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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • This is a wonderful composition and it becomes even more admirable when we go into details. First of all, we simply have the parable of the sower. After introductory words having been said, we are told what the sower sows; that birds also eat the sown seeds, some seeds fall on stony ground where they can only have weak roots and get too little inner strength, others fall on good earth. This is clearly put to us; and after this has been given, the next parable already starts with the words: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...” The parables that follow and that are also spoken to the people, begins with “The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...” The people are therefore thoroughly prepared, by first having the facts established and then they are softly led to what is said as facts, facts aimed at the nature of the kingdoms of heaven. That’s all the people will be told, then they will be released.
  • The following parables are taught to the disciples: the parable of the treasure in the field, the parable of the precious pearl, the parable of the fish caught in the net from which many are thrown out, and the good ones gathered for nourishment. These parables are only spoken about to the disciples, and they are asked whether they have understood. They answer with the word “Yes,” which in the context of the Gospel would mean the same if today we could acquire the right feeling for it, and say: Yes, Amen. — In this the wonderful composition lies, which does not have to be looked for because it comes across in a natural way.
  • Sceptics may well say: this layout means nothing, as it is put down. — However, my dear friends, if you let yourself live into the Gospels, you will not be able to do anything other than experience these things; and it will have its reasons why we must experience them so, as to live into the wonderful composition, in order to really notice all the details, the Gospels have to reveal. Here you have a wonderful composition.
  • Let’s try and enter into this wonderful composition. Let’s go to the three parables only told to the disciples about heaven. According to the total sense in which the 13th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is expressed, out of the spirit of Matthew’s Gospel of Christ Jesus, this is not said to the people. Listen carefully what I emphasize: in the spirit of the Matthew Gospel this would not be told to the people. Try to remember exactly what is said in these parables which are only told to the disciples. Firstly, there’s the parable about the treasure in the field, discovered by a man who then sells all he has in order to buy the field with the treasure in it, so he may own it. Actually, it comes down to this, that he sells everything in order to acquire this treasure; that he gives up everything so that he may have the treasure. This relationship of Jesus to his disciples may not be expressed to the people. Why? Because it contains a certain danger; that of becoming egotistic, the danger of reward-ethics. One could not, without damaging the people, without further ado speak about egoism. Egoism is addressed when one urges good deeds with reference to the reward of the Eternal. Reward ethic, which fundamentally is still present to a marked degree in the Old Testament, this reward ethic is rejected by Christ Jesus. That is why he speaks about this parable — for which the unprepared would look for as reward — only to those who had already progressed far enough that there would no longer be a danger for this parable to indicate its egotistic meaning. The disciples who through their communal life with Christ Jesus had gone beyond egoism, to them this could be said as it is in this parable, to them the heavenly realms could be compared with a treasure. In the disciples the urge for selfishness was not agitated. To the people in this sense of the Matthew Gospel it could not be said, just as little as what follows, which is structured accordingly with the parable
  • In the total style of the 13th Matthew Gospel one’s first attention is directed to the full human being; to the focus of the whole human being in his heart, perceiving through his senses, if he is to approach the interpretation of the parables. In the following way Christ Jesus makes it understandable to his disciples: after he has gone through from quite an objective observation given in the parable of the sower, he can no present further active parables and allow these to lead towards the functions of the heavenly realms. First, we have the parable of the plants and the weeds which point out that the good seeds could not flourish, without evil next to it. Then again one could say this is being expressed in a wonderful, quite scientific knowledge, because we know in a certain sense that plants can be damaged if the weeds are taken out in the wrong way. Likewise, we would harm mankind if we were to eradicate sin, for example, by not leading sinful men spiritually to the righteous, but by eradicating them before “the harvest,” that is, before the end of the earth. This is approachable to people; what works in plants or in weeds, can be placed before their souls. It can be taken further, placed there objectively, how the world is spread out in the wide-open spaces, and how to carry what comes from the world, to the heavenly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is the mustard seed, which is small compared with other seeds, then again it becomes a bigger tree compared with other plants.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • The Catholic Church was actually on this point always consequential, also when it became a worldly establishment under Constantine, as it went over into the political field. It was, one could say, really ironclad in its consequentiality. It has maintained its ceremonies in the most conservative way and in order not to go under, suffocated its soul content with dogmatism. No wonder that the ceremonial content became more and more strange as an experience, because people had no lively relationship to it anymore, and the dogmatic content was experienced as something obsolete — while it had been lively knowledge in olden times, knowledge experienced by a different soul constitution. The dogmatic content could not hold true compared with what came out of purely worldly knowledge. However, the Catholic Church had to remain absolutely consequential, and it has remained in its conserved state right up to the present. It has remained conservative by not participating in the state of mind/soul constitution residing in the present day. It has remained so, that it demands faith in preserved dogmas, which corresponds to a knowledge of an earlier soul constitution so that what is learnt about the Catholic Christ in the Church today is completely bound up with a dogmatic content which believes it presents a level of knowledge which mankind had actually reached at the end of the 14th century AD.
