# The Essence of Christianity

## GA 68a — 18 January 1907, Stuttgart

### 26. The Origin of Evil

Today, my task is to speak to you about the origin of evil in the sense of spiritual science. The fact of evil and its presence in the world is like a great mystery of life in the midst of our existence. And those who think that human development is permeated by divine power and divine providence are confronted with the question: How is it possible that the Divine allows evil? And for those who deny the Divine, the existence of evil is easily one of the reasons for such denial. They say: How can one imagine a world under divine guidance where evil reigns in the most diverse forms? In any case, this question of evil intrudes mysteriously and disconcertingly into our lives.

Since time immemorial, the question of the cause and origin of evil has been an important question. So today we want to deal with the fact of evil; and it should be said and attention should be drawn to individual points of resolution. In doing so, we must above all remember Jakob Böhme, who in his writings repeatedly raises the question: How does evil come into the world and what position does it occupy in the development of humanity?

Schelling draws on Böhme in his reflections on this in order to form a concept of evil and its existence in the world. For Böhme, evil is what darkness is to light. Böhme says: Beings owe their existence to the light of the sun; light is the sustainer, the creator of existence in the world. It is only through darkness that light is recognized, and light only exists when mixed with darkness. If we ask about the cause of darkness or even try to explain the light with darkness, we come to the correspondence of the ungrounded in relation to the primal ground.

If the light is to appear, then it must drive out and overcome that which is there for no reason and yet opposes the light; the divine primal ground of existence, the good, stands out by itself in the process. It is good; it is the pure good; but the light penetrates into the ground of evil in order to be able to fully unfold. This is an explanation of the concept that seems to shed light on our understanding.

In modern times, the question of good and evil seems to be playing a role again, for example in the work of someone who has impressed many, many people, Nietzsche. You all know the book “Beyond Good and Evil”. The modern philosopher Nietzsche juxtaposes good and bad, not good and evil. He says: We do not need to worry about the origin of evil, we distinguish between the weak and the strong, the strong-willed. They rule, the strong-willed; they want to assert themselves, their ideas, and that must naturally lead to a struggle with the weak, to their oppression. Those in power see themselves as the good guys. The oppressed think quite differently. They feel that what the powerful do is to their detriment. Since they are the weak, they come to the conclusion that there is still a good that has not been realized. They regard what the strong do as evil. Therein lies the origin of the contradiction in ideas between the weak and the strong. From this flows what is called slave morality.

Basically, those who have thought more deeply have always taken the position on good and evil relatively; we need only think of Goethe when he says: Oh, if men would only not always speak in the same way, this is good and that is evil, but would go into the motive power of their actions.

In his “Faust”, Goethe described the struggle between good and evil in humanity. In his youth, Goethe had not yet worked out these powerful contradictions in his Faust creation. In the present version, however, the characteristic features of good power and Mephistopheles emerge in Goethe and his Faust as early as the “Prologue in Heaven”. Goethe sensitively perceived the profound impact of good and evil in man; in Faust he seeks to fathom this supremacy of feelings.

Our task today is to fathom the fact of the origin of good and evil according to the new spiritual research or theosophy. We must indeed go back a long way in human development to do this. The Bible goes back very far indeed, almost to the origin of man. One of the most wonderful and greatest allegories on this subject is the “Fall of Man”, even for those who do not believe in the fact. The snake is the seducer of man, who in the beginning was created only for good. Only through an act of free will on the part of man is the difference between good and evil conceived. The animals do much more terrible things than what we call evil in humans; but who would think of speaking of an evil animal in this sense. The animal follows an implanted law in its actions, and there is no sense in speaking of good and evil; this is only the case with humans. In answering this question, spiritual science must go back to the point where man appears as the crown on our Earth planet. Why can we not speak of evil in animals? The animal also has a soul, but not an individual soul, but a group soul. What is a group soul? What a whole group is in the animal, man has for himself alone. To understand this, we need only consider the fact that a person has a biography, whereas an animal does not.

Every person, without exception, has a biographical interest for us and we know that there is no other person with exactly the same biography. With animals, it is only the whole species and type that interests us to the same extent. Like all lions together, we are interested in the individual person. The soul exists for an entire animal species together. Man has only just ascended from a group soul to an individual one. Man is in the midst of this development. We still meet people who appear to be members of the tribe.

But the richer the life of the soul becomes, the less this soul is a soul of the species, the more it takes on its own character in gestures and feelings. Thus man himself is mostly situated between group soul and individual soul; and as we go forward into the future, he becomes more and more individual, and in the past more and more group soul,

right back to the beginning of man's development. When we trace man back, we go back the periods that we call the historical ones. We conclude the historical times with the fifth main race and its five different sub-races.

