The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] If we recall the thoughts from yesterday’s reflection, we can summarize them in the words that the age at the beginning of our calendar, drawing upon the treasure of its wisdom, made every possible effort to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, and that this wisdom encountered the greatest difficulties in this endeavor. We must linger a little longer on this phenomenon, for without a proper understanding of this necessary misunderstanding of what had occurred through the Mystery of Golgotha—without an understanding of this phenomenon—it would be impossible to properly illuminate a significant fact of the later centuries: the emergence of the Grail ideas, which we shall discuss briefly in our present context. Precisely when we look at the most significant, wisdom-filled current of the era from the beginning of our era, at the Gnostics, we can see, in the spirit of yesterday’s remarks, how profoundly penetrating, how magnificently ingenious their ideas were on the one hand, in order to place the Son of God within a vast worldview. But if we look only at what we have been able to discover so far about this Mystery of Golgotha from the spiritual chronicle of the ages, we must say: there is nothing to be gained from the concepts and ideas of the Gnostics. And we see this particularly clearly when we look at the various mental images the Gnostics formed regarding the appearance of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. There were those who, drawing on Gnosticism, likely said to themselves: Yes, this Christ-being is a being that transcends all earthly things and is rooted in the spiritual realms; such a being can only temporarily dwell in a body that is a human body, such as the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 2 ] These Gnostics, who spoke in this way, actually hit upon what we must emphasize again and again today: that it is true that, for three years, the Christ-Essence dwelt temporarily, for a time, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. However, these Gnostics could not come to terms with the way in which the Christ-essence lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. For, first of all, the mystery of the body of Jesus of Nazareth itself was not clear to them; they did not know that the I of Zarathustra dwelt in this body, that the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were such that, in their combination, they constituted a human substance that had never before been embodied in the flesh on Earth. These Gnostics failed to grasp the entire relationship of the Christ to the two Jesus boys. Therefore, what they themselves could say always seemed unsatisfactory to them, or at least what they could say about Christ’s temporary sojourn in the body of Jesus of Nazareth soon seemed unsatisfactory to their followers. The Gnostics also touched upon the manner of birth, this most powerful mystery of human development, in their own way. They well knew that what had made the appearance of Christ on earth necessary was connected with the passage through physical conception. But they were unable to fully reconcile the mother of Jesus of Nazareth with the birth of Christ-Jesus. And those—there were also such people—who attempted to do so were actually very little understood. There were also Gnostics who, because of the difficulties just described, denied the physical appearance of the Christ on earth altogether; they had a mental image of a physical body of the Christ on earth appearing only before and after the death on Golgotha, when only an illusory body—what we would call an astral body—had walked about on earth, appearing here and there. Because people found it difficult to conceive of how Christ could unite with a physical body, it was said that he had not united with such a body at all. It was said to be maya if people believed that he had walked about in a physical body. This, too, found no acceptance. One sees everywhere that the Gnostics strove with their concepts and ideas to grapple with the greatest historical problem of Earth’s development, but that in a certain respect their concepts and ideas were nevertheless insufficient; they proved, as it were, powerless in the face of what had happened.

[ 3 ] We will, of course, still have to discuss the way in which Paul attempted to deal with the problem. But it would be good first to clarify what the actual situation was, so that such a misunderstanding appears to us, so to speak, as a necessity. When we use the methods of spiritual research to ask ourselves a series of questions and then try to answer them, it becomes clear to us—one might say, in an abstract sense—what the situation actually was.

[ 4 ] One might ask, for example: If the age of Christ Jesus was so incapable of understanding his essence, would another age have been able to understand him? When one places oneself in the minds of people from various eras, one arrives, as a spiritual researcher, at a rather strange conclusion. One can first place oneself in the souls of the great teachers of ancient India, of Indian culture, which was the first of the post-Atlantean era. We stand there, as we have often emphasized, with the deepest admiration before the comprehensive and profound wisdom of the holy Indian rishis of old, wisdom permeated throughout with clairvoyant insights. We know that the secrets of the world, which were lost to later epochs for the sake of wisdom, were drawn into the souls of these great teachers of their era. And when one places oneself, as best one can with clairvoyant consciousness, within the soul of such a great teacher of ancient India, then one must say: If it had been possible for the Christ-being to have appeared on Earth at that time, say, in the midst of the holy Rishis, then the wisdom of these Rishis would have been fully capable of understanding the nature of the Christ. There would have been no difficulties; one would have known what it was all about. And because phenomena as significant as those just described cannot really be properly expressed in abstract terms, allow me, my dear friends, to offer an image.

