An Outline of Religious Ideas in post-Atlantean Times

GA 102 — 13 May 1908, Berlin

This lecture will deal with a topic that will be significant from the point of view of spiritual life. We will be able to present some ideas about how those who profess spiritual science can take their stand in relation to other spiritual currents, how they can relate to the development of humanity today, and to contemporary issues in general. I would like to give you a broad outline of the development of religious ideas in the post-Atlantic culture up to the present.

In doing so, we will recall what we have already mentioned here and there: that the concept of religion is actually something that only makes sense in the post-Atlantic era. Before the great Atlantic flood, there could be no such thing as what we call religion, because religion presupposes that the human being does not have direct perception or insight into the supersensible worlds, at least that the great mass of people do not have such perceptions. Religion is man's connection with the supersensible when, for the great mass of men, the supersensible is not perceptible, but can only be conveyed in various ways, through prophets, seers, sages, mysteries and so on, as has been the case in the last millennia. Before the great Atlantic flood, when our ancestors lived for the most part in the area of ancient Atlantis, people still had more or less direct experiences and perceptions of the supernatural. In a time when people lived in the spiritual world itself, when they had experiences at all times as today's humanity has them in the sensual world, no religion was needed. Toward the end of the Atlantean era, supersensible experience was extinguished for the vast majority. It was replaced by the pronounced sensory experience that humanity has today. What remains from the old Atlantean era?

If we go back to the dim and distant past and sift through the legends and myths, and let the Germanic teachings about the gods take effect on us, we find messages from the supersensible worlds in pictorial form. These messages are not images, personifications, invented by the folk imagination, as some would have us believe, but they are real memories from those ancient times when people themselves still knew what they had experienced. The legends of Wotan, Thor and so on are such memories. And what has remained with man, especially into the post-Atlantic period, is, in the highest sense of the word, a kind of religion of memory. It is most advanced among the peoples living in southern Asia, among the Indian peoples; in a different form it asserted itself in Europe. In India, the memory of the time when every human being still had direct perception in the spiritual world made itself felt as a longing for that world. What is real was felt to be illusion, maya, and there was a yearning back to those ancient times. This was called yoga, and in some individuals it brought forth the ability to penetrate into the supersensible worlds. Not all peoples proceeded in such a way that they had sages who could rise to the level of yoga. Other peoples had to be content with memories, especially the peoples of the north. Their initiates also penetrated into the spiritual worlds, and had direct experiences in the divine world, but the Nordic nature made it difficult for them to penetrate in larger numbers. This is how Nordic mythology developed.

But there is one thing we will find that people still had in common in that post-Atlantic period: it is an echo of the much more highly developed power of memory that existed in the Atlantic period. In those days, memory was developed quite differently than it is today. People remembered further back, up to the lives of distant ancestors. They knew what such an ancestor had gone through centuries ago, just as an old man knows what he had experienced in his youth. Such memories of the ancestors shaped what can be called the religion of the ancestors, the cult of the ancestors. Ancestor worship, veneration of the ancestors, is in reality the first religion. Memory had in a sense been kept alive. This activity of memory was so great that, although individual people could not rise to the level of yoga, they could still enter into a spiritual state in which the common ancestor of a people appeared to them in dreams or in psychic states.

This was not just a legend, a myth, something that an ancient tribe had as a living common ancestor, but it was something that appeared to people from time to time, that appeared in psychic consciousness, that accompanied the people. The individual tribes that streamed through Europe had the most diverse experiences. But one experience always remained vivid and alive for many, and they told it to those who trusted them, who believed in them: that was the appearance of the ancestor, who was their adviser from the spiritual realm, who was in contact with them. He came at particularly important moments, was there in doubtful cases. The cult of ancestors was something that was very much alive through the physical qualities of the ancestors.

More and more, this cult of ancestors developed into a kind of religious system, which, although it had been worked out by certain initiates, was also acceptable to many non-initiates. Such a religious system emerged in various areas, for example in ancient Indian Brahmanism. The last echoes of this can be found in Vedanta philosophy; but we also find the last echoes of this ancient pantheism in the oldest philosophical systems. It was a kind of esoteric pantheism, as we can see in ancient Brahmanism. It also comes to light in the actual system of the Egyptians, and also among the Hebrews. In reality, we can imagine that this religious system originated from the fact that a more comprehensive idea of the divine essence, which permeated and flowed through everything, gradually emerged. The ancestor had grown together with the spiritual foundations of existence; he had become a kind of spiritual primal power.

Then, in what we can call anthropomorphism, we have a special form of esoteric pantheism. It imagines the various gods in human-like images. The Greek system of religion belongs here, for example. But it is a complete misconception to think that for the educated Greek, the unified spiritual world did not prevail behind the individual gods. When we speak of angels, archangels and so on, in fact of the various spiritual beings who stand above man, as we have done in the cosmic evolution doctrine, we speak in a very similar way to how it was done in those days, when one spoke of Zeus, Athena and so on in comparison to the sole world spirit. A unified world idea underlies this system. Pantheism is the spiritual substratum of things; then the gods are conceived as human.

And if we ask ourselves how it came about that the much more abstract esoteric pantheism developed into the many-sided Greek world of gods, we must recognize in it a deep fundamental need of humanity in general, a deep principle in the evolution of humanity. When we look at the transition from Egyptian to Greek, we have the most beautiful example of this principle in action. In the whole pre-Greek period there is something particularly powerful and symbolic. The Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes are magnificent, powerful creations of the human spirit, which point in a somewhat abstract form to a spiritual source that one does not yet dare to develop. How the Greek spirit has demonstrated the ability to impress the spiritual into the pictorial form! There is tremendous progress in this, which can be seen everywhere. You can see this transition most clearly when you follow the transition from Oriental to Greek architecture in your mind, when we grasp the architectural idea in its purity. Throughout the development of mankind, the architectural idea is best expressed in Greek architecture. Nowhere else do we find such a complete transformation of thought into external form as in Greek architecture. We see how everything is placed in space, how it corresponds to the great cosmic laws.

Perhaps there has only been one other time in the development of humanity when architectural thoughts have been created: that is the thought of Gothic architecture. And if we contrast the Gothic idea with the Greek architectural idea, we have to say that in the Gothic we are no longer dealing with pure architecture, but with an expression of the mystical element that pushes into the feeling, only hinted at in the forms. The Gothic is not the complete expression of this idea. The Greek temple, on the other hand, is the dwelling place of the god and is to be understood entirely as such. If we imagine the god in the act of creation in space, his powers flooding the space, as it were, forming a body for himself, weaving a garment for himself, we have the Greek temple. And we know when we see it standing before us: this is the dwelling place of the god. The Gothic cathedral is not that; it is a house of prayer. It cannot be conceived without the visitor who is in it, for whom it was built to create the right mood. Imagine the Greek temple standing all by itself, inhabited only by the god, and you have the complete picture. This is not to be understood or interpreted symbolically. The devout believer belongs to the Gothic temple. And whoever does not understand space as emptiness, but as permeated by forces, whoever knows that forces crystallize in space and who feels these forces, feels that something has crystallized in the Greek temple from the dynamic forces of the world. Those who have a feeling for it, so strong that they can perceive these entities, know that forces shoot through space. The Greeks knew about the vitality of space. One can best see how thinking, feeling and willing have become concrete by comparing Greek and Romanesque architecture, in which we see in many cases how the column, for example, is elevated from its spatial task as a carrier. Romanesque architecture is also grand, but it has many decorative elements, including these columns, for which there is no deeper motivation. But the sense for it is missing, the sense of space is missing. The column is there, but it does not fulfill its purpose. All this is connected with the stages of development of the human spirit. Only through this anthropomorphism could humanity be prepared to conceive of the God-man, to conceive of God dwelling within man himself. This is why Christianity is also called theomorphism by occultism.

In Christianity, all the different divine figures flow together in the one living figure of Christ Jesus. For this, it was necessary for humanity to undergo a great and powerful deepening, a deepening that enabled humanity not only to think of the living form in space, as expressed in Greek sculpture, but to rise to the idea of seeing inwardness outwardly, to the belief that the eternal in a historical form has really lived on earth in the spatial-temporal. That is the essence of Christianity. This idea represented the greatest advance that humanity could make on earth.

We need only compare the Greek temple, which is a dwelling place of the god, with what later becomes the Christian church, as it is most purely expressed in the Gothic style. We will see that in the external forms there must even be a regression if one wants to represent the eternal in the temporal and spatial. And what later art achieves by expressing the inner in the outer is entirely under the influence of the Christian spiritual current. Basically, it must be said that it is understandable that architecture could become most beautiful where one could still cling with all one's soul to the outer powers that flood through space.

Thus we see how religious thought becomes ever more profound in the post-Atlantean era, how people seek their clues for the supersensible. It will not be difficult to see in all that has been said here indications of man's longing to penetrate the outer form, to somehow conjure up the supersensible within it. This is the aim of the most original sources of art. With Christianity we have, so to speak, arrived at our own time. From this and various other things said about the development of the post-Atlantean time, you will recognize that the course of humanity is striving more and more towards internalization. There is also an ever-increasing awareness of internalization in the external in the different races.

We would like to say that in the Greek images of the gods we see how that which lives within man pours out into the outer world. In Christianity, the most important impulse in this direction has been given. With Christianity, we see the emergence of what has been called science up to the present time. For what is today called science, the investigation of the intellectual foundations of existence, only begins in the Chaldean period. Now, in our time, we are really living in a great turning point in the development of humanity.

If we now survey what we have briefly considered and ask ourselves: Why did all this happen, why did man develop to impress the inner on the outer? the answer is that man was impelled to do so by the evolution of his organization. The ancient Atlanteans were able to perceive the supersensible world because their etheric body had not yet been completely drawn into the physical body. A point of the 'ether head' did not yet coincide with the corresponding point in the physical head. The complete penetration of the etheric body with the physical body is the reason why man is now being pushed out more into the outer world.

When the gates to the supersensible world closed, man needed a bond, a connection between the sensual and supersensible worlds, in his artistic development. In the past, in Atlantean times, he did not need this because at that time he was still able to get to know the supersensible world through direct experience. The gods and spirits had to be related to people only after they had lost their perceptibility, just as one has only to relate plants to people who have never seen them. This is the basis of the religious development of the post-Atlantean period. Why then did a being of a supersensible nature like Christ have to appear and live on earth in a finite personality, in Jesus? Why did Christ have to become a historical personality? Why did the eyes of men have to be fixed on this figure? We have said that men could no longer see into the supersensible world. What had to happen so that the God could become an experience for them? He had to become sensual, to embody Himself in a sensual, physical body. That is the answer to the question. As long as human beings were able to perceive in the spiritual, as long as they were able to perceive the gods there in supersensible experience, no god would have needed to become man. But now the god had to be there within the sensual world. The disciples' words flowed out of these feelings to affirm this fact: “We have laid our hands in his wounds,” and similar ones. Thus we see how the appearance of Christ Jesus Himself becomes clear to us from the nature of post-Atlantean men, how we recognize why Christ actually had to reveal Himself for sensory perception. The strongest historical fact had to be there for people. The spiritual self had to be there in a sensory way so that people had a point of reference that could connect them to the supersensible world.

Mere science degenerated more and more into a worship of the external world. Today we have reached a climax in this. Christianity was a strong support against this absorption in the sensual. Today, Christianity must be grasped in theosophical depth in order to be able to present itself to people in a new understanding. In the Middle Ages there was still a connection between science and Christianity. Today we need a supersensible deepening of knowledge, of wisdom itself, in order to understand Christianity in its full depth. So we are faced with a spiritual conception of Christianity. This is the next stage, the theosophical or spiritual-scientific Christianity. On the other hand, material science will increasingly lose its connection with the supersensible worlds.

What, then, is the task of spiritual science? Can the person seeking the spirit look to today's conventional science? What today's conventional science is, is precisely that which will increasingly take the course of post-Atlantic development and will increasingly focus only on the external, the physical, the material, and increasingly lose touch with the spiritual world. will lose its connection with the spiritual world. Follow any science back into earlier times: how many spiritual elements were there in it in the past!

You will see everywhere, in medicine and in other fields, how the spiritual connection has increasingly disappeared. You can follow this everywhere. And this process must be so, because the process of the post-Atlantic period is such that the original connection with the supersensible world must increasingly be lost. Today we can predict the course of science. Outward science will not, however much experiments are made, be capable of spiritual deepening. It will increasingly merge with that which is a higher instruction in technical skills, a means of mastering the outer world. For the Pythagoreans, mathematics was still a means of looking into the context of the higher worlds, into the harmony of the world; for today's man, it is a means of further developing technology and thus of mastering the outer world. The course of outer science will be secularized and unphilosophized. All people will have to draw their impulses from spiritual development. And this spiritual development will take the path to spiritual Christianity. Spiritual science will be that which is capable of giving the impulses for every spiritual life.

Science is increasingly becoming a technical guide. And university life is increasingly sliding over into that of a technical college, and that is the right thing. All spiritual knowledge will develop into a free human possession that must come out of science. Science will then appear again in a completely different context and in a completely different form. It is therefore necessary for present-day humanity that the re-establishment of the great experiences of the supersensible worlds take place. You can see that it is necessary if you realize what will happen if it does not. The etheric head is now drawn into the human being; the connection of the etheric body with the physical body is at the peak of development today. Therefore, the percentage of people who could have supersensible experiences has never been lower. But the course of human evolution moves forward in such a way that a re-emergence of the etheric body occurs all by itself again. And that has already begun. Again the etheric body emerges, it becomes more independent, freer, and in the future it will again be outside the physical body as it was in early times. The loosening of the etheric body must happen again, and that has already begun. But now man must take with him in his emerging etheric body what he has experienced in the physical body, especially the physical event of Golgotha, which he must experience physically, that is, in an earthly existence. Otherwise, something will be irretrievably lost to him: the etheric body would withdraw without him taking anything essential with it, and such people would remain empty in the etheric body. But those who have fully experienced spiritual Christianity will have in abundance in the etheric body what they have gone through in the physical body.

The greatest danger is for those who have turned away from spiritual truths through scientific deception. But the beginning of the emergence of the etheric body has already been made. The nervousness of our time is a sign of this. This will increase more and more if man does not take with him what is the greatest event in the physical body. There is still a lot of time for this, because for the masses it will take a long time, but some are already arriving at it. But if there were a person who had never gone through what is the greatest event in the physical world, who had never experienced the depth of Christianity and incorporated it into his etheric body, he would face what is called spiritual death. For the emptiness of the etheric body will result in spiritual death.

The clairvoyant Atlantean did not need a religion because the experience of the supersensible was a fact for him. All human development originated in such a time. Then the vision of the spiritual world faded. Religere means to connect, and so religion is a connection of the sensual with the supersensible. The time of the rising materialism needed religion. But the time will come when people will be able to have experiences in the supersensible world again. Then they will no longer need religion. The new vision requires the bringing along of spiritual Christianity, it will be the consequence of Christianity. This is the basis for the sentence that I ask you to remember as particularly important: Christianity began as a religion, but it is greater than all religions.

What Christianity has given will be taken along into all times of the future and will still be one of the most important impulses for humanity when religion as such no longer exists. Even when people have overcome religious life, Christianity will remain. That it was first a religion is connected with the development of humanity; but Christianity as a world view is greater than all religions.