SECOND
LECTURE:
DECEMBER 29, 1913
If we call to mind once more the thoughts of yesterday's
lecture, we can draw them together by saying that the period at the
beginning of our era took all possible pains to understand the
Mystery of Golgotha out of the treasure of its wisdom, and that this
endeavour encountered the very greatest difficulties. We must pause
to consider this, for unless we are clear about this inevitable
misunderstanding of what came about through the Mystery of Golgotha,
we shall not be able to comprehend an essential fact of later
centuries: the advent of the Grail idea, concerning which we shall
have something to say in connection with our subject.
When we recall the beginning of our era and look at its
most significant, wisdom-filled current of thought — when we
look, that is, at the Gnostics — then on the one hand we can
see, in the light of yesterday's lecture, how grandly original
were the ideas with which they sought to place the Son of God in the
centre of an imposing world-picture. But if on the other hand we look
at what can be learnt about the Mystery of Golgotha from the
spiritual chronicle of the time, then we must say that no real truth
can be had from the concepts and ideas of the Gnostics. And this is
particularly evident when we consider the various ways in which the
Gnostics pictured the manifestation of the Christ in Jesus of
Nazareth.
There were some
Gnostics who said: “Yes, the Christ is a Being who transcends
everything earthly and comes from spiritual realms; such a Being can
remain for only a limited time in a human body, as was the body of
Jesus of Nazareth.” These Gnostics had discerned something
which today we must emphasise again and again: that in truth the
Christ Being dwelt for three years only in the body of Jesus of
Nazareth. But these Gnostics went wrong over the way in which the
Christ Being dwelt in the body of Jesus. First of all, the mystery of
the body of Jesus of Nazareth was not clear to them. They did not
know that the Ego of Zarathustra had lived in this body; that the
three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth represented in their conjunction an
essence of humanity which had never before been incarnated in the
flesh on Earth. The whole relation of the Christ to the two Jesus-boys
[See, among others,
the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner:
The Gospel of St. Luke,
notably lectures 4 to 7;
The Gospel of St. Matthew,
notably lecture 6;
The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind;
Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.]
was hidden from these Gnostics. Hence they were never satisfied — or at
least their followers were never satisfied — with what they could say
about the temporary inhabiting of the body of Jesus of Nazareth by
the Christ.
Another question touched on by the Gnostics was the
manner of the birth of Christ, the most tremendous mystery in human
evolution. They knew well enough that the necessary reason for the
appearance of Christ on Earth is connected with the passage through
conception in the flesh, but they could not quite see how to bring
the mother of Jesus into relation with the birth of Christ. And those
who tried to work this out — there were some — were very
little understood.
Again, there were Gnostics who because of these various
difficulties denied entirely that the Christ had appeared on Earth in
bodily form. They formed the idea that it was only a phantom body —
what we should call an astral body — which had gone about on,
Earth before and after the death on Golgotha: it had appeared here
and there, but it was not a physical body. Because of the difficulty
of conceiving how the Christ could have been united with a physical
body, it was said that no such union had occurred and that when
people thought He had gone about in a physical body, this was
illusion, Maya. This notion, too, gained no recognition. So we can
see everywhere that the Gnostics tried to master with their concepts
the greatest historical mystery in the Earth's evolution; but
their ideas were inadequate, powerless in face of what had actually
occurred.
Now we must speak of the way in which Paul tried to come
to terms with the problem, but first it will be well to grasp clearly
how it was that such misunderstandings were inevitable. If with the
help of spiritual investigation we ask ourselves a series of
questions and try to answer them, the course of events will become
apparent to us in — one might say — an abstract form.
For example, we can ask: If the epoch of Christ Jesus
was so poorly equipped to understand His nature, would another epoch
have been in a position to understand Him? If as a spiritual
investigator one enters into the souls of men at different periods of
the past, one certainly comes to a strange result. First of all, one
can enter into the souls of the great teachers of the ancient Indian
civilisation, the first of the post-Atlantean culture-epochs. There,
as we have often emphasised, we stand with deepest admiration before
the comprehensive, deeply-grounded wisdom, permeated throughout with
clairvoyant vision, of the holy Indian Rishis of that ancient time.