[ 5 ] I would like to say: If the holy Rishis of ancient India had perceived the radiance of wisdom—the wisdom of the Logos pulsing through the world—in a human being, they would have offered their sacrificial incense to the Logos, the symbol of recognition of the Divine working its way into the human sphere. But this Christ-being could not find a body at that time. The bodies available at that time would not have been suitable for it. Thus, it could not—we will explain the reasons for this later—appear in the age when all the means for understanding would have been present.

[ 6 ] And if we go further and put ourselves in the place of the souls of the ancient Zarathustra culture, we can say: Although these souls of the Zarathustra culture were no longer equipped with those lofty means of ancient Indian culture; but they would have understood that the Sun Spirit had set out to live in a human body, and they would have been able to grasp the Sun Spirit-like nature of such a fact. If I were to speak figuratively again, I would have to say: The disciples of Zarathustra would have celebrated their Sun Spirit in the human being with shining gold, the symbol of wisdom.

[ 7 ] And if we go even further back to the Chaldean-Egyptian cultural period: Once again, the ability to understand Christ Jesus would have diminished. But it would not have been as limited as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, the Greco-Latin period, where not even Gnosticism was powerful enough to comprehend this phenomenon. People would have understood that a star had appeared from spiritual heights and had been born in a human being. They would thus have clearly grasped the divine-spiritual origin from extraterrestrial spheres. They would have offered myrrh as a sacrifice. And if we put ourselves in the minds of those who, in the Bible, come from the East as the three Magi and are the guardians of the treasures of wisdom originating from the three post-Atlantean cultural epochs, the Bible itself indicates to us that a certain understanding exists in the fact that these three Magi appear at least at the birth of the infant Jesus. One thing, however, will strike us—something that perhaps very few people think about today: that the Bible finds itself in a peculiar position precisely with regard to these three Magi. For does not the Bible itself tell us: These are three significant sages who already understood, at the very moment of birth, what was at stake? But one might ask: Where, then, do these three sages go later on? What actually becomes of their wisdom? Do we have anything that we can trace back to these three wise men from the East for an understanding of the appearance of Christ? This, as I said, is merely to be raised as a question. It is one of the numerous questions that must certainly be raised regarding the Bible and that will be more significant than all the pedantic biblical critiques of the nineteenth century.

[ 8 ] And as we now enter the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can say this about it: Now the body is present in which the Christ-being can incarnate. This body was not present in the first, second, or third post-Atlantean epochs. But now it is here. Yet people today lack the capacity to understand what is happening, to truly grasp and penetrate it. A peculiar phenomenon, isn’t it? For nothing else presents itself to our eyes but the fact that Christ appears on Earth in an age least suited to understanding him. And when we look at the following ages, and in particular consider the endeavors that arose in the subsequent centuries to understand the essence of Christ Jesus, we find an endless theological squabble. We finally find, in the Middle Ages, the sharp separation between knowledge and faith—that is, a complete renunciation of any knowledge of the essence of Christ Jesus whatsoever—not to mention the modern era, which has remained powerless in the face of this phenomenon right up to our own day. A strange phenomenon indeed! Christ is born into precisely the age least suited to understanding him. And if it were a matter of human development that Christ should have worked on earth through the understanding of human souls, then the state of this effect would truly, one must say, have been a sad one. Perhaps one might say it is a radical expression, but in order not to be misunderstood, I would nevertheless like to use this word: In fact, to anyone who views the theological-spiritual development linked to the appearance of the Christ from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it appears as though this theological development has set itself the task of contributing as much as possible to placing obstacle upon obstacle in the way of understanding the Christ-being. For this theological scholarship seems, in its course, to be moving further and further away from this understanding. That is a radical statement; but anyone who wishes to delve into the meaning of this radical statement will be able to grasp the deeper meaning of these words.

[ 9 ] Now, strictly speaking, unraveling the mystery contained therein is not at all easy, and I must confess to you that over the years I have tried a wide variety of approaches in spiritual research in order to get to the bottom of this mystery. It goes without saying that—due to lack of time—I cannot discuss all of these various approaches. But I would like to mention one of them today. It is the path that leads, around the beginning of our era, through a very remarkable phenomenon of spiritual life, namely the phenomenon of the lives of the Sibyls.

