The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Kernel of Wisdom in Religions

Article in the “Frankfurter Nachrichten” dated January 21, 1906

[ 1 ] “The Core of Wisdom in the Religions” was the topic of the third Theosophical lecture, which Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin delivered on Friday in the Gutenberg Hall.

[ 2 ] All religions share certain similarities; they all have fundamental principles in common. Only the Theosophical movement, which is so widely misunderstood, was called upon to shed new light on these mysterious matters; for one of its main tasks is to explore the wisdom teachings of the religions of all peoples.

[ 3 ] What is religion? The word means “connection”; through religion, the human soul is connected to the divine; it is the bridge between the soul and its spiritual-divine origin. All religions have come into being and have evolved; they were different in the past than they are today. Modern scientific research is convinced that a continent once existed between Europe and Africa, and between Africa and America—which we call “Atlantis” after the ancients—inhabited by people different from us today. They did not possess the mental faculties we have, but they possessed others that we lack, which resemble the abilities our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; rather, the external world appeared to them in images—symbolic, as it were—just as it does to us in dreams. In this way, they also sensed their divine origin, for they felt at one with all life—with that of plants and animals.

[ 4 ] This view held by the Atlanteans is characteristic of the very beginnings of all religions. The soul’s communion with all of nature—this sense of oneness with the forces of nature experienced through a higher spiritual vision—gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit,” which reveals itself in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, emerging from the soul’s dreamlike state and symbolic perception, intellectual life as we understand it today began to develop. People dispersed to various lands and adapted to their climates and other conditions. What had previously been perceived as spirit now had to take on a different form; religion had to be proclaimed in new ways to correspond to these changed circumstances. The Atlanteans had developed their images from within the soul world; now the external world approached humanity, and it was different everywhere. Consequently, the bond between the soul and its divine origin also had to be forged in new forms. Hence the diversity of religions, but also their commonalities—the agreement regarding fundamental truths and the core of wisdom.

[ 5 ] Spiritual leaders and guides of humanity—the “Brotherhood of the Initiates”—have always existed, even among the Atlanteans; and it was they who, throughout all ages and among all peoples, proclaimed the core wisdom of the primordial religion and thereby preserved it. All the founders of religions—the authors of the Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Chaldean magi, the Babylonian priests, the Greek sages, Zarathustra, Confucius, indeed the German mystics, Paracelsus, Angelus Silesius, and Jakob Böhme—all of them, together with the greatest Initiate, Jesus Christ, were such guardians of humanity, such proclaimers of the core of religious wisdom. Redner explained what he meant by this “core of wisdom” using the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, which recurs in all religions in one form or another.