The Rudolf Steiner Archive

18. The Gospel of Matthew and Its Relationship to Egyptian and Modern Spiritual Life

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] Last time, I concluded with a reference to the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Today I would like to pick up on this remark—that the Gospel of Matthew begins by tracing the birth of Christ back through a forty-two-generation genealogy. In fact, this opening of the Gospel of Matthew shows us how the essence of Jesus Christ was understood by those from whom Matthew actually derived his view of this essence. The forty-two-generation lineage can only be understood if we come to realize that we are dealing with the Egyptian conception of the 42 judges of the dead, before whom must appear the one who wishes to ascend to divinity—that is, the one who wishes to become “Osiris.” This is also a factor in Essene teaching. [The Essenes] are familiar with this sequence, which must be traversed. According to the Essene view as well, every human being on the path to becoming divine is in the process of passing through these 42 stages. They symbolize the 42 points of passage. When he has reached the forty-third step, he is already in the higher spheres, where the process of becoming divine has already begun, or—to put it in Egyptian terms—where he “becomes Osiris.” The fact that there are further subdivisions there is of little concern to us for the time being.

[ 2 ] Above all, the point is that man now appears at a stage in which he is “Osiris, a divine being.” I have said that these are ideas that Matthew simply adopted. This is evident from the fact that Matthew speaks of 3 times 14 ancestors = 42 ancestors. However, since he ultimately lists only thirteen, one may assume that he is well aware that the number 42 plays a major role, but that he unconsciously omitted the final stage. We should therefore focus less on how the matter is expressed in detail.

[ 3 ] In Matthew, then, we encounter the view that human beings have 42 stages of ancestors along their path and that, once they have passed through [these stages], they enter into divinity. These stages, these predecessors, can be spread out over many lifetimes. But only the one who has passed through forty-two stages can enter the world as a “Buddha” or “Christ.” It is exactly the same. Buddha, too, had to pass through the same series of incarnations. In the case of Buddha, we also have 6 times 7 = 42 stages or incarnations. It is thus the case that we not only observe a profound similarity between Jesus and Buddha, but that we also find in the transcendent nature of Jesus the very same essence that is present in the nature of Buddha. We are dealing with a human being at a higher stage of development who has gone through all the stages that one goes through when one has survived life with all its trials and when one has oneself entered the stage where one can be a judge of the dead. He will return after having descended to judge the living and the dead; he will enter the realm of the judges of the dead—he, Jesus, who has passed through the forty-two-fold chain of the judges of the dead. It is just as it is written in the Buddhist legend, where the Buddha passed through forty-two stages. He then entered the stage where he himself became God; the human who has become God is now no longer bound to pass through the links by eternal necessity. He appears by divine decree. That is why we are told of Jesus and the Buddha that they were sent by divine decree and [...] by the will of the Father. The individual links in the chain of ancestors have gone before us according to a world order.

[ 4 ] Thus, in the case of the Essenes, we are dealing with a Christ; in the case of the Buddhists, with a Buddha—a being who, having undergone all the trials that must be endured, appears among humankind as a human being who has become a god. This tells us nothing other than the view held by the Egyptians and also by the Buddhists. We are therefore dealing here with a real Buddha and a real Christ.

[ 5 ] This can only be understood from this perspective. Otherwise, one will never understand how Matthew came to juxtapose the genealogical line and [the supernatural lineage] of Jesus. He says in chapter 1, verse 17: “There are fourteen generations from Abraham to David. From David to the Babylonian Exile, there are fourteen generations. From the Babylonian Captivity to Christ there are fourteen generations.” [Up to verse 17] you have presented the natural genealogy of Jesus, and immediately afterward you have recounted how Joseph was told by the angel that a supernatural birth lay at the root of it all and that Jesus was to be born of the Holy Spirit. This is, in a crude sense, a complete contradiction. However, it is a teaching that must be presented this way—a teaching we find everywhere where the aim is to hint at the reincarnation of a personality who has already advanced to the “Osiris stage.” Such a personality experiences a double birth.

