In Chapter 21 of The Revelation to John (The Book of the Apocalypse: Revelation) we read part of the description of the New Jerusalem, a picture of a mighty vision experienced by John in the Spiritual World: “The city has a great and high wall and twelve gates. And on the gates twelve angels, and names were written on them: the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel.” (verse 12)
 
This year we hope to uncover an understanding of the twelve ways in which we can enter the New Jerusalem.
 
The way of Benjamin

The description of Benjamin in Genesis is that he is a ravenous wolf: In the morning he devours the prey, and in the evening he divides the spoil. This may seem a rather aggressive description for the last born of Jacob’s (Israel’s) sons. It has been understood that this description captures Benjamin’s hunger for the Divine spark in all of existence. So, like a ravenous wolf he recognizes that his mission is to passionately seek the Divine energy embedded in matter, devour it, consume and elevate it.

Benjamin may also be depicted by a picture of the Temple. The area of the Temple belonged to all the tribes but in a geographic sense it was in the area of Benjamin (Jerusalem is in the land of Benjamin), falling into the larger lands of the Kingdom of Judah. The connection of the Temple, of Benjamin, with Judah, reminds us of the connection of Jesus as a son of Judah, and the body that bore the Christ as the builder of the new Temple of the inner life.

Twelve tribes and twelve paths: each a gateway into the New Jerusalem. Each one a way into the relationship with the new Temple builder: Christ.​

​The Gospel Study continued the study of John’s Gospel beginning at the fourth sign: the Feeding of the Five Thousand, immediately followed by the fifth sign. Although the group had discussed these in October in the absence of Rev. Michaël Merle, the group wished for his input to these signs.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is related to the Sacrament of Communion, the Eucharist. The two fish represent Pisces, the sign into which the axis of the earth has been pointing from shortly before the birth of Jesus until now. The sign of the zodiac directly opposite Pisces is Virgo which is represented by the sheaf of domesticated grain which make the five loaves of bread. This points to a relationship between the bread and the one who blesses the bread. It connects Christ (Pisces) with the bread (Virgo). The bread is the result of the human being taming and transforming nature to make a new substance. This is the new sacrifice. What the disciples gather up is that which is ‘over and above’ what was needed to feed the people. This over-abundance is carried by the full span of the community. It is the substance from which Community can grow. The five thousand is the full volume of the community of the human being.

The fifth sign is the sign of the etheric force of Christ that walks on the water. The fifth sign is the sacrament of the one who can ‘take the boat to the other side’. It is the Sacrament of Ordination. Though ordination the spiritual world is opened up for others. Crossing a threshold is difficult. It is with the ‘I’ in me that I can overcome the fear of the world. The ‘I am’ is related to priesthood.

These signs are followed by the first of the ‘I am’ statements of the Christ. The seven ‘I am’ statements are related to the seven-fold human being. The first: “I am the Bread of Live” relates to our physical body and what it is to be in a physical body as a spiritual being living an earthly life. Jesus accuses the people who question him that they are looking for signs but that they are not recognising the signs that he has given to them. They are unable to connect the signs to a spiritual reality. If they see only the outer sign and miss the spiritual reality that the sign reveals, they are missing the purpose of what they have witnessed. It is this that causes the tension that we read in the verses between the first and second ‘I am’ statements.

Jesus has arrived as the ‘Anointed One’ but this is not obvious in the outer world and therefore many cannot see this reality as it differs from their expectations. The greatest deed of Christ is not witnessed by anyone. After His death there are witnesses to Him being placed in the tomb. After His Resurrection there are witnesses to Him being alive, but there are no witnesses to the event of His Resurrection. His Resurrection is not just an act of overcoming death, it is the overcoming of death so that there is new life. The Resurrection brings something new to the human being. The Buddha saw as the ultimate aim the release from death (the release from the cycles of rebirth), whereas Christ takes this aim of the Buddha a step further, that beyond death there is life, not just release and a return to the essential oneness of existence; there is a future.

