The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] During this course, each day of the week is devoted to a specialized examination of the nature of education. Let us use today’s Sunday lecture—which, in its nature and content, stands apart from the series of educational lectures—to lift our gaze from earthly human education, which we are to master as an art, to the great divine educators of all humanity, to the world educators who have guided humanity from epoch to epoch throughout the course of historical development, so that in each epoch humanity should strive for different things—particularly in religious and moral terms—in connection with its understanding of the world.

[ 2 ] When one surveys history as a whole, it appears—despite the manifold troughs and lowlands that stand in opposition to the peaks of humanity’s ascending development—as a continuous education of the human race, as an ever-renewed permeation with what might be called humanity’s religious and moral consciousness.

[ 3 ] The science of initiation that I attempted to describe in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and which is today’s science of initiation—leading us from the mere knowledge of nature to the knowledge of the spirit—has always had a corresponding science of initiation of one kind or another throughout all ages and epochs of human development. And for this science of initiation, the course of human history appears to be threefold.

[ 4 ] One can look back to a very ancient epoch in human development that came to an end around the 8th century B.C. One can then look upon an epoch of human development that derives its splendor and light from the Mystery of Golgotha—from that which entered into this human development through Christ Jesus as an eternal, ever-lasting impulse. And one can then consider a third epoch—an epoch at the dawn of which we actually stand now, and which we will have to deepen precisely through a newer science of initiation.

[ 5 ] Each of these epochs has strived for something beyond what comes to human beings naturally through their inherent development—through reason and intellect, will and feeling—as if of their own accord, and through ordinary earthly education. Each of these epochs has sensed a great cosmic mystery that profoundly affects human destiny. And in each epoch, this cosmic mystery took on a different form in a certain respect, because humanity has undergone different states of soul in the various epochs. Only in today’s abstract age do human souls appear to be of the same nature, ever since they evolved from the animal kingdom—as is assumed today through a hypothesis that is, admittedly, invalid.

[ 6 ] To those who, through a deeper understanding of science, gaze more impartially into the reality of human life, the human soul appears, in the first epoch mentioned, to be of a completely different nature than in that epoch which was able to rejoice in the advent of the Mystery of Golgotha, and yet different still from our own era, in which we must once again seek the Mystery of Golgotha so that we do not run the risk of losing it to intellectual understanding.

[ 7 ] When we look at the nature of human souls in the ancient Orient—from which the wisdom of the Vedas and the philosophy of the Vedanta shine upon us, and which we today once again seek out in the most diverse ways—albeit through many misunderstandings—when we look at these souls, indeed, even when we look at the ancient Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian souls, the Egyptian souls, and even the Greek spirit in its earlier days—as these lectures on pedagogy have shown in recent days—then we must view human souls in those times as being of a completely different nature than they are today.

[ 8 ] These human souls experienced a much more dreamlike, spiritual life than the soul of today, which in its waking life is entirely dependent on sensory impressions, on what the intellect can make of these sensory impressions, and on what has been preserved in memory from these impressions as the soul’s content.

[ 9 ] Everything that is now part of the modern soul was not present in the same way in the souls of an earlier epoch of humanity. Rather, these souls possessed an instinctive, primal wisdom regarding the inner, soul-spiritual life of the human being. What was present was not what we today, out of habit based on our sensory perception, regard as a clearly conscious insight, but rather an inner weaving and living, as we experience it in a weakened and shadowed form in our dream life—an inner life in which the human being was not merely certain that: “You have a soul that ripples through and weaves through the body, constituting your very humanity,” but also “You have a soul that emerged from a divine-spiritual existence before you clothed yourself in a body in earthly life.”

[ 10 ] One might say: just as in waking dreams, so did human beings experience themselves in those earlier epochs. And they experienced themselves as souls. They experienced themselves as souls in such a way that, for this soul—which was inwardly felt and experienced with elemental vitality—the body was something like a garment, merely a tool for carrying out earthly existence.

