A Science of the Spirit

Evolūtiō Ecclesiae
An Introduction to Anthroposophy

When we open the Bible and find an answer in a passage to the enigmas that we encounter, many, I  think, would agree that these scriptures—at each turn of life—appear to contain entirely new meaning to meet us upon each reading, and at times peculiarly at the moment it can speak most directly to our soul. What is this phenomenon to be attributed to? Yes, it is the aging, the maturing of one’s soul, the reward, if you will, of much earlier seeds beginning to sprout, in which a man or woman has more internal currency at their disposal, not occupied by the developing body, in order to look upon one’s life with more clarity and depth of scope. Of course, we must also give the salute to God—extend due honor to those higher powers, showing an appreciation for all that can be attributed to the unknown mystery of the working of a grace from above, often unperceived, that acts on content that reaches us from without, as well as transforming the organs of perception, of cognition itself. There seems to be inexhaustible content in the holy books that is brought to consciousness from the invisible spirit into what can be grasped through a person’s faculties of soul. And before anyone may decide to turn away, we aren’t asking, in this introduction to esoteric or occult science, for participants to take in a new idea or concept in ways that seem natural in the traditional sense, in the ways of academia, let’s say. Where a few concepts may be enough to master all that one assumes is necessary for them to then immediately apply in the world, how one idea links to another in ways one is most accustomed to, in more or less vague generalities—whereby the images invoked do not penetrate far enough for it to be profitable in the way anthroposophy, this science of the spirit, intends for one to approach life. Instead of mere intellect in its ordinary way of assimilating knowledge, one learns to engender a loving interest in how knowledge has been inoculated into man’s cognition from spiritual worlds. One thus can experience a truer living relationship to the scriptures and apply them in all scopes of life, have them work in life’s actualities, where the feasting on the bread from heaven becomes a literal occurrence. Spiritual science wishes to bring about an ever-widening perspective of how we experience ourselves and relate to history in all its events and forms, not only in the accumulation of fuller concepts but ones that develop the inner life. One must also couple any study with the development of one’s soul and spirit. Thereby, anthroposophy is not a religion of doctrine or mere theories but a path of knowledge that remains flexible in its outer forms and does not rigidify into dogma because inwardly it allows man to become creative in his faculties of soul.

This helps us to, inch by inch—line upon line—let go of dogmas, these snares that keep one from outgrowing one’s worn-out notions of how the spiritual world influences life on the earth. Learning to expand one’s mental images, one’s imaginative faculty, when delving into these sacred texts, in this case the Holy Scriptures, asks for a commitment to the conditioning of the student’s inner life so that these fuller and richer concepts become something actual, a true impulse that eventually swallows up our more pedantic concepts, often linked to our own egoism—ideas that so easily seduce one to rest in knowledge already won. One learns the reality of an idea’s origin and can discover a realm of pure thinking where one can begin to grasp how the inner life of the soul is woven into the full living reality of universal phenomena. In time, and by some consistency in this path of inner work, our egoistic thoughts seem to disappear, and what used to occur so connected to physicality’s ebbs and flows instead adheres to thoughts from another world that express themselves through an inner life that is now conscious of a world that had always been within and without but was veiled due to the condition of consciousness—the constitution of an individual’s soul. What we may have sensed beyond matter as hidden forces begins to reveal itself as the deeds of beings that were perhaps too abstract—a little out of reach when our knowledge of higher activity in other forms of consciousness was dimly presented to us through modern theology or modern physics.

When one has reached an age and perhaps has faced certain trials that allow one to shed much of life’s unnecessary pursuits, or they have embarked on a specific training of the will—as anthroposophy has at its core a schooling that contains exercises for the inner life, the soul—an experience can be quickened, the process that brings an ability to separate oneself from one’s thinking. One, in reality, has created a distance from one’s identity that prior was so influenced by the thoughts that are so bare in hindsight. One understands, as one climbs higher in the ideals one cultivates, how even the elect have been deceived by the formation of dogmatic habits of thinking. Thinking is often considered by many circles as a process that goes on almost automatically—keeps on sustaining itself of its own accord, locked up within my skin—its actual impulses are not noticed in the passing moments of life and are not so readily thought of as possessing such power as they do and can, and must be mastered, brought under control, so that only what the beholder wishes to perceive will enter his consciousness. This is quicker for some, and for others it takes much longer endurance of inner effort, but one begins to move past one’s erroneous conceptions—they fall away and dissolve, and in their place new paradigms appear. Life presents itself as a completely new experience when one absorbs the fact that thoughts themselves are living realities, parts of actual beings of higher and lower worlds. The strong delusion that the scriptures themselves point to, which God sends forth, reveals itself as an ongoing mystery to unravel: a delusion that consists of humanity’s lower thinking or memory, the thoughts that are habitual and pertain only to sense-bound knowledge, having obscured the cognition of our ancient past, when outer scriptures were not needed to provoke a memory of a spiritual reality. A delusion that blinds one to a higher sphere which guides the lower—not only external happenings, the budding and dying of physical creation, but the rising and descending of the soul itself as it follows the spiritual rhythms that manifest in all that we see in this material life spread out before us in waking consciousness. One then can look upon oneself in an objective way and indeed, in a certain sense, experience oneself outside of oneself, can feel oneself as a secure spiritual being within the hierarchies that were mere skeletons in traditional religious expressions. One then grows into a feeling for how reality is not a mere linking up of external happenings—simply cause and effect. After the effects of this esoteric development emerge, the soul is able to bring forth an elevated thinking and feeling, a living moral imagination that isn’t subjective but grows into the thoughts of the beings that sustain the cosmos. One then carries a higher consciousness because one realizes that this grace from above, which did not hold much inner sustenance as a concept or mental image, now is received as an intimate experience of the soul itself, creating out of itself a higher vantage point and means of communication with the spiritual beings through whose love the human soul itself was created—a love expressed through its gradual evolution and involution. Or, in other words, one can begin the truly beautiful experience of the mutual edification of love for one another within the spiritual hierarchies.

We let Rudolf Steiner illuminate more of what occurs occultly in the hidden astral substance or spirit when one is or is not able to grasp more of reality through an assimilation of ideas that seek to penetrate these elusive worlds of soul and spirit with the same conviction one has in concepts suited to physical reality.

Through his concepts, a person is continually creating structures in his astral body. These show themselves in the most various forms. The astral substance that lies unused between the individual structures is called ‘intermediary’ astral substance, to distinguish it from that which has been shaped into structures. This intermediary astral substance is continually supplementing itself out of the astral substance in our surroundings, is continually flowing in and out, is continually renewing itself. But the structures that man has cultivated by the way he feels and thinks and decides remain fixed. Let us then assume we have two people engaging in an ordinary conversation with each other. One of them has cultivated rigid, fixed concepts, which have correspondingly engendered very fixed structures in the astral substance. The other talks to him and tries to explain something to him. What must happen if one person is to make something clear to another? He must inject his own concept into the other person’s astral substance. This concept, this thought, thus flows into the other person’s astral substance. Once there, it must first of all be absorbed in the intermediary substance and [then] remake itself and become transformed [in a manner] corresponding to the forms already developed there. Now let us assume that the one is trying to explain to the other something to do with, say, reincarnation. The other has however already formed a fixed idea about reincarnation. Let us assume him to be a prejudiced person who has formed for himself the idea that reincarnation is something silly and absurd. This thought has hovered in his astral substance. The new thought of the first person now arrives and dissolves itself in the intermediary astral substance of the other, and would then have to be transformed by the thought forms already existing there. This will not work, however, because his [the second person’s] concepts are too rigid, too fixed. He cannot adapt the newly transmitted thought to his [own] thought forms and therefore does not understand it.  The more a person keeps his concepts flexible, so that these can always be dissolved in the surrounding intermediary substance, the more he will understand the other people he encounters. This is why it is so difficult to convey theosophical life to academically trained people. The concepts acquired at university engender structures which are rigid, fixed and enclosed within themselves, which are not easily dissolvable. The academic usually comes to a theosophical lecture full of such structures and is then unable to comprehend theosophical life. 

To conclude, we would like to bear further witness to this specialized knowledge that Anthroposophy desires to instill within a greater portion of humanity, which offers a path for the modern spiritual researcher who, in this case, desires to keep the Bible near as they embark upon the process we hinted at earlier of outgrowing our naïve or simple conceptions of man’s role in cosmic evolution. We wish to move away from our place as merely observers and toward becoming willing participants in the mystical fact of Christianity. Our aim is to engage in a richer pursuit of experiencing the actual essence of grace, redemption, and eternal life—those elusive spiritual impulses in which we have perhaps outgrown our initial ideas, but which in their core are more profound than one originally believes, as what lies behind them is actually the whole evolution of the human race.

We can begin to live more deeply into the Spirit within the Scriptures when we come to recognize that these sacred writings were not, in their earliest expression, historical documents in the modern sense in which we naturally approach the past. What remains within the text, even through the many translations, cultures, and centuries that separate us from its origin, often bears the imprint of far older realities. Behind many passages stand the purified initiation experiences of those great souls who were entrusted with carrying forward the impulses that eventually took form as what we now recognize as religion. These were not speculative ideas fashioned in the form of doctrine or modern science, nor were they formed as we today form concepts through intellectual reflection, but were the fruits of direct participation in higher worlds.

