�Underlying these lectures is the view that rather
than being a once-and-for-all act, intelligent design is an ongoing
evolutionary process, and that it would be very helpful if we could understand
where we have come from, where we are now and where we are going. As human
beings we are at the centre of what may be the biggest mess the world has been
in since God foreclosed on the Garden of Eden. We sense that our powers of
thought and moral insight come from the spiritual world, that by the grace of
God we are able to use them as free individuals, and that it is our duty to do
so. This moral
and intellectual freedom is in cosmic terms a comparatively recent development,
although in human terms its acquisition has been a long-drawn-out process. Out
of the many insights that Rudolf Steiner gave into these matters, I�ll give the
briefest possible outline up to the beginning of something resembling modern
scientific thinking � in other words, the period in the sixth century BC, just
before the great age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Then I�ll talk about
some of the early philosophers and the events in the spiritual world that
Steiner regarded as crucial in fostering this flowering of Greek thought. We�ll
see how Aristotle imposed some order on the mass of warring opinions produced
by earlier philosophers, but still left problems that haunted thinkers for many
years to come. Finally I�ll give a preview of the next lecture.
According to Rudolf Steiner, the story of the human
race began in a remote age of the world, long before our present states of
matter appeared. As Steiner describes the situation in An Outline of
Esoteric Science, we must imagine a state of consciousness in which we
lacked any sense of individuality or separation from the heavenly powers who
were to foster our evolution. The whole process of evolution has been one of
physical densification and increasing self-awareness, and has been guided by
successive levels of spiritual beings who have appeared to humanity as gods and
angels and have supplied the divine intelligence that is inherent in the human
and natural world. For a very long time the human race lived in complete
communion with the spiritual world, but at a certain point a weaning process
began so that eventually we would be able to take the responsibility for our
thoughts and actions. The intention was that through
our increasing connection with the physical world, we should become independent
and eventually reunite with the spirit out of our own free will. In speaking
about the human life-cycle, a great anthroposophist by the name of Walter
Johannes Stein once remarked �Ve enter though ze gate of birth and ve leave
through ze gate of death, and in between ve have ze time of our lives.� Ve �
er, we � are born out of the spirit and when we die we return to the
spirit; this, however, is something we don�t have much option about and, as the
poet Wordsworth mentioned, when we arrive on earth we may be trailing clouds of
glory but we soon forget where we came from.
When Steiner spoke of returning in freedom to the spirit he was talking about
something that we would eventually do as living, conscious people and, in order
to see how Steiner�s story works, we need to
be willing to allow the idea of reincarnation into our thinking. In our past
incarnations we have moved further and further from our spiritual home, and in
future incarnations we may freely return. Or we may not, and some of the
reasons why we should probably be more concerned about this than about the condition
of the dollar will emerge in these talks.
If you are familiar with the Revelation of St.
John the Divine, you will know that �there was war in Heaven; Michael and
his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and
prevailed not� and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the
devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out into the
earth, and his angels were cast out with him.� I�m not a biblical scholar and
I�m certainly not going to tell you that this is a poetical description of
events described by Rudolf Steiner. I am quite prepared to believe that St. John gave a factual description of events in the heavens that have had far-reaching
results on earth. My point is that when we talk about people as beings created
by God and given free will, we tend to forget that on higher levels of
existence something similar applies to angels and all the other beings of the
hierarchies. Steiner gave us some information not only about the precipitation
of Satan and his hosts but also about other disagreements that have taken place
in the heavens and their results for the people of earth. Nature, with all its
beauty and all its cruel waste, and the human being, full of high aspirations
and ghastly failings, give the impression of good things spoilt. In the
Judeo-Christian tradition we regard this as the result of the Fall, and we
realize that when angels fall, the earth and its inhabitants suffer. The
ancient plan for human evolution has been subverted and a big part of history
has been the constant effort to transform evil into good so that we can return
freely to the spirit instead of becoming stuck in materialism or drifting in a
warm and pleasant sea of easy spirituality. That is why Christ is with us and Michael
is his right-hand archangel. Before getting down to some ordinary, exoteric
history I�ll add that Steiner didn�t want to be believed merely on his say-so.
The question is, does what he says make sense in the light of our own
experience and knowledge? The history we�ll be going into this evening gives a
pretty good read on that question.
