The Rudolf Steiner Archive

45. The Kernel of Wisdom in Religions

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! While there is no doubt that we come to know the essential nature of human beings by observing humanity in its historical development, it may also be said, on the other hand, that we in turn learn something essential about the human soul by observing the religious life of humanity within human history. And if a cultural endeavor known as spiritual science—or theosophy, as it is commonly called in our time—is to make observations about the soul of human life and about the various religions, this can only be done by taking into account the process of progress in religious life.

[ 2 ] In the context of the spiritual sciences, we speak of a core of wisdom within religions, while being fully aware that the religious element itself—that which can be called religion—must not be confused with the core of wisdom within religions. This is the focus of theosophy, which penetrates the spiritual world with the open eye of the seer.

[ 3 ] Religious life fosters the development of the soul, through which we are drawn toward the spiritual world—the fire of the soul, the soul’s sensitivity to the spiritual world. This is what we have in mind. And we also have in mind what takes place in the spiritual world and what it contains. Theosophy is therefore called upon to speak about the content of wisdom. We do not wish to speak about the content of the various religions, particularly because even within Theosophical circles, among those who speak of a certain unity in the religions, misunderstandings upon misunderstandings have arisen.

[ 4 ] It has become a catchphrase for many that all religions indiscriminately contain the same wisdom and truth. This overlooks the fact that humanity is in a state of constant development, and although human endeavor always contains a certain core of wisdom, one cannot speak in abstract terms of a unity in all religions, precisely because it, too, is in a state of constant development.

[ 5 ] To further explore this topic, let us begin with a statement by Goethe. Goethe, who knew how to grasp the essence of things so profoundly, was the one who spoke of how the single principle of action—which underlies, for example, the plant leaf—runs as a unified whole through the entire plant. If you trace the plant all the way up to the flower and the fruit, you will find that the leaves are formed everywhere as a unified plant organ. You will find this in all the various plant forms.

[ 6 ] Goethe did not, however, claim that it makes no difference whether one speaks of the green leaf or the flower's leaf. Step by step, like the rungs of a ladder, the plant develops, from leaf to leaf, until it reaches the height of the flower.

[ 7 ] In much the same way, one can speak of the unifying core of religions, which extends from the distant past to the present day through a process of development from what came before to what comes after—much like the progression in a plant from leaf to fruit. This is said by way of an introduction to the essence of our topic.

[ 8 ] If we wish to view development in a unified way, we must go back to a very distant past to find a starting point. Everywhere we see human beings as beings connected to what lies hidden beyond the sensory world. We can therefore never find the starting point if we take materialistic views as our basis. According to such views, we would have to begin with lower forms of existence. We will not discuss this external theory of evolution today. It is not the one that corresponds to the findings of spiritual science.

[ 9 ] Through its methods, spiritual science also reaches back into the distant past, but it perceives not only the material but also the spiritual and soul aspects. While the natural scientist draws conclusions from the imperfect ancestral forms of humankind, the spiritual scientist can recognize—we can only touch on this briefly today so as not to stray too far from our topic—that the further back we go in human evolution, the more we find that the human soul exhibits entirely different inner experiences. The distant ancestor of humankind stood, in spiritual and soul terms, much closer to that world toward which modern humankind seeks to ascend through spiritual and religious feelings.

[ 10 ] If we wish to gain clarity about this bond today, we must recognize that for the human being of ancient times—before he had clothed himself in a material body—it is true that he evolved as a spiritual-soul being from his spiritual-soul ancestors; that before he entered the physical world, he was in the spiritual-soul world, and that, in a time not so very distant, they were closer to the beings from whose bosom they had sprung than they are at present.