  • Look at the Sistine Madonna, she is magnificent. As far as one can see there are images of clouds which transform purely into angelic heads, and how the Madonna herself, with the Child, condenses out of the angles who reside in the clouds. It is as if the angelic forms have condensed out of the cloud images and have descended down to the earth, yet everything is wonderfully lifted into the spirit. Then the two curtains (he sketches on the blackboard) and below that a coquettish female figure and a terrible priestly figure, all things which absolutely do not belong to it. Why is this so? It is simply from the basis of Raphael having initially intended with this image, to give a soul experience with the picture of Mary on a certain feast day of Mary — now this is on the Feast of Corpus Christi -where people walk around in a procession with a picture of the virgin Mary that is carried under a canopy and comes to the altars where people kneel down. This is why there are these curtains (points to sketch on blackboard) with the kneeling female and male forms in a chapel, in front of the picture of Mary. Well, that is the kind of elementary school way of looking at what Raphael painted. What is actually meant here stands right in the Roman Catholic cult — absolutely right inside it.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 12: Prophecy, Dogma and Paganism
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  • The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers’ writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people’s attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.
  • So we must say — and I have expressly spoken about it — if we look at the totality of facts, the Christian church fathers lived in a misunderstanding of the Gospels, perhaps even a really bad misunderstanding of the Gospels. When we actually bring our feelings into the Gospels, as I have shown you yesterday, when we really with our whole heart and entire soul find ourselves with ever more wonder towards the Gospels, then we would find it inordinately difficult to find our way with our intellect to the first church fathers. We discover with the first church fathers that we relatively early come to the end of understanding because the Gospel itself leads us into immeasurable depths, and we very clearly experience that in a certain way we actually feel uncomfortably touched when after our wonder at the Gospels we now turn to something which appeared in the church fathers.
  • We see how it is stated in about the first 3 sentences of the Mark Gospel: After Christ left the temple — the temple in which one also heard something within the outer world of the divine — one of his disciples says to him: ‘Look, what magnificent stones, and wonderful buildings.’ Jesus however said to him: ‘You see only the large buildings. There will not be one stone left on top of another, without man taking part in the process of destruction because from now on, all of the outer, ungodly world begins to become a world of destruction.’ And he went away and spoke intimately. On the Mount of Olives, he spoke either intimately by himself through teaching people how to pray, or he spoke only to his most intimate disciples, to Peter, James, John and Andrew. To Peter, James, John and Andrew he only spoke about spiritual events as observed from the perspective of divine realms in contrast to destructive events in the world facing destruction.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 14: Gnostics and Montanists
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  • Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced — really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas — that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John’s Gospel because all together, they don’t form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won’t accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven’t managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John’s Gospel. Out of the harmony of John’s Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can’t be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians.