1. The Human Being as a System

The world constellation within which the human being is evolving at the present time is in many respects conditioned by the fact that our evolutionary cycle of seven aeons has irrevocably passed its mid-point. As an extraordinarily complex, many-layered and many-sided phenomenon this cycle undergoes at its central point an unbelievably radical transformation of all its characteristics. Their metamorphoses follow a quite definite, temporally extended sequence. Through the last such metamorphosis the human being acquired the capacity to know the world and its development with the thinking consciousness, and thanks to it the first half of the cycle (corresponding to three-and-a-half aeons), now elapsed, attained its completion.

In order to grasp this macrocosmic fact, one can look at its small-scale counterpart, a human life. This cannot be regarded as complete if the physiological, psychical and other processes inherent in it are not made conscious and are not cognized by the being in whom they are taking place. In addition, the life of the human being consists of states of waking and sleeping. Few would dispute that both states are necessary for life as a whole. Our inability to penetrate with our consciousness into the unconscious realm of sleep makes our life incomplete, puzzling, and this we can in no way resign ourselves to. If we accept the doctrine of reincarnation, we begin to grasp the wholeness of the individual life, which consists of the earthly incarnation and also that part of life which we spend in the spiritual world as we move from one reincarnation to another. And there are human beings whose striving it is to develop their consciousness in such a way that, in the earthly state, they can bring to consciousness the non-earthly part of their life.

This is how our own evolution proceeds, and scarcely anyone would claim that it can be regarded as complete and self-sufficient without self-consciousness and therefore without cognition. However, there exists the view regarding evolution of the world, that the human being as a component part of it contributes nothing existential with his thinking.

The position of Anthroposophy in this question is different. It sees the acquisition of thinking consciousness by the human being as comparable to the ‘awakening’ of world evolution in its otherness-of-being (Anderssein), in sense-reality. The development of the sciences completes the stage it has passed through and endows it with the character of wholeness by creating the conditions for human consciousness to move across to the other, supersensible side of being, to earlier epochs of becoming, where the human being was developing on pre-conscious levels. Thanks to this ascent of consciousness the period of evolution that has elapsed acquires no less than one half of its total being. Thus the development of the world changes in a decisive way when the thinking human being appears within it. In the Old Egyptian cultural epoch only a few individuals who were further advanced in their development had the capacity to think in concepts. But it was not possible until the following Greco-Latin epoch for culturally-historically significant results to be achieved by this means. It was at this time that the quite definite process occurred, of the transition of consciousness from picture-forming to reflection. This was a metamorphosis of the human being as a species and it went hand in hand with great transformations in the spiritual world surrounding him. Saint-Martin says on the fourth page of his ten-page book, that in that epoch there arose non-material beings “who think”. Plato was able to experience them semi-clairvoyantly and called them intelligible beings. They ‘arose’ in the sense that they changed the form in which they revealed themselves to man: it became similar – in a certain sense – to the forms of conceptual thinking. In this way the affinity between the archetypal phenomenon and its phenomena was revealed. The concepts arose in the head of the human being as a shadow of those intelligible beings. At the same time the laws of the highest existence of those beings were also reflected in his consciousness. Their manifestation on the level of reflection devoid of being was described by Aristotle, and thus arose the science of logic. The thought-beings, or cosmic intelligences as Rudolf Steiner calls them, are substantial in their nature. They are living beings, and for this reason the true nature of conceptual thinking, leaving aside its secondary, reflected character, must be studied morphologically, i.e. like a living organism. The morphological features of thinking first came to expression in dialectics.

Things polarize themselves, so that the new can arise, but reunite again in order to ascend in their quality onto a higher level. The same occurs in the dialectic of thinking. For this reason the meaning of the spiritual life of man is contained within it. The human being has the task of re-entering the Divine world and of partaking with his ‘I’ in a higher form of being. He can only begin his ascent if he recreates the dialectic of the descent of the life of the World-Spirit into matter in the dialectic of pure thinking.

In this way we come closer to an understanding of the universal character of thinking. On an abstract level this found its reflection in the Hegelian panlogism. It was not able to reveal itself immediately, i.e. also in its supersensible reality, to philosophy as such in its historical development, essentially because of its focus on research into the development of ideas independently of the connection with the development of consciousness. As a result of the restriction (specialization) of philosophy and of sciences such as psychology, sociology, history etc. to single aspects and manifestations of the unitary being of man, the human being as an object of science suffered again – in the modern age – the fate of ancient Osiris who was torn to pieces by Tiphon and scattered throughout the whole world (i.e. through all the sciences). This is the reason why Anthroposophy strives, like Isis of old, to gather these pieces and join them together into a living, unified whole.

In Anthroposophy the nature and genesis of individual consciousness is viewed in the full totality of the biological, psychical, gnoseological (epistemological) and purely supersensible components of the unitary human being, whose development encompasses within itself both the material and the spiritual world and, on the level where these two meet, the world of art, science and religion. In the three worlds we have just mentioned the human being has, over a period of around 2500 years, undergone at least three metamorphoses of decisive importance for his destiny, in the course of which he has not succeeded completely in fulfilling his main task: namely, to maintain his self-identity in a fundamentally changing ‘I’-consciousness, to remain a unitary soul-spiritual being under conditions in which all his component parts have undergone fundamental transformation.

The urgency of this task does not decrease, it grows as time goes on. But at the same time the possibilities of its solution also increase because, despite the many different ways in which modern civilization works upon it destructively, the power of human self-consciousness has attained a hitherto undreamt-of intensity.

Of course one must in no way underestimate the obstacles which prevent the human being from fulfilling his duty to world-evolution, if he loses his understanding for the meaning of history, relativizes the concept of progress and loses altogether that ability to think ‘on a grand scale’, which was characteristic of the periods when the classical views of life and the world were created. Let us recall, for example, that for Hegel progress consisted in the world-encompassing process of the self-development of the World-Spirit. When subsequently the need arose to bring this concept closer to the human being, even to make it sociological, Auguste Comte, despite the false general conclusions drawn by his philosophical doctrine, viewed progress quite rightly as the ascent of knowledge on the scale of perfection: from theology to metaphysics and to scientific truth. In his opinion this process progressively changes the structure of human society. What he tragically left out of account was the synonymity of the concepts ‘ascent of knowledge’ and ‘ascent of the human ‘I’-being’. It was not possible for the one-sidednesses of positivism to be countered by anything constructive even from the side of the latest idealistic world-views, in which the concept of progress took on an irrational character; it was defined as, for example, “the fatal cyclic course of things”94) or as “eternal recurrence” (Nietzsche).

In Anthroposophy the evolutionary process is regarded as progressive in the sense that, as it proceeds, new forms of consciousness-being are born. In them the self-development of the absolute spirit is objectified in a manner corresponding to its essential being. The logical process is the first manifestation of this self-development in the ‘other’, and it is immanent to the being of the subject. In this way the panlogism of Hegel is ontologized in Anthroposophical gnoseology (epistemology), where it is thought through in the sense of progressive evolution.

Progress is intrinsic to both evolution and involution; for this reason its character changes as a result of the transformations that take place in their reciprocally determined unity. One of these transformations occurred with the transition from the fourth (Greek) to the fifth (present) cultural epoch. At that time the evolutive and the involutive in the relation ‘world – man’ began to exchange places, their lemniscatory metamorphosis occurred, as a result of which the relation ‘inner – outer’ in the ontogenesis of the ‘I’ switched into its opposite. This process was the projection of a macrocosmic culmination (Vollendung) on the earthly plane, which had already begun in the old Atlantean root-race. Then our evolutionary cycle began to enter its middle phase.

In the cultural epochs of the fifth, post-Atlantean root-race*  this macrocosmic process assumed a cultural-historical character and began to reach its completion in the human spirit. Thus cultural-historical development became progressive because the human being, gradually unfolding his self-consciousness, lays in the course of this development the foundation-stone of his own individual evolution (thereby determining the character of the cultural-historical development); as a result of this, a number of qualities which were hitherto hereditary in this or that group, emerge in the individual human being. The individual begins to make the transition, within himself, towards the unity of his phylo- and ontogenetic being in its working in soul and spirit. In this way the parts of the well-known identity of Fichte alter their positions. What was formerly ‘I’= not-‘I’ is now the equation not-‘I’ = ‘I’. In the first case, the following applied in objective evolution: If the ‘I’ (i.e. the World- ‘I’) is posited, then there is a human, earthly ‘I’ (ich) which realizes itself in the experience of concept and percept. The position now is as follows: If the ‘I’ (ich) – i.e. the not-‘I’ from the standpoint of the World-‘I’ – is posited (and undergoes an evolution), then there is an ‘I’, i.e. the processes in the first involutes a second, which becomes an ever higher ‘I’ of the human being.

* For the content of the term ‘root race’ (composed of seven sub-races, or cultural epochs, the existing evolutionary unit), see GA 11 and 13.
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This is the nature of the metamorphosis through which the human being passes by virtue of the changing relationship between him and the world. The outer, objective evolution of the world, whose fruits the human being received into himself through long periods of time, became a special characteristic in him: the ability to think in concepts and thus to know the world. He began to project outwards his formerly involutive process through the motives of activity. And then arose the question as to the possibility of freedom, of self-determination in the ‘I’ (ich).

In the metamorphosis described here three of the categories of development we are considering are active: evolution, human being, consciousness. Fundamentally speaking, this triad is the same as that which underlies Hegel’s science of logic (the logic of development, we could say): Being – Becoming – Not-being. All that we have done is to lend the Hegelian triad a character that is more suited to the elaboration of universal and not merely logical conceptions of evolution. This triad – it is very important for us to understand this – forms the central member (Glied) of the triune human being consisting of body, soul and spirit (Fig. 3). His evolution proceeds in two stages: Firstly, the world-encompassing essential spiritual Being who rules as the creative principle raises, on the basis of the body (which is threefold), the human soul up to that level where the principle that is external to it and by which it is determined – the processes of nature, of revelation, the imaginations of group-consciousness – attain their culmination. In the second stage the human being develops, through the process whereby the soul is structured as a tri-unity of feelings, thoughts and expressions of will, a spirit with the capacity to determine (Ger. condition) itself. He emerges as thinking ‘I’-consciousness and as a lower, everyday, waking ‘I’ (ich). Then the World-principle begins to enter (cross over into) the human being: into his soul, his spirit, his ‘I’ emerges as thinking ‘I’- consciousness.

