Twenty-ninth Lecture

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, what it is about is that one forms a relationship to what I have often called the triune God, because through this veneration or worship or however you want of the triune God, everything that, when it afflicts people, actually corrupts them or even makes them ill, is avoided. If you take the triune God, you avoid such one-sidedness as pure, naked worship of nature, as it is in a service to the sun, in whatever form it may appear. But at the same time you have also avoided – as the matter demands – then taking the idea of God so far away from the human being that you no longer have any concrete content for it at all. For in the second form of the Godhead, in the second person, in the Christ, the Godhead is to be conceived as thoroughly human within, while we know that in the Father God it has more of a symbolic character. It is absolutely the case that the expansion of our understanding of the divine through the Trinity – if we are not speaking merely in definitions, but are entering into something very concrete – also gives the content of God a fullness that cannot be attained by anything else. If today some people fall back into a nature service, into an idolatry, it is because through a non-supernatural understanding of the concept of God, it has been greatly removed from what we now have in the visible world as the so-called most perfect in us, in man.