Talks on the Prologue to John's Gospel, by Vladislav Rozentuller
Part 2 (From session of September 12, 2007)
If we want to understand the prologue to John's Gospel, we must rely heavily on our capacity for intuitive thought. The words are so exalted -- "God," "life," "light," "word" -- that we can grasp them at first only through a kind of inner, intuitive movement, or gesture. Then it is our task to find the images that can bring this gesture more firmly down into our consciousness. When we consider Genesis, on the other hand, we have to move in the opposite direction, because there we are given a rich language of images. Everything is in images, and these images derive from the life of our senses. This may tempt us, for example, to picture God as speaking in a human way when He pronounces the creative Word, or to interpret the six days of creation as being like our days, even though some of them were without sun and moon. Literalism in such matters trains our understanding in an extremely unhealthy way. So our task with Genesis, as with much of the Bible as a whole, is to transform sense-based images into inner, less rigid, and more intuitive gestures.
Like an image of sense, an inner gesture has form, but it is a form less fixed, less crystallized, than what we normally gain through sense perception today. Instead of picturing water as it might appear in a particular river, we must come to the essential movement behind the outer image -- to the flowing. Living images are still in process; nothing is fully given. We will have many examples.
One other caution. In the story of creation we find a few words repeated a number of times -- for example, "light," "water," "day," and so on. This requires us to be aware of context. What does "day" mean in one context, before there is a sun and moon, and what does it mean after the creation of those bodies? What does "light" mean before there were sun and stars to radiate something like the light we know today? In general, as we go back earlier and earlier in the story of creation, before animals and plants, before water and dry land, before sun, moon and stars, we approach a time increasingly devoid of the qualities upon which our consciousness depends now. We need to remember that our present consciousness is the final step of the creation story, not the first.
In considering the first verses of John's Gospel, we saw four broad stages of development: the Word was with God, or in God; then everything outward came into being through this Word; then there was life; and finally the life became light. It will be useful to compare this creation story with the one in Genesis. Such comparison is a valuable spiritual exercise; it keeps our thinking flexible through the effort to bring different points of view into connection.
Here are the opening verses of Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
The first thing we notice in Genesis is that at every step of creation God said something. He spoke a word: "And God said, Let there be light." Creation was an act of speech. Only in the first verse do we have a different word: not "God said, Let there be heaven and earth" but "God created heaven and earth." In speaking we have a revelation of the being who speaks; what was inside is brought to the outside. In creation, on the other hand, we can sense a more intense inner process, a process of will, preceding the revelation of God through His Word. We could take this to mean that the first step of creation took place still within God Himself as a kind of preparation. The verse has in fact been translated, "In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth" (Young's Literal Translation of the Bible).
What God created was called "heaven" and "earth." These words are associated with the directions "up" and "down," and they gain a deeper meaning when we pause to feel in them the moral qualities that universally attach to them. And so at the very outset we have a fundamental polarity governing all the worlds to come -- a polarity associated with the creative act and expressing a moral significance. Notice the sense images characterizing the lower pole: the earth is without form, void, covered with darkness. In other words, it is without qualities. It is something like pure potential -- material to be worked on and transformed, but nothing like the already formed material of our familiar experience.
We also have a reference to the Spirit moving (also translated "brooding") over the face of the waters. But neither can we take this water in the sense of our familiar element or even in the sense of some spiritual substance. It is mentioned even before the creation of light, and what it suggests is the soft receptivity of the "earth" pole -- it's ability to receive qualities. On the other hand, the Spirit brooding over the waters and representing the upper pole is a creative potential. It is sometimes translated "a mighty wind." In this wind or Spirit and in this brooding we can sense something active (the creative pole) that is ready to impress itself upon and transform soft, flexible "matter," here represented by water. We can see how appropriate the term "water" is for suggesting the receptivity of the lower pole if we compare the actual text to "brooding over desert rocks." The Spirit/wind above is a creative impulse, while the waters below suggest a malleability that can receive the imprint of this movement.
And so in the beginning we do not have an undifferentiated unity, but rather two poles: heaven, or Spirit, containing all possible creative potentials, and earth, or the void, possessing no particular qualities but ready to receive all possible qualities. There was not just heaven at first, and then earth; the two arose together, as opposite poles requiring each other. And we will find that all creation begins with a separation of above from below so that a high, active moral potential can work on what is lower and passive but also receptive.
This principle has great significance for our lives. We find in our souls a great mixture of good and evil, of healthy and unhealthy impulses, feelings, desires and all the rest. A chief reason for the practice of stillness, contemplation, and prayer is so that we can bring about a separation of the higher and lower within ourselves. Then we can allow what is above, free, and creative to work upon and transform what is below, bound, and egotistic. Only in this way can healthy development happen. When we separate our I Am from our lower nature and then work from above, the lower elements become malleable to the higher. In the mixed state, by contrast, the lower elements present themselves as impenetrable "rocks" against which we ceaselessly stumble.
