Darkness, Page Two

Here we must remove our mantle of doctrine in favor of the image. Thinking, in a process more military-political than spiritual, became frozen into doctrine and dogma as the reality of Christ's physical presence faded and Christendom joined forces with the powerful arm of the Roman empire. Through that process the doctrine of the Trinity became firmly established (see fn 22 in the "Three Bodies" essay in The Burning Bush). That doctrine embodies only the male principle in Father-Son-Holy Spirit terminology. We saw in The Burning Bush that the parable of the Prodigal Son is an allegory telling of the descent of the human being into earthly materiality and then its return (ascent) to its heavenly home. It is a parable about a parabola (the pathway of humanity), the image of which we have seen amply demonstrated in the "Fire" essay.

The descent of the human being has encompassed, as we have seen, the entirety of creation up to our time, or at least up to the "right time" when the Incarnation occurred. The descent was a process of materialization, of densifying or hardening, the male aspect in the polar/rhythmic nature of creation. What goes in one direction will return in the other—what stands at one extreme will be balanced by what stands at the other—the unity that divides through "fission" will eventually again unite through "fusion." The male (or male principle), standing alone, is like space without time or time without space, a nullity, an impossibility.⁷ The only reality is the unity of male and female. Thus, the doctrine of only a male principle occupying the highest spiritual realm must be seen as the false relic of a period of darkening human consciousness. We must courageously rethink, in all humility and reverence, what the images of creation have clearly demonstrated to us, namely, the counterbalancing image of the eternal feminine, the coequal of the male principle expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity. And even in accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, we need to remember that it is just that, only doctrine, frozen human thinking, and that Christ himself stressed the unity of himself and what he called the "Father." We must recognize that if the highest divinity were to incarnate during humanity's residence in the mineral-physical body, it had to be done either as a male or a female—there was no other option, hence no exaltation of one sex over the other.⁸ But we must see in the incarnation process that both the eternal male and eternal female principles were involved. The presence of the latter in the Nathan Jesus Mary, the real basis for the concept of "the Mother of God," can be seen in The Incredible Births of Jesus, as well as in "The Nativity" essay in The Burning Bush.

Steiner told us that males have dominated the historical landscape of humanity up to the present time, but that as the human soul evolves in its upward journey on the Prodigal's return, more and more the female (or female principle) will dominate that landscape. See Karmic Relationships, Vol. 5, Lect. 7, p. 103.

Though theologians do not yet generally recognize it, the Bible declares that the human soul is neither male nor female (Gen 1,27; 5,2; Mt 19,4; Mk 10,6).⁹ When Jesus responded to the Sadducees' question concerning the woman with the seven brothers as successive husbands (the levirate law matter), he showed that in the spiritual world there is no male/female division (Mt 22,30; Mk 12,25; Lk 20,34-36). And the "mother" of Christ given by Jesus to Evangelist John from the Cross, according to its higher meaning, was the eternal feminine principle that permitted him to write his Gospel (Jn 19,27; see "Who was the Mother of Jesus?" in The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved). The Christ Spirit that dwelled within Jesus of Nazareth was neither male nor female. It was the female portion of his unity, however, that would permit Evangelist John to write the Gospel that, more than any other, would point humanity in the direction of its reascent.

If you now rightly ask what relevance this male/female discussion has to the meaning of darkness, I will tell you that it refers to the very beginning of creation, to the matter of humanity being made in the image of God (Gen 1,26),¹⁰ for all creation reflects ("declares"), fractal-like, the highest Creator God (Ps 50,6; Rom 1,20). We have thus far shown, in examining the meaning of darkness, its relationship to matter. But we cannot stop there. The Bible, as stated above, shows that darkness existed before the creation of matter. While that darkness in Jn 1,5 may or may not have existed before matter, clearly that in Gen 1,2,4-5 did (see the "Creation" and "Light" essays). And we've previously shown, and the Bible declares, that all matter (e.g., "things seen"; Heb 11,3) is made out of the unseen.

At this point in our quest, we must return to the general definition of darkness as the absence of light. This definition is not patently different from the declaration that in the "first day" light and darkness were separated (Gen 1,4), the darkness having existed before light was created (Gen 1,2). Steiner himself, in what I perceive as the highest writing given to humanity outside of the Bible itself, speaks of darkness during the Ancient Saturn Condition of Consciousness as being the absence of light, e.g., "pure spiritual light that is darkness for everything outside" (An Outline of Esoteric Science [OES], Chap. 4, p. 149). Later in the same chapter (p. 159), he speaks of darkness appearing during the Ancient Sun Condition of Consciousness because germinal "human beings who had remained behind at the Saturn stage … were not able to condense [from "warmth structures"] into air in the right way." This was all before the Earth Condition of Consciousness (Earth evolution) began (see I-1). And this was well before the germinal human soul was endowed with reason or existed in any material state, and preceded by far the conditions mentioned in Gen 1,1 (though not those in Jn 1,1). Our lower kingdoms (mineral, plant and animal) are those that fell behind in the three earlier Conditions of Consciousness (Saturn, Sun and Moon) that preceded the Earth Condition of Consciousness. Yet these lower kingdoms did not come into existence because of their own moral guilt. They are, in fact, what resulted from germinal human souls that did not properly develop (i.e., fell behind) in one or more prior Conditions of Consciousness—sacrificed in the creative process, so to speak, in order to become servants for the benefit of those who did not fall behind, namely, those who are human beings during Earth evolution. Comprehension of this gives greater understanding of Saint Francis of Assisi's referring to all the lower kingdoms as "brothers or sisters," and of Paul's mystical reference to them in Rom 8,19-23.

Darkness is the polar opposite of light. If we are to go back to the very beginning, before the Word went out from the ultimate Creator God, we must follow the image, like a prospector seeking the mother lode, all the way back to the point where it merges into that Creator God, losing its own identity in the whole from which it would later come forth.

When the time arrives in any evolutionary development for one stage to be replaced by another, be it concept, mutation or adaptation, the new is normally born through the hard labor of conflict, the dying of the old. Slavery died hard in our country just before the start of the current Michaelic age in 1879. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have witnessed the struggle for woman suffrage and for full equality of all the downtrodden as against the forces of discrimination, prejudice and bigotry, often associated with religious fundamentalism—present even to this day in some religious persuasions with regard to qualification for priesthood or ministry. The struggle is far from over.