The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I pointed out the significant turning point in the development of Western civilization that occurred in the 4th century A.D., and I noted how, at that time, Greek wisdom—the very wisdom through which people sought to express the depths of Christianity in a wise manner—began to disappear from European civilization. The actual date of this disappearance lies somewhat later. It occurred when Emperor Justinian declared the writings of Origen heretical, abolished the Roman consulship, and closed the Greek philosophical school in Athens, so that the bearers of Greek wisdom were forced to flee to the East and, in a sense, withdrew from what European civilization had become. What had spread from the East as far as Greece, and what had then taken on its own distinct form in Greece—that was one aspect.

[ 2 ] The other aspect, however, was that the Mithras cult was intended to suggest, through a significant external ritual, how human beings should rise above—through their spiritual and soul aspects—all that could be comprehended through the convergence of beings in the planetary sphere with earthly forces, and how these human beings could feel themselves to be fully human. This was precisely what the Mithras cult was meant to symbolize. And this Mithras cult, which sought to reveal the human being to himself, also disappeared after it had spread from the Danube region up into Central and Western Europe. And what took the place of these two currents in Europe—one a cultic current and the other a current of wisdom—was, at first, a narrative of the events in Palestine that followed the outward facts. And so one can say: Neither could a cult take root in Europe at first that would have seen in Christ Jesus the conqueror of all that humanity had to overcome in the course of world development, nor could that which sought to grasp the true mysteries of Christianity through wisdom take root in this Europe; instead, the external narrative of the events in Palestine spread. But what was to be conceptually established regarding these events in Palestine became immersed in a legalistic mode of thinking, in which the exploration of the mysteries of the world was replaced by the establishment of dogmas through majority decisions of the councils and so on.

[ 3 ] Now, it is precisely this fact that shows that a significant, a tremendous turning point in the development of Western civilization—and thus in the development of all humanity—took place in this 4th century A.D. Everything that had spread from the Orient and taken hold in the eastern part of European civilization was, so to speak, pushed back toward the Orient. The only thing that could maintain its Western character alongside the grasp of the external, sensory world of facts was what had emerged in the Romance world as an attempt at abstract thought.

[ 4 ] How vivid the Greeks’ conceptions of their gods were, and how abstract and conceptual the Romans’ conceptions of their gods were. Essentially, in later times, the ideas the Greeks held about the supernatural world had already become lifeless, even though they were very vivid in themselves, yet relatively lifeless compared to the vivid conceptions of the supersensible worlds that depicted an inner life within these supersensible worlds, as they existed in the earlier Persian form of civilization or in the earlier Indian form of civilization. There, people lived in the supersensible worlds—albeit through an instinctive human perception—but they lived with these supersensible worlds just as, in contrast, a later humanity lives with the sensory world. For the ancient Oriental, the spiritual world was something thoroughly accessible. For the ancient Orient, the spiritual world was something that existed for human beings in terms of its beings just as, for later human beings, other people—let us say—exist as fellow human beings alongside them; and the Greeks had formed their system of concepts out of this living supersensible world. Greek ideas, right down to Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., were not abstract ideas derived from external sensory observation and then abstracted upward; these Greek ideas were still born out of the living, supersensible world, out of an ancient worldview. These living Greek ideas still animated and warmed people, still gave them the necessary enthusiasm for their way of social life, insofar as they were able to participate in these ideas. Certainly, one must never forget that a large part of the Greek people was not allowed to participate; this was the widespread world of slavery. But those people who were the bearers of Greek culture were indeed fully immersed in a world of ideas that was, in essence, a radiance of supersensory-spiritual powers shining down into the earthly world.

[ 5 ] In contrast, however, the Roman world—which was separated from the Greek world only by the sea—appeared quite abstract. The Romans described their gods, one might say, in the same sober, matter-of-fact manner as our natural scientists describe the laws of nature. And while this already expresses the significant shift I wish to point out here, it becomes particularly evident to us when we look very closely at a spiritual reality that has only been partially realized in the course of world history—one that has not yet fully come to fruition. Consider, for a moment, the fate of the ancient Greek people. There is a certain tragedy inherent in this fate of the ancient Greek people. This Greek people, after its great flowering, is wasting away; it is, in essence, disappearing from world history. For what then emerged as a shadow within its territory is, after all, not a true descendant. Suffering from a grave illness in the context of world history, the Greek people are wasting away and bringing forth from their ancient ideas something that, I would say, is the dawn of all later culture—they give rise to Stoicism and Epicureanism, in which, as specific worldviews, what would later be attained in Western civilization in a much more abstract form is already foreshadowed. But one can also see in Stoicism and Epicureanism—and even in later Greek mysticism—that they express a decline of ancient Greek civilization.

