The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] It will now be our task to understand the spiritual horizon within which the human being of the present stands by investigating his origin. We have seen how human beings have become, so to speak, more and more similar to their present form as they developed through the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs; and today we want to continue our consideration of this last epoch, the Atlantean, up to our own time, as far as we need it to understand our subject.

[ 2 ] We know that before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, human consciousness was quite different. During the day, while humans were in their physical bodies — if we may put it that way — they did not see objects with sharp contours as we do today, but everything was more or less blurred. But when human beings left their physical bodies at night, they did not fall into a dreamless sleep; instead, they were able to perceive spiritual beings from a spiritual world. We will not go into the fact that those spiritual beings, who also sought embodiment in Atlantean bodies, entered into a certain partnership with human beings; we will only point out that human beings at that time were convinced, based on their immediate experience, that other realms were arranged above the human realm to which they themselves belonged: the realm of the angels, the archangels; and human beings came to know these higher beings — if we may use the expression — from spiritual face to spiritual face, just as human beings now come to know one another in the physical world. Then came the time when object consciousness became clearer and clearer during the day, from waking up to falling asleep, and when, in contrast, more and more dullness and darkness spread during the night. But this was the same time when the first seed of the I or “I am” was planted in human beings. By learning to perceive the objects around them, human beings simultaneously acquired the form and shape of their self-consciousness, which they were now to develop more and more.

[ 3 ] Now we must imagine everything in the world in degrees; we must think that just as there are all possible degrees of beings in the animal and human kingdoms, so too are there the most diverse degrees in the series of beings above man. There are beings in the realm of angels who are very close to humans; but then there are also those who are on a higher, more exalted level—we would encounter every conceivable degree if we were to turn our gaze to these higher worlds. Above all, we must be clear that these higher beings, at the time when human beings were still ascending into the higher worlds during the night in a dull, clairvoyant consciousness, also had something of this human gift in a certain sense — to put it very simply — in that they experienced an enrichment of their own inner life through their contact with human beings. For these beings were still intimately connected with human beings at that time; they inspired them and influenced their imaginative consciousness, which was, of course, only dim. So we must imagine human beings in those ancient times as if, when they stepped out of their physical and etheric bodies, they were taken up by such a higher being, or in a broader sense, by a host of higher beings. Basically, this is still the case today, only human beings are unaware of it, whereas in those days they knew it, albeit only dimly through clairvoyance. We have already mentioned in other lectures that even today sleep is by no means unnecessary for human beings; it has a tremendous task to fulfill. During the day, human beings are constantly wearing out their physical body and their etheric body. The life we lead from morning to evening is a wearing out of these two bodies, and what you feel as fatigue in the evening is nothing more than the expression of the fact that perceptions of the outer world have taken place within your physical and etheric bodies, via the astral body, that feelings, impulses, suffering, and pain, that all kinds of things have taken place within you. And what happens in this way wears down our physical and etheric bodies throughout the day, and we are tired in the evening because we have been working all day to destroy our physical and etheric bodies. When you lie in bed at night with your physical body and etheric body, the astral body with the I is not idle, but sends its power into the physical and etheric bodies throughout the night; it works to restore the destroyed and exhausted forces. But it could not do this if it were not taken up into another realm when it leaves the physical and etheric bodies. Above the human realm there is indeed a spiritual realm, the realm of angels, archangels, and other beings. It is like an ocean of spiritual beings that surround us and from which we are separated during the day because we are enclosed within the skin of our bodies, within our perceptions. At night, however, we dive into this ocean of spirits, and the astral body draws from it the forces that it then pours into the physical and etheric bodies in order to repair them. People today know nothing of this. But in those days, when people still had a dull, clairvoyant consciousness, they saw how the I and the astral body emerged and were taken up by the divine-spiritual world.