The ‘system’ character of what is shown in the Figure becomes apparent when we project it onto the evolution of the world. It consists, as we know, of seven aeons. In the course of the first three there was formed – and there-after developed – the triune body, not only of man but

also of the world; and man was a macrocosmic entity. Beginning with the earthly (fourth) aeon, the human body underwent a development corresponding to the individual ‘I’, and therefore separated itself from the world with respect to a number of characteristics. The human being developed the triune soul within the triune body. But already in the earthly aeon the human being is overshadowed from above by the triune spirit, as the permanently cosmic aspect of his triune body: Spirit-man, Life-spirit and Spirit-self or, as they are called in the old esotericism, Atma, Buddhi, Manas. In the course of the three future aeons the human being comes into possession of these as an individual. In order to establish a connection with them, it is necessary for him to develop an individual, higher ‘I’ in the earthly aeon, and this means: to become a free individuality, to be able to set oneself moral goals which can be involuted by the universe as a whole. Understood in this sense, the human being is the central system-object of our evolutionary cycle and thus the measure of all things. He has been born out of the unity of the world. It was his development which predetermined the individualizing and therefore differentiating activity of the nature-process, which extends to the soul-organism of man. Having come to life in the soul and, to some degree, also in the spirit of the human being, nature rose to a higher level, came into contradiction with itself and served as a basis for the emergence of the dualism between the world and the ‘I’ in man. In the future these opposite parts of a unitary whole will be reunited thanks to the fact that the human being in his individual spirit takes possession of the species-nature of humanity, a part of which he once was, and becomes a species in his own right, identifies with his archetype, the ‘ur’-phenomenon, brings to expression his ‘world-idea’, which is ‘the free spirit’ and becomes one with it. The overall picture of the system ‘man’ which we arrive at in this case, is represented in Figure 4.

As a system the human being has a multiplicity of sub-systems. All the processes within them bear, by virtue of the basic law of the system as a whole, the character of threefold metamorphoses. In the process of becoming, the threefold principle of lemniscatory metamorphoses grows to a sevenfoldness, returning to threefoldness again, and from thence to unity.

2. The Three Stages of the Metamorphosis of Consciousness

If one is trying to understand the structure, existence and development of the world, its spheres and kingdoms and finally the role of the human being within it, then one must bear in mind that the laws at work in the world on a macro-level come to expression on all levels of being, without exception. For this reason, the higher planes of existence, metamorphosing themselves, are projected onto the lower. This is summed up in the word of the ancients: As above, so below.

In our Foreword we touched upon the theme of the three metamorphoses of man as a species. The most important aspect of these for us is the way in which cosmic structural principles appear in the laws at work in human consciousness. We will not dwell here on the first metamorphosis, as a result of which man developed into a being with an upright gait. It is enough to recall that through this the conditions were created for the development of man into a thinking being. Also in his further development everything was kept in movement through the power of the metamorphoses, of qualitative transformations. An especially important one came to the fore through the birth of Greek philosophy.

Materialistic science tries to demonstrate the existence of reflective thinking in the distant past, in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, of ancient Egypt and America, but in so doing, it ignores the obvious fact, reflected in many cultural monuments, that the thinking of the men at that time had a mythological picture quality and shows signs of being determined by the world of Imagination. Their mythologies did not arise on the basis of a naïve deification of nature prompted by fear of its manifestations. They were created by the initiated priests and fulfilled the role of a remarkable ‘gnoseology’, which was adapted to the state of consciousness of the mass of ordinary people. This consciousness had the character of perception and lived in the process of self-identification with the mythological pictures; it was nourished by semi-clairvoyant supersensible visions and projected these onto the plane of earthly experience.

If we go five or six millennia back into the past, we find the consciousness of the human beings there filled for the most part with supersensible experiences. The world of sense reality presented itself to man as though in a fog, in the shape of a dream which was condensed out of what was perceived supersensibly. For this reason the individual human being was helpless in all life-situations and needed the continuous firm guidance of those who were in advance of their time. The human being of antiquity came to know of himself largely by indirect means, through the group-life of the community to which he belonged. For him this served, so to speak, as a mirror of self-knowledge. He perceived all the phenomena of the surrounding world as a direct consequence of events occurring in the supersensible world. His consciousness was truly perceptive, as he saw supersensibly the essential being of things. Through his identification with this, he experienced each phenomenon as a part of some higher totality. Such was this remarkable ‘monism of life’ of men in ancient times.

The force that separated the individual from the group lay in the changes that took place in the world of his perceptions. The perceptions began to assume an ever more sensible character and their supersensible part faded increasingly. This process went hand in hand with a closer union of the physical body with the ether and astral bodies. This meant that in the human being a strengthening of the involutive process was taking place. He began to take in through his sense-organs the world given to him in perceptions, but on the other hand concepts, as shadows of intelligible beings, began to arise in his inner being as a counterpart to the percepts. Through connecting the one with the other, the human being began to develop a soul-life of his own. He could now have knowledge of his earlier visions; their supersensible being now turned into the mythological content which he was able to connect with his experience of sense-perception, thereby acquiring knowledge of its essential content. This was the foundation of Greek culture. The human being of that time who saw, let us say, a running brook knew the name of its elementary divinity, but did not himself see this being.

For this reason a huge Pantheon of Gods, demigods and nature-spirits built up in antiquity. These are direct forerunners of the subsequent ‘Pantheon’ of categories and concepts of philosophy, which in their essential nature are all real and are only devoid of being in their manifestation to reflective thinking. Where in later times people strove to preserve, at least in part, their essential ‘being-nature’, there arose the concepts of mysticism, of occultism, of alchemy, of the magic of numbers and also the remarkable form of artistic representation – icon paintings.

The human being undergoes a colossal metamorphosis in this process of reorientation of the factors of development. And if one learns to grasp the meaning of cultural history these evolutionary changes be- come clearly visible. It is therefore worth comparing, for example, the heroes of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ with the participants in the Socratic dialogues, looking particularly at the way they relate to each other, and it becomes clear at once that we have to do with two completely different types of human being.*  Even amongst the pupils of Socrates the differences in their way of thinking (not the extent of their knowledge) are so pronounced that in our time they could be compared to the difference between young people and adults.

* Odysseus is clever, but he is archetypal.
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Let us consider a telling example of this. In the dialogue ‘The Symposium’ we are shown how Socrates is trying (as he always does) to awaken in his pupils conceptual thinking, to which, as he well foresees, the future of the world belongs. He urges them to elaborate the concept of love. But the questions asked by Socrates to point the way, are answered in the language of mythology. His pupils are not able to think through the questions and transform them into concepts, and they use them as inner representations based on sense-perception. Thus Phaidros says with enthusiasm to Socrates that “Eros is a mighty God ... especially because of his origin. Since it is an honourable thing, that he is one of the oldest Gods”. In these words one hears, unquestionably, a striving to develop conceptual judgements, which was not yet the case in the epoch of Homer and still less before him, at a time when the myths were related to the people as, quite simply, a preparation for cultic rituals. In the words of Phaidros an individual element drawn from his own life-experience, and not fixed in one direction, is present. This appears still more strongly in Pausanias, who reasons as follows: “For if there were only one Eros, it would be a wonderful thing. But there is not only one ... without Eros [there would be] no Aphrodite”; and then there is a lower, “base” Eros. – This is without question already the beginning of dialectics and philosophical ethics. In the spirit of the latter, Agathon says: “Eros ... is the happiest among them [the Gods], because he is the most beautiful and the best” etc.

Thus the Greeks give direct evidence of the beginning of the intellectualizing of their Divinely-imbued pictorial thinking. Already here we find indications of the approaching, scientific thinking with its methods of classification, its knowledge of objects in their development, its use of contradiction etc. But in these Greeks we do not, as yet, find concepts. Only few know how to operate with them. One of them is Socrates himself. For pedagogical reasons he is forced to subordinate himself to his pupils’ way of thinking, but his questions have a philosophical character: “Is the being of Eros such that he is the love experienced by someone (in particular) or by no-one? ... and does [love] desire and love what it desires and loves, when it has this, or when it does not have it? ... Does it not merely appear to be so, but is it not necessarily the case that the subject of desire desires what it is in need of, and does not desire when it is not in need?” The qualitative transition from one type of culture to another which took place in ancient Greece flowed into the stream of soul-spiritual phylogenesis, and also into the forces of biological inheritance of the greater part of humanity. But to begin with, a kind of evolutionary threshold was created. In the case of those who crossed, overcame it, even the organic structures of the body changed, and those who were unable to overcome it or, on account of a particular connection with the old, did not wish to do so, were forced to remain behind, this coming to expression subsequently in the differences between the cultures of the various peoples. These differences are of many kinds and one must be able to understand what in them serves progress and what is atavistic. In our time we tend, for example, to reproach materialism and material culture for having severed itself from the spirit, and to point to the spirituality of the Eastern or ancient cultures. But it is materialism which has led the human being to the threshold of yet another – the latest – metamorphosis. The spiritualism of the East is an epoch that has already been passed through by Europe, which is moving in the direction of a qualitatively different spirituality.

The better to understand the nature of this ancient threshold, let us imagine three levels of world-development. On the lowest of these the sphere of sense-perceptions is consolidated. On the uppermost level the transformation takes place of the imaginative world, the world of intelligible beings, the world of meta-history in correspondence with the new tasks of development. Between the lowest and the highest level lies the path of the development of human self-consciousness, of the ‘I’ (see Fig. 5). On this path the human being is concerned with the connection between sense-perceptions and their ideal counterparts. In this way is woven the initial reality of the individual human ‘I’. Hovering cloud-like above the human being is the world of cosmic intelligence and from it there stream into his head the ideas of all the things perceived by man in the sense-world. The stream flows with the necessity of a natural law to the degree that individualized percepts come into being. They are themselves also (the) percepts. The Greek philosopher did not, as yet, reflect them as we do. He wove what was for him a single unitary reality out of two kinds of perceptions (if we take perceptions as objects – i.e. as percepts – and not as processes). They remained for him products of the world-unity, and for this reason the Greek was not yet troubled by the philosophical problem of dualism which has occupied us so much since the time of Descartes. As regards monism, an awareness of this as a problem of philosophy arose already at that time thanks to Aristotle. If we are not mistaken, Nikolai Losky is the only philosopher who succeeded in identifying the monistic traits in the Aristotelian system. In his ‘Metaphysics’ – so Losky says – Aristotle is reflecting upon the nature of two principles: force (matter) and form, whose inseparable unity reveals the real and essential being. For Aristotle the forms can be both abstract concepts and concrete-ideal principles, one of which is God himself. “The force that is guided by this form is a living Being, who strives towards the realization of a multiplicity of goals, which are only attainable in the process of development.”95) The abstract forms are subordinate to concrete-ideal forms: the substances, which are concrete spirit “with the infinite wealth of content of existence”. For Aristotle, so Losky continues, God stands at the summit of all forms, and “the world as a living totality, strives towards this highest form. In its striving towards this infinitely lofty goal and on the way to it, through a series of mediatory stages, the world realizes within itself ever more forms and ever higher ones, which raise it onto the level of steadily-growing spirituality. The process is such that matter (force) assumes above all the forms of elementary substances: earth, water, air, fire. At a further stage it incorporates into itself – without leaving these forms behind, but as a completion of them and on the foundation which they provide – higher forms: plants, animals, the human being. In this way the human being, for example, still consists of those original elements (alchemical elements - G.A.B.): earth, water etc.; but the higher spiritual goals make the entire bodily structure subordinate to them in its activity, in such a way that the material, earthly etc. qualities (emphasis G.A.B.) are overcome to a considerable degree and withdraw into the background.”96) This world-picture created by Aristotle, so Losky concludes, “almost deserves to be called monism, because in it from beginning to end every real being is described as an indivisible unity of force and the spiritual order of its activity”.97) It is the monism of concrete ideal-realism, “i.e. of a system which finds within the sphere of ideal (spiritual) being not merely abstract ideas, rules, laws etc., but also ... substances ...”.98)

In this way the civilized world in the form of its most outstanding representatives Socrates, Plato and Aristotle recognized in a brief period lasting no more than a century that it was confronting an entirely new reality in which the task was to find the earlier, existential unity of the world and provide it with a solid, rational foundation, by developing the activity of concepts and thoughts next to that of perception, by finding conceptual connections between the percepts and, in addition to this, rising to the sphere of pure thinking. Aristotle was probably the first to succeed in crossing the evolutionary threshold we have described (i.e. undergoing metamorphosis). And the first thing that he did on the other side of the threshold was to seek the earlier (in reality eternal) foundations of being in their new form. He created a system of philosophy whose monism still has features of the ancient esotericism, but he also created the science of logic. His system nourished the philosophy of the intellect for millennia, until Rudolf Steiner extended its limits, developed in brilliant fashion the teaching of pure epistemological monism, which serves the human being as an instrument for the crossing of a further evolutionary threshold that has arisen in the last 100-150 years, and on the other side of which freedom awaits us. Between the first and this last threshold European humanity crossed another threshold which, unfortunately, is underestimated and falsely interpreted in the history of philosophy. We refer to the period of Scholasticism. Ultimately, as in the case of the world-view of Goethe, it has only become possible thanks to Rudolf Steiner to find a relation to this remarkable phenomenon of the spirit, that corresponds to its role in the spiritual development of mankind. The metamorphosis of consciousness which the human being started to undergo at that time opened wide the gates to that development of thought which came to expression in the idealism of the 19th century and, in the direction that leads from Goethe to Steiner, engendered the problem of ‘judgement in beholding’.

