Religion: An Introductory Reader

RELIGION

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RUDOLF STEINER

RELIGION

An Introductory Reader

Compiled with an introduction,

commentary and notes by

Andrew Welburn

Sophia Books

All translations revised by Matthew Barton

Sophia Books

An imprint of Rudolf Steiner Press

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

For earlier English publications of individual selections please see Sources

The material by Rudolf Steiner was originally published in German in various volumes of the ‘GA’ (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized volume is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach (for further information see Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures)

This selection and translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 333 2

Cover design by Andrew Morgan

Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Introduction by Andrew Welburn

1. Mysticism and Beyond: The Importance of Prayer

2. The Meaning of Sin and Grace

3. Rediscovering the Bible

4. What is True Communion?

5. Rediscovering the Festivals and the Life of the Earth

6. Finding One’s Destiny: Walking with Christ

7. The Significance of Religion in Life and After Death

8. Christ’s Second Coming: The Truth for our Time

9. Universal Religion: The Meaning of Love

Notes

Sources

Further Reading

Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Introduction: Religion and Spirituality – Enemies or Allies?

by Andrew Welburn

Religion – who needs it? The eruption of spirituality that we have seen in modern times, as we touch the threshold of a new millennium and a ‘new age’, has swept away so many of the old boundaries. Even now we keep on discovering its revitalizing, unifying power, which brings a breath of fresh air and a sense of freedom to more and more of what once seemed separate, limiting spheres of life. Why do we need something called ‘religion’, set apart like Sunday observance from the rest of our existence?

It is more or less common knowledge now that everything from motorcycle maintenance to playing golf can offer opportunities for spiritual discovery. In fact, certain ancient mythologies have already told us of the cowgirls who did their washing in the river while their thoughts dwelt with love on Krishna, and thereby gained liberation.¹ Spirituality has proven its power to give meaning and purpose to life for many kinds of peoples. It becomes real for them as it affects their life practically or creatively, or in deepening relationships, in nurturing children, or growing things, or through forms of ‘sacred dance’.

But few like to use the term ‘religion’ to describe what they feel to be so alive. Looking back to past times when religious commitment still constituted an unquestioned part of life, many people feel a sort of shudder run through them. They feel that religion was actually a straitjacket on spirituality, stifling and imprisoning it, entangled in formal social behaviour and moral conformism. ‘Religion’ as a way of expressing the exuberance, the energy of the spiritual, seems to many old-fashioned. While it may originally have begun in spiritual ideas and vision, they see its external forms as ‘energy enslaved’ in the Blakean phrase, or as Blake puts it elsewhere:

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.²

As a prophet of our new age Blake certainly seemed to hold a forthright view along those lines when he propounded the ‘devilish’ view of the origins of religion, namely, that from imaginative beginnings

a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslaved the vulgar ... thus began Priesthood ... and men forgot that All deities reside within the human breast.³

When we come to think about our own age there are serious ironies about a situation of rivalry or even hostility between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. There are ironies in particular about a great spiritual figure, still often unappreciated and misunderstood, who opened the way to many discoveries which many people are nowadays pursuing in all spheres of life.

When Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher of freedom, developed his ‘human wisdom’ or anthroposophy, he broke the bounds of his own time by drawing attention to the real potential of spiritual vision – not just in its Sunday rest-day form, but in practical applications of the most diverse kinds: holistic education, ecological agriculture, social questions, the arts, science – in fact every area of life could, he showed, be informed and greatly enhanced by an awareness of the spirit. Steiner’s anthroposophy showed manifold ways of linking the spirit in human beings with the spirit at work in the universe.

The urge to find or create one’s personal ‘lifestyle’, nowadays experienced as such a strong need – despite being travestied and exploited by commercial interests – arises from our sense that inner and outer worlds should relate to each other, that the outer forms of things should directly express the way we use or relate to them, and that inner experiences should, as far as possible, flow seamlessly into the externals of life. The spiritual freedom innate in anthroposophy endeavours, for example, to express itself in a more living style of architecture or wholesome relationship with the natural world. As a ‘wisdom of humanity’, anthroposophy certainly takes heed of Blakean perception, asking us to seek and find our own values rather than simply taking them ‘on authority’.

