The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels. Lecture 2 of 14.
Rudolf Steiner, Kassel, June 25, 1909:
When a subject
such as our present one is discussed from the standpoint of spiritual science,
this is not done by basing the facts upon some document or other exposition come
into being in the course of human development, and by then illuminating the
facts in question on the authority of such a document. That is not the way of
spiritual science. On the contrary, entirely independent of all documents,
spiritual science investigates what has occurred in human evolution; and only
then — after the spiritual scientist has completed his research by means
independent of any documents, and knows how to describe what he has found — only
then is the document in question examined with a view of discovering whether it
agrees with what had first been disclosed without reference to any tradition
whatever. So all the statements made in these lectures concerning the course of
this or that event are by no means to be taken as merely deriving from the
Bible, from one of the four Gospels, but rather as the conclusions arrived at by
spiritual research independent of the Gospels. But no opportunity will be missed
to show that everything the spiritual scientist can fathom and observe is to be
found in the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of St. John.
We have a
curious utterance by the great mystic Jacob Boehme which puzzles all who are not
in touch with spiritual science. Jacob Boehme once drew attention to his way of
discussing past epochs in human evolution — say, the figure of Adam — as though
they had been within the scope of his own experiences, and he said: “Many might
ask, Were you then present when Adam walked the Earth?” And Jacob Boehme answers
unequivocally: “Yes, I was present.” Now, that is a noteworthy statement; for
actually, spiritual science is in a position really to observe with the eyes of
the spirit whatever has occurred, be it ever so far back; and in these
introductory remarks I should like to touch briefly upon the reason for
this.
Everything that
happens in the physical sensorial world has, of course, its counterpart in the
spiritual world. When a hand moves there is present not only what your eye sees
as a moving hand, but behind this moving hand, this visible image of the hand,
there are, for example, my thought and my will: the hand is to move. In short, a
spiritual element underlies it all. But while the visible image, the sense
impression of the hand motion, passes, its spiritual counterpart remains
inscribed in the spiritual world and always leaves a trace; so if our spiritual
eyes are opened we can trace all things that have happened in the world by the
imprints left by their spiritual counterparts. Nothing can occur in the world
without leaving such traces.
Suppose the
spiritual scientist gazes back to Charlemagne, or to the time of Rome, or to
Greek antiquity: everything that took place there has been preserved in the
spiritual world as imprints of its spiritual prototypes, and can be seen there.
This seeing is called "reading the akashic record." There exists this
living script which the spiritual eye can see; and when the spiritual scientist
describes the events of Palestine or the observation of Zarathustra he is not
describing what is found in the Bible or in the Gathas, but what he himself is
able to read in the akashic record. Only then does he investigate whether
the disclosures of the akashic record are to be found in the documents as
well — in our case, the Gospels.
The attitude,
therefore, of spiritual research toward documents is wholly unhampered; and for
this very reason spiritual research will be the true judge of what documents
have to tell. But when we find the same information in the documents as we were
able to glean from the akashic record we infer first, that the documents
are true, and second, that someone must have written them who was also able to
read in the akashic record. Many religious and other documents of the
human race are retrieved by spiritual science in this way. — What has just been
said shall now be clarified by the study of a special chapter in human
evolution, the Gospel of St. John, and its relation to the other Gospels. But
you must not imagine that the akashic record, the spiritual history which
lies open like a book before the seer's eyes, resembles any script of the
ordinary world. It is a living kind of script, and we will try to understand
this through what is to follow.
Suppose the seer
gazes back in time — say, to the time of Caesar. Caesar did certain deeds, and
insofar as they occurred on the physical plane his contemporaries witnessed
them. But they all left their traces in the akashic record; and when the
seer looks back he sees them as spiritual shadow-pictures or prototypes. — Call
to mind again the movement of the hand: as a seer you do not perceive the
picture this presents to the eye, but you will always see the intention to move
the hand, the invisible forces that move it. In the same way is to be seen
everything that went on in Caesar's thoughts, be it certain steps he intended to
take or some battle he planned. Everything seen by his contemporaries originated
in the impulses of his will and was executed by the invisible forces underlying
the sense images. But the latter really appear in the akashic record as
the Caesar who moved and had his being, as the spiritual image of Caesar.
