The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] This evening, I do not wish to directly continue the reflections that are usually held here on Saturdays and Sundays. Instead—so that the friends of our cause who have come here may take away as much as possible of what is connected, in a broader or narrower sense, with the reflections that have been offered here this week—I would like to offer a few more intimate reflections, which will, however, follow on from the questions that have already been raised this week.

[ 2 ] With regard to the enrichment of linguistics through anthroposophical spiritual science, I myself have pointed out how an original way of perceiving language has been lost, and how this way of perceiving has been replaced by a more abstract orientation toward the things of the environment. I have pointed out that the emergence of what came to be called logic—through Aristotle, that is, in the 4th century B.C.—represents a significant force of development in human history. For the conscious immersion in the logical—which previously operated more unconsciously and instinctively in the human psyche—means precisely an ordering of the world in an abstract sense.

[ 3 ] I said that in earlier times, people still sensed an inner, more concrete process that can be compared to what we can study in human puberty. What occurs in a child when it learns to speak is precisely a metamorphosis—a metamorphosis of the process that unfolds later in human beings during puberty, one that develops more inwardly. And what takes place within a person during this process of learning to speak had, for humanity in earlier times, repercussions for the whole of human life: People felt as if, through the word, something within them was coming to expression—something that also lives in the things outside, but which those things do not express because they are, so to speak, silenced. In the resounding of the word within, something was felt that corresponded to processes in the external world. What was experienced there was far more substantial, far closer to human life than what is experienced inwardly today in the apprehension of the world through abstract concepts. But what people experienced through the word was, I would say, more organic; it was more instinctive; it was more inclined toward the animally-psychic than is what can be experienced through the abstract conceptual grasping of things. People were brought closer to spiritual life through this abstract comprehension. But at the same time, human beings were led toward abstraction. So that at that moment—that moment in world history—when human beings were, as it were, lifted up to gradually experience the spirit, he simultaneously—one can, of course, only express these things more or less figuratively, since language has not yet coined actual words for them—experienced, so to speak, a dilution in his spiritual experience, precisely a dilution into abstraction.

[ 4 ] As you will understand, this process did not unfold in the same way among all peoples. Among the peoples who were, so to speak, the most prominent early bearers of civilization, it took place earlier; others lagged behind. And I could say that the peoples of Central Europe, as late as the 11th century, were still at a stage that, in relation to the development of Greek civilization, must be described as pre-Aristotelian. In Central Europe, the point that the Greeks had surpassed through Aristotle was not reached until much later. Through Aristotelianism, the Greeks anticipated much of what for the Central European peoples—and those who belonged to their civilization—did not actually occur until the first third of the 15th century.

[ 5 ] Now, two things are connected with this human progress in terms of understanding language and understanding the abstract. I have already alluded to one of them: As Aristotelianism—which was, however, merely a symptom of a general grasp of the matter within Greek civilization—elevated human inner life into abstraction, it became alienated from that immediate experience of the word and of language. And with that, the door to that aspect of human development that lies toward birth was, in a sense, closed. Human beings could no longer find themselves in their ordinary experience, back to the point where, while learning to speak, they could have seen how the spiritual-soul aspect reigns within them—an aspect just as spiritual and soulful as that which exists outside in the world. But this also distracted them from looking further back. And the next stages would indeed have revealed what one might call the connection of the spirit with physical-bodily matter in general. They would have revealed an insight into pre-existence—the realization that the human spiritual-soul aspect leads an existence in supersensible worlds before it unites with the physical being that exists within physical matter. This insight, however, was present in earlier periods of human development not in the explicitly conscious form in which we seek to regain it today through spiritual science, but rather in an instinctive way; and remnants of it have indeed remained in what we encounter as Eastern culture, for which the contemplation of the pre-existing human soul is a matter of course.

