עברית 'Fire flashed forth from his words… Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries'.
The Joy of Community Building II
The Living Spirit of Platonism then and Today
'Fire flashed forth from his words… Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries'.
The joy of community building flares up after intellectualism has been thoroughly spiritualized, the ‘soul basement’ cleared, and love and harmony fill the etheric hearts of the assembled friends. The light of the old Platonic friendship and companionship lights up and the spark of the spirit flame is ignited, that leaps from soul to soul, from etheric heart to etheric heart. Then the community etheric and astral bodies rise up, its shared spiritual activity is offered as loving offering to the spiritual world, and the assembled etheric community is becoming a chalice to revive the blessings of the gods. This is the spirit of the renewed Michaelic Mysteries, as Rudolf Steiner envisioned it for the 21st century.
To illustrate this, I would reach back to the last spiritual source of true life, that nourished humanity for almost 2500 years- from Athens in the 5th century BC to The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894. Let us reach back to the mystery of that human soul, that preserved the last living echo of the rapidly closing old Mysteries, and the first to translate the mysteries into human thinking: The venerable and revered, divine Plato, and through his anthroposophical resurrection experience the resurrection of its eternal essence, the Dionysian spirit.
Plato’s fine distinction between the esoteric essence of the living spiritual event and the written word, which the modern intellectual anthroposophists have totally forgotten and suppressed, testifies to the fact that he was initiated in the mysteries. As Rudolf Steiner pointed out in his book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, in the chapter ‘Plato as a Mystic’,
Fire flashed forth from his words… To Plato's pupils more than the mere literal sense of his expositions was conveyed. Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries.
We can sense the atmosphere of the new Michaelic Mysteries, when we read Plato’s words with our etheric hearts today, and will feel that he wrote them (in his seventh letter) from the fire that flashed forth from his etheric heart:
Thus much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers… who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgement at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith.
Now that we went through the lowest physical point of evolution, and have begun to rise up along its ascending etheric arc, we shall feel the powerful sun rays of inspiration streaming from the living and active spirit of Plato, that worked from the spiritual world also into the school of Chartres in the 12th century. And if this was Plato concern in his age, in the infancy of intellectualism, how much more must we suffer to redeem and renew his inspiration today, through the total intellectualization of all aspects of life today!
And now Plato describes the moment of experiencing consciously the spiritual illumination, which is the source of the great joy of community building. He says that,
It does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul suddenly, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself.
Beautifully it has resounded through centuries and millennia, and if we resurrect it in our etheric hearts today, its living spiritual inspiration will speak to us today. We will communicate, as Rudolf Steiner advised, the most important esoteric things only in the intimate meetings from heart to heart, and not entrust them to dead writings. As Plato said,
If they should be badly stated in writing, it is I who would be the person most deeply pained… if I had thought that these subjects ought to be fully stated in writing or in speech to the public… it would not, as I think, prove a good thing for men… some it would most unseasonably fill with a mistaken contempt, and others with an arrogant and empty desire, as though they had learnt some sublime mysteries.
Naturally , about this mysteries one must speak and write as long as our intellectual age continues. But one can rest assured that what is thus expressed is self-protecting by its very nature, because it cannot be experienced by intellectual thoughts, sentimental feelings and personal vanities. It must be experienced together with others in the intimate communion, in the new Michael community, through the etheric heart of each individual. In the new etheric community and communion, it is also shared with the active departed souls and the gods. There the spirit of the Platonic mystery of the symposium will also be resurrected, and after 2500 years, become reality again, on the ascending arc of the evolution of consciousness. It will be the feminine soul, of course, that will speak- in men and women alike- once more as it spoke through Socrates:
And here, ‘I pray you’, said she, ‘give me the very best of your attention. When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature.’”
And with the resurrection of the Platonic symposium in which one doesn’t speak about love, but practices the realization of the new school of love, the spirit of the new Michaelic Mysteries will descend on the assembling spirit friends, that have risen to the etheric world:
A real spiritual being must be present in a room where anthroposophy is being carried on, and this as a direct result of the way anthroposophical ideas are being absorbed. Divine powers are present in sense perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being talked of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose, avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a super-sensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the supersensible.
Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 27 February 1923 (GA 257).