[ 11 ] The soul’s consciousness, though dreamlike, was the very state in which the human being lived even while awake. And from this soul experience it became perfectly clear to him that, before he was clothed in a physical body on Earth, he had lived as a soul in a spiritual sphere, in a spiritual world, in a divine realm.

[ 12 ] And so this person from an earlier time knew the soul-spiritual life through direct inner perception. And because he knew this soul-spiritual life through direct perception, he had a completely different awareness of death than humanity has today. People today feel connected to their bodies. Unlike in earlier times, their soul consciousness does not detach itself from their physical consciousness in the same way. And so people today view birth as a beginning and death as an end.

[ 13 ] The elder had such a vivid inner experience of the enduring, eternal nature of the soul that, as he contemplated this spiritual life, he always felt himself to be above birth and death. To him, they were stages of growth, metamorphoses of life. He was fully aware that he existed before he came to earth. This gave him the certainty that he would continue to exist even after passing through the gate of death. Birth and death appeared to him as temporary events in life.

[ 14 ] But human beings always need a science that looks into the spiritual realm to supplement their immediate experience, so that a spiritual science of initiation may reveal to them something beyond what they can grasp through their own inner life and through what earthly education can offer them in ordinary life.

[ 15 ] The ancient initiates—the teachers of wisdom of that earlier humanity, who possessed something akin to instinctive clairvoyance—had to provide humanity with an answer to a very specific question. In spiritual and soul matters, so to speak, the earlier humanity was well-informed. People knew how things stood in the spiritual-soul realm; for they experienced it, as I have just indicated. But what remained a mystery was this: When you enter the physical life through conception and birth, you are clothed in your physical body, which contains the same forces—indeed, the same substances—as the outer, lifeless natural world. You are clothed in something foreign. Between birth and death, you are contained within a body that is a natural body. You are born in a physical sense. This physical birth is foreign to your inner, experienced existence.

[ 16 ] The great question that stood before the soul of the ancient person who gazed into his inner being was not a question of the soul, nor was it a question of the spirit; it was precisely the question of nature—that question which overwhelmed a person when he felt himself filled with his full spiritual and soul values, and when he then sought to understand why he was clothed in a physical body that was foreign to him.

[ 17 ] And so, for the science of initiation, the task was to teach people that the very same forces through which one perceives inner spiritual and soul life can also be directed toward external nature, which otherwise merely presents external phenomena in silence. And if, as that initiatory science taught, one directs—through appropriate training—the powers that otherwise lead only to inner knowledge, to knowledge of the soul, toward stones, plants, animals, the clouds, the stars, and the course of the sun and moon, then one can also perceive the outer world. And then one sees spiritual beings, not only within one’s own inner being, but also in the bubbling spring, in the flowing stream, in the towering mountain, in the drifting cloud, in lightning and thunder, in stone, plant, and animal.

[ 18 ] And so an ancient initiatory science told humankind: You are accustomed to finding the divine within yourself by looking within and vividly sensing your spiritual and soul life. Initiation science, however, trains the powers that otherwise perceive only the Divine in human beings to perceive the Divine in all of nature as well. Through this, you can be assured that, as you are clothed in an outer physical body—which is itself of a Divine nature—your physical birth carries you into earthly existence not from something outside the Divine, but from the Divine itself.

[ 19 ] And so, for an ancient initiatory science, the task was to teach people the great truth: You are not only a child of God by looking within yourself; you are also a child of God by being in your body, which appears in the world through physical birth.

[ 20 ] What a later era summarized in three enlightening, powerful words was precisely what the ancient father initiation presented to the human soul: We are born of God.

[ 21 ] Ex deo nascimur.

[ 22 ] This was the first stage in which initiatory wisdom influenced human beings and gave rise to religious consciousness within them.

