LECTURE II
Hebrew - English Bible
N
a good many places in this course of lectures
— as well as elsewhere in our Anthroposophical
discussions — it may well sound as if I rather enjoyed having to
set myself up in opposition, or apparent opposition, to “modern
science.” I am thinking more of people in the outside world
unacquainted with the kind of feeling that prevails in our circles,
but it is a point on which I am particularly anxious to avoid any
misunderstanding. You may take it as definite that it is a very real
effort for me to do anything of the sort; and that I only do it
precisely at those points where I myself am able to develop or carry
further what science has to say. My sense of responsibility is such
that it will not permit me to bring forward anything that conflicts
with the opinions of modern science, unless I have first placed
myself in a position to understand, and if necessary reproduce, its
findings on the subject in hand. No one having such an attitude could
possibly approach the all-important matters which are to occupy us in
the next few days without the deepest sense of awe and of the
responsibility that goes with it.
Unfortunately, it
just has to be said that, as regards the questions now to come before
us, modern science breaks down altogether. The scientists are not
even in a position to know why this should be so, or to perceive why
their science must necessarily prove so hopelessly amateurish in face
of the real and the great problems of existence. So, although in a
short course of lectures it is naturally not possible to engage in
controversy about every detail, please take it for granted that
behind all I say I am fully aware of the modern scientific outlook on
these subjects. Only, as far as possible, I must confine myself to
what is positive, and trust that in a circle of Anthroposophists this
will always be understood.
In the last lecture I
tried to show how those tremendous, archetypal words with which the
Bible opens — words which are put before us in a language
different in its very nature from modern tongues — can only be
rightly interpreted if we try to forget the attitude of mind and
feeling we have acquired as a result of the usual modern renderings.
For the language in which these powerful words of creation were
originally given to us has actually the peculiarity that the very
character of its sounds directs the heart and mind towards those
pictures which arise before the eye of the seer when he contemplates
the moment of the welling-forth of the sense-perceptible part of our
world out of the super-sensible. Every single sound in which the
immemorial origin of our earth existence is placed before us is full
of active power. In the course of these lectures we shall often have
to refer to the character of this language; today, however, let us
confine ourselves to one of the first essentials.
You know that in the
Bible, after the words which yesterday I at least tried to put before
your souls in picture form, there comes a description of one of the
complexes which arose out of the divine meditation, out of the divine
productive musing. I told you that we have to conceive that, as if
out of a cosmic memory, two complexes arose. One was a complex which
may be compared with the thoughts which can arise in us; the other is
of the nature of desire or will. The one complex contains all that
tends towards outer manifestation, tends to proclaim itself, tends,
as it were, to force its way out — haschamayim. The
other complex — ha'arets — consists of an inner
activity, a permeation with inward craving; it is something which
inwardly vivifies, animates. Then we are told of certain qualities of
this inner, vivifying, self-stimulating element, and these are
indicated in the Bible by appropriate sounds. We are told that this
self-stimulating element was in a state which is designated as
tohu wabohu
[ 1 ]
— without form and void. To understand what is meant by
tohu wabohu we must try to recapture a picture of what it
expresses; and we only succeed in doing that if out of our spiritual
scientific knowledge we call to mind what it was that, after its passage
through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, emerged again and surged
through space as our planetary earth existence.
I pointed out
yesterday that what we call solidity, the state which offers a
certain resistance to our senses, did not exist during the Saturn,
Sun and Moon evolutions; only the elements of fire or warmth, gas or
air, and water were to be found there. It was only with the emergence
of the earth that the solid element was added. Thus at the moment
when there happened what we were describing yesterday, when the
tendency began for the sun to split off from the earth, there is a
mutual interpenetration of the elements warmth, air and water —
they surged through one another. That preliminary surging
interpenetration which we have tried to picture to ourselves is the
meaning of the phrase inadequately translated as without form and
void, but eloquently and effectively rendered by the succession
of sounds tohu wabohu. What then does tohu wabohu
signify?
