Ancient Mysteries and Christianity

GA 87 — 1 February 1902, Berlin

13. The Mysticism of Philo of Alexandria

Highly Esteemed Attendees!

We saw last time how the basic doctrines of Platonism were expressed particularly in the "Phaedo" and the "Banquet" and how three main preconditions were necessary for the emergence of Christianity.

The first precondition was that which lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world; the second was the initiation process to which everyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to submit; and the third was a transformation.

We have also tried to make clear to ourselves how this transformation took place and we have seen how an amalgamation with a historical fact then took place, from which Christianity could then form. We have seen how Christianity had to place particular value on the vouching of doctrines through appearance as an actual process, and pointed out how in Philo of Alexandria we have a personality who was able to deepen what was present in Platonic mysticism in a significant way.

This is a fact that we must understand from the course of European mysticism itself. This becomes most clear to us when we follow it through the philosopher who lived around the time of Christ's birth, Philon. But it is precisely Philon's mysticism that I must describe in broad strokes. I have to trace its lifeblood in order to be able to show how this teaching, which was expressed in Alexandria, lived through various metamorphoses on the one hand in North Africa, but then also in Palestine, especially in the sect of the Essaeans, from which Jesus of Nazareth emerged.

The best way for us Western thinkers to understand what Jesus taught is to take the detour via Philon's worldview, via Philon's mysticism. What Jesus [learned] within the Essaean community is something that emerged [also] from Philon's mysticism, which on the one hand drew from the Egyptian mystical view and on the other hand from the views of the Greeks, mixed with the view of Judaism. I will provide historical evidence for this later.

Within Judaism there were two strictly separate schools of thought. They can be compared with the two schools of thought in Christianity, scholasticism and mysticism. If we consider these two directions as they developed within the [thirteenth] century, we will notice that the same is also present in Judaism. An intellectual philosophy developed there in such a way that the written word, which lives in Orthodoxy, was interpreted, and then another direction, which was kept strictly secret, Jewish mysticism. This was kept so strictly secret that there are sayings that go something like this: Anyone who tells even two people about it is doing a great injustice. - It was considered downright dangerous to share this secret teaching with a large mass of people.

I would like to go back to Philonic mysticism and say that Philon, as a mystic and theosophist, made one of the greatest decisions, a decision that we will hardly find again in history in the same sense. In order to characterize this, I would like to mention a few things that I have already discussed on other occasions.

We know that philosophers have appeared before who said that every divine being is born out of man. We find this Feuerbachian view expressed by Greek philosophers as early as the fifth century BC. We find it expressed in order to polemicize against the divine idea. Then in the nineteenth century it was expressed by Feuerbach in the following sense: If man creates the divine idea in his own sense, it is a human creation. Thus its objective meaning is lost and it only has the value that it is to be overcome by man.

This view is only based on a misunderstanding of our cognitive process. There is no conception which has [not] arisen in the same way as the divine teachings. If we take a simple idea, this is a simple transfer from the inner to the outer world, it is the same way in which the highest idea that man can form, the idea of God, has arisen.

We can speak here, by way of illustration, of the collision of two spheres. One ball flies this way, the other flies that way. The force of the impact is said to have caused the two balls to fly further. What we add is that no experience comes from outside. When we say: The ball pushes - , this is something that we can only take from ourselves. We have taken a certain force effect from ourselves and transferred it to the outside world. So if we follow the recipe of those who say that the concept of God has no justification, then we would have to delete our entire inner life. We could know nothing at all about the outside world. Conversely, those who take the mystical viewpoint say the opposite: Yes, it is precisely what we experience inside that is the most real thing, and what the outside world has to tell us, it only reveals to us in a roundabout way through our inner life. Therefore, it is only a continuation of ordinary thinking that we also experience the highest ideas, the highest concepts, through which we explain the world to ourselves, only within ourselves. We can explain the world through these elements experienced spiritually within us.