One must learn to imagine this wisdom itself differently. It is not merely a carefully arranged body of beliefs or rituals, nor simply a religious psychology. Rather, it consists of living impulses of soul and spirit received through actual intercourse with realities that transcend ordinary perception. This knowledge was not handed down through external instruction but through the higher worlds themselves by men and women whose consciousness had been prepared to perceive what remained hidden from the majority of humanity. They became instruments through whom divine revelation could gradually enter the stream of history.

Outer historical science itself has already uncovered evidence that nearly every great civilization possessed two streams of religious life. There was the public expression of religion, intended to guide and sustain the life of an entire people, and alongside it there existed a deeper current reserved for those who had undergone suitable preparation. These individuals—whether they were called priests, sages, initiates, or by some other title—were entrusted with truths whose misuse would have hindered rather than advanced humanity’s development. It is best at this point not to linger on the idea, even though it may contain some truth, that such knowledge was withheld through pride or through malevolent impulses of domination or control, but rather to think of it as another grace from the spirit, in which a much higher wisdom embodies quite intrinsically a perfect reverence for the tremendous creative forces that accompany genuine spiritual insight.

These inspirations from the other side of existence were true mysteries—not secrets in the ordinary sense, but hidden realities concerning the manner in which higher worlds continually work into earthly evolution. They spoke of the living relationships extending from the celestial movements of stars and planets down into the formation and structure of human consciousness itself. Embedded within these sacred texts was an initiation wisdom through which the eternal patterns underlying existence became revealed. Entire civilizations were quietly guided by these impulses, and through them the soul itself learned the paths it must travel in its continual transformations.

This is why the Scriptures continue to speak with such inexhaustible power across every sphere of human life. Their deepest essence does not consist merely in their outward words, but in the invisible spiritual impulses that continually seek to unfold themselves within those words, and not only through their expression in writing or speech, but through a wisdom that unfolds itself within each encountered phenomenon and form. It is this hidden wisdom, woven into every genuine phenomenon of existence, that gives rise to the forms through which truth gradually manifests. It is the living force within becoming itself—the quiet activity that enables humanity to discover new knowledge and  find genuine satisfaction within the soul.

Those responsible for preserving what would eventually become the Bible—these initiates, such as Moses, Daniel, and the apostles—were not simply authors recording events for posterity. They were guardians of living realities that had first been experienced before they were ever written. As humanity’s consciousness developed, these same divine revelations necessarily assumed new forms so that each age might receive according to its capacity. These are the works prepared beforehand into which we ourselves are now called to enter—not merely through outward deeds, but through the inward miles our own souls must travel. For initiation was never merely the acquisition of hidden information. The initiates themselves underwent profound transformations of their own being. The subtle members of man’s constitution had to be consciously cultivated and strengthened so that new capacities of perception and cognition could awaken. Humanity’s present powers of thinking did not simply appear fully formed. They emerged through immeasurable sacrifices made by countless generations who labored inwardly to expand the boundaries of consciousness. The freedom of thought enjoyed today stands upon foundations laid by those who willingly endured the difficult work of spiritual transformation long before such capacities became common to humanity.

If one were to journey backward in time—long before the first vestiges of recorded history, before the words of Homer echoed throughout ancient Greece—one would indeed discover what could properly be called an esoteric or occult science. This science, as we have stated, was entrusted to a comparatively small number of pupils, adepts, and initiates who had undergone the preparation necessary to experience these truths. But here again, it may be good to remember that the forms and functions have not remained static, nor has the source, the spiritual worlds, ever remained still, but is also following its own paths of transformation. So one must always retain a certain nimbleness in how one imagines the spiritual world as ever preparing a different relationship to man’s thinking and feeling, thus shifting the boundaries of what is exoteric or esoteric knowledge.

Perhaps a crude example can help paint a little clearer picture of what is meant here by esoteric knowledge or this initiation science, so we don’t think of it as some kind of nebulous magical or mystical form, but instead can have a clearer sense of how the limits of knowledge and cognition are ever transforming themselves as humanity gradually emerges from darkness into knowledge that was previously hidden from it. We teach children today that the earth moves around the sun, that the heavens obey lawful relationships, and that what appears to the senses is often only the outward appearance of a deeper reality. Yet there was a time when such knowledge itself would have belonged to the mysteries. At a certain point in early evolution, humanity would have found itself in almost a reversal of where it stands today, so instead of trying to find an assurance of salvation in higher worlds of spirit, humanity in much more ancient periods needed an assurance that the divine could be found in the sense-perceptible. What is commonplace in one age may once have required initiation in another. Thus, the Copernican conception of the universe serves as a fitting illustration of a far more universal principle: what is esoteric in one epoch gradually becomes exoteric in another as humanity itself grows into the capacities necessary to bear it.