If we try to picture
what can be aroused in our souls by these sounds it is something like
this. The sound which resembles our own T calls up a picture of
forces diverging from a central point in every direction. Thus the
moment one utters the T sound one gets the picture of forces
diverging from a centre in every direction to illimitable distances.
So that we have to imagine the elements warmth, air and water
permeating, interpenetrating each other, and within them a tendency
to diverge, as from a centre in all directions. The sound
tohu alone would suffice to express this tendency to push
outwards, to separate. What then does the second part of the phrase
signify? It expresses the very opposite of what I have just
described. The character of the sound resembling our B, called forth
by the letter Bet, expresses what you would get if you
imagined an enormous sphere, a hollow sphere, with yourself inside
it, and rays proceeding from every point inside this sphere towards
its centre. Thus you imagine a point within space whence forces
stream out in all directions — that is tohu; these
forces are arrested at the extremities of the spherical enclosure,
and turned back again on themselves from every direction of space
— that is bohu. And if you have formed this idea, and
think of all these streams of force as filled with the three
elementary substances of warmth, air and water, then you know the
character of this inner animation. The combination of these sounds
indicates the way in which elementary existence is guided by the
Elohim.
How far has this
brought us? We shall not understand the sublime process of the seven
days of creation unless we bear these details in mind. If we do so,
then the whole will seem a wonderful cosmic drama. Let us recall once
more that in the word bara — “in the beginning the Gods
created” — we are concerned with a
soul-spiritual activity. I have likened it to the thoughts which are
called up in our own souls. Thus we may think of the Elohim as
arrayed in space, and bara as a cosmic soul-activity, a
pondering. What the Elohim ponder is expressed by
haschamayim and ha'arets — the outward
radiation and the inner, mobile energy.
To make the
comparison as close as possible picture yourselves in the moment of
awakening; groups of ideas arise in your souls. This is how
haschamayim and ha'arets arise in the souls of the
Elohim. Now you know that these Elohim came over to earth evolution
at the stage to which they had evolved during the Saturn, Sun and
Moon evolutions. So that they are in a somewhat similar situation to
your own when on awakening you call up thoughts in your souls. You
can contemplate those thoughts, you can say what they are. You can
say: “When I awake in the morning and recall what has
previously been left in my mind, I can describe it.” It was
something the same with the Elohim, when they said to themselves:
“Let us now reflect upon what arises in our souls when we
recall what took place during the ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions. Let us see how it looks in recollection.” What it
looked like is expressed in the phrase tohu wabohu; it could
be expressed by a picture such as I have given you, as streams
radiating from a centre outwards into space and back again, in such a
way that the elements are interwoven in this streaming of forces.
Thus the Elohim could say to themselves: “At the stage to which
you have so far brought things this is what they look like. This is
how they are resumed.”
Now in order to
understand what comes next, usually rendered “darkness was
above the fluid substances” or “above the
waters”(above the abyss) — or darkness was upon the
face of the waters (English A.V.) — we must take into
consideration something else. We must once more turn our attention to
the course of evolution before the earth came into existence.
First we have the
Saturn existence, inweaving in the fiery element. Then comes the Sun
existence, with its addition of the airy element. But in my
Occult Science
you can read how with the addition of the air
something else is associated. The fine warmth element of Saturn
condenses to a gaseous element. But every such densification is
accompanied by a counter-process of refinement. Condensation to the
gaseous element is a descending process, but on the other side there
is an ascent to the light element. Thus, speaking of the transition
from Saturn to Sun, we must say that Saturn still weaves solely in
the element of warmth, whereas during the Sun evolution something
denser, the gaseous element, is added, but so also is light. The
light element makes it possible for the warmth and the air to
manifest themselves in outward radiance.