​This discussion group is permitting the members to explore what it means to be a human being where the experiences of the world around us taken into our soul through our physical nature meet the spiritual experiences that enter the soul through our I-constitution. Spiritual well-being is the recognition of the input we receive as imagination, intuition and inspiration from our spiritual nature to use in our soul to understand the experiences that come to us from the physical and formative life forces of the world around us.

In his book Theosophy Rudolf Steiner belabours the point that as human beings we belong to one species. There are no different species of human being, we are all one. We inherit physical and also non-physical characteristics through heredity from the family, culture and ethnicity into which we are born. But as spiritual beings we are unique and a species unto ourselves; a species that recurs on earth time and time again in a different physical body but that has potentialities and characteristics that are unique to itself completely. This makes the human being an interesting meeting place of that which we can identify as being inherited and that which we recognise as being entirely unique to us. Therefore, spiritual well-being also is about our response to the world around us and the development of the unique potentialities that we bring into this life with us.

Sacrament means the development of a relationship to the Divine. The theology of the Act of Consecration began by considering the first words of the celebrant before stepping up to the altar. In these words we learn something of the nature of the Divine Trinity and the relationship we can develop with each of these aspects of the Divine.

Then we looked at the Trinity Epistle which describes in great detail the nature of the Divine Trinity.

Now we are looking more closely at the Advent Epistle. Advent is the first of the three liturgical festivals of the Father that describe the expectation of something coming to earth; the birth of something on earth; and the revealing of this something in the being of a human being. For a while we will deepen our understanding of the Father, the nature of the Father and our relationship to the Father as the Ground of the World and the One who sends the Son.

We learn that we can only come into a relationship with the Divine through a true understanding of the human being. Rudolf Steiner explains that the human being is created in the image of the Divine and therefore to understand the Wisdom of the Divine (Theosophy) we should come to understand the human being. In this module the theme was communion or common union. Our relationship to the Etheric Christ is in community or common unity through communication or common unification. We developed a picture of the human being at hand of Form and Movement. Through our threefold and fourfold nature as human beings we recognise the working of the second and first Hierarchies in our development and creation.

The activities of the Saturday allowed us to work with the prayers that are said during the Communion part of the Act of Consecration of the Human Being. We worked by comparing the prayer as was previous prayed and as it has been renewed in our sacrament through image, written words, speaking an intuition that arose, and finally by reflecting in community.

The coming of Christ has brought about a major change in the human being. That which was outside has come to be inside of us. We can become aware that the Beings of Form that created this Heaven and this Earth as the servants of the Divine, are handing over the creative impulse to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality. We can no longer rely on outer forms to sustain us, individually or communally. It is now our inner activity that gives the form to our lives and through our inner activity we commune with Christ and through inner activity we form community with others. The form in the outer world has moved to the inner activity of movement within the human being.

More extensive reports of the Seminary Module will be published on the Africa Seminary website in December.

​Salisbury Cathedral was built between 1220 and 1258, a remarkably short period of time. Wells Cathedral was built between 1175 and 1239. These two cathedrals are the only two cathedrals representing the early English Gothic style of architecture in their entirety in Britain. Prior to the Gothic style the Romanesque style was restrictive in the height that could be achieved in the building. The Gothic style on the Continent, particularly prevalent in the cathedrals of northern France at the time, allowed for much greater height to be achieved through buttressing the high walls. On the Continent these buttresses were build on the exterior of the building (known as flying buttresses) and restricted the width of the cathedrals. The Continental cathedrals of the Gothic period are primarily lit by rose windows at the two ends. The British architects and master masons came up with a unique internal buttressing technique that permitted almost the height of the Continental cathedrals but allowed for greater width and allowed side aisles to be added to the nave. These cathedrals were lit with lancet windows all along the length as well as at the two ends and provided a lot of interior light even when the windows contain stained-glass images.

