LECTURE TWO
The
God Within and the God of Outer Revelation
MUNICH,
DECEMBER 7, 1909
AS
YOU KNOW from the
spirit of our anthroposophical work over the years, our work is not
based on a striving for sensations. Instead, we want to calmly
examine the facts of spiritual life that are important in our lives.
It is not by speaking of what lies on the surface of daily life that
we serve our age spiritually, but by gaining knowledge of life's
larger connections. Our individual lives are closely connected with
the great events of existence, and only when we judge our own life on
the basis of the greatest phenomena of life can we assess it rightly.
That is why we have tried in the last three years to deepen our
fundamental views in relation to universal questions. We spent the
first four years in this first seven-year cycle in the existence of
the German Section of the Theosophical Society establishing our views
and insights. From what you heard in the various lecture cycles, you
will have realized that the lectures on the Gospels are part of the
work of these last three years. Those lectures not only helped us
understand the contents of the Gospels, but also showed what we can
learn from them about human nature. Today, we will talk more about
how the Gospels can be applied to our personal lives.
Conventional
science is less and less willing to consider
the Gospels historical documents about the greatest individuality
ever to intervene in human evolution, Christ Jesus. The attitude
toward the Gospels in the first Christian centuries and even
in the Middle Ages was quite different from what it has become in
modern times. These days, the Gospels are indeed seen as four
mutually contradictory documents, and nothing seems more natural than
to ask how they can be considered historical records when they
contradict each other as much as they do in giving an account of what
happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era.
Now, if people did not love
to overlook the most important things, their thinking would
inevitably have to lead them to the following realization. They would
have to admit that it does not really take much to see that the
Gospels contradict each other in our modern sense of the word. One
could say that even a child can see the contradictions. But we
could also add that nowadays the Gospels are available to everybody,
and everybody can read them. However, before the invention of
printing, they were not available to all people but were read only by
a few people. These few were spiritual leaders. The content of the
gospels was then taught to other people in a way they could
understand. Now we have to ask if those few people who read the
gospels, the spiritual leaders, were really such tremendous fools
that they did not realize what every child can see these days,
namely, that the gospels contradict each other.
When we investigate this
matter, we soon notice that people's whole world of feeling toward
the Gospels was different in the past. Today it is the critical
intellect, trained in outer sensory reality, that has a field day
with the Gospels. It has no problem at all finding the intellectual
contradictions there; this is, after all, child's play.
How, then, did those
leaders of spiritual life, who were reading the Gospels, come to
terms with these contradictions? On account of the Gospels, people in
ancient times had a tremendous reverence we can't even imagine today
for the great Christ event. Indeed they felt that precisely because
they had four Gospels they should revere and appreciate the Christ
event all the more. This is because these early readers of the
Gospels thought quite differently than we do today. Modern readers
are no cleverer than somebody who photographs a bouquet of flowers
from one angle. Then he has a picture of the bouquet and shows it
around. People look at it and remember the picture, thinking
they now have a clear idea of what the bouquet looked like. But then
someone takes a picture of the same bouquet from another angle and
gets quite a different picture. He also shows it to everyone but now
people say it cannot possibly be the same bouquet because the two
photographs contradict each other. And if the bouquet is photographed
from all four sides, the four pictures will not be at all similar;
yet they will be four pictures of the same thing.
This was how the early
readers of the four Gospels felt. They believed the four Gospels are
four different representations of one event, each taken from
another point of view. They provide a complete picture of the event
precisely because they are not alike. It is only when all four sides
are combined that a complete idea of the event in Palestine emerges.
People back then felt they had to look up to the Christ event with
even more humility precisely because it was presented from four
perspectives, for clearly this event is so great that it cannot be
understood if it is presented from only one point of view. They felt
they had to be grateful to have four Gospels describing this event
from four points of view. However, they saw they had to
understand how these four different points of
view originated. Then they could develop an idea of what the
individual can derive from the four Gospels.
