WorkRudolf Steiner

Christianity as Mystical Fact

Steiner's case that the raising of Lazarus was an initiation, and that Christianity brought the ancient mysteries out into daylight.

by Rudolf Steiner174 passages held

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Original title: Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums
First published: 1902(aged 41)
Original language: German

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Overview

In his Life of Jesus of 1863, which told the Gospel story as the biography of a man, the French historian Ernest Renan guessed that the raising of Lazarus had been a scene staged to strengthen belief in Jesus, and finally conceded that no one could now say what had happened at Bethany. Rudolf Steiner took that episode as his key. Between October 1901 and April 1902 he gave some two dozen lectures at the Theosophical Library in Berlin, run by Count and Countess von Brockdorff, and in September 1902 he published the book that grew from them, Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache. The book argues that Christianity grew out of the mystery religions of the ancient world, the secret rites of Greece and Egypt in which, as Steiner describes them, a candidate passed through a symbolic death and woke to a higher life. Heraclitus, Empedocles and Plato, he holds, spoke from inside that tradition. What the mysteries had enacted in secret for a chosen few, Steiner claims, happened once, openly and in history, in the life and death of Jesus; that is the sense in which Christianity is a mystical fact. Read this way, the raising of Lazarus, which the Gospel of John records, was an initiation: Lazarus, in Steiner's telling, lay three days in a deathlike sleep before Jesus called him out. Steiner's picture of the ancient mysteries drew on books he had read as a philosopher, among them the history of Platonism written by Heinrich von Stein, the professor who had examined his doctoral thesis. For the second edition of 1910 he added and the Mysteries of Antiquity to the title and expanded the text he had published eight years before.

Key concepts

What does mystical fact mean in the title?

An event in history that carries the same meaning as the inner process the mysteries enacted. In the mysteries a candidate passed through a symbolic death to awakening, in secret and for a few. In the life and death of Jesus, the book claims, that process happened once in the outer world, visible to all, so that what had been an initiation became a fact of history.

What is the enchanted god of the mysteries?

The book's image for the divine as the mysteries understood it: not a being standing outside the world, but spirit poured out into nature and lying there as if under a spell. The initiate's task was to release it by awakening it within the soul. That is why, in Steiner's reading, knowing God in the mysteries was always also a transformation of the knower.

What does the book mean by initiation?

A process in which a person dies inwardly to their ordinary self and wakes to a higher life, so that they know the spiritual from experience and not from hearsay. In the ancient mysteries, as Steiner describes them, it was carried out through trials and a deathlike sleep of three days. He reads the raising of Lazarus in John's Gospel as an initiation of this kind.

Why are the Gospels read as records of initiation rather than biographies?

Because, the book argues, they follow a pattern older than Jesus: the course every initiate passed through, from entry into the mysteries to trial, death and awakening. Their writers told his life in that shape because they saw in it the mystery process become history. Differences between the Gospels, on this reading, reflect different mystery traditions rather than faulty memory.

What is the Logos in the book's reading?

The divine Word or world-reason, which Heraclitus named and which the mysteries sought to awaken in the initiate's soul. In the book's account, the prologue of John's Gospel declares that this Logos became flesh: the same spirit the mysteries found inwardly appeared as a historical person. That is what makes Christianity, for Steiner, both continuous with the mysteries and new.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Dying Before Death: The Ancient Mysteries

What did the ancient mysteries give the few they admitted? In Steiner's account, a death before death: an inner transformation after which the candidate knew the divine within, and from which Heraclitus and Plato spoke.

The mysteries, as the book describes them, taught no doctrines. They led a candidate through trials and a symbolic death into a new life, after which the god who lay enchanted in the world was found awake in the soul. What an initiate had learned could not be told to the unprepared without being misunderstood, hence the secrecy. Steiner reads Heraclitus, Empedocles and Plato as speaking from that experience: the Phaedo's call to practise dying is the language of initiation, and the myths of Heracles and the Argonauts picture the path.

mysticism
initiation
mystery traditions
wisdom
soul
immortality
eternity
heraclitus
mythology
symbolism
spiritual development
spiritual transformation
self-knowledge
death
body
reincarnation
human nature
knowledge
epistemology
spiritual experience

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A Mystery Enacted in History

If Christianity grew out of the mysteries, what was new about it? The book's answer is that what had been enacted in secret for a chosen few happened once, openly and in history, in the life and death of Jesus.

Steiner reads the Gospels less as biographies than as records of initiation, and takes the raising of Lazarus as the key. Where Renan saw a staged scene, Steiner sees an initiation: Lazarus lies three days in a deathlike sleep and is called out by Jesus, and Jesus loves him, Steiner writes, because he found him ripe for the awakening of the Word. The Christ is the Logos, the divine word the mysteries had sought within the soul, now become a historical person. The later Church, he argues, from Augustine onward, set faith in the place of that knowledge.

christianity
christology
logos
gospels
divinity
faith
religion
comparative religion
interpretation
cosmology

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Within this work

passages held: 174
distinct concepts: 276
by passages held, corpus-wide: #381

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “initiation” and “mysticism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
initiation	mysticism	10
christianity	initiation	9
knowledge	mysticism	7
mysticism	spiritual development	7
divinity	mysticism	6
divinity	soul	5
mysticism	soul	5
christianity	mysticism	4
initiation	soul	4
initiation	spiritual development	4
logos	mysticism	4
divinity	initiation	3
initiation	knowledge	3
logos	soul	3
christianity	knowledge	2
divinity	spiritual development	2
initiation	logos	2
knowledge	spiritual development	2
soul	spiritual development	2
christianity	logos	1
christianity	spiritual development	1
knowledge	logos	1
knowledge	soul	1
logos	spiritual development	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)
A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.
DE
1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)
The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.
DE
1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)
Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.
DE
1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)
The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.
DE
1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)
The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.
EN
1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums) you are here EN
1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)
The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.
DE
1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)
Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.
DE
1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)
The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.
DE
1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)
Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.
EN
1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)
Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.
DEEN

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