The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] Throughout our lectures, you have seen how we approach the text known as the Gospel of John when we stand on the ground of spiritual science. You have seen that the point is not to extract any truths about the spiritual worlds from that text, but to show how—independent of all human and other texts—the possibility exists to penetrate the spiritual world, just as one would learn mathematics today one would do so independently of any textbook through which this or that part of mathematics was first communicated to us in the course of human development. What do those who are just beginning to learn, for example, simple elementary geometry in school—which everyone today learns on their own, from geometry itself—know about Euclid’s geometry, about that text in which, so to speak, this elementary geometry was first communicated to humanity! But once people have learned geometry on their own, they are all the better able to appreciate this “book of records” in its essence and significance. This should show us more and more that one can gain, from within the spiritual life itself, those truths that pertain to that spiritual life. And once one has found them and is then referred back to the historical documents, one finds in them once again what one already knows, so to speak. In this way, one arrives at a proper appreciation—a truly human appreciation—of these documents.

[ 2 ] We have seen in the course of these lectures that the Gospel of John truly loses none of its value as a result; we have seen that, for those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, the respect and esteem for the documents are by no means any less than for those who, from the outset, stand on the ground of such a document. Indeed, we have seen that the deepest teachings about Christianity—which we might just as well call the general teachings of wisdom—are once again presented to us in the Gospel of John. And we have seen that when we grasp this profound meaning of Christian teaching in this way, only then can we understand why Christ had to enter human evolution at a very specific time, at the beginning of our era. We have seen how, in the post-Atlantean era, humanity gradually developed. We have pointed out how, after the Atlantean Flood, there was a first great post-Atlantean cultural epoch in the ancient Indian culture. We have pointed out how this ancient Indian culture is characterized by the fact that people’s minds were dominated by longing and memory. We have described what this memory and longing consisted of. These memories consisted of living traditions that had survived from an epoch of human history preceding the Atlantean Flood, in which human beings, by virtue of their nature and being, still possessed a kind of dim, clairvoyant state through which they could glimpse into the spiritual world—so that the spiritual world was known to them through lived experience, just as the four kingdoms of nature— the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the human kingdom. We have seen how, in this time before the Atlantean Flood, there was not yet such a sharp distinction between the state of consciousness during the day and the state of consciousness during the night. When people in those days sank into sleep in the evening, their inner experiences were not as unconscious and obscure as they are today; rather, as the images of daily life receded, the images of spiritual life arose within them, and they were now immersed in the realities of the spiritual world. And when, in the morning, they re-emerged into their physical body, the experiences and truths of the divine-spiritual world sank back into the darkness, and around them rose the images of present-day reality—the present-day realms of minerals, plants, animals, and so on. That sharp boundary between nighttime unconsciousness and daytime wakefulness arose only after the Atlantean Flood, in our post-Atlantean era. Then, in a certain sense—as far as immediate perception was concerned—human beings were cut off from spiritual reality and increasingly exposed to purely physical reality. All that remained was the memory that there is another realm—a realm of spiritual beings and spiritual processes—and linked to this memory was the longing of the soul to re-enter, through some exceptional states of consciousness, those realms from which humankind had descended. These exceptional states were granted only to a select few—the initiates—whose inner senses were opened in the mystery temples, enabling them to glimpse into the spiritual world. They were able to bear witness to the others, who were unable to look beyond their physical limits, that the spiritual worlds were real. In ancient Indian culture, yoga was the process through which human beings transported themselves back to the ancient, twilight-like state of clairvoyance. When exceptional individuals were initiated or consecrated, they thereby became the guides of humanity, the witnesses to the spiritual world.

[ 3 ] Under the influence of this longing and memory, a particular mindset took shape within the ancient Indian, pre-Vedic culture—one that viewed external reality as māyā, or illusion. People said to themselves: True reality exists only in the spiritual world, to which we can return only through an exceptional state—through yoga. This world of spiritual beings and processes is real; what humans see with their eyes is unreal, is illusion, is Maya!