What
we call the Christ event is a tremendous, mighty event in the
spiritual evolution of humanity. What place does that event in
Palestine have in this evolution? We can say that everything humanity
had previously experienced spiritually merged in this event in
Palestine and from then on continued in one common stream. For
example, the ancient Hebrew teaching, as it is recorded in the Old
Testament, is one part of this common stream. It flowed in as the
event in Palestine took place. Another stream proceeded from
Zarathustra. This, too, entered into Christianity, which then
flowed through the world as a kind of mainstream. Likewise, what we
might call the oriental spiritual stream, which found its most
significant expression in Gautama Buddha, also joined the one
great mainstream. All these various streams are now contained in
Christianity. You do not learn what Buddhism is nowadays from people
who warm over the teachings of Buddha from 600 B.C.
Those teachings have flowed into Christianity. Likewise, you do not learn
what Zarathustrianism really is from people who want to explain its nature
on the basis of ancient Persian documents. For the one who taught in
ancient Persia what was recorded in these ancient documents has
evolved further. He has let his contribution to the spiritual life of
humanity flow into Christianity, and we will have to look for it
there.
To
get a clear picture of the facts, let us consider how these three
streams, Buddhism, Zarathustrianism, and the ancient Judaic stream,
flowed into Christianity. To understand how Zarathustrianism flowed
in, we should remember that the individuality we call Zarathustra was
the great teacher of the second post-Atlantean epoch who first taught
among the ancient Persians and was then incarnated again and again.
Through each incarnation he ascended higher and higher, and finally
he appeared around 600 B.C. as a contemporary
of Buddha. He appeared in the secret schools of the ancient
Chaldean-Babylonian culture and was the teacher of Pythagoras,
who had gone to Chaldea to perfect himself. Then this Zarathustra,
who in 600 B.C. was known as Zarathas
or Nazarathos, was reborn at the beginning of our era to parents
called Joseph and Mary, as described in Saint Matthew's Gospel. This
child of Joseph and Mary, the so-called Bethlehem parents, was one of
the two Jesus children born at the beginning of our era. Thus, we see
the individuality who was the bearer of Zarathustrianism — one
of the significant streams mentioned above — transplanted to
ancient Palestine.
This
was not the only spiritual stream that was to revive and in a new
form flow on in Christianity. Many different things had to come
together to bring this about. For instance, Zarathustra had to be
born in a body so organized that it was possible for him to develop
further the faculties he had acquired through ascending from
incarnation to incarnation. We must keep in mind that no matter how
highly developed an individuality is, if it descends into an
unsuitable body because it cannot find a suitable one, this
individuality cannot express his or her soul-spiritual faculties
because it lacks the necessary physical instruments. It takes a
certain kind of brain to express such faculties as Zarathustra
possessed. That is, he had to be born into a body that had inherited
the qualities making it an appropriate instrument for such
faculties. Thus, the Jesus child described in Saint Matthew's
Gospel had to have a high soul-spiritual organization in his
reincarnating I, which would allow him to have the powerful effect
that was necessary, and he also had to have a perfect physical
organization, which was inherited, for his soul to be born
into. Zarathustra had to find a suitable physical brain.
This perfectly adapted
physical organization was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews to
Christianity. A suitable physical body for Zarathustra, a body with
the most perfect imaginable physical instruments, had to be created
in the Hebrew people through purely physical heredity. This had to be
prepared far back in the past through many generations so that the
right qualities were passed on and then inherited by the body that
was born at the beginning of our era.
Let us look at how this
life flowed into the mainstream of our present spiritual life. Just
as we have seen the mission of Zarathustra in relation to
Christianity, so we will now find out about the mission of the
ancient Hebrews. Here I must tell you that the more
spiritual-scientific research progresses, the more it has to admit
that the Bible, not outer cultural history, is right. What cultural
history digs up appears childish in comparison with what is written
in the Bible and what only needs to be read properly to be
understood. For spiritual science the Bible is more correct than
historical research. For example, it is true that Judaism descended,
in a sense, from a common forefather called Abraham or Abram. It is
indeed absolutely correct that as we trace the generations back into
the past, we come to a forefather who was endowed with very special
powers by the spiritual world. What were these powers? To understand
what special capabilities were given to Abraham, we must recall
various things we have already spoken about here.
