The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth lecture

[ 1 ] You will already have gathered from yesterday's lecture that a document such as the Gospel of Luke can only be understood if one comprehends the development of humanity in that higher sense which spiritual science provides us with, that is, if one truly contemplates the changes that have taken place in the course of human evolution and which have altered the whole human being in his organization. If we want to understand the radical process that took place with humanity at the time of Christ Jesus — which is necessary for understanding the Gospel of Luke — it is good to compare it with what is happening in our time, not so quickly, but gradually, yet clearly perceptible to those who can see.

[ 2 ] In order to understand this, we must first break thoroughly with another judgment that is so often expressed and to which human complacency is so fondly attached. This is the judgment that nature or evolution does not make leaps. If one takes the usual understanding of this statement as a basis, there can be no statement more false than this one. Nature makes leaps all the time! And that is precisely the essential point: that leaps occur. Let us consider, for example, how a plant seed develops. When it sprouts its first leaf, that is a significant leap. Another significant leap takes place when the plant transitions from leaf to flower, then again when it transitions from the outer to the inner part of the flower, and another very significant leap occurs in the formation of the fruit. Leaps occur continuously, and anyone who does not take this into account will not understand nature. When observing human development and noticing that progress is slow over the course of a century, they will believe that development must have proceeded at the same pace in other eras. But it may well be that at a certain time development proceeds slowly, as with the green plant from the first green leaf to the last; but just as a leap occurs in the plant when the last leaf has developed and the flower begins to form, so leaps occur continually in human development.

[ 3 ] And such a significant leap occurred at the time when Christ Jesus appeared on earth. Such a leap occurred that, in a relatively short time, the characteristics of the old clairvoyance and the dominion of the spiritual over the physical were transformed, so that only a little remained of clairvoyant power and of the effectiveness of the soul-spiritual over the physical. Therefore, before this change took place, it was necessary to summarize once again what had been inherited from ancient times. Christ Jesus had to work within this framework. Then the new could be taken up by humanity and could now develop slowly and gradually.

[ 4 ] In other areas, a leap is also taking place in our time, though not quite as rapidly. It is taking place over a longer period of time, but it must appear entirely comprehensible to those who want to understand our time. We can best understand this if we listen to people who are approaching spiritual science today from one spiritual field or another. For example, it often happens that a representative of this or that religious community comes to a lecture on spiritual science. What I am about to say is something that is entirely understandable and is not meant as a criticism. Such a person listens to a lecture on spiritual science, which deals, for example, with the nature of Christianity, and afterwards says: “That is all very nice, and basically it does not contradict what we say from the pulpit or from the lectern; but we say it in such a way that everyone can understand it.” What is said here, on the other hand, is such that only a few can understand it.” This is something that happens very often. Anyone who says or believes that this is the only possible way of understanding or proclaiming Christianity fails to take one thing into account: that one has a duty to judge not according to one's preferences, but according to the facts. And once I had to respond to such a person: You may believe that you are proclaiming Christian truths for all people. But our belief decides nothing in this case; it is the facts that decide. Do all people go to your church? The facts prove the opposite! For those for whom you are doing the right thing, spiritual science is not there: it is there for those who need something else. We must judge according to the facts and not according to our hobbies; and it is usually very difficult for people to distinguish their hobbies from the facts.

[ 5 ] If such people could not be cured of the opinion that they are doing the right thing and condemn everyone who speaks differently from them, and if spiritual life could not arise among such people, what would happen? There would be more and more people who could not hear the kind of proclamation of spiritual facts that has been customary in this or that spiritual movement up to now. Fewer and fewer people would go where such things could be heard. And if there were no spiritual scientific movement, these people would have nothing, no satisfaction of their spiritual needs; they would degenerate, because they would have no nourishment. But it does not depend on the will of the individual how spiritual nourishment is provided — it depends on development. We have now reached the point in time where people want satisfaction for their spiritual needs, for the interpretation of the Gospels, and so on. But it is not important how we want to provide spiritual nourishment, but how the human soul demands it. The longing of the human soul for spiritual science was born today. And it does not depend at all on those who want to teach something else whether they satisfy the spiritual needs of the time; for they will have fewer and fewer listeners.

[ 6 ] We live in a time when the possibility is disappearing more and more from human hearts to accept the Bible as it has been accepted during the last four or five centuries of European cultural development. Either humanity will receive spiritual science and learn to understand the Bible in a new sense through spiritual science, or people will come to the point, as is already the case with many today who do not know anthroposophy, where they can no longer listen to the Bible. Humanity would lose the Bible completely, the Bible would disappear, and immense spiritual treasures would be lost to humanity — the most important spiritual treasures of our Earth's development. This must be understood. We are at such a turning point in our development. The human heart longs for a spiritual scientific explanation of the Bible. If humanity receives this spiritual scientific explanation of the Bible, the Bible will remain a blessing for humanity; if it does not receive this explanation, the Bible will be lost. Those who believe that they must absolutely maintain their hobby, their traditional way of approaching the Bible, should tell themselves this. This is how we can characterize the leap we are now making in human evolution. Those who know this fact cannot be deterred from cultivating the anthroposophical spiritual current, because they recognize it as a necessity for human development.