[ 6 ] And if a person is then still able to go further, even that which is even more difficult to comprehend than preexistence—namely, repeated earthly lives—will become a true insight, a true vision. This insight existed—albeit in an instinctive form—in earlier periods of human development. It was then preserved in a more poetic, imaginative form in the civilizations of the Orient; but this was already during a period of decadence—albeit a very significant and beautiful one.

[ 7 ] Thus, when we look back—free from the prejudices of modern anthropology—on earlier stages of human development, we find a way of perceiving the world that, while instinctive, penetrates to the very core of things. Because human beings, in a sense, still understood the process of language development, they understood something of the spiritual forces at work even in the external natural world; and because they understood the embodiment of the spiritual-soul aspects in the physical-bodily realm, they understood something of the spirit that ripples and surges through the world.

[ 8 ] As far back as Greek historical knowledge extends, only the sparse remnants of this ancient understanding of the spirit are traditionally preserved in Greek civilization. If one goes back beyond Aristotle and Plato to the Ionian philosophers—roughly to the turn of the 5th and 6th centuries in the development of Greek thought— one finds, for example, in Anaxagoras a philosophy that cannot be understood from today’s perspective. Out of a certain sound understanding, Western philosophers should actually say to themselves: Western philosophy actually lacks the prerequisites to understand Anaxagoras; for what Anaxagoras—already in a decadent form—recognizes as his nus goes back to those times I have just spoken of, when it was still sensed, and cognitively sensed, how the world is permeated and surges with the spiritual, and how the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being descends from the spiritual to unite with the physical-bodily. In earlier times, this was an instinctively vivid insight. It then weakened into the insight that was provided precisely by the instinctive insight into the process of language, which was subsequently lost even in the most advanced civilizations during the era of Aristotelianism.

[ 9 ] When people still observed this process of language development, they sensed—as I have already said—in the sound of the word something that was an expression of an objective event out there in nature. And this brings me to a fundamental difference: What the so-called “language experts” of that era understood as the world soul was conceived primarily as filling space, and human beings felt themselves to be shaped out of this space-filling spiritual-soul element. But that was something different from what one arrives at when one goes further back from Anaxagoras’s “Nus.” There one arrives at something that leads into the pre-existence of the human soul—something that has to do not merely with the fact that the human soul weaves and interweaves with the world spirit and the world soul in the present, but rather we find here that this human soul lives with the world spirit and the world soul within time.

[ 10 ] One must come to know these things through inner understanding if one truly wishes to understand, from a historical perspective, a highly significant process in the development of West Asian and European civilization. Today, we actually have no accurate conception of the spiritual disposition of the people who lived at the time when Christianity was founded. Certainly, when one considers the general state of the human soul today in its particular configuration, one must imagine the vast majority of people in West Asia and Europe as uneducated in comparison to today’s proud level of education. But from this vast mass of the uneducated, individual people stood out at that time. I would say that the successors of the ancient initiates stood out with significant knowledge—knowledge that, admittedly, did not live in the soul in the same way as our own knowledge, which is permeated throughout by abstract concepts and has therefore attained full consciousness. There was still something instinctive even in the highest knowledge of that time. But at the same time, there was something penetrating in this instinctive knowledge—something that did indeed go to the depths of things.

[ 11 ] It is remarkable what a peculiar fear many representatives of today’s traditional creeds have that anyone might discover that such profound knowledge existed in those days—knowledge that arrived at subtle concepts, even if, as mentioned, these were viewed more in instinctive images and expressed in forms of language for which there is little sensitivity today. Our anthroposophy is not intended to be a revival of what is called Gnosis; but our anthroposophy is the path to looking into the essence of this Gnosis. And just as our anthroposophy—even though it has nothing in common with the ancient Indian philosophies in terms of its sources—can nevertheless penetrate the profound, sublime, and that which flows forth from things in Vedanta, Sankhya, or Yoga philosophy—because it consciously reaches once again the regions of the world that were instinctively reached in those days—in the same way, our anthroposophy can also penetrate the essence of Gnosis. That Gnosis was, after all, eradicated by certain sects of the early Christian centuries, so that historically very little Gnostic material remains, and the Gnosis of modern humanity has actually become known only through the writings of those who sought to refute it—and who therefore include quotations from the written records in their counter-writings, while the original writings themselves have been lost; thus Gnosticism has actually come down to posterity only through the writings of its opponents, who, of course, quoted only what they deemed appropriate to quote according to their own judgment.