[ 23 ] The ancient pagan religions became nature religions because human beings sought to find religious justification for their physical birth within nature. The mystery of nature stood before his soul. And in the “Ex deo nascimur,” the mystery of nature was solved for him, so that he could lead his earthly existence with peace of mind within a religious context, even though from the moment he awoke until he fell asleep, he felt himself to be a spiritual and soul-being transcending the physical.

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[ 24 ] The next stage in human development consisted in the fact that the ancient, dreamlike experience of the soul-spiritual—which human beings carried within themselves, as it were, as an innate awareness of their own being—gradually receded into the background, and human beings learned more and more to make use of the faculties of their physical body. I would say: the dreams of the soul-spiritual, which were inherent in a primal instinct of the human race, faded into an indefinite darkness, and humanity learned—only in the last millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—to make use of the external senses and of the intellect bound to those external senses. And what we today call nature increasingly presented itself to human beings as a direct experience. Whereas the ancient initiates had to bring the spiritual in nature to the forefront of the human soul through wisdom, now the purely physical aspect of external nature stood before the human soul as a question; and to the ancient mystery of man’s earthly nature was added the second great mystery in the historical development of humanity: the mystery of man’s earthly death.

[ 25 ] It was not until the last millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha that human beings truly began to feel death in an intense way during their earthly existence. Whereas they had previously had little sense of their physical body—and all the more sense of their spiritual and soul life—they now felt and experienced themselves within their physical body. And they experienced the event that is mysteriously connected to the physical body as the great mystery of existence in this second epoch of human development: they experienced this mystery of death. We see this mystery of death emerge in an intense form, for example, among the ancient Egyptians, who embalmed corpses because they experienced, in a sense, the historical fear of death—the connection between that in which human beings now felt themselves to be, namely their physical bodies, and death. And while the first mystery for human beings was this: How do I live in my physical, earthly body? — the second great mystery now arose: How do I experience earthly death?

[ 26 ] In that time when human beings looked up toward the spiritual-soul realm by experiencing it directly, as through an instinctive clairvoyance, they knew: When I am no longer connected to this earthly existence, then I no longer belong to the earth; my earthly existence undergoes a metamorphosis, and I am once again connected to the non-earthly realm, to the stars. For the soul knew of the stars in a spiritual way when it instinctively felt alive in its former existence. From the stars, humankind read its destiny. It felt connected to the sun and the moon, and it knew of the stars. But from the spirit in the stars it came from a pre-earthly existence; to the stars—but to the spirit in the stars—it returns when it passes through the gate of death.

[ 27 ] Now all of this became a mystery to him. He looked upon death; he saw in death the end of the human body. He felt the soul intimately connected to this human body. As he deeply pondered this mystery, he asked himself: What will become of me after death? How do I pass through the gate of death? — At first, nothing on earth could have guided humanity out of this mystery.

[ 28 ] The ancient initiates knew how to instruct people regarding the mysteries of nature. They replied to them—if we were to translate it into a later language—as follows: Ex deo nascimur.

[ 29 ] But that which had enabled human beings to know where they had come from in their pre-earthly existence, and where they were to go once they had passed through the gate of death—that which had stood clearly before the souls of the ancients—had now been extinguished from the souls of human beings. The knowledge that human beings instinctively sensed by extending their own soul-spiritual experience to the world of the stars—that was no longer there. Then the great event took place: the world of the stars—the Spirit of the world of the stars, whom a later age called Christ and whom an earlier Greek age called the Logos—descended in substance as a being onto the Earth and incarnated in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth. And so humanity was able to experience the great event in earthly existence: that which an ancient humanity had previously sensed as it looked up to the stars—the Divine, which also included the Divine of the Earth—itself passed through an earthly existence and through death. For the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, was initially the central event for Christians who understood Christianity.

[ 30 ] And this passage of God—who had previously revealed Himself only through the stars—through a human body, through the death of a human body, provided humanity with the solution to the second riddle of life, the riddle of death, as it was discussed by the initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha in what is known as Gnosis.