(iii)
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers
The earliest Greek philosophers appeared in the
sixth century BC, which was roughly six hundred years after the siege of Troy,
between two and three hundred years after the composition of the Iliad and
about 100 years after the lifetime of a grumpy Boeotian
farmer called Hesiod. Hesiod�s father left him and his brother a small plot of
land in a hamlet called Ascra at the foot of Mount Helicon, which is the
traditional home of the Muses. Hesiod, who appears to have been an introverted
misogynist, referred to Ascra as �a cursed place, cruel in
winter, hard in summer, never pleasant�, and seems to have spent his long
winter evenings writing the poetry from which later Greek writers derived a
great deal of their mythology. His Theogony concerns the origins of the
world and of the gods and shows a special interest in their family relations.
According to the fifth century historian Herodotus, Hesiod's retelling of the
old stories became the generally accepted version.
Against the mythological background provided by Homer and Hesiod we can place a
little political history. ����������� Around
1000 BC, Greek�colonists, driven from the mainland
by the Dorians, established colonies in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. In spite of several invasions, which culminated in occupation by the Persians in
546 BC, their twelve cities remained prosperous. These included Miletus, Samos, Ephesus�and Colophon, places that some rather well known people came from or
went to, including St. Paul. The Ionian revolt against King Darius�I in 500 BC precipitated the Persian Wars. While all this
was going on, Greek philosophy is traditionally supposed to have begun in 585
BC when Thales�of Miletus correctly forecast an eclipse of the sun. What makes the Greek philosophy of
this period so striking, however, is not that people were suddenly able to
perform such mathematical�feats as predicting eclipses. The Babylonian�astronomers had been doing that for centuries. Later on,
when Aristotle�referred to the new
philosophers as physicists, he meant that they had studied everything that
happens in the natural world. The Babylonians had worked for the most part with
purely mathematical relations, like the rhythms of the solar system, but
the Greeks got into the deepest philosophical questions. How and why did the
universe begin? What is it made of and how does it work?
Old farmer Hesiod had answered some of these
questions before, and had done so in terms of the creative deeds of gods. Some
of the activities of the Olympian�Pantheon do not seem particularly godlike to
us, but this is understandable since, by the time when Homer�and Hesiod�were at work, the power of human beings to see into the divine world had
already waned considerably. Many of the stories have reached us in corrupt
forms, depicting the Gods as irresponsible people equipped with supernatural
powers, with Zeus as a sort of ultimate James Bond, rather than divine beings
caring for the health of the human race. Xenophanes�of Colophon,�who lived from about 570 � 475 BC, complained that �Homer and Hesiod attributed to
the gods all the things that among men are regarded as shameful and blameworthy
� theft and adultery and mutual deception�, and he rejected the whole pantheon
in favor of a single great god who perceives and works through the sheer power
of thought.
Xenophanes�was not the only one to dismiss the Olympian�deities in favor of something less personal, more reliable and more
intellectual. The early�philosophers, now known as the pre-Socratics, generally
agreed that the universe is lawful and that its processes can be understood.
History is not a one-damn-thing-after-another sequence of unrelated events and
nature is not just a playground for a troupe of whimsical gods. This does not
mean that the pre-Socratics were atheists � only that they wanted nature to be
self-explanatory and God, or the gods, to be rational and not to interfere too
much. It�s worth noting, however, that some of them came close to committing
the sins of which Socrates himself was suspected � impiety and atheism � and
for which he was put to death. Socrates, however, had the misfortune to live in
a democracy in which he could be condemned by a majority vote of five hundred
of his fellow citizens. But that�s another story.
*
If you want to say that nature is self-explanatory you
have to show that its enormous variety and changeability can be explained in
terms of a few basic principles. This is where we come to the ancient idea of the elements. The Greek elements bore very little resemblance to those of
modern physical science and there was no more agreement among the pre-Socratics
about them than about most of the other topics they discussed. Several of them
believed that everything comes from transformations of a single element. Thales
thought it was�water, while his fellow-citizen Anaximander�spoke of an indefinite basic stuff, a sort of primal goo, from which all familiar
substances derive. Anaximenes, who was Anaximander�s younger contemporary and
pupil, thought the primal stuff was air. Alcmaeon, the physician, wanted to
explain everything in terms of pairs of opposites: hot and cold, light and
dark, wet and dry. Xenophanes�seems to have thought that earth was the primal�substance and Heraclitus, who came from Ephesus�and was known as the �obscure�
and the �riddler�, made fire his principle.
