The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] You have seen throughout our lectures the way in which we relate to the document called the Gospel of John when we stand on the ground of spiritual science. You have seen that it is not a question of gaining any truths about the spiritual worlds from that document, but of showing how, independently of all human and other documents, the possibility exists of penetrating into the spiritual world, just as, if one were to learn mathematics today, one would do so independently of every documentary book through which this or that part of mathematics was first communicated to us in the course of human evolution. What do those who begin, for example, to learn simple elementary geometry at school, which everyone today learns from themselves, from geometry itself, know of Euclid's geometry, of that book of documents in which this elementary geometry was, so to speak, first communicated to mankind! But once people have learned geometry through themselves, they will be able to appreciate the essence and significance of this documentary book all the better. This should show us more and more that one can gain from the spiritual life itself those truths which deal with this spiritual life. And when one has found them and is then again referred to the historical documents, then one finds again in them what one already knows, so to speak. In this way one arrives at a correct appreciation, a true human appreciation of these documents.

[ 2 ] We have seen in the course of the lectures that the Gospel of John truly does not lose any of its value as a result; we have seen that the respect and appreciation of the documents for those who stand on the ground of spiritual science is by no means less than for those who place themselves from the outset on the ground of such a document. Indeed, we have seen that the most profound teachings about Christianity, which we could just as well call the general teachings of wisdom, confront us again in the Gospel of John. And we have seen that when we grasp this deep meaning of Christian teaching in this way, we can only then understand why Christ had to enter human development at a very specific time, at the beginning of our era. We have seen how this humanity gradually developed in the post-Atlantean period. We have pointed out how, after the Atlantean flood, there was a first great post-Atlantean cultural epoch in the ancient Indian culture. We have pointed out how this ancient Indian culture can be characterized by the fact that people's minds were dominated by longing and memory. We have characterized what the memory, the longing consisted of. The memory consisted in the fact that living traditions had remained from an epoch of mankind preceding the Atlantean flood, in which man, by virtue of his nature and being, still had a kind of dim clairvoyant state through which he could look into the spiritual world, so that the spiritual world was known to him through experience, through experience, just as the four kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom, are known to mankind today. We have seen how in this time before the Atlantean flood there was not yet such a sharp separation between the state of consciousness during day life and the state of consciousness during night life. At that time, when man sank into sleep in the evening, his inner experiences were not as unconscious and dark as they are today; but when the images of day-life submerged him, the images of spiritual life opened up to him, and he was now within the things of the spiritual world. And when in the morning he again submerged in his physical body, the experiences and truths of the divine-spiritual world sank down into the darkness, and around him rose the images of today's reality, today's realms of minerals, plants, animals and so on. That sharp boundary between nocturnal unconsciousness and daily waking only came into being after the Atlantean flood, in our post-Atlantean time. There man was in a certain way - as far as immediate perception was concerned - cut off from spiritual reality and more and more placed out into purely physical reality. The memory alone remained that there was another realm, a realm of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, and this memory was linked to the longing of the mind to re-enter these realms from which man had descended through some kind of exceptional state. These exceptional states were only granted to a few chosen ones, the initiates, to whom the inner senses were opened in the Mystery Places so that they could look into the spiritual world. They were able to tell and bear witness to others who were unable to see beyond, that the spiritual worlds were real. In ancient Indian culture, yoga was the process by which man returned to the old twilight clairvoyant state. If individual exceptional natures were then initiated or initiated, they became the guides of humanity, the witnesses of the spiritual world.

[ 3 ] Under the impression of this longing and memory, a mood developed within the ancient Indian, pre-Vedic culture that saw Maya or illusion in external reality. It was said that true reality is only in the spiritual world, to which we can only return through an exceptional state, through yoga. This world of spiritual beings and processes is real, what man sees with his eyes is unreal, is illusion, is maja!