Here someone
inexperienced in such matters might object: Your tales are nothing but
day-dreams — you know from your history what Caesar did, and now your mighty
imagination makes you believe you are seeing all sorts of invisible akashic
pictures. — But those who have experience in these things know that the less
familiar one is with such events through outer history, the easier it is to read
in the akashic record; for outer history and a knowledge of it are
actually confusing for the seer. When we have reached a certain age we are
hampered by various aspects of our education connected with the age in which we
live. In the same way the seer, equipped with the education provided by his
epoch, arrives at the point when he can give birth to his clairvoyant ego. He
has studied history; he has learned how things are handed down in geology,
biology, archeology, and the history of culture. All this actually interferes
with his vision and may bias him in his reading of the akashic record;
for in outer history one can by no means expect to find the same objectivity and
certainty that are to be achieved in deciphering the akashic record.
Consider for a
moment what it is that causes this or that event to become what is called
history: it may be that certain documents have been preserved relating to some
events, while others — and perhaps the most important ones — have been lost. An
example will show how unreliable all history can be. Among a number of poems
Goethe had planned but did not finish — and for the deeper student these
constitute a beautiful supplement to the great and glorious finished works he
left us — there is the fragment of a poem on Nausicaa. There exist only a
few sketches in which Goethe had noted how he intended to deal with this poem.
He often worked that way, jotting down a few sentences of which frequently but
little is preserved. That was the case with the Nausicaa. Now, there were
two men who endeavored to complete this work, both of them research men:
Scherer, the literary historian, and Herman Grimm. But Herman Grimm was not only
a researcher but an imaginative thinker — the man who wrote The Life of
Michelangelo and Goethe. Herman Grimm went about the task by
trying to find his way into Goethe's spirit, and he asked himself: Goethe being
what he was, how would he have conceived of a figure like the Nausicaa of
the Odyssey? — Whereupon, with a certain disregard of that historical document,
he created a Nausicaa in the spirit of Goethe. Scherer, on the other hand, who
always sought what was to be found among the documents in black and white,
argued that a Nausicaa begun by Goethe must be completed purely on the basis of
the material available; and he, too, tried to construct a Nausicaa, but
exclusively out of what these scraps of paper had to offer. Of this procedure
Herman Grimm remarked: What if Goethe's servant used some of these scraps of
paper — perhaps just the ones containing something very important — for Iighting
the fire? Have we any guarantee that the surviving scraps of paper are of any
value at all compared with those that may have been used for lighting the
fire?
All history
based on documents may be analogous to this illustration, and indeed it often
is. When building on documents we must never lose sight of the possibility that
just the most important ones may have perished. Indeed, what passes for history
is nothing more nor less than a fable convenue. But when the seer is
hampered by this convention and at the same time sees everything quite
differently in the akashic record, it is difficult for him to have faith
in the akashic picture; and the public will voice its resentment when he
tells a different story out of the akashic record. Hence one who is
experienced in these things likes best to speak of ancient times of which there
exist no documents, of the remote stages in the evolution of our Earth. There
are no documents relating to those epochs; and that is where the akashic
record reports most faithfully, because the seer is not confused by outer
history. — You will be able to gather from these remarks that it could never
occur to anyone familiar with these matters that the pictures provided by the
akashic record might be an echo of what is already known to him from
outer history.