[ 6 ] It is incredibly difficult to talk about this. For Theosophy and for a true Theosophist, this is incredibly fundamental. To those who have already delved somewhat deeper into the theosophical teachings, it seems understandable when it is said that one has reached the forty-second step. For others, however, this is completely incomprehensible. Perhaps I can make myself understood by suggesting a path that, in any case, almost every modern, thinking person will have to follow if they wish to move from the most modern views into Theosophy. This path sheds significant light on all these matters. We must indeed say that for the West—at least for our European education—there is no more obvious path to arrive at the things we find expressed here in such a difficult-to-understand manner than the one that emerges from the natural sciences. This is also the same path that leads to what underlies the source from which Matthew drew his inspiration. I am convinced that—more than any Western religion is capable of—this path will lead to the goal if the teachings of the natural sciences are to flow into theosophy.

[ 7 ] I would like to shed light, with just a few highlights, on the path that the natural sciences will take to arrive, through their own efforts, at the same point where theosophy stands when it draws upon ancient wisdom teachings. We must not view the development of spiritual life in the West with utter pessimism, even as we see how some people disregard religious creeds. This is because they have no idea of the esoteric content of these writings. Even as we see how amateurish the latest developments are.

[ 8 ] Just a year ago, a detailed discussion of Wrede’s—not August Wrede’s—“Messiah consciousness” was published. Before that, one could certainly have been pessimistic. But scholarship can no longer help but converge on the very destination to which Theosophy seeks to lead Western humanity. This is not all that difficult to say. But in order to fully grasp the idea, to let it penetrate one’s being completely, to understand its full significance—where it sheds light on the entire spiritual life, where it no longer lets us go once we have grasped it—[for this, it is necessary to have suffered under the concepts of natural science and to have carried them around with oneself as a believer; for this, anyone who approaches the natural sciences of our day with an open mind must undergo the transformation, the metamorphosis of that process, without becoming completely ensnared in this materialism.]

[ 9 ] Anyone who has stood up to materialism and—like Goethe—has known how to see with the eyes of the spirit, and anyone who is able to perceive and understand these mysteries in their full scope, will surely be unable to harbor pessimistic views, even when considering, in particular, the natural sciences of the last decade.

[ 10 ] Personally, I have had the best experiences with the natural sciences. In 1889, I wrote an essay in which I stated that, according to our scientific findings, the concepts of substance, matter, and force are not even scientifically clear when understood in that sober, spiritless sense of force and substance as found in Büchner and Strauß. Anyone who scientifically penetrates the facts of nature comes to the conclusion—as a direct experience—that natural science provides us with proof that there is no such thing as substance, but that everything we call substance is nothing other than another form of spirit. Substance is merely an apparent form of spirit that manifests itself in a certain way. The world is spirit. This must become our creed.

[ 11 ] Anyone who knows how to view natural science through the eyes of the spirit will come to this realization. At that time, I stated that what natural scientists have conceived of as matter does not exist, that matter is nothing other than the lowest manifestation, the lowest form of the spirit, and that natural science itself will come to this realization. Shortly thereafter, amid the vast and fragmented body of scientific literature, a natural scientist emerged with a paper in which he expressed exactly the same idea as I had—in almost the exact same words.

[ 12 ] Anyone who realizes that [natural] science can be only one factor in intellectual life—only a part of intellectual life—must be delighted when a chemist comes along and explains that what has been regarded as “matter” cannot be justified scientifically as long as matter is considered the foundation of natural science.

[ 13 ] Unfortunately, Ernst Haeckel was unable to bring himself to accept what has emerged from our natural sciences. There is no doubt that we are no longer dealing with the old theory of matter. However, [today] the chemist—and also the physicist—will say that he is dealing with energies, because he is concerned only with manifestations of force. The other, however, sees spirit in this. Natural science will follow its own path, ultimately rising to the realization that even what underlies a seemingly material process is nothing other than what underlies the Indian teachings of wisdom—that it is nothing other than what materializes the Logos. Pessimism no longer clings to us today.