We know that the souls of those great teachers were open to cosmic
mysteries which were lost to the wisdom-knowledge of later times. And
when one tries to enter clairvoyantly, as well as one can, into the
soul of one of these great teachers of ancient India, one must say
that if it had been possible for the Christ Being to have appeared on
Earth among the holy Rishis at that time, their wisdom would have
been in the highest degree capable of understanding the nature of
Christ. Then there would have been no difficulties; they would have
known what it was all about. And since one cannot properly express in
abstract words such significant phenomena as those I have just
described, let me evoke a picture.
If the holy Rishis of ancient India had perceived in a
man the splendour of the wisdom of the Logos, the wisdom that pulses
through the world, they would have brought to the Logos their
offering of frankincense, symbolising a recognition of the Divine
that works in the realms of humanity. But the Christ Being could find
no body at that period; the bodies of that time would not have been
suitable for Him. So He could not appear — the reasons for this
will be given later — in the epoch when all the means of
understanding were present.
If we go further and enter into the souls of the old
Zarathustrian civilisation, we can say: These souls were certainly
not endowed with the high spiritual resources of the old Indian
civilisation, but they would have understood that the Sun-Spirit had
elected to live in a human body, and they would have been able to
grasp the significance of this fact in relation to the Sun-Spirit. To
speak pictorially again: the disciples of Zarathustra would have
honoured their Sun-Spirit with an offering of shining gold, the
symbol of wisdom.
If we go further still into the Chaldean-Egyptian
culture-epoch, we find that the possibility of understanding Christ
Jesus would have again decreased; but it would not have narrowed down
as far as it did in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin
epoch, when even the Gnosis was not powerful enough to understand
this manifestation. It would have been understood that a Star from
spiritual heights had appeared and had been born in a human being.
This divine-spiritual line of descent from spheres beyond the earthly
would have been clearly grasped; and myrrh would have been brought as
an offering. And if we enter into the souls of those who figure in
the Bible as the three Magi, who come from the East and are the
guardians of the treasures of wisdom derived from the three preceding
culture-epochs, we find the Bible itself indicating that a certain
understanding was present, since these three Magi do at least appear
at the birth of the Jesus-child.
One thing that very few people think about today will
certainly strike us — that the Bible is in a strange position
with regard to the three Magi. For does it not wish to say that here
were three men of exceptional wisdom who even at the time of the
birth understood its significance? But one might ask — where
were the three Wise Men later on? What came of their wisdom in the
end? Have we anything that could lead us back to an understanding of
the Christ manifestation by way of these three Wise Men? This must be
thrown out only as a question. It is one of the many questions which
must certainly be put to the Bible, and which will be more
significant than all the pedantic Bible-criticism of the nineteenth
century.
When we come to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can
say of it: Now there is present a body in which the Christ can
incarnate. It was not there in the preceding epochs; but now it is
there. In this fourth epoch, however, men lack the possibility of
finding their way to a real understanding of what is happening.
Indeed a strange paradox, is it not? For the fact that confronts us
is actually this: the Christ appeared on Earth in an epoch that was
least adapted to understanding Him. And when we look at all the
attempts that were made in subsequent centuries to understand the
nature of Christ Jesus, we find endless theological wrangling; and
finally in the Middle Ages a sharp distinction is drawn between
knowledge and faith — which implies a complete abandonment of
any knowledge about the being of Christ Jesus ... not to speak of
modern times, which up to the present have remained powerless in face
of this manifestation.
A truly remarkable phenomenon! The Christ was born in
the very epoch that was least adapted to understanding Him. And if in
the evolution of humanity the essential thing had been for Christ to
work on the understanding of human souls on Earth, then —
one must say it — this working would have been in a sad way.
One might perhaps call that putting it very strongly; but in order
not to be misunderstood I want to say this: To anyone who looks from
the standpoint of Spiritual Science at the history of theology in
relation to the Christ Event, it must seem as though theology had
deliberately set out to place one hindrance after another in the way
of understanding the Christ Being. For theological erudition seems to
take a course which leads it farther and farther away from this
understanding. That is radically expressed, but anyone ready to enter
into this way of putting it will be able to grasp the deeper meaning
of my words.
Now, fundamentally speaking, it is certainly not easy to
unravel the riddle I have been speaking of, and I avow that in the
course of time I have tried to come near it through the most varied
ways of spiritual research. Obviously there is not time to speak of
these ways now. But there is one way among the many that I should
like to mention. It is the way that leads round at the beginning of
our era through a very remarkable manifestation of spiritual life,
the life of the Sibyls.
