The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. The Core of Wisdom in Religions

[ 1 ] When someone today reads a popular book—say, about astronomy—it is probably primarily to learn about the mysteries of the universe. They will likely find satisfaction in such a book when the information presented makes sense to their intellect, their intuition, and their emotions. They will likely also try, wherever it is possible to see for themselves how such truths and insights are arrived at—in popular lectures that include experiments, or at accessible observatories, laboratories, and so on—to delve as deeply as possible into the concepts being presented to them. In any case, however, one thing remains. The person reading such works must assume that there are other people who, through very specific research methods and very specialized scientific and technical training, have acquired the abilities described in our popular books.

[ 2 ] Anyone who reads Haeckel’s *Natural History of Creation* might say to themselves: Yes, this makes sense to my mind, my reason, and my intuition. — But they will also realize that a great deal—a very great deal—is required just to establish these facts. And they may then assume that there is a small group of people who are engaged in establishing such facts. In much the same way, a large part of humanity probably relates to other writings that seek to present facts from a different realm to people—namely, the so-called religious scriptures. Essentially, this attitude is no different from the one I have just described. Even when faced with religious texts, people first ask themselves: Does this speak convincingly to my sensibilities, my feelings, and my reason? — Here, too, they assume—or at least always assumed in times past—and there are still numerous religious creeds today in which the same is true —that just as with external, sensory facts—which we learn, for example, from Haeckel’s *Natural History of Creation* or from popular accounts of astronomy—there is also, for these religious truths, a small circle of people who know the methods and possess the key to ascertaining these facts. Thus, when it came to religious texts, people also assumed that there are individuals who are capable not only of reading these truths but also of verifying them; that there are individuals who possess the key to them and know the methods by which one can be directly convinced of their truth. In short, just as with any other account of facts, the religious scriptures must be regarded as stemming from knowledge and direct experience.

[ 3 ] When it comes to writings that deal with sensory facts, people assume that there are individuals who verify these facts using telescopes, microscopes, and biological and other methods of investigation. With regard to the accounts contained in religious texts, we must also assume that there are people who know the methods for gaining access, through experience, to the realm addressed in those religious writings. Just as the “Natural History of Creation” deals with the realm of sensory facts in a concrete manner, and popular lectures deal with the realm and facts of astronomy, so too do religious texts deal with the realm of the supersensible, the invisible, and the spiritual. And if we, as non-self-explorers, are to place the same trust and faith in the religious scriptures, we must likewise assume that there are individual persons, individual personalities in the world, who have made it their special task to gather experiences in the world of the supersensible, the invisible—in the world of that which underlies the sensory world as spiritual causes. Human beings cannot adopt any other attitude toward the account of a natural creation story than toward the account of a supernatural creation story. It is not people’s attitudes toward these matters that differ; what differs are merely the realms of which the respective scriptures speak. This means that there must be those with knowledge who can verify the facts communicated in the religious scriptures. Admittedly, to a certain extent, this awareness has been lost with regard to religious texts, especially in our time. And just as it would make little sense if one could not assume that researchers stand behind popular scientific accounts, so too, fundamentally speaking, it would make little sense if we could not assume that researchers stand behind the statements in religious texts. To renew and revive the awareness today that research also exists in the supersensible realm—that is the task of theosophy or spiritual science. Spiritual research seeks nothing other than to reawaken, in the widest possible circles, the awareness that it is just as I have now described.

[ 4 ] In German, the word “theosophy” is often translated to mean that theosophy is a form of knowledge or wisdom about God. This is not an accurate translation; at the very least, it does not convey what theosophy actually aims to achieve. Knowledge of God is something that initially seems to the theosophist like a vague intuition—something that represents the ultimate goal of all knowledge. And just as we have not yet brought all means and capacities of knowledge to consciousness, so too we cannot say that we can have a comprehensive or definitive understanding of the divine source of the world today.

