Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel: Insights into a New Understanding of the Christ Mystery

Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel: Insights into a New Understanding of the Christ Mystery Peter Selg SteinerBooks, 2010, 166 pgs

Rudolf Steiner as a Spiritual Teacher: An Introduction, Peter Selg, SteinerBooks, 2009, 90 pgs.

Review by George Centanni

Rudolf Steiner—Apostle?

We are used to calling Rudolf Steiner a thinker, scientist, initiate, and teacher. Those are terms he used to describe himself. But to my knowledge, no one calls him an apostle. Yet how should we regard a man who not only spreads the gospel of Christ, but actually purports to produce one out of his own experience? Of course, the marketplace today is full of books by people who claim to speak with and for God. Anyone can write a gospel, and we regard their works with varying degrees of seriousness. Those fortunate to know Rudolf Steiner’s extraordinary corpus of spiritual philosophy and instruction take him seriously indeed, but does that make his gospel true? And even if it might be, why call him an apostle? Technically, not even all four authors of the New Testament gospels were apostles. Yet Mark and Luke are regarded as mouthpieces of Peter and Paul, and Paul is an apostle because of the great role he played in the spread of Christianity— and because he was spiritually called by the risen Christ himself.

If we may ignore viewpoints that deny the apostolic attributions entirely, then at the end of the day we have four apostles who are considered the primary authors of four gospels—and who, as apostles, were also protagonists and figures in the story they tell. When we study the Fifth Gospel, we realize that Rudolf Steiner is not merely its author but also a protagonist, despite having lived 2,000 years after the life of Christ. He doesn’t turn up in the story in the fashion of a time traveler in science fiction, of course. But consistent with his many descriptions of what it is to read the akashic record, he enters into the inner experience—the actual inner spiritual lives—of Jesus Christ, his mother, and the twelve apostles. That he does this seems completely natural to those versed in Steiner’s ideas. His presence in the fifth gospel—which is to say the penetration of his transformed human ego into the akashic, everlasting gospel—marks a critical advance in the capacity of earthly self-consciousness that even the first apostles had not attained following the Resurrection. Such ability came to them only after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, whereupon they could then understand all tongues—signifying that their earth-born egos had at last attained the power to stay awake in the realm of higher consciousness. That all people should someday gain the power of such wakefulness was the very goal of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, of the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus Rudolf Steiner’s fifth gospel does more than merely retell the life of Christ and deeds of his apostles from an “occult perspective.”

Seen in this light, to propose that we regard Rudolf Steiner as an apostle is not to be cultish or quaint. It is to ponder—once again—the nature of his great service to humanity. Yet as important as this is to consider, it may well be a different story for readers who don’t really know what Rudolf Steiner taught—including anthroposophical students still largely unacquainted with his basic books. They may well look askance at many of the details contained in the Fifth Gospel, details that can strike one as not merely strange, but quite outlandish. Is it to be taken seriously?

With such a question in mind, it is not entirely shocking that Peter Selg ends his book, 'Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel', on a strikingly despairing and discordant note. The final paragraph—yes, the final paragraph of the entire book—consists of this statement of Friedrich Rittelmeyer:

"And so he left us, leaving us with little more than fragments of the radiant life of Christ, which lay open for his spirit to read. But what does our generation deserve, having welcomed his first gifts, which contained a great question to humanity, by dragging his hideously distorted face through the tabloids with the caption “The Fifth Evangelist”?"

It is not an uplifting conclusion. Peter Selg seems to point us toward what looks very much like the abyss. Why should he do this?

Before trying to address that question, let me say that the book as a whole is greatly illuminating and uplifting. Here, and in Rudolf Steiner as a Spiritual Teacher, we get a sense of what it was like to know Rudolf Steiner personally. Selg observes his subject thoroughly, through the eyes of students and coworkers, giving us the opportunity to encounter him in a most meaningful way, much in the spirit of these words of St. John Chrysostom:

"I wish that it were possible to meet with one who could deliver to us the history of the apostles, not only all they wrote and spoke of, but of the rest of their daily life, even what they ate, when they walked, and where they sat, what they did every day, in what parts they were, where they lodge—to relate everything with minute exactness."

John Chrysostom’s wish is to know the apostles as men: if they were filled with Christ’s spirit, then one could learn a great deal just by living in their company. Selg’s anecdotes and quotes, some of them narrowly saved from history’s dustbin, bring Rudolf Steiner to life in just this way.

