Part i: Contents

CHRISTIANITY AS MYSTICAI FACT
and the
Mysteries of Antiquity

CONTENTS

I. Bibliographical Note
II. Foreword
III. Introduction: Rudolf Steiner A Biographical Sketch
IV. Author's Preface to the Second Edition
V. Points of View
VI. Mysteries and Mystery Wisdom
VII. Greek Sages Before Plato in the Light of Mystery Wisdom
VIII. Plato as a Mystic
IX. Mystery Wisdom and Myth
X. Egyptian Mystery Wisdom
XI. The Gospels
XII. The Miracle of the Raising of Lazarus
XIII. The Apocalypse of John
XIV. Jesus and his Historical Background
X. The Essence of Christianity
XVI. Christianity and Pagan Wisdom
XVII. Augustine and the Church
XVIII. Comments by the Author

Part I: Bibliographical Note

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rudolf Steiner's Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of
Antiquity (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache) was first published
by C. A. Schwetschke and Son, Berlin, 1902. It was dedicated to Count
and Countess Brockdorf "and also to my dear Vienna Friends, Rosa
Mayreder and Moritz Zitter." An octavo volume, measuring approximately
6 by 9 inches, the book contained 141 pages of text plus 6 pages of
prefatory matter. The second edition, thoroughly revised and enlarged
(strictly speaking, this edition is the first to carry the sub-title,
the Mysteries of Antiquity), was published by the well-known Leipzig
publishing firm of Max Altmann. This edition, also an octavo volume
like the first, contained 192 pages of text plus 6 pages of
introductory material. The Foreword to this second edition was dated
May, 1910. The 3rd and 4th editions also appeared with the Altmann
imprint in 1910. The 5th edition was published by the
Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach,
Switzerland, 1925, as an octavo volume, containing 164 pages of text
and 8 pages of introductory material.

A specially licensed edition appeared in Dresden in 1936. In 1949
under a license agreement, a German edition -- the 6th edition of the
book -- appeared in Stuttgart. This was one of the Steiner titles
published in post-war Germany to meet a widespread demand for his
books, all of which had been confiscated and burned by the Gestapo
under orders from the Nazi government. The most recent edition -- the
7th -- of this book was published by the Rudolf
Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland, in 1959. It is from
this edition that the present translation has been made. In all,
thirty one thousand copies of Das Christentum ak mystische Tatsache
have been published since its first appearance in 1902. Not included
in this total is a pocket book edition which was published early in
1961 in Stuttgart.

The first "authorized English translation" of this book appeared in
London under the editorship of the late Harry Collison in 1914, and in
subsequent editions and reprintings in 1922, 1930 and 1938, through
the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company. A "completely revised,
authorized English translation, copyright by Henry B. Monges" was
issued in 1947 by the Anthroposophic Press, New York. The present
translation of Christianity as Mystical Fact is entirely new having
been undertaken especially for the Centennial Edition of the Written
Works of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1961).

 

Part II: Foreword

FOREWORD

IN THIS BOOK Rudolf Steiner traces the path leading from the secret
rituals of ancient Mystery sanctuaries to their ultimate fulfillment
in the Mystery of Golgotha, accomplished by Christ "on the great stage
of world history as an external fact." Steiner shows how the currents
of spiritual experience forming the science, art and religion of the
ancient world, found their highest expression in the Passion, Death
and Resurrection of Christ -- the Mystery of Golgotha. In the latter
Steiner saw the central event in the evolution of cosmos, earth and
man, the culminating point of the prehistorical and historical
process, which began with the divine word, "Let there be light." In
Christ's Deed of Freedom he recognized the spiritual impulse in which
alone can be found the significance and the destiny of all created
things. Steiner considered "the Logos which became flesh" as the
foundation for all contemporary religious striving, stating plainly,
"Today it is no longer possible to find the spiritual unless we grasp
the Mystery of Golgotha." This book is a first step on the way to a
truly modern comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the events
leading up to it, and of the consequences of it in the early years of
our era. It carries the reader from that time when men still
recognized as concrete, living reality the birth of all things out of
the divine Will, through the central moment of the Death on Golgotha,
to the awakening of new possibilities for creation in the dawning
light of the Spirit.

How Steiner came to this profound insight into the nature and
significance of Christ, how he prepared for it by long and arduous
schooling in natural science, philosophy, and, above all, in the
development of his own inner life is shown in the introduction to this
book. The Rev. Dr. Alfred Heidenreich met Rudolf Steiner personally
and attended a number of his lecture courses. His impressions of this
outstanding thinker of our time are a valuable contribution to this
volume of the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf
Steiner.

The present translation of Christianity as Mystical Fact is the fruit
of the joint effort of three students of Steiner's writings-one of
them an active clergyman. The translation, together with their
explanatory and reference notes, bear the marks of careful
scholarship, and will be valued by the serious student.

In his use of the word "mystical" in the title of this volume, Steiner
refers indirectly to a modern spiritual training, leading to what he
termed "exact cognition of the spirit." Although he cited numerous
writers of the late classical and early Christian centuries, he
depended first of all upon this "exact cognition" rather than
traditional or historical sources From the vantage-point of his
conscious perception of spiritual reality, he saw in Christianity a
"Mystical Fact" of a scope and significance beyond the powers of
ordinary human conception.

In addition to sharing with others the fruits of his own spiritual
perception by means of books such as this, Steiner outlined a science
of the spirit, involving a method of training suited to the capacities
of men and women of today. He indicated how a person can awaken
dormant faculties within himself, can learn to open his spiritual
eyes, thus attaining a clear, conscious grasp of higher reality.

The first step on this path of spiritual training is to be found in
the injunction of the ancient world: "Know thyself." From early times,
self-knowledge has been recognized as the indispensable first goal of
spiritual achievement. In an early Christian century one of the Desert
Fathers wrote: "Great is one who can raise the dead; great is one who
can see angels with his physical eyes; but really great is one who is
able to see himself.-Such a one has his spiritual eyes open." Rudolf
Steiner sets self-knowledge as the sine qua non for those today who
would begin the pilgrimage out of the darkness, who would strive
toward an opening of their spiritual eyes to a conscious perception of
The Light of the World.

PAUL MARSHALL ALLEN
Alvastra,
South Egremont, Massachusetts
September 1961

 

Part III: Introduction Rudolf Steiner -- A Biographical Sketch

INTRODUCTION
RUDOLF STEINER -- A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

One spring day in 1860, an autocratic Hungarian magnate, a certain
Count Hoyos, who owned several large estates in Austria, dismissed his
game-keeper, because this game-keeper, Johannes Steiner wanted to
marry Franziska Blie, one of the Count's innumerable housemaids.
Perhaps the old Count had a foreboding as to what a great spiritual
revolution would be born of this marriage. (The baroque palace of Hom,
where it happened, is still in the possession of the Hoyos family, and
stands today just as it was one hundred years ago.) So Johannes
Steiner had to look for another occupation, and got himself accepted
as a trainee telegraphist and signalman by the recently opened
Austrian Southern Railway. He was given his first job in an
out-of-the-way request stop called Kraljevic (today in Yugoslavia),
and there his first child, Rudolf, arrived on February 27, 1861. On
the same day the child was taken for an emergency baptism to the
parish Church of St. Michael in the neighboring village of Draskovec.
The baptismal register was written in Serbo-Croat and Latin, and the
entry still can be read today as of one Rudolfus Josephus Laurentius
Steiner. "Thus it happened," Rudolf Steiner writes in his
autobiography, "that the place of my birth is far removed from the
region where I come from."

In later life, particularly in his lectures on education, Steiner
frequently made the point that the most prodigious feat any man
achieves at any time is accomplished by him in the first two or three
years of his life, when he lifts his body into the upright position
and learns to move it in perfect balance through space, when he forms
a vital part of his organism into an instrument of speech and when he
begins to handle and indeed to fashion his brain as a vehicle for
thought. In other words, when the child asserts his human qualities
which set him dramatically apart from the animals.

This initial achievement the boy Rudolf performed in Kraljevic.
Kraljevic (meaning King's Village) is situated in the western
outskirts of the vast Hungarian plain, the Puszta. Even today endless
fields of maize and potatoes extend in every direction, and the solemn
monotony of the country is more enhanced than relieved by the lines of
tall poplars flanking the primitive, dead straight roads. It is basic
three-dimensional space at its severest, domed over by the sky, which
local people say is nowhere else so high nor so blue as over the
Puszta. One might almost say that nature provided laboratory
conditions in which the boy learned to stand, to walk, to speak and to
think. One could justifiably say of Rudolf Steiner what the
biographer, Hermann Grimm, said of Goethe: "It seems as if Providence
had placed him in the simplest circumstances in order that nothing
should impede his perfect unfolding."

From the severity of the Puszta the family moved, when the boy was two
years old, into one of the most idyllic parts of Austria, called "the
Burgenland" since 1921. Comprising the foothills of the eastern Alps,
it is of great natural beauty, very fertile, and drenched in history.
It takes its name from the many Burgen, i.e. castles which at
different times of history were erected on nearly every hill. During
recent excavations coins bearing the head of Philip of Macedonia, the
father of Alexander the Great, have been found near Neudorff, where
the Steiners now settled, and where a daughter and a younger son were
added to the family.

The management of the Austrian Southern Railway seems to have taken a
sympathetic view toward the promising boy, and agreed to move father
Steiner as stationmaster to several small stations south of Vienna, so
that the eldest son was able to attend good schools as a day student,
and finally in 1879 could matriculate at the Technical University of
Vienna, then one of the most advanced scientific institutions of the
world. Until then Rudolf Steiner's school life had been fairly
uneventful, except that some of his masters were rather disturbed by
the fact that this teen-ager was a voracious reader of Kant and other
philosophers, and privately was engrossed in advanced mathematics.

In his first year at the University Rudolf Steiner studied chemistry
and physics, mathematics, geometry, theoretical mechanics, geology,
biology, botany, and zoology; and while still an undergraduate two
events occurred which were of far-reaching consequence for his further
development.

In the train in which the young student travelled daily to Vienna he
frequently met a curious personality, an herb-gatherer, who turned out
to be a latter-day Jacob Boehme. He was filled with the most profound
nature lore to which he had first-hand access. He understood the
language of plants, which told him what sicknesses they could heal; he
was able to listen to the speech of the minerals, which told him of
the natural history of our planet and of the Universe. In the last
winter of his public life, in December 1923, Steiner provided
something of a historic background for this wisdom, notably in his
lectures on the Mysteries of Eleusis. Steiner immortalized the
herb-gatherer in his Mystery Dramas, in the figure of "Father Felix."
But "Father Felix" was instrumental in bringing Steiner together with
a still more important and mysterious personality.