[ 5 ] Humanity will continue to evolve and progress, including in its cognitive abilities. Even the most advanced among us today may not yet be able to conceive of the insights into the mysterious worlds of existence that humanity will eventually be able to attain along this path. We must make it absolutely clear to ourselves that educated Europeans have a completely different conception of the divine than, for example, the so-called “savages” of Africa or the barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire from the north at the beginning of the Middle Ages. We must assume that an ordinary educated person among us also has a different conception of the divine nature than Goethe did. Thus, we can also imagine that humanity will continue to advance further and further, and that in the future, human beings will develop faculties in comparison to which Goethe’s intuitive and imaginative powers will seem quite underdeveloped. We can have a sense of just how much more sublime and magnificent those people’s concept of God will be than our own. We can say that we live, move, and have our being in Him, but that our knowledge of Him can never be complete. Thus, Theosophy does not mean to claim that it is a knowledge of God. For Theosophy refers to the knowledge acquired by the deeper, innermost essence of the human being, in contrast to the ordinary, everyday knowledge acquired by the outer, sensory, transitory nature of the human being.

[ 6 ] Let’s be clear about this: We see colors and light all around us; we hear sounds, smell odors, taste flavors, touch objects, feel warmth and cold, and so on—all of this through our external sense organs. And we can imagine that for someone who has no ears, there is no world of sound around them, but a silent world; for someone who has no eyes, there is no luminous, no colorful world, but a dark one. All of this is merely a summary of what human beings can perceive with their senses. But the senses consist of material forces that will be returned to the earth. And what we perceive through them is also transitory. We have thus brought the transitory nature of human beings before our eyes. The physicist shows us that a time will come when the Earth will have disintegrated into countless atoms, when it will no longer exist. Then all the colors, lights, sounds, and forms of minerals, plants, and animals will no longer exist in their present form; indeed, the human form itself will no longer exist.

[ 7 ] We have thus characterized the scope of the transitory in human beings. What this transitory human being perceives is everyday science—the kind of science pursued by our official science. This is not meant to be a criticism of this official science. However, this entire field of science is nothing other than an engagement with the things of transience. There is, however, another way to view the world, namely through those faculties within the human being that are themselves imperishable. The human being carries an imperishable core within itself. And this imperishable core, which we find within ourselves through self-observation and introspection, the human being will carry forth into a new existence in the times when the Earth will have disintegrated. Humanity will carry this imperishable core into other worlds, and what it has come to know, it will carry into another world as the fruit of this earthly life. What is thus recognized through the divine core of the being is the content of spiritual science. Theosophy is not a knowledge of other things, but a knowledge of a different kind—a knowledge of the other aspect of the human being. Theosophy, or spiritual science, therefore does not come from those who, using their ordinary intellect and ordinary senses, seek to rise to a contemplation of the spiritual from the physical, but from those who have awakened the dormant faculties within the human being and are thereby able to explore the supersensible and the imperishable. Ordinary science considers plants, animals, and humans according to their ordinary characteristics, as they present themselves to the senses. Spiritual research, too, considers only that which surrounds us in the world. But it observes them through different powers and abilities and thereby comes to know their eternal and imperishable qualities. This is theosophy. And those researchers who have awakened such abilities within themselves are the ones capable of verifying for themselves the supersensible facts communicated to us in religious teachings. Just as natural scientists in the laboratory and at the observatory use the power of the senses and instruments to determine what is then recorded in popular books, so too do researchers of the supersensible, through their own experience, verify what has been communicated in the religious texts of the various eras of humanity. In the same sense that we speak of scientific laboratories and astronomical observatories as centers of research, in the same sense we speak of spiritual centers of research. We call this spiritual research center—the exact term is not important—the Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom. Because all wisdom must ultimately be based on a common origin, on a common source, and because all those who are spiritually connected to these teachers are permeated and filled with that wisdom, all research likewise traces back to the spiritual source, to the Great Brotherhood of the most advanced sages, who have recognized through their own direct perception—by means of spiritual research—that which is proclaimed in those religious texts. Call what underlies all religion “the spiritual laboratory of humanity,” call it “the Great White Lodge”—it amounts to the same thing. We now know what is meant by this. Just as every popular book traces its origins to what has actually been researched somewhere, so too does each of the great religions trace its origins to what has been researched in a spiritual sense in this laboratory of the White Brotherhood of Humanity. And those who founded the religions were nothing other than great, outstanding individuals who received the instruction and guidance of that Brotherhood in this great spiritual laboratory, were initiated into the spiritual life that underlies all phenomena, and were sent out from there to the various peoples to speak to each people in its own language and manner. A unified foundation of knowledge, a primordial truth, is taught in that spiritual laboratory, and it is possible that those who ascend through inner development may come to recognize the methods of research for themselves and apply them just as Haeckel and other natural scientists apply the sensory methods, It is possible that they will find their way to the researchers of the spiritual laboratory and learn from which central source the great sages—who journeyed out to the south and west and brought the great messages to humanity—originated; it is possible that they will find their way to those from whom they can learn how all of this came about.