This is the kind of nest of contradictions that
makes students of early Greek philosophy reach for the Advil, but we must
remember that these people were thinking, talking and writing long before the
orderly philosophical worlds of Plato and Aristotle appeared. There is a story
that the great playwright Euripides�gave Socrates�a copy of Heraclitus� book
and asked him what he thought of it. Socrates replied: �What I understand is
splendid; and I think that what I don�t understand is too � but it would take a
Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.� Here is a sample from a historian
called Hippolytus: �Heraclitus says that the universe is divisible and
indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal, Word and Eternity,
Father and Son, God�and Justice. He praises and admires the unseen part of God�s power above the known part but
says that he honors more those things which are learned by sight and hearing...�� No wonder that Socrates was
puzzled and later philosophers and divines from Parmenides to Averroes
and Aquinas felt the need to assert that contradictory statements could not be
simultaneously true.
In spite of all these different opinions some common
factors are clear, and one the most important for us is that to these
proto-physicists, the physical objects of nature were not merely
physical: Aristotle remarked that �Some say that soul is mixed with everything
and perhaps that is why Thales thought that the universe is full of gods.� Anaximenes believed that our souls, being air, hold us together, and breath and air
contain the whole world. One very basic idea that emerged is that the process
of creation implies the necessity of destruction. This idea makes perfect sense
to us. All living things die and return their substance to the earth; of dust
thou art made and to dust thou shalt return. The very rocks crumble and lose
their nature. But Anaximander explains this by saying, �For they give justice
and reparation to one another in accordance with the arrangement of time�, and
we feel baffled again.
During this time, Greeks had colonized parts of the island of Sicily and produced a philosopher who did his best to
bring some order and unity to the scene. This was Empedocles�(c.495 � 435 BC) who tried to account for all the variety of different substances
in terms of combinations of four elements;�earth, water, air and fire. This was
accepted by later philosophers and is what most people think of when �the Greek
elements� are mentioned. We must beware of thinking that this poor old guy had
the right general idea but got all the details wrong. Empedocles says that the
elements in different substances are held together by love�and torn apart by
strife, so you can see that his ideas moved in a totally different world from
those of a modern scientist. Some people have tried to put this in modern terms
by saying that love simply means a force of attraction and strife a force of
repulsion, assuming na�vely that the ancient Greeks thought in exactly the same
way as we do but had odd, fanciful ways of expressing themselves. To the
pre-Socratics, however, the world was still ensouled and permeable to the
spirit, and it wasn�t until the eighteenth century that the soul element was
finally driven out of physical science � only to be brought back a little later
by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner. Love and strife transform the elements, just as
they transform men and women. Empedocles believed that human reason reaches
only so far, and appealed for divine help to keep the search for knowledge on
the right path:
�
�O Gods, from holy mouths channel forth a pure
spring.
And you, Muse of long memory, white-armed maiden,
I beseech: tell me what is right for mortals to
hear.�
The Muse assures him that true learning is possible
and that an understanding of the natural world is open to those who have the
right relationship to divine wisdom. People had begun what we can recognize as
serious scientific thinking about the natural world, but they still felt the
presence of the divine and the need for guidance from the spirit. If you are
now thinking that Empedocles has put things into a good and perfectly
understandable perspective you are in for a disappointment, for while he was at
work another philosophical movement began which cast serious doubt on whether
any kind of scientific knowledge was possible at all; but before going into
that it is time to see what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the great change of
consciousness that gives the key to all these events.
(iv)
Behind the Scenes
At the beginning of the Iliad, Homer, or whoever it
was, invokes the Muse: �Sing the wrath of Achilles��
Four hundred years later we find Empedocles still asking for divine advice.
This is an observation that works in two directions. Here, as has often been
said, is a manifestation of human dependence on the Gods; what we are to hear
is the divine voice speaking through the human author. But it also indicates
that these individuals were sufficiently out of the womb to be able to make
such a request. Babies don�t ask their parents for advice. Young children ask a
lot of questions and teenagers may occasionally ask for advice but don�t
usually take it. It�s tempting to say that Empedocles was in the young child
stage and that we are still going through teenagery, but it�s not an analogy
that I�d want to press. It�s a slightly better analogy to say that at a certain
point the Gods decided to throw us out of the
nest and get us to fly on our own � that is, to do our own thinking and take
responsibility for our actions. Steiner frequently talked about the way in
which the powers of thinking and acting independently were instilled into the
human being, and he described the process from several different angles. The
following discussion draws mainly on a series of lectures given in 1923, called
The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History and on his book The
Riddles of Philosophy. In later lectures I�ll bring this into relation with
descriptions given in the Karma Lectures and the Letters to Members.
