The Essence of Christianity

GA 68a — 3 February 1909, Basel

45. The Wisdom at the Core of Religions

My dear attendees! If it is beyond doubt that we can learn something essential about the human being by observing humanity in its historical development, then it may well be said that, on the other hand, we can also learn something essential about the human soul by observing the religious life of humanity in human history. And if observations are to be made about the soul of human life, about the various religions, in the context of a cultural endeavor that is referred to as spiritual science – or as theosophy, as our time tends to call it – then it can only be done by considering the process of progress in religious life.

In the spiritual-scientific sense, we speak of a wisdom core of religions and are well aware that the religious element itself, that which can be designated as a religion, must not be confused with the wisdom core in the religions. This is the subject of Theosophy, which penetrates into the spiritual world with the opened eye of the seer.

Religious life unfolds the development of the soul through which we incline towards the spiritual world, the fire of the soul, the soul's perception of the spiritual world. This is what we have in mind. And we also have in mind what is going on in the spiritual world, what it contains. It is therefore the task of theosophy to speak about the content of wisdom. We do not want to speak about the content of the different religions, especially because even in theosophical circles misunderstandings upon misunderstandings have arisen among those who speak of a certain unity in religions.

It has become a catchword for many that the same wisdom and truth are contained indiscriminately in all religions. No attention is paid to the fact that humanity is in a state of constant development, and although human striving always includes a certain core of wisdom, one cannot speak in the abstract of unity in all religions because it is in a state of constant development.

We will start from a saying of Goethe's to further elaborate on this topic. Goethe, who knew how to grasp the essence of things in such a penetrating way, was the one who spoke of the fact that the one principle of action, which underlies the plant leaf, for example, runs through the whole plant as a unified whole. If you follow the plant up to the flower and the fruit, you will find that the leaves are formed everywhere as a unified plant organ. You find this in all the different plant forms.

But Goethe did not claim that it makes no difference whether one speaks of the green leaf or the flower leaf. Step by step, like the rungs of a ladder, the plant develops from leaf to leaf to the height of the flower.

In a similar way, we can speak of the unified core of religions, which runs from the distant past to our times, developing from the preceding to the succeeding, as in the plant from leaf to fruit. This is said by way of introduction to our topic.

If we want to look at development in a unified way, we have to go back to a very distant past to find a starting point. Everywhere we see the human being as a being that is connected to what is hidden behind the world of the senses. Therefore, we can never find the starting point if we base our search on material considerations. According to these, we would have to start from low forms of existence. We do not want to talk about this external doctrine of evolution today. It is not the one that corresponds to the results of spiritual science.

With its means, spiritual science also goes back to the distant past, but it sees not only the material, but also the spiritual and soul. While the natural scientist characterizes from the imperfect ancestral forms of man, the spiritual scientist can recognize — we can only touch on this today so as not to stray too far from our topic — that the further we go back in human development, the more we find that the soul of man shows completely different inner experiences. Man's primeval ancestor was much closer in soul and spirit to the world to which the modern man seeks to rise in his spiritual and religious feelings.

If we want to understand this relationship today, we have to recognize that prehistoric man, before he had clothed himself with the material shell, had developed as a spiritual-soul being from his spiritual-soul ancestors, that before he entered the physical world he was in the spiritual-soul world, and that in a relatively recent time he was closer to the beings from whose womb he sprang than he is at present.

The soul of the normal human being today depends on a physical and sensual environment. If it wants to recognize something, it does so through the intellect; it recognizes what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, and the hands can grasp. This external way of perceiving has only developed out of other forms of knowledge, out of a different kind of perception, out of the dark clairvoyance of primitive man. At this point, I must say something that may seem grotesque to those who have not yet delved deeply into the theosophical tenets; but what will soon become self-evident upon deeper penetration into them, as self-evident as the results of natural science.

We can go back to the area of our Earth where our ancestors lived and which science is also beginning to study, to the land that once existed between present-day Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand and the American continent on the other, and from which the present-day Atlantic Ocean takes its name, the land of the Atlanteans, of which the Greek philosopher Plato also gives an account. We find that our ancestors lived in a form that was such that no remains could remain that paleontology could explore.