[ 4 ] This was the first basic religious sentiment in the post-Atlantean period, and yoga was the first form of initiation in the post-Atlantean period. At first there was no understanding of the actual mission of the post-Atlantean period. For it was not the mission of humanity to regard reality, which we call sensuality, as maja, as illusion, to flee it and become alien to it; rather, post-Atlantean humanity had a different mission: to conquer more and more physical reality, to become master of the world of physical phenomena. But it is also quite understandable that humanity, which was first placed in this physical plan, at the beginning considered that which previously hardly appeared within the spiritual reality and which it could now perceive alone, as maja or illusion. But this attitude towards reality was never allowed to remain. This view of physical reality as an illusion could never be allowed to remain the lifeblood of the post-Atlantean era. And we saw how, bit by bit, post-Atlantean humanity conquered the connection with physical reality in the various cultural epochs.

[ 5 ] In that culture which we call the primeval Persian culture - for what history knows as the Persian and Zarathustra cultures are the last echoes of what is meant here - in this second cultural epoch we saw men take the first step to grow out of the old Indian principle and to conquer physical reality. Nowhere is there yet a loving immersion in physical reality, nowhere is there anything like a study of the physical world. But there is already more than in the old Indian culture. Even what has remained of this ancient Indian culture until later times still shows us the echoes of that mood which regards physical reality as an illusion. Therefore, our present culture could never have emerged from this Indian culture. All wisdom within Indian culture looked away from the physical world and looked up into the spiritual worlds that were present as memory, and the study and treatment of physical reality seemed unworthy of it. Therefore the true Indian principle could never have produced a science useful for our earthly world; it could never have produced that mastery of the laws of nature which today forms the basis of our culture. All this could never have emerged from ancient Indianism. After all, why learn about the forces of a world that is only based on illusion? If this later became different even in Indian culture, it did not flow from it, but arose from later foreign influences.

[ 6 ] In ancient Persian culture, the external physical reality is initially a field of work. It is still regarded as the expression of a hostile deity, but the hope has already sprouted that this material field of reality can be penetrated with the help of the deity of light and completely transformed into one permeated by spiritual powers and good gods. Thus the follower of Persian culture already senses a little of the reality of the physical world. Although he still regards it as the domain of the god of darkness, he still has the hope that he can incorporate into it the powers of the good gods.

[ 7 ] And then humanity moves on to the cultural epoch that found its historical expression in the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian culture. And we have seen how it came about that the starry heavens were no longer Maya to man, but something in whose writings one could read. In what was still Maya to the Indians, in the orbits and the brilliance of the stars, the member of the third cultural epoch sees the expression of the counsels and intentions of divine-spiritual entities. Gradually, one lives into the attitude that external reality is not a deception, but a revelation, a manifestation of the divine-spiritual entities. And in the Egyptian culture one begins to apply what one reads from the star script to the division of the earth itself. Why did the Egyptians become the masters of geometry? Because they believed that matter could be conquered by the thought that divides the earth and that matter could be transformed by the human mind. - So gradually a later humanity permeated this material world, which was first regarded as maja, with the spirit, which emerged more and more in man's inner being as well.

[ 8 ] We have seen that it was actually only in the later Atlantean period that people came to be able to feel the I or “I-am”. For as long as people saw the spiritual images, they were also aware that they themselves belonged to the spiritual world, that they themselves were an image among images. Now came the perception of the spirit within. Let us now look at what we have repeated a little today, the development of man's own inner being.

[ 9 ] As long as man looked out in a kind of dreamy, clairvoyant consciousness in the Atlantean period, he did not actually pay much attention to his inner being. The inner world, which is encompassed by the “I” or “I-am”, was not yet something sharply outlined for him. To the same extent that the spiritual world disappeared, man became aware of his own spirituality. In ancient Indian culture there was still a strange attitude towards one's own spirituality. It was said that if we wanted to penetrate the spiritual world, to rise above illusion, then we had to lose ourselves in the spiritual world, we had to extinguish the “I-am” as far as possible and merge with the All-Spirit, with Brahman. - In the old initiation in particular, it was a loss of the personal. Impersonal absorption in the spiritual world is above all what characterizes the oldest form of initiation.