We are so used to
experiencing our thinking�as a process that we control, and our thoughts as our own,
even when we get them from someone else, that it is hard not to assume that
this has always been so. And yet the whole flavor of the ancient civilizations is
quite removed from anything that we experience today. The objects of everyday experience were physical,
certainly, but not merely physical. Thoughts were not just about
the objects of perception but were perceived as belonging to and
inherent in those objects. The ancient Greeks, as Rudolf Steiner tells us, were
conscious of the spiritual beings who were in charge of the workings of nature:
�If an ancient Greek had wanted to explain the origin of
his thoughts through knowledge of the Mysteries, he would have had to say the
following: I turn my spiritual sight up toward those beings who, through the
science of the mysteries, have been revealed to me as the Beings of Form. They
are the bearers of cosmic intelligence and cosmic thoughts. They let thoughts
stream through all the world events, and they bestow these thoughts upon the
human soul so that it can experience them consciously.�
The Beings of Form are also called the Exousiai or,
in St. Paul�s terminology, the Powers, the fourth hierarchy above the
human being.
Steiner�describes how, in a process centered in the fourth century
AD and reaching completion in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the Exousiai gave up their rulership of the cosmic intelligence to the Archai �
the Principalities � one step closer to the human being. At the same time the
Exousiai maintained their stewardship of the whole world of sense impressions �
colors, forms and sounds. To the ancient Greek,�the angelic thought-forms were inseparable from the
objects they belonged to, and were perceived along with the colors, forms and
sounds of those objects. By the time the pre-Socratics appeared, this ancient
unity of thought and thing was just beginning to come apart and, while
colors, forms and sounds were still perceived externally, people began to
experience thinking�as an inner process. We human beings seem to be slow
learners � it took us about two thousand years to get these thoughts all the
way into our heads. If the process was centered on the fourth century AD and
completed by about the fourteenth, it must have begun in the seventh century BC
and extended over the period that Steiner called the Age of the Intellectual
Soul.�*** Its beginning helps us to understand why the Presocratic philosophers
got busy when they did, and its end is connected with the growing feelings of
independence and self-confidence with which people in the Renaissance�tackled the problems of the world around them. But if we were able to plot a
learning curve for the period in question, it would not be a nice smooth ascent
� it would look more like one of our recent days on the stock market and it
wouldn�t end punctually in 1400 AD. Recently my younger son gave me an I-pod,
but it took me several days to figure out how to use it, and this reminded me
of the fact that when we gave him his first bicycle the first thing he did was
to fall off it. So it�s very important to realize that although 1400 AD gives
us a rough date for the end of the downloading process, we�re still learning
how to use our new capacities.
(v)
Problems Emerge
The gift of intelligence and the
separation of thinking from sense perception had some rather painful results.
It is what made philosophy and science possible in the first place, but it soon had the paradoxical effect of making
some of the Greeks feel that any form of natural science is impossible.
The chief hero or villain of this new movement was
Parmenides of Elea, who flourished in the early fifth century BC. He composed a
long poem consisting of two parts, called The Way of Truth and The
Way of Opinion, and there is nothing in the whole of early Greek
philosophy that more clearly illustrates the developing separation between the
inner and the outer. Like Empedocles, Parmenides�appeals for divine guidance
and the Goddess of Justice tells him that he must begin to take responsibility
for his thinking. �You must learn all things�, she says, �both the steadfast
heart of compelling truth and the untrustworthy opinions of mortal men.�
She tells Parmenides that his thinking takes
precedence over the deceptive claims of the senses; and that the processes that
seem to be going on in the natural world are not �the kind of change you can
believe in.� The Way of Truth is the path of reason and thinking, but�The Way of Opinion describes the natural world as it appeals to our senses
and is, according to the Goddess, a �trail devoid of knowledge.� So, to
Parmenides, the inner world of thinking is reliable and truthful, while the
outer world of sense-perception is unreliable and deceitful.
His thinking leads him to believe that, contrary to
all appearances, creation and dissolution�are impossible and that the world is
a single, permanent, eternal, unchangeable object. So it seemed that thinking�was about to cut the ground from under the scientists� feet, for science depends
precisely on observing the changes in the natural world that Parmenides
considered illusory. As Rudolf Steiner�puts it, it was as if Parmenides�were surrounded by a wall of thought,
cutting him off from the world of nature.
The other two members of the
Eleatic school were Zeno, famous for his paradoxes, and Melissus of Samos. The
little that is known of Melissus suggests that he was quite a character. When
the island of Samos was attacked by the Athenians in 441 BC,�Melissus took advantage of the temporary absence of Pericles, the Athenian leader,
and launched a successful attack in which the Samians defeated the Athenian
navy and gained control of the Aegean Sea.
