Wisdom

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Wisdom (Greek: σοφία sophia; Latin: sapientia) as human ability is based on a deeper insight into wide-ranging contexts of life drawn from experience, comprehensive knowledge, intuition, rationality and well-founded faith. It first arose as objective astral wisdom or cosmic intelligence on the Old Moon, which is therefore rightly called the Cosmos of Wisdom. Wisdom emerged from truth, which was already predisposed on the Old Sun as a force working in the etheric. Today it forms the Buddhi of the Earth, which underlies the whole development of the Earth. In the Kabbalah, wisdom (Hebrew: חכמה Chochmah) is the second Sephira on the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah and at the same time the uppermost of its right pillar Jachin. A person to whom a part of this wisdom is accessible is commonly called a sage.

The Proverbs of Solomon

In the Proverbs of Solomon, wisdom characterises itself thus:

„22 “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. 23 Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. 24 When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. 25 Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, 26 before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. 27 When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28 when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, 29 when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 30 then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, 31 rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man. 32 “And now, O sons, listen to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. 33 Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. 34 Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. 35 For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, 36 but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.”“

– ESV

The Origin of Wisdom on the Old Sun

The evolution of the Old Sun was under the guidance of the Spirits of Wisdom.

„What lives in the truth, which purifies itself into wisdom, actually already has its first beginning during the evolution of the Sun, then has its climax in a certain way in the evolution of the Moon, continues to live in the evolution of the Earth, and will essentially already be completed in what we know as the evolution of Jupiter. There the human being will have attained a certain full completion with regard to the content of wisdom.“ (Lit.:GA 170, p. 74)

Today this objective wisdom meets us everywhere in earthly nature, in the wise construction of the thigh bone as well as in the construction of the wasp's nest, to name but two examples.

The subjective inner wisdom, the individual intelligence, only entered into earthly development with the human I. It is described by Plato as one of the most important forms of wisdom. It is named by Plato as one of the four cardinal virtues of man.

Wisdom and Spirits of Form

„Everywhere in our environment we find everything filled and impregnated with wisdom, with that with which we ourselves will be impregnated when we have fully developed manas. This wisdom that we find everywhere is something that belongs to the members of the Spirits of Form. As our lowest member is the physical body, so the wisdom we find around us is the lowest member of the Spirits of Form. Then these Spirits of Form have Buddhi, Atman, where we have our etheric body and astral body, and then the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh members. So you see, we are dealing here with highly exalted beings to whom we look up, and when we see wisdom in our surroundings, we see only the last member of these highly exalted beings.“ (Lit.:GA 102, p. 79f)

Wisdom as the Buddhi of the Earth

The entire fullness of wisdom that underlies the formation of the earth may be called the Buddhi of the earth. The twelve masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings, who may be equated with the twelve Bodhisattvas, and who include, for example, Buddha, Zarathustra (the later Master Jesus), Scythianus or Christian Rosenkreutz, encompass all this wisdom:

„One who has absorbed all earthly experience, so that he knows of every thing how it can be utilised and has thus become a creator, is called a Bodhisattva, that is, a man who has sufficiently absorbed Bodhi, the Buddhi of the earth. Then he is ripe to work out of the innermost impulses. The sages of the earth are not yet Bodhisattvas. Even for a sage there are still things in which he is not yet able to find his way. Only when one has absorbed all the knowledge of the earth in order to be able to create, is one a bodhisattva. Buddha, Zarathustra, for example, were Bodhisattvas.“ (Lit.:GA 93a, p. 54)

Wisdom and the Separation of the Sexes

→ Main article: Separation of the Sexes

„Very beautifully and clearly it is written in Genesis: before Yahweh created man, he created on the earth fruits, animals and so on, and last of all he created man, Adam, and this he then divided into two sexes [...]