[ 12 ] Well, take a look at our opponents’ citation practices, and you’ll get an idea of just how deeply one can penetrate the essence of such a matter when one has to rely on the writings of one’s opponents! The knowledge of Gnosis has often depended—and, from an external, historical perspective, it still depends almost entirely on them today—on the writings of Gnosis’s opponents. Just imagine for a moment: it could certainly be in the interest of, say, a certain Mr. Vor Gleich that all anthroposophical writings be burned—that would surely be his greatest wish!—and that anthroposophy be passed down to posterity solely through his own pronouncements. One must always make these things tangible through something that can truly draw attention to them.

[ 13 ] But if, for these reasons, one cannot gain insight into what already existed at that time, then all scholarly investigations—no matter how well-intentioned—that relate to something of the utmost importance, particularly in the understanding of Christianity, will go astray. The very concept in which almost everything still remains to be accomplished—because everything that has been accomplished so far by no means leads to what an honest quest for knowledge could call true knowledge—is the concept of the Logos, which appears to us right at the beginning of the Gospel of John. One cannot understand this concept of the Logos unless one inwardly understands the spiritual and psychological development of the people of the most advanced civilization of that time—namely, unless one understands the spiritual and psychological development as it made its way through Greek civilization, which, after all, radiated out toward Asia and casts its shadow upon what we encounter in the Gospel of John. One must not approach this concept of the Logos merely through some lexical or external philological method. One can approach this concept of the Logos only by studying from within the spiritual and psychological development at issue here, roughly from the 4th century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. No history has yet been written in a satisfactory manner about what actually took place inwardly among the most advanced members of humanity and their representative sages. For this is connected with the decline of the understanding of the process of learning to speak. The other aspect—the understanding of pre-existence—has, of course, been preserved in the tradition up to Origen; but it was lost to inner insight much earlier than the understanding of the speech process, of the resounding of the word within the human soul.

[ 1 4] When we consider the psychological and spiritual state of the peoples of the Near East and Europe as reflected in their representative sages, we find that a turning point is indeed taking place. What had been a unified process in perception—the resounding of the word and, in the word, the essence of the world—became differentiated into a focus on abstract concepts and ideas, and into a feeling, a vague feeling of that which is pushed further down into the subconscious: the word as such. And what resulted from this? This gave rise to a very specific reality for the life of the human soul: the earlier human being perceived the content of the word and the conceptual content of ideas in consciousness as undifferentiated. Now the conceptual content became separated. But in the early stages, it still retained something of what had once been present in the undifferentiated unity of word, concept, and representation. People spoke of “concepts” and of the “Idea,” but one can, I would say, almost touch it with one’s hands even in Plato—that the Idea was still felt in its fullness of content, spiritually. When people spoke of the Idea, it still contained something of what had previously been inwardly perceived in the undifferentiated concept of the word. So people were already approaching the Idea, which is grasped as a mere concept, but this grasp still retained something of what had been understood in the old resonance of the word. And as this progression took shape, the content of the world that people grasped spiritually became what was then expressed in the concept of the Logos. One has the concept of the Logos only when one knows that it embodies this movement toward the idea, but without any clinging to the old concept of the word in the grasping of this idea. And when people spoke of the Logos as the world-creating principle, they were no longer clearly, but only vaguely, aware that this world-creating spiritual principle contains something that had been grasped in earlier times through the concept of the word.

[ 15 ] One must take into account this very special nuance of the soul’s experience of the external world in the Logos. There lived a very special nuance of spiritual perception—the perception of the Logos. Aristotle then worked his way toward abstraction and derived subjective logic from it. For Plato, however, the Idea is the world-creating principle, and in Plato’s thought it is still imbued with concrete spirituality, because it still contains remnants of the old concept of the Word; for it is, in essence, the Logos, albeit in a veiled form.

