Christianity. Believers of the community of Jesus said: "That which
was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with
our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of
the Word of life ... declare we unto you." In the same way it might be
said in the spirit of Neo-Platonism, "That which was from the
beginning, which cannot be heard and seen, must be spiritually
experienced as the Word of life."
And so the old conception of the universe is developed and splits into
two leading ideas. It leads in Neo-Platonism and similar systems to an
idea of Christ which is purely spiritual; on the other hand, it leads
to a fusion of the idea of Christ with a historical manifestation, the
personality of Jesus. The writer of the Gospel of St. John may be said
to unite these two conceptions. "In the beginning was the Word." He
shares this conviction with the Neo-Platonists. The Word becomes
spirit within the soul, thus do the Neo-Platonists conclude. The Word
was made flesh in Jesus, thus does St. John conclude, and with him
the whole Christian community. The inner meaning of the manner in
which the Word was made flesh was given in all the ancient
cosmogonies. Plato says of the macrocosm: "God has extended the body
of the world on the soul of the world in the form of a cross." The
soul of the world is the Logos. If the Logos is to be made flesh, he
must recapitulate the cosmic process in fleshly existence. He must be
nailed to the cross, and rise again. In spiritual form this most
momentous thought of Christianity had long before been prefigured in
the old cosmogonies. The Mystic went through it as a personal
experience in initiation. The Logos become man had to go through it in
a way that made this fact one that is true for or valid to the whole
of humanity. Something which was present under the old dispensation as
an incident in the Mysteries becomes a historical fact through
Christianity. Hence Christianity was the fulfilment not only of what
the Jewish prophets had predicted, but also of the truth which had
been prefigured in the Mysteries.
The Cross of Golgotha gathers together in one fact the whole cult of
the Mysteries of antiquity. We find the cross first in the ancient
cosmogonies. At the starting-point of Christianity it confronts us in
an unique event which has supreme value for the whole of mankind. It
is from this point of view that it is possible for the reason to
apprehend the mystical element in Christianity. Christianity as a
mystical fact is a milestone in the process of human evolution; and
the incidents in the Mysteries, with their attendant results, are the
preparation for that mystical fact.
XIII
ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE CHURCH
The full force of the conflict which was enacted in the souls of
Christian believers during the transition from paganism to the new
religion is exhibited in the person of St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430).
The spiritual struggles of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory
Nazianzen, Jerome, and others are full of mysterious interest when we
see them calmed and laid to rest in the mind of Augustine.
In Augustine's personality deep spiritual needs developed out of a
passionate nature. He passed through pagan and semi-Christian ideas.
He suffered deeply from the most appalling doubts of the land which
attack one who has felt the impotence of many varieties of thought in
the face of spiritual problems, and who has tasted the depressing
effect of the question: "Can man know anything whatever?"
At the beginning of his struggles, Augustine's thoughts clung to the
perishable things of sense. He could only picture the spiritual to
himself in material images. It is a deliverance for him when he rises
above this stage. He thus describes it in his _Confessions_: "When I
wished to think of God, I could only imagine immense masses of bodies
and believed that was the only kind of thing that could exist. This
was the chief and almost the only cause of the errors which I could
not avoid." He thus indicates the point at which a person must arrive
who is seeking the true life of the spirit. There are thinkers, not a
few, who maintain that it is impossible to arrive at pure thought,
free from any material admixture. These thinkers confuse what they
feel bound to say about their own inner life, with what is humanly
possible. The truth rather is that it is only possible to arrive at
higher knowledge when thought has been liberated from all material
things, when an inner life has been developed in which images of
reality do not cease when their demonstration in sense-impressions
comes to an end. Augustine relates how he attained to spiritual
vision. Everywhere he asked where the divine was to be found. "I asked
the earth and she said 'I am not it' and all that was upon the earth
said the same. I asked the ocean and the abysses and all that lives in
them, which said, 'We are not thy God, seek beyond us.' I asked the
winds, and the whole atmosphere and its inhabitants said, 'The
philosophers who sought for the essence of things in us were under an
illusion, we are not God.' I asked the sun, moon, and stars, which
said, 'We are not God whom thou seekest.'" And it came home to St.