All the fertilising and fruit-bearing power that brings forth a new man was formerly united in one sex. Then man is divided into male and female. Which sex has the actual claim to the procreative power? It is the female. That is why in the oldest Greek mythology Zeus, who was worshipped as the father of mankind, is depicted with a female bust, with a female bust. Zeus as a superhuman being was closer to the female sex. The female sex was therefore the first, the earlier, and at that time had within itself the power to bring forth the whole human individual. This productive power was present in the unisexual human being, whose physical outer form was closer to that of the female. In this unisexual human being the fertilising force was wisdom, the spiritual itself, and a later repetition of this is the fertilisation of the female spirit with inspired wisdom. This man of the unisexual time was the result of the substance given in the woman and of the fertilisation with the divine spirit.“ (Lit.:GA 93, p. 230f)

Separation of the Sexes

„When the division of the sexes took place, the differentiation occurred in such a way that, first of all, for the female sex, the spiritual organs of fertilisation were transformed into organs of wisdom. The masculine power that the female had within her transformed the creative power into the organs of wisdom. Thus, half of the creative power remained with the woman; the creative physical power remained with the man. This separation gave rise physically to the spinal cord and the brain with the nerve cords, represented in the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. The organ of wisdom is formed in the spinal rings with the spinal cord and its extension in the brain. From then on there is a duality in the human being: These are the two trees in the biblical document, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life [...].

Physical nature had split into one that fertilises and one that is to be fertilised. Likewise, the spiritual nature has also split. In female individuals the spirit has a masculine character and colouring; in man the spiritual has a feminine character. This is still the woman in the man.“ (Lit.:GA 93, p. 231f)

Luciferic Temptation and the Fall of Man

„The biblical legend depicts this very precisely. It is well known that the bisexual man is forbidden to eat of the tree of knowledge. The power that Jehovah had put in man was: to make his wisdom work in the woman. "Thou shalt not eat of the tree of knowledge" means as much as: Thou shalt not separate the fertilising power and make it independent. - For thereby the woman loses the Yahweh power, the fertilising power. When the woman ate from the tree of knowledge, she laid the foundation for becoming independent in wisdom and thus ceasing to remain a dependent instrument of Jehovah, as He had planned. Thus, however, with Jehovah's power it lost the power to impregnate itself with wisdom. She put this power out of herself by eating [of the tree of knowledge] and giving the man of the apple. Thus the woman became dependent on the man. It was Lucifer who set man on this path to make him independent. Jehovah opposed this and therefore issued the prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge. But the woman eats and gives to the man. He also eats, and then follows the punishment inflicted by Jehovah. New bodies have to come into being, which carry out the karma of the previous life, death and being born come into the world. The woman is now no longer fertile by herself, but has become barren. And with the fact that fertilisation comes from outside, the possibility of such death has also come into the world.“ (Lit.:GA 93, p. 232f)

Passive Male and Active Female Wisdom

„What happened when the feminine split off from the masculine? In which sex has the shadow of the productive spiritual power of wisdom been more preserved, in the male or in the female? We have seen that the feminine wisdom actually has a masculine character: that is the creative, the productive, the intuition, that which is original, that which brings forth. The same divine power which formerly had a fertilising effect in woman in order to bring forth the physical man, now has a fertilising effect on the knowledge of the divine essence in man. In order to promote this process, the religions work through word and image.

The female being becomes physically infertile, that is, she cannot produce offspring as she did before. The male, passive spirit is the one who is spiritually barren, but the man is the one who can fertilise physically. He now allows himself to be spiritually fertilised by all that is in the world. He is now spiritually fertilised in order to be able to fertilise himself physically. The whole world first penetrates him. He is spiritually fertilised, the woman physically. The woman, on the other hand, is spiritually self-fertilising; the man is spiritually fertilised. By collecting and combining everything outside, male wisdom was fertilised. Thus man's wisdom came into being, which was anxious to collect worldly wisdom. This was really not there at first, like the wisdom that used to flow in from above. It first had to be gathered from the knowledge of the physical world. Female wisdom, on the other hand, was in fact transferred to the priesthood. Priestly wisdom became the good which originally came from the old feminine wisdom. Jehovah could only preserve the human race by dividing it into the two sexes. Two oppositions arose: Freemasonry and priestly rule, symbolised by Cain and Abel.“ (Lit.:GA 93, p. 233f)

Literature
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.
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