The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Spiritual Science, the Gospel and the Future of Humanity

[ 1 ] This fall, Nuremberg will celebrate a significant centenary. For it was in the fall of 1808 that this city welcomed within its walls one of the greatest of German minds, one of those German minds that are not exactly talked about much today, whose works are even less understood, but who will mean a great deal for the future of human intellectual life when he is finally understood. He is difficult to understand, though, and so it may take some time before people will understand him again. In the fall of 1808, Hegel became director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.

[ 2 ] Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps place at the head of our considerations today as a verdict. Hegel said: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ: with the historical and the external, and that is precisely the greatness of the Christian religion, that for all its depth it can easily be grasped by the consciousness in an external way and at the same time invites deeper penetration. It is thus suitable for every level of education and at the same time satisfies the highest demands. These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.

[ 3 ] That the Christian religion, that the preaching of the gospel is comprehensible for every level of consciousness, has been taught by an era that can almost be counted in millennia. To show that it calls for the deepest thoughts, for the deepest penetration into the wisdom teachings of humanity in general, will be one of the tasks of the anthroposophical spiritual movement, of spiritual science, when it is grasped in its true sense, in its innermost impulses, and made the master of human life. It would be to misunderstand today's meditation to believe that Anthroposophy or spiritual science is in any way a new religion, that it seeks to replace an old religion with some new creed. One would even like to say, just to avoid any misunderstanding: Once spiritual science is properly understood, it will be clear that, although it is the firmest, most secure support of religious life, it is not itself a religion, and will therefore never contradict any religion as such. But it is another matter that it can be the instrument, the tool, to explain the deepest wisdom and truths and the most serious and life-filled secrets of religions and to bring them to understanding.

[ 4 ] It may seem a little far-fetched when, in order to describe the relationship between anthroposophy and the scriptures of this or that religion — and today we will be dealing with the religious scriptures of Christianity — to make the comparison that Anthroposophy relates to religious texts in the same way that mathematical theory relates to the texts that have appeared in the course of the historical development of humanity as mathematical textbooks or books in general. There we have an ancient book that is actually only studied by the historian who is well-versed in mathematics: Euclid's Geometry. It contains in a scholasticized manner for the first time that which children today learn in school from mathematics and geometry. But how few of these children become aware that everything they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, and so on, is in that old book, that it was given to mankind for the first time in it! It is right to awaken in the child the awareness that one can understand these things by oneself, that when the human mind sets its powers in motion and applies them to the forms of space, it is able to understand these forms quite independently of that old book. But someone who may have known nothing of this book and has absorbed the mathematical and geometrical teachings, will, when he gets to know it, appreciate and understand it in the right sense. He will appreciate what was given to humanity by the one who first presented this book to their minds.

[ 5 ] This is how one would characterize the relationship between spiritual science and religious documents. The sources of spiritual science are such that spiritual science should not depend on any documents or traditions if it is understood according to its true impulse. Just as the other knowledge of mankind provides us with knowledge of the surrounding sensory world by man's free use of his powers, so the deeper spiritual, supersensible powers and abilities, which initially lie dormant in the human soul, provide us with knowledge of what, as supersensible, as invisible, underlies all that is visible. Just as man, when he uses his sense organs, is able to perceive what presents itself to the outer sense appearance, and is able to connect and link what he has perceived with his intellect, so too, when man uses the methods handed down to him through spiritual science, he is able to look behind the scenes of sensual existence, to where the spiritual causes lie, where the beings weave and work that the sensual eye does not see and the sensual ear does not hear, but the supersensible one does. Thus lies in the free use of human powers, even if they still slumber as supersensible powers in a large part of humanity today, the source, the independent free source of spiritual knowledge, as in the free use of the powers directed towards the sense world lies the source of external knowledge. But then, when in some way man has placed himself in possession of the knowledge that introduces him to the supersensible behind the sensual, to the invisible behind the visible, when he acquires from it knowledge just as solid as the sensual knowledge of external objects and events is, then, equipped with this supersensible knowledge, he may just as easily approach tradition, to the books and documents, to the records through which, in the course of evolution, knowledge has come to man about the supersensible realm, just as the geometer approaches Euclid's geometry. And then he examines them from a similar point of view as the present-day geometer examines Euclid's geometry. Then he can appreciate and recognize these documents for their true value. And for anyone who takes this path, who truly approaches the records of the Christian proclamation equipped with knowledge of the supersensible world, these records truly do not lose any of their value. On the contrary, they appear in a higher splendor than they did to the merely believing mind. They show that they contain deeper wisdom than man had previously suspected before the anthroposophical realization.