"Felix was only the intermediary for another personality," Steiner
tells us in his autobiography, "who used means to stimulate in the
soul of the young man the regular systematic things with which one has
to be familiar in the spiritual world. This personality used the works
of Fichte in order to develop certain observations from which results
ensued which provided the seeds for my (later) work.... This excellent
man was as undistinguished in his daily job as was Felix."

While these fateful meetings occurred on the inward field of life, a
very consequential relationship developed on the outward field. The
Technical University of Vienna provided a chair for German literature,
which was held by Karl Julius Schroer, a great Goethe enthusiast and
one of the most congenial interpreters of Goethe. Schroer recognized
Steiner's unusual gifts, and anticipated that he might be capable of
doing some original research in the most puzzling part of Goethe's
works, i.e. his scientific writings.

Only two years ago, Dr. Emil Bock, of Stuttgart, Germany, one of the
most eminent Steiner scholars, discovered the correspondence between
Professor Schroer, Steiner, and the German Professor Joseph Kurschner,
who was engaged in producing a monumental edition of representative
works of German literature from the 7th to the 19th century. In the
first letter of this correspondence, dated June 4, 1882, Schroer
refers to Steiner as an "undergraduate of several terms standing." He
says that he has asked him to write an essay on Goethe and Newton, and
if this essay is a success, as he thinks it will be, "we have found
the editor of Goethe's scientific works." Steiner was then twenty-one
years of age. Schroer's letter is reminiscent of the letter Robert
Schumann wrote to the great violinist Joachim, after he had received
the first visit of the then twenty-one year old Brahms: "It is he who
was to come."

The introductions and explanatory notes to the many volumes of
Goethe's scientific works which Steiner was now commissioned to write
were much ahead of their time. They blazed a trail into the less
familiar regions of Goethe's universal genius which only today begins
to be followed up by other scholars.

The young Steiner wrote these, his first works, in outward conditions
of great poverty. The family lived in two rooms, which are still shown
today. The larger one of the two was kitchen, dining, sitting and
bedroom for the parents and his younger brother and sister, and off
this larger room a few steps led into a narrow, white-washed, unheated
cubicle where the young Steiner worked as in a monk's cell. No wonder
that a Viennese celebrity of the time refers to him in his memoirs as
one "who looked like a half-starved student of theology."

However, this first literary success led to Steiner's call to the
central Goethe Archives at Weimar, where despite his youth he now
became one of the editors of the great Standard Edition (Sophien
Ausgabe) of Goethe's Complete Works. This concentrated occupation with
Goethe, continued for seven years in Weimar, from 1889 to 1896, had a
profound effect upon the unfolding of Steiner's own mind and
philosophical consciousness. Goethe was the catalyst which released
new mental and spiritual energies in Steiner s own personality. It was
during these years that Steiner's fundamental philosophical works were
conceived and written.

In 1886 he published An Epistemology of Goethe's World Conception. In
1891 his small concentrated thesis on Truth and Science earned him his
Ph.D. In 1896 his comprehensive Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
opened a completely new approach to the understanding of the human
mind and the nature of thought. It represents the first really fresh
step in philosophic thought and in the philosophic interpretation of
the human consciousness since Kant. It is no wonder that in those years
Steiner began to be looked upon in Germany as "the coming philosopher"
upon whom before long the mantle of the dying Nietzsche would fall.
But his genius led him a different way.

In his thirty-sixth year - "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," as
Dante calls it, Steiner moved to Berlin, and the next seven years were
perhaps the most dramatic period in his life. His new position in
Berlin was that of editor of the weekly, Das Magazin fur Litteratur,
founded in 1832 (something equivalent to the London Saturday Review).
He wrote the leading article and the dramatic reviews, occupying in
Berlin a position somewhat similar to that of Bernard Shaw (who was
five years his senior), with his weekly dramatic criticism in the
Saturday Review. This assignment brought Steiner into close social
contact with the intellectual and artistic elite of Berlin at the
time, and for some years he pitched his tent among them. In the last
years of his life, during rare moments of relaxation, he would at
times tell stories of this exciting and often amusing period.

Side by side with these literary circles, or perhaps in polarity to
them, Steiner was also drawn by objective interest and personal
attraction into the camp of Haeckel and the militant monists. To move
in this manner abreast of the spirit of the time would be a most
interesting experience for anyone. For Steiner it was more. And I must
now touch upon that side of his life about which I shall have to speak
presently in greater detail. From childhood while for others such
"being involved in this or that fashion of thought would be no more
than an ideology," for anyone standing in the spiritual world it
means, as Steiner says in his autobiography, that "he is brought close
to the spirit-beings who desire to invest a particular ideology with a
totalitarian claim." Steiner refers to his experience as a "Soul's
Probation" which he had to undergo. (He later chose The Soul's
Probation as the title of one of his Mystery Dramas.) He speaks of the
"tempests" which during those years in Berlin raged in his soul, a
rare expression in the otherwise very even and dispassionate style of
his autobiography. At the end of those "forty days in the wilderness"
- -which were in fact four years -- the thunderclouds lifted, the mist
cleared, and he stood, to use his own phrase. "in solemn festival of
knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha." He had come to a first-hand
experience of Christ and His active presence in the evolution of the
world.

We have now reached the point where we must venture into the great
unknown: Steiner the seer, the Initiate.

It is a plain fact that in some form or other spiritual knowledge has
existed throughout the ages. Secret wisdom has never been absent from
human history. But in Steiner it assumed a totally new form. In order
to appreciate this revolutionary novelty, we must first have a picture
of the old form.

The faculty of spiritual perception and secret wisdom is obtained
through certain organs in the "subtle body" of man, to borrow a
convenient term from Eastern Indian medicine. In Sanscrit these organs
are called "chakrams" generally translated into English as "lotus
flowers." They fulfill a function in the "subtle body" similar to our
senses in the physical body. They are usually dormant today, but can
be awakened. We can disregard for the moment the rites of Initiation
which were employed in the Mystery Temples of the ancient world, and
confine ourselves to the survival of more general methods which today
are still practiced in many parts of the world. They all have one
thing in common: they operate through the vegetative system in man,
through bodily posture, through the control of breathing, through
physical or mental exercises which work upon the solar plexus and the
sympathetic nervous system. I realize that I am presenting a somewhat
crude simplification. But nevertheless I am giving the essentials.

Steiner broke with all this. He began to operate from the opposite
pole of the human organism, from pure thought. Thought, ordinary human
thought, even if it is brilliant and positive, is at first something
very weak. It does not possess the life, say, of our breathing, let
alone the powerful life of our pulsating blood. It is, shall we say,
flat, without substance; it is really lifeless. It is "pale thought,"
as Shakespeare called it.

This relative lifelessness of our thoughts is providential, however.
If the living thoughts filling the Universe were to enter our
consciousness just as they are, we would faint. If the living idea in
every created thing simply jumped into our consciousness with all its
native force, it would blot us out. Fortunately, our cerebro-spinal
system exerts a kind of resistance in the process; it functions like a
resistor in an electric circuit; it is a sort of transformer, reducing
the violence of reality to such a degree that our mind can tolerate it
and register it. However, as a result, we see only the shadows of
reality on the back wall of our Platonic cave, not reality itself.

Now one of the magic words in Steiner's philosophy with which he
attempts to break this spell, is "Erkraftung des Denkens." It means
putting force, life into thinking, through thinking, within thinking.
All his basic philosophic works, notably the Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, and many of his exercises, are directed to this purpose. If
they are followed, sooner or later the moment arrives when thinking
becomes leibfrei, i.e. independent of the bodily instrument, when it
works itself free from the cerebrospinal system.

This is at first a most disturbing experience. One feels like a man
who has pushed off from the shore and who must now strive with might
and main to maintain himself in the raging sea. The sheer power of
cosmic thought is such that at first one loses one's identity. And
perhaps one would lose it for good, if it were not for a fact which
now emerges from the hidden mysteries of Christianity. One does not
finally lose one's identity because He Himself has walked the waves
and extended a helping hand to Peter who ventured out prematurely.
Gradually the waves seem to calm down, and a condition ensues which
Steiner expresses in a wonderful phrase: "Thinking itself becomes a
body which draws into itself as its soul the Spirit of the Universe.''

This is a stage which, broadly speaking, Steiner had attained at the
point of his biography which we have reached. Now he made a discovery
which was not known to him before. He discovered that this "living
thinking" could awaken the chakrams from "above," just as in the old
way they could be stimulated from "below." Thought which at first in
the normal and natural psychosomatic process "died" on the place of
the skull, but which through systematic exercises had risen again to
the level of cosmic reality, could now impart life to the dormant
organs of spiritual perception which have been implanted into man by
Him who created him in His image. From about the turn of the century
Steiner began to pursue this path with ever greater determination, and
gradually developed the three forms of Higher Knowledge which he
called Imagination: a higher seeing of the spiritual world in
revealing images; Inspiration: a higher hearing of the spiritual
world, through which it reveals its creative forces and its creative
order; Intuition: the stage at which an intuitive penetration into the
sphere of Spiritual Beings becomes possible.

With these unfolding powers Steiner now developed up to his death in
1925, in twenty-five momentous years, that truly vast and
awe-inspiring body of spiritual and practical knowledge to which he
gave the name "Anthroposophy." (Incidentally, this word was first
coined by Thomas Vaughan, a brother of the English mystical poet,
Henry Vaughan, in the 17th century.) Anthroposophy literally means
wisdom of man or the wisdom concerning man, but in his later years
Steiner himself interpreted it on occasion as "an adequate
consciousness of being human." In this interpretation the moral
achievement of Steiner's work, his mission, his message to a
bewildered humanity which has lost "an adequate consciousness of being
human," to which Man has become "the Unknown," is summed up. This
monumental work lies before us today and is waiting to be fully
discovered by our Age -in some 170 books and in the published
transcripts of nearly 6,000 lectures.

Three characteristic stages can be observed in Steiner's
anthroposophical period. In a lecture given at the headquarters of the
German Anthroposophical Society at Stuttgart (on February 6, 1923) he
himself described these stages. Stage one (approximately 1901-1909):
to lay the foundation for a Science of the Spirit within Western
Civilization, with its center in the Mystery of Golgotha, as opposed
to the purely traditional handing down of ancient oriental wisdom
which is common to other organizations such as the Theosophical
Society. Stage two (approximately 1910-1917): the application of the
anthroposophical Science of the Spirit to various branches of Science,
Art and practical life. As one of the milestones for the beginning of
this second stage Steiner mentions the building of the Goetheanum,
that architectural wonder (since destroyed by fire) in which his work
as an artist had found its culmination. Stage three (approximately
1917-1925): first-hand descriptions of the spiritual world. During
these twenty-five years of anthroposophical activity, Steiner's
biography is identical with the history of the Anthroposophical
Movement. His personal life is entirely dedicated to and absorbed in
the life of his work.

