Steiner's three-stage inner path to the Mystery of Golgotha: solitude before God, recognition that the solitude is self-made, and the Risen Christ born within.
The Three Degrees of Mystical Experience in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a graded inner path to the Mystery of Golgotha, set out in Lecture VIII of Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (GA 175), given in Berlin on 24 April 1917. The first degree is the experience of God in total and utter solitude, which Steiner separates sharply from the complacent formula that God is experienced within myself. The second is the recognition that this solitude is self-created, that we make our gods in our own image, and with it the feeling of shared responsibility for the death of the divine in us. The third is the birth of the Risen Christ in the soul. Steiner offers the sequence as a source of knowledge independent of documentary history, and meditation is the practice through which it is worked.
The Three Degrees of Mystical Experience describe what happens to a person who takes the meditative path far enough to meet the Mystery of Golgotha from the inside. Steiner traced the sequence back to Aristotle, whose account of the method was, he said, cut from the surviving manuscripts. The German phrase he used in the Berlin lecture is ein dreistufiges mystisches Erlebnis.
In Steiner's Own Words
There are three degrees of mystical experience. To find the path leading to the sources of the Mystery of Golgotha is of itself not enough; something more must be added, something that has been grotesquely misrepresented, even concealed, at the present time. The only person who forcefully pointed out what had been concealed from mankind by the nineteenth century was Friedrich Nietzsche in his book On the Uses and Abuses of History. Nothing is more calculated to destroy our understanding of Christ than what is called history today. And the Mystery of Golgotha has never been more thoroughly misrepresented than by the objective historians of the nineteenth century.
What it Means Today
Six years before Steiner gave the Berlin lecture, Evelyn Underhill published Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (Methuen, London, 1911), a book that has stayed in print ever since. Underhill read Ruysbroeck, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross as reports of a single sequence, and she set out the mystic way in five phases: awakening, purgation, illumination, the dark night of the soul, and union. Her fourth phase and Steiner's first two occupy the same ground. Both describe a stretch where the consolations fall away and the seeker is left with nothing but the fact of being alone, and neither treats that emptiness as a failure of practice.
The methods differ where it counts. Underhill worked as a scholar, gathering testimony from the literature and arranging it. Steiner spoke as a practitioner giving directions, and he named a destination Underhill's survey does not: the Mystery of Golgotha reached without recourse to a document. The Thalira synthesis: Underhill's five phases are a map drawn from other people's journeys, while Steiner's three degrees are drawn as instructions, which is why his second degree names a moral fact (we make our gods in our own image) where Underhill's corresponding phase names only a mood. Read Underhill for the breadth of witnesses and Steiner for the sequence of steps: both arrive at a solitude that has to be carried rather than escaped.
Where to Read More
- Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 175
- Find Building Stones at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]