[ 6 ] But there is still another question we need to be clear about in order to gain the right perspective on the relationship between anthroposophy and religious texts. Let us ask ourselves: Who is the better observer of Euclid's geometry, the one who can literally translate the words of the book and, without first penetrating the spirit of the geometry, wants to reveal the content of the book, or the one who first understands geometry and therefore also knows how to find the geometry in that book? Let us imagine a mere philologist faced with Euclid's geometry book, someone who understands nothing of geometry: how much incorrect information would be revealed if he tried to reveal the meaning of the book! And so it has been done by many with the religious documents, even by those who should be called upon to fathom the true meaning of them. They have approached these documents without first knowing, independently of them, something of what can be fathomed about the supersensible. Thus we have today very careful explanations of the religious documents, explanations that gather together everything from contemporary history about how these documents came into being, for example. But the explanations are just as inadequate as the explanations of geometry by Euclid by a non-geometer.

[ 7 ] We want to make it clear that knowledge of religion is something that can only be gained by looking at it with the help of knowledge gained through spiritual science, although anthroposophy can only be a tool of religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized by the content of the human heart, the human soul, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man sends up the best of what he has of receptivity in his soul to the supersensible beings and forces. The character of a person's religion depends on the intensity of the feelings of this emotional content, just as the warm beating of our heart depends on the feeling for beauty when we encounter a painting. The content of religious life is certainly what we call the spiritual, the supersensible world. But just as aesthetic-artistic feeling is not the same as what we call spiritual comprehension of the inner artistic laws – although spiritual comprehension of them will increase our understanding of art – so too is that wisdom, that science, which introduces us to the spiritual worlds, not the same as religion itself. This science will make religious feeling, religious sentiment, more earnest, more dignified, greater, more comprehensive, but it does not want to be religion itself, if it is understood in the right sense, although it may lead to religion.

[ 8 ] If we now want to understand the power and meaning, the sense and spirit of the Christian proclamation of religion from this spiritual-scientific point of view, then we have to reach far back into spiritual life. We must cast our eyes into the distant past; in other words, we must go back to the pre-religious times of humanity and try to envision the emergence of religion. Was there a pre-religious time for humanity? Yes, there was once a time on Earth when there was no religion. Spiritual science must also answer such a question in the affirmative, although in a completely different sense than materialistic cultural wisdom does. What does religion mean for humanity? Religion was and will be for a long time for humanity what its word already expresses. The word religion means: the connection of man with his divine, with the spiritual world. And essentially, religious times are those in which man longed for union with the divine, whether from the sources of knowledge or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if divine power flowed through it. Such times, when man sensed more inwardly, as it were, than that he knew something outwardly, when he sensed the supersensible world more than that he beheld it, that he had it around him, those are the religious times of our earth. And before these times there were other times when man did not need such a sensing, longing connection with the spiritual-supernatural world, because he did not need it because he knew about this supernatural world, about this spiritual world, as man of the present knows about sensual things. Does man need to be convinced that there are stones, trees, animals? Does he need some kind of written record, some teaching about them that testifies to them or gives him a presentiment that stones, plants, and animals exist? No, because he sees them, he beholds them around him, and so he has no need of such a religion of the senses. Let us imagine a person who lived in a completely different world, equipped with completely different sensory and cognitive organs, who would not see stones, plants, and animals because they would be invisible to him. Let us imagine such a person who, through writings or otherwise, was given knowledge of stones, plants, and animals: What would be for you intuition, experience, direct knowledge, what would it be for him? — It would be religion for this man. If it were written somewhere in a book that there are stones, plants, and animals, that would be religion for this man, for he has never seen it.

[ 9 ] There was a time when man lived among the spiritual beings and facts that religions and wisdom teachings tell us about today.