[ 4 ] That was the first fundamental religious sentiment in the post-Atlantean era, and yoga was the first form of initiation in the post-Atlantean era. At first, there was still no understanding of the actual mission of the post-Atlantean era. For it was not humanity’s mission to regard reality—what we call the sensory world—as Maya, as an illusion, to flee from it, and to become estranged from it; rather, post-Atlantean humanity had a different mission: to conquer physical reality more and more, to become master of the world of physical phenomena. But it is also entirely understandable that humanity, having first been placed within this physical plane, initially regarded as Maya or illusion that which had previously scarcely appeared within spiritual reality and which it could now perceive on its own. Yet this attitude toward reality could never be allowed to persist. This conception of physical reality as an illusion could not be allowed to remain the lifeblood of the post-Atlantean era. And we saw how, step by step, post-Atlantean humanity, throughout the various cultural epochs, established a connection with physical reality.

[ 5 ] In that culture we call the proto-Persian—for what history knows as the Persian and Zoroastrian cultures are merely the final echoes of what is meant here—in this second cultural epoch, we saw humanity take the first step toward moving beyond the old Indian principle and mastering physical reality. Nowhere yet is there a loving immersion in physical reality, nor anywhere anything resembling a study of the physical world. But there is already more there than in the ancient Indian culture. Even what has survived into later times from this ancient Indian culture still shows us the echoes of that mindset that regards physical reality as an illusion. Therefore, our present-day culture could never have emerged from this Indian culture. Within Indian culture, all wisdom turned its gaze away from the physical world and looked up toward the spiritual worlds, which existed as a memory; and the study and exploration of physical reality seemed worthless to them. Therefore, the true Indian principle could never have produced a science useful for our earthly world; it could never have produced that mastery of the laws of nature which today forms the foundation of our culture. None of this could ever have emerged from ancient Indian civilization. For what is the point of learning about the forces of a world that is based solely on illusion! Even if this later changed within Indian culture as well, it did not flow from within it, but arose from later foreign influences.

[ 6 ] To ancient Persian culture, external physical reality initially appears as a field of work. It is still viewed as the manifestation of a hostile deity, but hope has already sprung up that this material realm of reality can be penetrated with the help of the god of light and completely transformed into one permeated by spiritual powers and benevolent gods. Thus, the adherent of Persian culture already senses, to some extent, the reality of the physical world. Although they still regard it as the domain of the god of darkness, they nevertheless harbor the hope that they can incorporate the powers of the good gods into it.

[ 7 ] And so humanity moves on into the cultural epoch that found its historical expression in Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian culture. And we have seen how it came to be that the starry sky was no longer “Maya” for human beings, but rather something whose inscriptions could be read. In what was still “maya” for the Indians—the paths and brilliance of the stars—the people of the third cultural epoch see the expression of the decisions and intentions of divine-spiritual beings. They gradually come to embrace the conviction that external reality is not an illusion, but a revelation, a manifestation of divine-spiritual beings. And in Egyptian culture, people began to apply what they read from the “writing of the stars” to the division of the Earth itself. Why did the Egyptians become the masters of geometry? Because they believed that through the thought that divides the Earth, matter can also be conquered, and that matter—which the human spirit can grasp—can be transformed. — Thus, gradually, later humanity permeated this material world—which was initially regarded as Maya—with the spirit that was emerging more and more within the human being as well.

[ 8 ] We have seen that it was not until the later Atlantean period that human beings were actually able to perceive the “I” or “I am.” For as long as human beings saw spiritual images, they were also clearly aware that they themselves belonged to the spiritual world, that they themselves were an image among images. Now came the realization of the spirit within. Let us now consider, in light of what we have briefly reviewed today, the development of the human being’s inner self.

[ 9 ] As long as, during the Atlantean epoch, human beings looked outward in a kind of dreamlike, clairvoyant state of consciousness, they did not really pay much attention to their inner world. The inner world, encompassed by the “I” or “I am,” was not yet something clearly defined for them. To the same extent that the spiritual world receded, human beings became aware of their own spirituality. In ancient Indian culture, there was still a peculiar attitude toward one’s own spirituality. It was said: If we wish to penetrate the spiritual world and rise above illusion, then we must lose ourselves in the spiritual world; we must, as far as possible, extinguish the “I-am” and merge into the Universal Spirit, into Brahman. - Thus, especially in ancient initiation, there was a losing of the personal. An impersonal merging into the spiritual world is, above all, what characterizes the oldest form of initiation.