[ 10 ] This was no longer the case in the third cultural epoch, for example. For up to the third cultural epoch man's self-consciousness developed ever more strongly. Man became more and more conscious of his inner self. By becoming fond of the matter around him, by immersing himself in it with the laws which the human spirit itself had devised, which were not gained in some dim dream state, he became more and more aware of his ego, until this consciousness of personality reached a certain climax in ancient Egypt. But there was still something present in this personality consciousness which at the same time made it appear as something inferior, as something which was now again bound and absorbed in the outer world, which had no possibility of gaining a connection with that out of which one was born. We must paint two basic moods of the development of mankind before our souls if we want to understand the whole course of events.

[ 11 ] We must remember how the people of the Atlantean and ancient Indian times longed to cast off the personality. The Atlanteans were able to do this because it was natural for them to shed their personality every night and live in a spirit land. The Indians could do it because their initiatory principles led them up through yoga into the impersonal. Resting in the universal divine was what they wanted. Resting in a generality had remained in a last offshoot of humanity: in the consciousness of belonging together with the generations, in the consciousness that one was born out of a succession of generations, that one was connected as an individual human being with his blood through the generations up to the ancestor. This was the mood that had developed from that old mood that felt spiritually secure in a spiritual-divine. Thus it came about that those human beings who had undergone a normal development began in the third cultural epoch to feel themselves as individual human beings, but at the same time knew themselves to be secure in a whole, in a Divine-Spiritual, that they attached themselves through blood relationship to the whole ancestral line and that the God lived for them in the blood flowing down through the generations.

[ 12 ] We have then seen how a certain degree of perfection of this sentiment developed within the people who form the confession of the Old Testament. “I and the Father Abraham are one”, that is, the individual felt secure in the whole context up to the Father Abraham. This was also roughly what characterized the basic mood of all normally developed tribes at that time, all tribes of the third cultural epoch. But only the confessors of the Old Testament had been prophetically foretold that there was still something spiritually deeper than the divine fatherhood running through the blood of the generations. And we have pointed out the great moment in the evolution of mankind when this was prophetically foretold. When Moses hears the call: “Say, when thou shalt proclaim my name, I have told thee this!”, then for the first time the tidings and revelation of the Logos, the Christ, are heard. Then it was proclaimed prophetically for the first time to those who could understand that in the God lives not only that which is related to the blood, but that in him lives a purely spiritual being. It was like prophecy that went through the Old Testament.

[ 13 ] Who was it actually - this is the question we want to address now - who was it who first proclaimed his name to Moses through prophecy? Here again we have a passage where the interpreters of the Gospel of John are quite superficial and do not want to recognize that these documents must be gone through as thoroughly as possible. - Who was the one who prophetically proclaimed his name, to whom one must give the name “I am”? Who was it?

[ 14 ] We will find out if we grasp a passage from the Gospel of John properly and with seriousness and dignity. It is the passage we find in the 2nd chapter from verse 37 onwards. There the Christ Jesus points to the fulfillment of a saying of the prophet Isaiah, to the prediction, with the indication that the Jews do not want to believe in the Christ Jesus. Jesus himself refers to Isaiah:

"He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they will not see with their eyes or hear with their hearts, and will turn and I will help them.
Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory and spoke with him.” (12, 40-41)

[ 15 ] Isaiah “spoke with him”! Who did Isaiah talk to? Reference is made to the passage that says:

"In the year that Uzziah the king died, I saw the Lord sitting on a high and lofty throne, and his throne filled the temple.” (Isaiah 6, 1)

