World Downfall and Resurrection
RUDOLF
STEINER
A
lecture given at Dornach, 3 June 1921
From
a shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer, published by
permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach.
English translation by H. Collison, revised by Karla
Kiniger.
THE
WRITINGS
of John Scotus Erigena emanate from a mode of thinking
which shines over from the first centuries of Christendom
into the 9th century. The mental process, the whole life of
thought and idea in those first centuries of Christendom was
different from what it came to be later on. A great and
fundamental change occurred in the 4th century of our era. From
the middle of the 4th century onwards, the thinking of men
consisted to a far greater extent in an exercising of the
reasoning faculty. Until that time, all knowledge and all
mental life sprang far more from a kind of inspiration than
later on when, with increasing consciousness, men began to work
out their own thoughts for themselves. Now the kind of
consciousness that was natural before the 4th century still
echoes on in sayings like that of John Scotus Erigena —
that man forms judgments and draws conclusions as a human being
but knows as an Angel. This idea — which springs
up in John Scotus Erigena as a kind of reminiscence, as a
heritage from an earlier form of knowledge — was a fact
acknowledged by anyone who thought at all in the days before
the 4th century of our era. It never occurred to men in those
days to attribute thoughts to the human being as such. Thoughts
were attributed to the Angel working within the human being. An
Angel indwelt the body of a man; the Angel was the knower and
the human being shared in the knowledge.
Consciousness of these things died away altogether after the
4th century and in men like John Scotus Erigena it flashed up
once again, was drawn forth as it were with effort from the
soul. This very fact indicates that man's whole way of looking
at the world had changed in the course of that century. And
that is why it is so difficult for us today to understand the
mode of thinking of the first centuries of Christen' dom.
Indeed, this understanding can only come from Spiritual
Science. It is a question of forming true and really adequate
conceptions of the thought and outlook of men in those early
Christian times.
The
Eucharistic controversy, as it is called, had already appeared
on the scene in the days of John Scotus Erigena, and discussion
was rife on such subjects as predestination. This is an
unmistakable indication of the fact that what was previously
more of the nature of inspiration, removed altogether from the
domain of controversy, had now been drawn into the sphere of
discussion and debate. But as the centuries took their course,
many things were no longer understood at all, as, for example,
the first verses of the Gospel of St John in the form in which
they are commonly rendered. If we read the first verses of this
Gospel carefully, we find a statement that has been overlooked
altogether by adherents of the Christian Faith throughout
subsequent centuries. Think of the first verses of the Gospel
of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. And
then: ‘All things were made by him [i.e.: by the Logos];
and without him was not anything made that was made.’
If
these words are taken literally, their purport is quite clear:
namely, that all things visible were made by the Logos, that
the Logos, therefore, is the creator of the things of the
world. In the Christian mind after the 4th century, the
Logos — rightly identified with the Christ in the sense
of St John's Gospel — is not regarded as the creator of
things visible, but the Father God is substituted for the
Logos. The Logos is known as the Son, but the Father, not the
Son, is conceived as the creator. This doctrine has persisted
through the centuries and completely contradicts the
words of the Gospel of St John. One cannot take this Gospel
literally and maintain at the same time that the creator of
things visible is the Father God and not the Christ.
And
now we must try to understand the kind of thinking in which such
a fundamental change came about in the 4th century. In the early
Christian centuries, thought was based upon the knowledge of the
spiritual world that had survived from ancient paganism. We must
try to understand the attitude of men living in the first
centuries of Christendom to teachings such as those now living
on in the form of the Eucharist. The essence of the Eucharist
is, as we realise, contained in the words: ‘This is My
body’ (the bread); ‘this is My blood’ (the
wine). There was a real understanding of this mystery in those
early centuries, even among men who were by no means learned
but whom the Eucharist drew together in simple devotion to
Christ. What did such a mystery really signify to these men?
Teachings of religious wisdom permeated the whole of antiquity.
