The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

0 the gospel of hellas
the spiritual entity as the living idea. The human body which was formed by
the chisel became the appearance of that which is divine and immortal. The
Hellenes never used a model. They created from within, aware of the typos, the
etheric or vital body.
The unfolding of sculpture, so supremely successful among the Greeks, did
not occur suddenly. It came about slowly as the result of the transformation
of the consciousness of mystical insight into that of the awakening intellect.
The ancient seers, mystics and augurs could still “touch” the gods; they came in
contact with the formative forces of divinities and saw within the vital forces
the divine, immortal element. Through such mysteries as those at Samothrace,
the Greek mystics gradually gained an insight into the spiritual forces of
physiology.
The formative forces within our vital-body are “the sculptor” within
ourselves. This sculptor bears the divine type and reveals the immortal idea. The
sculptors of Hellas who still preserved a feeling for and a knowledge of these
formative forces created something which really represented the divine and
immortal, regardless of its resemblance to a god or goddess, whose being and
cult the Hellenes by degrees forgot or neglected. Even fragments of sculptured
statues which represented an unknown warrior on the metopes of Olympia
or a victorious charioteer in Delphi appeared as divine as the statues of gods,
because in them were incorporated the formative forces of vitality.
The Hellene whose thinking penetrated the vital forces and came to an exact
fantasy was a sculptor by nature. There was, in fact, no more vivid expression
than the language which the chisel spoke and the marble echoed. Goethe
standing before fragments of Hellenic art (Roman copies) in Italy could only
exclaim in observation: “Supreme works of art, like the most sublime products
of Nature, are created by man in conformity with true and natural Law. All that
is arbitrary, all that is invented, collapses: Here is Necessity, here is God.” 131
The statues of Apollo which were found in Delphi, Boeotia, Aktion and
Tenea near Corinth are the oldest examples of Greek sculpture. Evidently the
sculptors came from the island of Crete and brought with them the tradition
of Egypt. Scholars refer to these ancient statues as the “Egyptian type of
Apollo” and hint at the mysteries of Egypt which underlay them. 132 The most