The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] For many souls in our time who are open to what anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science has to say, it is necessary to resolve in their minds the various contradictions that arise. The soul can be drawn to one contradiction in particular if it is able to take seriously the memories of a festive season such as that surrounding Christmas and the beginning of the year. The fact that, through the insights we seek to gain, we also wish to penetrate the spiritual course of humanity in order to properly understand our own spiritual development becomes particularly clear to us when we take such festive memories seriously. We need only raise a thought, and it will immediately—one might say—draw attention to it in a way that is, on the one hand, illuminating and, on the other, unsettling, showing how contradictions and difficulties must pile up before the soul if that soul wishes to accept, in the true sense, our anthroposophical insights into humanity and the development of the world.

[ 2 ] Among the various insights we seek to gain through our deepening of anthroposophy is, of course, the knowledge of Christ—the knowledge of the fundamental impulse that took hold at the beginning of our historical development, which we have called the Christ impulse. We will certainly have to ask ourselves often: How is it that our time can hope to penetrate the course of world development more deeply and intensely through deepened anthroposophical insights, in order to understand the Christ impulse, than the time in which the contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha lived? One might ask: Was it not much easier for those contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha to penetrate the mystery specifically connected with this Mystery for the development of humanity than it is for our time, which is so far removed from the Mystery of Golgotha? This could become a burdensome question for the souls of the present who wish to follow the Christ-understanding in an anthroposophical way. It could become one of those contradictions that must have a depressing effect, especially when we take the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge very seriously. A resolution of this contradiction presents itself to us only when we, so to speak, bring before our soul the entire spiritual situation in which humanity found itself at that time, from which we begin our reckoning.

[ 3 ] Anyone who attempts, at first without any religious or similar sentiments, to penetrate the state of mind of people from the beginning of our era may make a most peculiar discovery. One can initially attempt this penetration in the following way: one should adhere to what even the most outwardly oriented souls cannot deny; one should adhere to the ancient tradition as it has been preserved in history; but one should try to penetrate that part which encompasses spiritual life in its purity. For one can indeed hope that through such an exploration one might catch a glimpse of the actual impulses of human development. Let us hold fast to the life of thought of the time that lies at the beginning of our calendar. Let us try, purely historically, to penetrate into what people, for the sake of argument, brought forth in terms of deepened thought two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and still a century and a half after the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to penetrate the mysteries of the world, the riddles of the world. There we find, however, that in the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, an infinitely significant change took place in the spiritual constitution of humanity with regard to the life of thought. One becomes aware that, in a certain sense, what Greek philosophy and other forms of deep thought had already brought to humanity over several centuries had passed over into a large part of the cultural world of that time. When one considers what humanity achieved in that era purely of its own accord, without reflecting on any external impulse—what those whom one might call, using the Stoic term, “wise men” achieved, and what numerous figures in Roman history achieved—one must say: With regard to the conquest of thoughts, the conquest of ideas, Western life after that time, after the turning point at the beginning of our era, has not actually brought us much more. This Western life has brought us an infinite amount of insight into the facts of nature; it has brought us infinite revolutions in thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, with which all these conquests were made, with which humanity attempted to penetrate the outer spatial mysteries of existence—these have actually developed very little since that age; they lived, even down to the thought of which the present age is so proud, down to the thought of evolution—they all lived in the souls of that time. What one might call a conceptual grasp of the world, a life in ideas, had reached a certain height, a summit, and had not only seized individual minds—as the disciples of Socrates had some time before—but had, in a certain sense, become popular, spreading across Southern Europe and other regions of the world. One is amazed at the depth to which thought had penetrated. If one were to consider a history of philosophy with an open mind, one would take particular note of this very triumph of thought in that era.