[ 10 ] The word development has become a magic word in many areas of world view today, but it is only applied by external science to external, sensual facts. For those who view the world spiritually, everything is in development, above all human consciousness. The state of human consciousness in which you live today, through which you, when you wake up in the morning, see and comprehend the world of the senses by means of your sense organs, this state of consciousness has developed out of another. In spiritual science we call this state of consciousness the so-called bright day consciousness. But this clear day-consciousness has developed out of an ancient, different consciousness, which we call the dim image-consciousness of humanity. Here we are returning to the early stages of human development, of which an external anthropology reports nothing, for the reason that it makes use only of the senses and the methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through conditions in the distant past that are actually the same as those our animal creatures go through today.

[ 11 ] Earlier lectures have already pointed out how we have to think about the relationship between humans and animals from a spiritual science point of view. Man has never been a creature like today's animals. He does not descend from beings that were like today's animals. The forms of development from which man has emerged would, if we wanted to describe them, prove to be very unlike today's animals. Today's animals are, so to speak, entities that have remained at earlier stages of development, that have conserved these earlier stages of development and brought them to a state of hardening. Man has outgrown his earlier stages of development, the animals have grown below them. Thus we see in the animal world something like humanity's retarded brothers, who no longer have the form of these earlier stages of development. The earlier stages of development took place at a time when the earth had different living conditions, when the elements were not yet distributed as they are today, when man was not afflicted with a body like the one he has today and yet was still man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the process of development with his descent into the flesh, was able to wait until the time when this carnal materiality could become such that he could develop the power of today's spirit. Animals could not wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was appropriate. That is why they had to fall behind. We can imagine that man lived under different conditions and in different forms of consciousness than today. If we trace these forms of consciousness back thousands and thousands of years, we will always find different ones. What we today call logical thinking, intellect and mind, only developed later in humanity. The powers of people were much stronger, and these are already on the decline today, for example, memory. This was much more developed in earlier times than it is today. With the increasing intellectual culture of humanity, memory has been pushed into the background.

[ 12 ] Anyone who looks at the world with reasonably discerning practical eyes can still recognize today that what is being said from spiritual science does not just come out of the blue. One could say: If this is true, then today's people, who by some chance are retarded, should show that they are least retarded in memory. They should also show that when one tries to teach intellectuality to people who have been artificially held back, memory suffers as a result. Here in this city one could observe a characteristic case of this kind.

[ 13 ] Professor Daumer, whose work cannot be valued highly enough, observed this case well in the case of a person who was so mysterious to many, who was once mysteriously transferred to this city and who died just as mysteriously in Ansbach; the same person of whom a writer says, to hint at the mysteriousness of his life, that when he was carried out, it was a day when on one side of the sky the sun was setting and on the opposite side the moon was rising. You know that I am talking about Kaspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been raised in relation to this case, if you only look at what is proven under all circumstances, you will know that this foundling, who was simply there on the street, who was called the child of Europe because no one knew where he came from, that he could not read or do arithmetic when he was found. At the age of twenty, he had acquired none of the knowledge that comes from the intellect, but, strangely enough, he had a wonderful memory. When they began to teach him, when logic entered his soul, the memory vanished. This transition in consciousness was also connected with something else. There was an incomprehensible, almost innate truthfulness in him originally, and it was precisely this truthfulness that he increasingly doubted. The more he was allowed to nibble at intellectuality, the more it faded away.

[ 14 ] We could study many things if we delved into this soul that had been artificially restrained. And not so unfounded for those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, the folk tradition, which the learned people of today do not believe and which reports that Kaspar Hauser, when he knew nothing, had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different shapes, that he exerted a strange effect when he was brought together with very angry animals. The wild animals would cower and become very gentle. There was something that radiated from him that made such an animal, which would attack any other angrily, become gentle. As I said, we can, because such a case presents itself that can be understood from spiritual science, penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, which is so enigmatic for many, and a case would present itself from which you could see that everything that cannot be explained from ordinary life is traced back by spiritual science to spiritual facts. Of course, such spiritual facts cannot be gained by speculation, but only by spiritual observation, but they are comprehensible to the all-embracing and logical thinking.