[ 10 ] This was no longer the case, for example, in the third cultural epoch. For up until the third cultural epoch, human self-awareness had been developing ever more strongly. Human beings became increasingly aware of the inner essence of their “I.” By growing fond of the material world around them and immersing themselves in it through the laws that the human spirit itself had devised—laws that were not derived from some twilight dream state—people became increasingly aware of their “I,” until this sense of personality reached a certain peak in ancient Egyptian culture. Yet within this sense of personality there was still something that made it appear, at the same time, as something inferior—something that was now bound once more and absorbed into the external world, something that had no possibility of regaining a connection with that from which one had been born. We must paint two fundamental moods of human development before our soul if we are to comprehend the entire course of events.

[ 11 ] We must recall how the people of the Atlantean era and the ancient Indian era that followed yearned to shed their personalities. The Atlanteans were able to do this because it was a matter of course for them that they shed their personalities every night and lived in a spirit realm. The Indians were able to do it because their principles of initiation led them upward through yoga into the impersonal. Resting in the universal Divine was what they sought. This resting in the universal had survived in one final remnant of humanity: in the awareness of belonging to the generations, in the awareness that one was born from a lineage, that as an individual one was connected by blood through the generations all the way back to one’s forefathers. This was the mood that had emerged from that ancient mood, which felt spiritually at home in a spiritual-divine realm. Thus it came to pass that those people who had undergone a normal development began, in the third cultural epoch, to perceive themselves as individual human beings, yet at the same time felt secure within a whole, within a divine-spiritual realm; they felt connected through blood kinship to the entire line of ancestors, and God lived for them in the blood flowing through the generations.

[ 12 ] We then saw how, within the people who constitute the Old Testament community of believers, a certain degree of perfection in this sentiment developed. “I and Father Abraham are one”—that is, the individual felt secure within the entire context, all the way back to Father Abraham. That was also, more or less, what constituted the basic sentiment of all the normally developed tribes of that time—all the tribes of the third cultural epoch. But it was only to the Old Testament community of believers that it had been prophetically foretold that there was something spiritually deeper than the divine fatherhood that flows through the blood of generations. And we have pointed to the great moment in human evolution when this was prophetically foretold. When Moses hears the call: “Say, when you proclaim my name, ‘I Am’ has told you this!”—then, for the first time, the message and revelation of the Logos, of Christ, resounds. There, for the first time, it was prophetically proclaimed to those who could comprehend it that what lives in God is not merely what is connected by blood, but that something purely spiritual lives within Him. It was prophecy that ran through the Old Testament.

[ 13 ] Who was it, after all—this is the question we now wish to focus on—who was it who first revealed his name to Moses through prophecy at that time? Here again we have a passage where the interpreters of the Gospel of John take a very superficial approach and refuse to acknowledge that these documents must be examined as thoroughly as possible. — Who was the one who prophetically revealed his name, the one to whom the name “I Am” must be given? Who was it?

[ 14 ] We come to this when we carefully and with seriousness and dignity examine a passage from the Gospel of John. It is the passage found in chapter 2, beginning with verse 37. There, Christ Jesus points to the fulfillment of a saying by the prophet Isaiah—the prophecy—noting that the Jews refuse to believe in Christ Jesus. Jesus himself refers to Isaiah:

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they cannot see with their eyes or hear with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.