It was during the last of the three phases that Steiner's prodigious
achievements in so many fields of life began to inspire a number of
his students and followers to practical foundations. Best known today
are perhaps the Rudolf Steiner Schools for boys and girls, which have
been founded in many countries and in which his concept of the true
human being is the well-spring of all educational methods and
activities. There are some seventy Steiner schools in existence with
well over 30,000 pupils. A separate branch are the Institutes for
Curative Education which have sprung up both in Europe and Overseas,
and whose activities have been immensely beneficial to the ever
increasing number of physically and mentally handicapped children and
adults. Steiner's contributions to medical research and to medicine in
general are used by a steadily growing number of doctors all over the
world, and his indications are tested and followed up in a number of
research centers and clinics. Another blessing for humanity flowed
from his method of Biodynamic Agriculture, by which he was able to add
to the basic principles of organic husbandry just those extras which,
if rightly used, can greatly increase both fertility and quality
without those chemical stimulants which in the long run poison both
the soil and its products.

In the field of Art there is hardly an area he did not touch with the
magic wand of creative originality. The second Goetheanum which
replaced the first one destroyed by fire shows the massive use of
reinforced concrete as a plastic material for architecture a
generation before this use was attempted by others. Steiner's direct
and indirect influence on modern painting with the symphonic use of
color, on sculpture, on glass-engraving, on metal work and other
visual arts is too far-reaching for anyone even to attempt to describe
in condensed form. Students and graduates of the Steiner schools for
Eurythmy and for Dramatic Art have performed before enthusiastic
audiences in the cultural centers of the world, ably directed by Marie
Steiner, his wife.

To those who have been attracted to this present publication by its
title and its reference to Christianity, it will be of particular
interest to hear that among those foundations which came into being
during the last phase of Steiner's anthroposophical work was a
Movement for Religious Renewal, formed by a body of Christian
ministers, students and other young pioneers who had found in Rudolf
Steiner "a man sent from God," able to show the way to a true
reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of religion and science. This
Movement is known today as "The Christian Community" and has centers
in many cities in the Old and New World. Apart from the inestimable
help this Movement received from him in theological and pastoral
matters, Rudolf Steiner was instrumental in mediating for this
Movement a complete spiritual rebirth of the Christian Sacraments for
the modern age and a renewal of the Christian priestly office.

Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity holds a
special place in the story of his remarkable and dedicated life. The
book contains the substance of a series of lectures Rudolf Steiner
gave in the winter of 1901-1902 in the "Theosophical Library" of
Berlin at the invitation of the President, Count Brockdorff. This
series had been preceded by another on the German mystics from Master
Eckhardt to Jacob Boehme (published in the Centennial Edition of the
Written Works of Rudolf Steiner under the title Mysticism at the Dawn
of the Modern Age, See Multimedia edition) in which Steiner had
ventured for the first time to present publicly some measure of his
spiritual knowledge.

After these lectures on the mystics which was something of a prelude,
Christianity as Mystical Fact now ushered in a new period in the
understanding of the basic facts of Christianity as well as in
Steiner's own life.

Compared with the free flow of spiritual teaching on Christianity
offered by Steiner in his later works, the book may appear somewhat
tentative and even reticent in its style. But it contains as in a
nutshell all the essential new elements he was able to develop and
unfold so masterfully in his later years.

Steiner considered the phrase "Mystical Fact" in the title to be very
important. "I did not intend simply to describe the mystical content
of Christianity," he says in his autobiography. "I attempted to show
that in the ancient Mysteries cult-images were given of cosmic events,
which occurred later on the field of actual history in the Mystery of
Golgotha as a Fact transplanted from the cosmos into the earth."

It will not be out of place to round off this biographical sketch with
a few personal reminiscences of the last four years of his life when I
met Steiner as man and Initiate among his friends and students, and
saw quite a good deal of him.

What was Rudolf Steiner like? In the first place there was nothing in
the least pompous about him. He never made one feel that he was in any
sense extraordinary. There was an astonishing matter-of-factness about
him, whether he spoke at a business meeting of the Anthroposophical
Society, presided over faculty meetings of the Waldorf School,
lectured on his ever increasing discoveries in the spiritual field, or
spoke in public discussions on controversial subjects of the day.

I attended small lecture courses of less than fifty people, heard him
lecture in the large hall of the first Goetheanum, was present at
large public meetings when he expounded his "Threefold Commonwealth"
ideas in the electric atmosphere of the Germany of 1923, during the
occupation of the Ruhr and the total collapse of the German Mark. He
was always the same: clear, considerate, helpful, unruffled. In those
days he could fill the largest halls in Germany, and his quiet voice
was strong enough to be heard without artificial amplification in the
last rows of the gallery.

His hair remained jet black to the end; I cannot remember a strand of
grey in it. His brown eyes, they sometimes had a shimmer of gold in
them, looked with sympathy upon everything. And he possessed a
wonderful buoyancy of carriage.

From 1913 Steiner lived permanently at Dornach, near Basel,
Switzerland, in a house known locally as "Villa Hansi." However, he
spent most of his time in his studio, which was really nothing but a
simple wooden building adjoining the large carpentry-shop where much
of the woodwork of the first Goetheanum was prefabricated. In this
studio he received an unending stream of callers. One would, perhaps,
be shown into the room by a helping friend, but at the end he would
always conduct one to the door himself. He put one at ease with such
courtesy that one was in danger of forgetting who he was. And he gave
the impression that he had no other care nor interest in the world
than to listen to one's immature questions.

He would sit on a simple wicker chair, his legs crossed, perhaps
occasionally moving one foot up and down. On the lapel of his black
coat one might see a slight trace of snuff, because he indulged in the
Old-World pleasure of taking snuff, but he neither drank nor smoked. I
have never met anyone, and I am sure I shall never meet anyone who
seemed so constantly at rest and in action simultaneously, all the
time perfectly relaxed and absolutely alert.

The last summer of his life, in 1924, was the most prolific of all. He
gave specialized courses on agriculture, on curative education, on
Eurythmy. Then followed a summer school in August at Torquay in
England; and when he returned to Dornach in early September, he
increased his activities still further and gave as many as five,
sometimes six different lectures each day. There was a daily course on
the New Testament Book of Revelation for the priests of the Christian
Community, another on pastoral medicine for priests and doctors
combined, another on dramatic art, where I remember him one morning
acting singlehanded the whole of Dantons Tod, a drama of the French
Revolution by the German writer, Buchner. On another morning he acted
the Faust fragment by Lessing. And in addition to all this, he also
held lectures for the workmen of the Goetheanum.

Besides these specialized courses, the general lectures and other
central activities of the Goetheanum School for the Science of the
Spirit continued without interruption.

But the inevitable moment approached when even his resilient body
showed the strain of his immense work. Sometimes for the period of a
whole week he would hardly sleep more than two hours each night. I
believe that he knew what he was doing. He well knew why he burned the
candle not only at both ends but also in the middle.

My last memory of him is of the night when I was privileged, together
with another friend, to keep vigil at the foot of his bed on which his
body was laid out. It was the night before his funeral. The bed stood
in his simple studio where he had been confined during the last six
months of his life. Looking down on him was the great wooden statue of
Christ which he had carved and nearly finished. Even in the literal
sense of the word he had laid down his life at the feet of Christ.

The dignity of his features was enhanced by the marble whiteness of
death. In the stillness of the night, with only a few candles burning,
it was as if ages of human history converged to do homage. With a deep
sense of reverence I wondered who he was. I am wondering still.

ALFRED HEIDENREICH
London, England
August 1961

 

Part V: Author's Preface to the Second Edition

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

CHRISTIANITY AS MYSTICAL FACT was the title given to this book by its
author when eight years ago he included in it the contents of lectures
held in the year 1902. This title was intended to indicate the
particular character of the book. It represents an attempt to describe
not merely the mystical content of Christianity in its historical
form, but how Christianity arose out of mystical conception.
Underlying this was the idea that involved in this process was a
spiritual reality which can be seen only through such conception. Only
the content of the book can prove that the author has not used the
word "mystical" to denote a conception which relies more on indefinite
knowledge gained through feelings, than on "strictly scientific
exposition." In many circles today the word "mysticism" carries such a
connotation, hence the tendency is to explain this as a region of the
life of the human soul which can have nothing to do with "real
science." In this book the word "mysticism" is used for the exposition
of a spiritual fact whose nature can be recognized only when the
powers of cognition are taken from the source of spiritual life
itself. Whoever declines a method of cognition founded on such a
source will be unable to take any position with regard to this book.
Only one who admits that in "mysticism" the same clarity can exist as
in the truthful exposition of natural phenomena will accept this
method of describing the mystical content of Christianity. For even
more important than the content of the text is the means of cognition
which has led to its existence.

In our present day many people violently abhor such a means of
cognition. They see it as contradictory to true scientific method.
This is the case not only among those who will not allow the validity
of any interpretation of the world which is not founded upon "genuine
natural scientific fact," but also among those who wish to consider
Christianity in the capacity of believers. The author of this text
takes as his basis an interpretation which acknowledges that the
natural scientific achievements of our day demand elevation to true
mysticism. This interpretation can show that any other attitude toward
cognition absolutely contradicts everything offered by natural
scientific achievements. The means of cognition which so many people
who assume that they stand on firm natural scientific ground, would
like to use, simply do not embrace the facts of this natural science.

Only that reader will accept this book who is able to admit that full
understanding of our present marvelous knowledge of nature can be
combined with genuine mysticism.

By means of what is here called "mystical cognition" this book sets
out to show how the source of Christianity created its preliminary
conditions in the ancient Mysteries. In this "pre-Christian mysticism"
is demonstrated the soil in which Christianity germinates as an
independent seed. This point of view enables one to understand
Christianity in its independent essence, although at the same time one
can follow its development out of pre-Christian mysticism. If one
ignores this point of view it is only too easy to miss recognition of
its independence through the belief that Christianity is merely a
further development of what existed in pre-Christian mysticism. Many
opinions of today lapse into this error, comparing Christianity with
pre-Christian viewpoints, believing that the Christian viewpoint is
merely a further development of the pre-Christian. This book sets out
to show that Christianity presupposes the previous mysticism as the
plant seed does its soil. It seeks to emphasize the unique essence of
Christianity through cognition of its origin, not to extinguish it.

It gives the author profound satisfaction to mention that this
exposition of the "essence of Christianity" has met with the assent of
a personality whose notable writings on the spiritual life of mankind
have enriched the thoughts of our time in the deepest sense. Edouard
Schure, author of Les Grands Initie's, The Great Initiates, agreed so
thoroughly with the standpoint of this book that he himself undertook
its translation into French under the title: Le mystere chretien et
les mysteres antiques. The fact that the first edition was translated
into French and other European languages is mentioned here as a
symptom of the great longing of the present day to understand the
essence of Christianity in the sense of this book.