The further we go back in time, the more deeply was this
teaching founded upon the nature of the Father God. When we
study the religious beliefs of very ancient times —
beliefs which then survived in decadent form — we find
everywhere that veneration was paid to the element flowing down
from the primal ancestor of a tribal stock. In his
Germania, Tacitus speaks of the peoples who, having
found their way into the Roman Empire, became the founders of
the new civilisation, and of how they still harked back in
remembrance to these tribal deities, although to some extent
they had already adopted a different form of worship, the
worship of Gods of locality. The conception, therefore, was
that generation after generation had passed by since the
existence of an ancient ancestor who had founded the tribal
stock, and that the soul and spirit of this father of the tribe
still held sway, down to the very latest generation. Men
thought: the bodies of all who constitute the tribal stock are
under this ancestral sway. These bodies are all related, they
have one common origin. One common blood flows through the
veins of them all. The body and the blood are one. And in
revering the soul and spirit of the father of the tribe, men
felt the sway of the Divinity behind this tribal ancestor whose
soul and spirit worked upon and through them as a people. They
beheld the sway of this Divinity in the bodies, in the blood
flowing through the generations and they felt the presence of a
mystery in the forces of the body and of the blood.
In
the days of ancient paganism men had a real perception of the
forces of the Divinity ruling in the body and flowing through
the blood. Whenever an adherent of that ancient view of the
world saw blood flowing from animals or from human beings, he
saw in the blood the body of the Godhead and in the bodies that
were built up by this blood, the bodies of the members of the
tribe, the form, the image of the Godhead. People of today have
no longer any real conception of how the Divine-Spiritual in
those times was worshipped in this material form.
And
so, the power of the Godhead flowed through the blood of the
successive generations. The Godhead shaped His image in the
bodies of the generations. The soul and the spirit of the
father of the tribe had been in the presence of the Godhead and
as the primal ancestor he then worked with divine power upon
and through his progeny. The father of the tribe was worshipped
as the divine ancestor.
Now
it must be remembered that the forces working in the body of
man are of the nature of the forces of the Earth. This is not
merely an ancient belief but an actual truth for, as you know,
the origin of the human physical body lies in still more
ancient times, and now, when the physical body has the mineral
kingdom within it, the forces of the Earth are working
in the body and in the blood of man.
In
human blood there work not only the forces introduced with the
foodstuffs but the forces that are active in the planetary body
of the Earth as a whole. If a man lives in a region where the
soil is red, or its geological constituents include certain
metallic substances, his blood is influenced by the Earth.
Again, the bodily form of the human being is itself affected by
the Earth. In warmer zones the human body is not the same as in
colder zones. The bodily nature and the forces working in the
blood are fundamentally influenced by the forces of the Earth.
This truth — which can only be revealed today by
spiritual investigation — was a matter of course in the
instinctive knowledge possessed by the men of old. They knew
that the forces of the Earth pulsate in the blood. When we
today connect the telegraphic apparatus in station A by means
of a wire with the telegraphic apparatus in station B, this is
only one part of the connection. The current of electricity
must be led through the wire. But the current must be
‘circuited’, as we say. You know quite well how this
is done — simply by sinking plates in the Earth. The Earth
does the rest. This has been discovered today by modern science.
We presuppose that the electric current works in the Earth. In
olden times men knew nothing about electricity or electric
currents, but on the other hand they knew something about their
blood. Standing on the Earth they knew: there is something in
the Earth which also lives in the blood. They did not speak of
electricity but of an earthly force living in their blood. We
no longer know that Earth-electricity is living in the blood.
We are content to rely on mathematical formulae and the science
of mechanics. But the men of old connected their picture
of the Godhead with the very body of the Earth. They felt the
sway of the Godhead in the blood, in the body, in the Earth. It
was their picture of the Father God. This picture of the Father
God was based upon the principle of the primal ancestor of the
tribe, which the people conceived as the initial focus of the
forces of the Godhead. But the Earth was the medium through
which this Godhead manifested and the forces of the Earth in
the blood, in the whole human body, were held to be workings of
the Godhead.
Now
another conception too was associated with this picture of the
Father God in the days of antiquity. Men said to themselves:
Every' thing would be well if the earthly forces only
were working upon the being of man, but this is not the
case. The Moon is working in the neighbourhood of the Earth. In
short, the Earth is not working alone, but together with the
Moon. And with this mingling of Earth and Moon forces there was
associated the idea not only of one single Godhead of the
Earth but of the many subordinate gods of paganism. All the
forces working upon body and blood were woven into this ancient
conception of the Godhead.
No
wonder that all striving for knowledge in those times was
directed to the forces of the Moon and of the Earth. A subtle
and intricate body of knowledge grew up, a ‘science’
as it were of the Father God, and we have an echo of this in the
first three sections of the great work of John Scotus Erigena,
On the Division of Nature. He himself no longer
possessed the knowledge in its real form, for he lived in the
9th century after Christ. None the less his books contain
fragments that are a direct heritage from primeval wisdom,
fragments in which we read that in all material existence there
lives the Father God — creating but not created —
and the other Divinities who both create and are
themselves created. These other Divinities are the Beings
of the Hierarchies.