[ 11 ] The human soul—the soul of the ordinary person—is today dependent on a physical, sensory environment. When it seeks to perceive something, it does so through the intellect; it perceives only what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, and the hands can grasp. Human beings developed this external mode of perception only after evolving from other forms of knowledge, from another way of perceiving, from the dark clairvoyance of primitive man. I must say something here that may seem grotesque to those who have not yet delved deeply into theosophical teachings; but what will soon seem self-evident upon deeper study of them—as self-evident as the findings of natural science.

[ 12 ] We can go back to the region of our Earth where our ancestors lived—a region that science is now beginning to study—to the land that once existed between present-day Europe, Asia, and Africa on the one hand, and the American continents on the other, and from which the present-day Atlantic Ocean takes its name—the land of the Atlanteans, which the Greek philosopher Plato also describes. We find that our ancestors lived there in a way that left behind no remains of the kind that paleontology can study.

[ 13 ] Today, when a person reflects on the nature of their relationship to the outside world, we find that they live in two states of consciousness that are sharply distinct from one another. One fills their soul from the morning, when they wake up, until the evening, when they fall asleep; the other from then until the next morning. In the evening, the sensory impressions of the day gradually sink into the darkness of unconsciousness. In the morning, it is by no means the case that these are recreated anew, allowing one to once again make use of the sense organs and the intellect—which is bound to the brain—but rather the altered form in which they exist brings with it the unconsciousness of the night and the consciousness of the day.

[ 14 ] It was not like that with our Atlantic ancestors. It was quite different then. When a person fell asleep in the evening—I am, as I said, well aware that this must sound grotesque to materialistic thinking—the colorful, luminous tapestry of the sensory world did not transform into unconsciousness; rather, the person immersed themselves in a world of spiritual and soul-based perception, in which they had experiences. And just as people today speak of the sensory world of minerals, plants, animals, and the like in their surroundings, so did those Atlanteans speak of a spiritual world that they perceived at night. However, their daytime perception was also different from what it is today. When they awoke, everything was as if shrouded in fog; objects appeared with few sharp contours. Back then, daytime and nighttime consciousness were less distinct from one another. That is why the word “religion” could not have had the same meaning for our Atlantean ancestors as it does today: the connection of the human soul with the invisible world—for them, the spiritual world was perception. The soul knew from experience: There is a spiritual world; it knew: I sprang from this spiritual world and descended into physical embodiment. Religion was, in that context, an experience.

[ 15 ] Then came great upheavals—not only those that science calls the Ice Age and religion calls the Flood, although the truth about these events is much less accurately captured in the latter than in the former. The face of the Earth gradually changed. Europe, Asia, and Africa on one side, and America on the other, developed.

[ 16 ] Today we will focus only on the wave of emigration relevant to our topic—one that moved from west to east, gradually populating Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and giving rise to post-Atlantic cultures. Leading figures laid the foundation for the most valuable aspects of Atlantic culture, in a form quite different from what modern history teaches. Spiritual research shows us how the best elements were brought to the heart of Asia by great leaders, from which sprang the various colonies that form the basis of the various post-Atlantic cultures.

[ 17 ] The first major cultural influence spread to northern India. The best of the traditions stemming from those insights into the spiritual world—which were the experiences of the Atlanteans—were passed on to the post-Atlantean population in a way that suited the needs of each individual people. It was significant, highly evolved individuals who established the culture in India. We call these great founders the ancient Rishis, and we speak of these holy Indian Rishis with immense reverence.

[ 18 ] However, in order to form a picture of what they taught in times that predated all Indian literature, we must have an understanding of the spirit of that people. We are speaking of the ancient times of Indian culture. You may know that wonderful cultural works, full of the greatest wisdom and poetry, have been preserved in the Vedas. They are wonderfully beautiful, but they are only a faint echo of what the holy Rishis originally taught; for only spiritual science can teach that. We have an echo of this in the Vedas—beautiful enough, but it falls far short of what the first great post-Atlantean teachers of humanity taught. What, then, was the spiritual disposition of the Indian people, these post-Atlantean beings who had migrated to India?