Perhaps that is why Steiner seems too challenging and unconventional to many within orthodox religion. Paradoxically, however, many others nowadays are suspicious that Steiner is somehow too close to the ‘old’ ways of religion. In fact, Steiner is one of the few to have seen clearly into the deeper relationship – in his view essentially a mutually fruitful one – between religion and spirituality. If he is right, religion certainly needs spirituality and recognition of the validity of personal inner discovery; but equally spirituality needs religion in order to become fruitful for the whole community and for the planet, rather than a marginal pursuit that ultimately leaves the world unchanged. What are termed ‘the Mysteries’, which Steiner sought to renew in the modern world, are a key to this deeper interdependence and relationship.

The rediscovery of the Mysteries

The ‘renewal of the Mysteries’ is in fact one of the increasingly important and recognized aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s work in today’s context. But to understand its significance for modern religion we must inevitably first glance backwards. It is characteristic of religion that it can be very modern and immediate, yet also point us back to the beginnings of time!

In ancient times ordinary people knew of and acknowledged the Mysteries, yet their contents were highly secretive.⁴ Those who underwent a closely supervised process of spiritual awakening gained extraordinary knowledge, and indeed a godlike ‘higher consciousness’. But it was not for themselves that they did so. In terms of their previous identity, the person they had been needed to die away altogether if they were to attain this. They gave themselves over unreservedly to those who directed the Mysteries, ‘as if they were preparing for death’. And when they re-emerged, they were not even able to find words in mundane, everyday language to characterize the way they had been changed. But though they could not share the experience, they shared the fruits of the knowledge they gained. The initiates were those who became great leaders or innovators, or founders of new cultures, new societies; or a little later they became the first philosophers and scientists. Rudolf Steiner described this in depth in his first, groundbreaking book on Christianity⁵, where he traces its roots back to these more ancient times. For gradually the fruits of initiatory knowledge filtered through to become the basis of life in communities and civilizations – even though the initiates alone knew the secret of its origin. As these insights of the Mysteries emerged and were assimilated in less conscious form by the population, they became what we know as religious rites and beliefs.

In ancient cultures the Mysteries were extremely powerful. They might rightly be said to have created civilization itself. And while they were strong, religion remained nascent and undeveloped, and society had not yet developed such complexity or reliance upon established and codified, written traditions. When people encountered a crisis or needed a new way forward, personally or in community life, they could turn for guidance to the higher perspective of the Mysteries. By drawing on this guidance, they had a definite experience of being able to break with the past, transform themselves and their ideas, and make a new beginning, as if the gods had just created everything anew. The Mysteries were a kind of link with the powers of Creation. At the same time, this meant that ancient civilization could not develop the diversity of thought and tradition, of law, of written literature, to express all the variety of individual experience and opinion that enriches our life today and gives large groups of people the sense of belonging to a shared culture, with values that are acknowledged or also challenged and argued over.

In those ancient times an individual could make a radical change in his way of life. Or a new leader could go off to found a new colony, leaving old problems behind. This is not the same as a society that incorporates diversity and individualism. Nor does it include the capacity to see one’s life as a continuous thread, either finding ways to gradually change it or learning to accept its problems and anxieties!

Those who needed guidance from the spiritual world could find this through the Mysteries. But when spiritual wisdom flowed out to the wider population and became received knowledge and values, or religion, this was in very restricted and local ways. The old Greek gods and goddesses, for example, were originally worshipped in very rudimentary religious festivals and rites, for instance when their statues were carried through the streets on festival days, to general rejoicing. All deeper aspects and truths remained hidden or occult in the Mysteries. (The word ‘occult’ means no more than ‘concealed’.) Ordinary people did not go into the temples. It was only in the ‘Mysteries’ that initiates could approach these secrets directly. Religious rites, moreover, were different in each place: Athene was the name for goddesses worshipped under many different local forms, each distinctive and probably originally unconnected. Or Apollo, for instance, was known under different titles and different roles at his oracle centres around the Mediterranean. There was almost no sense of something that we take for granted when we think of world religions such as Islam or Christianity: a common religion uniting all worshippers across the world. Think for instance of the Mithras Mysteries of Roman times – none of these temples was built to hold more than 15 or 20 people. Little cells of worshippers proliferated, but never thought of themselves as a single, unified movement. Their universality was on a different, cosmic and ecstatic level which enabled their initiates to ‘run with the sun’ around the world, as they put it.