I
he visible world spread around the human being is created and
does not create, and man is to look forward to a world wherein
the Godhead rules as the Godhead at rest — neither
creating nor created but receiving all things into himself.
Such is the substance of the fourth section of the work of John
Scotus Erigena.
This fourth section treats of soteriology and eschatology. It
speaks of the history of the Christ Jesus, of the Resurrection,
of the gifts of the Divine Grace, of the ending of the world
and the return to the Godhead at rest. The first three
sections, particularly, echo the conceptions of antiquity for,
as a matter of fact, the thoughts become genuinely
Christian only when we reach the fourth. The first three
sections contain (Christian thoughts, but are derived, in
essence, from ancient paganism. And so, it was among the Church
Fathers of the first centuries of Christendom. Their
conceptions were relics of the ancient era of paganism. Let me
put it in these words: In Nature, in the created world around
him, man gazed upon the region of the Father God. Behind Nature
he saw an Ideal world. He beheld the workings of certain forces
in nature; and in the succession of the generations, in the
development of humanity itself in the different races and
peoples he saw the ruling of the Father God.
Now
in the first centuries of Christendom there was added to this
conception another sphere of knowledge which has been entirely
lost. The earliest Church Fathers spoke as follows, although
such doctrines have been exterminated altogether by their later
exponents. They said: The Father God has worked in the blood
flowing through the generations and in all that has shaped
itself into the bodies of men, but the Father God has been
engaged in perpetual warfare with the powers who oppose him,
namely the Nature Spirits. The minds of men during the first
centuries of Christendom were imbued with the idea that the
Father God had never succeeded in working alone but had been
obliged to wage perpetual warfare against the Nature Spirits
ruling in the things of the outer world. The teachings of the
earliest Church Fathers were to the effect that in the
pre-Christian era men believed in the Father God but could not
distinguish him from the Nature Spirits. What these men of old
really believed in was the whole world of the Father God
combined with the kingdom of Nature. It was from this
that they conceived the visible world to have proceeded. But,
said the Church Fathers, this is an error. All these different
Nature Gods are working in Nature but at a certain stage they
insinuated themselves into the things of the Earth. The things
of the Earth we perceive with our senses, the things that are
outside us, that have become earthly, do not proceed from these
Nature Spirits, nor from the Father God who worked creatively
only in the metamorphoses of pre-earthly existence. The Earth
we see proceeded not from the Father God and not from the
Nature Spirits, but from the Son, from the Logos whom the
Father God sent forth in order that He (the Logos) might create
the Earth. And the Gospel of St John is there as a token and a
memorial that the Earth is not, as the ancients believed,
created by the Father God. The Father God sent forth the Son,
and the Son is the creator of the Earth.
It
was for the upholding of the teaching contained in the first
verses of the Gospel of St John that the early Fathers of the
Christian Church were fighting. So difficult was it for the
growing faculty of human intellect to understand this teaching
that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Whatsoever is
created by the human intellect is Affirmative Theology, but
Affirmative Theology does not penetrate into those regions
where the real mysteries of the world are contained. These
regions can only be attained by the negation of all predicates,
by speaking of God not as essentia but as
super-essentia, by speaking not of personality,
but of super-personality. In other words, when everything is
negated, then, through Negative Theology alone can the real
mystery of existence be fathomed. But neither Dionysius the
Areopagite nor a successor like John Scotus Erigena (who was
already permeated by the forces of intellect) believed that
human reason was in any way capable of explaining these
mysteries of world existence.
And
now try to think what is implied by the assertion that the
Logos is the creator of the world. Think of what was present
all through pre-Christian antiquity but had grown somewhat dim
at the time of the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. Men
said to themselves: The Godhead works through the blood,
through the body. And they associated with this the
conception that when the blood runs in the veins of human
beings or of animals, the Gods have been deprived of it. The
blood, they said, is the lawful possession of the Gods.
Therefore, we can draw near to the Gods if we give the blood
back again to them. The Gods desire the blood for themselves.
Men have taken possession of it and it must be given back again
to the Gods. Hence the blood sacrifice in the days of
antiquity.