[ 31 ] Now the Initiates could point out to humanity how that which, in the ancient way, guaranteed eternity—that which dwells in the stars—had entered a human body and, within that body, had overcome death. Now Christ once again became the essence of the entire Spirit, the Logos, and the world. Whereas the ancient initiates had previously pointed to nature and taught people, “Your nature is born of God,” the initiates could now point out to people how they could be connected to the divine being who passed through the human being Jesus of Nazareth—who, in the human being Jesus of Nazareth, passed through death together with the rest of humanity, yet conquered death. And once again, through that science of initiation—now the Christ-imbued science of initiation—one could solve, just as the mystery of nature had been solved in the past, the mystery of death.

[ 32 ] And while in Buddhism we are still told how the Buddha discovered the Four Noble Truths—and how one of these truths dawned on him at the sight of a corpse, where he was so moved by the desolation of the dead human body that we are given a glimpse of how the Buddha, some six centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, upon seeing the dead man, so to speak, reached the final outgrowth of the old worldview—we see how, some six centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, the perspective develops that looks up to the dead man on the cross, to the dead human form. And just as the Buddha believed he had discovered in the dead human form the suffering of life as the last remnant of the old worldview, so now humanity, permeated by Christ, looked upon the dead human form on the cross, upon the Crucifix, and perceived in that dead human form the complete heavenly guarantee of life through death—the death that Christ, in Jesus, had conquered.

[ 33 ] And just as the Egyptians, driven by a historical fear of death, had embalmed their corpses—in a sense to preserve what was natural in human beings before death—in the time when people still said: Ex deo nascimur — so we see the first Christians, who still possessed the impulse of initiated Christianity, burying their dead, but holding a worship service over the dead—in the certainty that the soul united with Christ has conquered death. And the grave becomes an altar. From the Mystery of Golgotha, the human being draws the certainty: if he is united with Christ, who descended to Earth as the essence of the stars and, in human form, underwent life, death, and resurrection, then through this union with Christ he himself, as a human being, will conquer death.

[ 34 ] This was how the essence of God the Father responded to the mystery of life’s nature. This was how the essence of Christ responded to the mystery of life’s death. And death’s sting was taken away. From then on, death was transformed into a metamorphosis of life through a stronger argument than had previously been necessary. In contemplating the mystery of Golgotha, in the certainty that Christ descended to earth and awakened to new life that which is death-bringing in the earth—this now permeated, as evidenced by the Gnosticism that was later eradicated and preserved only in a few remnants — the initiates of Christianity now imbued humanity with that truth, which contains the human truth of the connection between the mortal human being on earth and the Christ, through whom the human being redeems that which is doomed to death within himself and awakens it to life. The initiates now imbued humanity with a new consciousness of immortality.

[ 35 ] The Initiates were able to tell people: Your soul can be united with Him who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; your soul can live through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. By not merely living your earthly life in a natural way, but by living it in such a way that the Kingdom of Christ is awakened within you in all your earthly lives—especially in your interactions with all people—you live in communion with Christ Himself; thus you make the divine Being, Christ, your brother. If you die in death, you die in life, for you die in Christ.

[ 36 ] And to the primordial truth of being born of God the Father could be added life with God the Son, with Christ, which was later incorporated into another three-word saying as a supplement to the “Ex deo nascimur” as:

[ 37 ] In Christo morimur,

[ 38 ] In Christ we die; that is to say, as souls we live.

[ 39 ] And so it was added for humanity in that epoch, which began a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and came to a close around the 15th century A.D. — we are now in a third epoch, which we must first truly understand —, so it was added in the great education of the human race—guided by the divine rulers of the worlds themselves—toward the realization that “We are born of the Father God”: “In the Christ-God we die, that we may live.”

