LECTURE FIVE
KRISTIANIA —
May 14, 1909
THE AGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
that counts as the fourth
and is characterized by the letter to the community in Thyatira began
in the seventh or eighth century before Christ and lasted until the
thirteenth or fourteenth century after Christ's birth. Only then do
we begin to count our fifth age, the Germanic cultural epoch. The fourth
age stands in the middle. In manifold ways it brought to expression
the life between birth and death and developed a love for the material
world. It had its greatest blossoming in the beauty of Greek art.
The soul would have had
to experience a darkening if the event of Golgotha had not occurred,
if the light coming forth from this event had not had its effect. After
human beings came to full consciousness of their earthly I, when they
had fully entered into the physical world, there appears, among other
things, for the first time the concept of the “last will and
testament”
as a sign that the human will had become so important that it survived
death. This first appears only in ancient Rome, not yet in Greece. Greece
did not yet have the concept of the single man or woman standing firmly
anchored on the earth. Only gradually did the feeling arise that the
human being was not only a member of a community but an individual.
Before this the concept of personality, the concept of the divine-spiritual
anchored in the human being, would not have been understood. In ancient
Greece they could only understand the divine-spiritual residing in the
spiritual world. But Greek culture could, in the fullest sense, feel what
it meant to know with human consciousness that the I lives. Nevertheless,
it did not recognize that the I is divine. In the Orient it was proclaimed
by Moses. For the Greeks, between birth and death it was not present
as something spiritual. And there was a deeply tragic feeling that
went through all the souls ... [gap in manuscript]. The Greeks said to
themselves that the human being has descended from the divine spiritual
world. But they did not know that human beings could work themselves
back up into that world again, that they could return in the future
to the spiritual world.
This is expressed in the
myth of Prometheus;
[See Note 1]
it is expressed so tragically in the drama of Aeschylus
[See Note 2]
when Io, who has become insane, appears to Prometheus.
Io represents the old clairvoyant consciousness that, in this
fourth epoch, could no longer appear in normal states of consciousness
but only in a state of madness. Science in the modern sense did
not yet exist in the earliest times of our culture. Only gradually
did the human being become a seeker in that science which can independently
research the external world independently. For this reason something
like science has only existed since Thales.
[See Note 3]
It is an abstraction to speak of “oriental philosophy.”
Those who began science with Thales were right: before them science
was always inspired, born out of the mysteries. That was the case with
Heraclitus,
[See Note 4]
who was still inspired by ancient
mystery wisdom. We are told that he placed his book on the altar of
the goddess of Ephesus.
To the extent that external
natural science increases in humanity, to that extent true wisdom will
be obstructed. We are told in the fourth letter of the Apocalypse how
people must find the connection to true wisdom. Let us assume that the
Christ principle, the revelation of Golgotha would not have come. Then,
in terms of external science, outstanding people such as Marcus Aurelius,
Seneca, and so forth,
[See Note 5]
would have been present,
but the science would have remained merely intellectual and none of
it would have contributed to a new ascent to the spiritual. Celsus,
[See Note 6]
the contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, wrote only external historical
gossip about the event of Golgotha. But in terms of scientific, logical
thinking these people all stood at the highest level.
What is called skepticism
came into this stream. We find in Roman culture a complete skepticism
existing alongside a highly refined approach to knowledge concerning
all things intellectual. Let us consider, on the other hand, a personality
like Augustine's. He was not in a position to arrive at anything other
than doubt concerning what he had learned of Greek and Roman science. Then
he encountered Manicheism, which he came to know only in a false form.
He became acquainted with a teaching that took into account everything
that Zarathustra taught. However, his soul was not inclined to take
in all of this because the souls of the people living at that time were
not meant to undertake such lofty flights of the spirit and see the spirit
everywhere behind the physical world. The science that had penetrated
all the way to the stars deteriorated; and even if this science had
reached the Europeans no one could have understood it. The soul had
to remain attached to what could be seen in the external world of the
senses.
Science only reawakened
during the time of the Renaissance. What Greece and Rome had started
became Arabic wisdom; it became the spirit of Mohammedanism. Arabism
then spread from Spain into Europe. This science is outstanding with
regard to everything directly relating to the sensible-sensual world.
The science that became a powerful stimulus for European science, that
influenced Bacon and Spinoza,
[See Note 7]
arises from Spanish
Arabism. It comes from Spain. However, it cannot rise above a pantheism
that is unable to reach concrete spiritual beings. Arabism did not arrive
at the concrete. It ascended to the sensible human being but what was
seen beyond that was only an abstract divine unity. It was not known what
this unity is. A poor and comfortable world view! There is no knowledge
of the spirit if it is summed up in a unity. Therein lies the poverty
of pantheism.
As a result, we entered
the fifth age with a science of the external world that began its great
rise to ascendancy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We see
this, for example, with the Scholastics. We experience in their thought
the dawning of a new science that is, however, wholly chained to the
sense world, that is unable to go even a step beyond the sense world.
Thus we see how the split appears between faith and knowledge. Augustine
was not able to understand a reference to something spiritual standing
behind the sun. He did not understand Manicheism because it speaks of
the veil of the senses spread over the spiritual. He could believe in
Christ who had descended into a physical man. But faith and knowledge
had entirely split apart at that time. All believers who stood on medieval
science wanted faith and knowledge entirely separated.