Now Plato saw the world that he could experience within himself as the basis of the entire universe. Now comes the great further step that still had to be taken here, the bold step that leads beyond Plato. Plato made the world of ideas, the world that opens up to the human mind, the [primordial basis], the primordial being of the world.

But if we allow our world of ideas to pass us by, even in this eternal view in which it appears to us in Plato, then we have a necessary connection, one idea is connected to the other, one now builds on the other. There is a necessary harmony in this world of ideas.

Is this the highest that man can experience within himself? This is roughly the question that Philon posed to himself. Is it the highest thing to experience what is necessary? No, he can go beyond what is necessary, he can experience the will in himself as free creative will.

I cannot get involved here in the arguments about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will, I can only emphasize that in Philo we are dealing here with the free development of the will as part of his mysticism. He said: I can decide for myself, thereby intervene in the course of the world and bring about something that can only be brought about by me. This consciousness is only individual, but after deepening into the personality it goes beyond the world of ideas to the extent that it can only create ideas in man by way of freedom.

If man is to introduce the idea from the world of the eternal into the material world, then he must have the ability, the possibility, to carry the ideas out into the temporal, he must therefore be able to intervene creatively in the fabric of the world. To imagine this most personal, most individual, in itself at the same time as divine, to think of it not only as a world of ideas, not only as spirit as such, but the most immediate inner experience as divine, that is the step that Philon took beyond Plato.

Philon went even deeper into himself and still retained the belief that this innermost being was the primordial being, the primordial reality. Plato could only find the real in his ideas. Where man himself forms the living link between the eternal and the temporal, Philon, digging even deeper, sought the divine no longer in the ideal, but in life. This is one of the most significant philosophical conclusions that could have been made after Plato.

Almost everyone easily senses that in our world of ideas we are given something that reaches beyond the world of ideas. We could not realize that we are individualities if a ray did not penetrate us, if we could not realize through our spirit that we belong to the universe. It is this spirit that shines in. That which man feels to be most individual, that which he can say belongs only to him, is the decision of will.

It is easiest to say that this has nothing to do with the great All-Spirit. To recognize that the primordial essence of the world is still present there too, that it also enters into the most individual, that is Philon's greatest deed. Therefore Philon says: We must not only penetrate to the ideas, not only to the spirit, we must descend even deeper if we want to feel the divine within us. We must penetrate to the most immediate life. - It was there that Philon dives out of the purely spiritual, which was the last subject of Greek mysticism, from the Platonic world of ideas back into the immediate life. Not only the cognizing, the thinking, the person seeking the path in contemplation, but also the deeper seeker immerses himself in the universe.

This is a completely different, much more vivid version of what Plato only imagined and only preconceived. It was a deeper descent into the material world. If Plato had called on man to step out of the material world in order to nourish his gaze on eternity, Philon again tried to submerge [into the material], not just into the spiritual world, but into that which is full of life.

And that is also the meaning of mysticism: Not to recognize in the spiritual, but to live in the spiritual, to set oneself a task in the spiritual, to be aware that God has lost himself in infinite love in the material and must be reborn, but can only be reborn by man transforming the world process from a material into a spiritual process, so that man actually submerges himself into the material by simultaneously taking on the mission of sinking the primordial Logos into the material world and thereby developing it back up into the spiritual world.

This is how Philon conceives of Plato from the grasp of life. He can no longer say: Immerse yourselves in the world of ideas, then you will find life. - He says: Search below the world of ideas, search for what is deeper in human consciousness. If you are able to spiritualize that which is still deeper, if you are able to recognize that it is life, then you will reach the divine.

What was still possible for Plato, I would say, to express the divine in the ideas, becomes impossible for Philon. One can now only immerse oneself in the sea of life. The Platonic world of ideas becomes only a reflection, a shadow image of that which lives behind the world of ideas as the primordial eternal. So we have placed something behind the world of ideas that man cannot grasp, that he can only grasp by intuition, so that [Philon] creates a perspective of life that is behind the world of ideas.

