The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

0 the gospel of hellas
the lost purity of the soul and the forfeited insight into the realm of the spirit.
Orpheus, who participated in the voyage of the Argonauts, was the first bringer
of light into the age of iron and darkness. He struck the spark from which the
torch of philosophy later took its light.
“The fleece is something belonging to man, and infinitely precious to him
… It is something from which he was separated in times of yore, and for the
recovery of which he has to overcome terrible opposition. It is thus with the
eternal in the human soul. It belongs to man, but man is separated from it by
his lower nature. Only by overcoming the latter and lulling it to sleep, can he
recover the eternal. This becomes possible when his own consciousness (Medea)
comes to his aid with its magic power. Medea is to Jason what Diotima was to
Socrates, a teacher of love. Man’s own wisdom has the magic power necessary
for attaining the divine after having overcome the transitory.” 149 Jason, who
brought back the golden fleece, is, indeed, the healer of the soul, a son of Apollo,
like Asclepius to whom the dying Socrates wisely sacrificed a cock.
The age of darkness caused Hesiod’s outcry: “O that I lived not in afterdays
... for now, indeed, is the race of Iron,” and Achilles’ lament to Odysseus: “Seek
not to console me for death; I would rather be a hired servant than the king
over all the dead.” 150 It lived within the odes of Pindar, the songs of Sappho,
the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as man’s gigantic struggle with the
question of birth and death.
Who gave the answer? “The true philosophers, and they only, are ever
seeking to release the soul. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the
body their special consideration? The true philosophers are always occupied in
the practice of dying, wherefore also to them least of all men is death terrible,”
said Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo.
Offspring of Deucalion, the Hellene was a philosopher in his inmost nature
and at the very outset of his life. There is, however, a definite era which heralded
the beginning of philosophy: the sixth century bc. During this time lived some
of the most outstanding men in world history.
At the time when the first Greek statues of Apollo appeared in marble,
and when the lyricists at the court of the tyrants began to sing in the age of
Solon, the cult which was that of Apollo in Greece appeared in Phoenicia as