But
now came the Christ Who taught that the things of the Earth
have not proceeded from the Gods who desire the blood for
themselves. Christ directed the minds of men to all that
works in their being before the forces of the Earth work upon
them. Think of the bread — the substance wherewith
man is nourished. He takes bread into his body. It is a means
of nourishment and passing through the organism reaches a
certain point before it is transformed into the forces of
the blood. But it is not changed into blood until it has passed
through the whole digestive tract. Only then do the forces of
the Earth begin to work. As long as the foodstuff has not
passed over into the blood, the earthly forces have not begun
to work. Christ, therefore, taught men to see God not in the
blood but in the bread before the bread becomes flesh,
and to see God in the wine before the wine passes into
the blood. There is the Divine, there is the
incarnate Logos. Look not upon what flows in the blood, for
what flows in the blood is a heritage of man from the Moon
period, from pre- earthly time. Away, therefore, with the
conceptions of the blood, of the body, of flesh. Turn your
minds to what is not yet blood and not yet flesh, to what is
prepared on the Earth around you without the influence of
the Moon; turn your minds to what comes from the Sun! For we
see things through the light of the Sun and when we eat the
bread and drink the wine we receive in them the powers and
forces of the Sun. Things visible exist not through the Father
but through the Logos — the Son. Such was the message of
Christ.
Here, you see, the mind of man is turned not to the kind of
knowledge derived by the ancients from Nature, but in the
direction of the Sun, to the forces poured down by the Sun to
the Earth. Instead of deriving his conceptions of the Divine
from physical, earthly things, man must behold the Divine in
the Spiritual, in the Logos. The Logos superseded those
ancient conceptions of the Father God. In other words, the mind
of man was directed to the Spiritual. In pre-Christian
times man had perceived the Divine with forces generated in his
own organic being and these forces then arose within him in the
form of vision. A vision of the Divine also proceeded from the
blood. But now man must seek for the Divine in acts of purely
spiritual contemplation. He must regard the things visible
around him as having proceeded from the Logos, not from those
beings who subsequently had insinuated themselves into the
Earth as a result of the activity of a God who had created in
pre-earthly existence.
Only in the light of this knowledge can we begin to understand
the ideas and mental outlook of those who lived in the first
centuries of Christendom. All that I have been describing was
an indication to men that their conceptions of the Divine must
be drawn from the forces of their consciousness alone,
and from no other source. Men were directed to the Spiritual
and the time had now come when it was possible to say to them:
In the days of the old dispensation the Earth was so powerful
that it was the source of your conception of the Divine. But
those days have passed away. The Earth can no longer give you
anything. Your own forces and your own forces alone must lead
you to the Logos, the creative principle. Hitherto you have
worshipped only the Godhead who created in pre-earthly
existence; now you are to revere the principle that is
creative in earthly existence. And this must be done through
the power of your Ego, of your Spirit.
The
early Christians, therefore, were wont to say: The end of the
world is at hand. They meant the downfall of that Earth from
which man drew his knowledge without conscious effort. To speak
of this ‘world ending’ was to voice a profound truth,
because hitherto the human being had been a son of the Earth, had
relinquished himself to the forces of the Earth, relying upon
his blood to give him knowledge. But this era had passed away.
The kingdom of Heaven had drawn near, the kingdom of Earth had
come to an end. Man was not, nor could he be henceforth, a son
of the Earth. He must make himself a companion of I he
Spiritual Being Who had come down to the Earth — of the
Logos, of the Christ. And so, this downfall of the world was
prophesied for the 4th century of Christendom. It signified the
downfall of the Earth and the dawn of that kingdom in which man
would feel himself dwelling as a Spirit among Spirits —
it is our own time. The modern mind will find it exceedingly
difficult to realise that in the first centuries of Christendom
men did not look upon their existence as earthly, but as an
existence within the kingdom of the Spirit after
the Earth, as it had been when men drew their powers from its
sources, had come to an end. Nobody who has ever really
understood the thought-life of the earliest Christians
will say that their belief concerning the end of the world was
superstition because it did not come to pass. In the form in
which the early Christians held this belief it did actually
come to pass. The early Christians would have regarded the
condition in which man lives as a Spirit among Spirits as the
‘new Jerusalem’. Only they would have said: We hold
that man has entered already into the kingdom of Heaven, but he
is so sinful that he knows it not; he imagines that Heaven flows
with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits in Heaven
against which he must protect himself. The early Christians
would have said: Hitherto these evil spirits were within the
things of Nature; now they have been released and are whirling
in their hosts invisibly around the human being who must guard
against them.