Today, when man reflects on his relationship to the outside world, we find that he lives in two sharply distinct states of consciousness. One fills his soul from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, the other from then until the next morning. The sensory impressions of the day gradually sink into the darkness of unconsciousness in the evening. In the morning, it is not at all the case that what is newly created again enables him to use the sense organs and the mind that is connected to the brain organ, but the altered form in which these are present brings with it the unconsciousness of the night and the consciousness of the day.

It was not like that for our Atlantic ancestors. It was quite different for them. When a person fell asleep at night – as I said, I am well aware that this must sound grotesque to material thinking – it was not the colorful, light-filled carpet of the sensory world that was transformed into unconsciousness, but rather the person lived themselves into a world of spiritual and soul perception, in which they had experiences. And just as people today speak of the world of the senses in minerals, plants, animals and their own kind in their environment, so did the Atlanteans speak of a spiritual world that they perceived at night. However, their perception during the day was not the same as it is today. When they woke up, everything was shrouded in mist, with objects showing few sharp contours. At that time, the consciousness of day and night was less distinct. Therefore, the word religion could not have had the same meaning for our Atlantic ancestors as it has today: the connection of the human soul with the invisible world. For them, the spiritual world was perception. The soul knew from experience: there is a spiritual world. It knew: I came from this spiritual world, descended into physical embodiment. Religion was there as an experience.

Now great upheavals occurred, not only those which science describes as the Ice Age, but which religion calls the Flood, although the truth about these events is much less accurately described in the former than in the latter. The face of the earth changed little by little. Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand, and America on the other, developed.

Today we will only consider the stream of emigration that is of interest to our topic, which moved from west to east, gradually populating Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and creating the post-Atlantic cultures. Through leading personalities, the most valuable part of the Atlantic culture was established, in a completely different form than today's history teaches. Spiritual research shows us how the best was brought by great leaders to the center of Asia, from which the various colonies that underlie the various post-Atlantic cultures emanated.

The first major cultural influence went to northern India. The best of the traditions of those insights into the spiritual world, which were experiences of the Atlanteans, were given to the post-Atlantean population in the way that the individual peoples needed it. It was significant, highly developed people who founded the culture in India. We call these great founders the ancient Rishis, and we speak with tremendous reverence of these holy Indian Rishis.

But now, in order to get an idea of what they taught in times that preceded all Indian writing, we have to have some concept of the mood of this people. We speak of the ancient times of Indian culture. You may know that wonderful works of culture, full of the greatest wisdom and poetry, have been preserved in the Vedas. They are wonderfully beautiful, but they are only a faint echo of what the holy rishis originally taught; for only spiritual science can teach that. We have an echo of it in the Vedas, beautiful enough, but it does not come close to what the first great post-Atlantic teachers of humanity taught. What was the mood of the Indian people, these post-Atlantic people who had moved to India?

Those people who had most clearly preserved the memory of what could be experienced in the Atlantic period with the soul of a different nature had gone to India, the memory that man had reached into the spiritual world and had his real home there. This idea was lost when man was driven out into the physical world. There he had acquired logical thinking, but he had had to give up the old clairvoyance. Only the memory remained; with this in their soul these people looked at the surrounding physical world. The basic feeling was therefore that they had to leave the old clairvoyance. They looked up at the magnificent starry sky, at the sun, at the moon; the old Indian looked at the mountains, the blue vault of heaven, everything that makes up the beauty of the physical world, and at first none of this seemed to him to be a substitute for what the soul had once experienced in the spiritual realm. “Truth,” said the old Indian to himself, ‘exists only in the spiritual world; here in all the glories of the sensual world there is only Maya, only a veil that weaves itself over the spiritual world.’

Then it was natural for him when the Rishis came and told him that if man develops the potential of a spiritual eye or spiritual ear that is present in his soul, he can see into the spiritual world again. This development, which is similar to the appearance of light through an operation for those born blind, this development of the spiritual organs was called yoga development. This is what the holy rishis pointed out. They were the comforters of ancient India. They brought comfort from Maya and illusion.