[ 14 ] Natural science has bequeathed to us a great treasure, namely, the idea of evolution. Natural science has rediscovered this idea for itself in the field of biology. There, it has addressed a specific topic in the same way that theosophists of all ages have viewed spiritual beings. They have viewed living beings from the perspective of evolution. And what does this evolution consist of? You need only compare the views of an eighteenth-century naturalist with those of a nineteenth-century one. Linnaeus says that there are as many plant and animal species on Earth as were originally created through so many acts of creation. Nineteenth-century natural science caused the coexisting forms to arise one after another, in succession. What arose later emerged from what came before. In this way, natural science has dispelled the miracle from the world. In the past, there were only coexisting miracles. Theosophy has always taken [the standpoint of evolution]. It transformed all coexistence into a sequence. When a higher living being can be traced back to an earlier form of life, those who view it from a spiritual standpoint see stages of development.

[ 15 ] The person who has reached a higher level, who has attained a higher degree of perfection, has not done so through some genius that fell from the heavens. The “genius” of which those who do not know what it is speak most often is nothing other than the “miracle” applied to the natural sciences. Natural science has long since set aside this concept—which is still in use today, particularly among so-called aesthetes—and cast it into the dustbin of history. Theosophy has never regarded genius as a miracle, but rather as a higher stage of development [of the personality]. It has seen in it nothing other than a personality that has gone through exactly the same process as any other individual, except that it went through what another individual goes through during this period at an earlier stage of development. What is experience for me today, what is stored within me today, appears to me [later] as something self-evident, as the mature product—seemingly like a miracle. But it is nothing more than what I have acquired for myself. I had to practice for a long time before I mastered, let’s say, a manual skill that I then perform unconsciously. I also had to study for years to grasp mathematics. But once I have grasped the concept, it soon becomes second nature to me.

[ 16 ] That is theosophy. Apply this to the great whole of the world, to the great events of the world. What you have absorbed as experience appears as that which reappears on a higher level. In this way, we can explain the most diverse experiences of life and the natural sciences through spiritual insight and deep reflection, and make them fruitful for theosophy. By comparing two personalities, you will see that there is a spiritual explanation for a great many things and phenomena of ordinary life, and that, fundamentally, we are dealing with nothing other than attention and spiritual comprehension. In this way, you can discover the seeds of theosophy in scientific books.

[ 17 ] [Perhaps you might pick up a basic textbook on the natural sciences, such as Topinard’s Anthropology, which explains how individual organisms have evolved. It tells us how the lowest levels of organization first developed, and then moves on to animals, apes, and humans. Topinard reiterates what Ernst Haeckel wrote about these matters and notes that Haeckel omitted something in the process; he failed to “mention the twenty-third degree, in which Lamarck and Newton shine.” You can continue writing this Anthropology for the spirit; indeed, you can apply everything the naturalist undertakes to the spiritual realm. After all, there are countless levels in spiritual life. When one considers this, it becomes clear what is at stake.]

[ 18 ] Goethe and Schiller are the two figures I am referring to. They attended a gathering of natural scientists in Jena. Batsch had given a lecture, but Schiller and Goethe were not very satisfied with it. Essentially, Schiller and Goethe lacked the intellectual connection—the big picture. Schiller sensed this. And as he was leaving the gathering with Goethe, he said: “It is disheartening to have plants lined up one after another like this without seeing an overview of the whole. There must surely be something in common among all plants.” Goethe responded by speaking of the primordial plant, of which all others are merely specific forms. Then he said, “But one can make that clear in another way,” took his pencil, and sketched the primordial plant with a few strokes, remarking that it does not actually exist, but that one can recognize this primordial plant in every plant. “Yes,” Schiller replied, “but that is not an experience; it is an idea.” But one can only achieve this by going through all the plants and examining what they have in common. Then one arrives at the general idea. “If that is an idea,” Goethe replied, “then I see my ideas with my eyes.” Goethe did not, in fact, need to know all the plants. He only needed to see the essence in each individual plant. He saw the spirit, the true nature of the plant. Schiller is quite right from his point of view when he says that [this was] an idea. And Goethe is also right when he says that he sees this idea, that he takes in the whole thing at a glance. He stands on a higher level. That is also what Schiller acknowledged without envy. This can be gleaned from Schiller’s letters, where he described Goethe’s nature in magnificent terms. We can see from this that such a spirit also had to go through this process. You can study this throughout Goethe’s entire life. His whole outlook was such that he saw the spirit in nature. A seven-year-old boy does not normally do what Goethe did at that age. Goethe’s incarnation is a further, higher stage of development that Schiller still had to go through in Goethe’s lifetime. The seven-year-old Goethe took the stones from [his father’s] mineral collection and built himself an altar on the music stand; he took a small incense candle and used a magnifying glass to ignite it in the sunlight, because that was how he wanted to offer his worship.