The same principle applies in social situations, where both parties in a relationship or everyone in a group must work on this separation of the higher from the lower. Sometimes progress is possible only when the people involved can let go and no longer take the relationship or group as an established fact. Further development happens only when they discover fresh resources from above as a basis for a new union. Everything we are given by nature is in a mixed state; we become creative when we can separate the elements and bring the higher to bear upon the lower.
We can also see this separation on a cosmic scale in the fall that affects all of earth and mankind, separating them from the divine, followed by the sacrificial descent of Christ in order to provide a path of redemption. In general, we have evolution only by virtue of the polar tension between two directions of movement.
We are still in the first day of Creation, where the preparatory movements take place within God. This stage of the Genesis narrative corresponds to the statement in John's gospel, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).
We can imagine what it is like when someone holds us strongly within himself -- bears us, supports us, identifies with us, gives himself to us. We will find in this an extremely warm and positive feeling. In fact, it's a feeling of being loved. To be held in another is to be loved. And if we imagine further that, at the outset of Creation, God held all of us, all things, within Himself, then we have a picture of the statement, "God is love."
"Let there be light." If we pronounce this sentence inwardly, we may sense some sort of movement or radiation in the area of our head. Then we can go beyond speaking the words and connect our feelings to this radiation, which leads to an engagement of our soul. We radiate light with our entire soul. And if, further, we contemplate the lives of the saints and meditate upon what it would mean to invest our entire life in the quality and reality of light so as to perform deeds of light, then we will appreciate that the speech bringing forth light at the beginning of creation was not some dry, abstract speech such as is common today. Rather, it was a speaking of an entire being. Moreover, the movement was no longer within God. It was from within to without, from inner being to external reality ("And God said, Let there be light, and there was light"). The inner being of the God of love, a being of light, was realized as an objective reality. This corresponds in John's narrative to "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:3).
The sun and stars were not yet created, so we're not talking about the kind of outward light we know today. For comparison we might think of the light of conscience, or the quality of purity in general. It's something radiating, giving. But there is no radiation without a center, and therefore light always possesses a center. It is from this center that the words "I am" can be spoken. When we experience the impulse toward deeds of light in their truest sense, we can always feel that I am doing this. We are not simply being carried by something external, something not fully clear to our center. Clarity is always connected with the center, with "I am." So the light given at the beginning was the radiating center of the whole universe. Such light has no boundaries; there is nothing inherently enclosing or contracting or separating about it; it is always giving. Through light we have the power of one being to penetrate and be united with another being. The first light manifested the unity of the cosmos in the eternal I am.
By comparison, darkness, which God now separates from the light, has an altogether different quality -- contraction, coldness, closeness, impenetrability. The polarity of light and darkness gives us, on the one hand, a power of penetration and union and, on the other hand, a principle of separation. Ultimately the darkness becomes what we call "matter" and embodies a power of death. And so at the beginning of evolution we have the creative Word, the I am, the light-radiating center of all being, and we have darkness (matter), which tends toward separation, death, impenetrability.
I would like to make a couple of further observations about the first day of creation. The fact that on this day God separated the light and darkness implies that before then the two were contained within some higher unity. Perhaps we should try to think of "spiritualized matter" and "materialized spirit." In this regard it is interesting that one version of the Christian creed refers to the Father as a "physical-spiritual" being. Certainly not physical in our sense today, but containing the essence of what would become physical being, and also the essence of what would become pure spirit. Only after this physical-spiritual being began to reveal itself outwardly in creation did it separate these two sides of its nature, yielding a movement toward physicality and darkness on one side, and toward spirit and light on the other. As we saw in the prologue to the Gospel of John, at a certain point of evolution when darkness had passed all the way into death, the light entered into the darkness in order to fight with and redeem it, thereby closing the circle that began with the creation of light and its separation from darkness.
It is interesting to notice that God's activity has three stages: First He held everything inside; then He created a world-content through the Word; and then He contemplated this content. And the contemplation in turn has two sides: He found something good ("And God saw that it was good"), and He gave it a name ("and God called the firmament Heaven").
Returning to the creation sequence, we come to the second and third days:
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it waas good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. (Genesis 1: 6-13)
The passive, receptive "substance," signified by darkness, receives a series of qualities from the creative Spirit. The first quality is that of life, which we see imaged in the waters that are divided between the above and below. This life, of course, does not refer to specific living creatures, but rather to life, as this is expressed through the inner qualities of water. These are qualities of movement and change.