The author has not found occasion to make any essential changes in
this second edition. There are, however, extensions of the exposition
made eight years ago. The effort has also been made to state many
things more fully and accurately than was possible then.
Unfortunately, through volume of work the author has been forced to
allow a long interval to elapse between the time when the first
edition went out of print and the appearance of the second.

RUDOLF STEINER
May 1910.

 

Part VI: Points of View

POINTS OF VIEW

NATURAL SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT has deeply influenced the formulation of
present-day ideas. It is becoming more and more impossible to describe
the spiritual requirements of the "life of the soul" without reference
to the methods of thinking and the conclusions of natural science.
However, it must be admitted that many people satisfy these
requirements without taking into account the trend of natural
scientific thought in modern spiritual life. But those who are alert
to the pulse of the times must take this trend into consideration.
Ideas derived from natural science conquer our thought-life with
gathering momentum, and our unwilling hearts follow hesitantly and with
apprehension. Not only the number thus conquered is important: there
is a power inherent in natural scientific thought which convinces the
observant that a modern conception of the world cannot exclude its
impressions. Several of the side-growths of natural scientific thought
compel us to reject which this method of thought has gained widespread
recognition and attracts people as if by magic. The situation is not
altered by the fact that isolated individuals can see how true
science, through its own power has "long" led beyond the "shallow
doctrines of force and matter," taught by materialism. It appears to
be far more important to heed those who boldly declare that a new
religion should be built on natural scientific ideas. Even if such
people seem shallow and superficial to those who know the deeper
spiritual requirements of humanity, nevertheless they should be noted
because they claim attention in the present time, and there is good
reason to believe that they will win increasing recognition in the
future. And those also must be considered who have allowed their heads
to take precedence over their hearts. These people are unable to free
their intellects from natural scientific ideas. They are oppressed by
the need for proof. But the religious needs of their souls cannot be
satisfied by these natural scientific ideas. The latter offer too
comfortless a perspective for their satisfaction. Why be enthusiastic
about beauty, truth and goodness if in the end everything is to be
swept away into nothingness like a bubble of inflated brain tissue?
This is a feeling which oppresses many people like a nightmare.
Therefore scientific ideas also oppress them, pressing their claims
with tremendous authoritative force. As long as they can, these people
remain blind to the discord in their souls. Indeed, they comfort
themselves by saying that true clarity in these matters is denied the
human soul. They think in accordance with natural science so long as
the experience of their senses and logic demand it, but they keep to
the religious sentiments in which they have been educated, preferring
to remain in darkness concerning these matters, a darkness which
clouds their understanding. They have not the courage to struggle
through to clarity.

There can be no doubt whatever that the method of thought derived from
natural science is the greatest power in modern spiritual life. And
one who speaks of the spiritual concerns of mankind may not pass it by
heedlessly. Nevertheless it is also true that the method by which it
attempts to satisfy spiritual needs is shallow and superficial. If
this were the right method the outlook would indeed be comfortless.
Would it not be depressing to be forced to agree with those who say,
"Thought is a form of force. We walk with the same force with which we
think. Man is an organism that changes several forms of force into
thought-force. Man is a machine into which we put what we call food,
and produce what we call thought. Think of that wonderful chemistry by
which bread was changed into the divine tragedy of Hamlet! " This is
quoted from a lecture of Robert G. Ingersoll, titled The Gods. It is
irrelevant that such thoughts, casually expressed, apparently receive
little recognition. The main point is that countless people,
influenced by the natural scientific method of thought, seem compelled
to assume an attitude in line with the above quotation, even when they
believe they are not doing so. (See page 36)

The situation would indeed be comfortless if natural science itself
forced us to the credo advanced by many of its newer prophets. Matters
would be entirely comfortless for one who has become convinced from
the content of this natural science that its method of thought is
valid and unshakeable in the realm of nature. Such a person must say
to himself, However much people may quarrel over individual questions,
though volume after volume may be written and observation upon
observation collected about the "struggle for existence" (See page 36)
and its insignificance, about the "omnipotence" or "powerlessness" of
"natural selection," natural science itself moves on in one direction,
and must find increasing agreement within certain limits.

But are the demands made by natural science really as they are
described by some of its representatives? The behavior of these
representatives themselves proves that this is not the case. Their
behavior in their own field is not such as many describe and demand in
other fields. Would Darwin and Ernst Haeckel ever have made their
great discoveries about the evolution of life if, instead of observing
life and the structure of living beings, they had gone into the
laboratory to make chemical experiments with tissue cut out of an
organism? Would Lyell have been able to describe the development of
the crust of the earth if, instead of examining strata and their
contents, he had analyzed the chemical qualities of innumerable
stones? Let us really follow in the footsteps of these explorers who
appear as monumental figures in the development of modern science! We
shall then apply to the higher regions of spiritual life what they
have applied in the field of the observation of nature. Then we shall
not believe we have understood the essence of the "divine" tragedy of
Hamlet by saying that a wonderful chemical process transformed a
certain quantity of food into that tragedy. We shall believe it as
little as a naturalist can seriously believe that he has understood
the mission of heat in the evolution of the earth when he has studied
the action of heat upon sulphur in a chemical retort. Neither does he
attempt to understand the construction of the human brain by examining
the effect of liquid potash upon a fragment of it, but rather by
inquiring how, in the course of evolution, the brain has been
developed out of the organs of lower organisms.

It is therefore quite true that one who is investigating the nature of
spirit can only learn from natural science. He really needs only to do
as science does. But he must not allow himself to be misled by what
individual representatives of natural science would dictate to him. He
must investigate in the spiritual domain as they do in the physical,
but he need not adopt their opinions about the spiritual world,
confused as they are by their exclusive consideration of physical
phenomena.

We shall act in conformity with natural science only when we study the
spiritual evolution of man just as impartially as the naturalist
observes the material world. Then in the domain of spiritual life we
shall admittedly be led to a method of consideration differing from
the purely natural scientific method as geology differs from pure
physics or the investigation of the evolution of life from research
into purely chemical laws. We shall be led to higher methods which.
although they cannot be those of natural science, yet hold good in the
same sense. Many a one-sided view of natural science will allow itself
to be modified or corrected from another point of view, but this only
leads to progress in natural science and thereby one does not sin
against the latter. Such methods alone can lead to penetration into
spiritual developments like Christianity, or the world of ideas of any
other religion. Anyone applying these methods may provoke the
opposition of many who believe they are thinking scientifically, but
nevertheless he will know himself to be in full accord with a truly
scientific method of thought.

An investigator of this kind must also go beyond a merely historical
examination of the documents relating to spiritual life. This is
necessary just because of the attitude of mind he has acquired from
the consideration of natural occurrences. When a chemical law is
explained it is of little value to describe the retorts, dishes and
pincers which have led to its discovery. And in explaining the
beginning of Christianity, it is of just as much or as little value to
ascertain the historical sources drawn upon by the Evangelist Luke, or
those from which the book of Revelation of John was compiled. (See
page 36.) In this case "history" can be only the outer court to
research proper. By tracing the historical origin of documents we
shall not discover anything about the ideas in the writings of Moses
or in the traditions of the Greek mystics. In these documents the
ideas in question are expressed only in outward terms. And the
naturalist, investigating the nature of "man," does not concern
himself about the origin of the word "man," or how it has developed in
a language. He keeps to the thing itself, not to the word which
expresses it. And likewise, in studying spiritual life we shall have
to keep to the spirit and not to its outer documents.

 

Part VII: Mysteries and Mystery Wisdom

MYSTERIES AND MYSTERY WISDOM

SOMETHING LIKE A VEIL OF SECRECY conceals the manner whereby spiritual
needs were satisfied for those within the older civilizations who
sought a deeper religious and cognitive life than was offered by the
religions of the people. We are led into the obscurity of enigmatic
cults when we inquire into the satisfaction of these needs. Each
individual who finds such satisfaction withdraws himself for some time
from our observation. We see that the religion of the people cannot
give him what his heart seeks. He acknowledges the gods, but he knows
that in the ordinary conceptions of the gods the great enigmas of
existence are not disclosed. He seeks a wisdom which is carefully
guarded by a community of priest-sages. He seeks refuge in this
community for his striving soul. If the sages find him mature they
lead him step by step to higher insight, in a manner hidden from the
eyes of those outside What happens to him now is concealed from the
uninitiated. For a time he appears to be entirely removed from the
physical world. He appears to be transported into a secret world. And
when he is returned to the light of day a different, entirely
transformed personality stands before us. This personality cannot find
words sufficiently sublime to express how significant his experiences
were for him. He appears to himself as though he had gone through
death and awakened to a new and higher life, not merely figuratively,
but in highest reality. And it is clear to him that no one can rightly
understand his words who has not had the same experience.

Thus it was with those persons who through the Mysteries were
initiated into that secret wisdom, withheld from the people, and which
shed light upon the highest questions. This "secret" religion of the
elect existed side by side with the religion of the people. So far as
history is concerned, its source fades into the obscurity where the
origin of peoples is lost. We find this "secret" religion everywhere
among ancient peoples insofar as we can gain insight concerning them.
The sages of these peoples speak of the Mysteries with the greatest
reverence. What was concealed in them? And what did they reveal to one
who was initiated into them?

The enigma becomes still more puzzling when we realize that at the
same time the ancients regarded the Mysteries as something dangerous.
The way leading to the secrets of existence went through a world of
terrors. And woe to him who tried to reach them unworthily. There was
no greater crime than the "betrayal" of these secrets to the
uninitiated. The "traitor" was punished with death and confiscation of
property. We know that the poet Aeschylus was accused of having
brought something from the Mysteries to the stage. He was able to
escape death only by fleeing to the altar of Dionysus and producing
legal evidence that he was not an initiate.

What the ancients say about these secrets is rich in meaning and can
be variously interpreted. The initiate is convinced that it is sinful
to say what he knows and also that it is sinful for the uninitiated to
hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated,
comparing their state of mind to a preparation for death. Initiation
had to be preceded by a special mode of life. This aimed at bringing
sensuality under the control of the spirit. Fasting, solitary life,
mortification and certain exercises of the soul served this purpose.
The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all value
for him. The whole course of his experience and feeling had to take a
different direction. There can be no doubt about the meaning of such
exercises and tests. The wisdom to be offered to the neophyte could
produce the right effect upon his soul only if he had previously
changed his lower world of experience. He was inducted into the life
of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world. He could find no
relationship to this world without previous exercises and tests.
Everything depended just on this relationship. Whoever wishes to
understand these things correctly must have known by experience the
intimate facts of the life of cognition. He must know by experience
that two widely divergent relationships are possible in relation to
what is offered by the highest cognition. The world surrounding man is
his real world at first. He feels, hears and sees its processes.
Because he perceives them with his senses he calls them real and
thinks about them in order to gain insight into their connections. On
the other hand, what rises in his soul is not real to him at first in
the same sense. It is "mere" thoughts and ideas. At most, he sees in
them pictures of material reality. They themselves have no reality.
One cannot touch them; one cannot hear nor see them.