If we now search
the akashic record for the great event to which we alluded yesterday, we
find the following salient points. The whole human race, in as far as it lives
on the Earth, is descended from a divine realm, from a divine-spiritual
existence. It can be stated that before any possibility existed for a physical
eye to see human bodies, for a hand to touch human bodies, man was present as a
spiritual being; and in the earliest ages he existed as a part of the
divine-spiritual beings: the Gods are the ancestors of men, so to speak, and men
the descendants of the Gods. The Gods had need of men as their issue, because
without them they would have been unable to descend, as it were, into the
sensorial physical world. In that remote time the Gods had their being in other
worlds, acting from without upon man who gradually evolved upon the Earth.
And now men had
to overcome, step by step, the obstacles placed in their path by their Earth
life. What is the nature of these obstacles? The aspect of evolution essential
for mankind was the need for the Gods to remain spiritual, while men, as their
descendants, became physical. All the obstacles presented specifically by
physical existence had to be surmounted by man, who possessed spirit only as the
inner phase of the physical, and who as an outer being had become physical. It
was within the confines of material existence that he had to develop; and it was
in this way that he progressed upward step by step, steadily maturing until he
should become increasingly able to turn to the Gods in whom he had his genesis.
A descent from the Gods, and then a turning back to them, in order to reach and
re-unite with them: that is man's path through life on Earth. But if this
evolution was to come about, certain human individualities always had to develop
more rapidly than the rest, to hurry on ahead in order to become their leaders
and teachers. Such men, then, have their being in humanity's midst and find
their way back to the Gods, as it were, in advance of others. We can picture it
in this way: In a given epoch men have attained to a certain degree of maturity
in their development. They may have the premonition of a return to the Gods, but
they have a long way to go before achieving it. Every man has within him a spark
of the divine, but in the leaders it is always brighter: they are closer to that
divine principle to which man must ultimately attain again. And this that dwells
in the leaders of mankind is perceived, by those whose eyes have been opened to
the spirit, as their essence and chief attribute.
Let us suppose
some great leader of mankind confronted another man, not his equal but above the
average. The latter feels vividly that the other is a great leader, permeated to
a high degree by the spirituality to which other men must eventually attain. How
would such a man describe this leader? He might say: Before me stands a man, a
man in a physical body like everyone else; but his physical body is negligible,
it need not be taken into account. When, however, I observe him with the eye of
the spirit, I see united with him a mighty spiritual being, a divine-spiritual
being which predominates to such an extent that my whole attention is focused
on it — not on what appears as body which he has in common with others.
To spiritual
sight, then, there appears in a leader of mankind something which in its nature
towers above the rest of humanity, and which must be described in quite a
different way: the description must be of what the spiritual eye sees. Nowadays
public men whose word is law would undoubtedly be amused at the idea of such
surpassing leaders of mankind: we already have the spectacle of various erudite
scientists regarding the shining lights of humanity as psychiatric cases. Such a
leader would only be recognized as such by those whose spiritual vision had been
sharpened; but these would indeed know that he was neither a fool nor a
visionary, nor simply a very gifted person, as the more benevolent might
designate him, but rather, that he was among the greatest figures of human life
in the spiritual sense.
That is the way
it would be today; but in the past it was a different matter, even in the none
too remote past. Human consciousness, as we know, has undergone various
metamorphoses, and formerly all men were endowed with a dim, shadowy
clairvoyance. Even at the time when Christ lived on Earth clairvoyance was still
developed to a certain degree, and in earlier centuries even more so, though it
was but a shadow of the clairvoyance common in the Atlantean and the first
post-Atlantean epochs. It disappeared only gradually. But a few isolated
individuals still had it, and even today there are natural clairvoyants whose
dim higher vision enables them to distinguish the spiritual nature of men.