[ 4 ] Now it is so that things that appear in a certain way in our physical world look completely different up there. One might say that the gods also benefit from their participation in humanity. We must acquire an understanding of this that is not entirely easy, but which is necessary if we want to understand the relationship between human beings and the world. We have said that the earth is the planet of love, and love is only properly developed on earth. Roughly speaking, it is cultivated, and through their participation in human beings, the gods also learn about love, just as they give it in another relationship. This is difficult to imagine. It is quite possible that one being instills a gift into another being and only learns about this gift through the other being. Imagine an immensely rich personality who has never known anything but wealth, without the deep spiritual satisfaction that doing good can bring. And now this personality does something good; it gives something to a poor personality. In the soul of this poor personality, the gifts give rise to gratitude, and this feeling of gratitude is also a gift: it would not be there if the rich personality had not given. However, the rich personality has not felt the feeling of gratitude, but has brought it forth. It is the giver of the feeling of gratitude, but the rich personality can only become aware of this feeling of gratitude in reflection, when it shines back from those in whom it has been kindled. This is roughly how it is with the gift of love, which is instilled in human beings by the gods. The gods are so advanced that they can kindle love in human beings so that they are able to learn to experience love, but the gods only learn to know love as reality through human beings. They descend from the heights into the ocean of humanity and feel the warmth of love. Yes, we know that the gods lack something when people do not live in love, that the gods, so to speak, have their nourishment in the love of human beings. The more love there is among people on earth, the more nourishment the gods have in heaven—the less love there is, the more hungry the gods are. The sacrifice of human beings is basically nothing other than what flows up to the gods as the love generated in human beings.

[ 5 ] Now we can imagine that this mutual communication between human beings and gods in ancient times, when human beings themselves still had an awareness of the divine, was something quite different from what it was later. Yes, there were certain beings among the divine-spiritual beings who, because humans could no longer ascend with their dull clairvoyant consciousness, could no longer descend, could no longer reach the sphere of humanity. During the Atlantean period, humans lived with a number of divine-spiritual beings, and the more he became incapable of looking up to the gods, the less a certain category of divine beings could experience what they could otherwise experience from humans. Among the Atlantean gods, there were certainly those who, when Atlantis perished, became more and more deprived, who suffered more and more from hunger, so to speak, because they could no longer find their way to humans.

[ 6 ] From this point of view, we must imagine the further development. We know that near present-day Ireland there was a kingdom, a region where the most advanced beings of the Atlantean era lived, those human beings who were most mature to undergo progressive development. These now moved from the west to the east, populated Europe, and there certain people remained at a certain stage of development, while others moved on. The most advanced moved to the region of present-day Central Asia, others to Africa. There, however, there were already populations from the ancient times of Atlantis and Lemuria; the others mixed with them in various ways, and this gave rise to those mixtures that the Greeks reproduced in various art forms as the satyr, Mercury, and Zeus types. Thus, the migration was from west to east, and we must imagine that the state of consciousness of human beings also changed more and more as a result. The people who had migrated still had more or less remnants of the old clairvoyant consciousness, but this gradually diminished. There were those who had lost all traces of clairvoyant consciousness at the onset of the Atlantean catastrophe, but there were also those who had retained some remnants of it, even among those who had emigrated to Asia, Europe, and Africa. Everywhere there were those who, in certain states, for example between sleeping and waking, were able to gain precise insight into the spiritual worlds. For example, the spiritual being known as Wotan was a “personality” well known to the ancient Atlanteans; one could say that all Atlanteans were connected to him in a closer or more distant way, much as people today are connected to a monarch. But the conscious connection was increasingly lost. Now, among the European population, among the pre-Germans, there were numerous people who, in an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, were able to enter into a relationship or connection with this Wotan, who really existed in the spiritual world but was bound by his development and could no longer make himself popular in the old way. There were also such people in Asia. This continued into late times, which even history rejects, when a primitive, natural clairvoyance had been preserved and people could speak of the gods from their own experience.