[ 8 ] The ancient religious teachers were sent forth from the same source as the great founders of religions who brought the first messages to ancient India—messages whose echoes so impressed European scholars when they encountered the wisdom inherent in ancient Brahmanism. This same source of wisdom sent forth the various Buddhas, who brought their messages to the individual followers of the Asian religions; it sent forth the Egyptian Hermes, who founded that marvelous religion of which someone once said to Solon: “What you know is like the knowledge of children compared to the wisdom of our initiates.” — From it emerged Pythagoras, the great teacher of the Greek people; from it also emerged the one who shines into the future, whose religious creed is becoming ever broader and more spiritual—Jesus himself. Here we have the connection as it presents itself spiritually, and we see how the various religions point back to the central sanctuary where the highest human wisdom is cultivated. Anyone who examines the various religions will be able to see for themselves that their very characteristics point to such a central sanctuary. The fact that similarities can be found in the various religious creeds has often been recognized even by our materialistic cultural researchers. Zoroastrianism, ancient Indian religion, Buddhism, and even the religion that flourished in ancient America—all contain elements in which there is a remarkable degree of agreement. However, it has been believed that this agreement stems from external causes. People have not delved deeply enough because they had, to some extent, lost the key to understanding it. But anyone who truly engages with what lies at the core of these religions as the essence of truth will be able to gain the conviction from the religious creeds themselves that these correspondences cannot stem from external factors, but rather that they arise from a common core of wisdom, and that they have been shaped differently only out of consideration for individual peoples and different eras.

[ 9 ] When we look toward Asia, we first encounter the remaining vestiges of an ancient religion—one that, strictly speaking, can no longer be regarded as a religion in the modern sense. We find this religion in the remarkable culture of the Chinese. I am not speaking of the religion of Confucius, nor of the one that spread as Buddhism in India and China, but rather I wish to speak of the remnants of the ancient Chinese religion, the Taoist religion. This is the religion that points people toward the Tao. Tao is translated as “the goal” or “the way.” But one cannot gain a clear understanding of the essence of this religion by simply relying on this translation. The Tao expresses—and has expressed for millennia to a large part of humanity—the highest ideal to which people could look up, the ideal they believed the world and all of humanity would one day attain: the highest that lies dormant within every human being and will one day blossom as a mature flower from the innermost core of human nature. The Tao signifies both a deep, hidden wellspring of the soul and a sublime future. The Tao is not only spoken of with reverent awe, but is also contemplated with such reverence by those who understand its true nature. The Taoist religion is based on the principle of development, and it teaches: What surrounds me today is a stage that will be transcended. I must be clear that this evolution in which I find myself has a goal, that I will evolve toward a sublime goal, and that a power lives within me that spurs me on to reach the great goal of Tao. If I feel this great power within me and sense that all beings are moving toward this goal together with me, then this power is for me the guiding force that blows toward me from the wind, resounds from the stone, shines toward me from the lightning, thunders from the thunder, and sends me its light from the sun. In plants, it manifests as the power of growth; in animals, as sensation and perception. It is the power that will bring forth form after form, time and again, toward that sublime goal—through which I know myself to be one with all of nature, which flows in and out of me with every breath, which is the symbol of the highest evolving spirit, which I perceive as life. I perceive this power as the Tao. — At first, this religion made no mention at all of a god in the afterlife; it spoke not of something outside the world, but of something through which one can find the strength to advance humanity.