These Sibyls were indeed a remarkable phenomenon, with a
prophetic character entirely their own. External scholarship cannot
say from which language the word ‘Sibyl’ comes. As soon
as we start looking at the fairly detailed knowledge about the Sibyls
that external documents provide, we come upon something quite extraordinary,
at the very beginning of the Sibylline age. From about the eighth century
B.C. onwards we encounter the first abode of the
Sibyls, in Ionian Erithrea; from there the first Sibyls sent out into
the world their manifold prophecies. And these prophecies, even in
the form handed down by external tradition, show that they arose from
strange subconscious regions of human nature and soul-life. As though
out of chaotic psychic depths the Sibyls utter all kinds of
prophecies about the future development of this or that people,
telling mainly of awful things to come, but sometimes also of good
things. Far removed from anything like orderly thought, the
utterances of the Sibyls pour out in such a way that — if they
are studied with the means of Spiritual Science — it seems as
one listens that every Sibyl is a spiritual fanatic who wants to
force upon people what she has to say. She does not wait to be
questioned, in the manner of the Greek Pythian oracle; she steps
forth, the people assemble, and her utterances about men and peoples
and Earth-cycles seem to ring out with overbearing force.
It is remarkable, as I said, that the Sibyls should
appear first in Ionia, for Ionia was at the same time the birthplace
of Greek philosophy: the wisdom which from Thales and Aristotle on
into the Roman epoch is so preeminently an expression of a well
ordered soul life, entirely opposed to anything chaotic. It draws
forth from the soul-life all that can be expressed in clear, lucid,
light-filled concepts. From Ionia sprang the philosophy of clarity
and light, which with Plato — one might say — became the
philosophy of the heavenly. And like its shadow appear the Sibyls,
with their psychic products emanating from the chaos of the soul,
often shedding a true illumination on the future, but also often
announcing things which their followers had to falsify in order to
make it seem that the prophecy had been fulfilled.
And then we see further how the Sibyls, always
accompanying the fourth culture-epoch like a shadow of its wisdom,
spread through Greece, through Italy. We hear tell of the most varied
kinds of Sibyls, and we see Sibyllism spreading on through Italy,
until we come to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we see how
Sibyllism gains influence over the Roman poets; how it even plays
into the poems of Virgil; how it is just the intellectuals who try to
shape their lives by appealing to the sayings of the Sibyls. How much
importance was attached to these sayings is shown by the so-called
Sibylline Books, which were turned to for guidance. And again in the
external world we see how in connection with the Sibylline sayings
great intelligence is chaotically mixed up with arrant humbug. And
then we see Sibyllism even gaining a foothold in Christianity. We
hear its voice in Thomas of Celano's hymn:*
Dies irae, Dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
*Day of Wrath, O Day which leads this World-Age into
destruction, according to the witness of David and of the Sibyl.
And so, right into the time of the development of
Christianity, many minds were aware of the Sibyls and their
prophecies, especially those that bore on doom and destruction and
the coming of a new world-order. Hence one can say that through many,
many centuries — indeed all through the fourth post-Atlantean
epoch and with an influence extending, if only sparsely, into the
fifth epoch — the Sibyls are encountered in the history of
mankind. Only someone dominated by present day rationalistic ideas
can overlook the far-reaching influence of Sibyllism on the world in
which Christianity grew up. As I have often said, the history we are
given to read is in many respects a fable convenue, especially
where anything of a spiritual nature is concerned. Until quite recent
centuries the ideas of all classes of people were influenced much
more widely than is generally believed by what came from the Sibyls.
Sibyllism is a remarkable, enigmatic phenomenon, occurring as it did
in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.
What really went on in the souls of the Sibyls must be
of interest to us, for through spiritual research we must unearth
such things from beneath the layer of materialistic culture which
covers them nowadays. In this condition they are useless; they must
be brought to light and renewed by the resources of spiritual
research which are available in our epoch. But attention must also be
drawn to the fact that in comparatively recent times the nature of
Sibyllism was not forgotten to the extent it is today. We have indeed
an important work of art which points to the traditions concerning
the significance of Sibyllism. Perhaps we do not always look at this
work with an awareness of its significance in this respect, but the
significance exists and should give occasion for reflection. I mean
the great paintings in the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo
depicted not only the development of Earth and Humanity, but also the
Prophets and the Sibyls. And in looking at these paintings we ought
to notice the way in which Michelangelo portrays the Sibyls, and
particularly how he contrasts them with the Prophets. In this
contrast, if we look at it impartially, we find something which
through Spiritual Science we can recognise as having to do with
various hidden aspects of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during
which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.