[ 19 ] Why does Goethe see the idea of the primordial plant, but Schiller does not? Either we do not perceive the spiritual in the same way, or we must absolutely extend our view of nature to include the spiritual as well. Then we arrive at that spiritual development which is the essence of all ages.

[ 20 ] I need not tell those familiar with Theosophical literature that Theosophical authors would present miracles to us in exactly the same way as eighteenth-century natural science presented individual plants and animals and their genera as miracles. However, through the ability to evaluate the spiritual just as we evaluate the physical, the views of the advanced natural science of the nineteenth century have shifted toward the Theosophical standpoint. The point here is to be able to evaluate the spiritual in the same way as we evaluate the physical.

[ 21 ] There is no doubt that, with consistent thinking and when the natural sciences are supplemented by newer forces, a spiritual science will emerge from the natural sciences—just as has already happened in the field of chemistry. Anyone who thinks scientifically and has the inner courage to extend this scientific way of thinking to the spiritual world—and to observe it after awakening the spiritual sense organs—must be led from the natural sciences to theosophy and its perspectives.

[ 22 ] Let us now turn once more to Matthew’s views on the personality, the essence, of Jesus. We are dealing here with the view that regards Jesus as a personality who emerged after having undergone the greatest possible number of reincarnations. It is a personality that has reached the highest possible stage of development, one who is born into the world with all that other personalities are still on their way to achieving—already fully formed within them. That which others must still struggle to attain is already born within this personality. What manifests as the spiritual when the transition from the forty-second stage to the forty-third stage takes place is the attainment and the passing of the human into the divine. Just as the purely physical and the chemical have a higher nature and perspective within the organism, so too does the physical possess a higher nature and perspective at the stage of divinity. The physical body, the physical organization, is no longer what it was or what it is. It fades into the background in the face of the spiritual process. It is indeed the case that it possesses a metaphysical, transcendental past within itself. Just as it is born of the flesh, so too is it born out of the divine. We must be clear that a new, higher stage of development of materiality has been reached and that the material itself has become spiritualized to a higher level, so that we are not dealing with a birth from the physical realm, but rather with the reception of physical birth by higher divine powers. We are thus dealing with a direct emergence from primordial matter, which only becomes worldly at the very moment of birth. It is then that this primordial matter—which had not yet been embodied, which was still contained within the pure spiritual—first passes over into the material. Thus, at the forty-third degree, on the forty-third level, we are dealing with the emergence of primordial matter that has not yet entered into a connection with physical matter. This is what the ancient teaching describes. In Egyptian tradition, it is said of the birth of Horus that the eye of Osiris shone upon Isis, indicating that a purely spiritual birth takes place. In the birth of Horus, you have the birth of the god from matter that is still virgin.

[ 23 ] If we go back to Egyptian mythology, we find three great, eternal symbols representing what we call the Father, the Mother, and the Child. This juxtaposition of Osiris, Isis, and Horus is the original symbol. On the Christian cross, the child has remained. The material aspect on one side has become merely evil, while the father principle on the other side has become merely good. On Golgotha, we see this symbolized by the three crosses. On the left we have evil, on the right good, and in the middle the child. This symbol has been transformed; it has become something else.

