Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 3 (From session of October 3, 2007)

It will be helpful, in approaching the scene of temptation, to consider for a moment the being we call "Adam." It would perhaps be better to think of him, not as a particular individual -- certainly not as someone like the people we know today -- but rather as representing a certain state of consciousness and even of body. This was the state of mankind in the garden of paradise. That is, we might think of Adam as the whole of humanity that first lived in a paradisal state, then went through the temptation, and finally moved toward our own state of consciousness -- later to be redeemed through union with Christ, the "second Adam."

Here is the passage about the creation of man:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27-28)

I would like to begin by considering the phrase, "in our image and after our likeness." To make man in the divine image surely does not mean to create a human being according to some outward, static physical picture. An archetypal image must represent a characteristic and essential spiritual activity. If Adam was in this sense made in the image of the Godhead, we should see this fact reflected in what we are told about the spiritual nature of God and of Adam.

You will remember from last time that we saw three stages in every act of divine creation. First God carries all beings, the entire world, within Himself. Then He creates through the divine Word. And finally He contemplates what He has created and gives it a name. Carry within; speak forth and create; contemplate and name.

And what, then, did Adam do? For one thing, he gave names to things. That is, he discovered the original wisdom, the eternal names, the divine thoughts invested in the form and substance, in all the creatures, of the world. In the second place, not only did God speak to Adam, but Adam spoke to God; there was a verbal communion between them. And in the third place, Adam took care of the plants and the different creatures in the garden; he carried them within himself as his own concern.

So you can see that Adam continued God's creation on a different level and in a different sort of place. He was spiritually active in the image of God. And so God's creative work never stopped; after the first six days Adam -- all of Adamic humanity -- continued to carry the divine work forward.

Then there is the other side -- not the image of God, but a likeness of Him. Likeness suggests a reflecting or mirroring. What we see of ourselves in the mirror has a certain external or outward character; it's not our inner essence. Likeness has to do, not with the creative powers at work in the world, but with that which is created. The created world is a world of likenesses. The human being belongs to this creation -- to what we now call "nature" -- not through his spiritual activity, but through his body. It may not have been a body as dense and coarse as the body we have now, but still it was a body. So we have two worlds: creative beings and created nature, and Adam was connected to both of them.

Regarding the human body: many have pointed out how throughout the animal kingdom we find specialized bodily forms, and how in the human being we have a very non-specialized form and, correspondingly, a kind of universal potential. The animal that becomes highly specialized for digging or swimming or flying is completely "out of its element" when moved to a different environment; we, by contrast, while less pre-adapted to specific conditions, can adjust to many different conditions. In this sense, each animal species represents just a limited aspect of the forming, creative forces that work in the human being. The human being encompasses the whole universe of animal capacities.

The plant world does not present us with definite forms in the same sense as animals do. Plants undergo continual change and metamorphosis -- for example, from the first shoot to leafy stem to sepal, flower, fruit, and seed. It is not so much the form and function of the plant that we find reflected in the human being as it is the processes of growth, metabolism, breathing, and circulation. In this regard the plant world, too, is contained within the human being. And, likewise, the mineral world works in us, doing so according to the distinctive lawfulness we know so well from science. We can, for example, discover in ourselves the principles of the lever, of warmth and expansion, of the downward pull of gravitation. In this way mineral substance becomes the foundation in us for more subtle bodies and processes.

So it is a remarkable fact that Adam was himself a whole universe -- he was a complete microcosm of the universe in a double sense: he was connected to the whole spiritual world through his spirit made in God's image, and he bore within his body all the kingdoms of created nature -- all aspects of God-likeness. And even more remarkable is the fact that, whereas in all the rest of creation these two aspects -- the creative, spiritual part and the created part; the image and the likeness -- were separate, in Adam they were a unity. By "separation" here I do not refer to the separation associated with sin, densified matter, and darkness, but rather to the fact that the spiritual part of, say, the animals lay somewhere behind their creaturely manifestation or, we could say, resided up there, in heaven. The animal did not possess its own spirit in the way that Adam did.