Let us turn to
the time in which Buddha appeared to the ancient Indian people. Conditions were
very different at that time. Today the appearance of a Buddha, especially in
Europe, would arouse no particular respect. But in those old days it was a
different matter, for there were very many who could discern the true nature of
the event, namely, that this Buddha birth meant a great deal more than does an
ordinary birth. In Oriental writings, especially in those treating the subject
with the deepest understanding, the birth of Buddha is described in the grand
manner, as one might put it. It is related that Queen Maya was “the image of the
Great Mother”, and that it was foretold she would bring a mighty being into the
world. This being was then born prematurely — a very common means of launching
an outstanding being in the world, because thereby the human being in which the
higher spiritual being is to incarnate is less closely amalgamated with matter
than when the child is carried the full time of gestation. It is then further
related in the notable records of the Orient that at the moment of birth Buddha
was enlightened, that he opened his eyes at once and directed his gaze to the
four points of the compass, to the north, south, east, and west. We are told
that he then took seven steps, and that the marks of these steps are engraved in
the ground he trod. It is further recorded that he spoke at once, and the words
he spoke were these: “This is the life in which I shall rise from Bodhisattva to
Buddha, the last incarnation I shall have to pass through on this Earth!”
Strange as such
a communication may appear to the materialistically minded man of today, and
impossible as it is to interpret offhand from a materialistic viewpoint, it is
nevertheless the truth for one who is able to see things with the eye of the
spirit; and at that time there still existed men who, by means of natural
clairvoyance, could discern spiritually what it was that was born with Buddha.
Those are strange excerpts I have quoted from the oriental writings: nowadays
they are called legends and myths. But he who understands these things knows
that something of spiritual truth is hidden therein; and events such as the
Buddha birth have significance not only for the intimate circle of the
personality in question but for the world as well, for they radiate spiritual
forces, as it were. And those who lived at a time when the world was more
receptive to spiritual forces perceived that at the birth of Buddha spiritual
forces were actually rayed forth.
It would be a
trivial question to ask: Why does that sort of thing not still occur today? As a
matter of fact, it does happen — only it requires a seer to perceive it. It is
not enough that there should be one to radiate these forces: there must also be
someone there to receive them. When people were more spiritual than they are
today they were also more receptive to such radiations. So again a profound
truth underlies the story that healing and reconciling forces were at work when
Buddha was born. It is not a legend but a report based on deep truths which
tells us that when Buddha came into the world, those who had previously hated
each other were now united in love, those who had quarreled now met with
expressions of mutual esteem, and so forth.
To one who
surveys the development of mankind with the eye of the seer this does not appear
as it does to the historian — a level path, at most overtopped a bit here and
there by figures accepted as historical. Men will not admit that spiritual peaks
and mountains exist — that is more than they can bear. But the seer knows that
there are lofty heights and mountains towering above the path of the rest of
mankind: these are the leaders of humanity. Now, upon what is such leadership
built? Upon having gradually passed through the stages leading to life in the
spiritual world. One of these stages we pointed out yesterday as the most
important one: the birth of the higher ego, the spiritual ego; and we said that
this was preceded and followed by other stages. It is evident that what we
designate the Christ event is the mightiest peak in the range of human
evolution, and that a long preparation was indispensible before the Christ Being
could incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.
In order to
understand this preparation we must visualize the same phenomenon on a smaller
scale. Let us suppose a man starts on the path to spiritual cognition in any one
of his incarnations — that is, he carries out some of the exercises (to be
described later) which render the soul more and more spiritual, more receptive
to what is spiritual, and guide it toward the moment when it bears the higher,
imperishable ego that can see into the spiritual world. Many experiences are
passed through before that moment arrives. One must not imagine that anything
pertaining to the spirit can be hurried: everything of the sort must be absolved
with patience and perseverance. Let us suppose, then, that someone starts a
training of this kind. His aim is the birth of the higher ego, but he only
succeeds in reaching a certain preliminary stage. Then he dies; and in due time
he is born again. Here one of two things can happen: either he can feel the urge
to seek a teacher who will show him how he can rapidly repeat what he had
previously passed through and attain to the higher stages, or else, for one
reason or another, he does not take this way. In the latter case, as well, the
unfolding of his life will often be different from that of the lives of other
men. The life of one who has trodden the path of enlightenment at all will quite
of itself provide something resembling effects of the stage he had already
reached in his previous incarnation. He will have experiences of a different
nature, and the impression of these on him will be different from that received
by other men. Then he will attain anew, by means of these experiences, to what
he had previously achieved through his efforts. In his former incarnation he had
to strive actively from step to step; but now that life brings him as a
recurrence, so to speak, what he had once acquired through effort, this
approaches him from without, as it were; and it may be that he will experience
the results of his previous incarnations in quite a different form.
