The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The God of Alpha and the God of Omega

[ 1 ] It is often rightly emphasized that spiritual science should not only be a theory about the world, life, and human beings, but that it should become the deepest content of the human soul: the substance of life. If one approaches spiritual science with the right attitude, it will indeed become this in human beings. It should be expressly emphasized that this will happen gradually, for spiritual science is like something that grows and develops: first there is the seed, which grows larger and larger and thus more and more effective.

[ 2 ] However, no one can hope to derive the right way of life from spiritual science through mere intellectual understanding. Viewed externally, spiritual science appears to be a worldview, albeit more comprehensive and magnificent than others. But it is something else as well, for what theory could have such comprehensive views of Saturn, the sun, and the moon? What worldviews would dare to make definite statements about these things today? They remain stuck in abstract concepts when they rise above what the senses can see and hear. Such worldviews and theories have vague ideas about the divine that weaves behind the reality we experience. Even with regard to other, less lofty truths, such as the teachings of reincarnation and karma, spiritual research is far ahead of anything science dares to say about human development. It could also arrive at these teachings, for if one really wanted to draw the consequences of materialistic-scientific facts, reincarnation and karma would long since have become popular teachings. But because modern science does not dare to draw these conclusions, it stops short of doing so. People speak of natural and historical development, but they do not want to hear anything about the true development of human individuality, which passes from life to life and carries the human soul into the future.

[ 3 ] Those who observe life must, purely through the consequences of this life, also arrive at the teaching that is revealed through clairvoyant research: the teaching of the four members of the human being. But because the present age is so despondent in its thinking, this teaching is proclaimed only by spiritual science. Thus, spiritual science as a teaching has much to offer over other worldviews and philosophies that approach people today.

[ 4 ] But all this is not, in the final analysis, the real fruit of spiritual science. Its fruit does not consist in its being accepted as a satisfying, far-reaching teaching. You cannot have the fruit without the seed. What we are developing today as the fruit of the anthroposophical worldview, and what can enliven our hearts and warm our love, cannot be had without the seed, that is, spiritual scientific knowledge itself. People say, for example: What do we need these ideas about reincarnation and karma, about the members of the human being and the development of the world? It is a matter of developing love for humanity and a noble disposition. Certainly that is true, but true love for humanity, fruitful for the world, is only possible on the basis of knowledge, namely spiritual scientific knowledge.

[ 5 ] As knowledge, spiritual science has much to offer that other worldviews do not. When it is truly experienced within us, when we do not allow ourselves to be discouraged from awakening these great, comprehensive thoughts in our souls again and again, when we carry these thoughts within us at all times, then we see that this teaching can become a purpose in life in a very specific sense. Spiritual science is a collection of ideas that lead us into supersensible worlds, and we must therefore lift ourselves up to higher worlds in our spiritual thinking. Every hour of spiritual science is a reaching out of the soul beyond the everyday. The moment we devote ourselves to the teaching, our thinking is transported to another world. Our ego is then united with the spiritual world, and when we consider that it is from this world that our ego was born, we are then, when we think spiritually, with our ego in our spiritual home, at the source from which it originated.

[ 6 ] If we understand this correctly, we can truly compare spiritual scientific thinking with the state of consciousness that we recognize, from a spiritual point of view, as sleep. When a person falls asleep in the evening and slips into a spiritual world, they are also in the world from which their ego was born, from which it emerges every morning to enter the sensory world within the body. Once upon a time, the soul will be consciously present in this spiritual world; in normal human consciousness, the ego is not consciously present there. Why? Because in the course of time, its consciousness of the spiritual world has become increasingly weaker.

[ 7 ] In the Atlantean epoch, the ego saw itself surrounded by divine-spiritual beings during sleep. After the Atlantean catastrophe, the ego was displaced into the sensory world and increasingly lost the ability to look into the world in which it is present during sleep. For it is absurd to think that it would cease to exist in the evening and rise again in the morning. It is in the spiritual world, only not consciously!

[ 8 ] Spiritual scientific thinking makes us strong so that we can gradually connect consciously with these spiritual worlds. Because anthroposophy leads us into this world, at least in our thinking, it has certain qualities in common with sleep. In sleep, all the worries and cares that come from the things of the sensory world cease. When a person can sleep and their thinking is extinguished, they forget all their worries. This is the most beneficial effect of sleep, and it is based on the fact that during sleep the ego allows the currents of the spiritual world to flow into itself. These currents have strengthening powers and bring about not only the forgetting of worries and cares during sleep, but also the overcoming of the damage to our organism that we receive through worries and cares. What these have made bad is erased by that spiritual power, and hence the refreshment, the rebirth that every healthy sleep gives. Spiritual scientific thinking has these qualities in common with sleep in the higher sense.

