The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] A line of thought that I began before our course was launched will only become fully understandable if we go even further back in our examination of the development of humanity in recent history, for we have, after all, essentially only provided a few initial insights into human development in the 19th century. Today, let us trace the spiritual development of humanity back a bit further, specifically to an extraordinarily important turning point in the development of Western civilization—that turning point which occurred in the 4th century A.D. In this 4th century A.D., a figure emerges whose memory has, in a sense, remained vivid for Western civilization: Aurelius Augustinus. In him we actually see a figure who had to struggle intensely, on the one hand, with what had come down from ancient times—that which, in the early centuries of Christianity, sought to establish Christianity on the basis of a certain ancient wisdom—and, on the other hand, with an element the one that ultimately prevailed in Western civilization—one that rejected this older way and limited itself to understanding Christianity in a more outwardly material sense, not imbuing it with the ideas of ancient wisdom, but simply recounting its actual founding history and then, as best as was possible at the time, comprehending it intellectually.

[ 2 ] These struggles between these two currents—I would say, between the current of a wisdom-based Christianity and a Christianity that appears, to a greater or lesser extent, to be based on a materialistic conception—these struggles were felt most intensely by the souls of the 4th century and the early 5th century. And in Augustine, humanity has preserved the memory of precisely such a figure who went through these struggles. We must simply be fully aware today that historical documents convey almost entirely erroneous impressions of what actually existed before the 4th century A.D. As clear as this has been since the 5th century, so unclear are, in fact, all common notions about the centuries that preceded it. But if we first consider what most people might actually know about this period before the 4th century A.D., we are directed to two areas: one that is more a realm of, shall we say, knowledge—an area cultivated primarily in schools—and another that is more a realm of worship, veneration, and the religious element. However, something very ancient from human civilization still extends into these two areas; but in a sort of Christian guise, this ancient element was still more or less present in both directions—toward the side of wisdom and toward the side of worship—during the first four Christian centuries.

[ 2 ] These struggles between these two currents—I would say, between the current of a wisdom-based Christianity and a Christianity that appears, to a greater or lesser extent, to be based on a materialistic conception—these struggles were felt most intensely by the souls of the 4th century and the early 5th century. And in Augustine, humanity has preserved the memory of precisely such a figure who went through these struggles. We must simply be fully aware today that historical documents convey almost entirely erroneous impressions of what actually existed before the 4th century A.D. As clear as this has been since the 5th century, so unclear are, in fact, all common notions about the centuries that preceded it. But if we first consider what most people might actually know about this period before the 4th century A.D., we are directed to two areas: one that is more a realm of, shall we say, knowledge—an area cultivated primarily in schools—and another that is more a realm of worship, veneration, and the religious element. However, something very ancient from human civilization still extends into these two areas; but in a sort of Christian guise, this ancient element was still more or less present in both directions—toward the side of wisdom and toward the side of worship—during the first four Christian centuries.

[ 2 ] These struggles between these two currents—I would say, between the current of a wisdom-based Christianity and a Christianity that appears, to a greater or lesser extent, to be based on a materialistic conception—these struggles were felt most intensely by the souls of the 4th century and the early 5th century. And in Augustine, humanity has preserved the memory of precisely such a figure who went through these struggles. We must simply be fully aware today that historical documents convey almost entirely erroneous impressions of what actually existed before the 4th century A.D. As clear as this has been since the 5th century, so unclear are, in fact, all common notions about the centuries that preceded it. But if we first consider what most people might actually know about this period before the 4th century A.D., we are directed to two areas: one that is more a realm of, shall we say, knowledge—an area cultivated primarily in schools—and another that is more a realm of worship, veneration, and the religious element. However, something very ancient from human civilization still extends into these two areas; but in a sort of Christian guise, this ancient element was still more or less present in both directions—toward the side of wisdom and toward the side of worship—during the first four Christian centuries.