This water of the second and third days still cannot be thought of like the physical water we know today. Nor would it have been seen by physical eyes in a world without sun, moon, or stars. But even of our own water we can say that it is transparent and scarcely visible. In order to see it we need contrasting rocks or sand or some boundary with a different subtance -- even a boundary with the atmosphere. In order to appreciate what water means here we must abandon not only the image of water surrounded by solid ground, but even any idea of fluid substance. We must concentrate only on flow as such. And then we will find it most natural to experience water as sound. The inner character of its flowing movement emerges as music. Water, you could say, is, in its essential being, the likeness of music. It flows, yet retains its identity. In this regard it is a principle of life. "Musical springs of living water" -- such a phrase expresses well what we experience in this element.
Again we have polarity, for there are two waters, one beneath and one above. What is lower is always heavy, created, substantial, whether the substance be subtle or coarse. What is above is light, heavenly, creative. If we observe what it means from the inside to retain our identity while undergoing change -- if we unite our inner being with those springs of living water -- we could express it as living in order to die and dying in order to live. One is continually being born and continually dying. This, in fact, is the principle of love. Only love can, in changing, remain the same; only love can give itself away while remaining true to its innermost and highest being.
The spiritual water we're talking about recalls the water Christ speaks of when He says we will drink it and never be thirsty again. It's not just the physical principle of life as we know it physically today, but the principle of eternal life. It satisfies the soul's thirst for reunion with God. We might think of it as the principle of the divine soul. And, in its character as music, it requires to be understood through feeling. We find in all music an expression of happiness or sadness, enthusiasm or hope, love or gladness, and so on. Similarly in the other direction: every feeling could sound, could be a tune or symphony. And the same can be said when we hear water -- for example, the music of a small stream, waterfall, great river, or still pond, the melody of light rain, a heavy downpour, or ocean waves. Each offers its own feeling. So we have one water down here, with its substantial presence, and another water above, which we can hear only with our souls -- with pure feeling.
To summarize the creation so far: first there was a preparation within God Himself through a kind of polarization -- the creation of "heaven" and "earth." Then there was the first speaking forth ("Let there be light") and the separation of light from darkness. The light is the radiating, creative center of the universe and the darkness is pure, yet-unformed potential to receive the creative impulse -- what has become matter in its much later, more formed stage of development today. And finally there was life: the inner, flowing, musical, loving, creative essence of life, signified by the waters above; and the corresponding development of the receptive potentials below in preparation for the development of actual life forms. What was given to these potentials (waters) below was the possibility for change -- the possibility to receive the living imprint of the creative, archetypal powers above.
On the next day of creation we have the plants, still strongly connected with the watery element. There is a principle of coordination here: each plant reproduces "after its own kind." We can think of it this way: when a certain melody sounds above, this particular plant grows, and a different melody gives a different plant. The world of plant life is a world of harmonies. Birch, willow, oak -- each brings its own sensations of feeling. We can think of the archetypes of the plants as archetypes of sound, or musical archetypes. They are not archetypes of the imagination, but something higher, or deeper, residing in the divine soul where music originates.
All this corresponds to the phrase in John's prologue, "in Him was life."
Just as the gathering of the waters and the creation of the plants are connected, so, too, are the placing of the celestial lights and the creation of animals. The waters were bearers of life; now the lights in the heavens are bearers of consciousness. And again we have two aspects, one above and one below. Here is the account in Genesis:
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19)
Where there had been no lights, the sun, moon, and stars appear. They were for bringing light to the earth; for organizing time into day, night, season, and year. If we imagine ourselves in a star, radiating this light toward the earth -- if we live vividly in this act of radiating -- then we can understand that this light is the light of consciousness. It lights up the earth, distinguishing things and uniting them harmoniously. It has a forming quality, not only organizing the times and seasons, but bringing order filled with meaning. And when we consider that the celestial bodies are not simply scattered around up there, but move as part of a vast and graceful harmony, then we can recognize how these heavenly lights constitute space as a unified whole.
And then connected with these lights are the animals. We get a glimpse of the connection when we consider the signs of the zodiac -- lion, bull, goat, fish, crab, and so on. It's consistent with the Genesis narrative that we should understand these constellations, not as arbitrary signs, but rather as the ancients understood them -- forming powers above that correspond to created beings below, and particularly to animals.
Whereas plants can be seen as musical creations, embodying feelings, animals are like incarnated thoughts, embodied wisdom. Each species incarnates a functional idea in its form; or, one could say, the form is created so that a functional idea can be realized through it. Such ideas are distantly mimicked in many of our machines: a beaver or mole or bird works in such-and-such a way -- embodies a certain idea, often a rather specialized idea, like a tool -- and we create a machine more or less in accord with the same idea. In our technology it's as if we observed nature's wisdom and then tried to reproduce it using dead materials.