Augustine that there is only one thing which can answer his question
about the divine--his own soul. The soul said, "No eyes nor ears can
impart to thee what is in me. For I alone can tell thee, and I tell
thee in an unquestionable way." "Men may be doubtful whether vital
force is situate in air or in fire, but who can doubt that he himself
lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? If he
doubts, it is a proof that he is alive, he remembers why he doubts,
he understands that he doubts, he will assure himself of things, he
thinks, he knows that he knows nothing, he judges that he must not
accept anything hastily." Outer things do not defend themselves when
their essence and existence are denied, but the soul does defend
itself. It could not be doubtful of itself unless it existed. By its
doubt it confirms its own existence. "We are and we recognise our
being, and we love our own being and knowledge. On these three points
no illusion in the garb of truth can trouble us, for we do not
apprehend them with our bodily senses like external things." Man
learns about the divine by leading his soul to know itself as
spiritual, so that it may find its way, as a spirit, into the
spiritual world. Augustine had battled his way through to this
knowledge. It was out of such an attitude of mind that there grew up
in pagan nations the desire to knock at the gate of the Mysteries. In
the age of Augustine, such convictions might lead to becoming a
Christian. Jesus, the Logos become man had shown the path which must
be followed by the soul if it would attain the goal which it sees when
in communion with itself. In A.D. 385, at Milan, Augustine was
instructed by St. Ambrose. All his doubts about the Old and New
Testaments vanished when his teacher interpreted the most important
passages, not merely in a literal sense, but "by lifting the mystic
veil by force of the spirit."
What had been guarded in the Mysteries was embodied for Augustine in
the historical tradition of the Evangelists and in the community where
that tradition was preserved. He comes by degrees to the conviction
that "the law of this tradition, which consists in believing what it
has not proved, is moderate and without guile." He arrives at the
idea, "Who could be so blind as to say that the Church of the Apostles
deserves to have no faith placed in it, when it is so loyal and is
supported by the conformity of so many brethren; when these have
handed down their writings to posterity so conscientiously, and when
the Church has so strictly maintained the succession of teachers, down
to our present bishops?"
Augustine's mode of thought told him, that with the coming of Christ
other conditions had set in for souls seeking after the spirit than
those which had previously existed. For him it was firmly established
that in Christ Jesus had been revealed in outer historical fact that
which the Mystic had sought in the Mysteries through preparation. One
of his most significant utterances is the following, "What is now
called the Christian religion already existed amongst the ancients and
was not lacking at the very beginnings of the human race. When Christ
appeared in the flesh, the true religion already in existence received
the name of Christian." There were two ways possible for such a method
of thought. One way is that if the human soul develops within it the
forces which lead it to the knowledge of its true self, it will, if it
only goes far enough, come also to the knowledge of the Christ and of
everything connected with him. This would have been a mystery-wisdom
enriched through the Christ event. The other way is taken by Augustine
and is that by which he became the great model for his successors. It
consists in cutting off the development of the forces of the soul at a
certain point, and in borrowing the ideas connected with the coming
of Christ from written accounts and oral traditions. Augustine
rejected the first way as springing from pride of the soul; he thought
the second was the way of true humility. Thus he says to those who
wished to follow the first way: "You may find peace in the truth, but
for that humility is needed, which does not suit your proud neck." On
the other hand, he was filled with boundless inward happiness by the
fact that since the coming of Christ in the flesh, it was possible to
say that every soul can come to spiritual experience which goes as far
as it can in seeking within itself, and then, in order to attain to
the highest, has confidence in what the written and oral traditions of
the Christian Church tell us about the Christ and his revelation. He
says on this point: "What bliss, what abiding enjoyment of supreme and
true good is offered us, what serenity, what a breath of eternity! How
shall I describe it? It has been expressed, as far as it could be, by
those great incomparable souls who we admit have beheld and still
behold.... We reach a point at which we acknowledge how true is what
we have been commanded to believe and how well and beneficently we
have been brought up by our mother, the Church, and of what benefit
was the milk given by the Apostle Paul to the little ones...." (It is
beyond the scope of this book to give an account of the alternative
method which is evolved from the Mystery Wisdom, enriched through the
Christ event. The description of this method will be found in _An
Outline of Occult Science_, see advt., front page.) Whereas in
pre-Christian times one who wished to seek the spiritual basis of
existence was necessarily directed to the way of the Mysteries,
Augustine was able to say, even to those souls who could find no such
path within themselves, "Go as far as you can on the path of knowledge
with your human powers, thence trust (faith) will carry you up into
the higher spiritual regions." It was only going one step further to
say, it is natural to the human soul only to be able to arrive at a
certain stage of knowledge through its own powers: thence it can only
advance further through trust, through faith in written and oral
tradition. This step was taken by the spiritual movement which
assigned to knowledge a certain sphere above which the soul could not
rise by its own efforts, but everything which lay beyond this domain
was made an object of faith which has to be supported by written and
oral tradition and by confidence in its representatives. Thomas
Aquinas, the greatest teacher within the Church (1224-1274), has set
forth this doctrine in his writings in a variety of ways. His main
point is that human knowledge can only attain to that which led
Augustine to self-knowledge, to the certainty of the divine. The
nature of the divine and its relation to the world is given by
revealed theology, which is not accessible to man's own researches and
is, as the substance of faith, superior to all knowledge.
The origin of this point of view may be studied in the theology of
John Scotus Erigena, who lived in the ninth century at the court of
Charles the Bald, and who represents a natural transition from the
earliest ideas of Christianity to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. His
conception of the universe is couched in the spirit of Neo-Platonism.