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[ 40 ] Looking back at history, the great mysteries of the first and second epochs are clearly evident to people. The mystery of the third epoch, in which humanity has been living for several centuries, is scarcely mentioned or felt today; yet, on an emotional and subconscious level, this mystery lives in the human soul in the present, just as much in need of a solution as the mystery of man’s earthly nature once did, and then the mystery of man’s earthly death.

[ 41 ] Since the 14th and 15th centuries of the Christian era, humanity has acquired knowledge that penetrates deeply into physical nature. We need only think of how that starry sky—which was once beheld in visions of insight by an ancient humanity, and from which that ancient humanity read its destiny in those visions—has been revealed more and more, through external calculation, geometry, and mechanics, right up to the present day. We need only think of how the science of stones, animals, and plants has spread as a purely natural science.

[ 42 ] It was not so in the first epoch of human development; nor was it yet so in the second epoch of human development—that second epoch in which, above all else, humanity sensed deep within its soul: What the human soul once read from the stars through instinctive clairvoyance has, in its very essence, entered into Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ; this lives among us as the Christ. The people of the second epoch looked to Christ, felt Christ in their hearts, and in this heartfelt communion with Christ, they felt the very same thing that humanity had once known—out of the spirit of the cosmos, within a dreamlike, ancient clairvoyant consciousness—as the justification for earthly existence. Humanity of the second epoch lived, so to speak, in the cosmic expanses by living together with the one who descended from the cosmic expanses to Earth—with the Christ.

[ 43 ] Then came the third epoch of humanity, that epoch in which, looking up into the starry worlds only through calculation, mechanics, the telescope, and the spectroscope, humanity finds in the stars the very same things it finds on Earth—things that are dead or, at best, animated by an ethereal force; that epoch in which humanity can no longer see Christ as the One who came down from the stars, because it no longer perceives in the stars the spiritual that pervades the cosmos. And so the cosmos has become alien to God—and thus also alien to Christ—for humanity.

[ 44 ] Humanity today therefore faces a great danger, in terms of its inner consciousness, of losing Christ. And we are already seeing the first steps toward losing Christ. Divine wisdom—theology, which for centuries lived in complete harmony with the ideas concerning the Christ-revelation—is today, in many cases, no longer able to find the Christ whom God placed in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. And many, when they look back to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, can no longer find the Christ—the spiritual essence, the spiritual being of the cosmos—but instead find only the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Because they now see only a deified nature in the starry sky, they can no longer find in the One who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha the Being whose physical realm is the entire cosmos, but who took up residence in the human being Jesus of Nazareth during the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 45 ] Because all of this can be deeply experienced, those who follow the wisdom of initiation today differ from those who follow only the external, uninitiated natural science. This external, uninitiated natural science has lost the spirit of the cosmos and faces the danger that humanity will also lose the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 46 ] That is why those who, especially in our time, are delving deeper into our knowledge of nature sense how, in the history of human development during the third epoch—since the 14th or 15th century—something like the third great mystery of humanity’s earthly evolution has come to the fore. They look back historically at the first great mystery—the mystery of the nature of the Earth—and at the second great mystery—the mystery of humanity’s death on Earth; and the third great mystery dawns upon them as they acknowledge something that humanity is still reluctant to admit today, yet which the human heart already feels subconsciously with a certain clarity. The initiates of the present age say to themselves: We live in the world that once spoke to humanity as a spirit from the cosmos, so that in this world, humanity was like one who was awake within the cosmos. We live in such a way that humanity began to feel this wakefulness of the cosmos dying out within itself—this connection with Christ, who descended to Earth as the essence of this spiritual cosmos that kept humanity awake—and now we live only in a cosmos that reveals its external nature to us. We live the idealized dream of the cosmos; we live a cosmos that has been calculated, weighed on a scale, and viewed through a spectroscope. That is our dream. Through this, we separate ourselves more from the true Spirit of the cosmos than we remain connected to it as human beings.