The thinking of the Scholastics, above all Thomas Aquinas, should be seen against the background of a mighty esoteric panorama on which a purely spiritual battle is waged for the Christianizing of the present cultural epoch. The interpretation given to this battle by the Catholic Church in no way reflects its true nature. As a philosopher Thomas Aquinas continually refers back to Aristotle. Parallel to this, Plato’s doctrine of the intelligible beings finds a grand continuation in keeping with its esoteric character. These teachings appear in Thomas Aquinas’ work in connection with the logic and the metaphysics of Aristotle. He achieved, in truth, the synthesis of these two great philosophical directions, and established thereby the principle of monistic ideal-realism, the basis upon which Rudolf Steiner erected his epistemology and methodology.

At the time of Thomas Aquinas the teaching of Aristotle, as it was undergoing its remarkable adaptation in the world of Arabian learning, appeared in Spain. In 10th-12th century Spain, Arabian sages, pupils of Averroes, but also he himself, were teaching that the cosmos is filled with the universally ruling intelligence. When a human being is born, a drop of it flows into his head and fills his body; but when he dies, the ‘drop’ returns to its general ‘reservoir’ in the universe. It follows from this that the human being possesses no personal immortality.

These views concerning immortality were vigorously opposed by the Dominican Scholastics, who insisted that the human being is personally immortal, and that the teaching of Averroes was therefore a heresy (see GA 237). This quarrel of the Scholastics with the teaching of Averroes is full of deep significance. The further course of European civilization depended on its outcome. And it would have unfolded less tragically if the teaching of Thomas Aquinas had remained an achievement of philosophy and had not been canonized by the Church. Then modern civilization would not have suffered from an almost ‘chronic’ inability to understand Anthroposophy.

The crux of the matter lies in the fact that the personal immortality of which the Scholastics spoke has been, so Rudolf Steiner explains, “a truth only since the consciousness-soul slowly and gradually entered humanity” (ibid.). But this highest element of the soul became a common heritage of mankind because, from the 9th and 10th centuries onward, the substance of the cosmic intelligence began to descend to human beings and to become within them “individual human cognition” (ibid.).

Aristotle lived in an epoch when intelligence worked in exactly the way described by Averroes – i.e. it was a group-intelligence. But those who, already at that time, had advanced to the stage of conceptual thinking began to experience within themselves the individual manifestation of the cosmic intelligence. Aristotle was undoubtedly one of these, despite the fact that he regarded the intelligence in himself as a manifestation of the pan-intelligence. This did not prevent him, however, from speaking of the existence of the soul after death. But personal immortality as the Greeks understood it, was something ephemeral compared to the way it was viewed later, beginning in the period of the Scholastics. The circle of those who developed the Scholastic teaching formed the vanguard of the coming epoch of the consciousness- soul. They ‘involuted’ the cosmic intelligence, and now that it is actually in the possession of the individual human spirit (this process is still under way), it endows the (human) subject with the strength to become a rightful member within the personified structure of the world. Thus one attains true immortality, which throws new light also on the problem of the creation of the soul.

The view of Averroes regarding the cosmic intelligence corresponded to the stage of group-consciousness. In this case, the human being, even if he has begun to think in concepts, does not actually think this opinion through, but he still perceives it, rather, as something that comes to him from above. Something higher is thinking in him (but inspirations can also have a sinister character). If one thinks in this way it is sufficient to create in the soul a ‘field of tension’ of the intellect and the ideas will stream in; one does not need to develop them oneself. Thomas Aquinas spoke of them as ideas ‘before the things’. Kant defined them as existing a priori. The idea of faith (belief) is an idea a priori and is entirely positive, but only if it is put forward in connection with Christ, the God of the human ‘I’. He it is who says: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20, 29).

In the Mystery of Christ becoming Man, the higher, universal idea of the human being (Pilate: Ecce homo) united with earthly man, with the result that the intelligible world entered into an immanent connection with the individual human spirit. The ideas pressed down into the thinking human being, just as in evolution, from its beginning, they had pressed down continually into the kingdoms of nature, which were being condensed out of them. The ideas ‘in the things’ and in the human being became two parts of a single identity, which are only distinct from one another in the form in which they come to manifestation; for this reason it has become possible to come to know the ideas in the things of the world through perceiving them ideally. This fact, which signified a radical change in the constellation of man within the structure of the world as a whole, even the Scholastics tried to understand and express conceptually. For the human being it was equivalent to that threshold beyond which the epoch of intellectualism, of the bare and naked understanding, began (which was sensed very well by the opponents of the Scholastics, the nominalists).

The epoch of the consciousness-soul was approaching. The Scholastics prepared the ground for it in such a way that, even under the conditions of prevailing intellectualism, knowledge remained alive of the reality of the world of ideas, awareness of the fact that the human being, in freeing them from the things, creates a new reality in the world. But it turned out that Scholasticism became locked in behind the walls of the Church, where to this day appeal is made to the group-consciousness, to Averroes in fact. The transformation of ecclesiastical Scholasticism into a doctrine of faith assured Averroes’ victory over it throughout the world, and this became a gigantic obstacle on the path to the true spiritual emancipation of the personality, on the path of the cosmic fact of the descent of the Pan-Sophia into the individual ‘I’ of the human being, and thus on the path to an understanding of the Christ impulse.

In this process, Lucifer was at work. And this led, initially within the Church, to a counter-blow of Ahrimanic forces, stretching from Roscelin (11th century) via Occam (14th century) to Guarez (end of 16th century); thereafter all the conditions were given for the appearance of materialism and positivism. What the nominalists had not brought to a conclusion was completed by Leibniz, Descartes and others, who fought against Scholasticism in its – to express it in modern terms – ecclesiastical “packaging”.

Within the stream of nominalism-positivism the question as to personal immortality was quite simply dropped. Through the working of Ahrimanic forces the cosmic intelligence in man came into a perilous situation. It had descended, in order then to ascend anew into spiritual heights and draw the human being upwards with it. By uniting it with the earth in the form of abstract reason, Ahriman strives to gain it for himself and drag it down into the anti-world of sub-natural forces. Since the end of Kali-Yuga the human being has been faced with the task of finding a relation to intelligence in ideal perception, and for this certain transformations in soul, spirit and body are necessary. But the return to a ‘beholding’ of the thought-beings must occur on a purely individual basis. Rudolf Steiner made the crossing of this threshold possible for culture and civilization as a whole (Fig. 5).

It has thus become clear for us that for a period of around three millennia a continuous forming of the individual human consciousness, of self-consciousness, has been taking place. It represents a kind of spiritual birth, as a result of which the human ‘I’-spirit acquires the character of wholeness or totality. Its birth is the outcome of three metamorphoses, through which virtually everything is conditioned which happens to mankind on a historical, spiritual, social, political and other levels. All of this has its ‘ur’-phenomenal source in these metamorphoses, the beginning of its causal connections.

The cultural milieu unquestionably works back upon the human being, but here it is crucial to understand that the human being in his reciprocal relation with his environment has to do with his own activity and its fruits – that is to say, his development takes on a self-determining (conditioning) character and follows the law of the ‘type’ of world-evolution: in the interplay of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing.

Rudolf Steiner thought through with great thoroughness this problem of the self-determination of the spirit (the motive of activity). He showed that the crux of the matter lies in the way we answer the fundamental epistemological question: Can thinking consciousness be self- determining? The answer to this question must be sought with the combined forces of philosophy and psychology, calling in at a certain stage the results of supersensible cognition – i.e. out of the totality of human knowledge and being.

There exists an axiom that has long been accepted, according to which the limits of logic are determined by the formal rules of thinking. In the opinion of Kant logic owes its success to the fact that “it has the right, indeed the obligation, to abstract from all the objects of cognition and the differences between them”.99) But neither Kant nor Hegel nor all the other philosophers noticed – nor did they wish to notice – that the forms of the understanding can themselves change. And if, as Kant maintains, logic since the age of Aristotle has taken neither a step for- wards nor a step backwards, then it does not follow from this at all that this will always be the case. Only the logic of abstract thinking remains unchanged, but if thinking changes then logic must unavoidably change also.

However, this does not mean in any way that a blurring of the boundaries of the sciences will immediately follow, which, as Kant rightly observes, is “not a growth but a distortion of the sciences”.100) But one must distinguish between a mixing-up of the sciences and their mutual fructification. When quantum mechanics and relativity theory wish to enter into a symbiosis with eastern philosophy, then this amounts to a blurring of the boundaries of the sciences.*  But if Eduard von Hartmann and Schopenhauer turn their attention to the philosophy of the unconscious and thereby infringe the limits of the logic laid down by Kant, then we have to do with a legitimate extension of scientific inquiry. Equally justified scientifically is Losky’s demonstration of the intuitive nature of thinking.

* Indian (Hindu) philosophy is esoteric through and through; it is based on the perception of the ideas and is not in the slightest degree developed by way of logic. It was only later that the attempt was made to imbue it with logic.
________

Nor can we speak of a blurring of the limits of science if we recognize that the human being is an ‘integral part of the world’, and ask: And what sort of world is it? – A material world, a ‘variation’-world, or a unitary world in its sensible-supersensible reality?

3. The Christology of Dialectics

The cultural-historical process crowned the objective evolution of the human being through the emergence of that form of the individual spirit which is founded upon conceptual thinking. In it there is a repetition of the macro-laws governing the natural and then soul-spiritual phylogenesis of the past, in the laws of logic. The abstract nature of logic is employed by the ontogenesis of self-consciousness, which, in each of its phases, creates a synthesis of the elements of earlier spiritual phylogenesis with the elements of its future conditions. Thus functions, and therefore exists, a momentary point of the lower ‘I’ when it forms inner representations and thinks dialectically.