Another relationship to the world exists. A person who clings at all
costs to the kind of reality described above, will hardly grasp it. It
enters the lives of certain people at a certain moment. Their whole
relationship to the world is reversed. They call truly real the images
which arise in the spiritual life of their soul. They assign only a
lower form of reality to what the senses hear, touch and see. They
know they cannot prove what they say. They know they can only recount
their new experiences. And they know that in recounting them to others
they are in the position of a man who can see and who imparts his
visual impressions to one born blind. They undertake the communication
of their inner experiences, trusting that they are surrounded by
others, who, although their spiritual eye is still closed, have a
logical understanding which can be strengthened through the power of
what they hear. They believe in humanity and wish to open spiritual
eyes. They can only offer the fruits their spirit itself has gathered;
whether another sees the fruits depends upon whether he has
comprehension for what is seen by a spiritual eye. (See page 36.)
Something existing in man at first prevents him from seeing with the
eyes of the spirit. First of all he is not here for this purpose. He
is what his senses represent him to be, and his intellect is only the
interpreter and judge of his senses. These senses would fulfill their
mission badly if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility
of their evidence. From its own point of view, an eye must uphold the
absolute reality of its perceptions, otherwise it would be a bad eye.
The eye is quite right, so far as it goes. It is not deprived of its
rights by the spiritual eye. This spiritual eye allows us to see what
the material eye sees, but in a higher light. Nothing the material eye
sees is denied. But a new radiance, hitherto unseen, shines from it.
Then we know that what we first saw was but a lower reality. We see
this still, but it is immersed in something higher, in the spirit. Now
it is a question of whether we experience and feel what we see.
Whoever is able to bring living experience and feeling to the material
world only, will regard the higher world as a Fata Morgana or as
"mere" phantasy-images. His feelings are directed entirely toward the
material world. When he tries to grasp spirit images, he seizes
emptiness. When he gropes after them, they withdraw from him. They are
"mere" thoughts. He thinks them; he does not live in them. They are
pictures, less real to him than fleeting dreams. Compared with his
reality they are like images made of froth which vanish as they
encounter the massive, solidly-built reality of which his senses tell
him. It is a different matter for the person whose experience and
feelings with regard to reality have changed. For him that reality has
lost its absolute stability, its unquestioned value. His senses and
his feelings need not become blunted. But they begin to doubt their
absolute authority; they leave space for something else. The world of
the spirit begins to animate this space.

At this point a dreadful possibility exists. A man may lose his
experience and feeling of direct reality without finding any new
reality opening before him. He is then suspended in a void. He seems
to himself dead. The old values have disappeared and no new ones have
taken their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. This is
by no means a mere possibility. At some time or other it happens to
everyone who wishes to attain higher cognition. He reaches a point
where to him the spirit interprets all life as death. Then he is no
longer in the world. He is beneath the world, in the nether world. He
accomplishes the, journey to Hades. It is well for him if he is not
submerged. It is well for him if a new world opens before him. Either
he disappears, or is confronted by a new self. In the latter case a
new sun and a new earth appear to him. Out of spiritual fire the whole
world has been reborn for him.

Thus the initiates describe what happened to them through the
Mysteries. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to
be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of
Zoroaster. He says that on his travels he swam across the great water
and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were
terrified by a drawn sword and that "blood flowed." We understand such
sayings when we know the point of transition from lower to higher
cognition. We ourselves have felt how all solid matter, all the
material world, has dissolved into water; we have lost the ground from
beneath our feet. Everything we had previously experienced as living
has been killed. The spirit has passed through material life as a
sword pierces a warm body; we have seen the blood of sensuality flow.

But a new life has appeared. We have climbed up from the nether world.
The orator Aristides relates, "I thought I touched the god and felt
him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit
was so light that one who is not 'initiated' cannot speak of it nor
understand it." This new existence is not subject to the laws of lower
life. Growth and decay do not affect it. Much may be said about the
eternal, but one's words will be "but sound and smoke," who does not
speak of the same thing as those who speak of it after the journey to
Hades. The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for
the first time they are entitled to speak about immortality. They know
that whoever speaks of immortality without the knowledge gained
through initiation does not understand it. The uninitiated attribute
immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth
and decay.-The mystics did not desire to gain the mere conviction that
the kernel of life is immortal. In their view, such a conviction would
be worthless. This is because they believed the non-mystic simply does
not have the eternal living within him. If he were to speak of the
eternal, he would speak of nothing. The mystics seek the eternal
itself. They must first awaken the eternal within themselves; then
they can speak of it. Therefore Plato's severe saying has full reality
for them: Whoever is not initiated is submerged in the mire, (See page
36) and he alone enters eternity who has experienced mystical life.
Only in this way can the words in the fragment from Sophocles be
understood:

"Thrice happy they, who, having seen these rites,
Then pass to Hades: there to these alone
Is granted life, all others evil find."

Are not dangers described in speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not
robbing men of happiness, of the most valuable part of life, to lead
them to the gate of the nether world? Terrible is the responsibility
incurred by such an act. And yet, may we shirk this responsibility?
These were the questions the initiate had to ask himself. In his
opinion his knowledge was to the soul of the people as light is to
darkness. But in this darkness dwells innocent happiness. The mystics
were of the opinion that this happiness should not be interfered with
wantonly. For what would have happened in the first place had the
mystic "betrayed" his secret? He would have spoken words, nothing but
words. Nothing at all would have happened through the experiences and
feelings, which should have evoked the spirit from these words. For
this, preparation, exercises, tests and the complete change of
sense-experience would have been necessary. Without these, the hearer
would have been flung into emptiness, into nothingness. He would have
been deprived of what gave him happiness without being able to receive
anything in exchange. It might be said that one could not have taken
anything from him. For certainly mere words could not change his life
of experience. He could only have experienced reality through the
objects of his senses. One could have given him nothing but a
dreadful, life-destroying apprehension. This could be regarded only as
a crime. (See page 36) The above is no longer fully valid today for
the acquisition of spiritual cognition. The latter can be understood
conceptually because modern man has a capacity to form concepts which
the ancients lacked. Today people can be found who have cognition of
the spiritual world through their own experience; they can be
confronted by others who comprehend these experiences conceptually.
Such a capacity for forming concepts was lacking in the ancients.

Ancient Mystery wisdom is like a hothouse plant which must be
cherished and cared for in seclusion. To bring it into the atmosphere
of everyday conceptions is to put it in an element in which it cannot
flourish. It withers away to nothing before the caustic verdict of
modern science and logic. Let us therefore divest ourselves for a time
of all the education we have received through the microscope,
telescope and the ways of thought derived from natural science; let us
purify our hands which have become clumsy and have been too busy
dissecting and experimenting, so that we may enter the pure temple of
the Mysteries. For this a truly unprejudiced mind is necessary.

For the mystic, everything depends primarily upon the frame of mind in
which he approaches what he feels to be the highest, the answers to
the enigmas of existence. Particularly in our time, when only things
pertaining to physical science are recognized as deserving cognition,
it is difficult to believe that for the highest things, everything
depends on a frame of mind. Cognition thereby becomes an intimate
concern of each personality. For the mystic, however, it is so. Tell
someone the solution of the world-enigma! Hand it to him ready-made!
The mystic will consider it nothing but empty sound if the individual
does not confront this solution in the right manner. The solution is
nothing in itself; it disintegrates if it does not kindle in his
feeling the particular fire which is essential. Let a divine being
approach you! It may be nothing or everything. Nothing, if you meet it
in the frame of mind in which you confront everyday things.
Everything, if you are prepared and attuned to it. What it is in
itself is a matter which does not concern you; the point is whether it
leaves you as you were or makes a different man of you. But this
depends solely on you. You must have been prepared by the education
and development of the most intimate forces of your personality so
that what the divine is able to evoke may be kindled and released in
you. What is brought to you depends upon the reception you prepare for
it. Plutarch has given an account of this education; he has spoken of
the greeting the mystic offers the divine being who approaches him:
"For the god addresses each one of us as we approach him here with the
words 'Know Thyself,' as a form of welcome, which certainly is in no
wise of less import than 'Hail;' and we in turn reply to him 'Thou
art,' as rendering unto him a form of address which is truthful, free
from deception and the only one befitting him alone, the assertion of
Being. The fact is that we really have no share in Being, but
everything of a mortal nature is at some stage between coming into
existence and passing away, and presents only a dim and uncertain
semblance and appearance of itself; and if you apply the whole force
of your mind in your desire to apprehend it, it is like unto the
violent grasping of water, which, by squeezing and compression, loses
the handful enclosed, as it spurts through the fingers; even so
Reason, pursuing the exceedingly clear appearance of every one of
those things that are susceptible to modification and change, is
baffled by the one aspect of its coming into being, and by the other
of its passing away; and thus it is unable to apprehend a single thing
that is abiding or really existent. 'It is impossible to step twice in
the same river' are the words of Heraclitus, nor is it possible to lay
hold twice of any mortal substance in a permanent state; by the
suddenness and swiftness of the change in it there 'comes dispersion
and, at another time, a gathering together;' or, rather, not at
another time nor later, but at the same instant it both settles into
its place and forsakes its place; 'it is coming and going.' Wherefore
that which is born of it never attains unto being because of the
unceasing and unstaying process of generation, which, ever bringing
change, produces from the seed an embryo, then a babe, then a child
and in due course a boy, a young man, a mature man, an elderly man, an
old man, causing the first generations and ages to pass away by those
which succeed them. But we have a ridiculous fear of one death, we who
have already died so many deaths, and still are dying! For not only is
it true, as Heraclitus used to say, that the death of fire is birth
for air, and the death of air is birth for water, but the case is even
more clearly to be seen in our own selves: the man in his prime passes
away when the old man comes into existence, the young man passes away
into the man in his prime, the child into the young man, and the babe
into the child. Dead is the man of yesterday, for he is passed into
the man of to-day; and the man of to-day is dying as he passes into
the man of to-morrow. Nobody remains one person, nor is one person;
but we become many persons, even as matter is drawn about some one
semblance and common mold with imperceptible movement. Else how is it
that, if we remain the same persons, we take delight in some things
now, whereas earlier we took delight in different things; that we love
or hate opposite things, and so too with our admirations and our
disapprovals, and that we use other words and feel other emotions and
have no longer the same personal appearance, the same external form,
nor the same purposes in mind? For without change it is not reasonable
that a person should have different experiences and emotions; and if
he changes, he is not the same person, he has no permanent being, but
changes his very nature as one personality in him succeeds to another.
Our senses, through ignorance of reality, falsely tell us that what
appears to be is.''