[ 15 ] All this should only be said to show you how you can find the way to the thought that that the present state of consciousness has developed out of an ancient and different state of consciousness, in which man was not in direct contact with sense objects in the modern sense, but was related to spiritual facts and beings. Then man did not see the physical form of another person, which, after all, did not even yet exist in its present form at that time. When another being approached him, something like a vision arose in his soul. Depending on how it was shaped and colored, it indicated to him whether the being was sympathetic or antipathetic to him. Such a consciousness perceived the spiritual facts and thereby the spiritual world in general. Just as man is today with carnal beings, so he lived in those days, when he turned his gaze to himself and was soul and spirit, among spiritual beings. They were present for him. He was a spirit among spirits. Even if he had only a kind of dream consciousness, the images that arose in him were still in a living relationship to his surroundings. That was the ancient time in which man still lived in a spiritual world, from which he later descended to create a sensual carnality for the consciousness that suits him today. The animals were already there as physical entities when man still perceived in spiritual regions. Man in those days lived among spiritual beings, and just as you require no proof to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primitive times needed no testimony of any kind to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and gods, and therefore had no need of religion. That was the pre-religious time.

[ 16 ] Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness transformed into the present one. Man no longer sees colors and forms floating in space, but the colors are laid over the surfaces of sensual things. To the same extent that man learned to direct his outer senses to the outer sense world, to the same extent this outer sense world spread like a veil, like the great Maja, over the spiritual world, and man had to receive knowledge of the spiritual world through this veil. Religion became necessary.

[ 17 ] But there is also an intermediate state between the time that precedes the religious consciousness and that of the actual religious consciousness. From this intermediate state come the mythologies, the legends, the stories of the peoples of the spiritual worlds. It is a bookishness that has no idea of the real spiritual processes, which claims that the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology, all the records of the gods and the deeds of the gods are inventions of the popular imagination. They are not fabrications of the popular imagination. The people do not imagine that when you see individual clouds passing by, they are lambs. That the people imagine such things is a fabrication of our present-day scholarship, which is full of vivid imagination in such matters. The truth is quite different. Everything contained in the old sagas of the gods and in the old stories is the last remnants, the last memories from the pre-religious consciousness. What has remained with people is knowledge of what they themselves have seen. These people who describe Wotan, Thor, Zeus and so on did so because there was a memory in them that they had once experienced such things. Mythologies are the fragments, the partly torn-off pieces of what they had once experienced.

[ 18 ] The intermediate state was also present in another respect. Even in the time when people were, let us say, already very clever, there were still those who, at least in states of emergency, could see into the spiritual worlds. Call it rapture or madness, as you like. They could still perceive what most people used to see. They told of how they themselves had glimpsed something of the spiritual world. This combined with their memories in such a way that a living faith lived in the nations. That was a transitional state to the actual religious state.

[ 19 ] And how was the actual religious state initiated in humanity? Man found the means and ways to develop his inner being in such a way that he could again see and behold the worlds from which he had grown out and which he had once seen in a dim consciousness. Here we come to a chapter that contains little that is likely to appeal to many a modern man: the chapter of the initiates. What are the initiates of humanity? Initiates were those people who developed their own soul and spiritual inner being through certain methods to such an extent that they grew into the spiritual world again. Initiation exists! There are supersensible powers and abilities slumbering in every soul. There is, or at least can be, such a great, powerful moment for every human being when these powers awaken. We can bring this moment before our soul if we imagine what the development of the human being was like in the past. To use Goethe's words, we can say: We look back into times of the distant past when there was not yet a physical eye in today's physical human body, nor a physical ear like today's. We look back to those times when, in the places where these organs are now, there were indifferent organs that could not see and hear. There was a time for the physical human being when such blind organs developed into points of light, when they gradually unfolded more and more until the light emerged for them. Likewise, there was a point in time when the human ear had developed to the extent that the previously mute world revealed itself in sounds and harmonies. Just as the sun, with its forces, worked to develop his eyes out of his organism, so today man can live in such a way that the spiritual and soul organs, which are often indifferent to him today, develop in a similar way. The moment is possible, and for many has already arrived, when their soul and spirit are transformed in the same way as the outer physical organization was once transformed. New eyes and new ears arise, through which the light shines and the sounds resound from the spiritually dark and silent surroundings. Evolution is possible, even to live in the higher worlds. That is initiation. And in the mystery schools, the methods of this initiation are given to people in the same way as in the outer world the methods of, let us say, the chemical laboratory or biological research. The only difference between the methods of outer science and initiation is that outer science has to prepare instruments and external apparatus. But for him who wants to become an initiate, there is only one instrument that he must develop, and that is himself in all his powers. Just as magnetic power can slumber in iron, so slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. Thus the time came when only the physical and sensual was seen in the normal and when the leaders of mankind consisted of such initiates who could see into the spiritual worlds, who could give messages and explanations about the facts of the spiritual world in which man had lived earlier.