The macrocosmic phylogenesis of the human being has as its foundation the Divine consciousness, in which aspects (Ger. Momente) of the past, present and future are found simultaneously in development and in the eternal, i.e. they merge together in a higher unity. In the human being this sphere remains in the unconscious. It is possible to penetrate this sphere if, in the first place, one extends the realm of memories and advances with one’s self-consciousness to where, in past conditions of the world, memory arose or the objective preconditions for its emergence were first created. And the further we reach back into our own past, which is also the past of the world, the more our future opens up. Does this mean that the future is predetermined? From the phylogenetic point of view, yes. In the sphere of the eternal (the enduring), the future conditions of the world exist together with the past (conditions). But we would emphasize yet again that this occurs only in the Divine Consciousness, which consists of the totality of higher ‘I’- beings. In the process of development this consciousness gives rise creatively to different conditions of life and of form. And at a certain point in time it is the task of the human being to intervene himself creatively in the process of spiritual ontogenesis. But given that this process in its creative potential represents a new element in the evolutionary cycle, how could that which it has brought into being be predetermined in the world-plan?

In Anthroposophy the teaching of evolution, which extends across our entire evolutionary cycle, opens up to the human being his unconscious part, and he gains knowledge of the conditions and different aspects of his free development within the sphere of the conditioning (power) which, in the final analysis, is simply God Himself. Within the bosom of the Divine it is preordained that the human being should become a free spirit. And if this appears to someone to be a restriction on his freedom, it would indicate that nominalism has become the dominant factor in his world-view.

Thus the human being is accompanied continually by his past. It strives to change itself, to metamorphose itself into the future, above all on the stage of thinking consciousness, thanks to which the human being becomes a creator of the future. And the first thing that stands at his disposal in this creative activity is the dialectical autonomous movement (Selbstbewegung) of thought. If we take it up – and this we can only do through higher spiritual activity – we are able to experience how the world-process comes to completion and in so doing reaches us in its mirrored form.

Let us try to clarify what has been said with the help of a diagram (Fig. 6). We are using the symbol of a chalice. At its boundary on the left, the descent of the ‘I’ into matter takes place, with the result that abstract thinking arises. This is the lowest point of the descent, beyond which thinking itself is subject to metamorphosis into ‘beholding’ (Anschauen), and then begins the ascent of the ‘I’.

When we reflect, we are located at a point in the present; in it can be mirrored the entire content of the world that has become (come into being). This is how the theses of the dialectical triads come to us. If they are to move forward into the future they must be superseded (aufgehoben) – i.e. not abolished, but metamorphosed. In this sense the future is always negating the past. Out of their collision arises the factor (Ger. ‘Moment’) of the present: synthesis, judgement, which becomes for the thesis the form of its existence in the next ‘Moment’ of the future; the thesis then shifts one step further into the future – i.e. also raises itself above the present.

We have already mentioned that in the past a pictorial group- consciousness preceded the (thinking) reflections. In the future, consciousness will again become pictorial, but on an entirely individual basis; it will become ideal perception. In very ancient times the human being beheld supersensible reality imaginatively; but he was not able to relate it to himself; in the future he will attain to individualized imaginations. In all processes of this kind a decisive role will be played by the higher ‘I’ in the human being.

In the past the connection of what-has-become with its future was brought about through the mediation of higher beings (in nature-processes it is still so today). The human being was an inseparable, integral part of the whole, comparable to the single organ within the total organism. From the Earthly aeon onwards, the higher ‘I’ of the human being began to play a steadily increasing role in this mediation process (still prior to its individual incarnation in the human being). This early activity of the higher ‘I’ was observed supersensibly by the human being, but he was unable to establish a personal relation to it; but the activity reaches back to the world-unity, in which past, present and future merge into one.

The human being did not have the feeling (he did not yet possess thoughts) that the world was somehow divided. Only when he had begun to experience his individual ‘I’ – a lesser reflection of the higher ‘I’ – did the human being discover that the world as a given reality reveals itself to him in sense-perceptions and that its ideal being is revealed in the concept. A diagram will clarify what we have said:

In order to represent the totality in a picture we have used the form of a circle. At its uppermost point (A) we imagine the position at the very beginning, when in the realm of the trans-temporal the first revelation of our evolutionary cycle takes place. This position is universal; potentially it contains within itself like a seed everything that can emerge and develop in our cycle. This cycle therefore exists, in one sense, continually as a whole, while in the other sense it develops, also in space and time, realizes itself in the manifoldness of living beings, forms of existence.

This entire phenomenology of life, of form and of consciousness is conditioned by the macro-principle of the evolutionary cycle. The latter, by transforming and differentiating itself in a variety of ways, becomes the laws of nature, and in human consciousness it finally returns to itself as the principle of pure thought. In this sense the human being shows himself to be the antipode of the Absolute: the image of God. He finds himself at a point on the world circle that is diametrically opposite to Him, and this is also the lowest point in evolution (B). The particular feature of this constellation consists in the fact that the human being within it can attain knowledge of the full universality and the cosmic character of being, only in its reflected form and via the mediation of the senses, as opposed to its supersensible immediacy. But thinking consciousness is immanent to this mediation (‘mediacy’ as opposed to ‘immediacy’), and immanent to both is the immediacy of the world-whole. For this reason Losky says that we perceive things as they are in reality. This “in reality” shows up its dark areas, of course: the things that are unknown; this is due to the narrowness of the human perspective, which has nothing to do with the limits of knowledge. Behind these supposed limits is concealed the reality of thinking and perception, in the form of a twofold creative stream of forces which flow towards one another. The stream that is active in our perceptions moves from the past into the future. In Anthroposophy it is described as the physical-etheric stream. The second consists of astral forces and moves from the future into the past. Through the complicated interplay of the two streams the entire manifoldness of the forms of the phenomenal world arises. Their highest fruits, the fruits of the ‘I’, will eventually be carried by both streams into eternity, within which the streams will reunite (point C, Fig. 7), and the countenance of eternity, of the absolute, will therefore be transformed: it will raise itself to a higher level.

This is the general principle of world development. Knowledge of it is of crucial importance, since it is an archetypal phenomenon whose working comes to expression in reflective thinking, in dialectic. Despite their seeming abstractness and poverty of content they are the expression, at the final limit of otherness-of-being (Anderssein), of the laws of world-being. For this reason philosophy, if it is not to bring about its own impoverishment, must, in the last resort, be religious. And religious philosophy is true esotericism. We will have ample opportunity to convince ourselves of the truth of this fact.

Concerning the beginning of the world, and its essential nature, one can speak in a way that is full of content and of great value for the ‘I’, if one operates with the categories of the absolute, of that which is (das Seiende), of being (Sein) etc. But to insist on this method of cognition as the only one possible is a mark of one-sidedness. Another one-sidedness, similar to this one, is the assertion that Faith alone has the right to speak of the Divine. Anthroposophy has a method of its own, which is more fruitful and is not one-sided. And the material of research in Anthroposophy is richer than that in other world-views. All this together enables it to point to the source of the doctrine of evolution in the first revelation of the triune Logos. According to the indications of Rudolf Steiner, the three Hypostases of the Logos show themselves, at the beginning of our evolutionary cycle, in the following form:

      1st Logos: Revealer
      2nd Logos: Revelation, Activity
      3rd Logos: Revealed mirror-reflection.

                  (B. 67/68, p.20)

These are the Father, the Son (the Word) and the Holy Spirit. They are on so exalted a plane, Rudolf Steiner continues, that “compared to anything we speak of in the ordinary sense as revealed or perceptible, we must call them occult. So they are three occult beings. They must first be revealed. There are only three, and so they can only be revealed to one another:

      The Father reveals Himself to the Word,
      The Word reveals Itself to the Holy Spirit,
      The Holy Spirit reveals Itself back to the Father.

                       (ibid.)

Such is the beginning and the highest fundamental principle of the existence and the becoming of our cycle of evolution. All the principles which follow and stand below this (laws) – earlier, later, higher, lower etc. – flow from it and are conditioned by it. The totality of concepts accessible to us is inadequate to express the inner nature of the Divine Trinity. Outwardly, however, it reveals itself in such a way that the Father principle posits what we call evolution, which moves from the past into the future, where ‘the body of the world’ comes into being. The higher, unitary consciousness moves here via the unconscious to the multiplicity of modes of consciousness and conscious beings in the world of revelation. The substance of moving consciousness is the physical (not the material, which represents only one of the forms of the physical). It is ‘being’, and as a principle is devoid of all modes and determinations; it is indeed the concept most lacking in content. The Son Principle, which is revelation itself (“And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me” – John 12, 45) calls forth the activity in the Fatherly substance, its becoming. It is life, the ether principle of the world, and He bears it into every moment of becoming. This life works once in evolution (“I and my Father are one” – John 10, 30), and a second time from above, i.e. from the trans-temporal (“I am the bread of life .... I am the living bread which came down from heaven” – John 6; 35, 51). Through the uniting of the substance with the life, of the physical with the etheric, the phenomena arise. The idea which, in them, acquires its form, pervades them as the totality of immanent natural laws. As it were from the other side, out of the future, which in this sense exists in the trans-temporal consciousness as the totality of the higher intelligible beings – the Divine Hierarchies – whose unity as an ‘I’ of a yet higher order is personified in the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, the force of individualization enters the phenomena in their process of becoming. This is the power of the Holy Spirit, which brings back to the Father the highest plan of the creation. Out of all that has been created, only pure ‘I’- beings can ascend to the Father.

In order to understand the creative character of natural development, one can imagine a sculptor who is working not with a dead block of marble, but with a mass of living material. It would be developing ac- cording to its own laws, but he would imbue it with the stamp of his own artistic plan. Something very similar to this takes place in the evolution of the world. Here, the Fatherly ‘material’ and the sculptor – the Holy Spirit – approach the present moment from different sides. Thus the force of the highest individual principle weaves mysteriously and with varying tempo in the evolution of species.

When in the world of otherness-of-being a phenomenon finally appears which is endowed with ‘I’-consciousness, i.e. with the characteristic of a hierarchical Being, then the cosmic intelligence is personifying itself already on the other, sense-perceptible side of the world, and is doing so directly, i.e. not as a wisdom-filled (artistic) natural form, nor as a kind of psychical activity. It becomes a second entelechy in the human being. The hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, which has hitherto revealed itself to the Fatherly consciousness in natural phenomena, now assumes the character of the phenomenology of the human spirit, revealing itself now to human consciousness. Thus it is given to the human being, when he perceives the objects around him with his sense- organs, also to perceive their ideas. They are, of course, not direct manifestations of the Holy Spirit, but they are ideas mediated by the Hierarchies and the entire past evolution of the world.

When the Bible tells how God commanded Adam to give names to the created things, it is indicating the capacity of man to receive the things from two sides: through perception and through concepts. God was preparing him for this already before the Fall, the emergence of a new quality in the world He had created. Now that the human being has developed his self-consciousness, the becoming of the phenomena is influenced by a spiritual working that comes from the sense-perceptible side of the world. The human being begins to mediate with his consciousness the flow through him of two evolutionary world streams. In this case, they do not simply return to themselves – to point A, if we express it once more in the pictorial language of Fig. 7 – but they rise higher than this and create a higher unity (point C). We may therefore say with full justification that becoming in space and time has its effect upon the eternal.