In this wonderful work of art we see first the portrayal
of the Prophets — Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel,
Jeremiah, Jonah. And ranged with them are the Sibyls — the
Persian, Delphic, Erythrean, Libyan and Cumaean Sibyls. Almost all
the Prophets, we find, have to a greater or lesser degree something
of the character which strikes us immediately in Jeremiah and comes
out with particular significance in Zechariah; they are deeply
reflective men, for the most part absorbed in books or something
similar, quietly taking into well-ordered minds whatever it is they
are studying. In the countenances of these Prophets we encounter the
calmness of their souls. Daniel looks like a slight exception, but
only an apparent one. He stands before a book which is supported on
the back of a boy; he has in his hand something to write with, in
order to write down in another book what he is reading. Here there is
a slight effect of transition from reading the world-secrets to
writing them down; while the other Prophets remain in meditation,
calm and relaxed in soul, entirely devoted to the world-secrets. In
gazing at them we see — and this must be kept firmly in mind —
that they are all absorbed in super-earthly things; their souls are
at rest in the spiritual and they are seeking to fathom the emergence
of humanity, from out of the spiritual. We see that in their thinking
they are far removed from their immediate surroundings, far above
human passion and fanaticism, untouched by the ecstasy that may
spring from these emotions; they are not only beyond human ken, but
beyond anything a human being can experience in himself in so far as
he is a man on Earth. That is the greatness of this portrayal of the
Prophets by Michelangelo.
Then we turn our gaze to his depiction of the Sibyls.
Here we have first the Persian Sibyl, close to the Prophet Jeremiah,
contrasting remarkably with his meditative demeanour. She raises her
hand as though wishing to force on humanity what she has experienced;
as though in the style of a bad speaker she wants to add all possible
emphasis to her words; as though impelled by the passion of a fanatic
to impose with imperious gesture her message on all mankind. Then we
turn to the Erythrean Sibyl; we see how she is connected with
everything that can accrue to man from the elemental secrets of the
Earth. Above her head is a lamp; a naked boy is lighting the lamp
with a torch. How could the intention of the painting be more clearly
expressed? Here is human passion kindling out of the unconscious
soul-forces the message that is to be instilled with all the power of
prophecy into mankind.
The Prophets are devoted in their souls to the primal
eternity of the spirit; the Sibyls are carried away by the earthly,
in so far as the earthly reveals the psychic-spiritual. The Delphic
Sibyl shows this particularly clearly; we see how her hair is even
blown to one side by a gust of wind, and the same wind catches her
blue veil, so that she has the air element to thank for what she
imparts. In this gust of wind we see pictured what the Earth wished
to reveal through the lips of this Sibyl, with forcibly persuasive
power. Then the Cumaean Sibyl! She speaks with half-open mouth, as
though muttering; as though stammering out a prophecy from the
unconscious, the unknown. The Libyan Sibyl, the hasty one, looks as
though she is turning round to grasp something from which secrets can
be read — something like that! In these Sibyls everything is
devoted, so to speak, to the immediate element of Earth.
Much was entrusted to images of this kind in the days
when — as we can readily understand — things could be
much more effectively expressed in paintings and other forms of art
than they would be in our time, when concepts and ideas are more to
the purpose.
What then is the special character of these Sibyls? What
are they? What does their prophesying signify? We must penetrate
deeply into the mysteries of human evolution if we want to fathom
what went on in the souls of these Sibyls.
With this aim in view, let us ask again: Why would it
have been so easy for the old Indian Rishis, with their scarcely
conceivable wisdom, to understand Christ Jesus? It seems trivial, yet
it is true to say — because they had the necessary concepts and
gifts of wisdom, and in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch these were
lacking. They had everything for which the Gnostics, and the
anti-Gnostics, and the Apostolic Fathers, as they are called,
thirsted in vain. They had it all, but in what form did they have it?
