Heresy

Heresy (from Greek: αἵρεσις haíresis "choice, view, school, heresy") or heterodoxy (from ἑτεροδοξία heterodoxia "different opinion") is the term used in Christian theology to describe a doctrine that claims a truth contrary to the orthodoxy (orthodoxy) of a particular Christian church. The follower of a heretical doctrine is commonly called heretic.

What all heretical movements had in common was that they sought a deeper spiritual understanding; people who belonged to these movements have brought this aspiration with them into their present incarnation and continue to seek spiritual knowledge today. Rudolf Steiner clearly pointed out that this is especially true for many anthroposophists.

„Well, you see, the thing is that today in general human life we have, if I may so express myself, two kinds of human beings. These two kinds of people come from the fact that at certain times the spiritual development of humanity on earth was different from that at other times, when there was, as it were, a wave-like movement. But the waves did not merely run one after the other, but also side by side. You see, for example, at a certain time the Western development of Christianity was once again superficialised, alienated. People had no possibility of deriving content from what Christianity offered them. There was a reaction among the Cathars. So there were people living side by side who lived very much in the external and people who wanted to internalise themselves strongly. Something similar was the case when, under Comenius' influence and earlier, the Moravian Brethren communities were founded deep into Hungary and Poland, so that people who strongly strove for spirituality in their souls and those who were simply forced by the karma of civilisation to externalise themselves always lived together in the world. This is connected with earlier karmic conditions, that one comes into one group, the other into the other. Now, for humanity today, it is very much a question of the extent to which the human being belonged in his earlier incarnation to one or the other of the groups of human beings just described. Let us suppose, therefore, that a human being is born today who has lived within a Christian development which was entirely externalised, he will have a quite different human configuration from a human being who, for my sake, belonged to the Bohemian-Moravian brethren. And what is the difference? - You see, the actual course of the Kali Yuga can only be found out if you look at the concrete circumstances, otherwise it remains a historical construction. The dark age lasts until 1899, then the light age begins. One does not have much of this consciousness. One must go into the concrete spiritual. People born at the turn of the Kali Yuga, people who have a strong spiritual aspiration in them - you need not be immodest about this, you need only take it into your living knowledge - these people are, to the greatest extent, people who were actually born out of heretics, out of those who wanted to internalise themselves. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, people were brought down who did not live in the general stream of externalising Christianity, but lived in such internalising sects. What is the consequence of this?

You see, if you go through the time between death and the new birth, you learn very precisely in a spiritual way, just as we here on earth can learn and study the non-human world, the universe, know and study the human universe. This is just as great and detailed, for the human being contains just as much within himself as the cosmos. We study this with our transformed will powers. There we get to know the human being in great detail. Now there is a difference between the two groups of human beings of whom I have just spoken to you. Those who had externalised themselves more were not able to enter the spiritual world properly in the passage between death and the new birth. They passed thoughtlessly by in the spiritual world before the peculiarity of man, were born again; and especially those people who were born in the second third of the nineteenth century were people of this kind, who had been so externalised in their previous life. They then brought no sense for man into earthly life. They behaved towards man in such a way that they used the body for eating, drinking, walking, standing, sitting, but they were not interested in it because they had not taken up interest in it between death and the new birth. These were the people who were preferably satisfied with materialism, because they had no need to get to know the human being. The materialist, who always wants to know only the material, knows him least of all.“ (Lit.:GA 316, p. 186f)

Literature

• Malcolm Lambert: Häresie im Mittelalter. Von den Katharern bis zu den Hussiten, Darmstadt 2001 ISBN 978-3534147175
• Fichtenau, Heinrich: Ketzer und Professoren: Häresie und Vernunftglaube im Hochmittelalter, München: Beck, 1992 ISBN 3-406-36458-6
• Borst, Arno: Die Katharer, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1991 ISBN 3-451-04025-5
• Koch, Gottfried: Frauenfrage und Ketzertum im Mittelalter, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1962
• Werner, Ernst/Erbstößer, Martin: Kleriker, Mönche, Ketzer. Das religiöse Leben im Hochmittelalter, Herder Spektrum, Freiburg, Basel, Wien 1994
• Eugen Roll: Ketzer zwischen Orient und Okzident. Patarener, Paulikianer, Bogomilen, J. Ch. Mellinger Verlag 1986, ISBN 978-3880691902
• Rudolf Steiner: Meditative Betrachtungen und Anleitungen zur Vertiefung der Heikunst, GA 316 (2003), ISBN 3-7274-3160-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.