The world grasped cognitively by man is qualitatively different from the world he has not taken hold of in cognition: it is enriched with concepts and with the life of ethics and aesthetics. In its movement in time, that which is position and relation in the world of the Trinity, becomes an antithesis as a driving force. Through the collision of the polarities the new arises. Otherness-of-being has to negate the natural course of things, in order to become the self-being (Selbstsein) of self-consciousness. Dialectical negation is a movement upwards – from the less to the more perfect; and at a certain level it assumes the position, in which the real, personified relation of the human being to the higher is achieved, the ability to unite with the universal consciousness.

It says in the Bible that on the sixth day of Creation “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1, 31). What is this if not the confrontation of creation and creator? The world stood before God and confronted him, and because it is God’s creation it is also his reflection. In the future the world will be reunited with God; not, however, as His mirror-image but as a realization (actualization). Something similar to this also happens in the human being. As he attained to conceptual thinking he became able to separate himself from the world-process, to reflect it within himself and evaluate it. And in the future, when he passes over from reflection to ‘beholding’, accomplishes a higher development within himself, he will unite anew with the world that is given to him in perception.

The concept of reflection has a double significance. The first remains exclusively within the sphere of the abstract, the second is opened up to us through an understanding of the triune revelation of God. The third Logos, the Holy Spirit, as it were reflects back to the Father His own creation. He does this in such a way that, like a sculptor or artist of superhuman gifts, he sets the imprint of the primal idea of the first Logos upon the substance that has been offered up on the altar of creation. The second Logos, the Son, imbues it with life, the Holy Spirit endows it with form. In this way the revelation of the Father is reflected back to him in the shape of the multiplicity of forms. This multiplicity of forms is given to man in perception. And when the perceptions ‘gaze into’ the thinking spirit of the human being, then they are reflected back in him in the form of concepts and ideas which are imprinted in them through the working of the Holy Spirit. In the process of perception it is given to the human being to gaze into the primal idea of God. This is the process of cognition. For this to be possible, it is necessary to have an ‘I’ which, by virtue of the second activity of the Son, comes to the human being from above. He gives being and life also to the individual spirit, and this is, basically speaking, what the phenomenon of the ‘I’ is. All forms of being, all the kingdoms of nature, have an ‘I’, but it works in them from higher cosmic levels. The human being alone acquired it in sense-reality; and this is why he has the gift of cognition.

The third Logos, which creates the forms of being, also ascends and descends on its various levels until it reaches the form in which it can reveal itself in a purely spiritual way. Thus arise the forms of the psychical, the soul-nature, and of thought. The only thing that it cannot give them is the substantial ‘I’. When a sculptor takes a block of marble and works upon it he imbues it with the stamp of his idea, which receives the form of an artistic work. To endow it with his own immediate ‘I’ is not possible for him (we recall the legend of Pygmalion). The life of the ‘I’ comes with the second Logos. The third Logos is the unity of the entire cosmic intelligence; it is the Pan-Intelligence of the world. When it comes into relation with the earthly plane, with the spiritual life of man, we call it Sophia – Divine universal Wisdom.

In its orientation towards the Father principle the third Logos engenders a form of being of the ‘I’ that is without substance and can do no more than reflect the reality of the spirit which descends to it. This is the ‘heaven’ of the lower ‘I’. Its ‘earth’ is the world of perceptions. And into this constellation of the human being the macrocosmic ‘I’ itself once descended – the Son of God. In His unity with the Father the impulses had once been given to the gigantic evolution which had resulted in the body and the living soul of Jesus of Nazareth. And His unity with the Holy Spirit was needed, so that the substantial ‘I’ could enter this body. This leaves us with no choice but to acknowledge that the Son is of like nature with the Father and, equally, with the Holy Spirit.

There is an Apocryphal Gospel according to which the voice that sounded at the Baptism in the Jordan said: “This is my beloved Son, now I have given birth to Him.” But the one who gave birth was the Holy Spirit. The angel says to the doubting Joseph concerning his wife Mary: “... that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” (Matth. 1, 20). We know that, for one single time in the whole evolution of the world, the entire fullness of the Divine plan as it was revealed to the Son before the beginning of the world, descended then to the earthly plane. And when the Resurrection of Christ had taken place, the final stage of our evolutionary cycle was reached – no longer in the world of the Great Pralaya, nor in eternity, nor in the trans-temporal realm, but in the realm of otherness-of-being, albeit in a single, cosmic-earthly all-encompassing act, and the Holy Spirit reflected back to the Father the fullness of this revelation, which had been opened up to Him, the Spirit, through the Son at the beginning of the world. At some time every human being experiences what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. But first the basis is laid in the human being for so high an ascent. In time and space the hierarchy of the phenomena arises. As He follows it backwards into the past, the Holy Spirit reaches the Father in eternity and reflects back to him the character of otherness-of-being. In the realm of otherness-of-being there takes place, by virtue of immanent laws, an evolution of species. As the formative influence streams out of the future, it is not possible for what has become to foresee the future fully and entirely. For example, one cannot say that the amphibia of today will one day, after a series of metamorphoses, grow similar to today’s mammals. Evolution is a creative process which unfolds on the basis of its immanent laws and also of the individualizing force of the spirit. All the beings, all the phenomena of the world, reveal in their forms the wisdom of the spirit, the idea that has determined them as form and as being. But they represent an imperfect embodiment of the idea, and therefore Pan-Sophia negates them. Thus an antithesis always arises between what has become and what is in a process of becoming. The forms negate the forms, existence negates existence. Their reconciliation occurs through the metamorphosis of the less perfect to the more perfect. This metamorphosis is the life of the ‘I’.

4. The Three Logoi and the Beginning of the World

The phylogenesis of thinking consciousness contains a deep contradiction within itself. It consists in the following: The conscious human being occupies the highest position in the hierarchical order of the kingdoms of nature, but the activity of thinking leads to the death of nature in him; he descends to its lowest, mineral level. In fact a mysterious process takes place in human consciousness, of movement up- wards on a descending scale. One cannot solve this riddle without turning to the highest foundations of the world.

In religious tradition it was customary not to characterize the Holy Trinity, but to give it names of a pictorial nature in order to point to the character of the relationships in which the human being stands towards it. We, too, would pursue our research in the spirit of this tradition.

In a lecture of Rudolf Steiner’s one can read the following: “If we are speaking of a threefoldness of the soul we must say Father, Mother and Son: Osiris, Isis, Horus. If we are speaking of a threefoldness of the spirit, we must speak of Father, Word and Holy Spirit” (B. 69/70, p.25). This is the reason why the human spirit is threefold – also in its conceptual manifestation, dialectics. Its genesis is also threefold.

The most perfect expression of the impulses of the Father and the Holy Spirit which come towards each other in evolution is the mineral, the crystal – the most perfect form in nature, able to exert an aesthetic influence on the human soul thanks to its play of light and colour. The thinking spirit also strives for such a form, through mineralizing its bearer. The problem of the life of the spirit is resolved through the second hypostasis. This is why the central question of epistemology, but also of the theory of mirror-reflection – namely the question of the autonomous movement of the dialectical triads – cannot be resolved without Christology. These questions are, in addition, a structural component of the evolutionary teaching as illumined by Anthroposophy. At the present stage of development it is given to us in contemplation in thought, to reach back to our primal origin and come to knowledge of the threefold revelation of the absolute, of the absolute unity which contains no object, by which, as John the Evangelist writes, “all things were made”. It is also the source of all true knowledge, which has to do with reality, with being. But its manifestations in being and in cognition are not equal in significance. Rudolf Steiner says that it is customary in the philosophical and (in the Platonic sense) theosophical traditions to describe that which penetrates into the realm of the knowable as spirit, in the sense that “all consciousness of the world.... also lives in the human being, in abstract thinking. Within himself the human being calls it ‘spirit’; insofar as it works outside in creative nature, he calls it ‘Holy Spirit’” (GA 93a, 12.10.1905). That which works in the sub (or super) conscious life of the soul, stands behind all that is living, and works in our speech, is grasped by means of the concept of the word, and through the name of Christ. “And that which belongs both to nature, as something at first unknown to us, and to that portion of our own being which is akin to nature, this the human spirit has always referred to .... as the Father-principle” (GA 131, 5.10.1911).

All this stands thus before the human being at the present stage of his development, when he possesses the faculty of cognition. His cognition is the fruit of development. Development proceeds, on the one hand, from unity, whose primal being is the relation between the Father and the Son. Rudolf Steiner says that, in order to understand the activity of that which gives the impulse to revelation, we need to imagine a Being who strives to form his mirror-reflection similar to himself, down as far as the condition of life (Round). In other words, we must conceive a total, cosmic consciousness which has the wish to reflect itself, in the manner of a sacrifice, in the condition of life.

Let us imagine, so Rudolf Steiner continues, that a Being of some kind gives up his existence, his life, to his mirror-image; then we would have an idea of what the first sacrifice means (B. 78, p.31). This is exactly what the First Logos does, and in so doing he ‘impairs’ the unity. He reveals himself as the universal power, which consists in the fact “that the Father reveals himself to the Word. This is referred to as the First Creation ...” (B. 67/68, p.21). The Greeks called it ‘chaos’. We have to do here with the creation out of nothing. Thus it is the beginning of all beginnings. In the course of further development, creation out of nothing can no longer be a primal act. It arises on the basis of what has already been called into being, and on two levels: as evolution and involution. Thus it is conditioned by the original relation of the first to the second Logos, which can be characterized as follows: “The first Logos begins by mirroring itself back, then it gives its own life to the mirror-image. While in the first Logos everything is directed outwards, existence works outwards, the second Logos has, firstly, the existence it has received and, secondly, the quality [ability] of radiating its content back to the first Logos. There is thus a duality in the second Logos. The life and the content of the second Logos are two different things. The content is the same as in the first Logos (universal consciousness – G.A.B.), but the life is different from that in the first Logos ...” (B. 78, p.32). The life in the second Logos is the involuted universal consciousness of the first Logos. But the universal consciousness itself in both Logoi is the same. This truth is expressed in the Fichtean identity ‘I’ = ‘I’: if the ‘I’ is posited, then the ‘I’ is posited. As in the beginning of creation, so also in the philosophy of Fichte, one cannot derive from this identity a multiplicity of created ‘I’s.

For this reason, at the beginning of creation the relation between the first and the second Logos is again mirrored back. The Gospels speak of both processes of mirroring. The first is referred to in the following sayings: “I and the Father are one” (John 10, 30); “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world” (John 16, 28); “neither came I of myself, but he sent me” (John 8, 42); “And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me” (John 12, 45); “But now I go my way to him that sent me .... Because I go to my Father” (John 16, 5; 16, 10).

It says of the second mirroring: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15, 26). This means that he will bestow upon us knowledge of the Christ, but, let us emphasize again, not the life of the ‘I’. Thus works the third Logos: As the mirroring of the mirror reflection, as a mirroring of the relation. And great as the distance may be between God and dialectics, such also is the initial phenomenon of its law of mirror-reflection, thanks to which a synthesis becomes possible.