The wisdom of the animal kingdom is a wisdom of will, of instinct. Think only of how young birds begin to fly. They already know without thinking. Or consider how in the form of a seashell there is profound thought, but not abstract thought; it is thought permeated with beauty and with will.
So what polarity do we have here? Above, there is creating, forming light. We can say it is the light of consciousness, but not merely an understanding consciousness; it's a creative consciousness. Down here we have the kingdom of animals. And in animals again we have this new, inward quality of awareness and experience. This is the third step: first there was the purely receptive, "material" potential of darkness, then the quality of life (movement, music, feeling, the power of love) was added to this dark matter, and now, in addition to life, matter receives the quality of soul and consciousness. We have ideal, creative consciousness above, in the sky, and the beginning of creaturely consciousness here in the kingdom of animals.
This third step of creation is expressed in the gospel narrative of John with the words, "and the life became light." What had been pure life became consciousness.
Let's try to get a brief overview. We always have polarity: something moves above, and something moves beneath. Above we have, first, the innermost essence of light -- the Logos that was spoken forth at the beginning; then life, which is a musical, archetypal power of change and development, represented by the waters above; and then the radiating, light-consciousness of the heavenly bodies. And below: matter, then life and the plant kingdom, then animals.
Further, we can observe that what is below is a reflection of what is above. We have eternal existence above, and matter as a foundation for existence below. We have eternal life above, and the life of plants below. We have the eternal light-consciousness of the stars above, and the consciousness of animals below. We could also say: we have archetypes above and likenesses below. And one thing we see is that the likenesses become more and more independent. Thus plants are more independent, more a separate world unto themselves, than rocks. And animals are more independent than plants. The creature becomes more and more detached from the universe. Even in form we can say that plants are very open, exposed to the light and air, whereas animals are more closed in upon themselves. Eventually, when they become warm-blooded, they gain a certain independence even from climatic conditions, maintaining their own climate within. They also gain an interior soul life. Moreover, at each stage of creation, from matter to life to soul, we see spiritual qualities intensifying -- which is to say that the distance between heavenly archetype and earthly likeness is diminishing. That is, the spiritual quality works less and less from without, more and more from within.
The next step will be to create a being who has gained a fully independent life of his own, and in whom archetype and likeness are united. And this God did on the sixth day. He said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." With this an entire phase of evolution came to its end. The step of self-consciousness was taken. When it says in the gospel of John that light became the light of men, it means that this light became not only the created, instinctive light of animals, but the light of cognition and understanding.
At the beginning of the creation narrative God spoke and created the world. At the end human beings start speaking and they give names to all God's creatures. Created in God's image and likeness, they continue God's creative activity by taking care of the garden and the animals who live there. By naming things they participate in the divine meanings that form those things. A story that begins with God's activity alone, ends with God and human being in conversation. The ideal, archetypal aspect of man and the likeness imprinted upon his material nature are (in the garden) a unity.
The limitation, of course, is that everything was simply given there as a fact. If there had been no Luciferic influence, no temptation in Paradise, then, as many theologians point out, the human being would indeed have been a moral being, but he would have been a moral automaton. He would have given names to all things and taken care of them, and all creatures would have obeyed him, but he would have lacked free choice.
So the temptation starts a whole new cycle of evolution, a very long cycle in which man fights for free will. We'll see archetypal image and likeness separating so that they can be united again at a higher level through the free activity of the human being.
I would like to finish by emphasizing that these three levels of creation -- bare existence, life, and consciousness, with their high archetypal correspondences of Logos, divine life, and the light of consciousness -- are not merely schematic ideas. They are the very real context of our life on earth. In the Lord's Prayer that Christ gave to His disciples we hear a petition to recover now on earth what we lost after the temptation in Paradise. "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is heaven." Not there in Paradise, but on earth. Only so can we live in harmony with how the world was created and is now sustained.
These high truths are also reflected in certain principles of Waldorf pedagogy, where it is recognized that the governing principle of the child's first seven years is love. The child naturally experiences the world as good, which reflects the fact that her developing body has its archetype in the highest, sacrificial, divine world. It's not that we pretend to the child that the world is good. No, children live in inner circumstances where they can still receive this quality or energy of divine sacrifice. And during the second seven years, from age seven to fourteen, the world is experienced most naturally as beautiful, so the child inwardly receives the musical, rhythmical, soul aspect of things. And only during the third seven-year period does she enter fully into the conscious world of light.
The story of creation is not for satisfying a mere curiosity about the past. It gives us the fundamental principles governing our own existence here on earth today.