[ 19 ] It was to India that those people were led who had most clearly preserved the memory of what could be experienced in the Atlantean era with a soul of a different nature—the memory that human beings had reached into the spiritual world and found their true home there. This idea was lost when human beings were cast out into the physical world. There they had acquired logical understanding, but they had had to give up their ancient clairvoyance. All that remained was the memory; with it in their souls, these people contemplated the surrounding physical world. Their fundamental attitude was therefore that they had had to leave their ancient clairvoyance behind. They gazed at the magnificent starry sky, at the sun, at the moon; the ancient Indian looked upon the mountains, the blue vault of heaven—all that constitutes the beauty of the physical world—and at first, none of it seemed to him to be a substitute for what the soul had once experienced in the spiritual realm. “The truth,” the old Indian told himself, “exists only in the spiritual world; here, in all the splendors of the sensory world, there is only Maya, only a veil woven over the spiritual world.”

[ 20 ] So it came naturally to him when the Rishis came and told him that if a person develops what exists within his soul as the potential for a spiritual eye or a spiritual ear, he can once again look into the spiritual world. This development—which is somewhat analogous to the appearance of light for someone born blind following an operation—this development of the spiritual organs was called yoga development. The holy Rishis referred to this. They were the comforters of ancient India. They brought solace regarding Maya and illusion.

[ 21 ] The first religious wisdom emerged in the post-Atlantean era. We must point out one thing in particular: these ancient holy Rishis said, “Even when you gaze upon the starry sky, the sun and moon, the mountains and forests, everything behind them is spiritual.” Spiritual foundations, spiritual beings lie behind them; only the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear can perceive them. — At death, the human being enters this spiritual world; but one day—as they already taught—something of what lies hidden behind all the sensible world that our eyes see will also appear within that very world, something that acts as the forces through which everything sensible on Earth can become visible. Beyond what we can describe, beyond the seven Rishis, there was yet another being; in ancient India, they called it Vishva Karman. The ancient Rishis pointed to it by saying: Look up at the sun, and you will see in the light streaming down, in the rays streaming down, the source of all growth on Earth. Just as it is with human beings—that what you see with your eyes is only their physical body, the expression of something invisible hidden within them—so, in the entire world, the physical is the expression of all that is superphysical. Along with the light of the sun, the spiritual also penetrates the earth. The outer physical garment is the sun of the spiritual, of Vishva Karman. A time will come—so they told their innermost disciples—when this central being of the sun will reveal itself in an entirely different form. —Such was what grew out of the Indian spiritual atmosphere.

[ 22 ] Let us now turn to the second period of post-Atlantean culture: ancient Persian culture. What is historically referred to as such is merely a later echo. Much earlier still, what could connect human beings to the spiritual world was already present there as well. This Persian people had needs quite different from those of the Indian people. The Indian people were contemplative, turning their gaze away from the sensory world; they had no interest in the achievements of the sensory world. But it was the mission of the Persian people to master these achievements. The first race to take an interest in the external world was the ancient Persian people, who lie at the foundation of historical civilization. Had Indian culture remained alone, we might have achieved marvelous accomplishments in ... [gap]; but everything that industry and commerce have gained for the benefit of humanity would not have come to us. This was the true mission of the Persians. It was they who first set their hands to the physical earth; the first traces of agriculture appeared.

[ 23 ] This people also needed a different kind of message. It received this message through that great individual whom we call Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We do not mean the figure that history designates—a figure applied, in its own way, to a series of similar, successive personalities and attributed relatively late to the historical Zoroaster. Even ... [gap] mentions this leader of Persian culture as early as 5,000 years before the Trojan War. But we must look even further back to find this second founder of post-Atlantean culture, who has had as great an impact on it as the Rishis did on the first. Only he had to speak in a completely different way. The Persian people had an inclination toward the physical world in their souls; therefore, they were also exposed to its temptations and inclined to regard the external, sensory realm as the only reality, failing to recognize that a spiritual realm lies beyond it.