[ 9 ] Spiritual thoughts are powerful thoughts when we grasp them with our whole life. When we lift ourselves up to thoughts of the earth's past and future and allow these magnificent events to work upon us, our soul will be drawn to them and carried far away from the worries of the day. Thoughts such as those that arise from karma, this plan of destiny, in which the ideal of our own royal will grows, give us courage and strength, so that we say to ourselves: Even if these or those obstacles in my life are insurmountable today, my strength grows from incarnation to incarnation. The royal will within me becomes ever stronger, and all obstacles will help me to make this will ever more royal. I will overcome the obstacles, and in doing so my will will develop more and more, my energy will grow. The pettiness of life, all the inferiority of existence, will melt away like frost in the sun, that sun which rises in wisdom and permeates us in spiritual thinking. Our emotional world will be warmed, glowed through, illuminated; our existence will expand and we will feel blissful within it.

[ 10 ] If we repeat such moments and allow them to have an effect on us, then a strengthening of our entire existence will flow from them in all directions. Not overnight, but through the constant repetition of such thoughts, the gloom, the lamentation over our fate, the gloomy temperament will gradually disappear. A remedy for our soul will be spiritual knowledge! And when it does, when our existence expands in this way, it will plant within us the attitude that is the fruit of spiritual knowledge. What it brings forth in us must be regarded as the ideal of spiritual science. All the conflicts and disharmonies of life will fall away in the face of harmonious thoughts and feelings that draw an energetic will in their wake. Thus spiritual research proves itself not merely as knowledge and teaching, but as a force of life and the content of our soul. When understood in this way, it will be able to work in life in such a way that it will rescue human beings from all worries and cares. And this is how it must work in our time, for it owes its existence not to arbitrariness, but to the recognition that it is necessary.

[ 11 ] Those individuals who are far advanced in the normal existence of human beings, the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings, have recognized that spiritual science must flow into our culture if it is not to wither away. Spiritual science is a new lifeblood, and humanity must be supplied with new lifeblood from time to time. Spiritual science is a necessary current in our time. Those who have a feeling for these great truths should hasten to take them up, so that they may be a kind of ferment for the rest of humanity, a salt for the spiritual life of the whole of humanity. Those who strive must feel this as a kind of duty. It is not difficult to see why, especially in our time, the call for spiritual science has come from high places to gather those who have an open heart and a free mind for it. We have let the post-Atlantean humanity pass before our souls and have followed the cultural epochs from the Indian to our own, the fifth epoch. We have seen how, during this time, human beings have gradually lost their awareness of the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] In the first epoch, human beings still had a deep longing for the spiritual world. The sensory world was Maya, illusion, to them. But then came times that called human beings to external, physical work. They had to learn to love the sensory world, for only then could they work with it. Human beings can no longer say that the outer world is only Maya; they must delve into it with their powers and wisdom. In doing so, however, they gradually lose their awareness of the spiritual world, and Zarathustra, the initiator of Persian culture, must say to his disciples: The power that radiates from the sun as physical power calls all living things into existence. But this physical force is not the only thing. Ahura Mazdao, the spiritual being of the sun, lives in the sun. It had to be shown to people how the outer expression of something spiritual is present in everything sensory.

[ 13 ] Thus it came about that the following mood first arose in Persian culture: What is illuminated by the sun is indeed Maya, but behind this Maya the spirit must be sought. The spiritual world is always around me, but I cannot experience it with my physical eyes and ears, only with supersensible consciousness. When this consciousness is awakened, then I can also recognize in physical existence the great spirit of the sun with all its sub-beings that belong to the sun. There will come a time when my soul will no longer recognize this. — But it was difficult to convey this fully to people. They must be gradually matured in ever new incarnations in order to recognize the divine-spiritual behind everything physical, to recognize that the whole of nature is permeated by it.

[ 14 ] Human beings could recognize the divine in this life, but they could not carry this consciousness over into the time between death and a new birth. For it was peculiar to that time that human consciousness became increasingly dark between death and a new birth. Let us take the soul of an Indian of ancient times. When it passed through death and entered the other world, it still lived in a relatively bright world among spiritual beings. In Persian culture, this was already less the case. The world between death and rebirth had become darker. Obstacles pile up between souls, and the soul feels lonely. It cannot, so to speak, reach out its hand to another soul. This is the heaviness and darkness of this life in the spiritual world, that one cannot walk together with others.