Plutarch often shows himself to be an initiate. What he portrays for
us here is an essential condition of the life of a mystic. Man
acquires a wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the
illusory character of material life. Everything the material nature
regards as existence, as reality, is plunged into the stream of
evolving life. And man himself fares the same as the other things of
the world. He disintegrates before the eyes of his spirit; his
totality is dissolved into parts, into transitory phenomena. Birth and
death lose their distinctive significance; they become moments of
coming into existence, and decay like everything else which happens.
The highest cannot be found in connection with growth and decay. It
can only be sought in something truly lasting, which looks back to
what has been and forward to what is to come. To find what looks
backward and forward is a higher stage of cognition. It is the spirit,
which is revealed in and through the material world. This spirit has
nothing to do with material growth. It does not come into existence
nor decay in the same manner as do sense phenomena. Whoever lives only
in the world of the senses has this spirit latent within him; whoever
sees through the illusory character of the world of the senses has it
as a revealed reality within him. Whoever achieves this insight has
developed a new organ within him. Something has taken place in him, as
in a plant which at first has only green leaves and then puts forth a
colored blossom. Certainly, the forces through which the flower
developed were already latent in the plant before the blossom came
into existence, but they became reality only when this latter took
place. Divine spiritual forces also are latent in the purely material
man, but they are a revealed reality only in the mystic. Therein lies
the transformation that has taken place in the mystic. By his
development he has added something new to the existing world. The
material world has made a material man of him and then left him to
himself. Nature has fulfilled her mission. Her potential connection
with the forces working within man is exhausted. But these forces
themselves are not yet exhausted. They lie as though spellbound in the
purely natural man, awaiting their release. They cannot release
themselves; they vanish into nothing if man himself does not grasp
them and develop them further, if he does not awaken to real existence
what slumbers hidden within him. Nature evolves from the least to the
most perfect. Nature leads beings by an extensive series of stages
from the inanimate through all forms of life up to material man. Man
in his material nature opens his eyes and becomes aware of himself in
the material world as a real being, capable of transforming itself. He
still observes in himself the forces out of which this material nature
is born. These forces are not the object of transformation because
they gave rise to the transformation. Man bears them within himself as
an indication that something lives within him, transcending his
material perception. What may come into existence through these forces
is not yet present. Man feels something light up within him which has
created everything, including himself; and he feels that this
something will spur him to higher achievement. It is within him; it
existed before his material appearance, and will be there after it.
Through it he has come into being, and he may grasp it, and himself
participate in his creation. Such feelings lived in the ancient mystic
after initiation. He felt the eternal, the divine. His deeds will
become a part of the creative activity of the divine. He may say to
himself: I have discovered a higher "I" within me, but this "I"
surpasses the boundaries of my material growth; it existed before my
birth, it will exist after my death. Creatively this "I" has worked
throughout eternity; creatively it will work in eternity. My material
personality is a creation of this "I." But it has incorporated me
within it; creatively it works in me; I am a part of it. What I am now
able to create is something higher than the material. My personality
is only a medium for this creative force, for this divine, within me.
In this way the mystic experienced his apotheosis.

The mystic named the force thus kindled within him, his true spirit.
He was the result of this spirit. It seemed to him as though a new
being had entered him and taken possession of his organs. This was a
being which stood between his material personality and the Sovereign
Power of the cosmos, the Godhead. The mystic sought his true spirit.
He said to himself, I have become man in the great natural world. But
nature has not completed her task. I myself must take over this
completion. However, I cannot do this in the gross realm of nature to
which my material personality also belongs. Whatever can develop in
this realm has developed. Therefore I must escape from this realm. I
must continue to build in the sphere of the spiritual, where nature
has stood still. I must create for myself a breathing space which
cannot be found in outer nature. This breathing space was prepared for
the mystics in the Mystery temples. There the forces slumbering within
them were awakened; there they were transformed into higher creative
spirit-natures. This transformation was a delicate process. It could
not endure the rough elements of the outdoors. When the process was
completed, through it man had become a rock grounded in the eternal,
able to defy all storms. But he was not permitted to believe that he
could communicate his experiences in their direct form to others.

Plutarch informs us that in the Mysteries "it is possible to gain the
clearest reflections and adumbrations of the truth about the daemons."
And from Cicero we learn that "those occult Mysteries . . . when
interpreted and explained prove to have more to do with natural
science than with theology." From such communications we see clearly
that for the mystic there existed a higher insight into natural
science than the religion of the people could give. Moreover this
shows that the daemons, that is, the spiritual beings, and the gods
themselves required explanation. Beings are approached who are of a
higher nature than the daemons and gods. And this is in the nature of
Mystery wisdom. The people pictured gods and daemons in images taken
entirely from the world of material reality. Surely one who could
penetrate the essence of the eternal was bound to lose confidence in
the eternalness of such gods! How could Zeus, as the people pictured
him, be eternal when he had the characteristics of a mortal being?
-One thing was clear to the mystic: man attains his idea of the gods
in a different manner from his ideas about other things. An object in
the external world compels me to form a definitive idea of it. In
contrast to this the formation of ideas of the gods has something
free, even arbitrary, about it. The compulsion of the external world
is lacking. Reflection teaches us that with the gods we imagine
something for which there is no external control. This puts man into a
state of logical uncertainty. He begins to feel that he is the creator
of his gods. He even asks himself: How do I come to transcend physical
reality in my world of ideas? The mystic must devote himself to such
thoughts. The doubts which then beset him were justified. He could
think to himself: Let us simply look at all these ideas of the gods.
Are they not similar to the creatures we meet in the world of the
senses? Has not man created them by mentally adding or subtracting
this or that quality essentially belonging to the world of the senses?
The barbarian who loves hunting creates a heaven for himself in which
the most glorious hunts of the gods take place. The Greek peoples
Olympus with divinities having their prototype in the reality which is
well known to him.

The philosopher Xenophanes (575-480 B.C.) referred to this fact with
crude logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were absolutely
dependent on Mystery wisdom. This will be demonstrated in relation to
Heraclitus in particular. For this reason the saying of Xenophanes can
be accepted without reservation as a conviction based on mystic
knowledge. He says:

"But men have the idea that gods are born,
And wear their clothes, and have both voice and shape.
But had the oxen or the lions hands,
Or could with hands depict a work like men,
Were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods,
The horses would them like to horses sketch,
To oxen, oxen, and their bodies make
Of such a shape as to themselves belongs."

Through such insight man may become doubtful of everything divine. He
may reject the legends of the gods and acknowledge as reality only
that what his material perceptions compel him to acknowledge. But the
mystic did not become such a doubter. He understood that the doubter
was like a plant which said to itself: My colored blossom is vain and
worthless, for I am complete in my green leaves; what I add to them
only increases the illusory appearance. But neither could the mystic
remain content with the gods thus created, the gods of the people. If
the plant could think, it would understand that the forces which had
created the green leaves are also destined to create the colored
blossom. And it would not rest until it had investigated these forces
for itself in order to see them. So it was for the mystic in relation
to the gods of the people. He did not deny them nor declare them to be
vain, but he knew that they were created by man. The same natural
forces, the same divine elements which work creatively in nature also
work creatively in the mystic. In him also they engender ideas of the
gods. He wishes to see this force which is creating gods. It is not
like the gods of the people; it is something higher. Xenophanes also
indicates this:

One God there is, 'midst gods and men supreme;
In form, in mind, unlike to mortal men.

This God was also the God of the Mysteries. He could be called "a
hidden God," for nowhere, so it was thought, is He to be found by the
purely material man. Direct your gaze outward toward objects; you find
no divinity. Exert your intelligence; you may understand the laws by
which things come into existence and decay, but your intellect shows
you nothing divine. Saturate your fantasy with religious feeling; you
can create pictures of beings which you may take to be gods, but your
intellect dissects them for you, for it proves to you that you
yourself created them, and borrowed the material for their creation
from the material world. Insofar as you, as intellectual man, consider
the things about you, you must deny the gods. For God is not there for
your senses or intellect, which explain material perceptions. God is
magically concealed in the world. And you need His own force in order
to find Him. This force you must awaken within yourself. These are the
teachings which a neophyte of ancient times received. Then began for
him the great cosmic drama in which he was engulfed alive. This drama
consisted of nothing less than the release of the spellbound God.
Where is God? This was the question the mystic put before his soul.
God is not, but nature is. He must be found in nature. In nature He
has found an enchanted tomb. The words, "God is Love," are grasped by
the mystic in a higher sense. For God has carried this Love to its
uttermost. He has given Himself in infinite Love; He has diffused
Himself; He has divided Himself into the manifold variety of natural
things; they live, and He does not live in them. He rests in them. He
lives in man. And man can experience the life of God in himself. If he
is to let Him come to cognition he must release this cognition
creatively in himself. Man now gazes into himself. As a hidden
creative force, as yet unincarnated, works the divinity in his soul.
In this soul is a place where the spellbound divinity can come to life
again. The soul is the mother who by nature can conceive the divinity.
If the soul is fructified by nature it will give birth to a divinity.
Out of the marriage of the soul with nature a divinity will be born.
This is no longer a "hidden" divinity; it is revealed. It has life,
perceptible life, and walks among men. It is the released spirit in
man, the offspring of the spellbound divinity. It is not the great
God, who was, is and will be, but it can be taken as His revelation in
a certain sense. The Father rests in concealment, the Son is born to
man out of his own soul. Thus mystic cognition is a real event in the
cosmic process. It is the birth of an offspring of God. It is an event
as real as any other natural event, only on a higher level. This is
the great secret of the mystic, that he himself creatively releases
his divine offspring, but he also prepares himself beforehand to
acknowledge this divine offspring created by himself. The non-mystic
lacks the experience of the father of this offspring. For this father
slumbers under a spell. The offspring appears to be virginally born.
The soul appears to have borne him without fructification. All its
other offspring are conceived by the material world. In their case the
father can be seen and touched. He has material life. The divine
offspring alone is conceived of the eternal, hidden Father-God
Himself.

 

Part VIII: Greek Sages Before Plato in the Light of Mystery Wisdom

GREEK SAGES BEFORE PLATO
IN THE LIGHT OF MYSTERY WISDOM

NUMEROUS FACTS lead us to perceive that the philosophical wisdom of
the Greeks stems from the same basic conviction as does mystical
cognition. We can understand the great philosophers only when we
approach them with the feelings gained from observation of the
Mysteries. How reverently Plato speaks of the "secret teachings" in
the Phaedo "And it appears that those men who established the
Mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning
when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified
to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there
initiated and purified will dwell with the gods. For as they say in
the Mysteries, 'the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few;'
and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true
philosophers. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing
undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them."
-Initiation can be discussed in this way only by someone who has
placed his own striving for wisdom entirely at the service of the
conviction engendered by initiation. And there is no doubt that a
bright light is cast upon the words of the great Greek philosophers
when they are illuminated by the Mysteries.