[ 10 ] The Tao was truly felt in those days, when humankind was still connected to the divine source, especially among the people of Atlantis. These ancestors of ours did not yet possess such a highly developed mind or such intelligence as modern humanity does. Instead, they possessed a more dreamlike consciousness, an imaginative life that arose more instinctively, and a less analytical way of thinking. Imagine a dreamlike life, but heightened so that it is meaningful rather than chaotic, and picture a humanity from whose souls such images arise—images that herald the feelings within their own souls and reflect everything that exists externally around us. One must imagine the inner world of these primitive humans as quite different from our own today. Today, people strive to form thoughts and ideas about their environment as accurately as possible. Primitive humans, on the other hand, formed symbolic, allegorical conceptions that appeared to them as full of life. When you encounter a person today, you try, above all, to form an idea of whether they are a good or evil person, an intelligent or a foolish one, and you try to arrive at a concept that corresponds to the person’s outward appearance in as dry a manner as possible. This was never the case with the primitive human of Atlantis. An image arose within him, not an intellectual concept. If he encountered an evil person, an image arose within him that was dull and dark. Yet this perception did not become a concept. Nevertheless, he aligned himself and behaved in accordance with this image. When he had a bright, beautiful image before him, standing before his soul as if in a dream, he knew he could place his trust in such a being. And he felt fear toward an image when it arose within him in black, red, or brown colors. Truths did not yet appear to him as rational or intellectual concepts, but as inspiration. He felt as if the divinity at work in these images were within himself. He spoke of the divinity that announced itself in the rustling of the wind, in the murmur of the forest, and also in the images of his inner soul life, when it urged him to look upward toward a sublime future for humanity. And he called that the Tao.

[ 11 ] Modern man, who has succeeded this primordial humanity, has a different relationship to the spiritual powers. He has lost the power of direct perception—which, in a certain respect, is more dull and dim than our own—and has instead attained the stage of intellectual and rational conceptualization, which is higher in some respects but also lower in others. As a result, modern man stands higher than primitive man because he possesses a sharp, penetrating intellect; but he no longer feels the living connection with the divinely active Tao forces of the world. Consequently, he has, on the one hand, the world as it reveals itself in his soul, and on the other hand, his intellectual faculties. The Atlantean felt the images that lived within him. Modern man hears and sees the outer world. These two things—the outer and the inner—stand in opposition to one another, and he no longer feels a bond extending from one to the other. This is the great significance of human evolution. Ever since the landmasses rose again after the ocean floods had submerged the continents, ever since that time, humanity has longed to rediscover the bond between what it feels and perceives within and what presents itself to it outside in the sensory world. Hence, the word *religare*—religion—is justified. It means nothing other than to reconnect what was once united and is now separated—to reconnect the world and the self. The various forms of religious belief are nothing other than the means, the paths taught by the great sages, for rediscovering this connection. They are therefore designed in such diverse ways so that, in one form or another, they may be understood by people at every cultural level.

[ 12 ] The ancient Indian, who lived amid a lush, flourishing natural world that put him in a dreamlike state of mind and made it unnecessary for him to create external tools or develop an external culture, needed to experience what exists as religion in humanity in a different way than modern man does. When a person lives a peaceful life, different ideas arise in their soul than when they work with crude tools and must engage in technical activities. Thus, external nature varies across the different regions of the Earth, and the inner life of the soul in human beings varies just as much; and since the connection is to be sought through the various religions, it is only natural that the Masters had to determine the path to discovering this connection in different ways for other peoples and different times.

[ 13 ] The first way in which this connection has been established—how the ancient Tao of Atlantis was sought once again—is through the religion of ancient India, the land of the Ganges, which in ancient times received the teachings of holy rishis, great initiates, whose sublime teachings still resonate in the wondrous Vedic poetry and in the Vedanta philosophy of the ancient Brahmins, which reaches up to the highest levels of human understanding. In broad strokes, it was proclaimed to humanity there that there is such a thing as a unified foundation of the world that serves as the basis for everything. It was called Brahman, Parabrahman, Bhagavad, and by whatever other names there may be. And what we find in the Vedas—which are but an echo of the original ancient teachings—shows us how vast, mighty, and at the same time sublime were the concepts through which that subtle spirituality sought to ascend to the divine source of being. One could describe it this way: Once upon a time, the spiritual hosts gathered around the Primordial Being and asked it who it was, and it replied: “I would not be who I am if I could define myself through anything other than myself. When you define a thing, you seek a higher concept for it.” Individual animal beings—the lion, the eagle, the dog, the wolf, and so on—are defined by moving on to the higher concepts of the cat species, the dog species, the bird species, and so on. The individual winds are defined by moving on to the general concept of “wind.” Thus, every thing in the world has a name that indicates what stands above it. But I—so said the Brahman to the spiritual hosts—I have no name that stands above me. I am the I-Am.