Nor was the practice of guarding profound discoveries unique to religion. As we move through history, those mighty cultural streams of philosophy, art, religion, and, eventually, science grew further and further apart. Even within comparatively recent centuries, however, a similar principle appears. Mathematical discoveries were not always immediately made available in their complete form. Newton, for example, developed important mathematical methods years before much of his work was formally published, while discoveries in algebra likewise passed through particular schools and circles before becoming part of the common inheritance of mathematical knowledge. These examples do not necessarily suggest elitism for its own sake; rather, they show how knowledge that becomes commonplace in one age may have existed long before humanity as a whole had developed the capacity to receive it into ordinary consciousness.

Let’s return to the Scriptures, where Christ Himself points toward this great transition. In time, what was once esoteric knowledge would become available to all humanity, just as spiritual reality had once been accessible to initiates and, in an earlier age, through mankind’s more pictorial and instinctual consciousness.

Recorded were these words from the mind of a God who bequeathed a part of His own essence and lived within a consciousness fitted to the human race, in order that both humanity and the spiritual worlds, together with their inhabitants, might continue their evolution. What follows is my own rendering of the spiritual meaning I understand to be contained within Christ’s words to His disciples:

“I speak now to you in parables, but there will come a time when the hidden things shall be perceived through direct, experiential understanding, and the mysteries of the universe shall be won for all.”

One could almost regard the whole history of initiation as moving toward the fulfillment of these words. What had long been clothed in symbol, parable, and sacred rite was destined, through the evolution of human consciousness, to become capable of entering ordinary waking awareness. The mysteries were never intended to remain forever hidden. Their concealment belonged to a particular stage of mankind’s development. Their future belonged to humanity as a whole.

What once drew mankind toward the mystical—the living substance of the unseen worlds, the impulses and experiences that eventually clothed themselves in myth and later in religious feeling and doctrine—has gradually lost much of its original efficacy. This has not occurred because the spiritual world has withdrawn in actuality, nor because the ancient mysteries were false, as some still believe, but because they now approach modern consciousness in forms that are no longer living. The modern soul no longer inhabits the same inward constitution as the men and women who first received those revelations. Many fail to appreciate that the very faculties through which the soul perceives have themselves evolved. Thinking, feeling, and willing are not fixed realities but living capacities that have undergone continual transformation throughout human history. The evolution of consciousness is not a peripheral subject; it is one of the central realities through which both history and Scripture become intelligible. In this sense, what Genesis describes as the Fall reaches beyond a merely moral event. It also signifies the gradual descent of human consciousness into a mode of perception increasingly bound to the senses, a necessary stage through which freedom of the individuality could be won.

Here the Science of the Spirit seeks to offer its greatest service. It desires to illuminate this hidden development and provide a path of knowledge for those prepared to enter more consciously into reality itself. Its task is not to invent a new world but to awaken mankind to the world already surrounding him—a world extending beyond the limitations imposed by sense perception alone. In speaking once again of the mysteries in a language suited to modern consciousness, Spiritual Science seeks to make available to the many what was once entrusted only to the few, so that men and women may walk with greater light both in the body and beyond it.

And then one can be in a position to realize, in a deeper sense, what is really at the heart of the fear that accompanies the thought of embracing new knowledge in a living manner—of risking the possibility of ardent change. It is this clinging to the perception of the physical world and the love man has for what he has worked so hard to obtain. Man has developed an extraordinarily penetrating consciousness of the physical world and has learned to observe its phenomena in ever finer detail. But this very achievement has also created a dependence upon sense-bound perception, so that he carries its assumptions into what he believes the soul and spirit themselves must be. There now exists an unconscious fear of the spirit, of what man cannot grasp with the intellect through sense-bound experience, which reveals itself in his refusal to give serious thought to its mysteries. So, in the way that Christ asked His followers to count the cost, we must have a willingness to hold before our inner gaze this pursuit of knowledge that expects our whole being.

So in the coming months, we will begin working through some of Steiner’s major works, not with the intention of simply placing ourselves beneath another label, but in the hope of entering more deeply into the living knowledge to which anthroposophy points. We will work through these texts together, approaching the Scriptures with a better understanding of their higher content and bringing that content to greater elucidation. We will couple much of what has been brought to us through theology and various streams of Christian thought with a spiritual science that endeavors to approach not only religious evolution and psychology but the larger schemes of evolution concerning our own planet as well as the constitution of the human being. We must always have a clearer understanding of who we are and how the knowledge we have obtained makes its way into these bodies of concepts. For this we will enter into Theosophy and Occult Science, where the constitution of the human being and the greater course of cosmic and human evolution can begin to take on a fuller form. We will approach Christianity as Mystical Fact so that the development and spiritual significance of Christianity can be viewed in relation to the ancient mysteries from which it emerged. And because this knowledge cannot remain merely something taken into the intellect, we must also make the soul capable of moving into these places, these many mansions that have been prepared. Through Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, we will go as deeply as we can into that modern path of initiation—one that seeks to understand not only what was and what is, but what the human being itself may become.