[ 4 ] If we now consider, on the one hand, this victory of thought—this infinitely significant elaboration of the worlds of ideas—and, on the other hand—in the sense in which we are attempting to penetrate today—present something to the soul such as the mysteries surrounding the event of Golgotha, then we become aware of something else as well. Then one becomes aware that, as the news of the Mystery of Golgotha spread in those days, an immense intellectual struggle took place with this Mystery. We see how the philosophies of that time, especially the deeply profound philosophy of Gnosticism, strive to direct all the ideas that had been attained toward this one goal. And it is significant to allow this struggle of human thought with the Mystery of Golgotha to sink in. For what becomes apparent is that this struggle is, in essence, a futile one; that this immense depth of thought which human development has attained is indeed present, and does indeed make every effort to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, yet that all these efforts are insufficient; that, in a sense, the Mystery of Golgotha, as if separated by spiritual worlds at a great distance, approaches human understanding yet refuses to reveal itself.

[ 5 ] Now, my dear friends, I would like to point out right from the start that, when I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha in these lectures, I do not wish to imbue this term with anything that might be associated with it in any religious traditions or beliefs; but rather that we should take purely the objective world of facts that underlies human development—that which presents itself to physical and spiritual observation. I would like to adopt, as it were, a perspective for us that looks beyond all that has been gained regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, which is present in the various religious creeds, and I would like to turn our gaze solely to what has taken place in human evolution.

[ 6 ] I will now have a few things to say, anticipating what can only be stated clearly and conclusively in the coming days.

[ 7 ] The first thing one notices in such a comparison between the mystery of Golgotha and the immensely profound intellectual development of that time is that one receives the impression I have expressed as follows: Far, far beyond what intellectual development can attain lies the essence of this mystery. And the more closely one delves into what such a comparison can offer, the more one must admit: On the one hand, one can immerse one’s soul completely in the worlds of thought that characterize the beginning of our era; one can try to bring to life in one’s soul the state of mind that prevailed, what people in the Roman Empire and in Greece thought; one can, as it were, summon these ideas that people thought back before one’s soul, and then one will get the feeling: Yes, it is the time when thought experienced a deepening as never before. Something happens to thought; it approaches the human soul, as it were, in a way it has never approached it before. But when one then seeks to bring fully to life within oneself—through that state of mind which might be called clairvoyant—what one has been able to present to one’s soul regarding this deepening of thought and this enlivening of the thought-worlds of that time; when one thus carries this within one’s soul, but now allows to take effect in the soul—what the clairvoyant state of mind can provide—something surprising suddenly emerges; one then feels: Far, far away in the spiritual worlds is actually taking place that of which this deepening of thought is also an effect.

[ 8 ] We have already pointed out that there are other worlds beyond our own. To use common terms: the astral world, the devachanic world, and the higher devachanic world. Let us first recall that these three worlds lie beyond our own. If one then truly allows this clairvoyant state of mind to awaken within oneself, one gets the impression: even if one were to enter the next world, the astral world, it would still not be fully clarified there what the actual origin is of what is expressed in the thought life of that time. Even if one were to look into the lower Devachanic world, it would still not be fully clarified what actually happened. And only if one could transport one’s soul into the higher devachanic world—so says the clairvoyant state of mind—would one be able to experience within it what radiates through the other two worlds, what penetrates down into our physical world, and what is recognizable in our physical world in the radical transformation of humanity’s world of thought over the centuries.

[ 9 ] At first, one can focus solely on the physical plane and its observation: While immersing oneself in the world of ideas of that time, one need not even be aware of what is communicated about the Mystery of Golgotha; one can initially disregard this entirely and ask oneself: Regardless of what took place over there in Palestine, what does external history show us? Well, it shows us that an infinite deepening of thought took place in Greece and Rome. Let us, as it were, enclose this Greek and Roman world of thought like an island of our soul life; let us think of it as closed off from everything that took place outside; let us imagine that nothing had yet penetrated into this world from the news of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we then direct our soulful contemplation toward this world, we certainly find nothing of what we explore today regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, but we do find that profound deepening of intellectual life which shows us: Here, in the course of human development, something has occurred that has gripped the innermost essence of the soul on the physical plane. Whatever we may initially believe, such a thought never existed back then, among any people or in any age! So no matter how unbelieving someone may be, or how little they wish to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, they must admit one thing: that within the realm we have now enclosed, there lives a depth of thought that never existed before.

