The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] The period of human development that is considered the fourth—and which is characterized by the Letter to the Church in Thyatira—begins in the 7th or 8th century B.C. and lasts until the 13th or 14th century A.D. It is only from there onward that we count our fifth period, or the Germanic cultural period. The fourth period lies at the center of the seven periods and has expressed in the most diverse ways the life between birth and death and the love of the material world; it reached its highest flowering in the beauty of Greek art.

[ 2 ] But the soul would have had to undergo a darkening had the event at Golgotha not taken place, had the light emanating from that event not exerted its influence. After human beings have attained full consciousness of their earthly “I” in this fourth epoch, when they have stepped out into the physical world, the concept of a will—among other things—appears for the first time as a sign that the human will has become so important that it survives death. Yet this first appears in ancient Rome, not yet in Greece. Likewise, Greece does not yet know the concept of the individual human being firmly grounded on earth; only gradually does the sense develop that the individual human being is not merely a social being but an individual. The concept of personality—the concept of the divine-spiritual anchored within the human being—would not have been understood at all beforehand. In ancient Greece, people could only conceive of the divine-spiritual as dwelling in the spiritual world. Now, however, the Greeks experience in the most profound sense what it means to know, through human consciousness, that the “I” lives, yet still not to recognize that the “I” is divine. Over in the East, this had been proclaimed by Moses. For the Greeks, it did not exist as a divine entity between birth and death. And it was a profoundly tragic feeling that permeated every soul... [gap in the postscript.] Thus the Greeks told themselves that human beings had descended from the divine-spiritual world; but they did not know that they could work their way back up again and that they might return to the spiritual world in the future.

[ 3 ] And this found expression in the myth of Prometheus; it found such tragic expression in Aeschylus’s drama, where Io, having gone mad, appears to Prometheus. Io represented the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, which in this fourth epoch could no longer manifest itself in normal states of consciousness, but only in a state of madness.

[ 4 ] In the sense that science exists today, it did not yet exist in the early periods of our culture. Only gradually does human beings become seekers in the realms of that science which independently explores the external world. That is why something resembling science did not emerge until Thales. To speak of an “Eastern philosophy” is an abstraction. Those who trace the beginning of science to Thales were correct; before that, it was always inspired, born of the mysteries. This was the case with Heraclitus, who was still inspired by the ancient wisdom of the mysteries. We are told that he sacrificed his book on the altar of the goddess at Ephesus.

[ 5 ] To the same extent that external knowledge grows in human beings, what is truly wisdom is paralyzed. In the Book of Revelation, we are told—as in the fourth epistle—how people must find the connection. Let us suppose that the Christ principle—the revelation of Golgotha—had not come; in that case, there would certainly have been such outstanding figures in the realm of external science as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and so on, but science would have become increasingly intellectual, and none of this would have led to a return to the spirit. Celsus, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, recounts only superficial historical gossip about the event at Golgotha. But scientifically speaking, all these people stand at a high level.

[ 6 ] However, what is known as skepticism had become part of this movement, and in Roman culture one finds, alongside a sophisticated science of the mind, a complete skepticism. Let us, by contrast, consider a figure such as Augustine; he is unable to arrive at anything other than doubt regarding what he had come to know as Greco-Roman scholarship. Now Manichaeism comes his way, though he encounters it in a distorted form. There he becomes acquainted with a doctrine that takes into account everything that had been taught by Zarathustra. But his soul is not yet ready to take all this in, because the soul of a person of that time was not equipped to undertake such a lofty flight of the spirit and to see the spirit everywhere beyond the physical world. Science, which had reached as far as the stars, fell into decline, and even if this science had reached the Europeans, no soul would have been able to understand it. The soul had to remain attached to what is seen in the outer sensory world.

[ 7 ] It was not until the Renaissance that science reawakened. What had been inspired by Greece and Rome became Arab wisdom, the spirit of Islam. Arab culture then spread from Spain throughout Europe. This science is great in all that relates to the immediately sensory. The science that, in the most eminent sense, became the inspiration for European science—the science that influenced Bacon and Spinoza—springs from Spanish Arabism; it comes from Spain. However, it cannot rise above a pantheism that is entirely incapable of conceiving of concrete spiritual beings. Arabism did not reach the concrete; it rose as far as the sensory human being, but what lay beyond that was merely an abstract divine unity, the nature of which remains unknown. What a poor and complacent worldview! One simply has no knowledge of the spirit when one reduces it to a single unity. Therein lies the poverty of pantheism.