[ 24 ] The ancient Persian people had retained only a few of the traditions that the Indian people possessed. Zoroaster, too, had to speak of the sun in a manner similar to that of the rishis, who spoke of the sun behind which lies Vishva Karman; but he had to do so in a much more vivid way. He said to them, in essence: In what appears to you as sunlight, there lives something that also lives within you as that which is most excellent—that which you sense in your soul as your own inner self. The sun is the garment of a being, a semblance of which exists in your own lives. — This inner essence of the physical was called the aura, and that which underlies the physical sun as its spirit he called the great aura, or Ahura Mazdao, from which the name Ormuzd arose—that is, the god who dwells in the sun and whose image lives in the human soul. Zoroaster pointed to him as the helper of humankind. When a person works the physical world, cultivates it, grows fruit on it, and obtains nourishment from it, Ormuzd is the helper. “He is your helper”—this is how Zarathustra characterized the great sun spirit for his followers; and the spirit that, so to speak, deceives people about the fact that there is a spiritual reality behind this material world—the spirit that incites people not to believe in it—he called the enemy of humanity: Ahriman, the adversary of the great sun aura.

[ 25 ] Thus he pointed out that the spiritual underlies all that is sensory. He pointed out that human beings are cast into this struggle between light and darkness; that human beings are called to be servants of the spirit of light by transforming the earth into an image of spiritual wisdom. He pointed to the physical world as something that not only concealed but also revealed the spiritual world. Zarathustra taught: But you must not seek the Spirit who is your helper only beyond the sensory world; he is contained within the entire sensory world, and when the time is ripe for him to reveal himself—to become manifest in a way that is comprehensible and vivid to human beings—then he will appear. That was his teaching, and he proclaimed it with wondrous words. What is often rendered as follows is merely a stammering attempt at it:

[ 26 ] I will speak; listen and heed me, you who, from far and near, yearn for this; I will speak, for it will one day be revealed. No longer shall the false teacher instill deception into the souls of men—the evil one who has professed false faith with his mouth. I will speak of that which is the highest in the world, as taught by Vishva Karman, the greatest of mankind. — And whoever refuses to hear my words will suffer greatly when, in the course of time, the spiritual is proclaimed on Earth.

[ 27 ] Next, we turn to the later post-Atlantean cultures and proceed to the third post-Atlantean culture—the Egyptian culture—during the period in which ancient Egyptian culture flourished. Today we can present only a very small glimpse of it in terms of its spiritual and soul content. For this culture, the following religious question arose: How does the individual soul that dwells within us—which has sprung from the spiritual and soulful homeland—relate to the spiritual that permeates the world?

[ 28 ] In ancient times, human beings still extended, at least in part, into the spiritual world; but now it is the case that human beings increasingly prefer to gain what external culture brings, and so we see in the third cultural epoch—the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian on the one hand and the Egyptian on the other—how a further conquest of the physical world took place. We see how human beings no longer looked up at the starry sky to say: ‘In this lies Maya, and behind the stars lies the truly spiritual, Brahman’—but now people closely observed the course of the stars, and a marvelous science arose. In the movement of the stars, in their constellations, human beings recognized an outward manifestation of the intentions of spiritual beings. Human beings developed an interest in the sensory world in order to experience the divine through it. Now the sensory world had become for him the physiognomic expression of the divine. Thus, through geometry, the earth was also conquered. From the spiritual heights, humanity penetrated ever deeper into the sensory world with its knowledge. As a result, it became increasingly estranged from the spiritual world. The consequence was that entirely different views had to emerge regarding humanity’s connection to the spiritual.