[ 10 ] But now, when one immerses oneself in this world of thought and has that clairvoyant state of mind in the background, one feels truly placed within the peculiarity of the thought. Now one says to oneself: Yes, just as this thought blossomed—as an idea in Plato or others—and just as it passed into the world we have tried to define, so this thought is something that sets the soul free, that seizes the soul and, so to speak, raises it to a higher view of itself, so that it can say: Whatever else you may grasp in the outer world and in the spiritual world, it makes you dependent on these worlds; in thought you grasp something that lives within you, something you can fully penetrate. You may withdraw from the outer physical world, may become a skeptic toward the spiritual world, may want to know nothing of clairvoyant impressions, may not want to let any physical impressions penetrate you: With thought you can live within yourself; you grasp, as it were, your own being in your thought!

[ 11 ] That is understandable. But then—and this cannot be otherwise if one enters into this, I might say, sea of thought—the feeling of the isolation of thoughts, the feeling that a thought is, after all, only a thought, the feeling that a thought initially lives only in the soul and that one cannot find within it the power to step out into a world in which one can also find, in its very foundation, that which we otherwise are. Precisely by sensing the highest glory of thought, one also senses, so to speak, its unreal nature. Then one can also sense how, in fact, all around in the world one has come to know through the clairvoyant gaze, there is nothing that could, in the final analysis, bear this thought.

[ 12 ] For why should this thought even exist?—one wonders. After all, it can only distort the physical world. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who cannot ascribe an essence of its own to thought, would actually be better off banning thought altogether. For if the material world is the only real one, then thought can only falsify it. It is only because the materialists are inconsistent that the only possible theory of knowledge of materialism, of monism, does not occur to them: abstaining from thinking, ceasing to think altogether. But for the one who, with a clairvoyant disposition of soul, immerses himself in the life of thought, there stands before the soul—one might say—the menacing aspect of this isolation of thought, this standing alone with thought. And then there is only one thing for him. But that exists; it approaches him, even if it approaches only as something standing at a great spiritual distance: Separated by two worlds, in a third world lies the true origin—so says the soul that has become clairvoyant—of what is in the life of thought. This could be a most powerful impression for souls in our time who are clairvoyant in their sensibility: to transport themselves, isolated in their thinking, into the time when thought experienced its deepening; to disregard everything that surrounds it, including the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect only on how that which we still draw upon today in terms of its intellectual content arose in the Greco-Roman world.

[ 13 ] And then one should turn one’s gaze toward other worlds and, only after rising above the Devachanic world, feel oneself entering a higher spiritual realm where the star shines forth with a power that also manifests itself in the intellectual world of Greco-Roman antiquity. Then, here on Earth, one first feels transported away from the present world; one feels transported into the Greco-Roman world with its influence extending into the other regions of the Earth at that time—say, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one allows the impression of the spiritual world to take effect, the star appears—I say the star symbolically—situated above the Devachan, the spiritual being of whom one says: “Yes, even what you experience here in the isolation of thought and in the possibility that thought has undergone such a deepening as in the time of the beginning of our calendar, is the result of the rays emanating from this star in the higher spiritual world.”

[ 14 ] And now a feeling arises that initially knows nothing at all of what historical tradition holds regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, but rather a feeling that can be expressed as follows: You stand there with the Roman-Greek world of ideas, with what Plato and the others were able to contribute to the general education of humanity, what they have instilled in souls—with that you stand there and feel alive within it. And then you wait... You truly do not wait in vain; for then there emerges, deep, deep in the background of spiritual life, the star that sends forth its rays of power, and of which you may say: One effect of these rays of power is what you have just experienced.

[ 15 ] This experience can be had. When one has this experience, one has not yet adopted any particular tradition, but has simply sought, without prejudice, the reasons for what took place in the Greco-Roman world. But one has also experienced that one is separated by three worlds from an understanding of the true reason behind the world of that time. And then one might be willing to look to those spirits who, in that era, attempted to comprehend this upheaval in their own way. Even in contemporary external scholarship, one begins to realize that during this period of transition—from which our calendar begins—religious-philosophical geniuses, so to speak, were alive. And one is most likely to encounter these religious-philosophical geniuses by looking at what unfolds in Gnosticism. This Gnosticism is known in the most diverse ways. Externally, of course, very little is known about it, but even from the external documents one can already gain an impression of the infinite depth of this Gnosis. We shall speak of it only insofar as it is important for our consideration of humanity.