[ 10 ] These Sibyls are strange phenomena with a highly peculiar prophetic character. Scholarship cannot even determine the language from which the word “Sibyl” originates. If we first consider what is actually known about the Sibyls in considerable detail from external documents, we can say that right at the beginning of the Sibyls’ history we encounter a highly remarkable phenomenon. Thus, from about the eighth century onward and continuing thereafter, we encounter in Erythrae in Ionia the first Sibylline site, where, so to speak, the first Sibyls sent their manifold prophecies out into the world, prophecies which, even as they have been handed down to us, indicate that these utterances of the Sibyls spring from the mysterious depths of the human being and the life of the soul. As if from the chaotic depths of the soul’s life, these Sibyls bring forth all manner of things they have to say about the future of earthly development to this or that people; namely, first and foremost, the horrors they have to say, but at times also the good. Far removed from all that is called orderly thinking, as if emerging from the chaotic depths of the soul, what the Sibyls say pushes its way out of them in such a way that one hears in almost every Sibyl—if one examines them retrospectively with the tools of Spiritual Science—that she steps before humanity with a spiritualized fanaticism and seeks to impose upon people what she has to say. She does not wait until she is asked, as, for example, the Pythia of Greece did with her prophecies, but she steps forward, the people gather, and how forcefully imposing the Sibyl’s utterances sound regarding human beings, peoples, and cycles of the earth. That they appear in Ionia is a remarkable phenomenon, I said; for it is in Ionia that Greek philosophy also takes its beginning, that wisdom which, from Thales and Aristotle on into Roman times, springs so entirely from the ordered life of the human soul, from that which is opposed to chaos, which seeks out from the life of the soul all that can be attained in terms of clear, bright, luminous concepts. From Ionia it emanates, the philosophy of clarity, of light, one might say of the heavenly, which it then took up in Plato. And like its shadow, the Sibyls appear with their spiritual products, which emerge from the chaos of the soul, sometimes luminously foretelling things that then come to pass, sometimes also things that must be falsified by followers of Sibyllinism in order to speak of a fulfillment. And then we see further how, as the shadow of wisdom accompanies the fourth cultural epoch, this Sibylline tradition spreads across Greece and Italy. We are told of the most diverse kinds of Sibyls, and we see how the Sibylline tradition spreads all the way into Italy. Gradually it emerges into the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha appears. We then see how it gains influence over the Roman poets, how it even plays a role in Virgil’s poetry, and how life is sought to be shaped precisely by spiritual people by appealing to the sayings of the Sibyls.

[ 11 ] The extent to which people place value on what is contained in the Sibylline oracles can be seen in the so-called Sibylline Books, which are consulted for guidance. And there, too, we see in the outer world, with regard to the Sibylline oracles, a strangely chaotic mixture of the most profound and the utterly humbug. And then we see this Sibylline tradition itself encroaching upon Christianity. It still echoes to us from the song of Thomas of Celano:

Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeculum in favilla
teste David cum Sibylla!

[ 12 ] Day of wrath, O day that brings this age to an end, according to the testimony of David and the Sibyl!

[ 13 ] Thus, right up until the time of the development of Christianity, the Sibyl and her prophecies remained before the eyes of many spirits, particularly those concerning the destruction of the existing world order and the coming of a new one. Thus, it can be said that throughout many, many centuries—indeed, throughout the entire fourth post-Atlantean epoch—and with her rays, though now only faintly, extending into the fifth epoch, the Sibyl stands before us in the course of human development. Only those who, dominated by the rationalistic mental images of the present, do not wish to concern themselves with such matters can overlook the profound influence that the Sibylline tradition in particular has had on the world within which Christianity spread. What is told today as history is, as I have often stated, especially when it comes to matters of a spiritual nature, in many respects a fable convenue. Far more than is generally believed, the mental images of the broadest strata of the people were dominated, right up to the late centuries, by what emanated from the Sibyls. It is a remarkable, enigmatic phenomenon that emerges in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch: this world of the Sibyls.

[ 14 ] We must be interested in what is actually taking place in the souls of these Sibyls. We must, in turn, bring such things to light through our spiritual research from what is today, so to speak, covered by a layer of materialistic spiritual culture—which, however, cannot be used as it is, but must be renewed with the means of spiritual research of our age. But it should be pointed out that the essence of Sibyllinism was not so forgotten in relatively recent times as it is today. And we do, I would say, have a significant document that points us to traditions regarding the significance of Sibyllinism. Perhaps we do not always view this document in light of its significance, but it does exist and should give people pause for thought. It is present in Michelangelo’s great work, where, in the significant paintings of the Sistine Chapel, he depicts not only the development of the Earth and humanity, but also the prophets and the Sibyls. And we should, especially when we look at these images, not overlook the way Michelangelo depicts the Sibyls, particularly how he contrasts the Sibyls with the prophets. For, viewed quite impartially, this contrast reveals something of what we can in turn recognize through Spiritual Science regarding various mysteries of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, into which the Mystery of Golgotha falls.

