The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
years. Steiner emphasized this observation as evidence that the Hellenic artist
himself felt consciously connected with the formative-vital forces of the body
as they work during the first half of human life.
The Greeks experienced the inner maturity of the soul and the outer
growth of the body as developing together harmoniously until the middle
thirties. After that age the Greek did not feel the formative forces of his own
body in connection with his soul and consciousness. Therefore, we rarely find
representations of men or women of greater age. Even the classical image of
Zeus in Olympia, as Phidias chiseled him, was the figure of a man of about
thirty, and the Zeus of Otricoli does not look like the father of all gods and
men; he does not appear aged. How are we to understand this? Was it that the
Hellenes could not imagine the gods in Olympus as old, particularly Zeus, the
father of so many gods and goddesses?
We must realize that the Greek sculptor was not a portraitist. He did not
venture to picture the gods as actual human beings. He represented their life
or etheric bodies, their forms, their typos, their being as living idea. Steiner
pointed out that insight into the vital body reveals it as the true opposite of
the physical body as far as growth and age are concerned. The representations
of the youthful gods and goddesses of Hellas reveal their etheric, not their
physical bodies, their immortal, not their corporeal existence.
The archaic statues of Apollo—the Greek Buddha—marked the first
chapter of sculpture. In the Amazon (Rome, Vatican), in the enthroned goddess
(Berlin, Altes Museum) and, finally, in the caryatids from the Erectheum on
the Acropolis, a new chapter was introduced with an element resembling
breathing. It is a breathing, as it were, with the limbs, especially with the arms.
The caryatid supporting the architrave of the temple on her head seems to
reinforce this support with the breath of her breast and larynx.
And now, from this point, we step into the art of the fifth century bc, the
era of the climax of Greek sculpture. From smiling to breathing, from breathing
to the motion of the limbs—we stand before the Discobol of Myron.
Although Myron is one of the earliest names which have come down to us
in the history of Greek sculpture, he and his younger contemporary, Phidias,
were creatively active at the peak of the evolution of this art. The road from