This bringing the support for the roof from the outside to the inside occurred some time before the birth of the Consciousness Soul in the human being, which Rudolf Steiner places at 1413CE, yet it reflects the pre-dawning of the ability to stand within one’s own individuality. This is the primary gift of Francis of Assisi (1180 – 1220CE) who helped the human being change the way we see ourselves in the world. This extraordinary time of Early English Gothic is this time from the late 12th century to the early 13th century in which we see the first glimpses of the reality of the Consciousness Soul capacities to come.

Michaël Merle accompanied this talk with a slide show of photos he took on a recent visit to Salisbury and Wells. He included the history of the towns and the cathedrals and interesting aspects of the design of the Chapter Houses of each cathedral.

A more extensive report of the presentation with a few images may replace this article later in December.

​In Chapter 21 of The Revelation to John (The Book of the Apocalypse: Revelation) we read part of the description of the New Jerusalem, a picture of a mighty vision experienced by John in the Spiritual World: “The city has a great and high wall and twelve gates. And on the gates twelve angels, and names were written on them: the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel.” (verse 12)
 
This year we hope to uncover an understanding of the twelve ways in which we can enter the New Jerusalem.
 
The way of Joseph and his sons 
Joseph represents the element of suffering in life. Yet, he not only survives; he thrives! He achieves greatness through his challenges. He overcomes all adversities and becomes a great leader saving his entire generation. Despite his corrupt environment (which may have significant resonance for us today) he maintains his spiritual integrity. The powerful light that emerges in Joseph, out of the darkness of his surroundings and circumstances, separates into two distinct dimensions – his two sons: Menashe and Ephraim.

Menashe represents the ability not to succumb to the powers of the constraints (mitzaim) that are present in Egypt. These powers wish that one forgets one’s spiritual roots. Menashe reminds us to remain connected regardless of the challenges.

Ephraim takes it even further. It is not enough to just survive in an alien environment, but to thrive – to “be fruitful in the land of my affliction". Ephraim represents the power to transform the difficulties into Divine power in us.

​Over the first three Sundays of Michaelmas Rev. Michaël Merle led three workshops exploring the nature and structure of Koine Greek – the language used to record and convey the Gospel: euangélion (εὐαγγέλιον): The new word that resounds from the realm of the angels: the good news, which translated into Latin gave us: evangelium.

The purpose of these workshops was to consider why the New Testament was written in Greek? How did this language, and what it captured of the concepts of life and development, contribute to our understanding of God? These questions as well as an exploration into some of the words found only in the New Testament or mainly in this text formed the basis of these workshops.

We began by considering the influence of Greek on the English language. The major remaining contribution of Greek is in the words we use in the sciences. Here we begin to understand how root words (roots) are used as prefixes or suffixes to give a very specific meaning to words. An example would be the skin or the dermis. In embryonic development we speak of the ectoderm (the outer dermis), the mesoderm (the middle dermis), and the endoderm (the inner dermis). When considering our skin as earthly human beings we speak of the epidermis (the well-fitting layer of dead skin cells upon the dermis that protects the dermis beneath). Anabatic winds flow up mountains and katabatic winds flow down mountains. This is because ana means up and kata means down. We quickly saw how roots in Greek can be used to give words a very specific meaning.

As a matter of interest, we looked at how the Greek alphabet developed from the Late Phoenician alphabet. We had studied the development of the alphabet during the St Johnstide workshops when Michaël ran workshops on the use of Ancient Hebrew in the Old Testament. (Click here to read the article.) It was interesting to see how the Romans adopted the Greek alphabet to give us our modern alphabet, and how many new letters we have that were adapted from the Greek or Latin as opposed to directly taken from them.