[ 15 ] During the Egyptian period, much of the power that enabled the soul to reach out to other souls had already been lost, so much so that the Egyptian soul longed for the preservation of the body. It was to be preserved in the mummy. This was because the soul sensed that the power it took with it into this life between death and new birth was small. People wanted to preserve the body so that the soul could look down on it as something that belonged to it and thus replace the power it no longer received on the other side. Cultural phenomena such as mummification are deeply connected with the development of the human soul.

[ 16 ] The Egyptians believed that they would be united with Osiris in death. They said to themselves: Once, in ancient times, the soul could see over there. Now it has lost its power, but it can create a substitute for itself if it acquires such qualities here in life that it becomes more and more like Osiris. Then it will itself become a kind of Osiris and will be united with him after death. In this way, by clinging to Osiris, the soul tried to create a substitute for what it could no longer obtain from ancient times. But what Osiris cannot give the soul is revealed in the Egyptian legend, which says that Osiris once lived on earth together with human beings. But then he was locked in a box, like a coffin, by his evil brother Seth. This means that Osiris once lived with humans on earth when they were more spiritual, but then he had to remain in the spiritual world because he was too good for the physical human form. Such a being must become the soul, a being that is too good for the human form, if this soul wants to find a substitute for the spiritual power of vision between death and new birth. By becoming similar to Osiris, the soul was able to overcome its loneliness, but it could not bring back into a new incarnation what it had received in the spiritual world through its communion with Osiris, for Osiris did not fit into this sensual-physical incarnation. The soul made its existence between death and rebirth bearable, but it could bring nothing of this with it into a new incarnation.

[ 17 ] This was the grave danger in which humanity found itself at that time, that incarnations would become increasingly worse. For nothing new could be added to spiritual power. Only what had remained from ancient times could be developed. This had reached maturity in the Greek-Roman period. Like fruit from a blossom, this came to light in the magnificent art of the Greeks. This was the most beautiful fruit of what had been given to humanity as an ancient heritage from primeval times. But this was linked to darkness and gloom in the life between death and new birth, and the noble Greek was right when he said: Better to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shadows! Yes, in this world of the Greek lands and the Roman states, where man possessed so much that delighted and satisfied his senses, in this world it was where he could take nothing with him into the life between death and new birth.

[ 18 ] Then came the event of Golgotha, that event which has significance not only for the outer physical world, but for all the worlds that man passes through. At the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer as his body hung on the cross, Christ appeared in the underworld and kindled the light that restored sight to the souls below. And from that moment on, the soul was able to see that power could also come from below for the outer world. The soul no longer united itself with Osiris in order to have a substitute for the lost vision, but from then on it could say to itself: I also find the Christ light down there, that which has sunk into the earth, for Christ has become the spirit of the earth. And I draw strength in life between death and new birth from the spiritual, such strength that I can bring with me when I return to earth for a new birth. But what was necessary for this strength to flow in the right way? For this it was necessary that a complete reversal took place in relation to the sensory world.

[ 19 ] Let us ask ourselves what these ancient Indians felt when they said: This world is Maya, the great deception, and when I connect with it through my senses and perceive it, then I myself have fallen prey to the great deception. Only when I withdraw from it and rise to what lies beyond the sensory, when I rise to the ancient spiritual, am I in the world of the gods! Only by withdrawing from the outer world do I return to my ancient home through my inner being, which has remained to me like an ancient heirloom from these spiritual worlds. I must return to this ancient sacred land from which I stepped into the world of the senses. I can only return by allowing my spiritual nature to work when it distracts my gaze from the outer world. This was possible in those days: one could turn back. There was still so much left in the inner being of the power to look up to the ancient gods that, by applying this power, the way to the gods could be found. Thus the Indian found his devas, from whom everything sprang.

[ 20 ] Then came the Persian era, in which the human soul no longer possessed so much of the power that was like a legacy from ancient times. If the soul had now said, “I will turn my steps back, I do not want to remain in this world,” it would no longer have found the old gods. It no longer had the strength to do so. This is connected with the further development of humanity. If the soul had now tried to turn its gaze away from the outer world and regard it merely as Maya, this would have led to it not seeing the high gods, but only the subordinate devas, the evil spiritual beings who do not belong to the high gods and who have fallen into evil. This is what the souls would have found. Because this danger existed, the soul had to be shown how, instead of turning away from the sensory world, it could see more in it, how the sensory world is an outer expression of something spiritual. When the gaze turns toward the sun, the soul learns to see in it not merely the external physical power of the sun, but Ahura Mazdao, the sun god, and through this the soul becomes capable of knowing something of the divine spirit even within the sensory world.