[ 15 ] First, we see the depiction of the prophets—Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Jonah—which is truly admirable as a work of art. And included in this line of prophets, we see the Sibyls: the Persian, the Deiphian, the Erythraean, the Libyan, and the Cumaean Sibyl. When we look at the prophets, almost all of them possess, to a greater or lesser extent, something of the character that immediately strikes us in Jeremiah, but which appears particularly significant in Zechariah: deeply contemplative people, for the most part absorbed in books or other matters, calmly taking in, with a soul of steady composure, what they read or otherwise bring to themselves. What lives quietly in the soul also confronts us in the faces of these prophets. A small exception is made—though only seemingly so—by Daniel, who sits before a book resting on the back of a boy and holds something to write with in his hand, in order to transcribe what he reads into another book: a gentle transition from the contemplative absorption of the world’s mysteries to the act of writing them down, while the others remain in deep thought, their souls serene and calm, wholly devoted to the world’s mysteries. We can see in all of them—and this we must note—that they are immersed in the supernatural, that their souls rest in the spiritual, and that they seek to fathom the becoming of humanity from the spiritual. We see in them that their thoughts extend beyond what immediately surrounds them, beyond what is contained in human passions and fanaticism, and in the ecstasy that arises from fanaticism and human passion; that they extend not only beyond what the human being perceives, but also beyond what he experiences within himself, insofar as he is a human being on earth. That is the greatness of Michelangelo’s depiction of the Prophet.

[ 16 ] Let us now turn our attention to the depiction of the Sibyls. First, we see the Persian Sibyl near the prophet Jeremiah, forming a striking contrast to Jeremiah’s thoughtful demeanor. As if she wanted to impose upon humanity what she had just learned, she raises her hand; as if, following the pattern of poor orators, she wanted to prove what she had to say immediately and with all her might, and as if, driven by her fanatical passion, she could do nothing else but let flow into her gesturing hand that which she wishes to persuade all of humanity to accept! Then let us turn our gaze to the Erythraean Sibyl. There we sense how she is connected to what can come to humanity, so to speak, from the mysteries of the earthly elements. She has a lamp above her head; a naked boy lights the lamp with a torch. How can one express more clearly what one wishes to express: Here human passion ignites what it seeks to implant in humanity with all its might as prophecy, drawing from the unconscious soul forces. The prophets are devoted in their souls to the primal eternal in the spirit; the Sibyls are carried away by all that is earthly, insofar as the earthly reveals the spiritual-soul. The Delphic Sibyl shows us this most clearly when we see how even her hair is blown to one side by a breath of wind, how this wind blows right into her bluish veil, so that she owes to the element of air what she has to communicate. In this breath of wind that blows through the Sibyl’s hair and veil, we encounter what the earth sought to reveal at that time through the mouth of this Sibyl, persuasively compelling us. Then the Cumaean Sibyl: she speaks with her mouth half-open, as if lisping. She appears to us as if stammering forth a prophecy originating from the unconscious. The Libyan Sibyl, who hastily, as if turning back, seizes something in which she can read secrets—something like that! Everything in these Sibyls is, so to speak, surrendered to the immediate element of the earth.

[ 17 ] Much is entrusted to such documents at a time when—as was only natural for that era—it was far easier to express what one had to say through painting and art than in later times, when we must rely more on concepts and ideas.

[ 18 ] What, then, is the peculiar nature of these Sibyls? What are they, really? What do their prophecies mean? One must delve deeply, one might say, into the mysteries of human evolution if one wishes to fathom what is going on in the souls of these Sibyls.

[ 19 ] Let us ask ourselves once again: Why would the ancient Indian rishis, with their wisdom that is almost beyond our comprehension, have been able to understand Jesus Christ so easily? Well, it is a triviality, but it is nonetheless true: because they possessed precisely the necessary wisdom and concepts that the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch lacked. They had everything that, for example, the Gnostics and also the anti-Gnostics and the so-called Apostolic Fathers yearned for in vain. They had all of that; but how did they have it? Not as ideas they had worked out, not as something they had developed in their minds like Plato or Aristotle, but as intuitions, as inspirations, as something that stood before them with overwhelming force as concrete inspiration. Their astral bodies were seized by what flowed in from the universe, and from the effects of the cosmos on their astral bodies emerged the concepts that could then have conjured up before their souls the essence of Christ Jesus. One might say it was given to humanity; people did not work it out for themselves; it came as if spurting forth from the depths of the astral body. And with a wondrous clarity it spurted forth from the astral bodies of the holy Rishis and their disciples, and, in essence, from the entire ancient Indian culture belonging to the first post-Atlantean cultural period. And this had become increasingly diminished, yet it was still present in the second and third post-Atlantean cultural periods and persisted as a remnant well into the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period. But how? As what kind of remnant?