The third Logos, says Rudolf Steiner, contains within itself:

1. The mirror-image of the first Logos.

2. The mirror-image of what the first Logos has brought about in the second Logos: namely, its life.

3. The mirror-image of what the second Logos rays back to the first.

                                                              (B. 78, p.32)

In this way, the first Logos lays the foundation stone of a new evolutionary cycle in absolute freedom. In ‘An Outline of Occult Science’, his most important work devoted to the theme of evolution, Rudolf Steiner says: “For one has entered a region where the beings and processes no longer receive their justification through that from which they originate, but through themselves” (GA 13, p.171). Only an activity which springs from love for the deed possesses the freedom to create from nothing (– in future the same will also be said of human freedom).

The impulse of the Divine creative activity arises in a condition that is beyond time and ‘before the world’. Within this condition the Divine creative activity is “the highest spiritual universal light....” (B. 78, p.33) – conscious universal consciousness and omnipotence. Through mirroring Himself in the second Logos, the Father calls forth the life of the world; thanks to the third Logos the life acquires forms, one of which finally becomes human consciousness.

Summarizing all that has been said about the three Logoi, the Tri-unity Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we arrive at the following picture. At the initial point of departure (which lies beyond the limits of reflective consciousness) the primal principle of the world is revealed in a three-fold form. Through this revelation a super-consciousness emerges, which does not belong to our evolutionary cycle. Revealing itself as a new universe, it makes a sacrifice to which, in its omnipotence, it is not prompted by anything external. This consists in an act of mirroring itself within itself. For this purpose it manifests itself, as a unitary content, in three hypostases.

The most important feature of this first manifestation is that the unity in it has precedence over the threefoldness. And whatever else may happen thereafter in the universe, its unity remains forever indissoluble and fundamental. Everything proceeds from it and everything returns to it again.

The first revelation must not yet be enclosed in a triangle, because this is a symbol representing the Tri-unity, which embraces a fourth element: the unity, whose symbol in esotericism is the ‘all-seeing eye’. But at the initial state of the world the first impulse proceeds uniformly from point I, moves out to points II and III, and back again: it proceeds from points II and III and moves to point I. We have to do here with an original non-dimensionality of the world, but also with absolute identity: ‘I’ = ‘I’ = ‘I’. It is essential to grasp this concept if one wishes to understand the monotheism of Christianity.

Rudolf Steiner describes the primal relation between the three Logoi, making it easier for us to understand by assigning letters to the concepts: “If the first Logos is the outward-striving creative activity, then its mirror reflection in the third Logos is the reverse activity of the first Logos” (see Fig. 8). Light (A) of the first Logos appears in the third Logos as the outermost darkness (‘I’ = not-’I’). In the second Logos there is life. “It is not the life that sacrifices itself, but that which has been received (from the first Logos – G.A.B.). The life which sacrifices itself in the first Logos is love. The opposite of this in the third Logos is the absolute desire (B), longing, striving for Logos” (the first L. – G.A.B.). C is the “faithful mirror image of the first Logos” in the third Logos (ibid.).

One can say that the threefoldness of the unitary God is revealed in the second act of the primal revelation, where the initial unity shows itself to be a unity of consciousness (universal consciousness) and life (AB) (see Fig. 9b). It reflects itself within itself (in A) and sacrifices its life (B’) to the reflection. Thus was created the beginning of the dualism of consciousness and life, which philosophy has so far been unable to resolve because it shies away from an ‘ontologizing’ of theory of knowledge.

Moving on, we see that life (B’) and the whole relation AB’ are reflected back not only to the initial position I, but also to III. Thus the Divine Tri-unity, which is known from religious conceptions in both east and west, reveals itself thanks to a further sacrifice, since the second hypostasis is also prompted by nothing external to reflect itself in the third hypostasis. Christ himself speaks of this; “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again” (John 10, 17). Let us recall that Rudolf Steiner notes in this connection: “The life which sacrifices itself in the first Logos, is love” (B.78, p.33). Thus the esotericism of Anthroposophy is nothing other than the eso- tericism of the Holy Scripture.

In the words of Christ everything has meaning. They contain – to use a modern expression – no platitudes. When He says He has the power to “lay down” His life, then this is, of course, in relation to the third hypostasis; this is therefore the second sacrifice. It receives its impulse from the Father, but is not conditioned by Him. Christ cannot sacrifice to the Father the life received from Him, since, in Him, they are both completely one. But the relation (AB’) of Father and Son already assumes a different aspect (A’B”) when it is mirrored in the third hypostasis; moreover, it is here that the problem of the existence (the fact) of consciousness arises, and then of its life in the ‘other’.

Super-consciousness (A) is also contained in the third hypostasis; to it comes that which the second hypostasis reflects back to the third. All of this must be mirrored back by the third hypostasis to the first. Thus a third sacrifice takes place, since the third hypostasis too is autonomous. If in the Gospel the word of the Holy Spirit were revealed, it could sound as follows: All that comes from the Father and the Son is mine; I have the power to endow it with form, in order to receive it (the form) back anew: To give nature forms and to receive back forms of self-consciousness, of the ‘I’; to give ideas and receive back ‘beholding visions’ (Anschauungen).

This is how the development of our universe begins on an ‘ur’-phenomenal level. First of all, there is revealed the threefold identity of the universal consciousness, of the universal ‘I’; then the identity sacrifices itself to the relation, in the form of a mirror-reflection; and then arises the tri-unity of consciousness, life and form. Then perfect love becomes wish, the light of universal consciousness becomes the darkness of reflection; contrast or antithesis takes the place of relation: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1, 5).

When in the process of development the form of ‘I’-consciousness of the lower ‘I’, is born, then in it the Divine universal consciousness begins to return to itself. Thus there takes place in three stages the development of the world, the fruit of which is the human being. In the final stage it is the task of the human, conceptually thinking consciousness to make the sacrifice of moving on from confrontation with the object in reflection, to merging with the object of cognition in the act of ‘beholding’. Then the individual spirit of the human being begins to merge and become one with the universal consciousness.

5. From the Beginning of the World to the Aeon of the Earth

The universe is not just an organic whole. It is a world-individual and all its parts are individualized spiritual beings. They are called the Divine Hierarchies. The Divine Trinity in the many-membered structure of the world-individual constitutes its spirit. He is the highest spirit in the universe. His revelation was for Him, so to speak, a transition from one state to another. This transition can be compared to a lemniscatory metamorphosis in which the transitional point from one loop to the other represented, on that highest level, the all-encompassing unity and the system-forming principle of our universe. For this reason we find, when we move on to similar lemniscatory metamorphoses in the human soul and the human spirit, at that point the pure activity of the ‘I’.

In its ‘ur’-phenomenal state, in the World-‘I’, this system-forming principle belongs neither to the elements of which the universe consists, nor to the connections between them. It exists in the realm of the ‘inexpressible’; the attempt is made to form a conception of it as a unitary God by so-called ‘negative theology’ (Dionysius Areopagita), in which a negative answer is given to all questions regarding the Divine attributes, since, as N. Losky says, “every ‘something’ in this world is too small for God; He is the more-than-something; negations that lead to this more-than-something point to the fact that in God there is nothing that contains within it a negation; they are therefore, in the final analysis, negations of negations” (!).101)

Thanks to the principle which lies beyond the world and beyond logic, it is by way of the logical element that the beginning is created in man for his ascent to God, since it is also the mission of the human being to become an individuality within the structure of the world individual. And when God speaks in the Revelation of St. John: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending” (Rev. 1, 8), we have the right to interpret this as follows: “The ultimate foundation of the world is God, the principle that transcends systems and transcends the world” (N. Losky).102) God is the Alpha. His Omega is the individual spirit of the human being, who thinks in accordance with the laws of dialectics, through which the emptiness of reflection is negated.

The evolution of the world also took its course between the ‘Alpha’ and the ‘Omega’ in the sense we have just described. In evolution the revelation of the God who transcends the world, the transcendent ‘I’ of the world-individual, was of necessity followed by the revelation of His Spirit (of the Trinity), and thereafter also that of the other members of His being (of the soul): namely, the Hierarchies. The revelation of the Spirit established the fundamental law of development (the tri-unity); the Hierarchies mediated the manifoldness of his manifestations. The aeon of Old Saturn became the first of these mediated manifestations.

In his work ‘An Outline of Occult Science’, Rudolf Steiner states that the beginning of the Saturn aeon was created through the sacrifice of the substance of will, offered up on the altar of creation by the exalted Hierarchy of the Spirits of will (Thrones). Out of this substance arose the seeds of the physical body of man, which densified into a warmth condition. A kind of ‘atmosphere’ of this cosmic body consisting only of warmth monads, was formed by the Hierarchical beings who stood below the Thrones: the Spirits of wisdom (Kyriotetes), the Spirits of movement (Dynamis) and the Spirits of form (Exusiai).

“There was now a continual interaction between the warmth bodies of Saturn and the beings we have characterized. These projected the members of their being into the physical warmth bodies of Saturn. And while there was no life in the warmth bodies themselves, the life of the beings who surrounded them came to expression within them. One could compare them with mirrors; but these were reflected from them, not the images of the living beings referred to (the Hierarchies – G.A.B.), but their life-conditions” (GA 13, p.160).

In the description quoted here there are two things we would point to: Firstly, we find in it the primary phenomenon of our reflection; from the beginning of the world we ourselves served for a long time as ‘mirrors’ for other beings, until we acquired the reflection within ourselves; secondly, we see that there is an analogy between the creation of the world and the revelations among the three Logoi, but that the former no longer has the power of unity inherent in the latter. This is the second (the secondary) creation.

It is not by chance that the Thrones have this name: they create a ‘place’ for the Father principle within our evolutionary cycle. But the activity of yet higher beings was needed, so that the primal revelation could enter a process of becoming. These were the Seraphim (the Spirits of universal love) and Cherubim (the Spirits of harmony; they are also known as the fullness of wisdom). Together with the Thrones they have, as Rudolf Steiner describes, “a direct ‘beholding’ of the God-head” and all that they bring with them, all that they do, they do out of their ‘beholding’ of the Godhead, God does it through them.... for the ‘beholding’ of the Divine is so great a power.... that they put into effect with immediate certainty and immediate impulse whatever they are called upon to do by the Godhead.... and as they do so, they see the Godhead in its original, true form....” (GA 110, 18.4.1909).

Such, therefore, is the ‘Alpha’, the primal phenomenon, not of reflection, but now of the power of judgement in beholding – the ‘Omega’ of the evolutionary process extending over the first four aeons; in this question, too, it is not possible to know the nature of the individual ascent of the human being if one does not wish to know what was the primal beginning of the world. In that primal beginning we come to know how the transition of the Divine Tri-unity took place from the condition of eternity, of duration, to that of creative activity. The entire ‘otherness-of-being’ of Old Saturn becomes a kind of mirror in which the higher Tri-unity is reflected. The ‘surface’ of the mirror represents the beginning of the working of the law of symmetry and at the same time forms in the stream of development a surface, or rather the axis of the relationship between past and future.

