SteinerBooks Spiritual Research Seminar 2010

March 12 2010 07:00 PM to March 13 2010 05:00 PM

Rudolf Steiner’s Fifth Gospel and the Inner Meaning of the Christian Mystery

The focus of our seminar this year is threefold. First, we are proud to welcome Dr. Peter Selg of the Ita Wegman Institute and The Study and Research Archive, Dornach, Switzerland, to celebrate the publication of his new book, Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel. A doctor and child psychiatrist by training, Peter is a twenty-first-century anthroposophist whose wide-ranging culture, passionate and generous heart, and impeccable scholarship always cast an insightful, loving light on Steiner’s work and mission—in this case, Steiner’s lectures on the “Fifth Gospel.” Our second focus is the initiatory significance of these lectures for our understanding of Anthroposophy, our path to Christ, and our common human future. Our third focus will be on the question: How do we read Rudolf Steiner’s works? With great emotion, aware of the “sacred obligation” of what he was about to do, over a four-month period, beginning in October 1913, Steiner gave the eighteen lectures, today known collectively as The Fifth Gospel: From the Akashic Record (the current English translation contains thirteen lectures). The Christ Event had always stood at the heart of what Steiner taught, but as he realized, his presentation of that turning point—though based in spiritual research—had always been more theoretical than alive. Then, as now, these matters were sensitive, easily misunderstood. However, in the dark months leading up to the World War I, he realized the time for reticence was over. The Christian Mystery had to be taken existentially into the heart. In the light of his experiences with the etheric Christ, and as Anthroposophy separated from Theosophy, Steiner felt the absolute need to bring the events surrounding the deed of Jesus Christ into actual human experience. Without this, there could be no true understanding—no true “Rosicrucian” Christianity. In those lectures on the “Fifth Gospel,” from his own initiatory experience, Steiner sought to initiate his listeners by giving them a graphic picture of the activity of Jesus Christ—“in concrete detail”—making possible “a much more conscious understanding of the figure of Jesus Christ,” and “spiritual insight into the person of Jesus of Nazareth” and to his mother Mary. Doing so, Rudolf Steiner provided anyone who reads those lectures with a truly initiatory, contemporary text. This is the essence of what our seminar will approach from various perspectives.

DOWNLOAD AN EXCERPT FROM PETER SELG'S
RUDOLF STEINER AND THE FIFTH GOSPEL (PDF).

PETER SELG:
Rudolf Steiner’s Own View and Experience of the Fifth Gospel. For Steiner, to speak of the “Fifth Gospel” was an inner obligation he owed both to the spiritual world and to human souls. Rosicrucian tradition had spoken of a “spiritual gospel,” necessary to understand the Four Gospels, which would need to be revealed when the time was right. With the twentieth century, that time had arrived. “He gave the impression of someone who had climbed Mount Sinai...someone shattered by unanticipated events, overpowered not so much by what he had beheld as by the voice that spoke to him” (Andrei Bely).

The Path of Jesus Christ According to the Fifth Gospel. The “Fifth Gospel” tells of the experiences of Jesus of Nazareth leading up to the Baptism in the Jordan with the incarnating descent of the Christ, and then of the experiences of Christ Jesus leading up to the Crucifixion: two stories, which in a sense are one. In deeply moving images and profound revelations, the path of Jesus Christ is shown to be one of loneliness, pain, cosmic sadness, unimaginable compassion, unconditional love, and infinite suffering. At the same time, it is filled with hope and joy. To take this Gospel into one’s heart gives a new meaning to “the imitation of Christ” and a new understanding of the Beatitudes.

The Unique Importance of the Fifth Gospel. The “Fifth Gospel” has a special significance because it provides a context for the manifold ways in which Steiner presented the divine, cosmic, and earthly event of the Mystery of Golgotha. These lectures also provide a kind of blueprint for a future Christianity, one of selflessness, community, and love that is able to reintegrate the divine-spiritual and earthly worlds.

CHRISTOPHER BAMFORD:
The Fifth Gospel as an Initiation of the Heart. Usually, we think of history and the evolution of consciousness moving through great personalities. In reality, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the vital pulse of Christ’s presence that now makes these possible has been carried humbly, selflessly, and without fanfare in ordinary human hearts. While recognizing that Christ’s deed could certainly be understood intellectually, Rudolf Steiner also knew from his own experience that—to fulfill its redemptive, transformative power—the gift of love that Christ is must be born in human hearts. With the “Fifth Gospel,” Steiner sought to initiate his listeners’ hearts, and so this talk will address what he said as “an initiation of the heart.”

RACHEL ROSS:
Eurythmy. “Eurythmy is capable of perfection without limits. The human body is a true microcosm, and when speaking through it, the human soul, manifesting its own inner life, can make visible in artistic form all the secrets of the universe” (R. Steiner).

MICHAEL GRUBER:
The Fifth Gospel: Toward a Logos of the Soul. The “Fifth Gospel” reveals an essential mission of Anthroposophy: to unfold the ongoing experience of the Mystery of Golgotha. One meaning of this today is to prepare souls to receive and participate in Christ’s entering the sphere of humanity in etheric form. Anthroposophy can facilitate our connection with the etheric Christ by inspiring us to contest the dehumanizing influences of Lucifer and Ahriman embedded in our astral body or soul. This lecture will consider how psychotherapeutic encounter, when structured by reverence for the other and awareness of the omnipresence of divine love, can animate the purification and transformation of our negative feelings, especially shame and guilt, thereby promoting a sense of self able to begin manifesting “Not I, but Christ in me”.

KWAN-YUK CLAIRE SIT:
The Fifth Gospel and the Eastern Middle Way. In The Fifth Gospel, Steiner relates how Jesus went into the wilderness and faced the three temptations by Lucifer and Ahriman. Steiner frequently mentions that we cannot avoid the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman (it is a fact of life), yet we can harness them for our development. In other words, we can harmonize the spirit and material aspects of our existence, which is also an integral part of the Eastern tradition commonly known as the “middle way.” We shall explore this tradition through Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and a Confucian classic, The Four Books.

ROSS RENTEA, MD:
The Fifth Gospel as a Source of Healing Impulses. With the content of The Fifth Gospel, Rudolf Steiner opens a new healing stream of spiritual health to a humanity that is now ready to take it in. Can the same impulses that lead to spiritual health also lead us to an understanding of how to create new anthroposophic remedies? Addressing the relationship between substances and soul-spiritual states, this lecture will explore how anthroposophic medicine can contribute to spiritual awakening.