[ 2 ] These struggles between these two currents—I would say, between the current of a wisdom-based Christianity and a Christianity that appears, to a greater or lesser extent, to be based on a materialistic conception—these struggles were felt most intensely by the souls of the 4th century and the early 5th century. And in Augustine, humanity has preserved the memory of precisely such a figure who went through these struggles. We must simply be fully aware today that historical documents convey almost entirely erroneous impressions of what actually existed before the 4th century A.D. As clear as this has been since the 5th century, so unclear are, in fact, all common notions about the centuries that preceded it. But if we first consider what most people might actually know about this period before the 4th century A.D., we are directed to two areas: one that is more a realm of, shall we say, knowledge—an area cultivated primarily in schools—and another that is more a realm of worship, veneration, and the religious element. However, something very ancient from human civilization still extends into these two areas; but in a sort of Christian guise, this ancient element was still more or less present in both directions—toward the side of wisdom and toward the side of worship—during the first four Christian centuries.

[ 6 ] Thus, within this teaching of the old school—which had been passed down after the heliocentric system had already been developed into a kind of esoteric-physical science—a final teaching of wisdom had emerged from ancient, instinctive explorations of wisdom, and this had been preserved as a tradition. People spoke of the influences of the heavens in no other way than by saying: Yes, these influences of the heavens exist; but they govern not only natural phenomena, they also govern the forces of human destiny. And so, in those days, there was definitely a connection between what one might call the study of nature—cosmology—and what later evolved into everything that people now regard as astrology, though in ancient times it had a much more precise character based on direct observation.

[ 7 ] Once a person has, so to speak, entered the planetary sphere on their path to a new birth—as was once believed—and has been received by it into their etheric body, they then enter the Earth. They are received by the Earth. But even then, people did not think merely of the solid Earth; rather, they actually thought of the Earth in its elements. People said to themselves: In addition to being received by the planetary sphere—which would make the human being a super-earthly being, which would make him what he is in reality only as a soul—the human being is received as a child by the elements of the Earth: by fire or warmth, by air, by water, and by the Earth itself. — That was the Earth proper. And through this, it was thought, the etheric body is so imbued, so permeated by these external elements that the temperaments now arise within this etheric body. Thus, these temperaments were conceived as closely bound to the etheric body and, through it, to the human vital organization. Thus, in what is actually physical in the human being—or at least what is revealed through the physical body—this ancient teaching saw something thoroughly spiritual. And I would say that the most human aspect of this teaching was what, for example, can still be clearly seen in the medicine of that time. Medicines and the art of healing had definitely emerged from this view of the relationship between the human etheric body and the planetary system, as well as from the etheric human’s penetration, so to speak, into the higher spheres—into air, water, warmth, and earth—through which the physical imprints of his etheric-soul temperaments found their way into his constitution: black bile, white bile, the other humors—phlegm, blood, and so on. This view, then—that the nature of the human constitution could be recognized in the humors—was something that was commonplace in this teaching. At that time, one did not study the individual organs that could be identified, but rather, in medicine, one studied the mixture of humors and the interpenetration of humors, and one viewed an organ simply as the result of a particular interpenetration of humors. In a healthy person, one observed a specific way in which the humors interpenetrated; in a sick person, one observed an abnormal interpenetration of the humors, so that one can say: The medicine that arose from this doctrine was entirely based on the conception of the aqueous human organism, the fluid human organism. What we today call the understanding of the human organism is, after all, based on the solid human organism, on the earthly human organism. With regard to the conception of the human being, the progression has been from an older understanding of the liquid human being to a more recent understanding of the solid human being with the sharp contours of the organs.

[ 8 ] This development in medical theory runs parallel to the transition from ancient etheric astronomy to modern physical astronomy. Hippocrates’ medicine essentially corresponds to ethereal astronomy, but even well into the 4th century A.D., the achievements of this medical perspective—which relates to the mixture of humors in the human body—remained evident, and indeed in a precise manner, unlike in later tradition. And just as this ancient teaching was obscured beginning in the 4th century A.D., and then, with the 15th century, physical astronomy emerged to replace the old etheric astronomy, pathology—indeed, the entire medical worldview—came to be based on the doctrine of the solid in the human being, of that which, with sharp contours, delimits and defines the human organism. This is essentially the aspect of human development during the inorganic age.