[ 24 ] Now I come to a very important point. What strikes us here is the following: In the early Christian myth, we can still trace the origin of the Christian symbol back to the Egyptian symbol. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in all other contemporary literature—with the exception of the Gospels themselves—although this myth is discussed in a wide variety of ways, including by Jewish mystics, there is one thing we do not find, which we actually find only in Matthew and Luke, namely the Holy Spirit. This is something that is indeed absent. This is another point. This Holy Spirit is nothing other than Isis in transformed form. Consequently, the virgin birth—which is still conveyed in the Osiris myth—was replaced by actual, natural birth. God the Father, through his magical influence, brought about this virgin birth, so that this birth is mediated on the one hand by the Father, and on the other hand by the Holy Spirit, who is now the Father’s representative.

[ 25 ] We encounter this Holy Spirit in the early days of Christianity [...], when the Christian conception [of the virgin birth] emerged. We can therefore say that, because the Holy Spirit first appears in Christianity, we must see in this a division of the originally feminine principle of the world-symbol. We have a Spirit who gives the child its origin. [The origin from the divine tree arose within the Essene community, where people indeed held an ascetic viewpoint and viewed sexuality as inherently evil. There it was impossible to embrace the feminine in the same way as in ancient Egypt, as was the case with the Egyptians’ worship of Osiris; thus, the radiance of Osiris through Isis is transformed into the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit.] This is a means by which the ancient Egyptian teaching was transformed into the Christian one. We have thus been able to see that we are in fact dealing with the same worldview. The Christian worldview sees in the personality of Christ a deified human being in exactly the same way that the mystery cult has always viewed these [deified] human beings.

[ 26 ] What kinds of teachings might have underlain this entire way of looking at things? Anyone who is truly able to read the Gospels sees in them nothing other than—I would say—a more detailed account of the ritual intended to initiate the initiates into the mysteries. And if we consider what initiation is all about, if we wish to understand what such a mystic sought to achieve, what he was meant to achieve, why he—the initiate, the mystic—was placed on a cross, why he was put into a death-like state, then we must tell ourselves, we must remember, that it is a matter of awakening a higher life force, that it is a matter of bringing him back to life on the third day. And when we ask ourselves by what means the initiation was performed for the mystics, we must realize that the mystical view was clear on the fact that the individual human being must undergo the entire process of creation within his own body. This was depicted as a return to the Divine, as a continuous deification of the world.

[ 27 ] Matter is that into which the spirit pours itself in order to return to divinity by a detour through matter—to return, as a soul, to what it originally was as spirit. This is the path. The mystic must cause the matter within himself to wither away to such an extent that matter no longer reigns supreme within him. His soul must be reborn so that his material body, too, may ascend to a higher level. They must be spiritualized on higher levels. It was not a higher level of scientific education that was sought for the mystic, but rather the task for the mystic was to spiritualize matter, to advance matter to the next stage of development. Everything the mystic had to go through was aimed at [resurrection] with a spiritual body, with a reborn body.

[ 28 ] The initiate had to undergo this path of the soul’s [return] to the Deity. It was also made clear to him that what he was going through, he was not undergoing for himself, but as part of the great universe, which was undergoing a stage of development within him. We know that the entire process is described to us during the initiation in such a way that, when the sun awakens the mystic on the third day, thunder rolls, just as it did at the resurrection of Jesus. These events are recounted to us as integral parts of the mystical process.

[ 29 ] The mystic should be made to understand that his own process is grounded in the cosmic world process; that God, with the aid of the Creator’s Word, the Logos, has brought about the world process; that this God is himself; and that the world process is, in reality, carried out within the mystic; that the process which man must undergo is like the world process. The cosmic process is synonymous with the description of the path that the mystical individual must traverse. This was an important part—not only among the Egyptians—of what was demonstrated to the mystic and then became second nature.

