The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
for him to take charge of his royal pupil, Aristotle was working independently
with his own disciples at Assos and at Mytilene. We can hardly assume that
at the age of forty years he would be inclined, without some deeper reason, to
give up such important work in order to teach a thirteen-year-old prince about
whose future significance no one at that time could have the slightest inkling.
We know that in the most ancient days priests and hierophants lived
as advisers and counsellors of kings. The Baghavad Gita gives such a picture
in singing about the king, Ardjuna, and his charioteer, Krishna; and in the
Babylonian epic of Gilgamesch, the king of Erek speaks of his friendship with
Eabani (or Enkidu), his teacher. Such a relation of teacher to king, as told in
myths and legends, now seemed to have become history.
Aristotle spent his years with Alexander partly at the court at Pellas, partly
in the solitude of the temple of the nymphs near Mieza, and we must assume
that not only Callisthenes but many of his closer students followed the master
and shared his teaching with the prince. Concerning Aristotle’s teaching to
Alexander, Plutarch remarked in speaking of the influence of the mysteries
of Samothrace: “It would appear that Alexander received from him not only
his doctrines of morals and of politics, but also something of those profound
theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed
to reserve for oral communication to the initiated and did not allow many to
become acquainted with.”
Aristotle’s teaching contained, therefore, two kinds of instruction. Through
his lectures on ethics and politics, history and logic, he laid the foundation
for the education of a prince which could enable him to become a statesman
from an external point of view. Through his esoteric lectures he introduced the
pupil into a deeper understanding of nature which was derived from the last
glimpses of mystery-wisdom as it was still taught in Plato’s Academy.
The first drafts and editions of Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and
Politics originated from this exoteric teaching with the foundation of his logic
and the doctrine of the categories and of the syllogism as it appeared in his
Analytics. In the categories of his Analytics, as Steiner explains, Aristotle tried to
work out a kind of intellectual “alphabet” for that which previously was a “worldscript”
of the cosmos in the eyes of the initiated priests of the mysteries. 186 His