When we consider the Gospel (and here we could say all the books of the New Testament) we are not reading a historical record. A 'social media' account of the day would have been written in Aramaic, the language of daily discourse. The purpose of the Gospel was to provide an understanding of what had occurred and what was still unfolding. In order to be precise, the Gospel was written in Koine Greek. Koine Greek was the language of philosophy (philo is love and sophia is wisdom, thus philosophy is a love of wisdom) and the writers of the Gospel wished to make it clear that the most profound writings of the time had been taken a step further, had been renewed through the events of which the Gospel speaks. Koine Greek converged ideas and concepts better than any of the other languages in common use at the time

Koine Greek had a capacity for using roots and creating new words. This allowed the Gospel writers to create words that were new, to describe precisely what they wished to convey. Everyone understood the meaning even when a word was newly created. Because each root in Greek can be translated into several different words – words that are dependent on the context in which the root is used - and sometimes an entire sentence is needed to express the meaning; hence, translating the Greek Gospel is no easy task. Translators prefer to find the most appropriate word or phrase for the Greek rather than writing sentences, and so each translator opts for a certain preference and in so doing, although not betraying the Koine Greek, something of the original meaning may be lost. (Of the modern European languages, German is best suited to creating new words by conjoining words. The new word can be understood by the meaning of each conjoined word and also be understood in its own right as conveying a clear concept. This may be considered as one of the reasons that German was best suited to bringing us the concepts of Spiritual Science. It also means that the translation of concepts of Spiritual Science require unpacking in other languages.)

A word that predominantly occurs only in the Gospel is the word anablēpo. The root ana means up and the root blēpo is to look or see. The Hebrews had a tradition of looking up in prayer. This is integral to the relationship the Hebrews had with Yahweh of the Elohim. The Greeks did not have this tradition of prayer. The Greeks placated their gods, but they did not communicate with their gods. Thus, the concept of looking up, or anablēpo was not one used in the Greek language. The word is used predominantly in the Gospel. In the Gospel it is used when Jesus raises his sight to the Father in prayer. But it is also used by Mark in the story of the healing of the man described in translation as being blind. The Koine Greek word is tuphlos/typhlos (τυφλός, ή, όν) which means to raise a smoke. In relation to a person, it signified that their sight was impaired, and this sight could be physical sight or spiritual sight. When Jesus asks the man: “What is it that you will I do for you?”; the man responds: “restore my anablēpo”. The man willed to be able to look up as one would in prayer. He asked to have his spiritual sight restored. In most translations the man asks for his sight because he was blind. Only in understanding the Koine Greek can we appreciate the nuanced way of understanding that this was not merely physical blindness and physical sight, but that the Gospel writer wishes us to understand a spiritual plea in the man’s request.

One of the interesting words that we considered is in the Lord’s Prayer, in the fifth petition: Give us this day …. The word that is used in Koine Greek is epiousious / epiousion. The first root (epi) tells us that this is appropriate, well fitting, fittingly, fittingly placed upon. The second root (ousia) means beingness. A good translation of this petition is: Give us this day the bread fitting for our appropriate. substantial development. This petition in the Aramaic of the day was Hawlan lachma d’sunqanan yuamana. This translates as produce in life and soul - bread or knowledge - needed or in illumined measure (as in a bird’s nest) - today. This could be translated as Give me the capacity today, to produce within my life and soul the nourishing understanding we need to illumine our circle of becoming. In his translation into Latin St Jerome used the word super-substantial (or super-essential). The King James translators followed Tertulian’s view of looking to the Old Testament for guidance and deciding to use the experience of the Israelites in the desert receiving manna on a daily basis, enough only for each day, as to best understand this petition and hence we have Give us this day our daily bread, as if we can only receive what we need for today. Epiousious can be considered the appropriately fitting substance that we receive today in order to manage tomorrow (and all that follows).

Finally, we undertook the translation of a part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 6: 10-13. Verse 12 reveals that our fight is not against our life on earth (our incarnation into earthly life) but rather against specific hierarchies of angelic beings that are very clearly defined. They are the “first rulers” or the spirit beings from the beginning of time. We know them as the fallen archai or the azuras; the spirit beings powerful in spiritual and earthly moral influence; cosmic powers of darkness; and spirit beings behind the pain we suffer in earth existence.

These workshops provided insight into the language of Koine Greek and how it was used to express the good word from the angels (the evangelious). This report does not detail the full workshops or all the scripture verses that were translated. It provides only a small window into some of the fascinating work that was undertaken in the course of the three Sundays.