[ 16 ] Above all, we can say this: the Gnostics had a sense of what has just been stated—that one must seek the causes of what occurred in the external world of that time in worlds infinitely far in the past. And this awareness has been passed on to others, and we can still see it shining through, if we are willing, if we are not superficial, in what we might call the theology of Paul. But also in various other manifestations. Now, anyone who delves into the Gnosticism of that time today will encounter great difficulties in understanding it. Our souls are, after all, far too afflicted and also infected by what the materialistic development of the last few centuries has brought about within them. When one traces the development of the world back, one thinks too much of the Kant-Laplacean cosmic nebula, of something purely material. And even those who seek a more spiritual worldview—when they look back to the most ancient times—think of this cosmic nebula or something similar, and yet people today, even the most spiritual among them, feel quite at ease when, so to speak, the burden is lifted from them of having to find the spiritual even in the primeval ages of the cosmos’s development. These souls of the present feel quite relieved when, in their search for the origins of the world, they can say to themselves: This or that subtle, substantial form existed back then, and from it all that is spiritual developed alongside all that is physical. And so we sometimes find souls who feel quite comforted when they can place materialistic research at the beginning of the cosmos, when they can, so to speak, place the most abstract concepts of some gaseous formation at the beginning of our cosmos.

[ 17 ] This is why it is so difficult for people to put themselves in the mindset of Gnosticism. For Gnosticism truly places everything that does not in any way resemble the material world at the very starting point of its worldview. Perhaps even a mind deeply immersed in contemporary education will be unable to suppress a faint smile when, in the spirit of Gnosticism, it is expected to believe that the world in which it finds itself—a world it explains so beautifully through Darwinism—has absolutely nothing to do with what in reality constitutes the primordial foundations of our world. Today’s person, steeped in contemporary education, will truly not be able to refrain from a quiet smile when asked to believe that the primal foundations of the world lie with those beings of the world for whom concepts do not even reach in the first place, to whom nothing reaches from all that is expended today toward an understanding of the world: In the divine Primordial Father lies that which may be called the foundation of the world. And as it were emanating from him, at his side, is that to which the soul can bring itself, if, setting aside all materialistic mental images, it seeks only a little of its deepest self: silence, the infinite silence in which there is not yet time and space, but only stillness. The Gnostic looked up to the pair of the Primordial Father of the world and the silence that precedes space and time, and then he brought forth, as it were, from the union of the Primordial Father with silence, others—one might just as well call them worlds as beings. And from these, yet others, and yet others, and yet others, and so on through thirty stages. And only on the thirtieth level does that which lies before our present sense of reality stand, and which is so magnificently explained by Darwinism in accordance with this sense of reality. It stands only on the thirtieth stage—actually, on the thirty-first; for thirty such entities, which one might just as well call worlds as entities, precede this world. Aeon is the term usually adopted for these thirty entities or worlds preceding our world.

[ 18 ] One can only begin to form a mental image of what is meant by this world of eons if one clearly and unambiguously tells oneself: Not only what the senses perceive—what you call the world around you—belongs, so to speak, to the thirty-first world, but also what you, as a physical human being, bring forth through your thoughts as explanations of this world belongs to this thirty-first level. It is, after all, still easy to come to terms with a spiritual worldview when one says: Well, the outer world is indeed maya, but through our thinking we penetrate into the spiritual world—and when one then has the hope that this thinking can truly ascend into the spiritual worlds. But according to the Gnostics, this was not the case. This thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world, according to the Gnostics. So that initially not only the sensually perceiving but also the thinking human being was excluded from the thirty Aeons, which can be viewed step by step as ascending through spiritual development and which present themselves in ever greater and greater perfection. One really need only imagine the smile that a modern monist, at the height of his time, forces upon himself when one expects him to believe: Three worlds lie ahead in which something exists that is entirely different from what you yourself are capable of conceiving. — But that was the view of the Gnostics.