[ 20 ] The first step of initiation, where does it lead? How does it present itself to the human soul? Do not believe that this development consists only in philosophical speculation, in the spinning out of concepts, in the refining of concepts. The concepts man has about the external sense world are transformed in the human being who grows into the spiritual world. It happens in such a way that man now no longer comprehends through sharply contoured concepts, but through images, through imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual, world-creative process. Only these sensual objects are as definite and clearly outlined as the objects of the sensory world. In the world-creative process, you do not have the animal with fixed outlines. There you have something like an image as a basis, from which the various external forms can arise, a living, structured reality. We must stand firmly on the ground of Goethe's words: “Everything that is transitory is only a parable.” In images, the initiate first learns to recognize and comprehend, learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must become more mobile than that which serves us to comprehend the sensory world around us. That is why this stage of development is called the imaginative consciousness. It leads man back into the spiritual world, but not in a dim way. This consecration to be attained is clear and bright, as man has it in the clear consciousness of day, as this day consciousness itself is. Man is enriched by the fact that he gains the consciousness of the spiritual world in addition to the consciousness of day. This is how he lives in the imaginative consciousness in the first initiation. And what those who were initiated in this way experienced in the spiritual worlds has been communicated in the records, in the documents of humanity, just as the lowly science of geometry was communicated to humanity through Euclid. We know what is in these records, we recognize it when we go back to the source, to the vision of the initiated.

[ 21 ] Thus it was within humanity until the appearance of the greatest Being who walked the globe, the Christ Jesus. With His appearance, a new element enters into evolution. If we wish to realize what the essential novelty is that was given to humanity through Christ Jesus, we must bear in mind that in all pre-Christian places of initiation, man was initiated in such a way that it was necessary to withdraw completely from the rest of human development, to work on one's soul in places of the deepest mystery. And above all, we must realize that there was still something in the human being's consciousness of a remnant when he raised himself up into the spiritual world, that old, merely dream-like image consciousness. Man had to hasten out of this world of the senses in order to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary today was brought about by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ principle has entered into humanity, the central being, the center being of the spiritual world has historically existed once in a human being on this earth, the same being for whom all those have longed who who have developed a religious life, who have seen in the places of initiation, who have moved away from the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man faces Him as his Highest, that Being entered into human history with Christ Jesus. And anyone who has any understanding of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the appearance of Christ Jesus is a pre-proclamation of Christ Jesus.

[ 22 ] When the old initiates wanted to speak of the Highest, which was accessible to them in the spiritual world, which they could see as the source of all things, they spoke of Christ Jesus in the most diverse names. We only need to remember one example, the Old Testament, which is also a prediction. We recall how Moses, when he was to lead his people, received the order: Tell your people that what you are to do, the Lord, the God, has told you. — Then Moses says: How will the people believe me, how will I be able to convince them? What must I say when they ask me, 'Who sent you?' And he is instructed: 'Say, “I Am” has sent you.' Read it and compare it as closely as you can with the original text. You will see what it is about. What does “I am” mean? The “I am” is the name for the divine essence, the Christ principle in man, for the essence that man can feel within himself, drop by drop, spark by spark, until he is able to say “I am”. The stone cannot say “I am”; the plant cannot say “I am”; the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation in that he can say “I am” to himself, that he can speak a name that is valid for no one other than for the one who utters it. You can only call yourself “I.” No one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks to itself, in that word to which only a being has access that comes to the soul through no external sense, on no external path. Here the God speaks. Therefore the name “I am” was given to the Godhead, which fills the world. Say, the “I am” has told you! - so Moses should tell his people.

[ 23 ] Only slowly do people learn to fully understand the deep meaning of this “I am”. Not immediately did people feel like individuals. You can still find it in the Old Testament: people did not yet feel like individuals. Even the members of the German tribes, even in the times of the Christian church, did not feel as individuals. Think back to the Cherusci, Teutons and so on, to the German tribes in whose country today's Germany is. The individual Cherusci felt more the tribal ego, in relation to which he appeared as a member. The individual would not have said “I am” in the sharp way we do today. He felt himself to be part of the unified organism of those who were related by blood.

