The renaissance of mystery wisdom in the work of Rudolf Steiner

literally unspeakable: the second when it had become aporretonforbidden to be spoken. In the second stage the true mystical experience had already been largely lost. But of how the experience at either stage was brought about, or in what it actually consisted modern scholarship can tell us little or nothing.

It is perhaps not difficult to understand why this must be so. The modern intellect can only grasp what belongs to the intellect, what can be deduced, measured and proved. It deals with the sphere of the calculable. Human consciousness has only recently entered that sphere. Brecht’s play of Galileo well represents one phase of that entry. But Brecht has little sympathy with the last—no doubt decadent—outpost of the incalculable, in the Church which clung to the tradition of a spiritual universe, which cannot be numbered and measured and weighed. Steiner had great sympathy with, and an immense understanding of, the sphere of the calculable, but his great achievement was to become a Galileo of the incalculable, that is, of the spiritual. To understand the spiritual with the same clarity as the intellect understands the physical calls for different forms of thought, and a type of consciousness which has many affinities with the experience of the Mysteries. If we pursue this consciousness patiently and far enough we can come a long way in understanding the essential experience of ancient Mystery Wisdom.

Let us therefore take some of the characteristics—Cardinal Newman would have called them ‘notes’-—of Mystery Wisdom and see how they reappear in Steiner’s spiritual knowledge.

First, we have the fact that Mystery Wisdom and experience require a moral preparation. The Eleusinian Hierophant bade all depart who were impure of body, hand or soul. This is a ‘note’ which has entirely disappeared from modern scientific knowledge. We may be glad if they are there, but we do not demand moral qualifications of our physicists, astronomers and engineers. In the ancient world morality was not so inward a thing as it is today, and external purifications had a significance they have lost for the modern man. But Steiner, with no less solemnity than an ancient Hierophant, wrote over the gateway of his path to spiritual knowledge, that whoever sets out on that journey must take three steps in morality for every one he takes in knowledge. For it is a path which leads to direct experience of

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