In his treatise _De Divisione Naturæ_, Erigena has elaborated the
teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite. This teaching started from a God
far above the perishable things of sense, and it derived the world
from Him (_Cf._ p. 208 _et seq._). Man is involved in the
transmutation of all beings into this God, Who finally becomes what He
was from the beginning. Everything falls back again into the Godhead
which has passed through the universal process and has finally become
perfected. But in order to reach this goal man must find the way to
the Logos who was made flesh. In Erigena this thought leads to
another: that what is contained in the writings which give an account
of the Logos leads, when received in faith, to salvation. Reason and
the authority of the Scriptures, faith and knowledge stand on the same
level. The one does not contradict the other, but faith must bring
that to which knowledge never can attain by itself.
* * * * *
The knowledge of the eternal which the ancient Mysteries withheld
from the multitude became, when presented in this way by Christian
thought and feeling, the content of faith, which by its very nature
had to do with something unattainable by mere knowledge. The
conviction of the pre-Christian Mystic was that to him was given
knowledge of the divine, while the people were obliged to have faith
in its expression in images. Christianity came to the conviction that
God has given his wisdom to mankind through revelation, and man
attains through his knowledge an image of this divine revelation. The
wisdom of the Mysteries is a hothouse plant, which is revealed to a
few individuals ripe for it. Christian wisdom is a Mystery revealed as
knowledge to none, but as a content of faith revealed to all. The
standpoint of the Mysteries lived on in Christianity, but in a
different form. All, not only the special individual, were to share in
the truth, but the process was that at a certain point man owned his
inability to penetrate farther by means of knowledge, and thence
ascended to faith. Christianity brought the content of the Mysteries
out of the obscurity of the temple into the clear light of day. The
one Christian movement mentioned led to the idea that this content
must necessarily be retained in the form of faith.
NOTES
P. 5--To one who has true perception, the "Spirit of Nature"
speaks powerfully in the facts currently expressed by the
catchword, "struggle for existence," etc.; but not in the
opinions which modern science deduces from them. In the first
statement lies the reason why natural science is attracting more
and more widespread attention. But it follows from the second
statement that scientific opinions should not be taken as if they
necessarily belonged to a knowledge of facts. The possibility of
being led astray by mere opinion is, in these days, infinitely
great.
P. 9--It should not be concluded from these remarks about the
sources of St. Luke's Gospel, that purely historical research is
undervalued by the writer of this book. This is not the case.
Historical research is absolutely justified, but it should not be
impatient with the method of presentation proceeding from a
spiritual point of view. It is not considered of importance to
make various kinds of quotations in this book; but one who is
willing will be able to see that a really unprejudiced,
broad-minded judgment will not find anything that is here stated
to be contrary to what has been actually and historically proved.
One who will not be broad-minded, but who holds this or that
theory to be a firmly-established fact, may easily think that
assertions made in this book are untenable from a scientific point
of view, and are made without any objective foundation.
P. 15--It is said above that those whose spiritual eyes are opened
are able to see into the spiritual world. The conclusion must not
on this account be drawn that only one who possesses spiritual
sight is able to form an intelligent opinion about the results
arrived at by the initiate. Spiritual sight belongs only to the
investigator. If he afterwards communicates what he has
discovered, every one can understand it who gives fair play to his
reason and preserves an unbiassed sense of truth. And such an one
may also apply the results of research to life and derive
satisfaction from them without himself having spiritual sight.
P. 20--"The sinking into the mire" spoken of by Plato must also be
interpreted in the sense referred to in the last note.
P. 20--What is said about the impossibility of imparting the
teaching of the Mysteries has reference to the fact that they
could not be communicated to those unprepared in the same form in
which the initiate experienced them; but they were always
communicated to those outside in such a form as was possible for
the uninitiated to understand. For instance the myths gave the old
form, in order to communicate the content of the Mysteries in a
way that was generally comprehensible.
P. 88--Everything that relates to knowledge gained through the
"eyes of the spirit" is called by ancient mysticism "Mantik."
"Telestik," on the other hand, is the indication of the ways which
lead to initiation.
P. 168--"Kabirs," according to ancient mysticism, are beings with
a consciousness far above the human consciousness of to-day.
Schelling means that man through initiation ascends to a state of
consciousness above his present one.
P. 186--An explanation of the meaning of the number seven may be
obtained in _An Outline of Occult Science_ (see advt., front
page).
P. 187--The meanings of the Apocalyptic signs can only be given
quite shortly here. Of course, all these things might be much more
thoroughly explained, but of this the scope of this book does not
allow.
THE END
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Typographical errors corrected in text: |
| |
| Page 140: "It can only be as is must be" replaced with |
| "It can only be as it must be" |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's Christianity As A Mystical Fact, by Rudolf Steiner