[ 24 ] For those who profess the Old Testament, this blood relationship has the broadest scope. The individual feels secure in the whole nation. For him, the nation is ruled by one I. He knows what it means: “I and Father Abraham are one,” because he follows the blood relationship through the generations up to Abraham. He knows he is safe when he wants to go beyond his individual self into Father Abraham, from whom all the blood, which is the external carrier for the common national self, flows down into the generations.

[ 25 ] Now, if we compare what the Christ Jesus presented with the saying, which means a great deal to every adherent of the Old Testament, we have, as if illuminated by lightning, the whole progress that has been brought about by Christian development. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I am’? What does that mean: Before Abraham was the “I am”? — That is the correct translation and interpretation of the relevant Bible passage. It means: Go back through all generations, you will find something in yourself, in your individual individuality, that is even more eternal than that which flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, there was the “I am,” that being that draws into every human being, of which every human soul can feel something directly in itself. Not I and Father Abraham, not I and a temporal father, but I and the spiritual Father, who is bound to nothing transitory, we are one. “I and the Father are one.” The Father is found in the individual human being. The divine principle lives in him, something that was there, that is there, that will be there.

[ 26 ] In the future, after almost two millennia of feeling the power of this world impulse, people will fully recognize what this leap within the mission and evolution of the earth means for man. What could only be grasped by ignoring the individual existence, the individual human being, by capturing the spirit of an entire tribe, that was what the ancient initiates wanted to achieve.

[ 27 ] In the ordinary world, when any man heard this, he said: The ego is something transitory that begins with birth and ends with death. But when he was initiated into the secret of the mysteries, then he saw that which the other sensed and felt as the same thing that runs through the blood of the generations, which is a real being, then he saw his tribal spirit. What can only be attained in the spiritual realm, but not in external reality, he could see. A God who runs through the blood of the generations, he could see. To stand before this God with the eye of the spirit, one could only in the mysteries.

[ 28 ] Those who were with the full understanding as his intimate disciples around the Christ Jesus were aware that a being of spiritual-divine nature was standing before them in a closed, carnal-human personality for the outer senses. They recognized Christ Jesus as the first, the first to have such a spirit within him in an individual human being, a spirit that otherwise only associated masses of people felt within themselves and that otherwise could only be seen in the spiritual world by the initiated. He was the first among human beings.

[ 29 ] The more the human being becomes an individual, the more he can become a carrier of love. Where blood chains people together, people love because they are led by blood to what they should love. If a person is granted individuality, and he cherishes and cares for the spark of God within him, then the impulses of love, the waves of love, must go from person to person out of a free heart. And so man has enriched the old bond of love, which is bound to blood, with this new impulse. Love gradually develops into spiritual love, which flows from soul to soul and will ultimately embrace all humanity in a common bond of universal brotherly love. But Christ Jesus is the power, the living power, through which, as it was in history, as it showed itself to the eyes of the outer man, humanity has been brought to fraternization for the first time. And men will learn to understand this bond of brotherly love as the perfected, spiritualized Christianity.

[ 30 ] It is easy to say today: Theosophy should seek the unified core of truth in all religions, because all religions contain exactly the same. — The people who say this, who compare religions only to seek the abstract same, understand nothing of the principle of development. It is not for nothing that the world develops. It is true that every religion contains some truth, but as it develops from form to form, it develops into higher forms. According to the truth, if you want to research deeply enough, you can find in Christianity what is contained in the teachings of other religions. Christianity has not brought new teachings. But the essence of Christianity is not in the teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions. With them, it depends on what they taught. Imagine that these founders of religions had remained unknown; what they taught would have remained. Humanity would have had enough of that. But with Christ Jesus, it does not depend on that. With him, it depends on the fact that he was there, that he lived here on this earth in a physical body. It is not belief in his teachings, but in his personality that is the deciding factor, that one has looked at the fact that he was the firstborn among those who can die, and asked: Would you too, in the situation I am in, feel as I do? Would you also think as I am thinking now, want as I am willing? — That is the important thing, that He is the greatest example as a personality, where it is not important to listen to His teachings, but to look at Him as He did. Therefore, the intimate disciples of Christ Jesus say something quite different from the disciples and followers of other religious founders. They say: The Lord taught this, the Lord taught that. But the disciples of Christ Jesus say: We do not tell you elaborate myths and doctrines, but we tell you what our own eyes have seen and our own ears have heard. We have heard the voice, our hands have touched the source of life, so that we may have fellowship with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in Judea, until the end of the world. This is a very important statement: You shall be witnesses to me until the end of the world. That means that there will always be people at any time who, just like those in Judea and Galilee, can say from direct knowledge who Christ was in the sense of the gospel.