[ 6 ] Why, then, in the course of world history, did this Greek civilization have to fall ill and then, in essence, die out? One might say that in this illness and demise of the ancient Greek people lies a significant mystery of world history. Indeed, this Greek people, through what it had inherited as an echo of the ancient Oriental worldview, still saw the soul-spiritual human being in all its glory. And in the earlier times of Greek culture, every human being did indeed see themselves as a soul-spiritual being who had descended from spiritual worlds through birth or conception, who had their home in the supersensible sphere, and who was called to the supersensible spheres. But at the same time, this Greece—even in its heyday, as I have often mentioned—sensed its decline in the course of world history. It sensed that human beings cannot become truly human on earth through this looking upward, through this sole focus on the supersensible worlds. It felt, so to speak, embraced and permeated by earthly powers. Hence that ancient Greek saying: Better to be a beggar in the sensory world than a king in the realm of shadows. — In its ancient times, the Greek had still beheld all the splendor of the supersensible world; but at the same time, by becoming fully human in that Greece, he felt how he could not retain this splendor of the spiritual worlds, how it was slipping away from him, and how his soul became entangled in earthly things; and he feared death, so to speak, because the soul, through life between birth and death, can become estranged from its supernatural homeland. One must certainly describe Greek civilization in terms of this feeling. |

[ 7 ] People like Nietzsche were, in essence, right in their intuition. Nietzsche was right when he called the era of Greek development that preceded the Socratic and Platonic eras the “tragic age” of Greek development. For even in the thinkers of Thales, but especially in Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, we see the twilight of a magnificent worldview about which modern history has nothing more to say. We see the fear of becoming estranged from the supernatural world and of being bound to that which alone remains to us as we pass through life between birth and death—of being bound to the world of Hades, to the world of shadows, which is ultimately what befalls human beings. Yet the Greeks had saved something—they had saved that which appears in its most beautiful bloom in the Platonic idea. I would like to say that with the waning of the ancient world, this Platonic world of ideas—the last glorious remnant of the ancient Orient, which is itself destined to die in Aristotelianism—emerges, yet these Greek ideas do indeed surface. And the Greeks continually sensed how the human “I” is, in human life, actually something that is lost. That was, in essence, the fundamental sentiment of the Greeks. Consider the description I gave of the development of the “I” in my Riddles of Philosophy, where the “I” was connected to thinking and to external perception. But since the entire experience of the “I” is linked to thinking, people felt the “I” even less within their own physicality than they felt it connected to everything that lives out there in the world—to the blooming of flowers, to the lightning and thunder out in the cosmos, to the rushing clouds, to the trees, to the rising mist, and to the falling rain. The Greek felt his “I” connected to all of this. He felt, so to speak, with the powers of the “I,” as it were without the shell of this “I”; rather, he felt: When I turn my gaze outward toward the world of flowers, there my “I” clings; there it blooms with the flowers. — That is what he felt. And one can already say that this Greek culture could not continue. But what would have become of it if it had continued? It did not possess the possibility of continuing in a straight line. What would have become of it? — Human beings would gradually have come to feel themselves as earthly beings who are subhuman, and what is actually the spiritual-soul aspect within the human being would have been felt as something that actually dwells in the clouds and in the flowers, in the mountains, in rain and sunshine, and that comes there to visit one. If Greek culture had continued to develop in a straight line, people would gradually have felt that when they fell asleep in the evening, they could sense the approach of their own “I” in all its radiance, that it was coming to visit them in a special way. But one would also have felt that, when one wakes up again in the morning and engages with the world of the lower senses, one is then, as an earthly human being, really nothing more than an outer shell. A certain sense of alienation from the “I” would have arisen had there been a linear continuation of what one can intuitively perceive as the true fundamental tone, as the true fundamental temperament of the Greek nature.

