The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Plato and Christianity

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

[ 1 ] We have briefly touched upon the fundamental concepts of the Platonic worldview. I call them fundamental concepts because they are, in fact, the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism—namely, the Platonic concepts of the immortality of the soul and the concept of love. One of these concepts has been revealed to us through a study of the Platonic dialogue Phaedo, the other through a study of The Symposium. We have seen that these two ideas—which perhaps play the greatest leading role in all of humanity’s spiritual development—namely, the great goal of the immortality of the soul and the path of love—are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

[ 2 ] This is also the point where we will best understand the influence that Platonism exerted on Christianity—that is, how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not exactly be doing justice to the subject if, while considering the immortality of the soul and love, we did not at the same time draw attention to how these two fundamental concepts have reemerged in Christianity. I will skip over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable to us as we touch upon the kinship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a great deal about this. You will therefore forgive me if, in the process, I must address some somewhat more difficult questions.

[ 3 ] I believe that the views and connections that exist between Platonism and Christianity have, quite rightly, given rise to such a vast body of literature—a body of literature spanning centuries—because through the influence, through the unique way in which the Platonic spirit has taken root in the Western world through Christianity, one can see how the West has been influenced by Platonism. One can only understand it—and it is only possible to reveal the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity—by examining its mystical elements and delving into the core concepts of Christianity.

[ 4 ] From a liberal, theological perspective, it is still maintained that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented using a mystical method. And so we must be clear that we need to explore the very core concepts of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to discern where Platonism intersects with Christianity, and thereby understand what Plato represents as a kind of worldview in relation to Christianity. Only the theosophical-mystical approach has the capacity to truly grasp this core. No exoteric method is capable of grasping what had to emerge from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to come into being.

[ 5 ] However, to illustrate what happened, I would like to highlight the characteristic features as reflected in the consciousness of the founders—those who contributed to its development. I would like to show how it appeared to the souls of the first [Church Fathers and teachers]. The most important point, then, is that [Christianity] represents something fundamentally new in contrast to Platonism. This fundamentally new aspect is nothing other than the fact that Christianity is immediate, real life—life as it presents itself to the eyes and ears. If one does not grasp this central point, one cannot understand what distinguishes it from the ancient religions, as well as from the mysteries and Platonism.

[ 6 ] I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. Immediate life—that which the everyday person perceives directly—was what Platonism was meant to transcend; and on the other hand, it was about the soul rising to something higher, something that cannot be perceived by the senses, into the vision of eternity. Plato’s Phaedo seeks nothing other than the immortality of the soul. It does not seek to prove the immortality of the soul. It is not a matter of logical proofs. Its purpose is to elevate the lives of those gathered around Socrates and to immerse them in a new world. The soul is to be elevated by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity is to be something one acquires—something one acquires through initiation into the mysteries. Plato’s student says: The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it beholds the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. Through this, it becomes eternal. This is a process of development that we have undergone in Plato’s Phaedo, and also a process of development that we see in the Symposium. We see that it was Diotima who raised us to this higher vantage point.

[ 7 ] I have drawn attention to what Goethe said about his view regarding such discussions of eternity. He says: Once I have integrated myself into the spiritual course of the universe’s development, then I am entitled to have nature assign me a place. We are not all immortal in the same way. One must first earn this right. We must first develop this initial right.

[ 8 ] This is the fundamental element that runs through Plato’s Phaedo. There, Plato says [in essence]: You can see whatever you want, but if you perceive only what your eyes, ears, and external senses provide, then you cannot enter the spiritual realm. It is the supersensible that guarantees the eternity of the soul. — He could not prove the eternity of the soul. The students were to attain it; they were to become immortal. This is the fundamental principle of the Platonic method. — Logic can only connect perceptions that one already possesses.

[ 9 ] And now let us look at what was prevalent during the first centuries of Christianity. Sensory experience was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior—the one who brought to the world humanity’s right to eternity—was visibly present. Thus, it is the Savior perceived by the senses who is the focus here. — Here are a few passages that show that this is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

“We have seen his glory. — The one who has seen this bears witness to it, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is speaking the truth, so that you may believe.” [John 19:35]

[ 10 ] We did not proclaim the presence of Jesus Christ to you through clever reasoning, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. — I do not mean to suggest that this should be understood symbolically; I mean to say that it is to be understood literally, not symbolically. — What we have heard and touched, that is what we tell you, so that you may share in the message with us.