The second axis of world symmetry arises along the vertical of creation, so to speak (Fig. 10). The outcome of this is the emergence of the world cross of creation, upon which, as Plato says, the world soul is crucified. Here we have before us the greatest archetype of the Mystery of Golgotha (which we can only discuss in more detail at a later stage).

The Thrones sacrificed the substance of their will, out of which warmth arose – the ‘otherness-of-being’ of that which is, the will of the Father. And one can say that the life of the second Logos straight away reveals itself in accordance with the principle of the Gospels: “I go unto the Father” (John 14, 28). This is a very important phase which helps us to understand the force underlying the dynamic of development. In the ‘otherness-of-being’ of the Father, mediated by the beings of the first Hierarchy – Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones – there moves the life of the Son, which is mediated by the beings of the second Hierarchy – Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai – in a reverse direction, so to speak, to the Father substance of will, the warmth monads. Thus there arises a process of mirror-reflection in which the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit is revealed, mediated by the beings of the third Hierarchy which are as yet coming into existence – the Spirits of personality (Archai), Archangels and Angels, and after them by the human beings, and, finally, after the human beings by the kingdoms of nature. Thus arises a gigantic stream of becoming, which to begin with moves away from the Father Ground of the world (is reflected away from it), but only to return to it again in the ‘I’. Therein lies the essential nature of the evolutionary process. It takes its course along two paths. One of them extends, so to speak, across the ‘heavenly firmament’ of the aeons, where the Hierarchies begin, one after the other, their activity in the evolutionary process. On Old Saturn they produce an effect on the other path, where the warmth monads are found, and in these various processes arise.*  The warmth monads themselves, however, form in the initial stages of evolution what in conventional language could be called a ‘reflective surface’ (space as we know it had not yet come into being), into which the beings of the second Hierarchy ‘gaze’ with their existence and thus comprehend their own tasks in the realization of the Divine Will in the other. Their super-conscious activity, in which ‘beholding’ is a life-process, is brought to a synthesis by the third Logos. He is their higher ‘I’ and creates with their help the multiplicity of forms consisting of life and consciousness, which to begin with are transcendent to these forms.

* For the numerous details of these evolutionary processes we refer the reader to the works of Rudolf Steiner, as our purpose is to introduce the methodology of Anthroposophy, and we are therefore citing the material available only to the extent that it serves this aim, and not a popularized presentation of Anthroposophy.
_________

The first step towards the immanentism of being-in-otherness was taken when the Spirits of personality acquired an individual ‘I’. They were the first in our evolutionary cycle for whom the process of mirror- reflection (albeit not of the shadowy kind) became what we now call ‘I’-consciousness. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the Archai as “human beings of Saturn”. Like the Archangels and Angels, they came into being not at that time, but at a still earlier stage – the beginning of their existence reaches back, beyond the limits of the first aeon –, but now acquired the individual ‘I’ (Fig. 11).

The peculiarity of the development of these beings, and later also of the Archangels and Angels, consists in the fact that they, in contrast to the beings of the second Hierarchy, enter into a quite immediate relation to the human monads created over the course of three aeons. These become, so to speak, members of their being and serve them in the way that our

nervous system serves our soul-spiritual activity. These beings have as their lowest member an astral body, but this attains in them so advanced a stage of development that it works like the human ‘I’ of today. With this they work upon the warmth monads, which are provided with the illusion of life, as life itself belongs to the beings of the second Hierarchy.

The Spirits of personality, says Rudolf Steiner, “lend the parts of the Saturn body the appearance of personality but on Saturn itself the personality is not present, only its mirror-image, the shell of the personality. The Spirits of personality have their real personality in the surroundings of Saturn” (GA 13, p.163). In them it is of hierarchic nature, as they came into being in pre-Saturn times and developed their astral body, but depend at the same time upon what the monads reflect back to them: “They do not merely have an ‘I’, they also know of it, because the warmth of Saturn, in radiating it back, brings this ‘I’ to their consciousness. Thus they are ‘human beings’ under conditions different from those on the Earth” (ibid., p.164).

In order to serve as a kind of ‘brain’ for its heavenly surroundings, the Saturn world of warmth monads also had to undergo far-reaching changes. “When the Saturn bodies”, so Rudolf Steiner continues in ‘An Outline of Occult Science’, “have acquired the capacity to reflect life, this reflected life is able to permeate itself with the qualities which have their seat in the astral bodies of the ‘Spirits of movement’” (ibid., p.162), and Saturn began to reflect back soul processes, but of a general kind. Immediately after this, the Spirits of form divide this life up into single, living beings....” (ibid., p.163). Thus arises a kind of ‘model’ of the future earthly human being with his physical, ether and astral bodies which, as they join together to a unity in the human being, form his soul-body.

This hierarchical activity directed to the monads led to a consider- able degree of separation of them from their spiritual surroundings. The final entry of the substance of will offered up by the Thrones into the world of emergent materiality was brought about by the influence exerted upon the monads by the imperfect astral bodies possessed by some of the Spirits of personality. This was in a certain way the archetype of the earthly Fall into sin. The human monads found themselves between the influence exerted upon them by the higher Hierarchies and the individualized perception of this activity in them by the ‘I’-beings of the Archai. Thus arose the primal phenomenon of what, under earthly conditions, the human being experiences as the dualism of percept and concept. If we reach back to the original source of dualism we can understand the way it is resolved: through (re)cognition of the (for the human being) pre-conscious mutual immanence of the two sides of the duality.

The concepts of the Archai were, of course, pure imaginations, supersensible visions (Anschauungen). And when material correspondences (consisting of warmth) to these arose, originating from the world of otherness-of-being, they were able gradually to relate these imaginations to themselves – i.e. to know that they possessed an ‘I’. But for the monads the imaginations proceeding from the Archai were somewhat in the nature of a group-consciousness, and they reflected them back through a certain manifoldness of their warmth existence which emerged thanks to the working upon them of the different Hierarchies.

The densification of the warmth substance led to the result that a part of the working directed towards them from the Hierarchies was gradually mediated by the Spirits of personality and this led in its turn to the emergence in these spirits of the new form of consciousness. This arose through the combined working of the highest revelations of consciousness, of life and of form and can be described as object-oriented because it rests upon the experience of interaction with otherness-of-being.

In the Archai this consciousness did not, of course, have a sensory character, but neither was it independent of otherness-of-being; within their consciousness the workings of otherness-of-being appeared in symbolic form. Only through the formative principle did the consciousness of the Archai become similar to that of the earthly human being. One can regard it as the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the developing human ‘I’- consciousness.

But the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the ‘I’-consciousness of the Archai was the Divine Trinity itself. At the beginning of evolution the relation between the hypostases of the Father and the Holy Spirit grew ever more distant. What separates them at first is the working of the Hierarchies and then the outer warmth. The hypostasis of the Son plays the role of the medium which sustains this relationship. Revelation and creation begin to grow distinct from one another in the following way (see Fig. 12). Creation absorbs into itself the highest principle of the Tri-unity and develops a threefoldness of its own; evolution, involution and creation out of nothing. As an out- come of this the ‘I’ of the Archai emerges.

What the Father on the highest level posits freely and out of Himself alone, becomes on a lower level warmth and a form of being which places itself over against the source from which it has originated. In order to maintain the emergent warmth within the sphere of otherness-of-being and prevent it from becoming spiritualized prematurely, the Son forms the medium (or basis) for the relation between the Thrones and the Spirits of personality, this coming to expression in the creative activity of the second Hierarchy. Or, to be more precise, the Son passes on the life which He has received from the Father, to these beings, and they direct it to the sacrifice of the Thrones and receive back in the form of a mirror-reflection that which causes the movement of general development ‘downwards’ on the ‘heavenly firmament’ (see Fig. 11) of the Saturn aeon and lends impulses to the development of the Spirits of personality.

Thus Christ is revealed as the true heavenly Creator: He creates individual life, for which the stream of evolution merely provides the preconditions, and in this sense He creates out of nothing. He follows His creation on its path downwards, and when this becomes the conscious human being He descends to the material plane, and then shows His creation the path of spiritualization through the Mystery of Golgotha.

In the course of two further aeons – those of the Old Sun and Old Moon – the Archangels and the Angels acquired an individual ‘I’. The principle of their development was the same as that of the Spirits of personality: their consciousness did not descend lower than the imaginative level and remained centrally connected with the existence of the universal consciousness. But the feature in it of orientation towards an object was stronger than it was in the Spirits of personality. This was due to the growing contrast between spirit and the material nature of otherness-of-being. The latter assumed the form of the kingdoms of nature, and the human monads acquired their own threefold corporeality and also the seeds of soul processes. The ‘mirrors’ which reflected the ‘I’s of the Archangels and Angels connected them more closely with their own being.

The emergence of the consciousness of the three kinds of beings of the third Hierarchy was guided by the Spirits of will. It was, therefore, from the very beginning, will-like in nature. These worked in their ‘I’, as a principle of transformation, will that had become conscious. Their ‘I’ was, and remains, a permanent becoming, in which two kinds of supersensible perception are united. One of them embraces within itself the activity of the Holy Spirit which comes from the future. Its substance is astral. In otherness-of-being the Spirits of movement carry out within it a mediating activity which leads it out of the highest sphere into a lower. Imaginations of the second kind are received from the past by the beings of the third Hierarchy; they are mediated by the Spirits of will and are imprinted sense-perceptibly in the kingdoms of nature. In their primal source the two kinds of imagination are identical; for this reason the world is perceived as a unity by the hierarchical beings. But in the realm of appearance the world is continually revealed in the shape of a kind of gigantic funnel with two spirals of becoming, moving in opposite directions. At the point where these spirals merge together, stand the beings of the third Hierarchy and earthly man. And here the past is reflected in the future. The ‘I’-consciousness of the beings of the third Hierarchy is able to gaze behind the surface of the ‘mirror’ which arises in the moment of the present. They thereby bring to the Father His primal revelation, it being the task of the Holy Spirit to mirror it back, but now in its realization on the path of evolution.

This is the ‘reflection’ of the beings of the third Hierarchy. They experience the past as a given fact, just as the human being finds within himself the boundless multiplicity of thetic (i.e. expressed in the manner of a thesis, affirmative, dogmatic) judgements; they are all connected with what ‘has become’. The imaginations which come from the future to the beings of the third Hierarchy, complete the past, make it conscious on the level of these beings, who were not able to perceive it consciously in those epochs (aeons) in which they did not yet possess the individual ‘I’, or were just developing it. The completed past ascends to the Father in the form of ‘I’-being. In sense-perceptible reality it is the human being who is called upon to fulfill this task.

The ‘I’ of the human being arises in a different way to that of the hierarchic beings, because his sense-organs are opened outwards and his reflections are shadowy in nature. At the beginning of the Earth aeon the beings of the third Hierarchy rise in his heavenly firmament. The beings of the second Hierarchy withdraw, as it were, into the depths of the world, into the heights of the spiritual universe, into the world of the fixed stars; in the planetary system, only their effect remains.

There unfolds in the otherness-of-being of the Earthly aeon the complicated life of the natural kingdoms, representing the phenomenology of the old forms of world-consciousness, which creatively conceived in thought the becoming of man. The human being himself, who separates himself off from this consciousness and the natural kingdoms, has at his disposal, under the conditions of otherness-of-being, an individual ‘I’. The peculiarity of this earthly constellation of man’s development lies in the fact that the point in Fig. 11 which, one could say, unites ‘heaven’ with ‘earth’ and into which the beings of the third Hierarchy placed themselves alternately, is seen here to be unoccupied (Fig. 13).