Thus it may
happen that even in his childhood some experience can make upon his soul an
impression of such a nature as to re-engender the forces he had acquired in his
previous life. Suppose such a man had attained to a certain degree of wisdom in
a given incarnation. He is then born again as a child, like everyone else. But
at the age of seven or eight he has some painful experience, and the consequence
is that all the wisdom he had once acquired comes to the fore again: he is back
at the stage he had reached before, and thence can advance to the next one. Now
we will suppose further that he endeavors to proceed another few steps, and dies
again. In his next incarnation the same thing can happen again: once more some
outer experience can put him to the test, as it were, again revealing first
what he had achieved in his next to the last incarnation, and then, in his last
one. And now he can climb another step.
You will see
from this that only by taking account of such events can we understand the life
of one who had already passed through certain stages of development. There is
one stage, for instance, that is soon reached by serious striving along the path
of enlightenment: the stage of the so-called Wanderer, of him who has outgrown
the prejudices of his immediate surroundings and has cast off the fetters imposed
by his environment. This need not make him irreverent — he can become all the more
reverent — but he must be free of the prejudices of his immediate surroundings.
Let us assume that this man dies at a stage in which he has already worked his
way through to a modicum of freedom and independence. When he is born again it
can happen that comparatively early in his life some experience will re-awaken
this feeling of freedom and independence in him. As a rule, this is the result
of losing his father or someone else to whom he is closely bound; or it might be
a consequence of his father's reprehensible behavior toward him — he might have
cast him out, or something of the sort. All this is faithfully reported in the
legends of the various peoples, for in matters of this kind the folk myths and
legends are really wiser than is modern science. Among the legends you will
often find the type in which the child is cast out, is found by shepherds,
nourished and brought up by them, and later restored to his station (Chiron;
Romulus and Remus). The fact that their own home plays them false serves to
re-awaken in them the fruits of former incarnations. The legend of the casting
out of Oedipus is in this category, too. You will now understand that the more
advanced a man is — whether at the stage when his higher ego is born or even
farther — the richer in experience his life must be if he is to be capable of a
new experience, one he had not yet had.
He who was
destined to embody in Himself the mighty Being we call the Christ could
naturally not assume this mission at any random age: he had first to mature very
gradually. No ordinary man could undertake this mission: it had to be one who in
the course of many lives had attained to lofty degrees of initiation. What was
here demanded is faithfully told us in the akashic record. This relates
how a certain individuality had striven upward throughout many lives step by
step to high degrees of initiation. Then this individuality was born again, and
in this earthly embodiment passed first through preparatory experiences. But in
this embodiment there lived an individuality who had already passed through high
stages of initiation, an initiate destined in a later period of his life to
receive into himself the Individuality of the Christ. And the first experiences
of this initiate are repetitions of his former degrees of initiation, whereby
all the previous achievements of his soul are re-evoked.
Now, we know
that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and
ego. But we also know that in the course of human life only the physical body is
born at physical birth, and that up to the seventh year the etheric body is
still enclosed in a sort of etheric maternal sheath which is then discarded, at
the time of the change of teeth, in the same way as is the physical maternal
sheath when the physical body is born into the outer physical world. Similarly,
at puberty, an astral sheath is thrown off and the astral body is born. And
approximately in the twenty-first year the ego is born, but again only
gradually.