For Philon, therefore, the divine cannot be expressed in words. When he says of any thing that it exists, the idea of existence is taken from sensory things and from things that he can perceive mentally. Man can perceive sensually and spiritually. He does not have a direct view of what lies deeper. Only the perspective opens up to one side of infinity. Man can never reach the end in this direction, he can never grasp it on the other side, on the material side.

What a person lives and what he weaves is for Philon, just as it was for Plato, an interpenetration of the spiritual and the material. In everything that is given to us, spirit and matter live everywhere at the same time. It is an interplay, a mutual interpenetration of spirit and matter. The atom is formed, lawfully arranged matter. The lawful arrangement is an influence of the spiritual into the world. What is arranged stems from matter. What we perceive as the soul is just as much an interpenetration of spirit and matter as the atom.

Everywhere we perceive, we are dealing with an intermediate part of the world that presents spirit and matter in all parts. We ourselves are such a link. On the one side we have a perspective that is always to be pursued towards the eternal, [on the other towards the temporal]; on the one side towards the unified, on the other towards the material, towards the manifold. This is the basic nerve of what drove Philon to his view.

We can approach what Philon wanted from another angle. If we imagine, to use another metaphor that I have often used, a being that can only touch, that has no eyes, no ears, only organs of touch, then the whole world would present itself to it in tactile qualities, in qualities that the sense of touch can convey to us. If hearing were then added to this, the world would be a world filled with sounds. And depending on which worldview a person belongs to, the world will look different to them. He will be able to say: I didn't hear the sounds because I didn't have ears. - Or: The equipment of my hearing organ adds the sounds to the world, the eyes also add everything colored.

And now think of this as a continuous opening up of new organs. This has a lot to do with it. Think of how the simple living being is only given organs of touch. If we were to speak in the sense of Schopenhauer and wanted to represent the world only as a being of tactile impression, as it presents itself to a simply developed being, then we would have to write: "The world as tactile sensation". A more developed being would then have a different view of the world. Every being thus has a higher or lower development. The human being, however, in whom the powers were already there that the human being still has to achieve, would see what the actual original being is. But as man is today, he must leave it completely undefined. He can only regard what he perceives as a reflection and strive to come closer and closer to the primordial being. Those who think subjectively and materialistically and believe that man does not find something real when he opens up his organs will not think like Philon. Philon says: "When I hear sounds, it is not I who create such sounds, but I am enabled to recognize this kind of world phenomenon. - It was all there. He will never say: Because my ear is there, therefore a sound is there. Everything that can be perceived by human organs is always there, is actually eternal. It was there before anything was there, even before time was there.

This must first be understood in order to understand why Philon left the end completely undefined. Man had to have developed all abilities from within himself, then his perception had to coincide with what the primordial being really is. Thus, he can only open up the perspective of the primordial real, which is impenetrable simply because man is a finite being.

Not that this primordial being does not have the same essence as man. It is, to paraphrase Goethe, a "revealed mystery. It is always and everywhere there, and it can be seen and recognized more and more by man. But it is only an assertion that Philon makes as a finite man and of which he is aware that it only has meaning for finite man, that - seen with the eye of God - it would be an untruth, that it would not be an exhaustive truth. This is Philon's assertion that the divine is not fully revealed in the world. Only for man does it not reveal itself. But man is on the way to making it accessible to him. Thus Philon has a primordial reason. - We must use the word, but we must also be clear that the word does not exhaust what it is about. -Thus he has the word for the primordial Logos, but at the same time he is clear that this is only an image, a shadowing of the primordial Logos, that man cannot help but enter that path through which the divine being is increasingly redeemed from the material.

The process that man undergoes is such that he immerses himself in the material in order to redeem God from matter with his help. He is aware that he who recognizes this will embark on the path of truth. He regards it as the task of the philosophy of life to lead man as a living being onto the path, so that as a philosopher, as a mystic, he arrives where Egyptian mysticism wanted to lead its disciples, where people take care of the divine business in the world. That is the basic idea, the basic feeling that led Philon to his views.