[ 29 ] The relationship between the human soul and the spiritual world is depicted in Egyptian religion in the Osiris myth. It tells how Osiris once ruled the world. However, he was too good for his reign on Earth to continue, so he was overpowered by his hostile brother Typhon and placed in a coffin. His wife Isis could no longer save him and instead raised his son Horus. Osiris ascended into the spiritual world. The legend thus relates: This divine figure once lived on Earth as a companion to humankind, but was then forced to withdraw into the spiritual world. This world was then given a kind of representative in the form of the child Horus. — The ancient Egyptians were told that when they passed through the gate of death, they would not only be united with Osiris, but their soul itself would become Osirian—itself an Osiris—interwoven with him. The human being becomes spiritualized, becomes Osirian in essence. When a person had to say to himself: “I belong, in my innermost being, to the spiritual world”—then they also had to say to themselves: “My connection to the spiritual world is veiled from me; but when this veil is removed, I will be reunited with the spiritual world; for when an attempt was made to place Osiris in a chest, he was carried away into the spiritual world.”

[ 30 ] The Egyptian held this belief: A divine, spiritual essence dwells within your soul; only by uniting with it can you truly exist after death. Only then will you yourself become Osiris. The being that will be united with you as Osiris cannot take form in this world, but it will one day take form and exist in the physical world.

[ 31 ] Thus, even in this third epoch, we see how the prophecy continues. What the Rishis hinted at to the Indians as Vishva Karman, and what Zarathustra hinted at to the Persians as Ahura Mazdao, the adherent of the Egyptian religion saw in Osiris and predicted that this being would one day appear.

[ 32 ] Let us now take a look at the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin or Greco-Roman one. Here, the conquest of the physical world goes even further. Humanity has progressed to the point where it is capable of forming a kind of union between what is experienced in the spirit and what becomes a reality in the outer physical world. We see this in art, which is something for humanity that is, in all parts of matter, simultaneously a reflection of the spiritual. In Greek art, we see the spiritual and the outer material united, as in a marriage. This is the foundation of the grandeur of the Greek temple. It is the direct imprint of what lived in the soul of the people of that time.

[ 33 ] We can understand this principle of Greek art by considering the difference between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. What is the difference? Standing alone somewhere, with the image of the god, not a soul in sight, and yet a complete, self-contained whole. This is how we find the Greek temple; this is what its architecture tells us, so that we say to ourselves: It is the house of the god who dwells within it, even when no people are there—no people are needed in this temple.

[ 34 ] With the Gothic church, it is quite different. This is not meant as a criticism; everything is in proper proportion to its purpose. With its pointed arches, the church is only complete in its entirety when the congregation of believers is inside. They are an integral part of it. Such a comparison can aptly symbolize how that union between the material and the spiritual was realized in Greek art.

[ 35 ] And when we look at the Roman world, we see how the process of learning to appreciate the value of the physical world finds expression in the individual personality. And we can go even further back, to the Greek polis, to see how the concept of citizenship arose—a concept that actually found its full expression only in the Roman world and that can only be clearly understood when we look back, by way of comparison, at what the ancient Indians felt. While for the ancient Indian, what existed in the physical world was regarded merely as a shadow of the real world—and reality was found only in union with Brahman, just as with the Egyptians in union with Osiris—the Roman sought to stand firmly in this physical world by identifying as a citizen.

[ 36 ] An ancient Indian could never have understood the concept of a deity dwelling in a physical body, for to him the physical world was but a shadow of the spiritual one. The human personality did not become fully comprehensible until the fourth epoch; therefore, the being foretold could only come into being at that time. It was none other than the Christ Presence, of whom the Rishis had spoken as the Vishva Karman, who at that time was comprehensible only in the spiritual world and who, in the epoch in which the physical world had been most fully conquered, was realized here as a human being among humans.