As we have said, when we
look at ancient times, we find that people had other faculties of
soul than we have today; these can be called a kind of dim
clairvoyance. Back then, people could not look at the world in the
self-confident, intellectual way we do, but they were able to
perceive the spiritual around them, spiritual phenomena, facts, and
beings. Since this seeing took place in a state of dimmed
consciousness, it was like a living dream, but a dream that had a
vital connection to reality. This ancient clairvoyance had to become
weaker so people could develop our modern way of thinking and our
intellectual culture.
Human evolution is a kind
of education through which the various faculties are gradually
developed. For example, in our present way of seeing, we perceive,
let's say, a flower without seeing its astral body winding all around
it. The ancients, however, still saw the flower and its astral body.
We had to be trained in our modern perception that sees objects with
the sharp contours of the intellect; this training required that the
ancient clairvoyance vanish. Now, there is a certain law that
prevails in spiritual evolution. According to this law, every
capacity humanity acquires must have its beginning in one
individuality. Faculties that are to become common to a large number
of people must first appear in one person. Thus, the faculties having
to do with reasoning not related to clairvoyance, with evaluating the
world by measure, number, and weight — faculties that aim not
at seeing into the spiritual world but at understanding sensory
phenomena — were first implanted by the spiritual world in the
individuality known as Abraham or Abram. He was chosen to be the
first to develop the powers that are especially
bound to the physical brain. It is not for nothing that Abraham is
called the discoverer of arithmetic, that is, of the capability to
quantify the world and calculate it according to measure and number.
In a sense, he was the first of those in whose soul the ancient
dreamy clairvoyance was extinguished and whose brain was prepared so
that the faculty using the brain as instrument could become
effective. Thus, the mission given to Abraham was a significant
and profound one.
Now
this faculty that had been given to Abraham in rudimentary form was
to become more and more perfect. As you can imagine, everything in
the world must develop, and the ability to perceive the world through
the physical brain was no exception. This faculty was developed
through being transmitted from Abraham to the succeeding
generations. However, something different had to happen in this
case than is usual when a mission is passed on from the older
generation to the younger. After all, other missions, especially the
greatest ones, were not connected to a physical instrument, the
physical brain.
For
example, let us look at Zarathustra. He gave his disciples a higher,
more advanced clairvoyant vision than other people had. It was not
bound to a physical instrument but was transmitted from teacher to
pupil. The pupil then in turn became a teacher and gave this higher
clairvoyant vision to his pupils, and so on. Abraham's mission,
however, was not a teaching or method of clairvoyant perception
but something bound to the brain. Thus, it could be transmitted to
later generations only through physical inheritance. The mission
given to Abraham depended on being transmitted physically from one
generation to the next, that is, the perfected organization of
Abraham's brain had to be inherited by his descendants generation
after generation. Because Abraham's mission consisted in perfecting
the physical brain, the latter became more and more perfect from
generation to generation. In other words, the mission of Abraham
depended on procreation for its gradual perfection in the
course of physical evolution.
There
was yet something else connected with this contribution of the
ancient Hebrew people, and we will understand what it was when
we consider people in other civilizations who had dim
clairvoyance. We can ask how they received what was most important to
them, what they revered most in all the world. They received it as
inspirations that lit up within them. They did not have to do
research as we do. Nowadays, we establish sciences by investigating
the world outside us, by experimenting and deducing laws from the
external facts. The ancients did not gain their knowledge in this
way; rather, it lit up within them as an inspiration like a flash of
lightning. They received their knowledge in their inner being; their
souls had to give birth to it within them. They had to turn their
gaze away from the outer world in order to allow the highest truths
to blossom forth within them as inspirations.
This
was to become different for those who derived their mission from
Abraham. Abraham had to bring to humanity precisely the results of
observation and reasoning. When people in those civilizations that
were built on ancient clairvoyance looked up to the highest, they
felt, “I am grateful to the God who reveals himself to me
within me. I turn my gaze away from the outer world, and the Godhead
is most present to me when, without looking at the outside world, I
let his inspirations light up within me.”