Because Adam was a unity of body and spirit, his body was transparent to the smallest movement of spirit. Everything spiritual could take hold of his body without encountering any resistance, could wield the body as an instrument of spirit. We can compare this to our current, broken condition, which Christ referred to on the night of Gethsemane: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Our flesh is not a servant of the spirit. Our spirit may seek and strive for higher things, but our body cannot fly with it. So now we experience as separate what once was a unity. The spirit has to fight to realize its aims through the body.

It's not only that the spirit has to fight the body; it also is greatly influenced by the body. The spirit is made to serve the body instead of the other way around. Just think how much time we have to spend taking care of the body and its natural processes through sleeping and eating, and consider also how the various wishes and desires stemming from the body can darken and weaken our spirits.

Adam, on the other hand, was a long way from such concerns; his body was nourished directly by everything -- all the light and substances and processes -- that flowed to him out of the universe.

You may remember how, in The Salamander, the angel described the extraordinary beauty of the first human beings. He invoked the softest, gentlest images of nature -- flowers, soft and delicate, freshened by the morning dew, or a rainbow after a shower -- and then he said that Adam was still brighter, fresher, softer. We can imagine Adam's body woven out of light and warmth and the most delicate substance. You might compare this substance with the buds on trees in spring -- they're only beginning to grow and are full of fire. Adam's softness was owing to the fact that in his substantial part he carried a lot of the fire of creation. And the light, warmth, and liveliness of his body was in perfect harmony with the light of his original wisdom, the warmth of his conversation with God, and the gentleness of his will as he took care of the different creatures. His being was a unity.

There is a Jewish legend that points to the importance of this unity. After the creation of Adam, the angels asked God, "Why did you do this? What do you find so special in this human being that does not already exist in the angels?" And God replied: "Can you give names to all things in the world?" "No, we cannot," the angels answered. "But Adam can," said God. Then the angels began to understand. Certainly the angels did know the eternal names of the things and beings of nature. What made Adam special is that, living in the world of created things -- in the world of separateness rather than in the spiritual world the angels inhabited -- he could still name all things. This shows that he could unite his own created, perishable element with the spiritual and eternal. He was the only spirit who was fully in the world of nature, and the only created being who was fully open to the spirit.

Think back again to the very beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. Remember that, over against the creative powers of heaven, the earth was empty, dark, a realm of still-unformed potential. And now, at the end of this first phase of creation we have a being who stands in both worlds -- in heaven and on earth, in the world of the spirit and in the world of nature. This unity of being prefigures a much later human destiny when we will have learned to find eternal meaning and morality in the midst of a fallen world. Then, again, the image and likeness of God will be one in us.

There is another aspect of Adam's wholeness beside this unity of spirit and body. God, we are told, created human beings "male and female." This polarity, which we can assume was present in Adam already before Eve was separated from him, must have been one aspect of the perfection of the divine image according to which Adamic humanity was formed. But if the polar unity of male and female belongs to the image of God, as this is expressed in Adam, then we are left to wonder where we see the male and female aspects in God Himself.

Traditionally we have thought of God mostly as male in character. Christian doctrine gives us "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," not "Mother, Daughter, and Holy Spirit." Some theologians have taken the Holy Spirit to be a kind of mother, so that we have a father and mother, and between them a son. I don't see the matter in this way, but certainly the mother should from the very beginning exist somehow within the divine, since the creation of male and female could hardly have been the expression of a potential lacking in God. I would like to share with you a few thoughts about the problem.

In considering the initial relation between heaven and earth, we can say that heaven, containing as it does the whole content of future creation, is associated with the creative Word, or Logos. The earth, by contrast, is described in very different, wonderfully descriptive terms: "formless void," "darkness upon the face of the deep," "spirit of God [mighty wind] moving upon the face of the waters." As we saw previously, we are given images of an earth that is soft, impressionable, receptive, ready to be shaped by the Spirit as a wind shapes the water of the sea.

Now, it's possible to conceive the relation between a creative force and a receptive substance in a completely one-sided way, as if the force simply pushes, twists, and molds an inert substance which, in its own right, has nothing to contribute to the process. This is tyranny. But we can imagine a very different relationship of giving and receiving if we have moral beings in view. Here there can never be the compulsion of force, but only free conversation. The giving is not a matter of imposing one's will on another but rather of sacrifice; the receiving is not a matter of being imposed upon, but of positive embrace of the gift. Can we not picture the creation as a result of such a conversation? The spiritual-moral, self-sacrificial giving of the Logos, the speaking forth of the Word, is met by a capacity -- we can think of it as a feminine capacity -- to receive and fructify this Word in absolute purity without any hindrance.