Not as ideas that had been worked out, somewhat as the ideas of Plato
and Aristotle were worked out, but as inspirations, as something that
stood before them with the full power of concrete inspirations. Their
astral bodies were laid hold of by that which streamed into them from
the great Universe, and out of this working of the Cosmos on their
astral bodies came the concepts which could have conjured up before
their souls the Being of Christ Jesus. One might say that this was
given to them. They had not worked it up for themselves; it came as
though showered forth from the depth of the astral body. And with
wonderful clarity it showered upon the holy Rishis and their pupils,
and fundamentally speaking upon the whole Indian culture of the first
post-Atlantean epoch. It became more and more narrowed down, but in
the second and third post-Atlantean epochs it was still there, and
the remains of it passed over into the fourth epoch. But what was
this remainder?
If we were to examine what things were like in the third
post-Atlantean epoch, we should find that at least those who had
raised themselves to the height of their epoch — and
proportionately there were many more spiritually developed persons
than there are today — had ideas about the interconnections of
the super-earthly and the symbolic significance of the starry
heavens. They could read world-secrets in the motions of the stars.
It is quite certain that the third post-Atlantean epoch, if Christ
had appeared on Earth then, would have known from the writing in the
stars what relationship it had with Him. But — in accordance
with the principle we have often mentioned with regard to the
evolution of humanity — it was necessary that the gift of
entering into relation with the mysteries of the world through living
pictures should recede more and more into the background of the
astrality of man. These pictures became increasingly chaotic. That
which flowed by this channel into the human soul became less and less
authoritative — I am not saying that it lost all authority —
but it became less and less authoritative as a means of fathoming the
real mysteries of the Universe.
And so two quite different developments can be traced.
On the one hand there was the world of concepts, let us say of Plato
and Aristotle: a world of ideas which could be called the most
attenuated form of the spiritual world, a world which had in it the
least of spirit, a world grasped and explored directly by the Ego and
no longer experienced through the astral body. For that is the
distinguishing mark of Greek philosophy: there for the first time the
spirit spoke out of the Ego, as it can do, in concepts that were
perfectly lucid, but far removed from real spiritual life. But the
Greek philosopher still felt that his thoughts emanated from the
spiritual world, whereas a modern philosopher is by necessity a
doubter, a sceptic, because he no longer feels any connection between
his thoughts and the mysteries of the world. In modern times there
has been a decline in the faculty for saying: When I think, the
world-spirit is thinking in me. As I have tried to show in
The Threshold of the Spiritual World, it is necessary to gain,
through meditation, a little of that confidence in the forming of
concepts and ideas which came naturally to the Greek philosopher,
because he was able to accept his thoughts as thoughts of the
world-spirit itself. Only the outermost fringe of the world-spirit
approached humanity through Greek philosophy, but it was a fringe
permeated with the actual life of the world-spirit; and this was felt
to be so.
The second element which persisted from older times was
atavistic, an heirloom, and it persisted most plainly in the
prophecies of the Sibyls. Out of the chaos of their inner life they
brought forth once more the human soul forces which had worked
harmoniously during the second and third post-Atlantean epochs and
now gave confused glimpses of the spiritual world.
Let us take a hypothesis which in our present context is
perhaps permissible: What would have happened if neither the Christ
nor Greek philosophy had come into the world? Humanity would then
have had to get along with what it had received as inheritance from
the past, and in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch this had reached the
stage of Sibyllism. Imagine this developing on its own lines in the
West, without the Christ Impulse and without philosophy, and without
the science that followed philosophy — then you will have a
picture of the spiritual chaos that would have overtaken the West,
arising inevitably from all that had been active in the souls of the
Sibyls. But forces have after effects. If with the resources of
Spiritual Science one examines this elemental strength, through which
the spiritual powers connected with wind and water and fire find
expression in the immediate circumference of the Earth, and if one
studies how these powers would have found an abode in human souls —
especially if one tests the strength with which the spirits of wind
and fire, water and earth, would have taken possession of the souls
of men — then one can see how harmony and order had faded out
of the old way of knowing the world, prevalent during the first three
post-Atlantean epochs, and how the forces only would have remained in
human souls.
Human souls would have lost the capacity for relating
themselves truly to the great phenomena of the Cosmos, but they would
have assuredly had a relation with the spirits of wind and water,
fire and earth, and particularly with the whole tribe of spectres and
demons which would have got loose from their cosmic connections. Men
would have fallen quite under the sway of the elemental spirits;
their teachers would have been of the Sibylline kind, and the force
would have been so strong that it would have persisted right up to
the present, and indeed up to the very end of Earth days. And if we
ask why this has not happened, and who has brought it about that the
force so apparent in the Sibyls has gradually declined, then we must
answer: the Christ, who through the Mystery of Golgotha infused the
Earth's aura with His Being; thus He destroyed the Sibylline
force in the souls of men and has driven it away.