[ 14 ] This is the primordial source from which humankind originated; this is the destination to which humankind is meant to return. Evolution also existed here in ancient India. Evolution was the magic word through which humankind sensed its destination. According to religious belief, there must have been something that led to the point where humanity stands today. There must once have been a longing that led down from the divine origin into this world, to the necessary transitional stage on which we stand today. Just as it was necessary and true that such a yearning and desire existed, leading into the world, so it is true that there must be a force that guides humanity back out again, so that it may return the fruits of this world to the divine source. This force is the overcoming of human desire through divine desires, the purification of human goals through the divine goal.

[ 15 ] Now, what was perceived as religion was something entirely different from what it had been in the ancient times we have been discussing. Now it was no longer the God who revealed Himself within; now it was the God who revealed Himself from without, for the inner self of human beings had been forced to create a gulf between itself and the outside world. Apparently, the word now takes the place of immediate life and of mere power, and indeed, “Veda” itself means nothing other than “word.” It is through this word that advanced, wise people proclaimed what is the source and goal of humanity, what underlies the entire world. In ancient times, people had a completely different conception of this word than we do today when we speak of the word.

[ 16 ] I would like to try to give you an idea of what people felt when they spoke of the Veda, the Logos, and later, the Word. Human beings give names to things. They say, “This is this, and that is that.” But when their mouths name these things, it is not arbitrary; rather, these are the very same names that the divine primordial soul of humanity once spoke forth from within itself, thereby creating the things. Human beings see things and then utter their names. But the Primordial Soul once spoke the names first, and things took shape according to the Word. Thus, in ancient times, there was a Primordial Soul that spoke the words of creation. The words became things, and the human soul subsequently discovered the words within the things that the deity had placed there. It reawakened the dormant words from within the things. This was humanity’s relationship to the deity, characterized by a religious sensibility—a sensibility toward the word—that truly lived in ancient India. For this reason, the word has come to be associated with the belief that there are people capable of looking more deeply into the nature and essence of the world, who can directly echo and proclaim in their speech what the deity once breathed forth from itself into the world. Such people were regarded as initiates. The ancient Indian spoke of his rishis not as ordinary human beings, but as those who had already attained the degree of immortality while still in the physical body and who do not live in the sensory world, but rather, in their souls, in the higher heavenly realm, where they commune with the gods and with the spiritual beings that underlie the world. By looking up in this way to people who had developed the Tao within themselves in this manner, people were aware that every human being would one day attain this level as well. And connected to this was the teaching of rebirth, of repeated return. It was not a product of his imagination, but spoke from his perception, when the Buddha addressed his followers and said: “I look back on one, two, three, four, ten, a hundred lives.” — And he spoke of these hundred lives just as a person speaks of a single life. In these many lives, he acquired everything that enabled him to speak not merely from the experience of the sensory world, but from the experience of the supersensory world, and to bring humanity the message of these supersensory worlds. This supersensory knowledge is a fundamental component of all religions.

[ 17 ] Let us once again put ourselves in the shoes of the peoples who sense the Tao. They do not merely seek to unite with the divine through religion; rather, they regard themselves as a garment, as a shell of the divine. That was their immediate awareness. There have been people who could not think this way, who were not as intelligent as we are, but who had a direct awareness that they themselves enclosed a divine core, just as a fruit encloses its seed. They saw and felt this core, and through it they looked back into the past and out into the future. Through this, they sensed within themselves the doctrine of reincarnation.

[ 18 ] This was the mindset that the immigrants who settled there encountered at that time. The ancient Indian teachers, who imparted the first Brahmanic culture to the Indians, still found a living belief in reincarnation at that time. That is why all religions that originated from this place include the doctrine of reincarnation. The Tao was perceived; it was perceived in its various manifestations within human activity. It is only natural that the human being of our era, having separated his soul life from the great external forces, could not survey the many lives, but saw only that he represented the limited aspect of this soul life. With each subsequent stage—which now extends northward, beginning with the ancient Persian religion—the awareness that the human soul is a shell surrounding the eternally reincarnating core gradually faded. Consciousness narrowed to the zenith between birth and death, and to the question of how, within the realm of birth and death, the “religare”—religion—must be sought. There, for the first time, the contrast of a duality rather than unity is truly felt.