A saying which has been handed down about Heraclitus of Ephesus
(535-475 B.C.) gives a clear indication of his relationship to the
essence of the Mysteries, saying that his thoughts are "a path which
is difficult to travel," that anyone who approaches them uninitiated
will find only "obscurity and darkness," but that on the other hand
they are "brighter than sunlight" for the person who is introduced to
them by a mystic. When it is said of his book that he placed the
latter in the temple of Artemis, this means that he could be
understood only by initiates. (Historical evidence of Heraclitus'
relationship to the Mysteries has already been contributed by Edmund
Pfleiderer. See his book, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im
Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin 1886.) Heraclitus was called "The
Obscure" because only the light of the Mysteries provided the key to
his conceptions.

Heraclitus strikes us as a personality with the most serious attitude
toward life. If we know how to conjure up his appearance, we see in
his physiognomy that he bore within him the most intimate experiences
of cognition which he knew could only be indicated, not expressed, by
words. From the soil of such a conviction sprang his famous saying,
"Everything is in a state of flux," which Plutarch interprets in the
following words: "It is impossible to step twice in the same river nor
is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance in a
permanent state, by the suddenness and swiftness of the change in it
there comes dispersion and at another time, a gathering together; or
rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same instant it both
settles into its place and forsakes its place; it is coming and
going." The man who thinks in this way has seen through the nature of
transitory things. He has felt urged to characterize in the sharpest
words the essence of transitoriness. Such a characterization cannot be
made unless the transitory is measured against the eternal. In
particular this characterization cannot be extended to man unless his
innermost being has been penetrated. Heraclitus does extend this
characterization to man: "Living and dead are the same and so are
waking and sleeping, youth and age. For the one in changing becomes
the other, and the other, changing, again becomes the one.'' Full
cognition of the illusory character of the lower personality is
expressed in this sentence. He speaks of this even more forcibly:
"There is life and death in our life, just as in our death." What does
this mean except that life can be valued more highly than death only
when seen from the point of view of the transitory. Death is decay to
make room for new life, but the eternal lives in the new life as in
the old. The same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When
man has grasped this eternal he looks upon death with the same
feelings as he looks upon life. Only if he is unable to awaken this
eternal within himself does life have a special value for him. The
sentence, "Everything is in a state of flux" may be trotted out a
thousand times, but if it is not spoken with a feeling for this
content it is void of meaning. Cognition of eternal creation is
valueless if it does not cancel out our dependence upon earthly
creation. Heraclitus means to repudiate the lust for life which
presses after transitory things with the saying, "How shall we say of
our daily life: 'we are,' when we know that from the standpoint of the
eternal: 'we are and we are not.'" (Heraclitus, Fragment No. 81) "But
Hades is the same as Dionysus," states another of the Fragments of
Heraclitus. (127) Dionysus, the god of lust for life, of germination
and growth, to whom the Dionysian festivals were dedicated, is for
Heraclitus the same as Hades, the god of annihilation and destruction.
Only one who sees life within death and death within life, and in both
the eternal which is infinitely above life and death, his gaze alone
can behold in the right light the disadvantages and advantages of
existence. Then the disadvantages find their justification, for the
eternal lives in them also. What they appear to be from the standpoint
of the limited lower life is only illusory: "For men to get all they
wish is not the better thing. It is disease that makes health a
pleasant thing; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; and toil, rest." "Sea
water is the most pure and the most polluted; for fishes it is
drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrinkable and
deleterious.'' (Fragment 104, 52) Heraclitus intends primarily to
point out not the transitory quality of earthly things, but the
splendor and majesty of the eternal. -Heraclitus spoke vigorously
against Homer, Hesiod and the scholars of his day. He wished to point
out the manner of their thought which clings only to the transitory.
He did not want the gods furnished with attributes taken from the
transitory world. And he could not respect as the highest a science
which investigated the laws of the growth and decay of things. For him
the eternal speaks through the transitory. He has a deeply significant
symbol for this eternal: "The harmony of the world is of opposite
tensions, as is that of the lyre or bow.''(Fragment 56) How much is
contained in this pictured Unity is attained by the striving of forces
in opposite directions and the harmonization of these diverging
forces. One tone contradicts another, yet together they achieve
harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought
of Heraclitus: "Immortals take on mortality, mortals immortality;
death is the eternal life of mortals, earthly life the death of
immortals.'' (Fragment 67)

To cling to the transitory with his cognition is the original fault of
man. Thereby he turns away from the eternal. Through this, life
becomes a danger to him. What happens to him comes to pass through
life. But it loses its sting when he no longer values life as
absolute. Then his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he
could return from the so-called seriousness of life to childhood. How
much that is play to the child is taken in all seriousness by the
adult! The one who knows, however, becomes like a child. "Serious"
values lose their worth when seen from the standpoint of the eternal.
Life then appears as a game. Therefore Heraclitus says, "Eternity is a
child at play; it is the dominion of a child." (Fragment 79) Where
does the original fault lie? It consists in taking with the utmost
seriousness those things to which this seriousness should not be
attached. God has descended into the world of things. Whoever receives
these things without God receives them seriously as the "Tombs of
God." He should play with them like a child and employ his seriousness
to draw out of them the God who sleeps spellbound within. Burning,
yes, scorching is the effect which contemplation of the eternal has
upon ordinary assumptions about things. The spirit dissolves the
thoughts of sensuality; it melts them. It is a consuming fire. This is
the higher sense of the thought of Heraclitus, that fire is the
archetypal substance of all things. Certainly this thought is to be
taken first in the sense of an ordinary physical exploration of the
phenomena of the world. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not
think about him in the way that Philo, who lived at the time of the
birth of Christianity, thought about the laws of the Bible. He says,
"There are people who take written laws only as pictures of spiritual
teaching. They search out the latter with great care and despise the
former. I can only censure such people for they should take care of
both: the cognition of the esoteric sense and the observation of the
exoteric.'' We pervert the thoughts of Heraclitus if we argue whether
by his concept of fire he meant physical fire, or whether for him fire
was only a symbol of the eternal spirit which dissolves and reforms
material things. He meant both and neither, because for him the spirit
also lived in ordinary fire. The force physically active in fire lives
on a higher plane in the human soul, melting sense-bound cognition in
its furnace and allowing contemplation of the eternal to emerge from
it.

Heraclitus in particular may easily be misunderstood. He allows strife
to be the father of things, (Fragment 44) but to him it is the father
only of "things," not of the eternal. If there were no polarities in
the world, if the most manifold conflicting interests did not exist,
the world of growth would not exist, nor would the world of decay.
What reveals itself, however, in this, what is diffused in it, is not
strife; it is harmony. Just because strife is in all things, the
spirit of the sage is to move over all things like fire, transforming
them into harmony. This point throws light on one of the great
thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is the personal essence of man?
The above passage contains the answer of Heraclitus. Man is a mixture
of conflicting elements, into which God is descended. This is the
condition in which he finds himself. Further, he becomes aware of the
spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. This
spirit, however, is born for him personally out of the conflict of the
elements. This spirit should also pacify the elements. In man, nature
creates beyond herself. It is the same unique force which has begotten
the conflict, the mixture, which, filled with wisdom, is to remove
this conflict again. There we have the eternal duality which lives in
man, the eternal contradiction in him between temporal and eternal.
Through the eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of
this he should create something higher. He is both dependent and
independent. He can participate in the eternal spirit which he beholds
only to the extent of the mixture the eternal spirit has produced in
him. Just because of this he is called upon to form the eternal out of
the temporal. The spirit works in him. But it works in him in a
special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of
the human soul that something temporal works like something eternal,
that it leavens and strengthens like an eternal quality. This makes
the human soul similar to a god and a worm at the same time. Because
of this man stands midway between God and animal. This leavening and
strengthening force in him is his daemonic element. This is what
strives beyond him from within. Heraclitus points to this in a
striking way: "Man's daemon is his destiny."(Fragment 137) (Daemon is
meant here in the Greek sense. In the modern sense we would say
spirit.) Thus for Heraclitus what lives in man extends itself far
beyond the personal. This personal element is the bearer of a daemonic
element. This element is not confined to one personality and the death
and birth of the personality have no significance for it. What
connection has this daemonic element with what in the form of
personality comes into existence and decays? The personal element is
only a form of appearance for the daemonic. The bearer of such
cognition looks forward and backward beyond himself. That he
experiences the daemonic element in himself is to him evidence of his
own immortality. Now he may no longer ascribe to this daemonic element
the single task of filling out his personality. For the personality
can be only one form of appearance of the daemonic element. The daemon
cannot confine itself within one personality. It has the force to
animate many personalities. It can go from personality to personality.
This premise of Heraclitus gives rise as a matter of course to the
great thought of reincarnation. Not, however, to the thought alone,
but to the experience of reincarnation. The thought is only the
preparation for the experience. Whoever becomes aware of the daemonic
element within himself does not discover it to be an innocent primary
element.

He finds that it has characteristics. How has it come by these? Why
have I tendencies? Because other personalities have already worked
upon my daemon. And what will become of the effect which I produce on
the daemon, if I may not assume that its task is exhausted in my
personality? I prepare for a later personality. Something which is not
the same as a divinity, something which reaches beyond me, introduces
itself between me and the cosmic unity. My daemon introduces itself.
As my today is but the result of yesterday, and my tomorrow will only
be the result of my today, so my life is the continuation of another,
and will be the basis for another. As physical man looks backward on
numerous yesterdays and forward to numerous tomorrows, so the soul of
the sage beholds numerous lives in the past and numerous lives in the
future. What I acquired yesterday in the way of thoughts and
accomplishments, I use today. Is it not so with life? Do not men set
foot upon the horizon of existence with the most varied faculties?
Whence comes this variety? Does it come out of nothingness? Our
natural science congratulates itself on banishing the miracle from our
conceptions of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss (see Alter und
Neuer Glaube, Old and New Faith) considers it a great achievement of
modern times that we no longer think of a perfect organic creature
being miraculously created out of nothingness. We grasp perfection
when we are able to explain it as an evolution out of imperfection.
The structure of the ape is no longer a miracle if we may assume, as
ancestors of the ape, primitive fish which have gradually transformed
themselves. Let us agree to accept for the spirit what seems to us
right with regard to nature. Is the perfected spirit to have the same
origin as the imperfected spirit? Is Goethe to have the same
disposition as any Hottentot? The spirit of Goethe cannot have the
same spiritual predispositions as an aborigine, any more than a fish
has the same predisposition as an ape. The spiritual ancestry of
Goethe's spirit is different from that of the aborigine. The spirit
has grown like the body. The spirit in Goethe has more predecessors
than that in the aborigine. Let us take the teaching of reincarnation
in this sense. Then we shall no longer find it "unscientific." On the
contrary, what is found in the soul will then be explained in the
right way. What is given will not be accepted as a miracle. That I can
write is the result of the fact that I have learned to do so. One who
has never held a pen in his hand cannot sit down and write. But
someone or other is supposed to have a "spark of genius" in some
purely miraculous way. No, this "spark of genius" must also be
acquired; it must be learned. If it makes its appearance in a
personality, we call it a spiritual element. But first this spiritual
element also had to learn; in an earlier life it has acquired for
itself the "ability" it has in a later one.