The archaic link with the spiritual world through the Mysteries, however, gradually died away. Rudolf Steiner will help us understand, too, why this was necessary, and why it was then that religion began to play its crucial part. In Christianity religion was able to preserve the essence of the knowledge of the spiritual, and to share it with ever wider circles of humanity at a time when direct awareness of spiritual reality was largely dying away. What was no longer attainable through the old Mysteries could be found nevertheless by anyone who truly sought it in the content of Christianity. And in the form of religion this source could develop its inner life while remaining open to all, so as to unite all true believers across the world into a single community or ecclesia, which is translated as ‘church’ but originally means the people themselves who ‘gather’ (not an institution, still less a building). This worldwide community that was emerging – so different, despite its values of love and cooperation, from the little cells of the Mystery schools – was what frightened the Roman emperors, for all their worldly power. Even the Roman Empire had not been able to unite people’s loyalties and hearts across the world as did emerging Christianity. This power to unite people across the world in love remains, despite all that has happened throughout religious history, as the reality of the Christian ‘Church’ at the deepest level. Rudolf Steiner points out how we encounter it in guises that are not at first sight even recognized as Christian, but in which the fully real Christian spirit, the Christ impulse, is actively at work, whenever people come together in a glimpse of universal community, shared humanity and love.

In Christianity the spirit has been poured out, then, upon the world of humanity and given universal scope. For all the profundity of the Mysteries which ruled the ancient world, they had not been able to unite people in this way. That is one level of meaning in the doctrine of the incarnation, of God become man, which from the first Pentecost became a power that works on in humanity. What had been hidden in the secret recesses of the Mystery temples had stepped out into the world. God had come to dwell in the lives and hearts of everybody on earth. Religion, whose etymological root means ‘binding together’, is what brings us close and links us in our hearts to that outpouring, and to God’s presence amongst us. It is our committed response (one basic sense of religion), our help in carrying the spirit and its message out into the world, our meeting the world with love.

With a little historical imagination one can therefore understand, perhaps, why in the Middle Ages religion came to be taught as the only true path. The hidden way of the Mysteries had been superseded, surpassed – or so it must have seemed. But Rudolf Steiner’s perspective, which recognizes an evolution of consciousness, tracing the thread linking the content of Christianity to the revelations of the Mysteries, is unique in both enabling us to appreciate the power and universality of religion and also acknowledge our longing to regain that older, direct form of Mystery knowledge. In the special, sacred places of the Mysteries, individuals were able to undergo change and find renewal. The innermost kernel of Christianity in fact grew out of those Mystery experiences; and the Christian religion loses the sense of its own inner truth, as may well be happening today, if it forgets that the first Christians themselves drew their inspiration from such Mystery experience.

But there is another factor which Steiner insists we put into the equation. One of the reasons that humanity had to cut its ties with the old type of direct spiritual vision and knowledge, in the course of evolution, was that we needed to develop ego-consciousness – that sense of our own individual destiny and uniquely personal point of view, the need for us to make autonomous moral choices. In a strange way, Christian belief – because it took the form above all of religious tradition, religious faith, not of overwhelming immediate experience – could also allow us to become free and independent. Becoming a Christian is each person’s choice and decision. This must be said with an awareness, of course, of the terrifying ironies of its history, of the Inquisition, of the centuries of stifling dogmatism and all those misguided attempts to compel people to believe. But the driving force that has kept alive the Christian search has ultimately been the will to find in freedom and individual conviction the answers to our intimate questions about life and God. If therefore we do also long once more for the spark of direct vision that leaps between modern spirituality, with its freshness and vitality, and the ancient Mysteries, it must now likewise be in a way that leaves us totally free – and by the same token, totally responsible – as individuals.

Mystery experience, religion, the individual path: in Steiner’s thought we are not asked to choose between these, but to understand how they have fed into each other, changed in their subtle balance and relationship as humanity evolves, and how they can flow together in enriching new forms for our future. In his renewal of the Mysteries for the modern world as anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner made the spiritual quest once more a path on which people could work together for the greater good. Anthroposophy is not a religion, but spirituality that