Having
considered the birth of the physical body, of the etheric body in the seventh
year, and of the astral body in the fourteenth or fifteenth year, we must
similarly take into account a birth of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul,
and the consciousness soul; and the ages at which these births occur are
approximately the twenty-first, the twenty-eighth, and the thirty-fifth year
respectively. From this it is evident that the Christ Being could not incarnate
in a man of this Earth, could not find room in such a man, before the
intellectual soul was completely born: the Christ Being could not embody in the
initiate into whom He was born before this initiate had reached his
twenty-eighth year. Spiritual science confirms this. It was between the
twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years that the Christ Being entered the
individuality who walked the Earth as a great initiate, and who gradually, in
the light and radiance of this great Being, unfolded all that otherwise man
develops without this radiance, this light; namely, the etheric body, the astral
body, the sentient soul, and the intellectual soul. Thus we can say that up to
this age we see before us in him who was called to be the Christ bearer a lofty
initiate who gradually passed through the experiences that finally evoked all he
had undergone in previous incarnations — the sum of his conquests in the
spiritual world. Only then could he say: Now I am here; now will I sacrifice all
that I have. I no longer desire an independent ego, but will make of myself the
bearer of the Christ: henceforth He shall dwell in me, shall fill me
completely.
All four Gospels
stress this moment when the Christ incorporated in a personality of this Earth.
However much they may differ in other respects, they all point to this event of
the Christ slipping into the great initiate, as it were: the Baptism by John. In
that moment, so clearly defined by the author of the John Gospel when he says
that the Spirit descended in the form of a dove and united with Jesus of
Nazareth, in that moment occurred the birth of Christ: as a new and higher Ego
the Christ is born in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. And the other ego, that of
a great initiate, had now attained to the lofty plane on which it was ripe for
this event.
And Who was it
that was to be born in the Being of Jesus of Nazareth? This was indicated
yesterday: the God Who was there from the beginning, Who had remained aloof in
the spiritual world, so to speak, leaving mankind to its evolution. He it was
Who descended and incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Can we find this indicated by
the writer of the John Gospel? We need only take the words of the Gospel very
seriously; and with this in mind let us read the beginning of the Old
Testament:
In the
(primordial) beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Let us visualize
the situation: The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Below, the Earth with its kingdoms as the issue of the divine Spirit; and among
these one individual evolves to the point of being able to take into himself
this Spirit that moved upon the face of the waters. What does the author of the
John Gospel say? He tells us that John the Baptist recognized the Being spoken
of in the Old Testament. He says:
I saw the
Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.
He knew that
upon whomsoever the Spirit should descend was He that was to come: the Christ.
There you have the beginning of world evolution: the Spirit moving upon the face
of the waters; and there you have John who baptized with water, and the Spirit
that in the beginning moved upon the face of the waters and now descends into
the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. It would be impossible to connect in a
more grandiose way the event of Palestine with that other event, told at the
beginning of the same document whose continuation is the Gospel.
But in other
ways as well we find the John Gospel linked with this oldest of documents. The
writer effects this by pointing out that with Jesus of Nazareth is merged the
same principle that from the beginning worked creatively at all earth evolution.
We know that the opening words of the Gospel of St. John read:
In the
beginning was the Word (or Logos), and the Word (or Logos was with God, and a
God was the Word (or Logos).
What is this
Logos, and in what sense was it with God? Let us turn to the beginning of the
Old Testament, to the passage presenting this Spirit of whom it is written:
And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the divine Spirit said, Let
there be light: and there was light.
Let us keep that
in mind and express it somewhat differently; let us listen to the divine Spirit
intoning the creative Word through the world. What is this Word? In the
beginning was the Logos, and the divine Spirit called out, and what the
Spirit called out came to pass. That means that in the Word there was life; for
had there been no life in it, nothing could have come to pass. And what was it
that came to pass? We are told:
And God said,
Let there be light: and there was light.
Turn back here
to the John Gospel:
In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the
Word.