[ 9 ] But we can now also turn our attention to what remains from those times in terms of ritual practices and religious ceremonies. The religious ceremonies were intended more for the general masses; what I have just explained was regarded more as a body of wisdom belonging to the school. The cultic practices that spread from Asia to Europe—and which correspond entirely, as cultic endeavors, to the view I have just outlined for you—are the cult of Mithras, that Mithraic cult which we indeed still find in the early Christian centuries, spreading from the East to the West—a path we can trace along the Danube region all the way to the Rhine region and into France. This Mithras cult, whose external forms you are familiar with, can be briefly characterized by a formula in which the conqueror of the Mithras bull is depicted imaginatively and pictorially within the context of earthly and cosmic connections: the human being riding the bull and overcoming the bull’s forces. It is very easy today to imagine that such images—which are, after all, all cult images, religious symbolizations, if we may put it that way, that have organically emerged from the ancient wisdom teachings—that such cult images simply arose in an abstract-symbolic way from the ancient wisdom teachings. But it is a completely false notion to believe that there were ancient teachers of wisdom who sat down and said: “Now let’s devise a symbol; for us there is the wisdom teaching, but for the ignorant masses we must devise symbols that can then lead them to their cultic practices and the like.” — Such assumptions would be fundamentally wrong. Modern Freemasons, for example, hold such an assumption, and they think similarly about the nature of their symbolism. But that was not the view of the ancient wisdom teachers. I would now like to explain the view of the ancient wisdom teachers specifically in relation to the Mithraic cult and the perspective I have just outlined. Those people who still had a living understanding of this absorption of the human being by the planetary world with regard to his etheric body, of the human being’s subsequent absorption into the earthly elemental sphere—heat or fire, air, water, earth—and of the formation of black bile, white bile, phlegm, and blood resulting from the influence of these elements on the human etheric being—those who had even a faint inkling of this were also able to pose a significant question to themselves, a question of fundamental importance. They posed a question that one can arrive at when one truly possesses an imaginative insight. The answer to this question was, at that time, an instinctive imaginative insight, but it can be restated today with full consciousness. When one forms an imaginative picture of this entry of the human being from the spiritual world through the planetary sphere into the earthly spheres of fire, air, water, and earth—when one forms such a conception—one comes to say to oneself: Yes, when something enters from the extra-planetary sphere into the planetary sphere and into the earthly sphere and is absorbed by the earthly sphere, it does not actually become a real human being; I mean, if one forms a mental image of what actually comes into being there—if one considers what can be perceived in purely imaginative thought outside the planetary sphere, what enters there and is absorbed by the planetary sphere, and what is then grasped by that which emanates from the earthly sphere—if one has this as an imaginative vision, then no human being results from it. One does not arrive at the concept of a human being. One arrives at the concept that is most clearly reflected not when one imagines a human being, but when one imagines a bull, a cow. — The ancient sages said to themselves: If there were only that which descends as an extraplanetary being into this planetary sphere of becoming, then no human beings would live on Earth. One does, however, they said to themselves, when first considering this, arrive at the idea of a being drawing in from the extraplanetary into the planetary and earthly spheres; but when one now seeks to form a fully three-dimensional, imaginative picture from what one has in these ideas, it does not become a human being—it becomes merely a bull. And if one understands nothing else in the human being but this, one understands in the human being only the bull-like aspect. — The ancient wisdom teachers formed these ideas; this concept existed. Now they said to themselves: Thus, the human being must struggle against this bull-like aspect with something even higher. He must overcome that which this wisdom presents as a vision. As a human being, he is more of a being who comes merely from the extraplanetary sphere, enters the planetary sphere, and is seized by the earthly elements; he has something within him that is more than that.

[ 10 ] I would like to say that these teachers of wisdom arrived at this concept, and that is why they then depicted the bull, placed Mithras upon it—the struggling human who overcomes the bull and says to himself: I must have a far higher origin than that of such a being as was conceived in the sense of that ancient wisdom teaching. — And now these teachers said to themselves: This ancient wisdom teaching does indeed contain a hint at what is at stake here. This ancient wisdom teaching looks up toward the planetary sphere of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and so on; but it also says: As the human being approaches the Earth, he is continually lifted up from the Sun, so that he does not merge into the earthly realm, so that he does not remain merely that which arises from the mixture of black and white bile, phlegm, and blood, and from the etheric body—when he is taken up by the planetary sphere, and when the astral body is taken up by the other planetary sphere through Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. What lifts the human being up dwells in the Sun. Therefore, these teachers said to one another: If we make the human being aware of the solar forces dwelling within him, then he is Mithras, who conquers the bull!

[ 11 ] That, then, was the cult image. It was not meant to be merely a contrived symbol, but was intended to represent the actual fact—the cosmological fact. The religious ceremony was more than a mere outward sign; it was something that was, so to speak, carved out of the very essence of the world itself.