However,
the descendants of Abraham were to renounce
inspirations coming from within themselves and prepare themselves to
turn their gaze to the world around them. They were to observe what
is revealed in air and water, in mountain and plain, and in the
starry world, and to ponder how all things exist side by side. They
were to connect external things with one another and to gain an
all-embracing thought from this. When they condensed what they saw in
the outer world into one single thought, they called what the outer
world told them Yahweh or Jehovah. They were to receive the highest
through a revelation that speaks through the outer world.
In contrast to what other
peoples were to contribute, the mission of the Abrahamic people was
to give humanity what came as revelation from outside. Therefore, the
instrument of spiritual life had to be inherited so that its
organization was appropriate for the revelations from outside,
just as earlier the inner powers of soul had to be adapted to the
revelations from within.
Let us look at what
happened when the clairvoyants of ancient times yielded to
revelations from within themselves. They turned their gaze away from
the outer world because what was revealed there could tell them
nothing about the spiritual world. They even turned their gaze away
from the sun and stars and listened only to what was within. There, a
great inspiration about the secrets of the world was revealed, and
they had a picture of the structure of the cosmos. What these ancient
clairvoyants knew about the stars and their movements, about the laws
of the starry world, and about the spiritual worlds was not acquired
through external observation. Rather, the ancients knew something
about Mars, Saturn, and so on because they had revealed themselves
within these people. The laws of the universe, which are inscribed in
the stars, were also inscribed within the human soul and
revealed themselves there in inspirations. Just as the laws of the
universe, which rule the stars, were revealed in the soul, so the
laws that rule the world were now to be revealed to the Abrahamic
people through outer reasoning and deduction — that is, those
laws had to be grasped through outer revelation.
For this purpose, heredity
had to be guided in such a way that the brain could acquire the
qualities enabling it to perceive the right relationships between
things. This wonderful lawfulness was implanted into the
predispositions transmitted to Abraham, predispositions that
developed through the generations in such a way that their
organization corresponds to the great cosmic laws. The brain had to
be transmitted so that its inner capabilities and its structure
developed like the laws of numbers in the stars in the universe. This
is why Jehovah said to Abraham, “You will see generations
descend from you that will be ordered and arranged in accordance with
the numbers of the stars in the heavens.” The generations
following Abraham were to be arranged in harmonious numerical
relationships just as the stars in the sky are ordered in harmonious
relations. In other words, these generations were to bear within them
laws that are like the laws of the stars in the heavens.
In the heavens, there are
twelve constellations. An image of this was to appear in the twelve
tribes of descendants of Abraham so that the faculties that were
implanted in rudimentary form in Abraham could be carried down
through the generations. In the organic structure of this people,
developing further from age to age, an image was to be created of
number and measure in the heavens. In one Bible translation this is
rendered as, “I will multiply your
descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is
on the seashore.” In truth, however, the passage should read,
“Your descendants shall be grouped regularly in their blood
relationships so that their arrangement is an image of the laws of
the stars in the heavens.” The Bible is profound, but the way
it is presented these days is colored by the modern view of the
world. Thus, we read, “I will multiply your descendants as the
stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore,”
while a true translation would be, “Your descendants shall be
so regularly grouped that, for example, twelve tribes will arise that
correspond to the twelve constellations.”
Thus,
the individual characteristics had to express that the Abrahamic
people was to realize that their mission was a gift from outside, not
something that came to life within them. They had to know that what
they have to bring to the world is given to them from the outside.
The Bible wonderfully expresses that Abraham's mission comes to him
from outside in contrast to the old revelations that were given from
within. What was this mission? Abraham's mission was to provide what
flows through the blood up to the time of Christ Jesus. The entire
spirituality of a certain stream had to be placed into this. It was
to work as if it came as a gift from outside. Abraham had to give to
the world the ancient Hebrew people. That was his mission.
If
this people was to be in keeping with this mission, it had to be
given to Abraham as a gift from outside. Abraham had a son, Isaac,
and he was asked to sacrifice this son, as the Bible tells us. As
Abraham was about to carry out the sacrifice, his son was given back
to him by Jehovah. What was Abraham given there? The entire Hebrew
people descended from Isaac. If Isaac had been sacrificed, it
would not have come into being. Thus, the whole Hebrew people was
given to Abraham as a gift. The sparing of Isaac wonderfully
expresses the nature of this gift. It was Abraham's mission to
father the Hebrew people, and with Isaac he received it as a gift
from Jehovah.