Now the Word had
streamed into matter, where it became the outer form of the Godhead, as it
were.
In it was
life; and the life was the light of men.
In this way the
author links his Gospel to that oldest of documents, the Book of Genesis.
He refers to the same divine Spirit, only in different words. Then he makes it
clear that this is the divine Spirit Who appears in Jesus of Nazareth. All four
Evangelists agree that with the Baptism by John the Christ was born in Jesus of
Nazareth, and that for the consummation of this event Jesus of Nazareth had
needed comprehensive preparation. We must understand that everything previously
told us concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth is nothing but the sum of
experiences portraying his ascent into the higher worlds during previous
incarnations: the gradual preparation of everything embraced in his astral body,
etheric body, and physical body for the eventual reception of the Christ.
The Evangelist
who wrote the Gospel of St. Luke even says, somewhat paradigmatically, that
Jesus of Nazareth had prepared himself in every respect for this great event,
the birth of Christ in him. The individual experiences that led him upward to
the Christ event will be discussed tomorrow. Today I shall merely point out that
the author of the Luke Gospel told us in a single sentence that he who received
the Christ into himself had indeed prepared himself in the previous years: that
his astral body had achieved the virtue, nobility and wisdom indispensable for
the birth of the Christ in him; and furthermore, that he had brought his etheric
body to such a degree of maturity, and had developed such pliancy and beauty in
his physical body, that the Christ could dwell in him. — One need only
understand the Gospel aright. Take the second Chapter of Luke, verse 52. True,
the wording of this verse in most of the Bible translations will not tell you
what I just said. There it says:
And Jesus
increased in wisdom and age [1], and in favor with
God and man.
It would still
make sense if such a man as the writer of the Luke Gospel had related of Jesus
of Nazareth that he increased in wisdom; but when he reports as a solemn fact
that he increased in age — well, that is not clear on its face, for it is a
circumstance calling for no special emphasis. That it is nevertheless mentioned
suggests that something more must be involved. Let us examine the verse in
question in the original text:
Kai Jesous
proekopten en to Sophia, kai helekia kai chariti Para theo kai
anthropois.
As a matter of
fact, here is what this means: “He increased in wisdom” signifies that he
developed his astral body; and anyone who knows what the Greek mind associated
with the word helekia can tell you that the term refers to the
development of the etheric body, whereby wisdom gradually becomes skill. As you
know, the astral body develops the qualities called upon for individual
occasions: we understand something once and for all. The etheric body, on the
other hand, shapes what it develops into habits, inclinations, and capabilities.
This occurs by means of constant repetition. Wisdom becomes a habit: it is
practised because it has become second nature. So what this "increase in age"
means is an increase in maturity: just as the astral body has grown in wisdom,
so the etheric body has increased in pure habits in the realm of goodness,
nobility, and beauty. And the third quality that increased in Jesus of Nazareth,
charis, really means that which manifests itself and becomes visible as beauty.
No other translations are right. In translating this verse we must indicate that
Jesus gained in gracious beauty; in other words, that his physical body, too,
grew in beauty and nobility.
And Jesus
increased in wisdom (in his astral body), in maturity of disposition
(in his etheric body), and in gracious beauty (in his physical body),
in a way manifest to God and man.
There you have
the delineation given by St. Luke. Clearly, he knew that he who was to receive
the Christ into himself had first to develop the threefold sheath — physical
body, etheric body, and astral body — to its highest capacity.
In this way we
shall learn how one can rediscover in the Gospels what spiritual science tells
us independent of them. For this reason spiritual science constitutes a cultural
current capable of recapturing the religious documents; and this recapture will
not remain a mere milestone in human knowledge and cognition, but will stand as
a conquest of soul and mind in the realm of feeling and sentience. And that is
precisely the sort of understanding we need if we are to grasp the intervention
of the Christ in the evolution of humanity.
#160;Translator's Note:
Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0112/19090625p02.html
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