[ 12 ] This cult-like phenomenon was something that had existed since very ancient times, something that had been brought over from Asia to Europe. It was, I would say, Christianity viewed from one perspective—the external, astronomical perspective—for Mithras was the power of the sun within the human being. Mithras was the human being who rebelled against the merely planetary and earthly. And now a certain striving arose, the ramifications of which we can perceive everywhere when we look back to the early Christian centuries. There arose the striving to combine the historical fact—the Mystery of Golgotha—with the cult of Mithras. At that time, there were many people—especially among the Roman legions—who brought what they had experienced in Asia, and indeed throughout the Orient, to the lands along the Danube, deep into Central Europe, and even as far as Western Europe. In what they brought back as the Mithras cult, there were feelings that—without reflecting the Mystery of Golgotha—nevertheless contained thoroughly Christian views and Christian feelings. The Mithras cult was regarded as a concrete practice relating to the solar forces within the human being. However, it was not yet recognized within this Mithras cult that, through the Mystery of Golgotha, this solar force itself had descended as a spiritual being and had united with the human being Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 13 ] And now—and the further east we go in our investigations, the clearer it becomes—there were schools of wisdom in the East well into the 4th century A.D. that gradually received reports, news, and knowledge about the Mystery of Golgotha, about Christ. They now endeavored to spread a message throughout the world, and for a time there was a definite effort to infuse into the Mithras cult that which corresponds to supersensible perception: The true Mithras is Christ, and Mithras is his forerunner; one must infuse into those powers within the human being that conquer the bull the power of Christ. Transforming the Mithraic cult into a Christ-centered cult was a movement that flourished intensely in the first centuries after Christ, well into the 4th century. And I would like to say that the spread of the Mithraic cult was followed by a movement that sought to Christianize it. A synthesis was sought between Christianity and the Mithraic cult. An ancient and significant image of the human being—Mithras riding and defeating the bull—was to be brought into connection with the Christ-being. One might say: There was a truly glorious endeavor in this direction, and in a certain sense, this endeavor was powerful.

[ 14 ] Anyone who observes the spread of Eastern Christianity—the spread of Arianism—can see in the spread of Arianism how an element of Mithras is present within it, even though it is already greatly weakened. And any translation of the Ulfilas Bible into modern languages remains incomplete unless one recognizes that Mithraic elements were still at play in the terminology used by Ulfilas (Wulfila). But who today still takes these deeper connections into account when considering linguistic elements? In Greece, well into the 4th century, there were philosophers who worked to reconcile the ancient etheric astronomy with Christianity, and from this arose that true Gnosis which was thoroughly eradicated by later Christianity, so that only a few fragments of the literary evidence of this Gnosis remain. What do people today—as I said the other day—actually know about Gnosis, which they foolishly claim our Anthroposophy is merely a rehash of? Even if it were, these people could not possibly know, for all they know of Gnosis is what is written about it in Western Christian critical writings. They are familiar with the quotations that the opponents of Gnosticism have left behind. After all, hardly anything remains of Gnosticism other than what can be expressed, for example, by the following comparison: Just imagine if Mr. von Gleich were to succeed in eradicating all existing anthroposophical literature, leaving nothing but his quotations; and if later on someone were to attempt to reconstruct this anthroposophy based on those quotations, then the approach taken in the West would be roughly the same as that taken with Gnosticism. So when people say that modern anthroposophy imitates Gnosticism, even if it did, they couldn’t possibly know it, because they don’t know Gnosticism—they know it only from its opponents!

[ 15 ] In Athens, in particular, there was a school of wisdom well into the 4th century—and even longer—that sought to reconcile ancient etheric astronomy with Christianity. The last remnants of this view—that human beings come from higher worlds through the planetary sphere into the earthly sphere—still shine through the writings of Origen and even through the writings of the Greek Church Fathers. One can see this shining through everywhere; and it shone particularly brightly through the writings of the true Dionysius the Areopagite. This Dionysius the Areopagite, after all, left behind a teaching that was a pure synthesis between etheric astronomy and what was alive in Christianity: that the forces—which were, so to speak, astronomically or cosmically localized in the Sun—entered the earthly sphere through Christ, via the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and that this created a certain relationship with the Earth—one that had not existed before—in relation to all the higher hierarchies: the hierarchies of the angels, the hierarchies of the Wisdom Beings, the hierarchies of the Thrones, the hierarchies of the Seraphim, and so on. An interweaving of this doctrine of the hierarchies with etheric astronomy—that was what was present in the original Dionysius the Areopagite.