Now let us take one
of the two complexes — the one expressed as ha'arets,
usually translated as “earth” — and ask ourselves
how the Elohim, turning their attention to this complex after their
act of recollection, would have described it. They could not have
said that what had already existed in the Sun evolution had now come
to life again. For it was without light; light had separated from it.
Ha'arets had thus become one-sided. It had not brought with
it the light, but only the coarser elements, the gaseous and the
warmth elements. True, there was no lack of light in what is
expressed by haschamayim, but haschamayim is the
sunlike, issuing from the other complex. In ha'arets there
was no rarefaction, there was no light. We may then say that in one
of the complexes warmth, air and water surged through one another in
the way which is indicated by tohu wabohu. These elements
were denuded, they lacked the light which had entered into evolution
on the Sun. They remained dark, had nothing sunlike about them; for
that had withdrawn with haschamayim. Thus the progress of
earth evolution means that the light, which it still had so long as
the sun remained united with it, had now withdrawn; and a dark fabric
woven of the elements of warmth, air and water was left.
We now have the
content of the meditation of the Elohim before our souls in more
detail. But we shall never be able to think of it in the right way
unless we are conscious all the time that air, water and even warmth
are external expressions of spiritual Beings. It would not be quite
correct to call this elemental existence their “garment”;
it should rather be regarded as making known their presence
externally. Thus what we call air, water, warmth, are maya,
illusion; they are only there for the outward aspect, and this is so
even for the mind's eye. In reality this elemental existence is
something psycho-spiritual, it is the external manifestation of the
soul-spiritual of the Elohim. But we must not think of the Elohim as
at all like man, for man is actually their goal. To fashion man, to
call man, with his own peculiar organisation, into existence, that is
the very matter of their cogitation. So we must not think of them as
human, but we must certainly envisage that there is already in their
nature a certain cleavage. When we speak of man today, we do not
understand him at all unless we distinguish between body, soul and
spirit. You know what great efforts we Anthroposophists have made to
get a closer understanding of the activity and nature of this human
trinity. To recognise this unity in trinity first becomes necessary
in the case of man; and it would be a great mistake to think of
Beings who existed before man, the Beings whom the Bible calls
Elohim, as if they resembled man. Nevertheless in their case too we
can rightly distinguish between a kind of body and a kind of
spirit.
Now when you
distinguish between body and spirit in man, you are well aware that
even his outer form bears testimony to the fact that his being lives
in it in a variety of ways. For instance, we do not try to locate
man's mind in his hand or his legs, but we say that his bodily
functions are in his trunk and his limbs, and that the organ of his
mind is the head, the brain; the brain is the instrument of mind.
Thus we distinguish in the external human form certain parts as the
expression of the physical, and certain other parts as the expression
of the spiritual.
We have to look upon
the Elohim in somewhat the same way. All this surging
elementary web of which I have spoken can only be correctly
understood if it is looked upon as the bodily vehicle of the Elohim's
psycho-spiritual. These elements of air, warmth and water are the
external embodiment of the Elohim. But we have to make a further
distinction; we have to look upon the watery and gaseous elements as
more connected with the bodily, denser functions of the Elohim, and
what permeates this tohu wabohu as warmth as being the
element in which their spiritual part is at work. Just as in the case
of man we say that the more bodily part functions in the trunk and
the limbs, and the more spiritual part in the head, so if we look
upon the entire cosmos as an embodiment of the Elohim, we can say
that their more specifically bodily part lived in the air and the
water, and their spiritual part moved in the warmth
Now the Bible makes
use of a remarkable phrase to express the relationship of this
spiritual part of the Elohim to the elements: Ruach Elohim
m'rachephet
[ 2 ]
— a phrase which we
must go into more closely if we would understand how the spirit of
the Elohim permeated the other elements. We can only understand the
verb racheph by praying in aid, so to speak, all the
associations which it would have carried with it in those days. If
one simply says “And the spirit of the Gods moved upon the
outspread substances — upon the waters” one has said
almost nothing. We can only understand the word if we think of a hen
sitting upon her eggs, and of her brooding warmth radiating out over
the eggs beneath her. (I know it is a crude illustration, but it does
help to bring out the meaning.) And if you think of the energy of
this brooding warmth which streams from the hen into the eggs in
order to bring the eggs to maturity, then you can have a notion of
the meaning of the verb used here to convey what the spirit does in
the element of warmth. It would of course be quite inaccurate to say
that the spirit of the Elohim broods, because what the physical
activity of brooding conveys today is not what is meant. What is
meant to be conveyed is the activity of the outraying warmth. As
warmth radiates from the hen, so the spirit of the Elohim radiates by
means of the warmth element into the other elementary states. When
you think of this, you have a picture of what is meant by the words:
And the spirit of God (the Elohim) moved upon the face
of the waters.