[ 47 ] Therefore, those who are part of the newer, third epoch of human development—not only of uninitiated science but also of initiatory science—face the third great mystery: the mystery of the slumber of knowledge, the great slumber of human life.

[ 48 ] The deeper minds have sensed it. Descartes sensed it when he began to doubt the truth of everything that external knowledge of nature can tell us. But this was only an initial sense of it. Humanity must become increasingly aware that all the knowledge of which modern humanity has been so proud for the past three, four, or five centuries represents a slumber of life, and that the third great mystery must increasingly come upon humanity. People had to ask themselves at some point: Why do we dwell in a physical earthly body? — They then had to ask themselves: Why do we pass through physical earthly death? — And thirdly, the question must arise in the human heart: Why do we sleep the earthly sleep despite a knowledge directed solely toward nature? How can we step back from the dream of the calculated cosmos—the cosmos viewed merely from the outside through astrophysics and astrochemistry, the externally dreamed cosmos—and turn toward the cosmos that, in turn, connects us in our deepest inner being with the deepest inner being of itself? How can we awaken from our modern dream of knowledge?

[ 49 ] And the ancient first initiates had to answer the question posed to humanity: “Why do I live in an earthly body, in a physical earthly body?” — with the explanation of “Ex deo nascimur”; in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Initiates sought to solve the riddle of death through humanity’s connection with Christ Jesus, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, in what later generations would call “In Christo morimur,” so a newer science of initiation is to gradually lead humanity—through the present and especially in the coming centuries—toward God-consciousness, toward religious life, and toward the way in which one awakens one’s inner being to a spiritual understanding of the cosmos. The science of initiation that is to come through anthroposophy—which also underlies the pedagogy presented here—does not merely seek to increase today’s dormant external knowledge, of which humanity is nevertheless so proud, and which is nonetheless so glorious in terms of external achievements: as an anthroposophical science of initiation, it seeks to awaken this dormant knowledge; it seeks to rouse human beings who are ensnared in intellectual, rationalistic dreams.

[ 50 ] Therefore, this science of initiation, which seeks to be sustained by anthroposophy, is not merely an accumulation of knowledge and insights, but an impulse toward awakening—an attempt to answer the question: How do we awaken from the slumber of life?

[ 51 ] And just as the earliest initiates of humanity explained the phrase “Ex deo nascimur,” and just as later initiates explained the phrase “In Christo morimur,” so the wisdom of initiation—which bears within it a life of knowledge for the future that truly awakens in the spirit, which bears within it a life leading once again to religious deepening, which bears within it a true consciousness of God—will now lead to the point where one once again feels Christ, whom one experiences in light of the Mystery of Golgotha, as the Logos that blows through and weaves the cosmos. And as human beings come to feel themselves once more within their cosmic existence, this new science of initiation—which is intended to bring about a true spiritual Christology, just as it is intended to bring about, for example, a pedagogy that works on a small scale—this science of initiation will, in both the large and the small, through religious devotion in the service of life that it seeks to render in practice, always strive to to add to the statement “We are born as physical human beings from God” and to “In Christ we die—that is, we live as souls”—a third element: As we advance toward the Spirit through the newer initiation, we come alive in the Spirit even in this earthly life; we awaken; we experience the awakening of knowledge, which in turn permeates our entire life with the light of religiosity, with the light of a morality and ethical character born of truly inner religiosity. In short, this newer science of initiation will strive, with regard to the ancient initiatory riddle of “Ex deo nascimur” and the middle initiatory riddle of “In Christo morimur,” by fully resolving these two riddles of the human soul and restoring them, it will endeavor to carry the other into the human heart with the clarity of light, which is to lead to the awakening of the spirit in the human heart and soul, to the religiosity of knowledge: In the grasping of the true, living spirit, we ourselves are raised as body, soul, and spirit:

[ 52 ] Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.