[ 16 ] In the 6th century, attempts were made to obscure the traces of even the earlier teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite, and they were reworked in such a way that what remained was essentially nothing more than an abstract spiritual doctrine. As the teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite stand today, they are indeed a spiritual doctrine that no longer has much to do with etheric astronomy. And so he is referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius. In this way, the wisdom teachings were doomed to decline: on the one hand, by distorting Dionysius, and on the other hand by eradicating that teaching—which was still very much alive in Athens—that sought to unite etheric astronomy with Christianity, and by eradicating the cult of Mithras.

[ 17 ] And then figures such as Constantine did the rest; his actions were reinforced in later times by the fact that Emperor Justinian had the Athenian School of Philosophy closed, so that the last people who had been engaged in reconciling ancient etheric astronomy with Christianity were forced to emigrate and found a refuge in Persia, where they could at least eke out a living. Indeed, following the same agenda that led him to close the Athenian School of Philosophy, Justinian also had Origen declared a heretic, and he abolished the Roman consulship for the same reason—a consulship that had, in truth, been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, yet in which, even as it existed only as a shadow, people still sought a kind of resistance against the Roman concept of the state, which had become subsumed into pure jurisprudence. The ancient human element still associated with the office of consul was allowed to disappear into the state imperialism of Roman culture.

[ 18 ] Thus, in the 4th century, we see fading away that which, as a form of religious worship, could have brought Christianity closer to humanity; we see fading away that which, as an ancient wisdom teaching, sought to unite within an ethereal astronomy with the understanding of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the West, we see taking its place that which already carried within it the seeds of later materialism—a materialism that could only be fully theorized in the 15th century, when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, but which was essentially prepared by the materialization of that which had come over from the East in a spiritual form.

[ 19 ] We must certainly take this course of European civilization into account. Otherwise, it will never become entirely clear to us what the actual foundations of European civilization are. And otherwise, it will never become entirely clear to us how it could actually have been possible that, time and again, when people journeyed to the East, they were able to bring back powerful spiritual inspirations from that region. Above all, throughout the entire early Middle Ages, there was a lively trade route from the East up the Danube, following precisely those paths that the ancient cult of Mithras—which, of course, had already faded away by the early Middle Ages—had taken. The people who traveled there as merchants to and from the East, found time and again in the East that which had preceded Christianity, yet which was already pointing toward what would follow Christianity. And we see this, too, when the Crusaders journeyed to the East: how they drew inspiration from the remnants they were still able to discern there, and how they brought ancient wisdom back to Europe. I said: This ancient wisdom was linked to the ancient medicine of the humors. — Time and again, the people who traveled to the East—including those who went as Crusaders or with the Crusades to the East and then returned to Europe—continually brought remnants of this ancient medicine back to Europe. These remnants of an ancient medicine were then passed down throughout Europe by tradition. Individuals who, at the same time, had been ahead of their time in their own spiritual development then underwent remarkable transformations, such as the figure known as Basilius Valentinus.