This
is how profound the stories in the Bible are; all of them correspond
in their impressive details to the inner character of the progressive
development of humanity. The Old Testament Hebrews gradually had to
relinquish the ancient clairvoyance that continued within the other
civilizations. This clairvoyance was connected to faculties
coming from the spiritual world, which were designated
according to their nature by expressions taken from the names
for the constellations. The last faculty to be given up in
exchange for the gift of the Hebrew people was connected with
the sign of the Ram. Therefore, a ram was sacrificed in place of
Isaac. This is the external expression of the sacrifice of the last
clairvoyant power, making it possible for Abraham to receive
the Hebrew people as a gift. The Hebrews were chosen to develop the
faculties for observation of the outer world. Nevertheless, every new
development contains also atavistic remnants of earlier things. That
is why everything that was not purely in the blood and still
recalled ancient clairvoyance had to be excluded for the sake of the
transmission of the new outer-directed faculties. Thus, the Hebrews
always had to exclude what came as an inheritance from other
peoples.
We
come now to a subject that is difficult to discuss because it
contains a truth far removed from modern thinking. Nevertheless, it
is a truth, and those who have worked for a while in anthroposophical
groups may be able to accept a truth that is foreign to the
conventional modern thinking. We must be aware that certain
classes of people in ancient times retained their earlier faculties
into later ages, especially faculties related to knowing. Clairvoyant
powers lived in human souls, and people were closely connected with
spiritual beings who revealed themselves in their souls. In certain
people, who were the products of the decline of these ancient times,
there developed ultimately a lower form of this connection to the
spiritual world around them. While the actual clairvoyants were
connected with the whole universe through spiritual intuition and
inspiration, those who were part of the process of decline and who
developed this connection to the spiritual in a phase of decadence
were actually lower types of people. They were not independent
because their I was undeveloped, and at the same time their
clairvoyant faculties were already declining. Such individuals
appeared throughout history, and in them we can see the relationship
between certain physical organs and the clairvoyant organs.
Now we arrive at the truth
that will sound strange to you. What we call ancient clairvoyance,
this lighting up of the cosmic secrets within human souls, had to
enter the soul somehow. We have to picture this as streams flowing
into human beings. The ancients did not perceive them, but when these
streams had occurred and lit up within them, people perceived them as
their inspirations. In other words, certain streams flowed into
people from their environment; in later periods these streams were
transformed. In the distant past, these streams were purely
spiritual, and clairvoyants could perceive them as purely
astral-etheric streams. But later these purely spiritual streams
dried up, as it were, and condensed to etheric-physical streams. What
became of them? They developed into hair. Our hair is the result of
these ancient streams. The hair on our body was formerly spiritual
streams that flowed from outside into human beings. Our hair is
nothing else but dried up astral-etheric streams.
Such facts are preserved
only where the old truths have been retained externally in writing or
through tradition. In Hebrew the characters for the words
“hair” and “light” are approximately the same
because people were conscious of the kinship between the light
streaming in astrally and hair. In general, the greatest truths are
contained in ancient Hebrew literature in the words themselves.
So, we can say human
evolution is progressive. However, in those people whose ancient
faculties were declining the incoming streams changed and dried up,
but no new faculties appeared to take their place. Those people were
connected with the new in an old way, yet unconnected because the
streams were dried up. Such people were very hairy, while those who
developed further were less hairy because new powers replaced those
that later condensed into hair.
It will take a long time
for science to arrive at these significant truths. Nevertheless, they
can be found in the Bible. The Bible is far wiser than our science,
which is still at the stage of a child beginning to learn his ABC's.