This is what Isaiah said when he saw His glory and spoke with Him.” (12:40–41)

[ 15 ] Isaiah “spoke to him”! To whom did Isaiah speak? Reference is made to the passage that reads:

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and exalted throne, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1)

[ 16 ] Who did Isaiah see? This is clearly stated here in the Gospel of John: he saw Christ! He was always to be seen in the spiritual realm, and you will no longer find it incomprehensible when esoteric science points out that the one whom Moses saw when he announced to him the word “I Am” as his name was the same being who then appeared on earth as Christ. The true “Spirit of God” of antiquity is none other than Christ, so that we are here at one of those passages in the religious texts where it becomes particularly difficult for those who do not approach the matter properly to see clearly. For one must see clearly here above all because the most peculiar confusions have arisen regarding the words “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit.” It has always been the case that, outwardly in the exoteric realm, these words have been used in the most varied ways precisely to prevent the true esoteric meaning from shining through immediately. When one spoke of the “Father” in the sense of ancient Judaism, one was speaking first and foremost of that Father who flowed down through the blood of the generations, in a material sense. When one spoke, as Isaiah does here, of the “Lord”—that is, of the One who revealed Himself spiritually—one was speaking just as much of the Logos as in the Gospel of John. And the writer of the Gospel of John means nothing other than this: The One who could always be seen in the spiritual realm became flesh and dwelt among us! — Now that we have realized that even in the Old Testament there is, in a certain sense, talk of the Christ, we will also understand in what way the ancient Hebrew people are placed within our own development. The ancient Hebrew principle emerges from Egyptian culture. There it stands out against the backdrop of the Egyptian principle.

[ 17 ] Thus we see how the normal course of human development proceeds, just as we described yesterday. The first culture of the post-Atlantean era is the ancient Indian culture; the second is the ancient Persian culture; the third is the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian culture; this is followed by the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch; and the fifth is our present cultural epoch. Before the fourth epoch begins, a people with its own traditions emerges—like a mysterious offshoot of the third epoch—that provides the foundation for Christianity. If we summarize everything we have gained from our lectures, we will find it even more understandable that the appearance of the Christ had to fall within the fourth cultural epoch.

[ 18 ] We have already emphasized that by the fourth epoch, humanity had progressed to the point where it had objectified and projected its own spirituality—its “I”—out into the world. We see how humanity gradually permeates matter with its own spirit, with the spirit of the “I.” We see the works of the Greek sculptors and playwrights, in which human beings present what they call their “spiritual property” as embodied forms before the soul. We see further, in the Roman world, how what a human being is also enters into their consciousness and how they fix this for the external world in the “Jus,” even if a convoluted legal science obscures it. For the deeper connoisseur of jurisprudence, it is clear that true law—which regards the human being as a legal subject—only emerged in this fourth cultural epoch. By then, human beings had become so aware of their own personality that they first began to feel themselves as true citizens. Even in ancient Greece, the individual still felt himself to be a member of the entire city-state. It was more important to be an Athenian than to be an individual. But it is something entirely different to say, “I am a Roman,” than to say, “I am an Athenian.” When one says, “I am a Roman,” one is pointing out that, as an individual, as a citizen of the state, one has value and one has a will. One could also demonstrate, for example, that the concept of a “will” only became possible in this historical epoch; for that is a Roman concept. It was only then that human beings had made their will so personal, so individualized, that they wished their will to continue to have an effect even beyond death. The things that are said in spiritual science correspond down to the smallest detail with the actual facts.

[ 19 ] Thus, humanity had increasingly come to permeate matter with its spirit. But this becomes even more evident later on. The fourth epoch is the one in which humanity completely incorporates into matter what it grasps in its spirit. In the Egyptian pyramids, you can still see how spirit and matter struggle with one another, how what is grasped in the spirit is not yet fully expressed in matter. The Greek temple embodies the entire turning point of the post-Atlantean era. For those who understand such things, there is no architecture more significant or more perfect than the Greek, which is the purest expression of the inner laws of space. The column is conceived entirely as a support, and what rests upon the column has been perceived entirely as something that must be supported and that exerts pressure. The sovereign, emancipated concept of space is carried through to its ultimate consequences here in the Greek temple. Few people later on have perceived the concept of space in the same way as they did back then. There have, however, been people who were able to sense the concept of space, but they perceived it in a painterly way. Take a moment to examine the space in the Sistine Chapel; stand at the back wall, where the large painting of the Last Judgment is, and look up: there you will see how the back wall slopes upward at an angle. It rises at an angle because the artist sensed the concept of space and did not think of it as abstractly as other people. That is why this wall stands there at such a wonderful angle. This means no longer perceiving the concept of space in the Greek manner. There is an artistic sensibility that perceives the secret dimensions hidden within space. To perceive architecturally does not mean to perceive for the sake of the eye, but to perceive something else. People today readily assume that right is the same as left, up is the same as down, and front is the same as back. If only people would consider the following: There are paintings in which one sees three, four, or five angels floating. These may be painted in such a way that one is justified in thinking they must fall at any moment. But they may also be painted by someone who has developed a true sense of space, so that one cannot even entertain this thought; they cannot fall at all, for they support one another. Then one has the dynamic relationships of space before one in a painterly way. The Greeks perceived them architecturally; they perceived the horizontal not merely as a line, but as a force of pressure, and they perceived the column not merely as a pole, but as a supporting force. This empathy with the lines of space is what it means to “feel the living spirit through geometry.” This is what Plato meant when he used the extraordinary expression: “God is constantly geometrizing.” — These lines in space exist, and the Greeks built their temples according to them.