[ 20 ] What kind of person was she, then? She was someone who, among the people with whom she had spent her youth, had adopted—sometimes quite unwisely—the tradition of ancient juice medicine, in one form or another. Until very recently—though this is less the case today—traces of this medical tradition, which had been carried over from the Orient through migratory movements, were still present in the old farmers’ sayings; these traditions had essentially taken root in peasant culture and were then passed down to those who grew up in that environment—who were, as a rule, the ones who later became priests. In particular, those who became monks came from peasant backgrounds. They had heard this or that there, but it was simply a distorted, decadent remnant of ancient wisdom. However, they underwent a more independent development. The process of development that took place through Christian theology was, after all, still much freer up until the 15th and 16th centuries than it later became. Then, drawing on their own spirituality, these priests and monks gradually brought a certain order to things. They reflected on what they had heard; drawing on their own genius, they connected the various elements, and thus the writings emerged that have been preserved as the works of Basilius Valentinus. Indeed, through this process, a school even took shape in which Paracelsus and even Jakob Böhme studied. They, too, absorbed what I would call the ancient medical wisdom still alive in the soul of the people. One can indeed observe this in Jakob Böhme—where it is particularly evident—as well as in Paracelsus and others, even if one considers their writings only superficially. But if one examines a work by Jakob Böhme such as his treatise De signatura rerum, one will find in the manner of its presentation that what I have said is plain to see. It is such ancient folk heritage, which, however, essentially contained wisdom that had become distorted within itself. Such ancient folk heritage was by no means as abstract as our modern science is; rather, there was a sense of the objective world embedded in the words. People sensed within the words. Just as we seek to recognize things in concepts today, so did people sense within the words. They knew that human beings had drawn the words from the objective essence of the world itself. You can see this when Jakob Böhme goes to such great lengths to sense what is actually contained in the syllable “Sul,” and what, in turn, is contained in the syllable “fur”: Sulfur. Look, for example, at how in De signatura rerum Jakob Böhme struggles—I would say—to extract something from an inner word, an inner essence of the word, to extract something from the word “sulfur” in order to arrive at an essence. There is certainly a sense that, when one experiences the essence of the words, one arrives at something real. In earlier times, so it was felt, that which the human soul had absorbed as it was drawn from otherworldly spheres through the planetary sphere into earthly existence was embedded within the words. But what the human soul, in its closer connection to the mixture of vital forces, placed into the words when the child was learning to speak—that was still something objective; it was still something in language that was like a divine teaching, not merely a human one. And in Jakob Böhme we see this beautiful aspiration, which can be expressed roughly as if he had felt: I would like to see in language something where, even behind the phenomena, living gods still work into the human organism to shape language within the human being and, along with language, a certain treasure of wisdom. There we see how the ancient treasure of wisdom continues even into later times, though now absorbed by modern thought—a thought that is, admittedly, scarcely hinted at in such elemental spirits as Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. And into this is now imprinted that which is purely intellectual and theoretical—that which, arising from human physical thinking, grasps only the physical. We see how, on the one hand, purely physical astronomy arises, and on the other hand, physiology and pathology—focused exclusively on the human body’s strictly limited organs—in short, the entire medical tradition. And so, gradually, human beings find themselves surrounded by a world they can comprehend only physically—a world in which, as cosmic beings, they naturally cannot exist. They now comprehend, in and of themselves, only that which they have become through the Earth, for it is through the Earth that they have become these strictly limited physical, organic beings. He can no longer find harmony between what is given to him from the cosmos through knowledge—through physical astronomy—and that which lives within his form, which indeed points to something else; but he turns his gaze away from the way in which this human form points to something else. He eventually loses all awareness that his striving for uprightness and the particular way in which he uses language—arising from his organism—cannot originate in the Mithraic bull, but only in Mithras himself. He no longer wishes to concern himself with any of this, for he then sails straight into materialism. He must drift into materialism, for religious consciousness itself has, after all, taken from Christianity only the outer material appearance and dogmatized this outer material appearance—not by attempting to recognize, out of some wisdom, how the Mystery of Golgotha took place, but by attempting to determine what the truth is through decrees.

[ 21 ] Thus we see the transition from the ancient Oriental way of thinking, based on an understanding of the world, to the distinctive Roman-European mode of “determination.” How was something “determined” in the Orient, and how, based on this instinctive Oriental perception, did something about the mystery of Golgotha also have to be “determined”? - By taking the knowledge that had emerged from the world—by looking up into the worlds of the stars—the mystery of Golgotha also emerged from that knowledge, even if it was instinctive and elementary, or at least was supposed to emerge. That was the path taken in the East. From the 5th century onward, this path was no longer followed. Earlier councils, having replaced the Asian approach with the Egyptian one, had already pointed out that one should not determine the true nature of the Mystery of Golgotha in this way, but rather that the decision should be left to the majority of the Fathers gathered at the councils. The legal principle was substituted for the Eastern principle of knowledge; dogmatics was transferred into the realm of law. People no longer felt that the truth should be determined from the conscience of the world. People came to believe that, through council decrees, one could determine in a legal manner whether the divine and human natures in Christ Jesus were two natures or one nature, and so on. We see the Egyptian-Roman-legalistic element making its way into the innermost fabric of Western civilization—that which is still so deeply ingrained today in people who are not inclined to let truth itself determine their relationship to it, but who wish to decide based on their emotions and therefore have no other standard for determination than the majority in some form. We will speak further about this tomorrow.