Now, up to a point,
we have reconstructed the picture which hovered before the soul of
the ancient Hebrew sage when he thought about this primeval
condition. We have constructed a complex of spherically interwoven
warmth, air, water, such as I have described the tohu wabohu
to be, from which all the light had withdrawn with the
haschamayim, and this interweaving of the three elementary
states was inwardly permeated with darkness. In the one element, the
warmth, there weaves or surges the spirituality of the Elohim, which
itself expands with the expanding warmth, and brings to maturity what
is at first immature in the darker elements.
Thus when we come to
the sentence And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters, we are dwelling on one characteristic of what in the
first verse of the Bible is called ha'arets — earth.
We are expressing what is left after haschamayim has been
withdrawn.
Now let us recall
once more the earlier conditions. From the earth we can look back to
the Moon, Sun and Saturn conditions. Let us go back to the Sun. We
know that at that time there was no separation of what we today call
earth from the sun. Therefore the earthly part was not illumined by
light from without. That its light comes from without is the
essential characteristic of life on earth. At that time, however, you
have to think of the earth-sphere as enclosed within the Sun, forming
part of the Sun, not receiving light, but itself forming part of the
Being that is radiating light into space. This condition can be
summed up by saying simply that in it the earth element does not
receive light, but is itself a source of light.
Mark the difference!
In the Sun evolution the earth itself participated in the radiation
of light. In the earth evolution that is no longer the case. The
earth has surrendered the radiant element, it has to receive light
from without; light has to stream into it. That is the essential
difference between the earth, as it has become in the course of
evolution, and the Sun condition; with the separation of the sun, of
the haschamayim, the light went out too. All that is now
outside the earth. The elementary existence which surges in
ha'arets as tohu wabohu has no light of its own. The
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, but that did
not make the earth light; it left it in darkness.
Let us take another
look at this elementary existence as a whole. You know of course from
earlier lectures that we are accustomed to enumerate what we call the
elementary states within our earth existence, beginning with the
solid, then coming to the watery, next to the gaseous or aeriform and
then to the warmth. These four constitute the denser conditions of
matter. But we have not yet finished. If we go further upwards we
meet with finer conditions, of which we do not get a much better idea
by calling them finer substances. The main thing is to recognise them
as finer relatively to the denser ones, the gaseous, the warmth and
so on. They are usually called etheric states, and we have always
distinguished light as the first of these finer states. Thus, when we
descend from warmth into the denser, we come to the gaseous
condition; if we ascend, we come to light. Ascending still further,
beyond the light we come to a yet finer etheric condition, we come to
something which is not really recognisable in the ordinary
sense-world. We only get a kind of external reflection of it. From
the occult point of view one can say that the forces in this finer
ether are those which govern the chemical affinities of matter, the
chemical combinations, the organisation of substances such as we can
observe if, for instance, we place a fine powder on a metal plate,
and then draw the bow of a violin across the plate, getting as a
result the “Chladni” sound-figures. What the coarse
physical tone brings about in the powder also occurs throughout
space. Space is differentiated, is permeated, by forces which are
more rarefied than the forces of light, by forces which represent in
the spiritual what tone is in the sense-world. So that when we ascend
from warmth to light, and from light to this finer element, we can
speak of a chemical of sound-ether, which has the power to decompose
and to combine substances, but is in reality of the nature of sound,
sound of which the sense-perceptible tone which the ear hears is only
the outward expression, the expression made by its passage through
air. That brings us somewhat nearer to this finer element which is
above light. Thus when we say that what has the quality of
manifesting itself externally withdrew from the ha'arets
with the haschamayim we must not think only of the light,
but also of the finer etheric element of sound which permeates
light.
