The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul is a cycle of five lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Cologne between 28 December 1912 and 1 January 1913, catalogued in the Collected Works as GA 142. Steiner spoke these words at a threshold moment: the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense, and he chose the theme deliberately to mark the seriousness of that beginning. The cycle sets two documents side by side that most readers would never think to compare, the great Eastern poem of the Gita and the letters of the Apostle Paul, and asks what deep current of human spiritual history runs beneath both.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 142 belongs to the rich lecturing period that followed Steiner's break with the Theosophical Society and preceded the building of the first Goetheanum. In these years he was steadily working out how the wisdom of the ancient East relates to the Christ event, and this cycle is one of his most concentrated statements on that question. It stands close to his written books: he sends the listener back to Occult Science for the picture of cosmic evolution, to Christianity as Mystical Fact for the mysteries behind Greek thought, and to The Occult Significance of Blood for the loosening of the old blood ties that forms the dramatic ground of the Gita. Readers who know his later cycle GA 146, The Bhagavad Gita and the West, will recognise GA 142 as the earlier and more compact treatment, where the comparison with Paul is the governing thread rather than a supporting one.
The lectures also mark a characteristic move in Steiner's method. He does not read the Gita as a historian or the Epistles as a theologian. He reads both as records of how human consciousness itself was changing, so that the poem and the letters become evidence for a single evolutionary story rather than two unrelated masterpieces.
Steiner opens the cycle by placing his listeners in a long view of history. For centuries, he says, educated Europeans understood the spiritual life through three thousand years of tradition: one pre-Christian millennium reaching back to Greece, and two millennia saturated by the Christ event. Greek thought was absorbed unconsciously in the second thousand years and consciously in the third, in Raphael and Leonardo, in Thomas Aquinas reconciling Aristotle with Christian teaching. Then, in the nineteenth century, something new broke in when the Gita first reached the West and thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt were astonished by its depth. That reach back beyond Greece into oriental antiquity is, for Steiner, the very task anthroposophy exists to take up.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture lays out the three spiritual streams of ancient India: the Vedas, the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and the Yoga of Patanjali. Steiner describes each in turn. The Veda stream is a spiritual monism, picturing the human self breathing in and out with the World-Self as Atman and Brahman. Sankhya is pluralistic, a careful study of the sheaths, or forms, into which souls clothe themselves as the primal substance thickens from the finest spiritual flood, through Budhi, Ahamkara, and Manas, down to the coarse elements of the physical body. Steiner adds that Sankhya also weighs how far the soul asserts itself within each form, naming the three gunas, Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, according to whether the soul shines through its covering, is balanced within it, or lies entangled and unable to emerge. Yoga is the path by which the soul lifts itself, stage by stage, back toward the spirit. The greatness of the Gita, on Steiner's reading, is that it fuses these three one-sided streams into one living whole. As he puts it:
"In the Bhagavad Gita we have the harmonious inter-penetration of all three spiritual streams."
From here the cycle builds its central comparison. Steiner maps the three streams onto three aspects of the teaching Krishna gives his pupil Arjuna: the creative Word, the Law of the world's forms, and devotional Yoga. He then shows how the same trinity reappears, made concrete and historical, in the world of Paul. What was the Veda-Word becomes the living Logos who has entered evolution as a single being. What was Sankhya's study of the world's forms becomes the Law of the old Hebrew revelation. What was Yoga becomes Faith in the risen Christ, the state Paul names in the phrase, not I, but Christ in me.
The later lectures draw out the difference in tone that follows from this. Krishna teaches one soul at a time, in intimate seclusion; his instruction suits an age when human beings were still alike enough that one path served all. Paul speaks to a whole community of differentiated individuals, each with a distinct gift. Steiner reads Paul's letter to the Corinthians on the varied spiritual gifts and the many members of one body, and his hymn to love in the thirteenth chapter, as the natural language of an age in which the group-soul of blood has given way to the freely sought group-soul that is the Christ-Impulse. He also treats the strange gift of speaking with tongues as a survival of an older, half-conscious inspiration, now needing to be balanced by those who can interpret with clear understanding.
Steiner lingers on Paul's hymn to love because it shows the new principle at work. Prophecy and knowledge are partial and will pass away; love alone endures and binds the differentiated members into one body. This, for Steiner, is not a moral flourish but a description of how a community of free individuals can be inwardly one without being made uniform. Krishna could give no such teaching, because his pupils, having received the same instruction, remain like a single unit even in the spiritual world, whereas those moved by the Christ-Impulse keep their own direction and yet are held together by the being who lives in each of them.
A final contrast closes the cycle. Where the Krishna path seeks freedom from maya, from the outer world treated as illusion, Paul does not ask the soul to escape material existence but to redeem it from within. The Eastern initiate strives to become a Paramahamsa who leaves the sense-world behind and thirsts no longer for rebirth; Paul turns instead to the destiny of the soul, Purusha, and asks how it is worked out inside evolution rather than fled from. The path to Krishna can be trodden only by one who receives Krishna's instruction, while the path to Christ, Steiner insists, stands open to anyone, Buddhist or Jew, Muslim or Hindu, who grasps the Christ-Impulse in its meaning for all humanity. In this way the two documents become, for Steiner, the dawn and the sunrise of one truth.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 142 for the following entry, which serves as a hub for the ideas this cycle develops. Follow the link to study the term in depth.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 142 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation of the lecture cycle alongside the original German. Visit rsarchive.org and search the Collected Works by number or title. For print and study editions, search SteinerBooks at steinerbooks.org, where the cycle appears in the standard English catalogue.
Continue Your Study
- Explore the full Thalira glossary to see how terms such as Paul the Apostle connect to the wider vocabulary of Steiner's spiritual science.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides to other volumes, including the companion Christological cycles on the four Gospels.
- Read the entry on Paul the Apostle to follow the thread of Law and Faith that GA 142 sets against the Eastern path of Yoga.