[ 8 ] It was necessary, so to speak, that the “I”—which was slipping away from human beings, the “I” that was slipping away into nature and the cosmos—be anchored within the human inner being as an organic entity walking upon the earth. This required a powerful impulse. That was, after all, the peculiarity of Orientalism: although it pointed sharply to the “I”—precisely by teaching about repeated earthly lives in relation to the human conception of life—it simultaneously harbored a tendency to alienate this “I” from the human being, to take this “I” away from the human being. That is why the West, which was unable to rise to the heights of Greek civilization, also lacked the strength to receive Greek wisdom in its full form; it allowed it, so to speak, to flow back to the East. Nor did it have the strength to adopt the cult of Mithras; it allowed that, too, to flow back to the East. It had only the strength, drawing from the full robustness of the human being and from earthly human nature, to allow the purely factual events of Palestine to be recounted and to have them affirmed by the dogmatics established by the councils. In a sense, the European human being was initially placed within a form of “personality materialism.”

[ 9 ] This is most clearly evident in the upheaval of the 4th century A.D. At that time, everything that would have fostered a deeper understanding of Christianity—everything that could have given rise to a form of worship that viewed Christ as the Triumphant One, rather than merely as the one sinking under the heavy burdens of the cross, whose triumph one can only glimpse behind the crucifix—gradually receded back to Asia. For the West, this ebb of wisdom and the old ceremonial rite was, first and foremost, a matter of strengthening the ego. From the robust strength of the Nordic barbarian peoples emerged that which was to be the source of this strengthening of the ego within the human body. And while this was taking place in the regions of the Danube countries, in those areas slightly to the south of them, in southern Europe, and in western Europe, Arabism—in forms different from what had previously been Oriental wisdom—was now spreading over from the East. Arabism took root in Spain, and one saw the southwest of Europe flooded with a fantastical culture of the intellect, which in the external artistic world achieved no more than the arabesque—a form that failed to achieve a fusion of the organic with the spiritual-soul. Thus, on the one hand, Europe was filled with the narrative of the purely factual as it related to ritual practices; on the other hand, it was filled with an abstract, fantastical truth and wisdom—that which, once filtered, formed the pure culture of the intellect and which entered Europe via Spain.

[ 10 ] Within this world—in which, then, only narratives of the events in Palestine that focused purely on the external aspects persisted, in which only that which had come through Arabism in the form of fantastical intellectual wisdom persisted—in this world, individual people also emerged — for there are always a few, even within the vast majority of humanity — who began to grasp something of how things actually were. It dawned on their souls that there is indeed a great Christian mystery for which even the highest wisdom is not profound enough to penetrate its full significance, for which even the most intense feeling is not strong enough to shape a ceremonial rite—that something emanated from the cross of Golgotha that must be grasped with the highest wisdom and the boldest feeling. This dawned on individual people. And something like a profound imagination arose within them: In the bread of the Lord’s Supper there was something like a synthesis, like a synthesis of the power of the outer cosmos—which, with all the currents of force flowing down from the cosmos to the earth, permeates this earth and conjures up vegetation from it; then what is entrusted to the Earth from the cosmos, what then wells up from the Earth, is synthetically summarized in the bread and constitutes the human body.

[ 11 ] And something else, too, passed through all the mists—I might say—that had settled over the ancient traditions; something else passed into these European ways—something that, admittedly, had its origin in the East, but which penetrated through the mists and was understood by a few. That was the other mystery that followed the mystery of the bread—the mystery of the holy chalice in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of Christ Jesus as it dripped down; that was the other side of the mystery of the world. Just as everything that constitutes the essence of the cosmos is gathered together in the bread, so everything that constitutes the essence of human nature and being is gathered together in the blood; in bread and blood—for which the wine was meant to be only the outward symbol— in bread and blood this was expressed for these European sages, who had truly developed as if from mysterious places of mystery, towering far above the bulk of the European population, which could only hear the facts about Palestine and which, as it grew into scholarship, only gradually found its way into the abstract fantasy of Arabism. Among these people, who were equally distinguished by something that was like the ripest, overripe fruit of Oriental wisdom and at the same time the ripest fruit of European sensibility and feeling, there developed what they called the Mystery of the Grail. But, they told themselves, the Mystery of the Grail cannot be found on earth.