[ 31 ] In the sense of the gospel, what does that mean? Nothing else, but that from the beginning he was the principle that lived in all creation. He says it: If you do not believe in me, at least believe in Moses, because if you believe in Moses, you believe in me, because Moses spoke of me. We have already seen today that Moses spoke of Him when He pointed out: “The ‘I am’ told me” - the “I am”, who until then was only spiritually perceptible. The fact that the Christ visibly appeared in the world as a human being among humans is what makes the difference between the Christ-gospel and the divine proclamation of other religions. For in these, all spiritual wisdom was directed towards something that was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something came into the world that was to be understood as a manifestation of the senses. What did the first disciples feel was the pinnacle of their wisdom? No longer merely to comprehend how the spirits live in the spirit realm, but how the highest principle in this historical personality of Christ Jesus could have existed on earth.

[ 32 ] It is much easier to deny the divinity of this personality than to feel this way. This is the difference between a certain doctrine of the early days of Christianity and what is called inner Christianity, the difference between Gnosticism and esoteric Christianity. Gnosticism does recognize Christ in his divinity, but it had never been able to rise to the view that the “Word” became flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the Gospel of John emphasizes. He says: Not only as something that can be comprehended only in the invisible should you see Jesus the Christ, but as the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. You should know that with this human personality a power has appeared that will continue to work into the farthest future, that will weave real, spiritual love around the world as a power, that lives and works in everything that lives into the future. And when a person surrenders to this power, he grows into the spiritual world from which he descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate can already see today. Man will cast off the sensual when he enters the spiritual world.

[ 33 ] Just as the disciple who was initiated in ancient times could look back on the old, on the past times of spiritual life, of spiritual life, so those who are initiated in the Christian sense, through participation in the impulses of Christ Jesus, receive the ability to see what will become of this world of ours when people work in the spirit of the Christ impulse. Just as one can look back at earlier conditions, so one can look into the farthest future, starting from the point of the appearance of Christ. One can say: Thus consciousness will change again, thus man will stand in relation to the spiritual and the sense world. While the earlier initiation is an initiation into the past, into ancient wisdom, the Christian initiation is to reveal the future to the person being initiated. It is necessary that man is not only initiated for his wisdom, for his mind, but that he is initiated for his will. Because through this he knows what he is to do, that he can set goals for the future. The sensual everyday man sets goals for the afternoon, for the evening, for the morning. The spiritual man is able to set himself distant goals based on spiritual principles, which pulsate through his will and quicken his powers. To set goals for humanity means to grasp it in the true highest sense, in the sense of the original Christian principle, esoterically. This is how it was understood by the one who wrote the great principle of the initiation of the will, who wrote the Apocalypse. One misunderstands the Apocalypse if one does not understand it as the initiator of the future, of action, of deed.

[ 34 ] All the things that we let pass us by today can be understood from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today I could only give sketchy outlines. If you understand from spiritual science what is behind the sensual, then you also look with understanding at what has been proclaimed in the Gospels, what has been proclaimed in the apocalyptic work. And the further you go in penetrating, in deepening into the supersensible worlds, the deeper you will find yourself in the Christian documents. The Christian documents appear to one with a higher radiance, with a deeper truth and content when one approaches them with the spiritual vision that can be attained with the help of anthroposophy. It is true: the simplest mind can sense the truths contained in Christianity. But the consciousness will not always be satisfied with a hunch; it will develop higher and want to know, to recognize. But even when it rises to the highest wisdom, there will still be profound mysteries in Christianity. It is for the simplest mind, but also for the most highly developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again in pictures. Therefore the naive consciousness may sense what truths lie dormant in it, but the human being will long for knowledge and not for belief, and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. He will be able to find full, satisfying content in Christianity when the explanations of the Gospels are given to him through spiritual science. Therefore, spiritual science will take the place of even the highest ancient philosophies. It will bear witness to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ Jesus, with the historical and external one, and every kind of consciousness - that is the great thing about Christianity - can grasp this Christianity according to its externals. At the same time, however, the most profound insights are challenged by Christianity. Christianity is appropriate for every level of education, but it can also meet the highest demands.