[ 21 ] The Persian soul had become weak in relation to the spiritual forces that led back to the ancient gods, and it first had to be educated to see through the veil of the material that lies over the spiritual. The evil Asuras were hidden from her in the outer world, but she could not yet see the good spiritual beings behind the Maya. That is why all the names for spiritual beings are reversed between Indian and Persian culture. In Indian culture, the Devas are good beings, while in Persian culture, the Devas have become evil gods. This is the true reason for this change; it lives in the further development of the human soul. It had become stronger and stronger in relation to the outer world, but weaker and weaker in relation to the inner world. But now those who are responsible for guiding human evolution prepared what was to come.

[ 22 ] When Zarathustra learned to turn his gaze upward toward the sun and to see the sun god in the sun's aura, he already knew that this was none other than the Christ spirit, who for the time being can only reveal himself from outside. In his soul on earth, man could not yet see the Christ being. What was seen earlier in the sun as Ahura Mazdao must descend to earth. Only then can man learn to see again within himself, through his inner being, a deva, a divine spirit. Life in the human body was not yet capable of receiving the Christ spirit and permeating itself with it in the Persian era. This had to come slowly and gradually. We must familiarize ourselves with the idea that the gods can only reveal themselves to those who prepare themselves to receive them. Only to humanity, which had prepared itself, could the deva come, who could be seen through the inner being.

[ 23 ] Everything in human evolution happens slowly and gradually; it does not progress in the same way everywhere. After the Atlantic flood, the peoples had migrated to the East. This or that part of the Atlantean descendants had remained in this or that region, and these peoples had developed differently. How did the Indians become capable of having a living feeling for the spiritual world? Because the development of the I took a very special course. The I remained deep within the spiritual world, so that it was inclined to find little connection with the physical world. It was the peculiarity of the Indian that he had this inclination toward the spiritual of ancient times and had little connection with the physical world, with which he did not want to connect his I. That is why the achievements of external culture do not flourish in the East; the peoples there have no inventive talent for this. In the West, human beings had more of a talent for working with the external world, since they had the task of working through it. Persia formed, so to speak, the border between West and East. People who paid little attention to the external senses remained more in the East. That is why, six hundred years before Christ, a teaching such as that of the Buddha was still necessary for the East. He had to be placed at this point in world development because he was to keep alive in souls the longing for the spiritual worlds of the past. That is why he had to preach against the thirst to enter the physical world. And that is why he preached at a time when the soul still had the inclination but no longer the ability to rise to the spiritual worlds. Buddha preached the high truths about suffering to people, and he brought them the knowledge that lifts souls out of this world of suffering.

[ 24 ] This teaching would have been impossible for the Western world. For them, there had to be a teaching that was equal to their inclination toward the sensual world. The West needed a teaching that said: In the outer world, you must work in such a way that the forces of this world are placed at the service of humanity. But you can also take the fruits of this life into the spiritual world after death.

[ 25 ] People usually do not understand the uniqueness of Christianity correctly. In the Roman world, it found little resonance among those who could enjoy the treasures and riches of this world, but it found great resonance among those who had to work in the sensory world. Despite all their work in the sensual world, within the physical world, they knew that they were developing something here that they could take with them after death. This was the high feeling that inspired those who accepted Christianity. People could say to themselves: By setting Christ as your ideal, you will develop something in this world that cannot be destroyed even by death. This awareness could only develop because Christ was truly on earth, not as a deity, but as a being incarnated in a human body, so that every human being could take him as a model and ideal. But for this, the impulse and the power had to be created. And Zarathustra created the preconditions for this. He had gone through so much that he was prepared to take on this mission.

[ 26 ] Zarathustra, who saw the sun god in Persia in the sun's aura, must have had to prepare himself well in earlier incarnations in order to be able to see this god. He had already had high, sublime incarnation experiences in the time that was still filled with the teachings of the holy Rishis. He was initiated into the teachings of the holy Rishis. He had received them gradually in seven successive incarnations. Then he was born in a body that was blind and deaf and had as little contact with the outside world as possible. As a person who was virtually impervious to external sensory impressions, Zarathustra had to be born; and then the memory of the teachings of the holy Rishis, which he had once received, came to him from within. And it was precisely then that the great Sun God was able to ignite something in him that went beyond the teachings of the Rishis. This arose again in his next incarnation, and it was there that Ahura Mazdao revealed himself to Zarathustra from outside.