[ 11 ] What is essential is that Irenaeus assures us that one can verify this from people who themselves knew such individuals. Irenaeus himself knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the tangible truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This tangible truth—which pertained to what the eyes saw and the ears heard—lives on in the Church. This [truth] is present for all time. It is not merely the temporal truth that took place during the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

[ 12 ] The Lord’s Supper is not merely a symbol and must not be merely a symbol, if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Today Christ has appeared—Christmas. We must accept this as an eternal truth: that what happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is truly present.

[ 13 ] This mystical view prevailed during the first centuries, when Christianity was taking shape. Therefore, I would like to express my full agreement with [Möhler] and consider it the only correct view when he says: Viewed from one perspective, the Church is one in which Christ, actively working in a living way, lives, and whose personality is repeatedly and continuously carried forward. Not in the manner of a deceased person. He does so in a tangible way. Through baptism, he continually welcomes people into his community. The Savior was foretold. And for the apostles and the early Christian teachers, both the Word and sensory perception apply. They draw upon the Old Testament just as they do upon what is visibly evident.

[ 14 ] We must be clear that they see in this continuation an incomprehensible continuation. That which has once taken place must exist eternally. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be repeatedly underscored; they show us that even in Augustine’s time, appearances compelled him to this view, for he says: “I would not profess this if the sensibly perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so.” This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

[ 15 ] Two things are required: first, confirmation by eyewitnesses and earwitnesses, and second, the authority of the Church that truly endures. Without this endurance of the Church, even Paul would not have been willing to believe it. The Church must be the embodiment of the mystery; it must be a mystical community; it must add to the testimony of the apostles and their disciples. We must realize that these views became increasingly firmly established in the first centuries and that they also became firmly rooted in Augustine’s worldview.

[ 16 ] What I have just outlined as a fundamental characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that its content cannot be proven, but only attested; that human thought has nothing to do with this content; and that it can, at most, serve as a point of reference for understanding this content. We must bear this in mind. It is an essential aspect of Christianity that it is based on attestation.

[ 17 ] The mysteries, too, have nothing to do with logic; they, too, are based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a mystic had to personally undergo the necessary process. He had to participate in it personally and be initiated. He had to ascend to the heights of knowledge. He had to ascend personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation as well.

[ 18 ] In Christianity, something new has been added: substitution by a single historical figure. It was something that antiquity recognized as an exemplary form of commitment in a historical act through a single historical figure. Three elements had to converge—and this is the crucial factor that had to occur for Christianity to come into being. It had to be present:

— first, what existed in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
— second, the initiation process that anyone who wished to be initiated had to undergo;
— third, a transformation had to take place.

[ 19 ] Let us now examine this transformation more closely. We have already seen glimpses of this in Platonic mysticism. This [transformation] consists in the fact that we are dealing with—I suppose I can best say—the first materialization of the eternal essence, let us say, the materialization of God. And then again, we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly toward the divine. We are dealing—let us say—with the Divine, to clearly capture the concept at hand—with the eternal, divine essence; and on the other hand, with the Logos taking shape in matter, developing, and transforming in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philo of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

[ 20 ] First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can comprehend it, even though human individuality rests within it. According to [Philo], this spiritual entity is the Primordial Logos. It is an [archetype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Anyone who lives and acts in the world and perceives the world must—and this must be emphasized—on the one hand, consider the descending line that leads from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand, the one that ascends and leads from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can one understand why one is an individual. Only in this way can one understand why one is a being that appears as a duality. By becoming aware that one can hope to return to the spiritual primordial being, but also by becoming aware that this being constitutes the world order itself.

[ 21 ] Because the world itself is imbued with spirit, he realizes that he is dealing with a twofold Logos: a Logos that is unattainable, and a Logos that has been poured out—the Logos who became flesh, the Logos who became material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; however, it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[ 22 ] [Philo] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the Primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God, are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, and strives upward toward the Primordial Logos. This upward striving, in one form or another, is reflected in mysticism. We will see in Neoplatonic theosophy what forms mysticism can still take. Then we have the fundamental framework underlying all mysticism. That is the one element.