Read the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob was the one who progressed a
step further and developed the new faculty; Esau, on the other hand,
remained at an earlier stage, and compared to Jacob he was a
simpleton. When they were presented to their father Isaac, their
mother had covered Jacob with false hair to make Isaac confuse his
younger son with Esau. This shows us that the Old Testament Hebrews
still had retained something that was inherited from other
cultures and that had to be discarded. Esau is
cast out, and what was to live on as sense-based reasoning is
transmitted through Jacob. Here, what had remained in a retarded form
was expelled in Esau. Similarly, the ancient clairvoyant faculties,
an atavistic inheritance, appeared in Joseph, who was consequently
expelled by his brothers to Egypt. Joseph had dreams through which he
could interpret the world — this faculty was not to be
developed in the mission of the Abrahamic people. Therefore, Joseph
was cast out and had to go to Egypt.
There
we see how a stream evolved in the Hebrew people that is built on the
blood relationships of generations and from which the remnants
of the old inheritance are gradually expelled. It was the special
faculty of the ancient Hebrews to turn what is inherited down through
the generations into a more and more perfect instrument so that
finally a body could be produced that could be the instrument for
Christ who would incarnate in it. If the Hebrews could no longer
receive revelations from within, they had to receive them from
without. They had to receive through external revelation even those
things other peoples received through direct inspiration. That is,
the Jews, led by Joseph, had to go to a people that still possessed
the old inspiration. There, Joseph was initiated into the Egyptian
mysteries, and the Jews attained through external means the knowledge
they needed about the spiritual worlds. They even received their
moral laws from the outside rather than as something lighting up
within them. After they had assimilated what they had to take in from
outside, they returned to Palestine.
We
must now show how the Hebrews gradually developed from generation to
generation so that finally the body of Jesus could be produced, and
the ancient Hebrew stream flow into Christianity. Remember our
discussion of the development of rudimentary characteristics in
individuals. The life of an individual can be divided into periods of
seven years. The first period, in which the physical body simply
builds its forms, extends from birth to the change of teeth at the
age of seven. The second period, in which the etheric body is active
in growth and forming, continues until puberty. The forms are defined
until the age of seven and the already-defined forms are then
enlarged. From fourteen to twenty-one the astral body is especially
predominant, and at twenty-one the true I is born and becomes
independent. The life of the individual runs its course in certain
periods until the birth of the human I.
In
the same way the gifts of the people that was to provide a body for
the most perfect I had to develop gradually. What takes place over
years in an individual, however, develops in a people over
generations. Each successive generation must further develop the
characteristics of the preceding one. To explain the occult reasons
for this would lead us too far afield, but you might recall a quite
ordinary phenomenon. Just remember that certain qualities are
inherited not directly, but skip a generation. For example, it is the
grandson who resembles the grandfather in those
characteristics. It was the same in the inheritance of
qualities in successive generations of the Hebrews; every other
generation was skipped.
What
is one period of seven years in an individual's life corresponds in
the successive generations of a people to two periods or fourteen
generations. We can therefore say the Hebrews developed in twice
seven or fourteen generations, which corresponds to the period from
birth to the change of teeth in the individual. The following
period corresponds to that between the change of teeth and
puberty and again comprises twice seven generations. A third period
of twice seven generations corresponds to the years between fourteen
and twenty-one, when the astral body is especially prominent. It was
then possible for the I to be born in the Hebrew people after three
times twice seven or three times fourteen, that is, forty-two
generations.
To describe the body that
became Zarathustra's instrument, I had to show how the seed given to
Abraham developed through thrice fourteen generations so that the I
could be born, just as in the individual the I is born into the
threefold corporeality after thrice seven years. The writer of Saint
Matthew's Gospel shows this. He describes thrice fourteen generations
— the generations from Abraham to David, from David to the
Babylonian Captivity, and from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth
of Jesus. Here, from the profundity of knowledge Saint Matthew's
Gospel points to the mission of the Hebrews, showing how the forces
were gradually developed that made it possible for the perfect I
attained by Zarathustra to be born in a body produced by this
people.
Looking at the destiny of
the Hebrews, we find that the Babylonian Captivity occurred at the
period when the individual, after the age of fourteen, prepares for
life, when the hopes of youth to be realized later take root. The
Babylonian Captivity was the time when the astral body of the Hebrews
developed, and what gives this astral body its impulse in the final
fourteen generations of the forty-two was implanted into it then.
