The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

0 the gospel of hellas
like them. He concluded that “all should joyfully obey such an excellent man
as the natural ruler and if he really proves eminent he should remain a king in
his state for life.” 190
Are these lines not directed to Alexander and do they not philosophically
justify what actually happened? The ideas which Aristotle sowed as seeds in
the hearts of a few pupils gathered around him with Alexander, became life,
light and impulse for the foundation of a whole period of culture. While his
own nephew, Callisthenes, accompanied Alexander as court historian, the king
supplied his teacher with all kinds of specimens of plants and animals and
supported the Lyceum at Athens with money totalling over four million dollars
in our valuation. The king amidst his victories, conquests and colonizations
never forgot that the spiritual ruler of the knowledge of man sat peacefully at
Athens as the teacher of the world.
The last fruit of these years of travel and tutoring was Aristotle’s
foundation of his system of logic. Here he concluded triumphantly the method
of transforming former mystery wisdom into the language of our intellect.
One must not overlook, however, how great an insight into the essence of
ancient mysteries was still revealed by him. In fact, mystery wisdom formed
the very background of his whole world. Even in his early book, the Manifesto
on Philosophy, Aristotle showed a profound knowledge of the ancient mysteries;
he wrote a survey summarizing all ancient wisdom including that of India,
Persia, the teachings of the Magi, Zarathustra, Egypt, Orpheus, Pythagoras,
Delphi and the seven sages, and prepared a short history of Greek philosophy
from Thales and Heraclitus down to the Sophists. He determined the date
of the life of Zarathustra (6000 years before Plato), compared Ormuzd and
Ahriman with the Greek Zeus and Hades and revived the thoughts which
Plato gave him about the stars, planets, spheres, ether and demons. And it was
under the shadow of the mysteries of the Cabiri of Samothrace that Aristotle
wrote about the meaning of initiation: “Those who are being initiated are not
required to grasp anything with the understanding (mathein), but to have a
certain experience (pathein) and so to be put into a particular frame of mind,
presuming that they are capable of this frame of mind in the first place.” 191
This was the fundamental mood in which Aristotle produced his logic.