If we look at the Indian Vedas, we sense a powerful culture that even Max Müller, a very sober researcher, recognizes. So far, then, are the historical times. From these, spiritual science goes back to prehistoric times. The methods of how to go back through the development of the inner senses can be found in more detail in my magazine “Luzifer - Gnosis”. Theosophy assumes that a huge continent once existed between America, Africa and Europe, Atlantis, which was destroyed by natural disasters and of which only small island peaks remain today. Today, modern science is beginning to confirm this. You can read about Atlantis in the magazine “Kosmos”. Spiritual science has always spoken of Atlantis. The living conditions there were completely different; the atmosphere was like billowing masses of fog, hence “Nibelheim”. This home of fog is preserved for us in the folk tales. At that time there was still an ancient human race; but we have to look even further back for the origin of earthly man, to Lemuria, a continent that was located in what is now the Indian Ocean. There we find the first humans of the kind that today's humans are.

So how does spiritual science view the origin of humanity? For spiritual science, humans do not originally descend from a material being; rather, the spiritual is the first. At that time, the physical body was still very imperfect. Spiritual science takes the view that the Lemurian man was very imperfect on the outside, but never descended from the ape, but the other way around; he left the apes behind at a lower level.

The organization of the physical man at that time was at the level of the reptilian organization, and his soul still dwelled outside his body. Today, the waking person has his soul in his body; in the sleeping person, who does not perceive through the doors of the senses, spiritual science knows that his soul is outside his body. The clairvoyant sees the astral body and its work on the physical body at night. The further back we go, the more we see the astral body at work on the physical. For in spiritual science, the spiritual body is the creator of the physical. In Lemuria, we see the physical human being still surrounded by the active astral body. The astral body or the soul has created the physical body; it is the creator of it, and the important point in time is when this soul was completely outside the body, where, after having made it perfect, this soul now passes from purely external activity to the inner being and becomes the I. An important moment, how in the Lemurian time the incarnation takes place. The Bible expresses this in a grand, powerful and meaningful way when it says: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) This indicates the moment when the group soul becomes an individual soul in the human being, the moment of the astral body's entering into the physical body. As a group soul it remained in the spiritual world; the religious expression for this would be: As long as the soul rested in the bosom of the Godhead, it was a group soul. Example: the fingers of the hand; they are members, organs; they stand in exactly the same relation to the physical body as the soul was before it entered the physical body, that is, as a group soul. It was a limb in the great Being, which we may now call God or All-Spirit. In these souls it was the Godhead that acted. Example: water and sponges that fill with water. When these souls moved into the physical body, they became individual drops of water.

Thus, in the process of development, the physical body, as it were, snatches the soul from the Divine. What are the consequences of this? Before, the soul does not feel and act independently, but as the Divine inspires it. This Divine is a part of the common Divine substance. All souls therefore knew something of each other; they had a common consciousness; this now ceased. Individual existence now begins. Before, Divine law was their conductor, now no longer. And with that, selfishness now begins to play a role. God's will was previously the will of one's own soul; now it had to come to its own will, to selfishness. Now it had to come to the birth of selfishness, with it at the same time the birth of self-awareness. The replacement of the world order of wisdom by the world order of love occurred now, that is what spiritual science of all time called it. Love and egoism were not there before.

Love demands that the independent comes to the independent, that free devotion is given. Example of the fact that love was impossible before: My right hand cannot love my left hand. — So now love entered the world, and in its most subordinate form, in sexual love. Spiritual science tells us that this was also the time of the separation of the sexes. With physical incarnation, they appear simultaneously as male and female with differentiation; and with that, the first impulse is given to utilize the first power for the body. So we have two epochs: one completely dominated by wisdom, the second completely dominated by the development of love, the higher and the lower human being. At that time the body was less developed, the soul more highly developed.

At today's stage, the soul is far from having the perfection that the physical body has as such. Later, the soul will develop to the same extent. Example of the wonderfully perfect nature of the physical body: the thigh bone, which, with the smallest amount of material, develops such a load-bearing capacity that even the most ingenious engineer could not have conceived. The spiritual researcher knows that this body is the expression of divine wisdom. Example: Contemplation of the heart. — The physical body of man is embodied wisdom. If, on the other hand, we look at the soul, which in the future will far surpass the physical body in perfection, it is now very imperfect. It is the soul that tempts man to do his deeds, not the physical body. The soul is flawed, sins, and goes astray in the body.