[ 7 ] Now, however, we must again bear in mind the fact that human beings drew themselves down more and more onto the physical plane, into the material world; as a result, the gods were less and less able to maintain connections with human beings. Gradually, it became possible for some of them to commune only with select beings. Certain god figures were no longer able to descend to ordinary human beings and could only connect with personalities who in a certain way came to meet them, who developed themselves upward toward them. Now, in a strange way, attitudes and remnants of clairvoyance and the principle of initiation mixed together in such a way that the expression of this mixture was preserved in the Germanic consciousness. During the Atlantean period, people knew that just as they ascend into the realm of the gods when they are asleep and have left their physical and etheric bodies, so too do they ascend into the realm of the gods after death; the gods are familiar to them, and there they can meet them again. And as a kind of punishment, people came to feel that when, after death, they were temporarily deprived of the possibility of looking up to the gods and being accepted into their community, they had to go through a certain period of trial after death because they had become too entangled in material life. However, those people who were able to value material life no higher than something else that was not material were believed to be held back by the material world, but to be able to enter the realm of the spirit immediately after death, which was well known to them. According to the beliefs of the peoples who spread across Europe, those who fought bravely on the battlefield, who died as warriors, who valued the honors of war more highly than material things, were considered above all not to be attached to material life. And it was believed that such people would immediately after death be seen by some deity. But those who could not die as warriors on the battlefield, those who had not learned to value spiritual goods more highly than material life, were said to die a straw death, to be unripe for immediate admission into the realm of the spirit, and to have to enter a realm where they had to undergo certain trials. And the encounter with the Valkyrie is the expression of this attitude in connection with the memory of ancient clairvoyance. It was rightly imagined that those who died on the battlefield were taken up by the Valkyries, and it is entirely in keeping with this kind of thinking that what had developed in Europe in this way took shape in ancient times as the symbolism of initiation. Other peoples had developed other ideas; but within the European region, personal bravery and ability were considered the most valuable qualities.

[ 8 ] Now, initiation was always rightly understood to mean that a person could experience during their lifetime what they would normally only experience after death: direct communion with the spiritual world. Just as the warrior only experienced his encounter with the Valkyrie on the battlefield, it was clear that those who sought initiation had to experience this encounter during their physical life. And within a part of Europe, Siegfried, who has been preserved in the form of Siegfried, was considered the last of the heroes of initiation. Hence the legend tells that he unites himself with the Valkyrie during his life, as the warrior does on the battlefield. Thus we see how, in the small, everything that applies to the principle of initiation in the large is consistent for the individual human being.

[ 9 ] Now let us try to put ourselves in the state of mind of this population that was drawn from the West to the East, to Europe. In a certain sense, they had risen to the height where they could enter into a further development. They were not ossified, but had the germ of full further development within them. But it was precisely they who retained a relatively strong gift of clairvoyance. Among almost all the peoples who had migrated from the Atlantic continent, it was the European population that was most gifted with clairvoyance; the African population was less gifted. In Asia, the most advanced population, which had migrated there early on, encountered an even older population, and they found these peoples in possession of an even older clairvoyant consciousness, so that there was also much clairvoyance there at that time. But then there was a small colony consisting of the most advanced people of the Atlantean era, who lived near the Gobi Desert. What kind of people were they? What does it mean to be the most advanced? It meant that they were least able to see into the spiritual world. For their advancement consisted in the fact that they had left the spiritual world and entered the physical world. These were people who felt that they had once had a connection with the spiritual world, but now they no longer had it. It was melancholy over the loss of the spiritual world that lived in the hearts of these people, a longing for this world, which was the more valuable one and from which they had been forced out.

[ 10 ] Conditions were different among the European population; there were many who, in certain states, could still look into the spiritual worlds. And in those days, when the mysteries still existed in Europe, it was like this: when the initiates, who through their occult development were able to ascend in full consciousness, spoke of the existence of spiritual worlds, when they spoke of this or that form or of this or that role that human beings had to play after death, and when they proclaimed this in myths and legends, in legends and in powerful images, they found people who understood them, for they had in part seen it themselves. The peculiar living conditions and dwellings of ancient Europe made it possible for even the uninitiated to experience, if not the high gods, then at least the spiritual worlds, and thus they had faith in these spiritual worlds. These worlds were really more than half familiar to them, and they therefore felt their humanity in a completely different sense than other peoples of the earth.