Now I would like to show how Philon, precisely because he stood within the Judaism of the time, could have been led to such a view, and I would also like to show how the symbolism among such great minds as Philon, which appeared as the infinite end point, was transformed at the end point of Philonian philosophy into the symbol on Golgotha. One must be clear about the fact that the [Christian] symbol that arose on the Mount of the Cross is a transformation of the symbol that reflects the source from which Philon drew, the symbol through which Jewish mysticism at that time, around the turn of the years into the Christian era, saw the source that appeared as God and man at the same time.

Jewish mysticism - like all mysticism - was imbued with the idea that when man looks within himself, he finds the primordial ground of the world within himself. But it was also convinced that what man finds within himself is also the true origin, the core of the world. And so, in the deepest humanity, man also finds the deepest divinity. Jewish mysticism expresses this deepest humanity in the symbol: Father on the right, mother on the left, child in the middle. This symbol of the immaculate father, the immaculate mother and the child, which was created in a purely spiritual way, this image, which at the same time expresses the two sides in nature, the eternal development, the continuous transformation of the various world forms, and in the child that which has emerged simultaneously from the spiritual and the material, this image was what appeared in the end as the symbol, as that which man could only have understood if he had seen completely behind the scenes. As it was, however, he could only imagine this primal mystery under the image of the father and mother with the child.

This primal symbol, which Jewish mysticism had, is nothing other than the beginning of the Bible itself. The Jewish mystic saw in human beings the original source of everything divine and at the same time of the deepest humanity. He saw this because this is where becoming and development really split or flowed apart most intensely, and whose parts were only united by a decision of will. Thus the symbolum, which as a symbolum of deepening leads through the free decision of will into the actual primordial being of the world, is represented by father and mother, by the "man - woman" and by the third, which has emerged from both and which contains both in its ongoing development.

We think of this symbol - which he who enters the path of knowledge would find more and more - translated as one of the ways for man to come to [higher] consciousness. One of the ways to reach [higher] consciousness is expressed by this symbol.

Let us imagine that man, as it were, turns his gaze away from the actual original meaning of this symbol, that he is content to find, incomprehensibly at first, the masculine and the feminine in this image, and directs his gaze to the child, thus directing his gaze to that middle link in development which we express as spiritual-material, spiritual-sensual, If we imagine that man tries to grasp the world from this intermediate link, from the child, because he has perhaps become aware that the other cannot be reached, that it lies at the end and he therefore directs his gaze to the center, so that what lies to the left and right appears shadowy, then you have set the human as the unattainable divine.

You have man living within the world development and within this man that which appears as male and female only as his powers within him, as it were only the consciousness, the realization that he can reach that goal on his path at the end of which are the two elements of the female and male.

Man has two kinds of consciousness. One is [his own], which leads him safely along the path, the second is that he has a guide who takes him further, that there is something definite and indefinite in him at the same time, that there is something in him that he can pursue himself, and something that lives in him through grace, which takes him further and leads him from step to step on the path of development.

The second divine power, the guide, comes to him and says: Leave the divine, turn your gaze away from the divine, so that you may recognize that which lives within you. And what lives within you? The path between good and evil lives within you. You will recognize the good and the evil. - So the child's path of life begins with the guide approaching the child and telling him: develop your own abilities, then your own abilities will lead you to the end that you can foresee in an infinite perspective. But you must realize that you have this divine only within you as [your own] power.

Now the child, I would like to say the divine-human, enters into the actual perspective, and the other enters as a secondary matter, as mere human power next to the human being as the good and evil, as that which he recognizes on his path through life. And there you have the transformation of the Jewish symbol of the world. The transformation is the actual Christian symbol on the Cross Mountain. The Redeemer in the middle, Father and Mother to the left and right. In the thieves we have the reflection of what we have in the original symbol as the mother and father principle, as the material and spiritual principle. Thus, in the mirror of the symbol, the mysticism of the time, the Jewish mysticism, is transformed into Christian mysticism. The gaze is directed to that side of the symbol - not to the end, because it is not reached after all, but to the Son - which provides the center of the new worldview.

