The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Christ in His Connection with Humanity and the Riddle of Death

[ 1 ] In the last consideration I tried to describe how the soul-spiritual existence in the field of human development passes over into the sensual-physical. It depends on the understanding that man brings to this transition whether he can gain a relationship to the event of Golgotha and its relationship to man's development on earth that corresponds to his present consciousness.

[ 2 ] If one does not recognize in one's own physical-sensual being how a spiritual-soul has changed from a spiritual form of experience in such a way that it has become a manifestation in the physical-sensual world, then it must also remain closed to one how the Christ spirit has appeared from spiritual worlds in the Jesus-man within the physical world.

[ 3 ] However, it must always be emphasized that it is not the seeing cognition itself that comes into consideration for each individual, but rather the comfortable understanding of that which is investigated through seeing. The seeing cognition is achieved by individuals. Reasoned understanding is possible for everyone.

[ 4 ] Whoever recognizes the worlds which the human soul lives through in the pre-earthly existence, also learns to look up to the One who, before the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, only lived in this existence, as Christ, and who, through this Mystery and since its event, has united his life with earthly humanity. The souls of earth humanity have only gradually developed into the state in which they live today. The ordinary consciousness takes the constitution of the soul as it is today and constructs a "history" in which the matter is presented as if the people of ancient times had thought, willed and felt almost exactly as they do today. But that is not the case. There have been times in humanity's existence on earth when this state of mind was quite different from the present. At that time there was not such a sharp contrast between sleeping and waking. Today only dreaming forms a transition between the two. But there is something deceptive and questionable about its content. Prehistoric man experienced an intermediate state between full wakefulness and unconscious sleep, which was pictorial and removed from the senses, but through which a real spiritual being revealed itself, just as a real physical being revealed itself through sensory perception.

[ 5 ] In this experience through images, not through thoughts, prehistoric man had a dreamlike experience of his pre-earthly existence. He experienced himself as a pre-earthly soul being as if in an echo of what he had gone through at that time. But he did not have the full, clear experience of the self that man has today. He did not feel himself as an "I" to the same degree as he does today. This "I" experience only occurred in the course of human spiritual development.

[ 6 ] The decisive developmental epoch for the development of the ego experience of humanity is the one in which the event of Golgotha took place.

[ 7 ] During this time, the spiritual experience of an echo of the pre-earthly existence became increasingly dull for the ordinary consciousness. Man's knowledge of himself became more and more limited to that which revealed itself to him as physical-sensory earthly existence.

[ 8 ] From this point on, the perception of death also took on a new meaning. Previously, man knew of his own essence in the manner indicated. He knew it through seeing the aforementioned echo in such a way that it was clear to him that it was not affected by death. In the far historical period in which the view was limited to the physical human being, death presented itself as a tormenting riddle to the soul.

[ 9 ] This riddle was not solved for man by the further development of merely inner powers of cognition. It was solved for him by the event of Golgotha entering into earthly development.

[ 10 ] The Christ descended to the ground of earthly existence from those worlds in which man lives out his pre-earthly existence. In the union of the experiences of the waking ordinary consciousness with the Being and in looking up to Christ's deeds, man can find since the event of Golgotha what he previously found through a natural constitution of his consciousness.

[ 11 ] The initiates of the ancient mysteries spoke to their confessors in such a way that they saw in the perceptions of the pre-earthly existence a gift of grace of the spiritual solar being, which has its reflection in the physical sun.

[ 12 ] The initiates, who at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were still living in a continuation of the old methods of initiation, spoke to those who wanted to hear about how the Being who had previously given people from the spiritual worlds the echo of the pre-earthly existence into the earthly world, descended as the Christ into the physical earthly world and took on the body of the man Jesus.

[ 13 ] In the first times of Christian development, those who knew what was right about the Mystery of Golgotha from the initiation spoke of the Christ being as one who descended from the spiritual worlds into the earthly world. It was the Christ of the supernatural world and his path to the people of earth that was of primary importance to the teachers of humanity at that time.

[ 14 ] The prerequisite for such a view was that one still knew so much about the supersensible worlds from the old initiation in order to see in Christ a being of the spiritual world before his descent to earth.

[ 15 ] The remnants of such knowledge lasted until about the fourth century AD. Then they dimmed in human consciousness. The event of Golgotha thus became an event known only through the propagation of external history. The initiatory principles of the old world were lost to the outside world and were only propagated in places of which people hardly knew anything. Only now, since the last third of the nineteenth century, has a stage been reached again within the development of mankind in which the new initiation, which has been described in the preceding descriptions, leads to a view of the nature of Christ within the spiritual world.

[ 16 ] For the full unfolding of the I-consciousness, which was to emerge within the development of mankind, it was necessary that the initiated cognition receded for a few centuries and that man first saw himself referred to the sensual and external-historical world, in which he could freely unfold the I-consciousness.

[ 17 ] So it only became possible for the Christian community to refer believers to the historical tradition about the Mystery of Golgotha and to clothe what was once known about it through spiritual knowledge in dogmas for faith. It is not the content of these dogmas that is at issue here, but the way in which it is experienced in the soul, whether through faith or through knowledge.

[ 18 ] Today it is again possible to attain a direct knowledge of the Christ. But for centuries the figure of Jesus stood before ordinary consciousness; and the Christ who lived in him had become an object of faith. More and more, however, the spiritually leading part of humanity lost its inclination towards the dogmas of faith; Jesus was seen more and more only as he presented himself to the ordinary consciousness from history. One gradually lost the experience of Christ. And so even a modern branch of theology emerged, which actually only deals with the man Jesus and lacks a living relationship with Christ. But a mere belief in Jesus is actually no longer Christianity.

[ 19 ] In the awareness of his pre-earthly existence, man of prehistoric times also had a basis for a proper relationship to his existence after his death on earth. That which in this way had given him a natural self-awareness for the riddle of death in prehistoric times was to be given to him in a different way in later times through his connection with Christ. According to St. Paul's words: "Not I, but the Christ in me", the Christ was to permeate him in such a way that he could thereby become his guide through the gate of death. In ordinary consciousness man now had something that could bring the full ego experience to fruition, but not something that could give the soul the strength to come to recognize its living passage through the gate of death. For ordinary consciousness is a result of the physical body. It can therefore also only give the soul a power that it must regard as extinguishing with death.

[ 20 ] To those who could still recognize all this from the old initiation, the human physical organism appeared sick. For they had to assume that it could not develop the power to give the soul such a comprehensive consciousness that it could experience its full existence. Christ appeared as the world's physician of the soul, as the healer, the Savior. And as such, he must be recognized in his profound connection with humanity.

[ 21 ] The event of death in connection with Christ is to form the subject of the next considerations.

[ 22 ] By taking up the experience of Christ, what the old consciousness, deepened by the statements of the Initiates, had given to man as an experience of eternity, becomes a philosophy that can reckon with the divine Father principle in the existence of the world. The Father in the spirit can again be seen as the all-pervading Being. Through the realization of the Christ, who, a being of the extraterrestrial world, took on an earthly body in the human being Jesus, cosmology attains its Christian character. In the events of human development, the Christ is recognized as the being who has played a decisive role in this development. - And through the rekindling of the dimmed knowledge of the "eternal man", the human mind is directed from the mere sensory world, which develops the ego consciousness, to the spirit, which together with the Father God and the Christ can be comprehensively experienced by the soul in a renewed cognitive basis of religion.