Steiner's phrase for the single god who entered earthly death, the one thing the ancient mystery gods, knowing all else, could never teach.
What is The God Who Learned Death?
The God Who Learned Death in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's designation for the being later called the Christ, the one member of the divine world who descended into earth evolution to undergo death. Steiner set it out in the fifth lecture of The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution (GA 212), given at Dornach on 7 May 1922. The ancient initiates communed with gods who could impart an all-embracing wisdom, yet those gods knew nothing of human birth and death, because birth and death in the human sense began only with earth evolution; before it there was metamorphosis alone. The Mystery of Golgotha, on this reading, is the event by which a god acquired the one knowledge the divine world lacked, and could then bind himself to a disintegrating earth. Steiner treats that acquired knowledge as the counterweight to the freedom won through technical thinking.
The God Who Learned Death names the asymmetry at the centre of Steiner's Christology: the old mysteries could reach gods who knew everything except dying. Death belonged to earth alone, and to the human beings bound to it. Steiner's claim is that one god crossed into that ignorance deliberately, learned death as a creature learns it, and carried the knowledge back into the divine world.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Gods knew all things; from them the initiates could receive an all-embracing wisdom. But there was one thing they could never learn from these Gods; they could never learn anything relating to birth and death. Particularly about death the Gods knew nothing. But in the mysteries, it was known that the God who was later called the Christ would come down, and that on earth he would know death. Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha consists of the fact that one of the Gods, who till then had known neither death nor birth and heredity, would learn to know death.
What it Means Today
Christian theology reached the same edge fifty years later from an entirely different direction. In 1972 Jürgen Moltmann, then professor of systematic theology at Tübingen, published Der gekreuzigte Gott, issued in English in 1974 as The Crucified God. Its target was the axiom of divine impassibility that patristic theology took over from Greek metaphysics: God, being perfect, cannot suffer and cannot die. Moltmann argued that the cross is an event inside the being of God, not something that happened to a man while God watched from a safe distance, and that a theology shielding God from death shields him out of the story. He wrote with the gallows scene from Elie Wiesel's Night before him, and refused the consolation that God was a spectator to it.
Steiner had said in 1922 that the gods of the old mysteries gave an all-embracing wisdom and still could tell nothing of death. Moltmann reaches the same structure by exegesis and post-war German conscience rather than by initiation.
Thalira synthesis: the two accounts part company over where the new knowledge goes. Moltmann keeps it inside the life of the Trinity; Steiner has it enter earth evolution as a working force. That is why an anthroposophist reads Golgotha as a change in the planet and a Protestant systematician reads it as a change in the doctrine of God.
Where to Read More
- The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, GA 212
- Find The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]