And so on the ground of Spiritual Science we observe the
remarkable fact that men with their wisdom have not understood much
about the Christ Impulse: their concepts and ideas have turned out to
be virtually powerless in this respect. But the essential thing is
not that the Christ Impulse came into the world primarily as a
teaching. The essential thing is the character of the facts, the
direct impulse that flowed from the Mystery of Golgotha. And this we
must look for not only in what is taught or understood, but in what
is accomplished for human souls. And one of these deeds, the struggle
waged by Christ, who had permeated the Earth-aura, against Sibyllism
— it is this deed that I wished to bring before you today.
Thus the Christ had in fact to fulfil the office of a
judge. This was misunderstood by those who took it materialistically
to imply that Christ would return soon after His resurrection. Human
concepts at that time could not reach to an understanding of these
things. But in the chaotic ideas of an early return there was the
truth that there had been this early manifestation of Christ. He had
manifested on ground which (as we shall see tomorrow) had been
prepared externally by Paul; but above all He had manifested in the
region behind the sense-world where the spiritual conflict between
Christ and the Sibyls had been waged. We must pierce the veil that
shows us the spreading of Christianity on the physical plane. We must
look behind the physical plane at the spiritual conflict whereby the
souls of men were freed from that chaotic element which would
otherwise have gone on from strength to strength. And this fact is
seen in a false light by anyone who fails to comprehend that through
this supra-physical deed something of endless value was accomplished
for mankind by the Christ. But who were they who achieved at least
something, indeed much, towards this comprehension? They were the
writers of the Gospels, and Paul, who were endowed with a certain
inspiration or revelation from the spiritual world.
We shall have to appreciate from other points of view
the emergence of the Evangelists and of Paul. But we can now see how
Paul stands in the midst of a world where something is going on
beyond the reach of his words, beyond all that he could contribute
through his powerful, fiery words towards an understanding of the
Mystery of Golgotha. And yet — particularly if one grasps the
nature of the struggle waged by the Christ against the Sibyls —
one has a feeling about Paul that I would like to sum up in a few
concluding words. With Paul it always seems that there is much more
between his words than one gets from simply reading them. It is as
though the Damascus vision had come to expression through him; as
though there penetrated into humanity through him a note which was
opposed to the prophetic note of the Sibyls; as though through him
there rang out again the note of the old Prophets whom Michelangelo
has represented so beautifully in his paintings. As I have said, the
Sibyls had something that came from the elementals of the Earth;
something that could not have been there if the elemental spirits of
the Earth had not spoken to them. With Paul there was something
similar, something which external scholarship has noted in a
remarkable but quite exoteric way; and this, if one examines it from
the standpoint of Spiritual Science, really leaves one standing
before a world of amazement.
Paul also, in a certain way, created something out of
the elemental nature of the Earth, but in a distinctive region of the
Earth. Naturally one can understand Paul quite well in a theological,
rationalistic, abstract way if one leaves out of account what I am
going to say, for this cannot be explained in terms of external
science. One can understand Paul quite well, if one wants to
understand him only from the standpoint of ordinary rationalism. But
if one wants to grasp what it was that lived spiritually in Paul, in
and between his words, and why one feels through his words something
akin to the prophecies of the Sibyls, but with him proceeding from a
good element in Earth evolution, then one comes to the phenomenon
which answers the question: How far does Paul's world extend?
What are its boundaries? And the remarkable answer we receive is:
Paul is great throughout the world where the olive tree is
cultivated. I know I am saying something strange, but we shall see
that this strangeness explains itself, in a certain sense, when
tomorrow we enter a little into the character of Paul.
Geographically, too, the world is full of secrets. And
the region of the Earth where the olive tree flourishes is different
from the regions where flourish the oak or the ash. Man as a
physically embodied being has a relationship with the elemental
spirits. In the world of the olive tree the rustle and movement, the
whisper and gesture, are not the same as in the world of the oak or
the ash or the yew. And if we want to grasp the connection of the
Earth-nature with human beings, we need to pay attention to such
peculiar facts as this — the fact that Paul carries his message
just as far over the Earth as the domain of the olive tree extends.
The world of Paul is the world of the olive tree.
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