[ 20 ] What, then, is the Greek temple? It is, by necessity, a dwelling place for the god. It is something entirely different from today’s church. Today’s church is a place of preaching. In the Greek temple, the god himself dwelt within it. People are there only by chance, when they wish to be with God. Whoever understands the forms of the Greek temple feels a mysterious connection with the God dwelling within it. There, one sees in the columns and what is above them not something that humans have imagined, but something that God Himself would have made if He had wanted to create a dwelling place for Himself. That was the highest degree of the interpenetration of matter and spirit.

[ 21 ] Compare the Greek temple with a Gothic church. This is not meant as a criticism of the Gothic style, for from a different perspective it stands on a higher level. In the Gothic church, you can see how what is expressed in its forms cannot actually be conceived or felt at all without the devout congregation. In the arched forms of Gothic architecture, there is something—for those who can sense it—that they simply cannot perceive in any other way than by saying to themselves: If the devout congregation were not there inside, clasping their hands together in an arched shape, the whole would not be complete. The Gothic church is not merely the dwelling place of God, but at the same time the gathering place for the congregation praying to God. Thus, humanity once again transcends the pinnacle of its own development in a certain sense. We see how what was wonderfully sensed within the Greek sense of space—in the lines of space, in the columns and beams—later fell into decadence. A column that does not bear weight, that exists only as a decorative motif, is not a column in the Greek sense. Everything in human evolution is in absolute harmony. The Greek cultural epoch was the most beautiful fusion of humanity’s self-discovered consciousness and that which was perceived as the divine out there in space. In this cultural epoch, human beings had grown entirely together with the physical-sensory world.

[ 22 ] It is simply nonsense for today’s scholars to try to obscure what people in earlier times perceived. From the perspective of spiritual science, we regard the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean era as the one in which human beings are completely in harmony with the world around them. This era, when human beings were, as it were, fused with external reality, was the only one capable of comprehending that the Divine could appear in a single human being. Any earlier era would have understood anything else before that; any earlier era would have felt that the Divine was far too high and exalted to appear in a physical human form. The divine was to be preserved precisely from taking on a physical form. “You shall not make for yourself an image!” (Exodus 20:4) therefore had to be said specifically to the people who were to grasp the idea of God in His spiritual form. This people developed out of such views, and from its midst arose the idea of Christ—the idea that the spiritual should appear in the flesh. This people was chosen for this purpose; and it was within this context—in the fourth of the post-Atlantean epochs—that the Christ event had to take place.

[ 23 ] Therefore, for the Christian consciousness, the entire process of human becoming is divided into a pre-Christian and a post-Christian era. The God-man could only be understood by human beings at a specific time. And so we see how the Gospel of John, in full awareness and in spirit, ties in with what—if I may use a trivial term—was immediately contemporary, stemming directly from the consciousness of the times. It therefore happened quite naturally—as something intrinsically related, so to speak—that the mental images through which the writer of the Gospel of John sought to grasp the greatest event in world history seemed to him best expressed in Greek forms of thought. And little by little, the entire Christian sensibility grew into these forms of thought. We shall see how, as things progressed, something like the Gothic style was bound to emerge, because Christianity was indeed called upon to lead people beyond the material world once again. But it could only arise where people had become so deeply immersed in the material world that they did not yet overestimate it, nor had they yet sunk into it as we have in our own age, yet were still able to spiritualize and penetrate it.