[ 27 ] Thus, Zarathustra had gone through much before he became the teacher and inspirer of the Persian people. We know that he had Moses and Hermes as disciples and that he gave his astral body to Hermes and his etheric body to Moses. From Moses came the teaching of “I am that I am” (Ejeh asher ejeh), which flowed from the Akashic Records. Thus Zarathustra slowly prepared himself for an even greater and more powerful sacrifice. When Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses, the I, which had continued to develop, was able to form an astral and etheric body in the new incarnation, corresponding to the perfect I. And Zarathustra was reborn within the ancient Chaldean lands, six hundred years before Christ, and became the teacher of Pythagoras—as Zarathos or Nazarathos. He then prepared within the Chaldean culture for the impulse that was to come into the world. We find this again in the mood expressed in the part of the Bible where it is said that the wise men of the East came to greet Christ as the new star of wisdom that had risen. Zarathustra taught that Christ would come, and those who remained as disciples of this significant Zarathustra teaching knew when the time of the great impulse from Golgotha would come.

[ 28 ] Now there is always a certain connection between those who stand in the world in this way—a Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras. For what works in the world is a force, it is a fact. The spirits work together; they are not born together in an age for no reason. Thus the great impulses of human evolution intertwine. Zarathustra pointed to the one who, through the event of Golgotha, would enable human beings to find the world of the devas through the power of their own inner being, more and more as they develop into the future and are able to take steps forward. And at the same time, the Buddha said: Yes, it is a spiritual world, compared to which the entire sensory world is Maya. Turn your steps back to the world where you were before the thirst for earthly existence awakened, and you will find Nirvana, rest in the Divine! This is the difference between the teachings of Buddha and Zarathustra. Buddha teaches that man can attain the divine by turning his steps back, and Zarathustra teaches as Zarathos: The time will come when light will incarnate within the earth itself, and through this the soul, as it progresses, will come closer to the divine. Buddha says: In stepping backward—Zarathustra says: In stepping forward, the soul will find God.

[ 29 ] Whether one seeks God in Alpha or Omega, one will find Him. Whether one steps backward or forward, one will come to God! But human beings must find Him with heightened human powers. The powers necessary to find the God of Alpha are the primal powers of human beings. But the powers necessary to find the God of Omega must be attained by human beings themselves on Earth. It is not the same whether one goes back to the Alpha or forward to the Omega. Those who only want to find God, who only want to enter the spiritual world, may go forward or backward, but those who care that humanity leaves the earth in an elevated state must point the way to the Omega.

[ 30 ] This is what Zarathustra did. He paved the way for those human beings who were to lay hands on the forces of the earth itself. Zarathustra had the fullest understanding of the Buddha, for both sought the same thing. What must Zarathustra do? He must bring about the possibility for the Christ impulse to descend to earth. Zarathustra is reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, and through what had happened in his previous incarnation, Zarathustra was able to unite himself with many things that had been left behind by spiritual economy. The world is deep and the truth is complicated!

[ 31 ] And the essence of the Buddha, which had continued in various ways, was also incorporated into Jesus of Nazareth, for in him who is to accomplish much, much is at work. At his baptism in the Jordan, the I of Jesus left the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, and the Sun God, the Christ Spirit, entered and lived for three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, Zarathustra had worked toward making humanity a recipient of the Christ impulse.

[ 32 ] This marked an important moment in the development of the earth. It had now become possible for people to find God within themselves, and they could now bring something from this life between death and new birth into their new incarnation. And now there are already souls who feel strongly enough: I was in a world where the light of Christ shone. The fact that this is dimly sensed in many souls enables people today to understand the words of spiritual science. Because such people exist today, the masters of wisdom and harmony of feeling said to themselves that we may hope that they will feel the truths of spiritual science and make them the content of their lives. Because the masters know this, they entrusted those who had the understanding for it with the mission of proclaiming anthroposophy in the present age.

[ 33 ] It is necessary that spiritual science now begin to become a spiritual current in our present time. Christ himself has prepared the souls for it, and a complete guarantee for its permanence is the fact that once the light of Christ has been kindled, it can never be extinguished. We fill ourselves with this sense of the necessity of the anthroposophical spiritual current, and then we stand within it in the right sense, and it stands before us as an unshakeable ideal.

[ 34 ] Yes, a human personality had to develop to such an extent that it became possible for the light to descend and say in a human body: “I am the light of the world!”

[ 35 ] It first shone down into the soul of Zarathustra and spoke to this soul, and this soul understood the light of the world and sacrificed itself for it, so that it might find a place to say to human beings from an earthly body: “I am the light of the world!”