[ 19 ] And then they asked themselves: What is this world really like?

[ 20 ] Let us set aside for a moment what we ourselves have said about this world in the context of the early twentieth century. What I am about to say should not be presented to us as some kind of ideological construct that might convince us—in twentieth-century anthroposophy, Gnosis will of course have to be overcome—but let us try to put ourselves in the place of this Gnosis. The surrounding world, including what human beings can think about it, why is it separated from the thirty Aeons? “One must look there,” said the Gnostic to himself, “to the lowest, yet still purely spiritual Aeon. What is there? There is the divine Sophia, the divine Wisdom. Descending in a spiritual manner through the 29 levels, she looked up within the spiritual world toward the highest Aeon, toward this series of spiritual beings or worlds. But one day—a world-day—it became clear to her that she had to separate something from herself if she wished to gain a free view into the spiritual world of the Aeons. And she separated from herself that which existed within her as desire. And that which is no longer present within her, within this divine Sophia, within this divine wisdom, now wanders through the spatial world, permeating all becoming in the spatial world. It lives not only in sensory perception, it also lives in human thought, living there with a longing for the spiritual world, yet living as if cast out into human souls. As it were, as the other side, the image, but as the image of the divine Sophia cast out into the outer world, desire lives, cast into everything, permeating the far reaches: Achamod. If you look into your world without rising up into the spiritual worlds, you are looking into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because it is the world filled with desires, that is why what emerges as a view into the world of the Aeons cannot initially manifest itself within it.

[ 21 ] Long, long ago in the world of the Aeons, born of the pure spirituality of the Aeons, Gnosis conceived what it called the Son of the Father God, and also what it called the pure Holy Spirit. So that in them we have, as it were, a different generational line, a different line of development than the one that subsequently led to the divine Sophia. Just as in physical life the sexes separate in the current of procreation, so too, in the course of the Aeons, at a very high level of the spiritual world, another current separated itself: the current of the Son-Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, and of the Holy Spirit. So that in the world of the Aeons there flows, on the one hand, that which led to the divine Sophia, and on the other hand, that which led to the Son-Spirit and the Holy Spirit. As one ascends through the eons, one eventually encounters an eon from which, on the one hand, descends the sequence of eons that led to the divine Sophia, and on the other hand, the sequence of eons from which the Son of God and the Holy Spirit descend. Then we ascend to the Father God and the divine Silence.

[ 22 ] Because the human soul is cast into the material world with Achamod, the longing for the spiritual world lives within it in the sense of Gnosis; above all, the longing for the divine Sophia, for divine wisdom, lives within it—from which, however, it is separated by its being filled with Achamod. This feeling of separation from the divine world of the Aeons, this feeling of not being in the divine-spiritual, is perceived, according to the Gnostics’ view, as the material world. And descending from the divine-spiritual world, yet connected to Achamod, appears to Gnosticism what one might call, borrowing from the Greek language, the Architect of the World, the Demiurge. This Demiurge, this Architect of the World, is the actual creator and sustainer of that which is permeated by Achamod and the material. Interwoven into his world are the human souls. The human souls are interwoven with their longing, first of all, for the divine Sophia, and in the world of the Aeons, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit appear purely divine and spiritual, as if from afar, but only to those who—in the sense of Gnosis—rise above all that into which Achamod, the desire wandering through space, is incorporated.

[ 23 ] Why is there still longing in the souls that have been cast into the world of Achamod? Why, after being separated from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for that divine-spiritual world? Gnosticism also posed this question, and it said: Achamod has been cast out of divine wisdom, the divine Sophia; but before she became this entirely material world in which humanity now lives, a light from the Son of God shone upon her like a brief radiance, which vanished just as quickly. This is an important concept for the Gnostics: that Achamod, as it lives within human souls, was once beheld in the distant past as the light of God, which vanished just as quickly. But the memory lives on in the human soul, no matter how deeply entangled it may be in the material world. In the world of Achamod I live—such a soul might have said—in the material world. I am surrounded by a shell taken from this material world. But as I sink into myself, a memory revives within me. That which binds me to the material world yearns for the divine Sophia, for divine wisdom, because the being Achamod, which lives within me, was once illuminated by the Son of God who lives in the world of the Aeons. — Let us make clear to ourselves this state of a soul that was, so to speak, a disciple-soul of the Gnostics. Such souls existed; they are not a hypothetical construct, they lived. And discerning historians will discover through external documents that numerous such souls lived in the era of which we are just speaking.