[ 16 ] And so one can imagine it this way: What entered into the human being Jesus through Christ was to be described, from the perspective of the time, as the world-creating principle. People had a concept for this—the concept that was preserved precisely in the idea of the Logos. The concept of the Logos was there. Through the concept of the Logos, people sought to understand what had been given to the world through the story of Christ Jesus. This concept, which had developed from ancient times and taken on a very special form, was used to express the starting point of Christianity, so that people at that time employed the highest wisdom to fathom this mystery. One must be able to fully immerse oneself in that era—not in the sense of an external observation, but through an inner grasp of how people at that time viewed the world.

[ 17 ] It is a great leap from Plato to Aristotle. But on the other hand, the entire style of the Gospel of John is such that one can see: it came into being because it was based on a living grasp of the world-creating principle and, at the same time, on the author’s familiarity with the now-vanished concept of the Logos. Any attempt to translate the Gospel of John is impossible unless one can engage with the origins of this concept of the Logos. This concept of the Logos truly lived in all its vitality among the leading representatives of wisdom in the most advanced civilized world between the 4th century B.C. and the 4th century A.D.

[ 18 ] When state Christianity emerged—on which the later Catholic Church was modeled—an era had been reached in which, I would say, even the last nuance of the old word, of the old concept of the word, had been lost from the conception of the idea. Aristotle, in essence, did nothing other than extract subjective logic from the Logos and develop the theory of this subjective logic. However, the prevailing state of mind and spirit among humanity at that time took little account of what Aristotle had thus established as subjective logic. On the contrary, it was forgotten and only re-entered later times via the detour of the Arabs. It lived on; but in the way it lived on outside of this detour—through direct tradition— people still sensed clearly that they were dealing, on the one hand, with subjective logic, and on the other hand, with the conception of a world-creating principle in the Logos, in which there was still something of what had been grasped in the ancient conception of the resounding of the Word within the human being as the counter-image of the Word falling silent—yet of the Logos that creates nature in its silence.

[ 19 ] Then, in the 4th century A.D., this nuance was lost from the concept of the Logos. It can no longer be found; it disappears. At most, it survives in a few isolated thinkers and mystical seekers. It also vanishes from the general consciousness of even the most representative Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church. And what still appears as a very comprehensive, ideologically spiritualized worldview—for example, in Scotus Erigena—no longer contains the old concept of the Logos, even if the word is used. The old concept of the Logos has been completely filtered down to the abstract concept of the Idea. And the world-creating principle is now understood not through the old concept of the Logos, but through the sublimated or filtered concept of the Idea. This is what emerged in Scotus’s writing on the division of nature, but which has, in essence, already completely disappeared from consciousness: this no longer having the concept of Logos, this transformation of the concept of Logos into the concept of ideas.

[ 20 ] Among the European people—of whom I have said that they have preserved for a later time a more ancient form of development—it was necessary to go back even beyond the time when the concept of the Logos had been active in all its freshness. But this return was made in an abstract form. And this return in an abstract form was even made dogmatic. At the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, it was established that the world and the human being are not to be conceived as divided into body, soul, and spirit, but merely into body and soul, and that the soul possesses certain spiritual qualities.