[ 16 ] Who did Isaiah see? This is clearly stated here in the Gospel of John: He saw Christ! He could always be seen in the spiritual, and you will no longer find it incomprehensible when secret science points out that the one whom Moses saw when he announced to him the word of the “I-am” as his name was the same being who then appeared on earth as Christ. The actual “Spirit of God” of antiquity is none other than the Christ, so that we are standing here at one of the points in the religious documents where it is particularly difficult for those who do not work properly to see clearly. It is particularly important to see clearly here because the words “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit” have been confused in the strangest ways. It has always been the case that these words have been used outwardly in the exoteric in the most varied ways precisely in order not to allow the actual esoteric meaning to emerge immediately. If one spoke of the “Father” in the sense of ancient Judaism, one spoke first of that Father who ran down through the blood of the generations, materially. If one spoke of the “Lord” as Isaiah did here, of the one who revealed himself spiritually, then one also spoke of the Logos as in the Gospel of John. And the writer of the Gospel of John wants to say nothing other than: He who could always be seen in the spiritual realm became flesh and dwelt among us! -- Once we have realized that the Old Testament also speaks of Christ in a certain sense, we will also understand how the ancient Hebrew people are placed in our development. The ancient Hebrew principle grows out of Egyptianism. There it stands out from the background of the Egyptian principle.

[ 17 ] So we see how the normal course of human development progresses as we described yesterday. The first culture in the post-Atlantean period is the ancient Indian, the second the Urperian, the third the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian culture, followed by the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, and the fifth is our present cultural epoch. Before the fourth epoch begins, a mysterious branch of the third epoch gives rise to the people and their traditions that provide the basis for Christianity. If we summarize all that we have gained in our lectures, we will find it even more comprehensible that the appearance of the Christ had to fall into the fourth cultural epoch.

[ 18 ] We have already emphasized that in the fourth epoch man had come so far that he had objectified his own spirituality, his ego, and placed it out into the world. We see how man gradually permeates matter with his own spirit, with his ego-spirit. We see the works of the Greek sculptors, the Greek dramatists, where man places what he calls his spiritual property embodied before the soul. We see further in the Roman world how that which man is also comes into his consciousness and how he fixes it for the outer world in the “Jus”, even if a complicated jurisprudence conceals it. For the deeper connoisseur of jurisprudence, it is clear that the actual law, which regards man as a legal subject, only emerged in this fourth cultural epoch. It was then that man was so far aware of his own personality that he first felt himself to be a true citizen. In Greek times, the individual still felt himself to be a member of the whole city-state. It was more important to be an Athenian than an individual. But it is quite different to say: I am a Roman - than: I am an Athenian. When you say: I am a Roman - you indicate that as an individual, as a citizen of the state, you have a value, you have a will. It would also be possible to prove, for example, that the emergence of the term “will” only became possible in this era, because it is a Roman term. It was only then that man had made his will so personal, so individualized, that he still wanted to work with his will beyond death. The things that one has to say in spiritual science agree in every detail with the real facts.

[ 19 ] In this way man came more and more to permeate matter with his spirit. But this also became more and more evident later. The fourth epoch is that in which man completely incorporates into matter that which he grasps in his spirit. In the Egyptian pyramid you can still see how spirit and matter wrestle with each other, how what is grasped in the spirit is not yet fully expressed in matter. The Greek temple expresses the whole turning point in the post-Atlantean period. For those who understand something of it, there is no more important, no more perfect architecture than the Greek, which is the purest expression of the inner laws of space. The column is conceived entirely as a support, and what lies on the column has been perceived entirely in such a way that it must be supported and that it presses. The sovereign, emancipated idea of space is carried out here in the Greek temple down to its last consequences. Few people later still felt the idea of space as they did then. However, there were still people who were able to feel the idea of space, but they felt it pictorially. Take a look at the room in the Sistine Chapel; stand at the back wall where the large picture of the judgment is and look up: you will see how the back wall rises up at an angle. The reason it rises up at an angle is because the artist felt the idea of space and did not think as abstractly as other people. That is why this wall stands at such a wonderful angle. That means no longer feeling the idea of space in a Greek way. There is a sense of art that perceives the secret dimensions hidden in space. Architectural perception does not mean perception for the eye, but something else. People today easily believe that right is the same as left, top is the same as bottom and front is the same as back. If only people would consider the following: there are pictures in which you can see three, four or five angels hovering. These can be painted in such a way that one is right to think that they must fall down at any moment. But they can also be painted by someone who has developed the real sense of space in such a way that he does not give the possibility of thinking this; they cannot fall down at all, because they carry each other. Then one has the dynamic relations of space pictorially before one. The Greek had them architecturally before him; he felt the horizontal not merely as a line, but he felt it as a compressive force, and he felt the column not merely as a stick, but he felt it as a load-bearing force. This empathy with the lines of space means “feeling the living spirit in a geometric way”. This is what Plato meant when he used the tremendous expression: “God is constantly geometrizing. “ - These lines in space are present, and the Greek built his temple according to them.