In
the sense of early Christian thought, then, there had been a
world ending. But it was not realised that in place of the God
indwelling the Earth, the God who proclaimed his being in
the events of Earth, there had come the supersensible Logos Who
must be known in the Supersensible and to Whom men must aspire
with supersensible forces. If we recognise this we shall find
that over the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries too, there hovered
another mood, another feeling of a world ending. Once again men
were expecting the downfall of the world. They did not yet
understand the thoughts of the early Christians but out of this
mood which spread over the whole of civilised Europe in the
9th, 10th and 11th centuries there came the urge to seek the
path to Christ in a more material form than that in which it
should properly have been sought. Men ought to have recognised
that the Logos must be found in the Spirit and not in the
phenomena of the natural world. This finding of the Logos in
the Spirit was not understood by men who once again were imbued
with the feeling of world ending, and they sought to find the
Logos by a more material path.
Out
of this feeling grew the mood which gave rise to the
Crusades. Men set out to find the Christ in His grave in
the East, and to hold fast to him in the throes of this
misinterpreted feeling that the downfall of the world was at
hand. But the Christ was not to be found away yonder in the
East. Those who had sought to find Him visibly in the tomb were
told: He Whom thou seekest is not here. Seek for Him in the
Spirit.
And
now, in the 20th century — and it will be so increasingly
in the days to come — there is again the same mood of
world downfall, albeit in their lethargy and indifference men
no longer give heed to it. Nevertheless, the writer of The
Decline of the West [Oswald Spengler] has made a
deep and perceptible impression upon his time. This mood of
world downfall will become more and more widespread.
Yet
in truth one need not speak of the downfall of the world. World
ending there has been, in the sense that the Spiritual can no
longer be derived from the source of Nature. The question now
is for man to realise that in very truth he is living in a
spiritual world. An error is responsible for the loss of the
direct knowledge that he is living and moving in a spiritual
world. This is the error that has brought calamity upon us and
that will make the bloodshed of wars more and more terrible.
Human beings are as if possessed — possessed by the evil
powers who cast their minds into confusion; and they no longer
speak as if they were voicing what lives in the Ego. They are
possessed as by a psychosis — a psychosis much talked
about, but little understood.
The
downfall of the world conceived by the first Christians has
come about and the new era is upon us. But the new era must be
recognised and understood. It must be realised that in very
truth when the human being ‘knows’, he knows as an
Angel; when he becomes conscious in his own true being, he is
conscious as an Archangel. The spiritual world has come down
to us and it is only a question of being conscious of it. That
is the all-important thing. Many people imagine that they take
the words of the Gospel literally and in all earnestness. Yet
in spite of the unequivocal statement in the Gospel of St John
that all created things are not to be explained on the basis of
their sub-earthly forces but as having been created by the
Logos, in spite of this, men have adhered to the Father God who
is, indeed, to be recognised as one with the Christ but as that
Person of the Trinity who was creative until the Earth took
shape. The true Regent of the Earth is Christ — the
Logos.
Understanding these things was hardly possible any longer in
the days of John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century of our era.
And that explains why his book On the Division of
Nature is on the one hand so grand and
significant but on the other so chaotic that Spiritual Science
alone can help us to make anything of it.
As
I have said, in the fourth section John the Scot speaks of the
Being who is not created and does not create. If we really
understand John Scotus Erigena when he speaks of the Godhead
at rest, of the Godhead to whom all things return and in
whom they are united, then we have the further stage. The world
that is described in the first three sections of the work has
come to an end. The world of the Godhead at rest — the
Being who is not created and does not create — is upon
us. The Earth is going towards its end — in so far, that
is to say, as the Earth is Nature. I have reminded you many
times that even our geologists today are saying that nothing
more is really coming into being on the Earth. It is, of
course, quite true that plant life continues; animals and human
beings continue to come into existence through propagation. But
the Earth, taken as one great whole, is not the same as it once
was. It is breaking up, falling to pieces. In its mineral
sphere the Earth is already disintegrating. The eminent
geologist Suess makes this statement in his book Decline of
the Earth. He says that we are moving about on the
disintegrating ashes of the Earth. He speaks of a certain
region where this is clearly evident and shows that it was not
so in earlier epochs. Such was the view of the world and of
life in the first centuries of Christendom — derived, of
course, not from the natural but from the moral facts of human
evolution.
We
have been living since the beginning of the 15th century more
within the ‘Godhead at rest’ than did John Scotus
Erigena. The Godhead at rest is waiting until we are active
enough to attain to Imagination and Inspiration wherewith we
may see the world around us as a spiritual world, knowing that
we are verily within that spiritual world from which the earthly
world has been cast off, that we are living after the
world ending has come to pass and that the new Jerusalem is
with us.