[ 8 ] Thus, humanity entered the fifth epoch with an external science that began to experience its greatest boom precisely in the 13th and 14th centuries. We see this, for example, in the Scholastics. There we witness the dawn of the new science, which, however, is entirely bound to the sensory world and cannot take even a single step beyond it. And so we see how the division between faith and knowledge arises. Augustine had been unable to understand the allusion to a spiritual reality that lies beyond the sun; he had not understood Manichaeism, because it speaks of the veil of the senses spread over the spiritual. He could believe in the Christ who had descended into physical humanity. But faith and knowledge had already become completely divided by that time. All believers who based their faith on medieval science wanted to keep faith and science entirely separate. Schematically, we can see how what continues from the Greco-Latin era focuses solely on the outer, physical realm. Human development proceeds in such a way that we are now once again experiencing the knowledge that was cultivated during the Chaldean-Egyptian period, but illuminated and spiritualized by the Christ impulse. Thus, we see ancient Egyptian wisdom emerging everywhere in Europe, but illuminated by the Christ principle. In our time, human beings will be able to take this in more and more consciously through the Rosicrucian teachings.

[ 9 ] When the ancient Egyptians spoke of the stars, they were referring to the spiritual aspect of the stars, of which they still had knowledge. Because a wondrous awareness of this ancient knowledge permeates the science of Copernicus and Kepler, we see how what the ancient Egyptians knew emerges in entirely physical form. Whereas they had once seen beings traveling through the spaces of the universe, people now saw only spheres moving in elliptical paths.

[ 10 ] But the fifth epoch was destined to rediscover the spiritual world beyond sensory existence, and theosophy had to emerge to guide humanity back to the point where all knowledge is increasingly permeated by the Christ principle.

[ 11 ] If a clairvoyant being had been able to observe the Earth over the course of millennia, it would have seen how, at the time the Savior died on Golgotha, the entire aura of the Earth suddenly took on a different light and shone in different colors. Ahura Mazdao, proclaimed by Zarathustra, became the elemental spirit of the Earth at that time. Christ expresses this when, at the Last Supper, he says, “This is my body” (Matt. 26:26), and for the grape juice he uses the expression, “This is my blood” (cf. Matt. 26:28)

[ 12 ] If we now study the Earth in the true sense, we must once again see in everything that grows and lives there the members of the Christ Spirit, even in the smallest things we see. The human being of the future will not speak of atoms; he will scientifically understand the Earth as an expression of the Christ.

[ 13 ] We are only at the beginning of this development; Christ must first be understood in the simplest way. All science will find Christ in the future, even if today it sees in the sensible world only something dead, something corpse-like. But the fifth epoch can initially perceive this coming only as a prospect, in that it will come to understand in a new way what Zarathustra meant when he spoke of Ahura Mazda.

[ 14 ] In the sixth epoch, the ancient wisdom of Zarathustra will reemerge in a new form. And finally, the age of the holy Rishis will return in a new form. Even if it is only a small handful who will understand theosophy during this epoch, even if it is a very small handful who will hear the revived wisdom of Zarathustra in the sixth epoch, and even if only a fraction remains for the seventh epoch: the further course of human development will be such that more and more people will gather together who will once again understand what Zarathustra proclaimed.

[ 15 ] But then a time will come upon the earth when those who wage war of all against all will be victorious. Yet the souls that are preserved from the sixth period must establish a new culture after the war of all against all. The seventh epoch will have neither people who are passionate about the spiritual nor those who are passionate about sensory existence; these people will be too jaded even for that. In the seventh epoch, very little of the Indian—the first—civilization will be felt on Earth; but carried up into the spiritual world, purified, and Christianized, these souls from the sixth epoch will walk, as it were, ethereally, no longer touching the Earth, while people today can already attain all that earthly civilization has to offer. The seventh epoch will be such that those who will make the greatest inventions and discoveries will live down here in increasingly dense physical bodies. In the seventh epoch, people who are completely entangled in matter will no longer have much to fear from theosophy, for there will no longer be many on Earth of those spiritualized people who have now embraced theosophy and will have become increasingly spiritualized during the sixth epoch.

[ 16 ] Those who have understood the call of the Masters today will be carried into the distant future. The key will be turned in the sixth cultural epoch. Those who have heard the call will be co-founders of a new humanity. If only a few people become entangled in material things, then the church of Laodicea will not last long. It is up to each person’s free will to belong to the church of Philadelphia or to that of Laodicea.