There is a striking moment in the Gospel of Luke when Gabriel proclaims to Mary that she is awaiting a son, and she answers, "Be it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). She says, in effect: Whatever God's Word intends, I will receive -- and as a result of her reception of this Word she bears a child. We can hardly think of God's Word here in the superficial way we often think of human words today. The Word is the speaking forth of God's entire being, an expression of His will, His divine purpose. And Mary's response is likewise much more than mere submissive yielding to necessity. She allows the will from above to come to expression through her entire being. Here I think we see expressed the inner principle of the female or mother: to receive the Word from heaven in this profound sense. And through the intimate communion between the Father whose Word is spoken from heaven and the Mother who is capable of receiving the Word and bringing it to birth, the whole universe came into being.

There are wonderful opportunities for meditation in these words, "Father," "Mother," "Son." We need to feel in such words much more than we are given in dry creedal statements. These are the beings through whom we have gained our own being and to whom the world around us owes its existence. Could anything be more significant for our lives than this? Our parents of flesh and blood, important as they may be for us, are (at their best) but symbols of our divine progenitors, whose connection to our living and breathing, our hopes and destiny, runs far deeper than any fleshly inheritance.

Each of us bears within himself, even if in different strengths, these two principles capable of engendering the universe: male and female. In Adam they were harmonious. We see them also imaged at the Crucifixation: Christ on the cross, and Mary standing under the cross of her own son, receiving and encompassing His suffering, bearing within herself a mother's unspeakable grief. There is also the passage in the gospel of Luke where the devout Simeon blesses Mary and Joseph after the birth of Jesus and then prophesies: "Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also." In the female capacity to encompass and to have compassion for all suffering beings, we see one expression of the capacity to perceive the world -- to perceive without any reserve, to take in without any self-protection, to receive what is there despite the pain it brings to one's own soul.

There are, then, two complementary gestures: to sacrifice, and to offer your heart in compassion, in co-suffering with another being.

Earlier, in considering the various polarities of creation, we discussed the relation between the creative heavenly pole (Logos) and the receptive pole of earthly substance. We talked about the principle of life above and its reflection in the plant world below. And we talked about the eternal light and its bestowing of consciousness in animals and in us. The question arises: what mediates between the creative Logos above and its manifestation in the created realm below? Now we can say: the Divine Mother, or Divine Soul. That is, between the eternal spirit and the natural world lies the world soul -- just as in the individual the soul mediates between our spiritual and our biological (created) nature.

The Greeks sometimes said that the whole world was created out of friendship and strife, or out of love and hatred. Not just one tendency, but two opposite ones. Similarly, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the archetypal creative powers of sympathy and antipathy. These work in the human soul, but they do not originate there, and they are not simply a matter of personal liking and disliking. Rather, they are cosmic tendencies. The pole of sympathy is one of absolute openness, whereas antipathy is the state of being closed. In sympathy we unite ourselves with the other; in antipathy we separate ourselves. Sympathy is a kind of self-forgetfulness, a disappearing before the presence of the other; antipathy is wakefulness, as when we awaken to our existence as individuals. Either one can be dangerous as an imbalanced extreme; we can either disappear altogether, dissolving into the universe, or else we can become completely isolated by losing our interest in and connection to others.

These are, so to speak, two melodies of the soul. It's not that one is good and the other bad. They are both essential creative forces. Together they enable us to live in a rhythm of uniting and separating, in self-forgetfulness and self-realization, in sleep and wakefulness. They are objective, mutually essential movements of the soul, and both are always at work in us one way or another.

So the creative activity of the Divine Soul or Mother lies in this music sounding between boundless eternity and the limited, separate, individual existence of a rock, plant, or human being. It's the process of creation: out of the spirit, through the music of soul, to the created being of nature. This is something to meditate on! The world was created out of God's Word, through the Divine Soul. The Soul received the Divine Word and gave birth to nature. Just as Christ is the I-center for all beings, so all of nature is brought forth from the engendering womb of the Mother.

