Lecture III

With this picture of human history, of occult history, before us we shall understand that a soul incarnated in the ancient Indian and then in the Persian epoch could be inspired by an individual Being of the higher Hierarchies, but that on passing into the Greco-Latin epoch this soul was alone with itself, inasmuch as the ego was then working in the ego. Everything that in the pre-Grecian age, in all the early cycles of Post-Atlantean civilisation, appears as divine inspiration, as a revelation from above—and this still holds good at the beginning of the Grecian epoch itself, in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, B.C.—everything that presents itself to us as inspired culture into which the spiritual content flows from outside, begins to be expressed more and more in the form of the purely human and personal. And this comes to its strongest expression in Greek culture. No previous age had seen—nor will any subsequent age see again—such an expression of the outer man living in the physical world as a self-based ego-being. The purely human and personal, entirely self-contained, comes to light as historical reality in the mode of life of the ancient Greek and in his creations. See how the Greek sculptor has woven the element of the human and personal into his figures of the gods! We can truly say that in a masterpiece of Greek sculpture man stands before us wholly as personality—in so far as it can be made recognisable in physical media. And if at the sight of a Greek work of art we were not able to efface the thought that the particular incarnation there expressed was preceded and will be followed by others—if we were to imagine for a single moment that in the form of an Apollo or a Zeus only one out of many incarnations is represented—then we should not have the true feeling for these masterpieces. In looking at them we must be able to forget that the human being is incarnated in successive earthly lives. In Greek works of art the whole personality has poured into the form of the single personality. This was the hallmark of the life of the Greeks.