Just as we go
downward from warmth to air, and thence to water, so we can go upward
from warmth to light, and from light to what is of the nature of
sound, of chemical combination. And from water we can descend lower
to earth. When we mount from the sound-ether we come to a still
higher etheric condition, which also withdrew with the
haschamayim. We come to the finest etheric state of all,
which weaves within the chemical or sound-ether we have just been
describing. If you turn your spiritual ear in this direction, you do
not of course hear a noise in the external air, but you hear the tone
which vibrates through space, the tone which permeates space and
organises matter just as the tone produced by the bow of a violin
organises the Chladni sound-figures. But into this condition brought
about by the sound-ether is poured a still higher etheric mode. And
this higher ether permeates the sound-ether just as the meaning of
our thought permeates the sound which our mouth utters, thereby
transforming tone into word. Try to comprehend what it is that
transforms tone into a word full of meaning; then you will have some
idea of this finer etheric element permeating the organising
sound-ether and giving meaning to it — the Word which
vibrates through space. And this Word, which thrills through space
and pours itself out into the sound-ether, is at the same time the
source of life, it is really vibrant, weaving life! Thus what has
withdrawn out of the ha'arets with the haschamayim,
what has gone into the sun, as distinct from the other, the lower,
the earth part — as distinct from the tohu wabohu
— announces itself externally as light. But behind the light is
spiritual tone, and behind that is cosmic speech. Thus we may say
that in the brooding warmth lives the lower spiritual part of the
Elohim, somewhat as our own desire lives in the lower part of our
soul. The higher spirituality of the Elohim, which went out with the
haschamayim, lives in the light, in the spiritual sound, in
the spiritual word, the cosmic Word. These can only stream into the
tohu wabohu again from without.
Let us now try to
bring before us in a picture what hovered before the soul of the
Hebrew sage as ha'arets, as haschamayim. When what
withdrew as spiritual light, as sound, as the uttering and formative
Word-element, streams back again, how does it act? It works from the
sun as articulate light, as light giving utterance to cosmic speech.
Let us think of what we have called tohu wabohu in its
darkness, in its surging interweaving of warmth, air and water; let
us think of it in its light-forsaken darkness. And then let us think
that out of the activity of the Elohim, through the creative Word,
which as the highest etheric entity lies behind their activity, there
rays in with the light all that streams out from the Word. How is one
to describe what is taking place? One cannot more fittingly express
it than by saying that the Beings who had withdrawn their highest
into the etheric with haschamayim radiated answering light
out of cosmic space into the tohu wabohu. There you have the
substance of the memorable verse: And God said, Let there be
light: and there was light. There you have the picture which
hovered before the Hebrew sage.
So we must think of
the Beings of the Elohim as spread over the whole cosmos, we must
think of this whole cosmos as their body, and the elementary
existence in the tohu wabohu as the lowest form of this
body; of the warmth as a somewhat higher form; and we must think of
the haschamayim, the part which has withdrawn, as the
highest spirituality, which now works creatively into the whole
structure of the tohu wabohu.
Now you see what I am
leading up to — that it was the cosmic Word expressing radiant
light which organised the surging of the elementary part, the
tohu wabohu, and made it what it later became. Whence comes
the power which organises the human form? There can be no human form
such as we have, standing upright on two legs, making use of hands,
unless it be organised by forces emanating from the brain. Our own
form is organised by the highest spiritual forces streaming out from
our own spiritual part. The lower is always organised by the higher.