[ 37 ] This was prepared by clearly pointing out to people what constitutes the innermost nature of a human being, which brings such a being into being. Hence the words: “If you do not believe Moses and the prophets...” (John 5:46–47, Luke 16:31) And whoever understands John knows that in the “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14), the “ejeh asher ejeh” of Moses, nothing other than the Christ was to be proclaimed; it was not to be a reference to the God Yahweh, but to the foreknowledge of the Christ: You are to recognize a God who can be comprehended in the sensory world, who weaves and lives in everything around you—in lightning and thunder, in plants and minerals, in the entire world surrounding you—if you want to have something where you can understand how He lives and weaves, then you must listen to that peculiar sound where the soul speaks to itself: ‘I am’—then you must listen to your ‘I’—for that is also the best expression of the image of the Deity. —What lives within every human being also lives as the all-pervading God; this also appeared in the greatest human being who ever walked the earth, Christ. This divine being appeared in the fourth cultural epoch.

[ 38 ] Thus we see how the core of wisdom in religions weaves and strives forward, like the leaf becoming the petal that bears the fruit; thus we see that what the ancient Rishis taught grows ever more mature until it appears as fruit in the God-man who walks upon the earth; and we see the necessity of progress in this. We see how, in a certain sense, Christianity certainly contains the same essence as the other religions; how it contains the unifying element, yet also in a different form. Therefore, those who say that what matters is that the same doctrine be present in it as in the other religions are mistaken. As long as the content of the doctrine is what matters, one can say that. Where the spiritual worldview is proclaimed as a doctrine—as the ancient Rishis had to do, as Zarathustra and the leaders of the Egyptian Hermes religion, the leaders of the mysterious mysteries, did—we have the same thing that we also find in the commandments of Christ, indeed! But to recognize that what the other religions merely spoke of is Christ; to understand, to grasp a spiritual manifestation as a personality, to understand Christ—not merely the doctrine—that is what constitutes Christianity.

[ 39 ] While religions speak of the Logos as something that can be taught, Christianity must speak of the human Logos who has become the bearer of the religion. What could previously only be taught is now lived out. The very embodiment of this teaching constitutes the essence of Christianity. Thus, those religious leaders could say of themselves: “I am the goal and the way.” Those leaders—a Zarathustra, a Moses—could have said: “I am the way and the truth”—but only Christ could say: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)

[ 40 ] The core of wisdom found in the religions has borne fruit in Christianity and thus become a seed. Just as we have now sought the origin of Christianity in the religions, so let us speak tomorrow about the future of Christianity; for just as it contains the fruit of all other religions, so it is true that within it lies the seed for a great development—for although nearly two millennia have passed since the appearance of the personality of Christ on earth, we are still only at the beginning of Christianity.

[ 41 ] Thus we see how, in our age, humanity has gradually sought a connection with the divine-spiritual, and we look into what all peoples have perceived as the core of wisdom in their religions, recognizing why it is there that the power and strength lie which give humanity the hope of reaching its goal.

[ 42 ] Anyone who looks into the spiritual life of human beings in this way dares to add to the words of a great poet—Goethe’s beautiful words:

[ 43 ] Human soul, how you resemble water; human fate, how you resemble the wind;

[ 44 ] thus evoking the image of the soul’s life ebbing and flowing like a wave on the water, whipped by the wind.

[ 45 ] But the one who contemplates that power which is the life coursing through human beings adds: It is true that the wind whips the waves; but it is also true that the wind—the air—is permeated by light, and that the light-filled air contains the element that conjures all sprouting life forth from the earth. It is true that water, permeated by warmth, is driven upward and becomes a cloud, and then falls back down as rain.

[ 46 ] The human soul is like water: it comes from heaven and ascends to heaven—but it is also true that the blessing of prosperity arises from the fact that water, permeated by fire, has a blessing effect, and that likewise the human soul can be set ablaze by that fire of the “I,” which feels a kinship to the light that reigns through destiny and is comparable to the wisdom that sweeps through the world. Then the soul’s world is filled with a sense of divine wisdom. Thus, the soul is something that ebb and flows, yet is certain of its destiny and its inner strength, and thereby pours forth from itself this power—the strength of that which lives throughout the entire world—as its salvation and progress.