In its kind and perfection, the body is superior to the soul today. At that time, when the human body was occupied by the soul, it was already predisposed to this perfection. Today, this entry of the soul has not yet been fully completed. As much of it as is the group soul has been built up by the physical body. The part that has moved into the body still has to go through this. There is no other way for the human being to develop than to go through the physical body. In the Greek mystery teachings, the soul was therefore called a 'bee'. It absorbs light, it hears, it collects by using the body as an instrument. And what the soul gathers down here on this earth, she will take with her and one day lay on the altar of the deity.

In this way she will become perfect and ever more capable of immortalizing the temporal. The temporal passes away, but the fruits of it will be immortalized by the human soul. But all the marvels, the joys, are destined to remain sensations. So the life of the soul is an essence that brings it to spiritual existence.

By going through the physical existence, it has to establish something that is wisely integrated into the wise construction of the cosmos. This did not come about suddenly, but in a long, long process of becoming.

What is wisely constructed today was once not wisely constructed. Let us imagine the same process with love, for example; here the same development can be seen. Likewise, love rises to ever higher and purer aspects and forms, towards the love that will one day make all people brothers. Love will one day be that which glows and drives the whole cosmos. The whole world is permeated by a stream of love, which will then rule everything, as wisdom does now. Wisdom flows from the world to us, and love will flow from the world to them, to the later races. Our work is to impress the love of the world. But that could never be if the opposite were not also possible. Love must be brought independently, freely from person to person, that is why the era of love begins at the same time as that of egoism. Love will work itself out to overcome egoism, that is its goal. The starting point of the cosmos is love; out of it, egoism has also grown all by itself.

The family, the tribe, groups of people were permeated by love; what is related, what has common blood, loves each other. Although there may be raging conflict, humanity is gradually being driven towards love. It spreads from tribe to tribe, from generation to generation, from nation to nation. When the principle of Jehovah or Yahweh gradually spread among the Jewish people, it is recorded in the secret or spiritual science that existed before our era. And now we speak of a force, of a principle that is called evil, of a force in spiritual science that opposes the Jehovah principle.

I will explain this to you with an example. You know that in school there are students who do not move from one class to the next; they stay put; it is the same in the cosmos. The world was then ruled by entities like us; these beings had completed their development in the Age of Wisdom. But there were also forces in this epoch that had not completed their development in the Age of Wisdom; these now continue to work in the Age of Love. That is the retarded, the luciferic principle; this we see as the opposite pole of the Jahve principle. Therefore, so that love can be free, the principle of separation is at work in the world. It tries its effects on the person who loves other people, on the person who wants to be a free, independent personality. In the counter-effect we see the counter-force, evil, which actually, to speak with Goethe's Faust, creates good. This power, which is the egoistic principle, drives people apart; but love must therefore become ever greater and greater in order to unite people. The principle of Yahweh needed blood relationship to assert the principle of love, and then the principle of Lucifer worked alongside it, promoting selfishness and independence. Love and selfishness are constantly growing, and humanity swings back and forth between them; and that is why the presence of good and evil is so natural, the pendulum movement between love and selfishness. With selfishness, evil came into the world; selfishness must now be overcome. He has to accept it because good could not be achieved without evil. It provides the opportunity for the development of love. Spiritual science sees it in such a way that a point in time had to come when an act, the greatest of our earthly development, had to happen that was suitable for bringing people together; and the forerunner of this is John the Baptist, who prepares this, and in Christ Jesus this act is embodied. The words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother and brothers for my sake, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), are to be understood spiritually.

Christ, through whom one can receive the great love and the independent human being together, who is able to overcome all the impulses of evil, Christ is the embodiment of this great power, which, after overcoming all selfishness, is to become the bond of love from person to person. Through Christ, the bond of love shall link free man with free man.

Christianity is the power that is only at the beginning of its development; it will overcome the necessary evil and the world. Only the free man can become the true Christian; he can see in the Redeemer the power that leads to the fully liberated personality. Thus evil is the background into which the light of love shines; thus light is only recognizable through darkness. “And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Love will gradually permeate human development; the stronger the force it has to overcome, the more it will grow. It is this love that explains the meaning of evil, the position of evil in the world.

And so we may compare this with a word from Fabre d'Olivet. “Consider the pearl with its wondrous radiance and delicate beauty; how is it formed? From the disease of a shell."

In the same way, beauty arises from evil. This is how we must see evil and its mission. Love develops as a pearl of the world. Where does it come from? Let us think of the parable of the pearl!