[ 24 ] Thus, I believe, the entire intellectual history of humanity reveals to us that the emergence of Christianity was an absolutely necessary development. If we now wish to understand the form that Christianity gradually had to take—the form prophetically foretold by a figure such as the author of the Gospel of John—we must consider several essential and important concepts in the next lecture.

[ 25 ] It has been shown that one must take everything literally, but first one must truly understand the letter. It is significant that the name “John” does not appear anywhere, but that the text always refers to the disciple “whom the Lord loved.” We have seen what mystery lies behind this, and that it is of profound significance. — Now let us consider another expression, one that will enable us to connect directly with the subsequent periods of development in Christianity.

[ 26 ] In the Gospel of John, the way the “Mother of Jesus” is referred to is usually overlooked. If you ask the average Christian, “Who is the mother of Jesus?” they will answer, “The mother of Jesus is Mary!” And some will even believe that the Gospel of John states something to the effect that Jesus’ mother is named Mary. Nowhere in the Gospel of John does it say that Jesus’ mother is named “Mary.” Everywhere it is mentioned—with a deliberate intent whose significance we will come to understand—it refers only to the “mother of Jesus.” In the chapter on the wedding at Cana, it says: “And the mother of Jesus was there” (2:1); and later it says: “His mother said to the servants” (2:5). Never is the name “Mary” mentioned. And when she appears before us again, as we see the Savior on the cross, the Gospel of John says:

“Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister—Mary, the wife of Clopas—and Mary Magdalene.” (19:25)

[ 27 ] It is stated clearly and unambiguously who was standing at the cross: The mother was there, then her sister—who was the wife of Cleophas and was named Mary—and Mary of Magdala. If one thinks about it, one will say to oneself: It is strange, after all, that both sisters are named Mary! That’s not common today.—And it wasn’t back then either. And since the writer of the Gospel of John names the sister Mary, it’s clear that Jesus’ mother was not named Mary. The Greek text states clearly and unambiguously: “Standing below were ‘his mother and his mother’s sister, who was the wife of Cleophas, named Mary, and Mary Magdalene.’” - This raises a question for a serious consideration: Who is the mother of Jesus? And here we touch upon one of the greatest questions of the Gospel of John: Who is the actual father of Jesus? Who is the mother?

[ 28 ] Who is the father? — Is it even permissible to ask such a question? You may ask this question not only in the context of the Gospel of John, but also in the context of the Gospel of Luke. For it takes a special kind of thoughtlessness not to see what is said in the Annunciation:

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore, the child to be born will be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

[ 29 ] Even the Gospel of Luke points out that Jesus’ Father is the Holy Spirit. This is to be taken literally, and those theologians who do not acknowledge this simply cannot read the Gospel. And so we must pose the big question: Given all that we have heard, how do the words “I and the Father are one,” “I and Father Abraham are one,” and “Before Abraham was, ‘I Am’ was” fit together? How can we reconcile all of this with the undeniable fact that the Gospels see the “Holy Spirit” as the Father principle? And how should we think about the Mother principle in light of the Gospel of John?

[ 30 ] So that you may come tomorrow well prepared in spirit to formulate these questions, it should also be noted that the Gospel of Luke provides a sort of genealogy, telling us that Jesus was baptized by John, that he began teaching at the age of thirty, and that it is stated, he is the son of Mary and “of Joseph, who was a son of Eli,” and so on, and then the entire genealogy follows. Follow it; you will see that it goes all the way back to Adam. And then something quite peculiar follows—the words there say: “who was of God.” (Luke 3:23–38)

[ 31 ] Just as the Son points to the Father, so too does Adam point to God in the Gospel of Luke. We must take such a passage very seriously! Then we will have gathered together the questions that will lead us tomorrow to the heart of the Gospel of John.