The Rudolf Steiner Archive

33. The Bible and Wisdom I

[ 1 ] In his “Addresses to the German Nation,” the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte once made a significant remark about the interaction between two social classes. He spoke of those who should be the teachers and leaders with regard to the small and great mysteries of existence, and of those who are the listeners or believers. It would be the greatest injustice if the class of leaders spoke a language that the listeners did not understand, if a gulf were to open up between them. Fichte believed that the Romance-speaking peoples were heading toward a time when this gulf would widen ever more. He attributed to the German people, in particular, the ability to foster a living understanding between leaders and listeners.

[ 2 ] Whether this applies to the Romans and the Germanic peoples need not be discussed further here. It is a disaster for a people when those who are, or are supposed to be, leaders speak a different language and hold different views. Today, there is one area where such a divide exists: the realm of religious life. I will speak about the foundation of this religious divide: the Bible.

[ 3 ] Questions that concern all people are: Where do humans come from? What is the meaning and purpose of life? What is its essential core, and what is its form? Countless people seek the answers to such questions in the Bible; but what really matters—a living sense of and attitude toward the Bible—is lacking. There is a gulf between the theologians who study the Bible and the believers, and when someone says, “We want this gulf to close”—for the time being, that is merely a wish. There are enough reasons, even without delving into mysticism and the occult, to believe that the gulf is growing wider and wider. A time is coming when teachers and believers will no longer understand one another. People usually do not realize just how wide this gulf is. Teachers of the past who explored the Bible took refuge in the highest truths. There was a sense that what the Bible contains is something ineffably lofty—that one is wise at the beginning when one understands something, and becomes wiser as one understands more and more. Through this wise exploration of the Bible, teachers were formed—and such teachers did exist. Those who listened, who listened intently, had the feeling that wisdom was to be found there. This is not to say that there are no such men today.

[ 4 ] Let’s look back 150 years: At that time, there was still some trace of that feeling toward the Bible—a feeling of sacred awe, a sense that such a text should be treated quite differently. Goethe was familiar with this as well. Today, all of this seems difficult to understand. We must realize that the spirit of materialism has little impact when it appears as theoretical materialism. We see this in Haeckel’s views. These are not the worst. The worst is the one that leads people to understand things in material terms, to see only what is tangible, and to overlook the deeper meaning behind it.

[ 5 ] We want to address two topics: biblical criticism and inspiration.

[ 6 ] If you mention inspiration to a materialist, he will laugh at you. Yet it is the movement we now call theosophy that reawakens the dulled sense of the concept of inspiration. Inspiration—that is, revelation from a higher world—would occupy a different position in relation to what is written in the Bible than it does in relation to any other book. Those who wrote it were conduits, channels through which what came from the higher world flowed. Admittedly, this is a crude way of expressing the concept of inspiration. The latter is completely misunderstood, even in theology. Believers who perceive it in material terms suffer the greatest harm.

[ 7 ] We want to focus now only on what some Bible scholars say. Both older and more recent scholars point out that certain details contradict us, proving that Moses could not have written the books in question, that certain passages must have been written centuries after Moses, and that these passages therefore cannot be his. I’d like to mention one example that tends to baffle people the most. It is the two different accounts of the creation of humankind. First, it says: God created him male and female (Gen. 1:27). To be clear: It does not say “male and female.” Then it says that God first created the man and, from his rib, the woman (Genesis 1:21–22). What is the basis for this? This is particularly telling. It has been said that surely one and the same person cannot provide two different accounts; therefore, they must have been combined.

[ 8 ] Thus, the Bible was scrutinized for contradictions. Furthermore, certain differences in style and expression were found; therefore, it was concluded once again that these were different sources and that some compiler had combined the two.

[ 9 ] Let us consider the six- or seven-day creation. It depicts, in lofty terms, the coming into being of the world from its very beginning until the day God rested. It is a cosmic work that, through vivid concepts and intense imagery, points out to us that we are dealing with an ancient, inspired text. The creation of Adam, his encounter with the animals, Eve’s fall, and the serpent as a symbol of sin (Genesis 3) led some to assume that the six- or seven-day creation account originated from a different source. Overly critical Bible scholars identified two distinct traditions: the Elohist and the Yahwist; others found further inconsistencies, until what is now known as the “Rainbow Bible” finally came to light.

[ 10 ] Thus, the Bible is fragmented. Now you might think that what I am saying amounts to biblical criticism. That is by no means the case. I only know that few fields have been the subject of as much diligence, insight, and intellect as the fragmentation of the Bible. The original fervor, the devotion to this book as inspiration from another world, has suffered as a result. Now we must shine a light into this rift in order to bring the two sides back together. What matters is the meaning behind it all. I would like to use an example to illustrate theosophy’s position on this question. I will use a simple experience—one I had myself—to explain. I worked for many years in Weimar at the Goethe Archive. Among Goethe’s notes, which he had organized in the 1880s, there was a handwritten text by someone else, the content of which he believed to be his own thoughts. However, he could not recall how he had come across this essay. When I arrived in Weimar in 1889, there were doubts as to whether the essay was actually by Goethe. It was a scholarly question. I was able to prove that Goethe had a man named Tobler at his side at the time, of whom Goethe said he had an excellent memory. With that, I considered the question resolved; Goethe expressed those thoughts, which Tobler wrote down, and Goethe is thus the author. This refers to the passage you’ll find in the latest volume of Goethe’s works: “We are nature” and so on, up to the concluding sentence, “Love is the crown.” Then a famous Goethe scholar—I won’t mention his name, though we owe him a great deal of gratitude—set out to prove that the ink for these words had not flowed from Goethe’s pen onto the paper. It is not an entirely apt comparison, but the situation is similar in biblical scholarship. People strive to prove when the content originated historically, factually, and in a sensory sense, because thinking has a materialistic tendency. The sense for the spirit has been lost.