[ 20 ] If we were to examine what conditions were like during the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, we would find that at least those people who had risen to the heights of their time—and in those days, a much higher percentage of the population was educated than today—had an understanding of the connections of the extraterrestrial, of what was symbolized in the starry sky. They could read the mysteries of the world’s existence in the movements of the stars. The third post-Atlantean epoch would certainly, had the Christ Jesus appeared on Earth, have recognized from the writing of the stars what his significance was. But that was, after all, the inevitable fate that we have often emphasized in principle with regard to human development: that the gift of connecting with the mysteries of the world through living images receded more and more in the human astral body. These images became increasingly chaotic. What entered the human soul in this way became less and less authoritative—not that it was not authoritative at all, I say, but only less and less so—for the fathomation of the actual mysteries of the world.

[ 21 ] And so it came to pass that two distinct things emerged. On the one hand, the conceptual world—let us say, that of Plato and Aristotle—the world of ideas, one might say, the most thoroughly sifted-through spiritual world, the spiritual world that retains the least of the spirit within itself, which is grasped and fathomed directly from the “I” itself, no longer coming from the astral body. For this is the characteristic feature of Greek philosophy: that in it, for the first time, the spirit manifested itself out of the ‘I,’ as it can manifest itself out of the ‘I’ in concepts that are entirely transparent but nevertheless far removed from actual spiritual life. Except that the Greek philosopher, unlike the modern philosopher, still felt in this regard that thoughts originated from the spiritual world, whereas the modern philosopher has necessarily become a doubter, a skeptic, because he no longer feels the living connection between his thoughts and the mysteries of the world. In modern times, the ability to say has diminished: What I think, the world spirit thinks within me. One must, as I have attempted to describe in *The Threshold of the Spiritual World*, arrive at this through a little meditation, gaining confidence in thinking—that confidence in the formation of concepts and ideas which was naively given to the Greek philosopher because he was permitted to regard his thoughts as the thoughts of the world spirit itself. It was, as it were, the outermost skin of the World Spirit that approached humanity in Greek philosophy, but it was still a skin permeated by the living life of the World Spirit; one could feel that. The second thing that remained from ancient times was atavistic, a legacy. And it remained, so to speak, in the clearest way in the prophecies of the Sibyls, who, out of the chaos of their world, brought back to life, as it were, the forces of the human soul that had worked harmoniously through the second and third post-Atlantean epochs and which now brought up in a chaotic manner the shivers of the spiritual world.

[ 22 ] Let us consider a hypothesis that might be permissible in our context—a hypothesis that could be phrased as follows: What would have happened if neither Christ nor the Greek philosophers had come? Well, then humanity would simply have had to continue with what it had inherited, with what had already reached the stage of Sibyllinism in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Imagine this developing straight on in the West without the Christ impulse, without philosophy, and without the science based upon it, and you have before your mental image the spiritual chaos of the West—that which might have become reality without Christ and without philosophy, that which would have had to arise from what took place in the souls of the Sibyls. But forces continue to work. And when one examines, through the means of Spiritual Science, precisely this elemental force with which the spiritual powers living, so to speak, in the immediate vicinity of the Earth express themselves in wind, water, and fire—and when one examines how these would have taken root in the human soul, when one specifically examines the force with which the spirits of wind, fire, water, and earth spirits had taken possession of human souls, then one gets a mental image of how, although harmony and order have given way to the old way of perceiving the world that existed in the first, second, and third post-Atlantean periods, the forces would still have remained in the human souls. Human souls would no longer have had the ability to truly establish a connection within their souls with the great phenomena of the universe, but they would have been able to do so with the wind spirits, fire spirits, and so on—namely, with all the spectres and demons that would have shown themselves to be detached from the great cosmic connections. Humanity would have fallen entirely under the power of the elemental spirits, and their teachers would have become Sibyl-like teachers, and the power would have been so strong that it would have remained to this day and until the end of the world. And when we ask ourselves: Why did this not come to pass? Who caused this power, which lives vividly in the Sibyls, to gradually weaken? We must answer: Christ, who flowed into the Earth’s aura through the Mystery of Golgotha and who, from within human souls, destroyed the Sibylline power, took away the Sibylline power.