[ 11 ] Let us put ourselves in the mindset of these ancient Europeans. They all said to themselves: I see that I am connected to the gods, I reach up into the realm of the gods. — And this is precisely how a strong sense of individuality developed in Europe, an awareness of the divine value of the human personality, and above all a strong sense of freedom. We must imagine this state of mind, for it was this sense of individuality that was also brought by those European masses who then migrated and populated the Greek and Italian peninsulas. We see the latecomers of this feeling of freedom in the ancient Etruscans. Even in their peculiar art, we see this strong feeling of freedom flowing from the Etruscans, who had preserved this feeling on a spiritual basis. Before the actual Roman Empire was established on the Italian peninsula, the Etruscan population was there and had something highly liberal in its constitution; on the one hand, it was admittedly somewhat hierarchical, but on the other hand, it was also liberal in the highest sense. Each city strongly protected its freedom, and the ancient Etruscans would have found any form of state union in the later sense intolerable. And everything that spread down to the southern peninsula in the way of freedom and sense of individuality came from the causes we have just described. But those other people who had migrated far away to Asia included a small group from whom the divine-spiritual worlds had withdrawn the most. But they had conquered one thing, they had saved one thing from this world that had descended into deepest twilight: the “I,” the “I am.” — that they felt that in the “I am” there was an eternal center of their being that came from the spiritual world itself; that all the forms they had seen before formed, so to speak, a sacred memory, and that their strength rested on this firm center that had remained with them. They did not yet perceive it in its full form—a later time was necessary for that—but a certain attitude was developing, especially among those who were most advanced, who had descended deepest, an attitude that could be described as follows: What we must cultivate above all else is to be conscious of our divinity in what we find in the deepest depths of our soul. Even if this soul has forgotten what it once saw in divine forms, we can still find the way back to the divine by looking into its innermost depths, into the sense of self. In short, the idea of a formless God emerged, who does not appear in external forms, but who must be sought in one's innermost being; an idea that is ancient in this tradition and which, in the course of human evolution, has been transformed into the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything.

[ 12 ] In ancient times, people had experienced God himself as an image. Now the image had withdrawn into obscurity, and people sought to summon all their strength to bring God out of the self, where he is formless, into imagination and thought, to grasp and feel an idea, a power of God. However, this was not immediately possible; in the early days of post-Atlantean cultures, the memory of what had been lost was still too strong, too great; the soul felt that the gate had closed, and the longing to return to this spiritual world was too powerful. Therefore, the first cultural epoch was formed by those who felt this longing for the lost, hidden spiritual world; who looked up to the initiates in divine worship and pleaded: Let us share in this lost world. — And under the influence of these initiates, colonial currents established the ancient Indian culture, the pre-Vedic, wonderful, awe-inspiring culture that found its final expression in the Vedas; the culture in which the longing for the spiritual world was so great that people strove artificially regain a connection with the ancient gods and spirits. The longing to flee from this world into which one had entered arose as a strong feeling in this first post-Atlantean cultural epoch, and we see this feeling at the bottom of the souls who were still able to experience the teaching of the initiates, the holy rishis. We see how this feeling develops in them: the world we see around us, the world we have now achieved, the world of the physical plane, is only an illusion, it is worthless, it is Maya; but the world that lies behind this deceptive physical plane is valuable. — And so the feeling develops of the worthlessness of the physical plane, of the necessity of fleeing it and reaching the spiritual; what develops is what we know as the basis of this ancient culture, but which is connected with the fact that human beings must lose their strong sense of personality when they see themselves, so to speak, completely separated from the divine and living in longing for this divine. He strives to merge completely with the divine, with the extinction of his personality; he prefers the destruction of the intrinsic value of his personality to life within that personality. We must understand this ancient culture primarily as a mood, then we will understand this flight from the material: how man, if he wanted to seek the divine, had to be free from the bonds of the sensual, how he had to be free from all illusion, all Maya.

[ 13 ] That was the first post-Atlantean cultural epoch. The mission of the post-Atlantean culture, however, consists in man increasingly making the world in which he is placed his own, increasingly conquering it. Thus we see that in the Persian, pre-Zoroastrian culture, the first phase of this conquest of the outer physical world takes place. The ancient Persians — and here we mean the prehistoric Persians, who were descended from a colony of the last Atlanteans who had migrated there — already possessed a different consciousness; they perceived the physical plane as something real. The physical plane no longer appeared to the ancient Persians as something foreign; they said to themselves: In this physical plane there are also possibilities for planting and nurturing the spirit. They already paid attention to the physical world; they did not yet study it, but they paid attention to it. The ancient Persians still sensed something hostile in it, but in such a way that they could overcome the enemy. They made themselves friends, comrades of the god Ormuzd, in order to redeem matter. He works his way into the physical; little by little he begins to suspect that this world is not only Maya, not merely an insubstantial appearance, but a reality to be reckoned with.