That is why the Hebrews were led into the Babylonian Captivity where,
six hundred years before our era, Zarathas or Nazarathos was
incarnated as the teacher in the Mystery schools of the Babylonians.
There, the most prominent Hebrew leaders came in contact with
Zarathas, the great teacher of that era. Zarathas joined them and
became their teacher. From him the Hebrew leaders received the
impulse that, in their last fourteen generations, prepared them for
the birth of Jesus.
History as we know it then
unfolded, and we see the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel take into
account a law in the spiritual sphere that will be recognized more
and more as significant for all life. This is the law that whatever
has happened earlier is repeated at a higher stage. This is expressed
in science in a somewhat distorted form in the axiom that what occurs
at a lower stage of the species throughout long epochs is repeated in
brief in each individual. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows
this in a magnificent way by saying that the I of Zarathustra was to
incarnate in a body that was gradually developed within the Abrahamic
people.
Abraham proceeded from Ur
in Chaldea, the place where Babylonian civilization originated,
through Asia Minor to Palestine. Through the dreams of Joseph, his
descendants were led farther south to Egypt, and after they had
received the Egyptian impulse, they returned to Canaan. This was the
fate of the whole people. First, they were led through Canaan to
Egypt, and then back again to Canaan. This fate of the whole people
was to be repeated in brief. After all that had originated in Abraham
had been developed, after the sheaths had been prepared,
Zarathustra's I again took Chaldea as its point of departure. His
spirit was connected with Chaldea, and in his last incarnation
he was the Mystery teacher there.
What path does
Zarathustra's soul take when it incarnates in
Bethlehem? He had remained connected with the Magi, who had been
initiated in the Chaldean Mystery schools. They remembered that they
had heard him say he would reappear and that his soul, which had
always been called “the golden star,” would proceed at a
particular time to Bethlehem. When the time came, they followed the
path his soul took, thus repeating the path of the Old Testament
Hebrews. As Abraham traveled the road to Canaan, so this star, the
soul of Zarathustra, also followed it. The three Magi followed the
star of Zarathustra, and he led them to the place where he was born
into the body from the Abrahamic people that was destined for him.
Thus, the I of Zarathustra repeated in spirit the path Abraham had
taken to Palestine.
The
Old Testament Hebrews then had to seek the way to Egypt. They were
led there by Joseph's dreams. Now the I that was born in the
Jesus-child of Bethlehem was led through the dreams of another Joseph
to Egypt along the same path the Abrahamic people had followed
earlier. Zarathustra's I repeated in Jesus' body the ancient
Hebrews' destiny, going first to Egypt and then returning to
Palestine. Here, we have a recapitulation in spirit through the I of
Zarathustra, reflecting the earlier fate of the
Hebrews.
Based
on his knowledge of the spiritual law that what appears at a higher
stage is a brief repetition of what has occurred earlier, the writer
of Saint Matthew's Gospel faithfully describes all this. How
profoundly these Gospels record the event that inaugurated our era!
That event is so great that the four evangelists found that each of
them could only describe it from his own standpoint. Each of them has
described this event according to his own limited powers. When we see
someone from one of four sides, we get only one picture, and only by
combining mutually contradictory pictures do we get an overall idea
of the person. Similarly, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel
described what he knew through initiation about the law of thrice
twice seven, the law of forty-two, and about the preparation of the
body for the great I of Jesus of Nazareth. Through his initiation,
the writer of this gospel knew the Mysteries according to which
Jesus’ body was prepared as the mission of the Hebrews. The
writer of Saint Luke's Gospel described, on the basis of his
initiation, how the stream of the Buddha flowed into Christianity.
The other evangelists have described the event on the basis of their
initiations. The event they recorded is so profound that we must be
grateful to find it described from the point of view of four
initiates.
Today
I just wanted to mention a few details of the spiritual origin of
Christianity to show how our knowledge of the world and of humanity
grows when we study this greatest of human events. I wanted to give
you an idea of how deeply this event should be taken and how profound
the Gospels really are when we know how to read them.
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