[ 20 ] What is the Greek temple? It is necessarily a dwelling place of God. It is something quite different from today's church. Today's church is a place of preaching. In the Greek temple, God himself dwelt in it. People only happen to be there when they want to be with God. Anyone who understands the forms of the Greek temple senses a mysterious connection with the God who dwells in the temple. In the pillars and what is above them, you do not see something that man has fantasized, but something that God himself would have made if he had wanted to create a dwelling place for himself. That was the ultimate in the interpenetration of matter with spirit.

[ 21 ] Compare the Greek temple with a Gothic church. Nothing should be said against the Gothic, for it is on a higher level from another point of view. In the Gothic church you can see how that which is expressed in its forms cannot actually be conceived or felt without the devout crowd. For those who can feel this, there is something in the arched forms of the Gothic that they cannot feel in any other way than by saying to themselves: if there is not the devout crowd inside and clasping their hands together in this arched form, the whole is not complete. The Gothic church is not only the dwelling place of God, but at the same time the meeting place of the crowd praying to God. Thus, in a certain way, humanity again transcends the climax of its own development. We see how that which was wonderfully perceived within the Greek sense of space in the lines of space, in the columns and beams, later came to decadence. A pillar that does not support, that is only there as a decorative motif, is not a pillar for the Greek sensibility. Everything in human evolution is in absolute harmony. The Greek cultural epoch was the most beautiful interpenetration of the consciousness of humanity discovered within itself and that which was perceived outside in space as the divine. Man had grown together completely with the physical-sensual world in this cultural epoch.

[ 22 ] It is simply nonsense when today's scholars want to obscure what earlier times perceived. In the spiritual-scientific sense we regard the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean period as the one in which man is completely in harmony with the world around him. This time, when man had grown together with external reality, was the only time when it was possible to understand that the divine can appear in an individual human being. Every earlier time would have understood everything else sooner than this; every earlier time would have felt that the divine was far too high and sublime to appear in a physical human form. The divine was to be preserved precisely from the physical form. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image!” (Exodus 20:4) therefore had to be said to the very people who were to grasp the idea of God in his spiritual form. Out of such views this people developed, and from its bosom grew the idea of Christ, the idea that the spiritual should appear in the flesh. This people was chosen for this purpose; and into this, into the fourth of the post-Atlantean epochs, the Christ-event had to fall.

[ 23 ] Therefore, for the Christian consciousness, the whole process of becoming human is divided into a pre-Christian and a post-Christian period. The God-man could only be understood by man in a certain time. And so we see how the Gospel of John ties in with the full consciousness and attitude of what was, if I may use a trivial word, directly contemporary, directly stemming from the consciousness of the time. It was therefore quite natural - like something inwardly related, so to speak - that the mental images through which the writer of the Gospel of John attempted to comprehend the greatest event in world history appeared to him to be best expressed in Greek thought forms. And little by little the whole of Christian feeling grew into these thought forms. We shall see how something like the Gothic had to develop as it progressed, because Christianity was indeed called to lead beyond matter. But it could only arise where one had gotten so far into matter that one did not yet overestimate it, had not yet sunk into it as in our age, but was nevertheless able to spiritualize and penetrate it.