In the same way the ha'arets, the body of the Elohim, their
lower part, was organised by their higher bodily part, the
haschamayim, and by the spiritual essence of the Elohim
working within it. Thus the highest spirituality of the Elohim takes
possession of what has been cast out, and organises it, and we can
express this by saying that the light manifesting itself through the
cosmic Word streams into the darkness. That is how the tohu
wabohu was organised, raised out of the disorder of the
elements. Thus, if you think of the haschamayim as the head
of the Elohim, and the elementary part which is left behind as the
trunk and limbs, organised through the power of the head, then you
have the actual process. Then you have man expanded to cover the
whole cosmos. And out of the spiritual organs in haschamayim
he organises himself. When we think of all the streams of energy
which pour out from the haschamayim to the ha'arets
we may venture to picture it as a macrocosmic man organising
himself.
Now in order to paint
the picture more accurately, let us turn our attention to man as he
is today. Let us ask ourselves how man has become what he is —
I mean, what he is to the spiritual scientist, not to ordinary
science. What is it that has given him the special structure which
distinguishes him from all the rest of the living creatures around
him? What is it which weaves throughout this human form? If one does
not blind oneself it is very easy to say what makes him man; it is
something he possesses which none of the beings around him has
— speech, which expresses itself in its own proper sounds. That
is what makes him man. Think of the form of the animal and ask
yourselves how it could be raised to the level of the human form.
What would have to permeate it for it to become human? Let us put the
question in this way. Let us think of an animal form, and imagine
that we have to make a breath enter into it — what would this
breath have to contain, in order to make this form begin to speak? It
would have to feel itself inwardly organised in such a way that it
uttered the sounds of speech. It is the sounds of speech which make
the animal structure human!
How then can one
picture the cosmos? Out of all that I have put before your souls, all
that I have built up gradually out of this elementary existence,
picture by picture, how can one come to feel the cosmos inwardly, how
can one come inwardly to feel the structure of macrocosmic man? By
beginning to feel how the sounds of speech flash into form.
When the sound of A
soughs through the air, learn to feel not merely its tone, learn to
feel the form it makes, just as the tone of the violin bow, passed
over the edge of a plate, makes a form in the powder. Learn to feel
the A and the B in their transience through space; learn to
experience them not merely as sound, but as form-making; then you
will feel as the Hebrew sage felt when the sounds of speech
stimulated in him the pictures which I have put before your mind's
eye. That was the effect of the sounds of speech. That is why I had
to say that Bet (B) aroused the idea of something enclosing,
like a shell shutting something off and enclosing an inner content.
Resch (R) stimulated a feeling such as one has when one
feels one's head: and Schin (S) suggested what I might
describe as a pricking or penetrating. That is a thoroughly objective
language, a language which, if the soul is receptive, crystallises
into pictures as the sounds are uttered. In the sounds themselves
lies the lofty discipline which led the sage to the pictures which
crowd upon the soul of the seer when he enters into the super-sensible
world. Sound is in this way transmuted into spiritual form, and
conjures before the soul pictures which form a connected whole in the
way I have described. What is so remarkable about this ancient record
is that it has been preserved in a language the sounds of which
create form, the sounds of which crystallise in the soul into form.
And these forms are the very pictures which one gets when one
penetrates to the super-sensible out of which our material physical
has evolved. When one comes to understand this, one feels a deep awe
and reverence for the way in which the world has evolved; and one
comes to realise that truly it is by no mere chance that this great
document of human existence has been transmitted in this script
— a script which by means of its very characters is capable of
arousing pictures in the soul, and of guiding us to what in our own
time the seer is to discover anew. That is the feeling which the
Anthroposophist ought to cultivate when he approaches this ancient
document.
Notes:
1.
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2.
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