[ 12 ] People have become accustomed to developing a way of thinking that reached its highest flowering in Arabism. People are accustomed to not looking into the meaning of external facts, but merely allowing these external facts to be recounted to them in terms of their sensory reality. One must penetrate to the very heart of the mystery of the bread, which is said to have been broken by Christ Jesus in that very chalice, into which the blood was then caught by Joseph of Arimathea, and which chalice was then carried off to Europe, but, as the legend tells, was held by angels above the earth’s surface—high above the earth’s surface—until Titurel came and created the temple on Montsalvatsch for this Grail, this holy chalice, this chalice encompassing the mystery of the bread and blood. In this sacred, spiritual temple, those who had thus become European initiates sought to gaze—through the mists of abstraction and through the mists of mere factual narratives—upon the mystery of the Grail, the mystery of the cosmos that had vanished with etheric astronomy, and the mystery of the blood that had vanished with the ancient medical worldview. Just as the ancient medical worldview gave way to abstract thinking, so too did the ancient etheric astronomy give way to abstract thinking. This had reached its highest flowering at a certain time, precisely through the Arabs in Spain. It was in this Spain that one could not find the mystery of the Grail outwardly among the people. There was only abstract intellectual wisdom. Among the Christians there was only an external recounting of facts; among the Arabs and the Moors, a fantastical development of the intellect. And high above this earth alone did the Holy Grail hover, and only those to whom divine powers had granted the necessary abilities could enter this spiritual temple, this Holy Grail, this temple enclosing the mysteries of the bread and the blood. It is no coincidence that it was to be found in Spain, where one truly had to venture miles beyond what earthly reality offered, where thorny hedges had to be breached in order to reach the spiritual temple that enclosed the Holy Grail.

[ 13 ] The concept of the Holy Grail developed out of such emotional premises. The invisible church, the supernatural church—which can nevertheless be found on earth—was what the mystery of the Grail encompassed. It was something that existed directly, yet it cannot be found by those who remain indifferent to the world within themselves. In ancient times, the priests of the mysteries would go out from the mysteries into the world, look around among the people, and, upon seeing a person’s aura, say to themselves: “This is someone we must admit into the mysteries”; this is another whom we must admit into the Mysteries.” — One did not need to ask; one was chosen. The initiative did not need to arise from within the person themselves; one was chosen, one was brought into the sacred places of the Mysteries. By the 11th, 12th, 9th, and 10th centuries, that time was already over. What had to be established within the human being through the Christ force—which had entered European civilization—was that which impelled him to ask: What are the mysteries of existence? — And no one could approach the Grail who wandered and passed through the outer world with an indifferent, sleepy inner state. It was said that only those who felt the impulse within their souls to inquire into the mysteries of existence—both cosmic existence and inner human existence—could penetrate the wonders, that is, the mysteries of the Holy Grail. And since then, this has essentially remained the case. Only after people had once been directed, around the middle of the Middle Ages, toward this act of questioning—toward this imperative to ask—did a major setback occur, beginning in the early 14th century, that is, in the first third of the 14th century. Fewer and fewer remained of those who had once inquired into the wonders of the Holy Grail, and souls grew increasingly inactive. They now turned their gaze to the outward forms of human existence on Earth and to that which can be observed, counted, weighed, measured, and calculated in the cosmos. But what has remained is this sacred call, which entered European civilization as early as the early Middle Ages: to inquire into the mysteries of the cosmos just as much as into the inner mysteries of the human being—that is, into the mysteries of the blood. After all, people have gone through, in the most varied phases, what materialism, with all its forces, was bound to bring upon European civilization. Those were indeed powerful words, even if they have largely faded away. One need only consider how great the opportunity was for significant words to resound within European civilization. That which was created for a particular age—the narration of the external facts of Palestine, the permeation of these external facts with Arab culture, which was then taken up by medieval scholasticism as medieval Christian philosophy—was significant for a certain age. But just as it developed out of an era of greater wisdom and greater ceremonialism—which were merely pushed back into the Orient—so, too, did what emerged there fail to grasp the need to listen to the supersensory mysteries of Christianity, to the mysteries of the Holy Grail. And all the truly compelling voices that rang out in the Spring Age—and there were quite a few of them—were silenced just as thoroughly by Roman Catholicism, which was sinking deeper and deeper into dogmatism, just as Gnosticism—as I also hinted at again yesterday—was eradicated root and branch.

[ 14 ] One must not pass negative judgment on the period from the 4th century A.D. through the 12th and 13th centuries, because of the numerous, I would say, resounding with holy sweetness and overripeness through European civilization—which, incidentally, was barbaric—only the somewhat clumsy voice of a man who could not write has survived: that of Wolfram von Eschenbach. “Ex” is still significant enough; it was spared by what became established as dogma in Europe—and which, in essence, eradicated those powerful voices that, albeit amid struggle and bitterness, had sounded the call for the Holy Grail. And those who sounded the call for the Holy Grail sought to let it resound as freedom dawning within the dulled soul. They did not want to take away human freedom; they did not want to impose anything on him; he was to be a seeker. He was to seek the wonders of the Grail from the depths of his soul. What has been lost there in terms of spiritual life was truly even greater than its opposite, even if the latter is not without a certain greatness of its own. And when that which the servants of the Holy Grail had designated as a spiritual path was supplanted by the physical path to the physical Jerusalem in the East—when the Way of the Cross to the Grail was supplanted by the Crusades to the physical Jerusalem—and when Godfrey of Bouillon, in opposition to Rome, sought to establish an external kingdom in Jerusalem, letting his cry “Away from Rome,” it was, however, less evocative than that of Peter of Amiens, which acted like a powerful suggestion to translate what the servants of the Holy Grail had meant spiritually into the material realm.