After the beings of the third Hierarchy have developed the ‘I’, ‘heaven’ – i.e. the spiritual world – begins to move away from the ‘earth’. It moves away in accordance with objective laws of development, because the human being with his reflective thinking has reached the lowest point necessary for the descent into matter. His further development will only take place in an ascending direction, and lead to various forms of spiritualization, though first to a refining of material existence. It is also such a breakthrough in development that leads to a crisis of cognition.

6. Man within the Structure of World-Unity

In the aeon of the Earth the human being unites within himself two worlds. One of them belongs only to the human being. This is the soul-spiritual world. The second is composed of the physical-etheric-astral corporeality. In this the human being is closely bound up with the kingdoms of nature around him. The life of soul and spirit lends a special character to the threefold corporeality, hence it is different in man from that in the natural kingdoms; at the same time, the life of the human will is on the same level of consciousness as the plant world, the life of feeling on the level of consciousness of the animal kingdom. In thinking consciousness the human being is only identical with (comparable to) himself. Thanks to it the dream consciousness of his feelings and the consciousness of dreamless sleep inherent in his will become ingredients of his ‘I’ and, in the content of mental representations, fill the individual life of soul and spirit.

The ancient mythological consciousness of humanity formed the transition from dreaming clairvoyance to waking, object-oriented consciousness. The human being begins to serve the aims of the development of the world and of himself in their mutually conditional unity, when he possesses an individual thinking consciousness in which he develops conceptual thinking on the basis of individualized sense-perceptions. In order to be able to take a further step in our research into this form of consciousness, we must add some remarks to what has been presented in Figs. 11 and 13.

We connect the temporal axis of development represented in them with the vertical axis of world-symmetry (changing Fig. 13 into Fig. 14), and then we have the hierarchical stages of evolution on which the spirit descended to its materialization. At the starting-point of this vertical there is the relation of the Father to the Spirits of will; this relation is that between All-consciousness and form, since the substance of will offered up in sacrifice there took on form in the ‘other’ – the primal form. God the Father was not able to endow it with life, as this would only have been a life in itself and for itself. But the beginning had to be absolute; therefore it was posited by the Spirits of will in the hypostasis of the Father. But life comes to it out of the hypostasis of the Son, which is likewise mediated, but through spirits of a lower rank, those of the second Hierarchy. If at that stage the life had come directly from the Son, it would have striven back at once to the Father.

The beings of the second Hierarchy unite with their own spirit the life received from the Son, in order to work in evolution out of the fullness of their essential nature. But in the spirit of the Hierarchies the Holy Spirit prevails. Thus arises that relation between Father and Holy Spirit, into which evolution ‘inserts itself’. The beings of the second Hierarchy bring their life, but despite their colossal power, they were, in the aeon of Saturn at the very beginning of creation, not able to bestow upon the sacrifice of the Spirits of will an existence of its own. They only maintained it in a certain way in the realm of otherness-of-being, standing towards it in a transcendent relation. Thus the substance did not identify itself with the power of the higher Hierarchies, and the Spirits of personality were therefore able to approach it, to find by means of it a relation to its spiritual archetype – the Spirits of will (Thrones) – and to become ‘I’-beings in correspondence with its form and image, thereby opening up to them the path to the further becoming of otherness-of-being.

In the aeons of the Old Sun and the Old Moon the second Hierarchy develops sufficient forces to endow otherness-of-being with the seeds of a true selfhood (Selbstsein). But the becoming of the individual ‘I’ within it (already in the earthly aeon) is furthered by the beings of the third Hierarchy, because they have themselves had (if only indirectly), through their entire process of becoming, the experience of working with sense-reality. They undertake the directing of human thoughts, feelings and expressions of will (see Fig. 14). Thanks to all the combined activity of these, the human being attains at first the group form of consciousness, which only allows him to draw indirect conclusions regarding his own being. At this stage of development he says to himself, as it were: The life which I share with others in the human community to which I belong enables me to know that I am.

Thus, thanks to the new qualities acquired by the human being, the beings of the third Hierarchy too receive more exact knowledge of how the world looks as seen from the side of sense-perception – a world which, as spiritual beings, they are not able to enter directly – and they pass on this knowledge to the higher Hierarchies. The human being thereby becomes the basis for the relationship between the material and the spiritual world. In a certain sense he divides into two within the stream of evolution and on the one hand follows a path (as we said at the beginning of this sub-section) together with nature, while on the other hand he follows his own: in thought, feeling and will (see Fig. 14). It is on his individual path that he becomes the above-mentioned ‘basis for a relationship’. From this it follows that the Christianizing of the human being begins at the moment when he acquires a thinking consciousness. Augustine was therefore right to say that the great Greek philosophers were Christians who had lived before the coming of Christ.

The new constellation of the human being is shown here in two separate diagrams (Figs. 15 and 16). In them we see that the Father World (the All-consciousness) stands before the human being as the world of perceptions, and also as the foundation of his being, with which he exchanges substance. Out of the forms of otherness-of-being, forms of soul-life begin, from a certain point onwards, to grow and to separate out, and within them the lower ‘I’ begins to crystallize.

On the other hand, both the world of perceptions and the life of soul are permeated by the world spirit, whose work upon the human being is mediated by the third Hierarchy and the Spirits of form who, in the aeon of the Earth, bestow upon humanity the true (not the shadow-like) ‘I’ – i.e. they do not ‘induce’ it into man, nor do they make it transcend him; they have the power to bring it into immanent union with the tri-une corporeality of mankind. By virtue of this ‘I’, the human being was able, within the cultural-historical process, to develop a lower ‘I’ that is devoid of substance, whereupon the question arose: how can one endow it with being?

 

The mirror-reflections that are caught up by the astral body – and it learns how to do this under the influence of the sense-perceptions – are summed together, brought to a synthesis by the lower ‘I’, which itself is also formed out of the material and after-effects of the perceptions and inner representations.

Thus we have established that the law of mirror reflection is one of the most fundamental laws of development. As every single activity of the Hierarchies is a creative and (in a higher sense) thinking activity and is always personified, so is the activity of mirror-reflection also personified, but as a secondary activity – in the processes of development: We have, so Rudolf Steiner said, “generations of Gods (Hierarchies – G.A.B.).... which are originally in their reality through themselves; and we have others, who are simply the real inner representations of the Gods who are directly connected with Saturn, Sun or Moon (the three aeons – G.A.B.).... Thus we have two generations of Gods – The one generation of Gods is the other’s inner world of representation; it truly stands in the same relation to the other, as our thoughts stand to our real soul-existence.... The original Gods had the need to represent themselves to themselves in self-knowledge. They therefore placed the Luciferic beings over against them as cosmic.... thought-beings, just as, today, his thoughts stand over against the human being” (GA 129, 25.8.1911).

It was as though the Gods in their forward, progressive movement, left behind them something into which they could look, as into a mirror, like a substance that had flowed out of them and remained behind. Every human being now bears within himself the image of this macro- cosmic division. As a consequence of this, the support of his self-consciousness in the sense-world (the brain) began to fall out of the process of development. It does no more than reflect the true macrocosm back to him. This is why the everyday consciousness of man is Luciferic, and one must rise out of this and ascend to the true Gods. The ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ (Philosophy of Freedom) shows us how this can be achieved.

In one of his lectures Rudolf Steiner explains the nature of the task that is fulfilled by the human being when he treads the path of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. He says, “We ourselves are not real when we think .... A mirror image cannot be a cause. If you have before you a mirror image, something that is a mere picture, and you let yourself be guided by it, it does not determine your action. If your thinking is a reality, it allows you no freedom. If your thinking is picture, then your life between birth and death is the school of freedom, because there is no cause contained in your thinking. And a life that is a life in freedom must be free of causation .... Through the fact that we have pure thinking and develop out of pure thinking the will to accomplish the free deed, in pure thinking we grasp hold of reality by the outermost tip. But where we ourselves lend reality to the picture from out of our own sub- stance, there the free deed is possible” (GA 205, 7.7.1921).

Our thinking is ‘pure’ when every step is willed by us. The substance of this willing (not thinking) is mirror-reflections of the thought beings which have been freely made conscious by us. They themselves possess a will-nature. In order to reach through to their reality, it is necessary to turn to the will of the Father, which, since the beginning of the world, has been mediated by the Spirits of will. In other words, it is essential that we should do what was done by the Spirits of personality at the time of Old Saturn. And Saturn itself, in the last resort, stands at our disposal, or, rather what the retarded Gods have made of it – the Luciferic, but also the Ahrimanic (the Gods of matter): that is, our head as a mirror. This must be overcome; then our thinking becomes pure will. Its overcoming is a deed of sacrifice. When we overcome the lower ‘I’ with its reflection, unreal thinking, we attain to ‘beholding’ (Anschauung) – a characteristic possessed by the true Gods. They breathe in and out, as we recall, the life of the world. The life of the world is Christ and it must become the life of our ‘beholding’ thinking. Thus, having begun at the stage of the universal individual, we have now arrived at the many-membered being of man which has been formed through the evolutionary process. He has involuted this (many-membered being), and now he is setting about the task, at the world periphery and in the non-being of thinking, of consciously metamorphosing his own soul and spirit, in order gradually to ‘live his way into’ the system of the universe as an individualized being. Let us draw the results of our study into a unity (Fig. 17). In our opinion, Nikolai Losky, when he is describing his views on the nature of the system- object, gives a noteworthy explanation of what is represented in this diagram. In his introduction to philosophy, where he is considering the concrete-ideal foundations of being, Losky writes as follows: “If one is investigating cosmology, it is necessary above all to examine the question of the concept of the whole and of the parts which belong to the whole. The relation between the whole and its parts can be construed in such a way that the elements (the parts in their relation to the whole) which belong to it are, in the final analysis, something of an original and fundamental nature, while the whole is something secondary, which is derived from these elements. Such a doctrine could be described as non-organic.”103) This is actually not just a doctrine but an entire world-view, with which the fault lies for the fact that systems analysis has only borne fruit for materialism. In direct contrast to it stands the organic world-view, or understanding of the fact that what is fundamental is the whole, upon which the single elements depend.

          Fig. 17: (GA 136, 7.4.1912)

For such an understanding, so Losky continues, “the entire world is an organic whole. Indeed, all substantially creative beings (human individualities – G.A.B.) share a single essential nature, i.e. through a certain side of their being they are joined together to form a single totality or wholeness. For this reason, they are so closely connected with one another, that all the states experienced by each one of them do not exist only for him, but for all other creative beings. From this it follows that each creative being passes through, in his experience, the life of the whole world. In this sense, the entire world is constructed in such a way, that all is immanent to all, i.e. all beings have within them, consciously or unconsciously, the life of all others.”104)

It is precisely these conclusions of Losky that we have attempted to present in the language of the pure esotericism of Anthroposophy in their supersensible reality, in the reality of their essential being. But for the present we are still only at the beginning of our path. The reality of what has been described still has to become self-evident for us.