In the long run the Athenians prevailed, but Melissus had made a little dent in
the course of history. Goethe once remarked that it is easier to act than to
think, but Melissus managed to do both. He�made his mark on philosophy by
expressing Parmenides� obscure poem in plain prose and adding some thoughts of
his own. Here are some
samples:
����������� �The world is eternal and infinite and one and
wholly homogeneous. And it will neither perish nor grow larger nor change its
arrangement nor suffer pain nor suffer anguish. For if it underwent any of
these things it would no longer be one.�
����������� �Everything we see seems to us to change from
what it was before. So it is clear that we do not see correctly. For things
would not change if they were true, but each would be as it seemed to be: for
nothing is stronger than what is true��
Nothing is stronger than what is true. If
appearances seem to contradict what we know to be true, the appearances must be
wrong. The belief that soundly argued philosophical conclusions are compulsory
continued for many centuries, in spite of the disagreements that arose between
individual philosophers and schools of philosophy. Truth may have an
indivisible core, but it seems to wear many faces and this may be one of the
reasons why science became increasingly separated from philosophy. The philosophical
problems were too difficult and it turned out to be perfectly possible to get
on with the scientific job and ignore them � but only up to a point. Philosophy
has had its revenge, but that�s yet another story.
So now, bearing on mind what I said about Advil, let
me review the situation just before Plato and Aristotle appeared, and give a
preview of the next lecture: we have Empedocles, whose system of elements
seemed as if it might put ancient science on a consistent footing; we have
Parmenides and Melissus, who believe that nothing ever changes and make it
appear that science is irrelevant; we have Heraclitus, who talks in riddles, whose motto is panta rei � all flows � and who thinks that the only
permanent feature of the world is change. And now along comes Democritus with
the idea that he can solve the whole thing with a system of permanent atoms
swirling around in ever-changing patterns. This sounds very plausible, but
Parmenides finds it very objectionable and Democritus himself realizes that it
seems to lead only to another dead end. We might well ask whether the heavenly
powers who, if I may say so respectfully, were responsible for this mess,
really intended things to turn out the way they did. So let me also remind you
that when you gave your children their first bicycles you didn�t intend them to
fall off, but you knew that it was a possibility. Like the best human parents,
our spiritual parents didn�t supply training wheels but did arrange for
adequate instruction. In addition to guidance already given in the
Egypto-Chaldean period
about the ways of the physical world, and to what continued to flow out of the
spiritual world, they gave us Plato and Aristotle, and it was the latter who
went very deeply into just those problems of sense perception and thinking that
had not existed before the change of consciousness began. He provided a
workable basis for scientific philosophy that would last for two thousand
years, and one of the key ingredients was the theory of potential, which looks
forward to Goethean science and appears to make the atomic theory unnecessary.
Aristotle provided inspiration and working material for many generations of
thinkers. Next time we�ll see how his thought traveled into Arabia and across North Africa, and lived on in the minds of the Muslim and Christian philosophers of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. But, in spite of all temptations, we must remember
that this is not a philosophy course. Our purpose is to understand the progress
of the human race from complete dependence on the spiritual world to our
present state of striving for independence and individuality. Aristotle may
have left us a practical system but it has its share of enigmas, and evolution
didn�t stop with his death in 322 BC. One of these is a passage in a book
called De Anima � About the Soul � which seems to cast doubt on
whether it�s possible that a human being can really be a true individual with
an independent set of perceptions and thoughts. Such difficulties refused to go
away and, as always, there were events in the spiritual world that fed impulses
into human history. The trail will lead us to Baghdad and the court of Harun el Rashid at the turn of the ninth
century. By this time consciousness of the spirit had receded so much
that divine revelation had to be replaced by authority and tradition. So while
there was conflict in the heavens about the future of the human race, there
were endless disputes on earth between Muslim theologians and the great Arabian
thinkers, who were devoted both to Islam and to Aristotle and believed that
sound religion must make good philosophical sense. These problems found their
way into Western Europe, where in the thirteenth century the labors of St.
Thomas Aquinas gave rise to a great synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and
Christian revelation. This is where I hope to get to in the next lecture, and
after that we�ll see how things fell apart again.
In the meantime let�s remember that the divine
powers didn�t present us with the gift of intelligence in order to make our
lives easy. Many of us don�t seem to use it very much and some of those who do
often wish they could give it back. At the risk of sounding like an elderly
moralizer, I simply recommend patience and fortitude, knowledge and courage.
����������� Oh, by the way, I�m not intending to explain
about turkeys, but you may have the opportunity to do a little research
yourselves � say, in a couple of weeks� time.