[ 21 ] That which has been dogmatically established runs parallel to the process of development I have just been discussing. For anyone studying the development of Western civilization from the early Christian centuries—when so much was still permeated by Gnosticism—through the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., it is an extraordinarily interesting fact to observe this fading of the concept of the Logos. And when the Gospels were later translated, it goes without saying that nothing of the sense of the concept of the Logos—as it had prevailed among pre-Christian humanity during the eight centuries centered on the event at Golgotha—could be incorporated into these translations. One must study this peculiarity of the era from which Christianity emerged through such intimate details as well. Today, people are all too eager to solve even the most difficult problems with simplistic terms—terms that are easily appropriated. Yet historical problems such as the one I have just described to you can only be solved if one seeks the preparation for the solution in the assimilation of very specific nuances of human soul life, if one wishes to proceed from the honest premise that we simply do not possess, in the present day and within general culture, that nuance in our soul experience which leads to the concept of the Logos as it is meant in the Gospel of John. Therefore, we must not attempt to understand the Gospel of John using the vocabulary and conceptual framework of the present day. If we try to understand the Gospel of John with this present-day conceptual framework, then superficiality dictates our approach from the very beginning. It is something that must be penetrated with an alert soul’s eye—a task that must also be accomplished historically in such fields, for as far as the history of these fields is concerned, the situation today is actually quite dire. Just in the last few days, I have once again had to allow an extraordinarily significant fact to come before my soul in connection with this chapter.

[ 22 ] I was reminded of a letter written by one of the most esteemed theologians—the letter was not addressed to me. This esteemed contemporary theologian spoke out against anthroposophists, Irvingians, and the like. He confuses everything. In particular, however, one point stands out in a curious way in his argument: “I,” he said of himself regarding this kind of view that turns to the supersensible, as anthroposophy seeks to do, “have no faculty for it; I must limit myself to everything that human experience provides.”

[ 23 ] A theologian whose profession it is to speak constantly about the supernatural—one who has become famous for writing voluminous books on the historical development of the supernatural in human evolution, books that serve as an authority for countless people today whose views matter— a contemporary theologian admits that he has no faculty for the supernatural, but wishes to stick to “human experience”! Yet he speaks of the supernatural and does not say: “I want to stick to human sensory experience, therefore I reject all theology”—no, he becomes a famous theologian in our time! Do we not, my esteemed audience, need to keep a watchful eye on everything that today—one might say—is, in a certain sense, dictating the course of our youth, yet at the same time proves to be an inner impossibility?

[ 24 ] It is necessary to grasp with great clarity how one is to proceed toward genuine and honest knowledge. This can perhaps be seen precisely in problems such as the problem of the Logos, and anyone who understands what anthroposophy has to say about such a problem should recognize that anthroposophy does not take the easy way out, that it seeks to investigate seriously and honestly, and that it comes into conflict with all manner of contemporary trends precisely because people today harbor either outright hatred or fear of such thoroughness—a thoroughness that must, however, be strived for, and that we need in all areas of scientific life. I ask you: Does the world of opposition—which passes such hasty judgments on anthroposophy—even know what anthroposophy is actually concerned with? Does it know that anthroposophy grapples with problems such as the problem of the Logos, which is, after all, only one detail, albeit an important one? It would indeed be the duty of those who set the tone in scientific life today to first take a look at what they are judging from the outside. Admittedly, the fact is that one can comfortably go along with outward life today—and this certainly applies to many people—if one does not subject oneself to the inconvenience of conducting serious research. But when one is so attached to comfort, one fails to notice how powerful the forces of decline are in our present civilization. The attitude of “after us, the deluge” dominates the current mainstream scientific world to a very great extent.

[ 25 ] That is what I have sought to illustrate today with regard to an important problem in linguistic-historical research. It is my hope that, as my esteemed fellow students in particular come to see more and more how conscientiously we are attempting to address precisely those problems that are so often neglected by mainstream research, an appreciation will grow—especially among the younger generation—for the need to pursue such paths. I cherish this hope, and I also know that if sufficient work is done to foster enthusiasm and a commitment to the truth, then what we need to restore the vital forces of human civilization must surely be achieved. Perhaps, for a time, certain forces of darkness may suppress what we are striving for from here. In the long run, they will not be able to do so if reality corresponds to our will, if there is truly some light contained in what anthroposophy seeks. For the truth has paths that only it can find, and which the forces of darkness cannot discover. Let us unite, old and young, young and old, so that we may develop a clear vision for discovering such paths of truth!