[ 19 ] While the Taoist of the Atlantean era felt a living connection to the Primordial Source, and the Brahmanic person still sought to awaken Brahman—which is conceived as the same both outside and within the human being—the people of Persia were the first to perceive a certain duality. He perceived that which humanity had become as inner and outer, as the Primordial Source and the present human form. He looked up to the Primordial Source from which everything around him had emerged; he looked up to the Word from which plants, animals, and humans had emerged in their physical forms. But they also sensed something else: they sensed that something was at work within it that was not in accord with harmony—something that must once again become like the original Divine. They perceived the latter as a departure from the original Divine. The contrast presented itself to him: the duality of light and darkness, or masculine and feminine. They represent the primordial source and that which awaits the human soul in material densification. This is the second stage of human development.

[ 20 ] The third stage is revealed to us in the prehistoric and historical accounts of Egypt, which have been preserved for us in the “Book of the Dead.” There, humanity perceived a third element alongside the duality. It saw how a light—the sun—outshone the earth; saw how it penetrated the earth with its rays and awakened to life the seeds and beings slumbering within it; saw how the primordial ground must be fertilized. This trinity—the primordial ground, fertilization, and new life—is symbolized by Osiris, the sun, the god of light; by Isis, matter; and by Horus, the life that develops from it. These were the three Egyptian deities. The trinity thus appears here. And this trinity now becomes a fundamental core in all later religious creeds.

[ 21 ] The Godhead then appears to us as a Trinity in religious creeds, where it is named: Father, Word, and Holy Spirit—Isis, Osiris, Horus—Atma, Buddhi, Manas. We now find the Trinity everywhere in religions. And we have recognized the reason for this. It appears to us in images or words in Asia, among the priests of Egypt, but also in the Greco-Roman world, in Augustine, and then in the Middle Ages, where one finds, as if echoing, a corresponding primordial tone that emerged perfectly clearly in the past as the primordial source from which humanity arose. Humanity has developed into what it is today and now strives toward the future from the center of its own being. The ancient spiritual researchers perceived this as the trinity within the human being. When, in the future, we have matured toward greater perfection, then that force to which we owe our existence—and which today works within us as the hidden primal source of being—will have emerged in a formative way. This was perceived as the Divine, the ineffable aspect of the human being, which is equivalent to the first constituent element of the threefold world. And then what now lives within the human being—that which strives toward this Highest—was perceived as the Word active in the present, the Son who has arisen from the Father, who rests ineffably within him: From the Father has emerged the Son-human. Just as this Father-principle shapes the future, more perfect human being, so too has it created the evolving Son-human, the Buddhi, the second human constituent, which is not yet perfect but is the foundation upon which we strive toward perfection. This is the second essence. But this cosmic foundation has also been at work in the past. Just as the sensory human being was created in the past by the primordial foundation of the universe, so too does that which has already taken form and radiated from within him today have a source that likewise emerged from the primordial foundation in the past and is now fully developed. Let us look out into the universe as it reveals itself through colors, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations: it has welled forth from the ineffable Primordial Source. In this sense, we can call this Primordial Source—which manifests itself to us, the creatures—Spirit, even in the Christian sense. But the world is not yet fully created. The world is a seed, something that possesses a soul within itself, something that possesses within itself the impulse toward the future. That is the Son. Hence, this striving was called: the Word, the Veda, the Edda. The third is that which is within us today as a force, that which will become perceptible within us in the future: the Father-source of all being, lying deep within all our souls.