This was the first religious wisdom in the post-Atlantean era. We must point out one particular point: the ancient holy rishis said: Even if you look at the starry sky, at the sun and moon, at the mountains and forests, everything is spiritual behind them. There are spiritual depths and spiritual beings behind them; only the spiritual eye and spiritual ear can perceive them. In death, man enters this spiritual world; but in the future, as they already taught, something of what is hidden behind all that is material and visible to our eyes will also appear within this material world, and will work as the forces through which all material things on earth can become visible. Beyond what we can tell, beyond the seven Rishis, there was still another entity; in ancient India it was called Vishva Karman. The old Rishis pointed to it by saying: “Look up at the sun, and in the light and rays flowing down, you see the source of all earthly growth.” Just as it is with man, that what you see with your eyes is only his physical body, the expression of an invisible, hidden within him, so in the whole world the physical is the expression of everything superphysical. With the light of the sun, spiritual energy also penetrates the earth. The outer physical garment is the sun of the spiritual, of Vishva Karman. There will come a time - so they said to the intimate disciples - when this central being of the sun will show itself in a completely different form. That was what grew out of the Indian mood.

Let us now turn to the second period of post-Atlantean culture, to ancient Persian culture. What is called historical in this context is only a later echo. In much earlier times, there was already something there that could connect people to the spiritual world. These Persian people had very different needs from the Indian people. The Indian culture was introspective and turned its gaze away from the world of the senses; it had no interest in the achievements of the senses. But it was the mission of the Persian people to conquer these. The first race to take an interest in the external world was the ancient Persian people, on whom the historical one is based. If the Indian culture had remained alone, we might have received wonderful achievements in... /gap; but all that industry and trade have gained for the good of humanity would not have come to us. This was the real mission of the Persians. They were the first to lay hands on the physical earth; the first traces of agriculture appeared.

These people also needed another proclamation. It received the same through that great individuality who is called Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We do not mean the personality that history designates and, in its manner, applies to a series of similar personalities following one another, and relatively late ascribes to the historical Zoroaster. Also... /gap] already names this leader of Persian culture 5000 years before the Trojan War. But we have to look even further back for this second founder of the post-Atlantic culture, who works for it just as the Rishis worked for the first. Only he had to speak quite differently. The Persian people had in their soul an inclination towards the physical world, therefore they were also exposed to its temptations and inclined to consider the external sensual as the only thing, not recognizing that behind it there is also a spiritual.

The ancient Persian people had little of the traditions that the Indian people possessed. Zarathustra also had to speak of the Sun in a similar way to the Rishis, of the Sun behind which is the Vishva Karman; but it had to be done much more vividly. He told them something like this: In that which appears to you as sunlight, there lives something that also lives in you as the excellent, that which you sense in the soul as your own inner being. The sun is the garment of a being of which there is something similar in your own life. — This inner essence of the physical was called the aura, and that which, as spirit, underlies the physical sun, he called the great aura, or Ahura Mazdao, from which the name Ormuzd was then derived. This is the god who lives in the sun and of whom an image lives in the human soul. Zarathustra pointed to him as the helper of man. When man lays hands on the physical world, cultivates it, draws fruit from it and gains nourishment from it, Ormuzd is the helper. He is your helper – this is how Zarathustra characterized the great sun spirit for his followers; and the spirit that deceives people, so to speak, about the fact that there is a spiritual aspect behind this material world, that incites people not to believe in it, he called the enemy of man: Ahriman, that is the opponent of the great sun aura.

In this way, he pointed out that a spiritual underlies all that is sensual. He pointed out that man is placed in the midst of this battle between light and darkness; that man is called to be a servant of the spirit of light by transforming the earth into an image of spiritual wisdom. He pointed to the physical world as something that not only hid but proclaimed the spiritual world. Zarathustra taught: But you must not seek for the spirit that is your helper only behind the world of sense; it is contained in all sense-world and when the time is ripe for it to show itself, to become manifest in a way that man can grasp and visualize, then it will appear. That was his teaching and he proclaimed it with wonderful words. Only a stammering is it, what one of it about so rendered:

I will speak, listen and hear me, you who long for it from far and near; I will speak, because he will be revealed in days to come. No longer shall the false teacher instill deception into the souls of men, the evil one who has confessed bad faith with his mouth. I will speak of that which is highest in the world, that which has taught Vishva Karman, the greatest of mankind. And he who does not want to hear my words will experience evil when in the course of time the spiritual will be proclaimed on earth.

