in these three things no error similar to the true can disturb us, for we do not grasp them like external things with a physical sense." Man learns about the divine by bringing his soul to first recognize itself as spiritual in order to find the way into the spiritual world as a spirit. Augustine had made up his mind to recognize this. It was out of such a mood that the desire to knock at the gates of the Mysteries arose in the pagan people among those seeking knowledge. In the age of Augustine, it was possible to become a Christian with these convictions. The incarnate Logos, Jesus, had shown the path that the soul had to take if it wanted to come to what it had to speak about when it was with itself. In Milan in 385, Augustine received the instruction of Ambrose. All his reservations about the Old and New Testaments disappeared when the teacher interpreted the most important passages for him, not just in the literal sense but "with the lifting of the mystical veil from the spirit". For Augustine, the historical tradition of the Gospels and the community that preserved this tradition embodied what had been preserved in the mysteries. He gradually becomes convinced that "their commandment to believe what they did not prove is moderate and without argument". He comes to the conclusion: "Who would be so deluded as to say that the Church of the Apostles deserves no faith, which is so faithful and supported by so many brethren's agreement that they conscientiously handed down their writings to their descendants, just as it has preserved their chairs down to the present bishops with a strictly assured succession?" Augustine's way of thinking told him that with the Christ event different conditions had arisen for the spirit-seeking soul than had existed before. For him it was certain that in Christ Jesus that was revealed in the external historical world which the Mystic sought through preparation in the Mysteries. One of his significant statements is: "What is now called the Christian religion already existed among the ancients and was not absent in the beginnings of the human race until Christ appeared in the flesh, from which point the true religion, which already existed before, received the name of the Christian religion." Two paths were possible for such a conception. One is that which says that if the human soul develops those powers within itself through which it comes to the knowledge of its true self, it will, if it only goes far enough, also come to the knowledge of Christ and all that is connected with him. This would have been a knowledge of the Mysteries enriched by the Christ-event. - The other path is the one that Augustine really took and through which he became the great example for his followers. It consists in concluding the development of one's own soul powers at a certain point and taking the ideas connected with the Christ event from the written records and oral traditions about it. Augustine rejected the first way as arising from the pride of the soul, the second corresponded for him to true humility. Thus he says to those who want to take the first path: "You could find peace in the truth, but this requires humility, which is so difficult for your strong neck." On the other hand, he felt in unlimited inner bliss the fact that since the "appearance of Christ in the flesh" one could say to oneself: every soul can come to the experience of the spiritual, which goes as far as it can go, searching within itself, and then, in order to come to the highest, can have trust in what the written and oral traditions of the Christian community say about Christ and his revelation. He says: "What bliss and what lasting enjoyment of the highest and truest good now presents itself, what serenity, what breath of eternity, how shall I put it? This has been said, as far as it can be said, by those great incomparable souls" to whom we attribute that they have seen and still see. We reach a point at which we realize how true is what we have been commanded to believe, and how well and salutarily we have been brought up by our mother, the Church, and what was the benefit of that milk which the Apostle Paul gave to the little ones to drink ..." (What develops from the other possible way of thinking, the knowledge of the mysteries enriched by the Christ-event, is beyond the scope of this writing. The description of this can be found in my outline of a "secret science"). - While in pre-Christian times the person who wanted to seek the spiritual reasons for existence had to be directed to the Mystery Path, Augustine was also able to say to those souls who could not follow such a path within themselves: Come as far as your human powers can take you in knowledge; from there trust, faith, will lead you up into the higher spiritual regions. - It was now only necessary to go one step further and say: it is in the nature of the human soul to be able to reach only a certain level of knowledge through its own powers; from there it can only go further through trust, through faith in the Christian and oral tradition. This step was taken by that current of thought which assigned to natural knowledge a certain area beyond which the soul cannot rise by itself; but which current made everything that lay above this area the object of faith, which must be based on the written and oral tradition, on trust in its bearers. The greatest Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), expressed this doctrine in his writings in the most diverse ways. Human cognition can reach what Augustine achieved with self-knowledge, the certainty of the divine. The essence of this divine and its relationship to the world is then provided by revealed theology, which is no longer accessible to human self-knowledge and which, as the content of faith, is elevated above all knowledge.

[ 4 ] This point of view can be formally observed in its development in the world view of Johannes Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and who leads in the most natural way from the first times of Christianity to the points of view of Thomas Aquinas. His world view is in the spirit of Neoplatonism. Scotus further developed the teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite in his work on the "Classification of Nature". This was a doctrine based on God, who is exalted above all that is sensual and transient, and from whom the world is derived. Man is included in the transformation of all beings towards this God, who achieves in the end what he was from the beginning. Everything falls back into the Godhead that has passed through the world process and is finally completed. But in order to get there, man must find the way to the incarnate Logos. This thought in Erigena already leads to the other: What is contained in the scriptures that tell us about this Logos leads to salvation as the content of faith. Reason and scriptural authority, faith and knowledge stand side by side. One does not contradict the other; but faith must achieve what knowledge can never achieve by itself alone.

[ 5 ] What in the sense of the Mysteries was to be withheld from the multitude, the knowledge of the Eternal, had become for this mode of conception through the Christian attitude the content of faith, which by its nature referred to something unattainable by mere cognition. The pre-Christian Myste was convinced that knowledge of the divine belonged to him and the people to figurative faith. Christianity became the conviction: God has revealed wisdom to man through his revelation; the latter is entitled to an image of divine revelation through his knowledge. Mystery wisdom is a hothouse plant that is revealed to individual, mature individuals; Christian wisdom is a mystery that is revealed as knowledge to none, as the content of faith to all. The mystery point of view lived on in Christianity. But it lived on in a different form. Not the particular individual, but all should become partakers of the truth. But it was to happen in such a way that from a certain point of knowledge one recognized its inability to go further and from there ascended to faith. Christianity brought the content of the development of the Mysteries out of the darkness of the temple into the bright light of day. The one marked school of thought within Christianity led to the idea that this content had to remain in the form of faith.