Another hallmark of this approach is to let Rudolf Steiner speak for himself. Selg is not a writer who attempts to recast what Rudolf Steiner has already said clearly in his own words. For instance, Selg observes: “spiritual-scientific research did not involve immersing himself in a general ‘cosmic memory’; instead it consisted of encounters and devoted connections with the exalted spiritual beings that make up the actual reality of the Akashic substance.” He then lets Rudolf Steiner’s own words portray the concrete nature of the experience behind such concepts:

"Anything related to the soul’s penetration of an individual event can be researched only when the soul makes sense of these words: The soul offers itself up as food to the Primal Beginnings or Archai, to the Spirits of Personality. Strange as this statement may sound, it is nonetheless true that we are eaten by, and serve as nourishment for, the Spirits of Personality. …If we want to research concrete facts in humanity’s evolution, facts such as the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we must know that we are being digested by the Spirits of Personality. … Higher research is not possible without inner tragedy and suffering."

Reading such passages, it is very difficult to understand how someone like Valentin Tomberg, an erstwhile student of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science and himself an evangelist for Christianity, could spread the notion that anthroposophy is deficient in emphasis on faith and feeling. The self-sacrificing aspect of “spiritual-scientific research” surely demands the highest kind of faith and surrender to the agonies that accompany great feeling, manifestly on a level with the mystics who produced the epiphanies of ages past. Through Rudolf Steiner we learn that faith and feeling do not have to dampen or contradict the alert thinking, observing, and clear-eyed “scientific” faculty of the spirit. In fact, he has amply demonstrated that the real mystery—and triumph—of Christianity is that faith and feeling may now do just the opposite. They give strength to pure thinking, and vice versa. The divine Jesus on the cross is the ultimate exemplar of the “anthroposophical” confluence of thinking, feeling, and willing awareness. Amidst all of his agonies and super-awareness, Jesus Christ never loses consciousness. This is so much the case that when he cries, “My god, why have you forsaken me?” his spirit isn’t wavering or sinking, as we tend to assume. Rather, he has knowingly quoted a psalm of David, “in fulfillment of the scriptures,” and also made an ultimate, tragicomic play on words—for the same syllables mean also “My god, you have exalted me.”

After having given only a handful of lectures on the subject, Rudolf Steiner suddenly discontinued his presentations on the fifth gospel. Why, Selg asks, did he leave us “with little more than fragments”—what in a sense amount to mere notes toward a fifth gospel? He first poses the question in his opening chapter, telling how Rudolf Steiner spoke of a “cry” from humanity, waiting for an answer that “can be provided wherever spiritual science can prevail with its gospel that proclaims the spirit.” In the final chapter we come to the final blow. We learn that during an early lecture on the fifth gospel, Rudolf Steiner spontaneously asked an audience, in a way reminiscent of the test put to Parsifal, “Does no one have a question for me?” It turned out that no one did. Rudolf Steiner was badly shaken by this lack of response. Selg quotes Andrei Bely, “Dr. Steiner said severely, ‘Good—I’ll make a note that no one here today had any questions….” What sounds like severity is evidently the expression of heartbreak. Selg relates a page earlier: “Rudolf Steiner expected—or at least hoped for—active, heart-centered participation in his presentations of material from the Fifth Gospel.”

Rudolf Steiner was not able to continue the lectures on this theme because, as in the Garden of Gethsemane, humanity was found to be dead asleep. That is Selg’s justification for ending the tale where and as he does. Rather than an uplifting moral, he leaves us with an image that should shake us to the core. But will it?

'Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel' and 'Rudolf Steiner as a Spiritual Teacher' are wonderful books. They do full justice to their great subject, which is not only Rudolf Steiner but humanity. If Rudolf Steiner is the apostle of our time, it is because he both teaches and exemplifies the way to apprehend the greatest realities human beings can aspire to. These books deserve to be read, along with the Fifth Gospel itself.

If the Christ will be with us always, “even unto the end of time,” then the human race will always look for and need new apostles. An apostle is fundamentally an initiate of the Christ and a spiritual pioneer—a prophet. The apostle of our time has been transformed into a scientist—an independent thinker and knower—encountering oneself, one’s fellow creatures, one’s gods, and one’s savior with eyes blazing, bringing the light of understanding where there was darkness.