[ 15 ] This was also one of the paths taken by materialism—the path toward the physical Jerusalem rather than the spiritual Jerusalem, which was to preserve within Titurel’s temple that which remained of the Mystery of Golgotha in the Holy Grail. Titurel, so it was said, had brought it down from the clouds—where the angels had kept it suspended—while Arabism and purely external accounts of events prevailed—Titurel had brought it down, the Holy Grail, to the earthly sphere. But the materialistic age did not begin to inquire about it. Lonely people, isolated individuals, people in “dullness”—not exactly in wisdom, like Parzival—were the ones who set out on paths toward the Holy Grail, but they, too, did not really understand how to ask the right question. And even before the path of spiritual materialism—which then began in the first third of the 14th century—there was already the other path of materialism, which, in essence, had already turned toward the East, toward the physical Jerusalem. And modern humanity experienced this tragedy; it had to and must pass through this tragedy in order to be inwardly moved by it and thus truly become seekers. Modern humanity had to and must experience this tragedy—that the light which had once come to it from the East was not recognized as spiritual light, that the spiritual light was pushed aside, and instead the physical land, the physical materiality of the Orient, was sought. People began to seek the physical Orient in the Middle Ages, after having set aside the spiritual Orient at the end of antiquity.

[ 16 ] This is the European situation, and our situation today remains within this European context. For as long as we understand the true, innermost call of humanity, we are—and must be—seekers of the Holy Grail. Humanity’s aspirations, as they have emerged since the Crusades, must still undergo a transformation, a metamorphosis into the spiritual. We must once again come to such an understanding of the cosmic worlds that we can seek the origin of Christ within them. As long as these cosmic worlds are grasped only through external, physical astronomy, they cannot, of course, be understood as the home of Christ, for from what the astronomer teaches today as the mystery of the heavens—for whose description he has only geometry, mathematics, and mechanics, and for whose observation he has only the telescope—from these heavens Christ could not have descended to Earth to incarnate in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. For this incarnation cannot be understood either if one merely gets to know the human being in the same way that, in order to study him, one takes him out of living life and into the clinic, where one dissects the corpse in order to then form ideas about the living human being from the corpse. The ancients had a living astronomy; they had a living medicine. We must once again seek a living astronomy, a living medicine. Just as a living astronomy will show us a heaven, a cosmos, that is truly permeated by that spirituality from which Christ can descend, so, in turn, revitalized medicine will present the human being to us in such a way that we can grasp him with our knowledge, with our understanding, right down into the mystery of his blood, right into that inner organic sphere where the forces of the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I” are transformed into physical blood. The moment we have grasped the mystery of the blood through true medical knowledge, and the moment we have comprehended the world sphere—the cosmic sphere—through a spiritualized astronomy, we will understand how Christ was able to descend from these cosmic spheres to Earth, and how he was able to find on Earth the human body that could receive him through its blood. This is the mystery of the Grail, which must be sought in earnest in this way: to set out with our whole being—head and heart—on this path toward the spiritual Jerusalem. This is the task of modern humanity. It is remarkable how that which is to come weaves itself objectively through the sphere of existence. And if it is not perceived in the right way, it is perceived externally; it becomes externalized and materialized. Just as the Christians first made their way to Jerusalem, so now groups of the Jewish people are making their way to Jerusalem, thereby once again expressing a phase of materialism and showing how that which should be understood spiritually by modern humanity in all its parts is now, after all, understood materialistically. But the time must come when the mystery of the Grail can once again be sensed in the right way. You know, I mentioned this in my Outline of Esoteric Science; I have, so to speak, woven it into the text that articulates what is to be sought on this path of spiritual science, and through this I have pointed to what we must attain as a kind of image and imagination—but which must be sought through serious spiritual effort and deep human feeling precisely as the path to the Grail.

[ 17 ] We'll talk more about this here again tomorrow.