[ 22 ] To experience this vividly, to make it the essence of one’s entire inner imagination, means to experience the Trinity. “Persona” means mask or outward form, a veil. Therefore, religion reveals this core truth, which I have just elaborated, in three different masks, in three persons. God has three distinct Persons, which means He appears in three different masks: Spirit, Word, and Father. In doing so, we have simultaneously touched upon the religious creed that subsequently led to Christianity. If you truly understand this, you will also find this truth expressed in it. If you correctly understand the deepest Gospel—that of John—you will find in it the same awareness of the religare, of the connection with a higher consciousness that has appeared in human form: the doctrine of the Logos made flesh, the incarnate Deity, the present Deity itself, which lives in brotherhood with the other two forms of Deity—the Spirit, who comes from the past and acts in the present, and the Father, who creates into the future within the present worlds. Thus, the Son has proceeded from the Father, is at the same time united with the Spirit, and thus the Son is the great forerunner who will lead to the Father. This is what is also indicated by the words: “No one comes to the Father except through me,” through the divine essence of the present. It is further pointed out that he will send the Spirit again—the essential core of what is already in the world today. Just as truly as Christ said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” so it is equally true that he will return, and that all of Christianity has been a preparation for the new form. For the time being, the Spirit is here—knowledge and science—and for the time being, religions have been taught as they were taught in the past. The religious texts have been preserved for us, and theologians are now seeking to interpret them and teach according to them. This is the way in which theology now functions in place of wisdom. Theosophy means wisdom and truth; theology means the teaching of wisdom and truth. Just as theology arose from spiritual science, so must theology return to spiritual science.

[ 23 ] I have often drawn attention to what research used to be like, and how a turning point then occurred. Until then, in all places where scholarship took place, people relied on the books of the ancient sages—Plato, Aristotle, and so on. There were no researchers there, only interpreters. I am referring here to that remarkable era described by theology, which, however, could no longer be understood in later times, when people learned once again to read nature—the “book of nature.” Faith in the written word was almost absolute. If, for example, a natural scientist had claimed that nerves originate not from the heart but from the brain, the response was still: Aristotle says otherwise, and Aristotle is right—even though one might have observed the claimed phenomenon in the object itself. Even today, in the broadest circles, there is still no awareness that there is a key, that there are centers of research and research methods which establish the facts of the spiritual world just as observatories or laboratories establish the facts of the sensory world. For thirty years now, it has once again been proclaimed that there is such a thing as a spiritual center for humanity, and the Theosophists are saying nothing more incredible by this than when Haeckel says: “It is such and such.” — When Haeckel makes a claim, we assume that he has found evidence for it in his research. Likewise, we assume that what is stated in religious texts has been verified by the facts, and that there are individuals among us who can themselves trace things back to the sources. Theosophy, or spiritual science, draws attention to spiritual researchers and to the return to the central source; it speaks once again from experience about the things of the supersensible, just as those who originally created the religious texts spoke from inner experience. Just as natural science experienced a revival four hundred years ago, so too should Theosophy, or spiritual science, signify a revival of direct spiritual research today.

[ 24 ] This compels us to return to that core of truth which I attempted to outline in broad strokes, from the Tao to the appearance of the great Redeemer of humanity. What I wanted to achieve today is to provide an understanding of how spiritual science relates to the central point—the core of truth—of the various religions. Those who have not yet become acquainted with spiritual science may return to hear more. But perhaps some will also say that it is a form of “New Buddhism,” a new religion, something Eastern—something that brings something foreign into our world. That is not the case, however; that would not be in keeping with spiritual science. Only those who lack the will to listen to what spiritual science has to say speak in this way. The aim of spiritual science is to seek the core of truth in our outward religious creeds, to go back to the sources from which the books that exist today originated and were created. It is necessary to go back to the facts; then the books will be better understood, and new life will flow into humanity. Thus, Christianity is to be understood as a religion that is meant to prepare humanity for the future—as the religion of the Son, through which one finds the Father by the same paths. Making this religion understandable is, at the same time, one of the most important tasks of spiritual science. It therefore seeks the core of truth in all religions in order to find the core of truth in our own. We recognized that religion did not arise from childish notions, but from the highest wisdom, from spiritual research. We also learned, however, that one can stand at the pinnacle of science and still be a religious person. When this insight, this research, finds a response once more, then a living feeling will awaken for what one of the Theosophists, more than a hundred years ago, Goethe proclaimed to the world more than a hundred years ago as a kind of program—a beautiful and magnificent motto for humanity—with which we wish to conclude today, while acknowledging that there can be no true science, no deeper human observation, that portrays religious truths as childish; and that all religions contain, at their core, our highest goal:

Whoever possesses science and art,
Also possesses religion;
Whoever does not possess those two,
Let him have religion!