We then come to the later post-Atlantean cultures and proceed to the third post-Atlantean – the Egyptian culture, in the time in which the ancient Egyptian culture flourishes. Today, we can only give a very small excerpt of it in terms of its spiritual and psychological content. For this culture, the question arose religiously: How does the individual soul that dwells in us, that has arisen from the spiritual and psychological home, relate to the spiritual that permeates the world?

In ancient times, man still partially reached into the spiritual world; now, however, man increasingly prefers to gain what external culture brings, and so we see in the third cultural epoch, in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian on the one hand and in the Egyptian on the other, how a further conquest of the physical world took place. We see how man no longer looked up at the starry sky to say: Maya lives in this one and behind the stars the actual spiritual, the Brahman —, but now people looked carefully at the course of the stars, and a wonderful science arose. In the movement of the stars, in their figures, man recognized an external realization of the intentions of the spiritual beings. Man gained interest in the sensory world in order to experience the divine through it. Now the sensory world had become the physiognomic expression of the divine for him. Thus, with geometry, the earth was also conquered. From the spiritual heights, man penetrated more and more into the sensory world with his knowledge. As a result, he became increasingly estranged from the spiritual world. The consequence was that completely different views had to arise about the connection between man and the spiritual.

The relationship between the human soul and the spiritual world is depicted in the Egyptian religion in the Osirissage. This recounts that Osiris ruled in the world. However, he was too good for his rule to remain on earth, so he was overcome by his hostile brother Typhon and placed in the coffin. His wife Isis could no longer save him and instead raised his son Horus. Osiris ascended into the spiritual world. The legend thus reports: This divine figure once lived on earth as a companion of men, but then had to withdraw into the spiritual world. This world was then given a kind of representative in the child Horus. — The ancient Egyptian was told that when he passed through the gate of death, he would not only be united with Osiris, but his soul itself would become Osirian, itself an Osiris, woven together with him. Man becomes spiritualized, becomes Osirian himself. If man had to say to himself: I belong with my innermost being to the spiritual world —, then he had to say to himself again: veiled is my connection with the spiritual world; but when it is taken from me, the veil, then I will be reunited with the spiritual world; because when the attempt was made with Osiris to put him in a box, he was transported to the spiritual world.

The Egyptian was aware that a Divine-Spiritual being lived in his soul, and that he could only be united with it after death. Only then would he become Osiris himself. The being that will be united with you as Osiris cannot take shape in this world, but it will take shape one day and exist in the physical world.

Thus we see in this third epoch how the prophecy continues. What the Rishis indicated to the Indians as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra indicated to the Persians as Ahura Mazdao, that saw in Osiris the confessor of the Egyptian religion and predicted that this being would one day appear.

Let us now take a look at the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin or Greco-Roman epoch. The conquest of the physical world goes even further there. Man has come so far that he is able to form a kind of marriage between what is experienced in the spirit and what becomes an event in the outer physical world. We see this in art, which is something for humanity, which is a reflection of the spiritual in all parts of matter at the same time. In Greek art, we see the spiritual connected to the external material as in a marriage. The greatness of the Greek temple is based on this. It is the direct imprint of what lived in the soul of the people of that time.

We can understand this principle of Greek art by observing the difference between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. What is the difference? A lonely building, with the image of a god, far and wide no people, and yet a complete totality. This is how we find the Greek temple; its architecture speaks to us, and we say: It is the house of the god who dwells within, even when there are no people there. No people are needed in this temple.

With the Gothic church it is quite different. This is not meant as a criticism; each thing is in the right proportion to its purpose. With its pointed arches, its entire composition is only complete when the faithful multitude is inside. That is part of it. Such a comparison can truly symbolize how that marriage in Greek art between matter and spirit has been consummated.

And if we look at the Roman world, we see how the individual personality expresses the learning of the value of the physical world. And we can go even further back, to the Greek polis, to see how the concept of citizenship arose, which actually only comes to full expression in the Roman world and which can only be clearly recognized by going back comparatively to what the ancient Indian felt. While for him what was in the physical world was only a shadow of the real world and reality only existed in union with Brahman, just as for the Egyptian with Osiris - the Roman wanted to stand firmly in this physical world by feeling like a citizen.