[ 30 ] Take together what is communicated individually, but which we must hold together. Consider the entire parallelism between the Gospels and the Old Testament [and the Egyptian tradition]; then, if you follow this line of thought, you will indeed be able to see that the most devout confessors of Christianity in later centuries bore traces of the understanding that the human process is the great cosmological process of the world. In some passages of St. Augustine’s Confessions, you will find such traces and references. They may not be entirely clear, but he shows that in individual events such as the birth, Transfiguration, and Ascension of Christ, and so on, he sees nothing other than a repetition of the cosmic process. Thus, he says in one passage: “God also created the Christ of our earth. Our earth was desolate and empty. Ignorance weighed upon us. We left our darkness and turned to you. We were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord.” - He describes the Resurrection of Jesus Christ using the words of Genesis. Here, then, the awareness of what was present in the Mysteries themselves still existed. In the Mysteries, there was no distinction between the process the initiate had to undergo and the cosmic process. That is why every ritual was structured in the same way as the description of the creation of the world. If we could compare, within the Egyptian teachings, the description of the path of the Egyptian initiates, we would see that it is one and the same as the cosmic process of development. What took place in the macrocosm has been translated into the microcosm.

[ 31 ] I would like to point out that such traces can indeed be found not only in Augustine. We also find them quite clearly in other Church Fathers [for example, in Eusebius] when they describe the life of Jesus. To do so, however, we must go back to the fourth century, when the descriptions were still more fluid; we must even go back to the third and second centuries. When we read or hear descriptions of the entire course of his life, when we hear accounts of the Resurrection and Ascension, it sounds—to anyone capable of judging these matters—like a translation of the process of initiation into the mysteries.

[ 32 ] After all, there is nothing left to interpret in the Gospels, which later became authoritative and in which this perspective was crystallized. Eusebius was still a myst. So I believe that when we examine the Gospels, we will still be able to see in their style that something remains of these ancient structures of correspondence between the cosmological process and the process of initiation:

[ 33 ] Take the Gospel of John. What is it but a betrayal of the mystical—in style and structure, nothing other than an individualized cosmogony? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” and so on. This opening of the Gospel of John begins exactly as Genesis does. We are dealing here with a Genesis. These phenomena directly show us clear evidence that we are in fact dealing with initiation texts in the Gospels—texts that did not exist in the first centuries of the Christian era. At that time, only [oral] tradition existed. We owe the Gospels essentially to the second century.

[ 34 ] If we take all this into account, we will see even in the Gospels how this trace of the correspondence between cosmogonic and individual development still remains. A passage such as the one cited in the Gospel of Matthew cannot be understood at all unless it is interpreted theosophically, unless we recognize in it the same process that Buddhists have undergone in forty-two stages. We are absorbed into God and reborn from Him.

[ 35 ] The one who developed this perspective within Essene thought—who stepped outside the original teachings even before he had formally left them—must have been deeply imbued with this truth; through a higher revelation, it must have been clearly evident to him what every other person must first painstakingly piece together. It must have dawned on him in a single, sweeping insight.

[ 36 ] Now, in the Gospels—and this is the question I must still raise—we find an indication that we are dealing with a personality who, in a single glance, encompassed everything that can be described as the teachings of the past, as the result of past experiences. In a single vision, we have the content of the Gospel, and now we must ask: Does this period represent a genuine renewal of this world mystery—which is otherwise present in symbolic form—this world mystery that is revealed to us in the Father, Mother, and Child? Is there such a vision? I believe that it is the entire personality—the real personality—that underlies this, that radiates forth as if renewing the past. This seems to me to be the apparition on the holy mountain, the apparition that Jesus experienced when he had only his closest disciples with him—Peter, James, and John, the latter’s brother—and when Moses and Elijah appeared to him.

[ 37 ] When we bring this phenomenon to mind, when we perceive and interpret it in this way, then it becomes clear to us what is at stake here. Only by starting from this phenomenon can one arrive at a full understanding of who this figure was—the one through whom Christianity came into the world.

[ 38 ] We can now understand what had happened, and once we have understood this, we arrive at a mystical understanding of Christianity. This is the most important aspect of this vision: that the founder of Christianity is not a single individual, but rather something in which the deepest mystery of existence was embodied, and in which the deepest human experience is concentrated.

[ 39 ] It is impossible, since time has moved on too far, to further illustrate what is revealed in the teachings and life of Jesus. When we understand this phenomenon, the necessary light will spread within us.