Augustine and Manicheism III


Mieke Mosmuller

Tue, 24 January 2017 23:00:00 GMT 0 comments Print!

In a lecture in 1914 (GA 156, Occult Reading and Occult Hearing) Rudolf Steiner speaks about Manicheism. He says that the power of clairvoyance diminished in the period after the Mystery of Golgotha, and while diminishing it became ever more difficult to see the full significance of this mystery and the full being of Christ himself. Knowing him in his full glory would mean knowing him as a cosmic divine celestial being.

Then Rudolf Steiner says of Mani that it was clear that he also could not reach the full glory of Christ any more, although his teachings were great, magnificent. Mani still had an old clairvoyance, therefore his teachings were much more spiritual than those of the Church fathers. But he couldn't see that Christ incarnated in his full glory into the flesh, he saw that he lived in a kind of etheric form on earth. The struggle to understand this full incarnation still had to begin in those times. Mani had the deep question: How can evil be understood in its relation to the good that is divine? Mani had very profound insights into the answer to this question, but - says Rudolf Steiner - the true insight into evil can only be achieved by seeing evil in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, as Mani tried.

But those profound beings like Mani had to struggle with an old clairvoyance that could not be brought into a relationship to Golgotha, to Christ having been on earth.
'We just have to think about this great teacher from the Occident, the holy Augustine. Before he had come to the Christianity of St. Paul, he had been devoted to Manicheism. He was much more impressed by the vision of how the divine helper had descended from heaven from aeon to aeon. This spiritual seeing outshone for Augustine the knowledge about how Christ could have lived in a carnal body on earth, and how with him the riddle of evil could be solved. It is moving to see how Augustine speaks with the bishop of the Manicheans Faustus and only because this bishop cannot impress him, he turns away from Manicheism and turns to the Pauline Christianity.’

In the book 'Contra Faustum' Augustine writes as follows and we can see clearly, what Rudolf Steiner meant:




Here we can see how Faustus, the Manichean bishop, is not able to represent the profound teachings of Mani anymore, and how Augustine, with a fading clairvoyance, starts to wrestle with the question about the incarnation of Christ. And he gives a lecture about how to handle contradictions, if we can't understand them. In anthroposophy we find the solution of this riddle of the incarnation of Christ. Then we can say that they are both right, in a way!

Augustine and Manicheism III
Aurelius AugustinusAugustine and Manicheism III by Mieke Mosmuller

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