Truly it is a strange destiny of men that living in the
spiritual world they know it not, nor are willing to know it.
All interpretations which present true Christianity as if it
were bristling with inadequate ideas, such as that of a world
ending which has not come to pass and is merely a figure of
speech, all such interpretations are empty and futile. It is
only a question of understanding the real meaning of the
Christian writings. We must realise that the conceptions of men
during the first centuries of Christendom related to a world
that was altogether different after the 4th century.
The
Church fathers of the early Christian centuries tried to bring
the teachings of the old pagan wisdom into connection with the
Mystery of Golgotha, but they did not believe that, to
begin with, men would be capable of understanding them.
Therefore, they preserved the mysteries of olden times in the
form of dogmas which were to be matters of belief, but which
men were not supposed to understand. These dogmas are not
superstitions or untruths. They are, after all, quite true in
themselves, only they must be understood in the right way,
namely, by the application of those faculties and forces which
have been developing in man since the time of the 15th
century.
Since the middle of the 15th century the Consciousness Soul has
been developing. When a man is evolving his thoughts and
concepts today he is altogether lacking in any realisation that
in his acts of knowledge he is an Angel. He will say: But I am
simply thinking about the things I have experienced. And most
certainly he will not say that in his ‘knowing’ he is a
spiritual being, nor that in self-consciousness he is a yet
higher spiritual being. Men seek for knowledge today with the
shadow of that kind of intellect which lived among the Greeks,
in Plato and in Aristotle, nay even among the Romans, and was
still alive, to some extent, in a man like John Scotus Erigena
in the 9th century.
The
very fact that we need no longer allow ourselves to be led
astray by the intellect can be a help to us. Today men are
running after a shadow — after the shadow that is their
intellect. They allow themselves to be misled by this intellect
instead of striving to attain Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition which will lead them into the spiritual world. The
fact that the intellect has faded into shadow is good in
itself. But with shadowy intellect we have evolved our natural
science and this sphere of knowledge must now be worked upon
further. The Godhead has come to rest in order that we
ourselves may labour. The fourth condition is upon us. It only
remains for men to become conscious of it. And if they do not,
then nothing new can come into being on the Earth, for what the
Earth once received as a heritage has passed away. The
new has to be created.
A
man like Spengler saw the ruins which still remain of bygone
civilisation. They lie before us clearly enough. The frame of
mind in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries was that of a world
doomed. Then came the Crusades — achieving nothing
because men were seeking in the material world for what ought
to have been sought in the Spirit. And when the Crusades
failed, the Renaissance came as a kind of makeshift. Greek
culture was brought to light once again and is still being
offered to human beings in the form of education. Greek culture
is there, but it did not come to light in the Renaissance as a
new thing. The only new thing that has come into being
since the beginning of the 15th century consists of the
mathematical and mechanical conceptions we apply to outer
Nature. But the ruins of antiquity are forever with us. They
are inculcated into the minds of the young in the form of their
academic training and so constitute the basis of civilisation.
Oswald Spengler gazed at these ruins of the Renaissance. Like
great erratic blocks they float across the ocean of life that
is travailing to give birth to something new. If we have eyes
only for these floating blocks, then we see nothing but
downfall. Nobody can galvanise our civilisation in the form in
which it exists today. It is going to pieces, falling into
ruin. A new civilisation must be brought into being from out of
the Spiritual by a primal power of creation, for the fourth
condition is upon us. This is the sense in which we must
interpret the writings of John Scotus Erigena, whose wisdom
— which he himself found difficult to under' stand
— was drawn from the Mysteries still cultivated in
Ireland.
What I have told you here is not only the result of Spiritual
Science. Ancient documents tell us exactly the same, that is,
if we really understand them and shake off Alexandrian
influences in the form of science that goes by the name of
philology. One cannot help saying that in their modern form
these things show few traces either of real philology or real
philosophy. In our methods of ‘cramming’ and in our
examination schedules today there is exceedingly little
room left for the ‘philo’. That must be brought
from somewhere else, but we stand in dire need of it.
In
this lecture I wanted first of all to speak of John Scotus
Erigena and, secondly, to show you the paths along which we can
come to an understanding of the now faded wisdom of antiquity.
The Gospel of St John states quite clearly: The Logos, not the
Father God, is the creative principle. But facts like this pass
by unheeded in our time.
|