We can imagine the whole process as a music or dance, and can understand the musician or dancer as co-creator of the entire universe. Listen to the description of Sophia in Proverbs:

Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth -- when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. (Proverbs 8:25-31, New Revised Standard Version)

Before anything in nature was created, this Sophia was with God, receiving all the creative impulses. On the one hand, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"; on the other hand, "When he established the heavens, I was there." Similarly, where Genesis says "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," the Proverbs passage says "when he drew a circle on the face of the deep . . . then I was beside him," and so on. So in this first creative activity whereby the darkness and emptiness were given form, she was there like a master workman or craftsman (in the usual Russian translation the word here is "artist") We see in the world's beauty the activity of the master artist who brings the Father's ideas into realization. She is our Divine Mother.

Now we approach the temptation, where it's said that God allowed man to eat from the tree of life and forbade him to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To know what's good and what's evil we have to be able to distinguish between the two. And in order to distinguish, we have to be able to make our own inner moral judgment. If someone tells us, "Listen, this is good and that is evil; follow the path of good," it may have some effect on us. But the effect differs a great deal from what happens when we struggle with choices, gain life experience, and then come "from the inside" to the kind of inner confidence that enables us to say: this is good, that is bad. To understand in any deep way what is good and what is bad requires profound inner moral activity. Without this capacity for moral judgment, we do not exist as free spiritual-moral beings. We become free and independent beings only by choosing that destiny. And this possibility for choice and moral judgment is connected with the fact of death. God told Adam in a direct way: eat the fruit of this tree and "thou shalt surely die."

Why was this death unavoidable? In order to have choice and to make moral judgments, we have to be detached from the process we are judging. We can't judge something when we are bound to it, united with it, living in it. We have to be outside it in order to see it in the manner required for judgment. Not even God judged when He was in the process of creation; first He created, then He looked and said, "It is good." In the same way man must stand apart from the creative forces and processes of the universe -- apart even from God -- in order to become capable of moral judgments. But this separation is death. There is an inescapable connection between the death resulting from our separation from God, and the freedom that gives us the possibility for moral choice.

Adam did not stand in a place where he could judge in the way we do. Sympathy and antipathy worked in him, but as I mentioned before, these are not forces of good and evil. They are cosmic, creative forces. Adam simply didn't exist at that time as a being separate from the universe; he was not like a person in our sense today. He had no need or possibility to make moral judgments of his own. He could no more be judged morally than we can judge animals who do not know good and evil. Before he could gain a moral relation to the world, Adam had to participate in the world's creative forces of sympathy and antipathy according to his own interests and his own will, rather than according to God's commands. Only after the temptation, when he had these forces at his private disposal, could they become good or evil.

Remember again that God first carried all things within himself, then uttered the world into being, then contemplated and judged what he had made, pronouncing it good. But Adam could not judge. He had to experience death in order to gain this capacity. However, there is a problem here. We can suppose that the angels, too, know good and evil, yet they do not know death. If it was necessary for the human being to be radically separate from God in order to gain his powers of judgment about good and evil, how can it be that the angels apparently can judge between good and evil while remaining with God?

It is apparently part of human destiny to experience free moral choice and inner freedom -- and therefore also separation from God -- to an extreme degree. Humans take the powers of destruction, darkness, evil, and death fully into their souls. This does not seem to be the case with the angels, who know good and evil, as it were, from the outside. They are either beings of light or beings of darkness. Only human beings are children both of light and darkness.

This difference between angels and humans has huge implications, because nothing can be transformed except from within. It's one thing to fight against evil or death from the outside. The angels are engaged in this fight and they help us in it. But it's not the same as transforming evil and death. To fight is to push back, to preserve a space in which evil beings cannot work. To transform is to bring forth a new creature, one that was bad and now has become good. Out of darkness, evil, and death comes a being full of light, love, and life. It is significant that no angel could fully incarnate on earth; only Christ, the very highest being, could do that. The angels are thus unable to enter into the full depth of our experience. They can observe it from above, and because of their supersensible capacities they know something about what is happening. But they don't know it from the inside. Only Christ descended from on high and experienced the human condition from the inside, and He became for us a second Adam. So we see in human destiny a descent into such deep darkness and death that only the highest being could come and raise mankind to new life.