In this way and no other did Heraclitus and the Greek sages conceive
the thought of eternity. For them there was no question of the
continuance of the actual personality. Let us refer to a saying of
Empedocles (490-430 B.C.). Of those who regard something as a miracle,
he says,

"Fools! for they have no far-reaching thoughts-
Who deem that what before was not comes into being,
Or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.
For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is,
And it is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish;
For it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it.
A man wise in such matters would never surmise in his heart
That as long as mortals live what they call their life,
So long they are, and suffer good and ill;
While before they were formed and after they have been dissolved
They are just nothing at all."

The Greek sage did not raise the question whether there is an eternal
element in man; he only asked of what does this eternal consist and
how can man cherish and care for it within himself. For it was clear
to him from the beginning that man lives as a creature midway between
the earthly and the divine. There was no question of the divine
existing outside and beyond earthly things. The divine lives in man;
it lives there, but in a human way. It is the force which urges man to
make himself ever more and more divine. Only a person who thinks in
this way can say with Empedocles,

When, released from the body, you ascend to the free ether, You will
become an immortal god, escaping death.

What can happen to a human life from such a point of view? It can be
initiated into the ordered cycle of the eternal. Forces must be
present in it which are not brought into development by a purely
natural life. And this life could pass by unused if these forces
remained lying fallow. It was the task of the Mysteries to open them
up, thereby likening the human to the divine. And the Greek sages also
set themselves this task. Thus we understand Plato's words: "Whoever
goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the
mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with
the gods." Here we are dealing with an idea of immortality, the
significance of which is determined within the whole cosmos.
Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the eternal within
himself he does in order to heighten the existence-value of the
cosmos. As a cognizant being one is not an idle observer of the whole
cosmos when he pictures to himself what would equally well be there
without him. His power of cognition is a higher natural creative
force. What lights up in him spiritually is a divinity which was
spellbound before, and which without his cognition would have to lie
fallow and wait for another deliverer. Therefore the human personality
does not live within itself and for itself; it lives for the cosmos.
Life extends far beyond individual existence when it is regarded in
this way. Within the framework of such a conception we can understand
sentences such as the following by Pindar, which gives us a glimpse of
the eternal: "Happy is he who has seen those Mysteries ere he passes
beneath the earth. He knows the truth about life's ending, and he
knows that its first seeds were of God's giving."

The proud physiognomy and solitary manner of sages like Heraclitus are
understandable. They could say proudly of themselves that much was
revealed to them, for they did not ascribe their knowledge to their
transitory personality at all, but to the eternal daemon within them.
Their pride was of necessity stamped with the attributes of humility
and modesty, which are expressed in the words: All knowledge of
transitory things is in eternal flux like these transitory things
themselves. Heraclitus calls the eternal cosmos a game; he could also
call it the most profoundly serious thing. But the word serious has
become worn out through being applied to earthly experiences. The game
of the eternal grants man a security in life of which he is deprived
by the seriousness arising out of the transitory.

Another form of world-conception, different from that of Heraclitus,
grew from the same foundation in the essence of the Mysteries, within
a community founded by Pythagoras in lower Italy in the sixth century
before Christ. The Pythagoreans saw the foundation of things in
numbers and figures, whose laws they investigated mathematically.
Aristotle says of them, "They were the first to advance the study of
mathematics, and having been brought up in it they thought its
principles were the principles of all things. Since of these
principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed
to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into
being-more than in fire and earth and water, such and such a
modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason,
another being opportunity-and similarly almost all other things being
numerically expressible; since, again, they saw that the attributes
and ratios of numerical scales were expressible in numbers; since,
then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled
after numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole
of nature, they supposed the demands of numbers to be the elements of
all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number."

The mathematical-scientific observation of natural phenomena must
always lead to a kind of Pythagorean conception. If a string of
definite length is struck, a certain tone is sent forth. If the string
is shortened in definite numerical relationships, other tones come
into being. The pitch of these tones can be expressed by numerical
relationships. In physics color relationships also are expressed by
numbers. When two bodies combine to form one substance this always
occurs in such a way that of one substance one quite definite mass,
expressible by number, combines with an appropriate one of the other
substance. The Pythagoreans directed their observation upon such
arrangements of measure and number in nature. Geometric figures also
play a similar part in nature. For instance, astronomy is mathematics
applied to the heavenly bodies. The point which became important to
the thinking life of the Pythagoreans is the fact that man discovers
the laws of numbers and figures entirely by himself, through his
spiritual activity alone, and that when he looks out into nature the
objects follow these laws he has established for himself in his soul.
Man formulates for himself the concept of the ellipse; he establishes
the laws of the ellipse. And the heavenly bodies move according to the
laws he has established. (Of course we are not concerned here with the
astronomical conceptions of the Pythagoreans. What could be said of
them also applies to the Copernican conceptions in the connection
under consideration here.) From this it follows immediately that the
functions of the human soul are not a force apart from the rest of the
cosmos, but that these functions are the expression of a law-abiding
pattern which is interwoven with the cosmos. The Pythagorean said to
himself: The senses show material phenomena to man. But they do not
show the harmonious patterns which the objects obey. Rather, the
spirit of man must first find these harmonious patterns within himself
if he wishes to behold them outside in the cosmos. The deeper sense of
the cosmos, that which reigns in it as eternal law-abiding necessity,
becomes apparent as a present reality in the human soul. In the soul
the meaning of the cosmos dawns. This meaning does not lie in what is
seen, heard and touched, but in what the soul brings forth from its
deep recesses into the light of day. The eternal pattern therefore
lies hidden in the depths of the soul. Let us descend into the soul,
and we shall find the eternal. God, the eternal cosmic harmony, is
within the human soul. The soul is not confined to the physical body
enclosed by man's skin. For in the soul are born the patterns
according to which the worlds circle in space. The soul is not in the
personality. The personality merely provides the organ through which
what is interwoven with the cosmos can be expressed. Something of the
spirit of Pythagoras is contained in the saying of the Church Father,
Gregory of Nyssa: "It is said that human nature by itself is something
small and limited, but the Godhead is infinite, and how has the
infinite been embraced by something so tiny? And who says that the
infinity of the Godhead was enclosed within the bounds of the flesh as
in a vessel? For not even in our life is man's spiritual nature
enclosed within the bounds of the flesh; on the contrary the physical
body is limited by neighboring parts, but the soul expands freely over
the whole of creation by means of the activity of thought." The soul
is not the personality. The soul belongs to eternity. Taking this
point of view, the Pythagorean also had to admit that only "fools"
could suppose the qualities of the soul to be exhausted with the
personality. For them also it depended upon the awakening of the
eternal within the personal. To them cognition was communion with the
eternal. The more a man brought this eternal into existence within
himself the higher they valued him. The life of their community
consisted in fostering this communion with the eternal. In order to
lead the members of the community to such communion, the Pythagorean
education was established. This education, therefore, was a
philosophical initiation. And the Pythagoreans could very well say
that by their mode of life they strove toward the same goal as the
Mystery cults.

 

Part IX: Plato as a Mystic
PLATO AS A MYSTIC

THE SIGNIFICANCE of the Mysteries in the spiritual life of Greece can
be seen in Plato's conception of the world. There is only one means of
understanding him fully: he must be placed in the light which shines
forth from the Mysteries. The later pupils of Plato, the
Neoplatonists, attribute to him a secret teaching, to which he
admitted only those who were worthy, and then strictly under the "seal
of silence." His teaching was considered secret in the same sense as
the Mystery wisdom. Even if Plato himself is not the author of the
seventh Platonic Epistle, as some people assert, this makes no
difference for our purpose; it need not concern us whether Plato or
someone else expresses the attitude of mind contained in this letter.
This attitude of mind was inherent in his conception of the world. It
says in this Epistle: "But this much I can certainly declare
concerning all these writers, or prospective writers who claim to know
the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of
other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my
judgment at least, that these men understand anything about this
subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise
of mine dealing therewith, for it does not at all admit of verbal
expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued
application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is
brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by
a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself." These words
could only indicate a powerlessness in the use of words due to
personal weakness, if one could not find in them the sense contained
in the Mysteries. What Plato never wrote and never intended to write
about must be something that defies expression in writing. It must be
a feeling, a sensation, an experience that cannot be conveyed in a
moment, but is attained through "continued application . . . and
communion." The intimate training Plato was able to give to the elect
is indicated here. For them fire flashed forth from his words; for the
others, only thoughts. It is of great consequence how one approaches
Plato's Dialogues. They mean more or less according to one's frame of
mind. To Plato's pupils more than the mere literal sense of his
expositions was conveyed. Where he taught, the participants
experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries. The words had overtones
which vibrated with them. But these overtones needed the atmosphere of
the Mysteries. Otherwise they died away unheard.

In the center of the world of Plato's Dialogues stands the personality
of Socrates. We need not touch on the historical aspect here. What
matters is the character of Socrates as represented by Plato. Socrates
is a person sanctified through death for the cause of truth. He died
as only an initiate can die, one to whom death is but a moment of life
like other moments. He meets death as any other occurrence of earthly
existence. His behavior was such that not even in his friends were the
feelings usual to such an occasion aroused. Phaedo says in the
Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul: "For my part, I had strange
emotions when I was there. For I was not filled with pity as I might
naturally be when present at the death of a friend; since he seemed to
me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, he was meeting
death so fearlessly and nobly. And so I thought that even in going to
the abode of the dead he was not going without the protection of the
gods, and that when he arrived there it would be well with him, if it
ever was well with anyone. And for this reason I was not at all filled
with pity, as might seem natural when I was present at a scene of
mourning; nor on the other hand did I feel pleasure, as was our custom
when we were occupied with philosophy-although our talk was of
philosophy-but a very strange feeling came over me, an unaccustomed
mixture of pleasure and of pain together, when I thought that Socr