{"id":9009,"date":"2017-01-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/blog\/augustine-and-manicheism-iii\/"},"modified":"2017-01-25T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T22:00:00","slug":"augustine-and-manicheism-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/blog\/augustine-and-manicheism-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Augustine and Manicheism III"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

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.<\/h2>\n

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.<\/h2>\n

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.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the book ‘Contra Faustum’ Augustine writes as follows and we can see clearly, what Rudolf Steiner meant:<\/p>\n

Faustus objects to the incarnation of God on the ground that the evangelists are at variance with each other, and that incarnation is unsuitable to deity. Augustine attempts to remove the critical and theological difficulties.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Faustus\u00a0said: Do I\u00a0believe\u00a0in the\u00a0incarnation? For my part, this is the very thing I long tried to persuade myself of, that\u00a0God\u00a0was born; but the discrepancy in the\u00a0genealogies\u00a0of\u00a0Luke\u00a0and\u00a0Matthew\u00a0stumbled me, as I\u00a0knew\u00a0not which to follow. For I thought it might happen that, from not being\u00a0omniscient, I might take the\u00a0true\u00a0for\u00a0false, and the\u00a0false\u00a0for\u00a0true. So, in despair of settling this dispute, I betook myself to\u00a0Mark\u00a0and\u00a0John, two\u00a0authorities\u00a0still, and\u00a0evangelists\u00a0as much as the others. I approved with\u00a0good\u00a0reason\u00a0of the beginning of\u00a0Mark\u00a0and\u00a0John, for they have nothing of\u00a0David, or\u00a0Mary, or\u00a0Joseph.\u00a0John\u00a0says, “In the beginning was the\u00a0Word, and the\u00a0Word\u00a0was with\u00a0God, and the\u00a0Word\u00a0was\u00a0God,” meaning\u00a0Christ.\u00a0Mark\u00a0says, “The\u00a0gospel\u00a0of\u00a0Jesus Christ, the\u00a0Son of God,” as if correcting\u00a0Matthew, who calls him the Son of\u00a0David. Perhaps, however, the\u00a0Jesus\u00a0of\u00a0Matthew\u00a0is a different\u00a0person\u00a0from the\u00a0Jesus\u00a0of\u00a0Mark. This is my\u00a0reason\u00a0for not\u00a0believing\u00a0in the birth of\u00a0Christ.<\/p>\n

Remove this difficulty, if you can, by harmonizing the accounts, and I am ready to yield. In any case, however, it is hardly consistent to\u00a0believe\u00a0that\u00a0God, the\u00a0God\u00a0of\u00a0Christians, was born from the womb.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Augustine\u00a0replied: Had you read the\u00a0Gospel\u00a0with care, and inquired into those places where you found opposition, instead of rashly condemning them, you would have seen that the recognition of the authority of the\u00a0evangelists\u00a0by so many learned\u00a0men\u00a0all over the world, in spite of this most obvious discrepancy, proves that there is more in it than appears at first sight. Any one can see, as well as you, that the ancestors of\u00a0Christ\u00a0in\u00a0Matthew\u00a0and\u00a0Luke\u00a0are different; while\u00a0Joseph\u00a0appears in both, at the end in\u00a0Matthew\u00a0and at the beginning in\u00a0Luke.\u00a0Joseph, it is plain, might be called the father of\u00a0Christ, on account of his being in a\u00a0certain\u00a0sense the husband of the mother of\u00a0Christ; and so his name, as the male representative, appears at the beginning or end of the\u00a0genealogies. Any one can see as well as you that\u00a0Joseph\u00a0has one father in\u00a0Matthew\u00a0and another in\u00a0Luke, and so with the grandfather and with all the rest up to\u00a0David. Did all the able and learned\u00a0men, not many\u00a0Latin\u00a0writers\u00a0certainly, but innumerable\u00a0Greek, who have examined most attentively the\u00a0sacred\u00a0Scriptures, overlook this manifest difference? Of course they saw it. No one can help seeing it. But with a due regard to the high authority of\u00a0Scripture, they\u00a0believed\u00a0that there was something here which would be given to those that ask, and denied to those that\u00a0snarl; would be found by those that seek, and taken away from those that criticise; would be open to those that knock, and shut against those that contradict. They asked, sought, and knocked; they received, found, and entered in.
….
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!<\/p>\n

\"Augustine
Aurelius AugustinusAugustine and Manicheism III by Mieke Mosmuller<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}