[ 24 ] So I think the emergence of Christianity shows us from the whole spiritual course of humanity as something absolutely necessary. If we now want to understand what form Christianity had to gradually take, what form is prophetically foretold to it by such an individuality as the writer of the Gospel of John, we must in the next lecture take into consideration some essential and important concepts.

[ 25 ] It has been shown that everything must be taken literally, but the letter must first be really understood. It is not the same that the name “John” does not appear anywhere, but that the disciple “whom the Lord loved” is always spoken of. We have seen the mystery behind this, and that it is of profound significance. - Now let us look at another expression, an expression that will immediately enable us to tie in with the subsequent periods of development of Christianity.

[ 26 ] In the Gospel of John, it is usually overlooked how the “mother of Jesus” is spoken of. If you ask the average Christian: Who is the mother of Jesus? he will answer: The mother of Jesus is Mary! And some will even believe that the Gospel of John says that the mother of Jesus is called Mary. Nowhere in the Gospel of John does it say that the mother of Jesus is called Mary. Wherever it is mentioned, with a full intentionality whose meaning we will come to know, it says only “the mother of Jesus”. In the chapter of the wedding at Cana it says: “And the mother of Jesus was there” (2, 1); and later it says: “His mother speaks to the servants” (2, 5). Never the name “Mary”. And where she meets us again, where we see the Savior on the cross, is said in the Gospel of John:

"Now by the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary of Magdala.” (19, 25)

[ 27 ] It is clearly stated who is standing at the cross: The mother was there, then her sister, who was the wife of Cleophas and was called Mary, and Mary of Magdala. If anyone thinks about it, he will say to himself: It is strange that the two sisters are called Mary! That is not common today. -- And it wasn't then either. And since the writer of the Gospel of John calls the sister Mary, it is clear that the mother of Jesus was not called Mary. The Greek text clearly states: “His mother and his mother's sister, who was the wife of Cleophas, Mary, and Mary of Magdala.” - This raises the question for a worthy understanding: Who is Jesus' mother? And here we touch on one of the biggest questions in the Gospel of John: Who is the real father of Jesus? Who is the mother?

[ 28 ] Who is the father? - Is it even possible to ask? You can ask not only in the sense of the Gospel of John, but also in the sense of the Gospel of Luke. For it takes a special thoughtlessness not to see what is said at the Annunciation:

"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, and that which is born of you will be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1, 35)

[ 29 ] Even in the Gospel of Luke it is pointed out that the Father of Jesus is the Holy Spirit. This is to be understood literally, and those theologians who do not recognize this cannot read the Gospel. And so we have to ask the big question: How do the words “I and the Father are one”, “I and the Father Abraham are one”, “Before Abraham was, there was ‘I-am>’ square with all that we have heard? How do we reconcile with all this the undeniable fact that the Gospels see the Father principle in the “Holy Spirit”? And how should we think about the Mother Principle in terms of the Gospel of John?

[ 30 ] So that you come tomorrow quite prepared in spirit with the formulation of these questions, it should also be pointed out that in the Gospel of Luke a kind of generational sequence is given, that we are told there that Jesus was baptized by John, that he began to teach in the thirtieth year and that it is said that he was the son of Mary and “of Joseph, who was a son of Eli” and so on, and now the whole generational sequence follows. Follow it; you will see that it goes up to Adam. And then follows something quite peculiar, the words: “who was God's.” (Luke 3, 23-38)

[ 31 ] Just as it is pointed upwards from the Son to the Father, so it is pointed from Adam to God in the Gospel of Luke. We must take such a passage very seriously! Then we have roughly the questions together that should lead us to the center of John's gospel tomorrow.