Tuesday, May 2, 2023

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's Rudolf Steiner for?

  


"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."  — Flannery O'Connor





The truth doesn't change,
but our truth does.




“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?”
         
 Robert Browning



Rudolf Steiner:  "Introductory lectures have already been given on the Gospels of St. John and of St. Luke. The impression they endeavored to convey can best be described by saying that, throughout, they took the view that the Being of Christ-Jesus — as far as human understanding in our present time is capable of conceiving Him — is so great, so all-embracing, so mighty, that there can be no one-sided presentation of who Christ-Jesus was and of His significance for the spirit and soul of every single human being. To attempt anything of the kind would seem presumptuous in the presence of the greatest of all world-problems. Reverence, veneration — these are the appropriate words to express the mood pervading our studies. This reverence expresses itself in the feeling that, when confronting the greatest problem of life, one should try not to place too high a value upon human powers of comprehension, nor even upon the knowledge imparted by a spiritual science able to penetrate into the very highest realms; one should not imagine that human words can ever be capable of describing more than a single aspect of this great, overwhelming problem."







Lean into it
















Rudolf Steiner:  "You can calmly feel the truth as an ideal placed before you at an immeasurable distance yet with the awareness that you are on your way toward it."








"ES IST ICH"

Rudolf Steiner: "In older languages the self was not specifically designated, for it was contained within the verb. The ‘I’ was not directly mentioned. The verb was used to show what one was doing, and this was what indicated that one was speaking about oneself. There was no name for the self. It only came about in later times that the human being gave his self a name, and in our German language that name [ich] contains the initials of Jesus Christ, which is an important symbolic fact." [Iesus CHristus: ICH]





Related posts:


Jesus: Krishna, redeemed by Christ


The New Yoga : Anthroposophy







Source: The opening words of lecture 1 of Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew. November 2, 1909.  GA 117




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