[ 11 ] Now something else must be added. Once again, I can best illustrate this with an example. Take geometry—that very ordinary school geometry. You can understand it on its own terms. You don’t need to know how it came about. What does a schoolboy know about Euclid? Why should we care who first wrote it down? What matters is exploring it. If a scholarly institution specializing in all languages, which knows nothing at all about geometry, approaches Euclid, that does not mean he has been explored. This can sometimes lead to something monstrous. No matter how famous a philologist may be, he will not understand Vedanta philosophy simply because he is a philologist. If you know geometry, you know Euclid.

[ 12 ] A crucial question, then, is this: Is it even possible to study the Bible? One must first understand the worlds of which the Bible speaks; only then is one a qualified scholar. Is there a way to approach the great mysteries of existence? This is the path pursued by the theosophical worldview. Just as there are ways to understand geometry, so too are there ways and means to penetrate the spiritual world. A number of people are already following these paths; they seek wisdom about the higher worlds. The result is that with every step one takes, the ancient religious texts appear before them in ever-changing forms. What does it matter from which sources, if we have the truth?

[ 13 ] You know that, according to theosophical views, this world—which we can see and touch—is considered to be just one world. This world would be different for us if we had different senses. Fichte once used the following example: Imagine you were the only sighted person among the blind, walking among people who can only feel their way around. You would be regarded as a fantasist if you were to attribute the quality of color to things. No one has the right to say that anything does not exist. Human perception depends on one’s senses and on how many of them one possesses.

[ 14 ] Through the principle of initiation, an inner meaning is revealed to the human being, and with it, the next world—the imaginative or astral world, so called because it operates through images—opens up to him. This consciousness of images can be accessed. Whoever applies the method described will enter it. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—magical about it. The imaginative world appears as a surging sea of light and color. These are not merely spots, but clearly defined forms, glowing from within and bright. Thus you rise into that world from which you originated.

[ 15 ] If you continue to develop these faculties, you will enter the world of inspiration. The Pythagorean school called this world the “harmony of the spheres.” This is not a metaphor; it is a reality. It is not a sensory sound. Goethe and others point to this harmony of the spheres. Christianity calls it the realm of heaven or the Kingdom of Heaven. Goethe has his Faust say: “The sun resounds in the old way,” and so on. This is not a poetic image. He knew how to capture its essential character with these words. In the second part, [Goethe] says: “It resounds to spiritual ears,” and so on, meaning the same thing.

[ 16 ] So this is the world of inspiration, and beyond it lies the world of intuition. There, one experiences the “thing-in-itself,” as our great philosopher Kant called it. There, love is something much higher; there, one merges with things.

[ 17 ] Anyone who opens themselves to the meaning of the concept of inspiration knows what it signifies. In this way, a person can journey through the world on their life’s path. Human development begins with the materialistic stage, through the physical eyes and the physical mind. This was preceded by their astral development. Just as ice relates to water—water in another form—so your body is to the soul; before it took on this form, it was merely soul. You lived in a world that is perceptible only through the imaginative senses. If you examine the world solely with your external senses, you can describe what Haeckel describes. It is all true, but only to the extent that ice remains merely ice.

[ 18 ] Go even further back, and you will find that this human-spiritual aspect had not yet condensed into the physical. The line does not end with imaginative insight. The soul has lived much earlier and embarks on a path of development that opens up the human soul. Imagine this path of development as one in which the soul lived separately on its own, because the physical world was not yet ready to offer it a suitable body. The world was a kind of current in which the human being floated while swimming.

[ 19 ] What enabled human beings to undergo this transformation? A very specific organ—a kind of swim bladder—evolved into a lung. Those were the times when the body became capable of being a condensed soul. In the Bible, this is described as follows: “God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) There is a world even higher than that of inspiration. If we go even further, man was spirit. The body is condensed soul; the soul is condensed spirit.

[ 20 ] As soon as one moves from imagination to inspiration, male and female disappear. The Bible says: God created human beings male and female—undifferentiated. (Genesis 1:27) They were all that in their spiritual bodies. Even without referring to the Bible, we can affirm this. Anyone who approaches the Bible with an open mind today will understand this literally.

[ 21 ] There are four different positions regarding the Bible:

1. The naive person accepts it as it is presented to him.
2. The enlightened person regards it as a childish popular fantasy. These are the freethinkers. Some among them, however—and one of their most prominent representatives, Bruno Wille—have arrived at a symbolic interpretation.
3. Those who have transcended mere intelligence find a mystical-symbolic meaning in the Bible.
4. Theosophists adopt a literal interpretation.

[ 22 ] Then comes the time when a person says to himself, “Now you’re beginning to understand a few things.” One comes to assume that wherever one cannot keep up, it is simply because one does not yet understand it. The Bible is thus grasped in a way that bridges the gap, and those who provide the means to do so are inspired men. Those who first grasped this did so under the influence of inspiration. We are moving toward a new understanding of the Bible and a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible.