Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 6 February 1911, Düsseldorf

37. Sonship of God and Sonship of Man

If it is said that man consists of seven members, this is generally correct, but it says very little. For it depends on how these different members are put together in their relationship to one another at different times. It was different thousands of years ago than it is now. But it is already different in the life of the individual between birth and death. In the first years of childhood it is different than later. The child speaks objectively of “Karlchen”, “Mariechen”. The saying in a well-known educational book is wrong: the child learns to think before it learns to speak. - But it is true: the child learns to think by speaking.

The child does not say the word “I” about itself, but it already has the right mental image of what the common pedagogue means when he uses the word. The child's various limbs are put together in such a way that the ego consciousness is not yet present, but a tremendous amount is learned at this very first age. The ego still slumbers in the depths of the human being. Because the ego still has other things to do than become aware of itself: It has to work on the outer shells itself in order to build them up; it has to work for the human being as an unconscious member of the human being.

In the early years, man is in relationship with higher beings who lend him this consciousness. Beings who already had the human stage on the old moon put it on the human being, as it were, like a glove that one puts on. The human being is then guided by the Angeloi and is much closer to the spiritual beings in life than later. The body is reshaped and reshaped in the first three years of life. It was not yet ready, the human being must first make his brain, which was still immersed in the mist of the spiritual world. And what we have brought with us from previous incarnations is particularly strongly imprinted in it. Why don't people realize this?

The wisest person can learn an extraordinary amount from a child. The clairvoyant who can see through this sees that in the child there is, to put it crudely, something like a telephone connection to the spiritual world. This is only noticeable to those who can see into the spiritual world. In the past, this was true for almost all people up to the twenty-second or twenty-third year. The old rishis remained in [childhood] in this way, did not talk much about the ego, preserved their childishness. The rishis themselves never lived in the ego form, remained children, had something of childlike oblivion themselves, for example in relation to worries, difficulties. Today, however, the child can only have a dark consciousness of this because the physical and etheric bodies are already stiffer and denser than in ancient times, and because they have not inherited the right bodies for this. The outer physique is too compact, too material. The whole human being today is constricted in a shell of dense physicality that is not flexible, not soft enough to feel the core of the being.

In religious documents, the outer Saturn, sun and moon man is called the “son of man”, that in which the core of essence is enclosed; but the “son of God” is the core of essence. And the first years of life remind us of the sonship of God; the tools in which the essence core works remind us of the sonship of man. They must harmonize. Man needs guidance in order to sense the Son of God in the Son of Man. In earlier times, man could still be completely imbued with the Son of God in later life, as he was in his first childhood.

Suppose one could tear out the usual individuality and implant the individuality of the first childhood, of the first three years, into the human being, this would then have to adapt to the outer shell: It would not last longer than three years. That is why the Christ was only three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. And herein lies one of the deepest meanings of the words: “Unless you become like little children ...”

The religious sayings have literal and symbolic meaning. Theosophy is the preliminary school of literal meaning. It enables us to understand the secrets of human development. In the development of Jupiter, human bodies will fall away like dead bodies, like something that is no longer useful. We pass through many stages from the beginning of the earth to the time of Christ. Until then, the sonship of God still works, as it were, from top to bottom as with the children, but the sonship of man becomes an ever greater obstacle to it. In between, the Son of God and the Son of Man balance each other out in humanity. Afterwards, however, an ever greater power of the Sonship of Man will have to be placed at the service of the Sonship of God. In Greek times there was balance, harmony between the outer form and the inner soul, because there was balance between the Son of God and the Son of Man. This is the only way to understand the flourishing of that culture.

Spiritual and physical powers were previously separate from each other. In the type of Zeus, Apollo and Mars we see the balance. In the centaur, the higher and lower natures are still each as if for themselves. The same applies to the ancient Chaldean temple building in comparison to the Greek temple. Temple means: My higher nature rises above and out of my lower nature - like the triangle above the columns. When I look up to the triangle, my spiritual being should rise up. In older temples there is still a struggle for this: winged figures as images of the higher human nature.

In the future, man will build his conscious Son of God into the resisting Son of Man. Culture throws many obstacles in our way. Today, everything is an obstacle, but man must constantly strive to harmonize worldview, moral sentiment and art. Architecture will be the final expression of this. In recent times, architectural styles have only ever been mixed together; something new has yet to come. 32 years ago, the architect of Vienna's Votive Church said something like this: 'Architectural styles are not invented. Our time is still not quite ripe for something new. - That will only come when the Son of God has been received by us, when man has become objective. Man must make it possible for the spirit to warm up within him. Music has undergone a great transformation in our time through Richard Wagner. This was an infusion of the sonship of God into the figures of myth, of legend.

Music, art, should spiritualize our inner being, set it in motion. Then the Son of God will reveal himself out of man, out of the flesh. The sonship of God must be born out of the sonship of man. You have to learn to feel that.

In Aeschylus, something of the sacred mysteries, of the sonship of God, still resonates. Just as one can feel blasphemy towards religions, one can feel the same towards some of the things with which one wants to renew the old art. The diversity of times and people necessitates a different combination of human elements, and this leads to new forms of expression in art!