[ 14 ] And then we see how another trend moves more toward the Near East and Africa, where it establishes the Chaldean and Egyptian cultures. Here we are already a step further in the conquest of the physical plane. People are such that they no longer perceive the external, the sensual, as merely hostile or even as nothing. Man already turns his gaze upward to the stars and says to himself: These stars are not Maya, they are not mere appearances! And he immerses himself in the course of the stars, he studies how star approaches star, what changes the constellations undergo. And he says to himself: This is an outward expression of the ruling gods, a script written by the gods. The external, the sensual is not just appearance, it is a revelation of the gods. — Another step is taken: the sensual-material is regarded as an expression of the divine, and one begins to seek wisdom in the sensual. And one directs one's gaze down from heaven to earth in the Egyptian world; one studies geometry in order to master the earth; one marries what the spirit can achieve with sensual matter — an essential step forward in development. And so it continues step by step.

[ 15 ] And now, within the third cultural epoch, a small, separate group is forming again, which in a certain sense takes up everything that has been gained from old traditions and new achievements; a small group whose initiates have preserved the ancient wisdom, the former cooperation with the gods; whose initiates knew how to reproduce what could be known as experience from the spiritual world, and who had absorbed both Chaldean wisdom — the scriptures of God in the universe — and Egyptian wisdom, which is expressed in the symbolic marriage of the spiritual and the physical. And it is this group of people who, in this sense, can be called the chosen people. It is the people who had to prepare the greatest period of world history, the Old Testament people, who in their Old Testament had the greatest and most significant document in relation to all ancient events and also to what lives on. And it is not only a scholarly aberration, but a farce, if any creation story is even remotely regarded as having the same value as the Old Testament. For the Old Testament contains, in powerful images, the descent of man from divine heights and at the same time links the historical experiences of man with these cosmic events. All this is contained in the Old Testament story, and above all that which fully corresponds to the world order.

[ 16 ] We have seen how man's germ of the “I am” prepared itself step by step in the evolution of the earth. We have seen that this germ could never have developed if the sun had not separated from the earth; that the moon also had to separate from the earth, and that this germ could then only gradually develop further as a result of the horizon closing off the divine-spiritual world. Let us consider how this germ developed. What does man gradually learn in his earthly development? We look back to ancient times when he was not yet able to perceive, when he lived only in the spiritual world; then came the time when things in the physical world appeared only blurred to him, when he could still perceive the spiritual realms. Who was it who prepared these people so that they were ready in later times, when they were able to see the full sun? It was God who, so to speak, nursed them to full maturity, whom we have called Jehovah, who separated himself from the Elohim in order to prepare the highest moment of earthly existence from the moon. While man was not yet able to perceive in the outer world, the God Jehovah instilled the consciousness of the I. It was he who crept into the ancient initiations that took place in a dull state of consciousness; who appeared to people in dreams, who slowly prepared them for the maturity of the I, which they could only attain through the descent of Christ. Christ did not come all at once, did not descend all at once, but that was only his last, personal appearance; he had already been working in those ancient times through the prophets. Christ himself points out in the Gospel of John that those who did not believe in Moses and the prophets would not believe in him either, for he says that Moses and the prophets spoke of him, though not yet of the one who stood on earth, but of the one who had been announced. In this sense, Christ has a certain history in the development of the earth. If we go back to the ancient mysteries, we can find this history of Christ and his descent everywhere.

[ 17 ] Let us study the European mysteries. There is a certain tragic element everywhere. If you immerse yourself in these ancient mysteries, you will see that the teachers everywhere say to their disciples: You can rise to a higher divine level, you can become initiated in a higher sense; but there is something that you cannot yet fully recognize, something that you must wait for, something that we can only hint at: that is the coming Christ. — Everywhere in the Nordic mysteries, people spoke of Christ as one who was to come; they knew him everywhere, but not as one who was already on earth. The initiates over in Asia, in Egypt, knew him; everywhere they knew that it was Christ who was coming, that he would one day be there. And everywhere they knew that the old mysteries could not lead to the highest stage. This has been preserved symbolically. We must not press things, not in sharp contours, but take them very subtly, partly as truth and partly only comparatively. Something of that tragic aspect has remained in relation to the old gods and the waiting for Christ, since the glory of the gods will disappear before the glory of Christ. We find this even in the latest legends of the Germanic gods. The legend attributes something strange to Siegfried: he was invulnerable; he had the strength of the initiate in the sense of the European mysteries. But one spot remained vulnerable, and there he was wounded, and that also brought him death. Which spot was that? The spot where later, in the one who was expected, the cross was placed. The spot where Siegfried was still vulnerable was covered by the cross on the way to Golgotha. This is the last remnant of that tragic process that ran through the ancient European mysteries. But often, in those mysteries from which the Old Testament emerged and into which Moses was initiated, and which Moses then transplanted into his people as far as he thought possible, reference was also made to this peculiar course of human development. And it is more than just an image; it is something that gives the image a deep reality, which we can record something like this.