[ 23 ] The other element is the initiation process; and here I must take special care to express myself clearly, because—based on the experiences of others—they tend to describe the matter somewhat differently. Based on my own experiences, I am compelled to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I possibly can. We must understand what this was all about. I will be able to demonstrate this only with a few brief examples, let’s say, from the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

[ 24 ] We must be clear that as a person moves forward along this path, they are traveling a path that, in the truest sense of the word, leads back. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is what a person attains when they retrace their steps, when their consciousness has been illuminated. Ever deeper truths can dawn upon a person. And these are the initiations that a person encounters on their journey into their inner self. These initiations are the very same as the Principia of the world. They are the foundations and cornerstones of the world that come to fruition within the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world “Logos.” If a person can truly progress along the path of initiation toward the true principles of the world, then he will encounter within himself the very same thing he encounters outside as a principle. Thus, initiation was a genuine, real process—something a person actually undergoes. It is not of subjective human significance, but of objective divine significance. The path of knowledge is a path of return, a reuniting of the human being with the primordial source of existence. What he finds within himself is that with which he rests in the objective reality of the world; that is what leads the human being to deification, to becoming divine. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

[ 25 ] The second type is the one based on principles, on the Logos. This, too, is a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The understanding that it is a real process can only be attained through spiritual experience. Imagine the initiation process that every initiate had to undergo, intertwined with the process of the world’s creation. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every mystic had to undergo, imagine a unique historical process; imagine a single initiate, and conceive of him as the primordial initiate, as the representative initiate for all others—then you have the image of “Christ” as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos, conceived as a unique event—but in such a way that it is the actual incarnation of the divine Logos—this is the Christ-appearance.

There are, therefore, three distinct categories:
1. the ancient theory of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process, and
3. the fusion of these two elements with a historical

[ 26 ] a single, deliberate act. This is the view that Theosophy holds regarding the origins of Christianity, and it is one against which, from an esoteric standpoint, not the slightest objection can be raised, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of viewing the truth as much deeper.

[ 27 ] Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the early Christians. They asserted as a requirement that which had been presented to them as a process of development in the ancient schools and which then took place as a single act. And this made it necessary to make that act dependent on outward appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to elevate the lower aspects of the human being, to deify them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual human being, so that the individual human being strives upward and sanctifies himself. This was demanded as something that had already been accomplished.

[ 28 ] Thus, instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and this is where the principle of ecclesiastical authority had to take hold. For Plato, the concept of love stood at the center. He regarded it as a kind of daemon. It is that which leads human beings from the lower stages to the higher stages of knowledge, that which transforms a human being from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also that demonic force which, within each individual human being, brings about the process of development—the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love does not take effect, to that extent, as Plato says, the “recollection of ideas” cannot take place.

[ 29 ] What is achieved through this initiation process—which is described to us as a process of initiation into ideas—is an introduction to the divine, to the act of seeing. This can only be conveyed through love, which serves as a guide for every individual. “Platonic love” is something else entirely. It should not be confused with what “Christian love” is. What can be found in Christian writings cannot be equated with Platonic love. Just consider that this path existed in the ancient mystical teachings. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was a path for the individual. Now, in Christianity, we are dealing with a vicarious mystery—a historical event that took place once and for all. The point is that what formerly served as the idea of the world’s creation becomes, as it were, the map by which one travels the path. This entire world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, has been shifted out of the personal perspective; it has been removed from personal observation. It was that which was attested to by historical tradition or by ecclesiastical authority. But what underlies the ancient mystery—the eternal truth of the Incarnation of the Logos—that was what was raised above the human perspective. For the followers of Platonic philosophy, this was called the path of love. This love, this Eros, has taken on a different, a new form. It had now become a principle through which human beings could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: Knowledge was meant to lead one to where perceptions could be made; but this knowledge could not lead there, [because the Eternal—born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light—Brahma, so to speak—was inaccessible to knowledge. ] What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a perspective, something that led one to remain within the visible, within the historical. At the same time, a path was closed off—one that the ancient mystic had sought to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. Therefore, Christianity had to establish a different concept for the “path of love.” And that is “faith.” Faith is that [which no human knowledge can attain; it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be attested to by appearance. The Christian can believe, but cannot strive for the essence of the Infinite. This is what took place at the dawn of Christianity, because these conceptions were in fact transformed, because within each individual the mystical process of initiation was recast as a singular historical event. Even the element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. I would like to speak next time about the ways in which the Platonic mode of thought—and the mystery teachings in particular—still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity.

FAQ:

[ 30 ] Christ has been completely sidelined. Two things must be distinguished here: the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables point to a teacher of the Essene community. He spoke to the people in a way that was appropriate for them. Behind Jesus stands the true teacher, as with Krishna, Rama, and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the East has taught. But what Christianity has become is something else entirely. What the mystics demanded was something else: to believe in a one-time historical event.

[ 31 ] The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as that of the ancient mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is portrayed as a diabolical imitation of the divine word, so that it can be claimed that they actually teach something different.

[ 32 ] Philo further developed Platonic philosophy. Philo broke with the principle of strict separation from the outside world. The outward dissemination of the teaching through parables was cultivated. As a result, the esoteric core disappeared, and the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric aspects of Christianity.