In Steiner's reading, the cosmic gospel: the briefest, most elemental of the four, where the Christ appears as a cosmic being whose power works into deed and will.
The Gospel of Mark in Anthroposophy is read by Rudolf Steiner as the cosmic gospel: the briefest and most elemental of the four, the one that presents the Christ not as a teacher of wisdom or a genealogical descendant but as a cosmic being whose power works directly into the will and deeds of earthly life. In the lecture cycle The Gospel of St. Mark (GA 139, Basel, 1912), Steiner holds that Mark shows, by its general tone rather than its wording, the Christ as an earthly and supra-earthly manifestation, and the Mystery of Golgotha as an earthly and supra-earthly fact. Where John gives wisdom, Luke love, and Matthew the star-genealogy, Mark gives the elemental record of cosmic power entering action. Esoteric Christianity has worked with this gospel of deed ever since.
The Gospel of Mark is, for Rudolf Steiner, the gospel of cosmic power. It carries no nativity, no genealogy, and almost no extended teaching. It moves quickly, in plain verbs, from one deed to the next. Steiner reads this terseness as a sign rather than a lack: Mark records the moment a cosmic being entered earthly evolution and acted, leaving the understanding of that act to a far later humanity.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is particularly shown in the Mark Gospel, not so much in the wording but in the general tone of the presentation, that Christ is to be seen as a cosmic being, an earthly and supra-earthly manifestation, while the Mystery of Golgotha is shown as an earthly and supra-earthly fact. But something else is also emphasized, and here we are faced with the fine artistic element, especially toward the end of the Gospel. It is emphasized that a cosmic element is shining into the concerns of earth. It truly shines in; and it was the task of earth beings, of earthly human beings to bring their understanding to this impulse.
What it Means Today
Within esoteric Christianity, the stream of contemplative practice that traces itself to Steiner's 1912 Basel cycle and the later Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, the Gospel of Mark holds a particular office. It is the text read when the question is not what the Christ taught but what the Christ did. The other three gospels can be approached as wisdom (John), as the working of love through a human biography (Luke), or as the fulfilment of a royal star-genealogy (Matthew). Mark resists all three. It opens with no childhood, races through healings and exorcisms in a single breathless chapter, and ends on the bare loneliness of the Son of Man and a few startled women at an empty tomb. Steiner's claim is that this very bareness is the point. Mark is the record of a cosmic being whose power works into the will, into action, rather than into doctrine, and so it remains the gospel of those who understand the spiritual life as a matter of deed.
This gives the cosmic-gospel reading its distinctive synthesis: the Christ of Mark is closer to what an older esotericism named a power than to a founder of religion. Where a literary critic finds Mark primitive and unfinished, the anthroposophical reader finds an account deliberately stripped to its cosmic skeleton, written for an understanding that, in Steiner's words, only the further development of mankind could supply. To work with Mark, then, is less to study a life and more to stand inside the moment a cosmic impulse entered earthly evolution and to ask what that impulse asks of one's own will.
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