[ 23 ] And so, standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, one observes the curious fact that human beings, with all their wisdom, do not understand much of the Christ impulse; concepts and ideas prove to be quite powerless. But with regard to the Christ impulse, what matters initially is not that it enters the world as a doctrine; what matters is its factual character, that which has flowed forth as an immediate impulse from the Mystery of Golgotha. And one must not seek this solely in what people teach, nor in what people understand, but in what happens—what happens for the human soul. And one of these deeds—the struggle of the Christ who has flowed into the Earth’s aura against the Sibylline tradition—is the deed I wished to present to you through today’s meditation.

[ 24 ] Thus, the Christ did indeed have a judicial office to fulfill. Those who interpreted this materialistically—believing that the Christ would return soon after his resurrection—had misunderstood. Human concepts of that time were simply not sufficient to comprehend these things. But within the chaotic ideas of a near-term return that soon emerged, there lived the truth that the Christ had appeared on a ground outwardly prepared by Paul, as we shall see tomorrow, but above all had appeared in the realm that lies beyond the sensory world, where the struggle between the Christ and the Sibyls takes place—a spiritual struggle. We must lift the veil that shows us the spread of Christianity on the physical plane. Behind the physical plane, we must look to that spiritual battle where that which would otherwise have grown to ever greater and greater strength precisely because of its chaotic character is driven out of the souls. And anyone who fails to realize that through this metaphysical act an infinite service to humanity has been rendered by Christ misunderstands this single act.

[ 25 ] But who has been able to contribute at least something, indeed much, to our understanding of this event? Those who were gifted with a certain inspiration or revelation from the spiritual world, those who wrote the Gospels, and Paul. From other perspectives, we will also have to appreciate the role of the evangelists and Paul. But we will now be able to consider how Paul stands, as it were, in the midst of a world in which something is taking place even without his word, without what he was able to contribute to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha with his powerful, fiery words. But one does have—let me say this at the end of today’s lecture—precisely when one considers this phenomenon, which has now been characterized as the struggle of Christ against the Sibyls, a feeling toward Paul that I would like to summarize in the following words: With Paul, everything appears as if there were much more between his words than what one reads at first glance, as if the power that passed from the Damascus vision to him were expressing itself through him, and as if through him a tone were penetrating into humanity that is opposed to the prophetic tone of the Sibyls; as if in him there were a continuation of something of the tone of the ancient prophets, whom Michelangelo so beautifully depicted in his figures. The Sibyls, I said, possessed something that emanated from the elemental forces of the earth, something that could not have been within them had not the elemental spirits of the earth spoken to them. In Paul there is something similar, something which, strangely enough but quite exoterically, has already been noted by external science, but which truly, one might say, brings one before a world of wonder when viewed from the perspective of Spiritual Science.

[ 26 ] Paul, too, drew in a certain sense from the elemental forces of the earth, but from a unique aspect of those forces. And of course one can understand Paul quite well from a theological-rationalistic-abstract perspective if one does not take into account what I am about to say, which cannot be explained by external science; one can interpret him quite well if one seeks to understand Paul solely from the standpoint of ordinary rationality. But if one wishes to grasp what lived spiritually within Paul, in and between his words; if one wishes to understand why one feels through his words something akin to the prophecies of the Sibyls, yet in his case arising from a positive element of Earth’s evolution—then the phenomenon that answers the question comes into view: How far does Paul’s world extend? How is Paul’s world limited? And the curious thing is that the answer we receive is: Paul became great in the very world that extends only as far as the olive-growing region. I am saying something strange, I know; but we shall see that this strangeness dissolves in a certain way when we consider the figure of Paul a little more closely tomorrow. The Earth is also full of mysteries geographically. And a region of the earth where the olive tree thrives is different from one where the oak or ash thrives. And as a physical being in physical embodiment, the human being stands in relationship with the elemental spirits. Things murmur, rustle, surge, and weave differently in the world of the olive tree than in the world of the oak, ash, or yew. And if one wishes to understand the connection between the earthly being and the human being, then it is not unnecessary to draw attention to such peculiar phenomena as the fact that Paul’s word reaches only as far on earth as the olive tree extends. Paul’s world is the world of the olive tree.