This is, in a symbolic-mystical way, what took place at that time under the influence of philosophical ideas such as those presented by Philon. It is a new philosophical life on the one hand, a certain renunciation seen from another side, from the side of the old mysteries. And here is the explanation of why the mystery was kept so secret. It was kept so secret because it could not be understood. It first had to be transformed, humanized, if this symbolism, this mystery, which was only accessible to a few, was to attain a general world significance.

I ask you not to misunderstand me, I do not want to place the main emphasis on the transformation of the symbol, I only wanted to show in the mirror of this symbol what took place in the people at that time, for example in the Essaean community, under the influence of Buddhist teachings, a doctrine developed as with Philon, but with a different purpose and came about differently, because the most diverse mystical schools attained a kind of deepening through such personalities as Philon. Philon, just like other people of the time, imbued himself with all the mystical teachings that were available at the time.

An external expression of how people strove at that time to recognize, as it were, the primordial divine, which lies dormant behind all limited views of the divine, what is hidden behind them, can be found in the life description of another ["Christ"], as he was imagined, and in the life description of Apollonius of Tyana [by Philostratos]. This Apollonius is presented to us in such a way that we can see from it how [these views] lived everywhere and how this is to be understood in each case only as individual sides of an original religion.

For his part, he sought this primal religion, this primal revelation, in such a way that he sought only forms of expression in all forms of religion, so that in Apollonius of Tyana we have before us a personality who strove to find the primal religion. Basically, we also have such a personality in Philon. Too little has been handed down to us from Apollonius. With Philon, however, we can vouch for the fact that he deepened the views as they came to him in his own way, leading them to an even deeper level of consciousness, so that they can be regarded as the preparatory philosophy of the West, which then reappeared in the various Christian communities as Christian doctrine.

Philonic philosophy has made it possible for Christian doctrine to be deepened in a philosophical way; Philonic philosophy has made it possible, in fact, for the gaze to be turned away from an [inadequate] way of investigating the mysteries, so that through it man has been pointed to life itself.

And now we will see how the development continues under the influence of such feelings, as expressed in the transformation of the Jewish symbol of father, mother and child into the form of the image on Golgotha. We will see how Jesus and Philon express to us in parables what they have to express.

It is partly hidden, partly what they have acquired in the mystery schools.

Answer to the question:

Gospel of Matthew. The first son of David. "Behold, a son is born to you, and his name will be Emmanuel, which means "God with us."

Here we have the contrast between the inner truth and the outer truth. The gospel can only be understood when we realize that two views have merged in it. On the one hand, we see what actually presents itself. When we are in the middle ground, Christ appears to us as the one who appears on the deeper background. This is why Matthew depicts the Crucified One on the cross (the Christian symbol).

[Stenographer's note:] In the next sentence he looks back to the mystical symbol of the time.

Logos.

The second logos is the mutual interpenetration. The third Logos is that which lies on the other side of the perspective. The second Logos is the Son. The Gospel of John is just another interpretation of the Philonic worldview.

The picture I have given can be justified historically. Also that of Jewish mysticism. But this is not as obvious as the other teachings. Without Jewish mysticism, no correct understanding of Christianity is possible.

Jewish mysticism is probably attributed to Assyrian and Persian influences?

In its symbols, yes, but in its actual basis of feeling it cannot be traced back to this Persian symbolism. One has to imagine that the actual deeper content has the same origin as Buddhism. Philon himself denies the Indian origin, but everything is already there. He received everything from them. They were symbolic images. Their content was forgotten and then found again.

Goethe. The eternal feminine is like the basic Greek idea of seeking a deeper state of consciousness. The mother is male-female. The shadow image is the child. The serpent symbol is not to be misunderstood in Goethe. It is the leader who comes to sacrifice.

The will-o'-the-wisps signify mere cognition, empty philosophies.

The dogma of the immaculate conception.

It is not a miracle. It only makes sense if it is placed on an esoteric background. Being born of the Virgin Mary is the symbol of a higher natural process.