[ 18 ] Let us assume that we have before us the human being in his fourfold nature, and his ego, his astral, etheric, and physical bodies are illuminated by the sun. Through the coming of Christ to earth, human beings have become capable of absorbing the physical and spiritual forces of the sun. Before that, it was different. During sleep, when the astral body was outside the physical and etheric bodies, during the night, so to speak, it was not direct sunlight but reflected sunlight from the moon that fell upon human beings; they absorbed this reflected light, not the direct sunlight. This is exactly the same in outward symbolic terms as it was with Christ, who lived as a spiritual ray of sunlight, and with Jehovah, who reflected back the reflected light of Christ until human beings became mature enough to receive the direct sunlight of Christ. Jehovah sent Christ down to humanity as if from a mirror. So how did people speak of Christ before his appearance? They spoke of him by speaking of Jehovah, and that is why Jehovah says to Moses: Tell your people: I am who I am. This is the same name that was later given to Christ. He does not want to reveal his own face to humanity yet; he is preparing Christ, giving humanity the image of Christ before Christ himself descends to them. And because human beings are to grasp this Christ in their deepest inner being, with their “I am,” because they are to grasp in him the entire descent into this physical world, this group of people, who were to prepare for Christ in the most genuine way, held most firmly to the idea of a formless God. They had to gain a new conception of God, not just remember the old form. And so this people, in its Jehovah religion, actually became the people who prepared for Christ. But now we must be clear that everything that is to be strived for particularly strongly in the world must also, so to speak, come from strong impulses. Therefore, the forces of the formless God had to be exaggerated, so to speak, within the Old Testament: a completely abstract, formless God, compressed into the center of a mere ego-being, stands at the center of the Old Testament religion, an ego-God, a formless God.

[ 19 ] Where could this God first take on a form that could be understood by human beings, who now lived on the physical plane and were to conquer it? Through a wise providence, something remarkable arose in southern Europe. Traits from Asia and Africa appeared and mixed with those that had come down from the north. Those who came over from the Orient with the strong conviction of the worthlessness of Maya, of the necessity that this material realm of human beings must be transformed into the realm of the spirit, mingled with those who had acquired a strong sense of personality. And the strongest spiritual forces, which had been left behind during the migration from the West to the East, met in Asia Minor, on the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and there the fourth stage emerged, and once again the conquest of the physical world took a step forward. To grasp and sense God in the depths was the mission of the third cultural epoch, the Chaldean-Egyptian culture; from it had to emerge the ethnic group that could seek God in an abstract way, as a spiritual entity with the least sensual content. But in southern Europe, another group formed. As people with a strong Nordic sense of personality moved down there, the marriage of the human soul with matter took shape, which we admire in Greek temples, in Greek works of art, in Greek tragedy, where man begins to represent his own destiny, where he mystifies his own spirit in matter, incorporating it into external facts. One might say that a marriage between the spiritual and the physical is concluded, in which both have an equal share. In Greek art, in everything the Greeks create, the spiritual and the physical have an equal share. And in a certain sense, this is also true of the Romans; they know that the spirit lives within them, that the spiritual can become personality within them.

[ 20 ] Only at this stage of human development can what has been announced take on its outer, real form on the physical plane. Only then could Christ descend to the physical plane, when man had conquered this physical plane. A Christ would not have been possible in the ancient culture, when only the Maya of the physical world was perceived, when only the longing for the past lived in people. Human beings turned more and more toward the physical plane at the time when the marriage we see in Greek art took place, which found its expression in the strong Roman bourgeois consciousness. And that was also the time when the Christ principle could appear in the flesh.

[ 21 ] Therefore, we must regard all those who worked before as well acquainted with Christ; we must regard them as prophets who could only point the way, who saw in the descent of Christ the fulfillment of what they themselves were striving for.

[ 22 ] In the next lectures, we will see how Christianity and other elements flow together into our post-Christian era and shape our present. Today, we should point out the moment when human beings, through their conquest of the physical plane, became ready to understand the God-man, the Christ.