We can illustrate
schematically how what began in the Greco-Latin age still lives today,
only on the external, physical level. The evolution of humankind takes
place in such a way that what was cultivated in the Egypto-Chaldean age
we experience again today — but we experience it as
knowledge, and now it is illuminated and spiritualized by the
Christ impulse. Everywhere in Europe we see the ancient wisdom of Egypt
appearing again, but illuminated by the principle of Christ. In our time
the human being will only be able to take this in consciously through
the Rosicrucian teaching.
| Diagram 5 Click image for large view | |
When the ancient Egyptians
spoke of the stars they meant the spiritual aspect of the stars, which
they still knew. A wonderful consciousness of ancient knowledge penetrated
the science of Copernicus and Kepler. As a result, what the ancient
Egyptians knew we now see appearing in a physical form. In the past
they had seen beings moving through space, now only spheres were seen,
moving in elliptical circles.
The fifth epoch is called
to find again the spiritual world behind sense existence; and Theosophy
must reach the point where it can lead people increasingly to permeate
all knowledge with the principle of Christ.
If a clairvoyant being
had been in a position to observe the earth through millennia then,
it would have appeared that the entire aura of the earth suddenly changed
color, radiated with different colors when the redeemer died on Golgotha.
Ahura Mazdao, who had been proclaimed by Zarathustra, became at that
time the elemental spirit of the earth. Christ expressed this when,
at the Last Supper, he said: “This is my body”
(Matt. 26:26)
and, for the grape juice, found the expression, “This is my
blood.”
(Matt. 26:28)
If we really studied the
earth we would have to see members of the spirit of Christ in everything
that lives and grows, even in the smallest thing we look at. Human beings
of the future will not speak of atoms; they will scientifically understand
the earth as the expression of Christ.
We are standing only at
the beginning of this development. Christ must first be understood in
the simplest way. In the future all science will find Christ, even though
it finds today nothing but a dead corpse-like existence in the sensible
world. The fifth epoch can feel, to begin with, only as a perspective,
that this new science is approaching, that humanity will understand
in a new way what Zarathustra meant when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao.
The ancient wisdom of
Zarathustra will appear again in a new form in the sixth age. Finally,
the age of the holy Rishis will come again in a new form. There may
be only a small band of people who understand Theosophy in our age;
there may be only the smallest of groups present to hear the reenlivened
wisdom of Zarathustra in the sixth age; and, finally there may be only
a fraction remaining for the seventh age. The further course of human
evolution will be such that more and more people will gather together
who will understand what Zarathustra proclaimed.
Then an age will come
upon the earth when the victors will be those who lead the war of all
against all. But the souls who will have been preserved from the sixth
age must found a new culture after the war of all against all. The seventh
age will have neither people who glow with enthusiasm for the spiritual,
nor those who glow with enthusiasm for sense existence; even for that
these people will be too blase. Very little of the Indian, the first
culture, will be perceptible on the earth in the seventh age. But these
souls from the sixth age when earned up into the spiritual world, purified
and “Christened, will walk as it were etherically, no longer
touching the earth, while humanity then will be able to master what
the entire culture of earth has to offer. The seventh age will be such
that here below on the earth, people living in increasingly dense and
hardened bodies will make the greatest discoveries and inventions. In
the seventh age, human beings wholly entangled in matter will no longer
have to fear much from Theosophy, for on earth there will no longer be
much to find of those transformed human beings who will have increasingly
spiritualized themselves in the sixth age by absorbing Theosophy. The
people who have understood the call of the master today will be carried
over into a distant future. The key will be turned in the sixth cultural
epoch. Those who have heard the call will be the founders of a new
humanity. If only a few people are entangled with matter, the community
of Laodicea will not last long. It lies within the free will of every
human being to belong to either the community of Philadelphia or the
community of
Laodicea.
Notes:
Note 1.
Compare the Berlin lecture
of October 7, 1904 on “The Prometheus Saga,” in
The Temple Legend
(GA 93) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
Note 2.
Aeschylus (525 – 456 s.e.)
was the most important founder of Attic tragedy and the oldest of
the three great Greek writers of Greek tragedy. Quote comes from
his trilogy “Prometheia.”
Note 3.
Thales of Miletus, (ca. 625
– ca. 545 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher,
one of the “seven wise men,” and one of the founders of
philosophy.
Note 4.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, (ca.
540 {544} – 480 {483 s.c.} was a Greek philosopher.
Note 5.
Marcus Aurelius:
(121 – 180 A.D.)
also know as Marcus Aurelius, the Philosopher. was the Roman
caesar from 161 A.D.; Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)
was a Roman politician, philosopher, and poet.
Note 6.
Celsus: was a Greek philosopher
of the second century. Around 180 he wrote “True Discourse”
which was the first polemic against Christianity. It has been lost
but the essence of its content is contained in Origen's response,
Contra Celrum.
Note 7.
Francis Bacon
(1561 – 1626)
was an English Renaissance philosopher. Benedictus Spinoza
(1632 – 1677) was a Dutch philosopher.
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