Lecture IX

Then came the early Christian struggles—right on into the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries—to reach a harmony between what can be seen as the spirit in external nature and what can be experienced as the divine when we look at our own moral world, our own human soul. In theory the matter seems simple. But in fact the quest for harmony, between seeing the spirit in external nature and guiding the soul upwards to the spiritual world out of which Christ Jesus had descended, was an immense struggle. Christianity came over from Asia and took hold of the Greek and Roman world. In the later centuries of the Middle Ages we see the struggle taking place most strongly in those parts of Europe, which had retained much of their primeval vitality. In ancient Greece the old heathen element was so strong that although Christianity passed through Greek culture and assimilated many Greek expressions on the way, it could not take root there. Only Gnosis, the spiritual view of Christianity, was able to take root in Greece.