[ 24 ] It is worth taking a moment to consider why there is so much opposition today to what I have just said. What would a reasonably intelligent person of today have to say about Gnosticism? We have, after all, had to hear that even Paul’s theology is perceived as rabbinical speculation, as something far too convoluted for the intelligent monist to engage with—the one who looks out upon the world so proudly and encompasses this world with the simple concept of evolution or the even simpler concept of energy, saying: Now we have finally become men, have gained the concepts that build us an energetic worldview, and look back on these children, these poor, dear children, who centuries ago built their Gnosticism out of childishness, built all manner of spirits, thirty eons: such is the “playful child’s soul” of humanity. The soul of today, now manly, has long since moved beyond such child’s play in the great monism of the present! Let us look upon these Gnostic, quite charming childish pranks with indulgence!

[ 25 ] That is simply the mood today, and this mood will not be easily swayed. One could, of course, say to it: A Gnostic who stood before you today with a soul born of Gnosis would also take the liberty of telling you his view, and he would speak something like this: I understand quite well that you have become so proud, so haughty with your ideas of development and energy; but that comes from the fact that your thought life has become quite coarse, simple, primitive, that you are content, from within your mists, with the most abstract of thoughts. You utter the words “evolution” and “energy” and believe you have grasped something. You are simply unable to look into that finer spiritual life which ascends to that which rises in thirty stages above what you possess.

[ 26 ] For us, however, my dear friends, the contrast I presented to you at the beginning of today’s reflection only becomes more stark. On the one hand, we see our own time with its very crude, primitive concepts, and on the other hand, we see this Gnosis. And we have just discussed how infinitely complex concepts this Gnosis employs—thirty eons—in order to find, in the course of its development, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find within the soul the longing for the divine Sophia, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit.

[ 27 ] Then let us ask ourselves: Indeed, did not what we have today—and with which we have made such magnificent progress in our concepts of evolution and energy—emerge from the intellectual depth that existed in the Greco-Roman world of that time? And do we not view this Gnosis, with its complicated concepts so unappealing to the present day, as something truly alien? Are these not colossal contradictions? Yes, they are. The contradiction that weighs heavily on our souls from this point becomes ever greater when we now reflect back on what we said about the clairvoyantly attuned soul: that it can place itself within the thought world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star of which we have spoken. And scattered throughout this deepening of Greek thought, we find that very deepening which Gnosticism represents. Yet when we view it in light of what anthroposophy is meant to offer us today—powerless, in fact, to understand what the star is supposed to signify, from which we are separated by three worlds—and when we ask the Gnostics: Did they understand what happened back then in the historical development of humanity? — then we, too, on the basis of anthroposophy, cannot accept the Gnostics’ answer, for it could never satisfy us; it could not shed any light on what reveals itself today to the clairvoyant soul.

[ 28 ] My intention today with this reflection was not to offer you an explanation for anything. The more you feel that what I have said is not an explanation, the more you feel that I have actually presented you with contradiction upon contradiction and merely shown you an occult experience related to the perception of the star, the better you have understood me today. I would like you to sense that something appeared in the world at the beginning of our era that was far, far beyond human understanding and yet was brought about by it. I would like you to sense that the epoch marking the starting point of our era is a great mystery. I would like you to have a sense that something is happening in human development which, in the Greco-Roman world, initially appears as a deepening of thought or as a discovery of thought, and that the very foundations of this lie deep within the mysterious. In hidden worlds, you may seek that which appears in the maya of the physical-sensory world as the deepening of Greco-Roman thought. And I did not wish to offer an idea or an explanation for what lies before us, but rather to pose a mystery through today’s discussions, which we intend to continue tomorrow evening.