An ancient Indian could never have understood a deity dwelling in the physical body, because the physical world was a shadow image of the spiritual one for him. The human personality only became fully understandable in the fourth epoch; therefore the predestined entity could only enter at this time. It was none other than the Christ, of whom the Rishis had spoken as the Vishva Karman, who at that time was only comprehensible in the spiritual world and who, in the epoch in which the physical world was most conquered, was realized here as a human being among humans.

This was prepared by the fact that people were sharply reminded of what constitutes the innermost nature of the person who actualizes such an entity. Hence the words: “If you do not believe Moses and the prophets...” (John 5:46-47, Luke 16:31). And anyone who understands John knows that in the “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), the “ejeh asher ejeh” of Moses, nothing else should be proclaimed as the Christ, not should be talk not of the God of Yahweh, but of the prediction of the Christ: You shall acknowledge a God who can be grasped in the sensual world, who lives and weaves in everything around you, in lightning and thunder, in plants and minerals, in the whole world around you — If you want something that can be understood by you, how it lives and weaves, then you have to listen to that peculiar sound where the soul speaks to itself: “I am,” then you have to listen to your ego - that is the best expression at the same time for the image of the Godhead. What lives in every human being also lives as the all-pervading God; this also appeared in the greatest human being who walked the earth, the Christ. This divine essence appeared in the fourth cultural epoch.

Thus we see how the wisdom of the religions weaves and strives forward, like the leaf to the petal that holds the fruit, so we see that what the ancient Rishis taught is becoming more and more mature until it appears as the fruit in the man of God who walks the earth; and we see the necessity of progress in it. We see how, in certain respects, Christianity does indeed contain the same as the other religions; how it contains the unified, but again in a different form. Therefore, he is wrong who says that it depends on the same teaching being in it as in the other religions. As long as it depends on the content of the teaching, one can say that. But where the spiritual world-view is proclaimed as a teaching, as the ancient Rishis had to do, as Zarathustra and the leaders of the Egyptian Hermes religion, the leaders of the mysterious mysteries did, we have the same thing that we also prove in the commandments of Christ, yes! But to recognize that which the other religions only spoke of, that this is the Christ; to understand, to grasp a spiritual phenomenon as a personality, to understand the Christ, not just the teaching, that is what makes Christianity different.

When religions speak of the Logos that can be taught, Christianity must speak of the human Logos who has become the bearer of the religion. What previously could only be taught was now lived. The life itself of this teaching is the essence of Christianity. So those religious leaders could say of themselves: “I am the goal and the way.” Those leaders, a Zarathustra, a Moses could have said: “I am the way and the truth” — but only Christ could say: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

The wisdom at the core of all religions has become fruit in Christianity and thus seed. As we have now sought the origin of Christianity in the religions, tomorrow we want to talk about the future of Christianity, because it is as true that it contains the fruit of all other religions as it is that it contains the seed for a great development, because although almost two millennia have passed since the appearance of the personality of Christ on earth, we are only at the beginning of Christianity.

Thus we see how, in our age, people have gradually sought a connection with the Divine-Spiritual and look into what all peoples have felt to be the wisdom core of their religion. We recognize why this contains the power and strength that gives people the hope of achieving their goal.

Anyone who looks into the spiritual life of people in this way dares to add to the words of a great poet, Goethe's beautiful words:

Soul of man, how art thou like the water, Fate of man, how art thou like the wind,

evoking the idea that the life of the soul surges up and down like the waves of water whipped by the wind.

But he who contemplates the power that is in the life that flows through men adds: it is true that the wind whips the waves; but it is also true that the wind, the air, is permeated by light, and the light-filled air contains the element that conjures all sprouting life out of the earth. It is true that water, permeated by warmth, is driven up and becomes a cloud and comes down again as rain.

Man's soul is like water. It comes from heaven and rises to heaven. But it is also true that the blessing of prosperity comes from the fact that water, permeated by fire, has a blessing effect, and that in the same way, man's soul can be aglow with that fire of the ego, which feels akin to the light that rules through destiny and is comparable to the wisdom that permeates the world. Then the world of the soul will be filled with the feeling of divine wisdom. Thus the soul is something that may indeed fluctuate up and down, but is certain of its destiny and of its inner strength.