[ 7 ] Now, viewed from a higher perspective, what is happening now is relatively small compared to what happened when Christ Jesus appeared on earth. At that time, human development was such that, so to speak, the last remnants of the development that had taken place since time immemorial, even since the previous incarnation of our Earth, were still present. Human beings developed essentially in their physical body, etheric body, and astral body. They had already integrated the I for a long time, but at that time the I still played a subordinate role. The fully self-conscious ego was still covered by the three sheaths: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, until the time of the appearance of Christ Jesus.

[ 8 ] Let us assume that Christ Jesus had not come to Earth. What would have happened? Human development would have progressed to such an extent that the ego would have emerged fully. But to the same extent that the I had fully emerged, all the former outstanding abilities of the astral body, etheric body, and physical body would have disappeared; all old clairvoyance, all old dominion of soul and spirit over the body would have disappeared, for that would have been the necessity of evolution. Human beings would have become self-conscious egos, but egos that would have led them more and more to egoism, which would have led more and more to the death of love on earth, to the disappearance of love from the earth. Human beings would also have become egos, but completely egoistic egos. That is the essential point.

[ 9 ] At that time, humanity was ready to move on to the development of the self, the I; but at the same time, it was ready to move beyond letting the old ways affect it. In the old Hebrew development, for example, the law, the proclamation from Sinai, could work because the ego had not yet fully emerged and was, so to speak, instilled and imprinted into the astral body, which stood as the highest, what it should do and feel in order to act in the right way in the outer world. Thus, the law of Sinai flowed forth as a foretelling, but as a final foretelling before the ego had completely emerged. If the ego had emerged and nothing else had happened, human beings would have looked only to their egos. Humanity was ripe for the development of the ego, but the ego would have been an empty ego, an ego that would have thought only of itself and would not have wanted to work for other people or for the world.

[ 10 ] To give this ego its content, to gradually drive this ego toward such a development that it radiates from itself that power which we call the power of love—that was the deed of Christ on earth. Without Christ, the ego would have become like an empty vessel; through the appearance of Christ, the ego stands there like a vessel filling itself more and more with love. That is why Christ could say to those around him: You say, when you see clouds gathering, that this or that kind of weather is coming; you judge the weather by external signs. But you do not understand the signs of the times. For if you could understand and judge what is happening around you, you would know that God must enter into the I, that He must permeate and impregnate it; then you would not say: We can live with what has been handed down from ancient times. What comes from ancient times is given to you by the scribes and Pharisees, who preserve the old and do not want to add anything to what has been given to people before. But this is leaven that will have no further effect on human evolution. But whoever says, “I will remain with Moses and the prophets,” does not understand the signs of the times and does not know what transition is taking place in humanity (Luke 12:54-59). In meaningful words, Christ Jesus said to those around him that it does not depend on the whim of the individual whether one wants to become a Christian or not, but on the necessity of the further development of humanity. With the words handed down to us in the Gospel of Luke as the “signs of the times,” he wanted to make it clear that the old leaven of the scribes and Pharisees, who only preserve the old, is no longer sufficient, and that only those who do not feel obliged to judge according to the necessities taught for the development of the world, who judge everything according to their own preferences, can believe that it is sufficient. Therefore, Christ Jesus called what the scribes and Pharisees wanted a falsehood, something that no longer corresponds to the outer world. That is what the expression actually means.

[ 11 ] We can best bring the emotional power of his words to mind when we compare them with corresponding events in our own time. How would one have to speak in our time in relation to what was implied, if one wanted to transfer what Christ Jesus said about the scribes and Pharisees entirely to our time? Do we have anything similar to the scribes in our time? Yes, we do! And these are those who no longer want to go along with the deeper explanation of the Gospels, who want to remain with what their abilities, acquired without spiritual science, can tell them about the Gospels; these are those who do not want to follow the steps into the depths of the Gospels that are taken by spiritual science. This is basically the case wherever people try to interpret the Gospels, whether in a more progressive or more regressive way. For the power to interpret the Gospels grows solely on the soil of spiritual science. Only from spiritual science can the truth about the Gospels be gained! That is why all other research into the Gospels today is so bleak and leaves us so cold if we really want to search for the truth. Only today, in addition to the scribes and Pharisees, we have a third kind of people, the natural scientists, so that we can now speak of three categories that want to exclude everything that leads to the spiritual, everything that human beings can acquire in terms of abilities in order to arrive at the spiritual foundations of natural phenomena. And those who must be included in this category today, if we speak in the spirit of Christ Jesus, are often found in the chairs of academia; they have it in their power to compile the phenomena of nature and reject spiritual explanations. They are the ones who are holding back the progress of human development, for the progress of humanity is held back wherever people do not want to recognize the signs of the times in the sense I have indicated.

[ 12 ] In our time, it would only be fitting for the followers of Christ Jesus to find the courage to turn against those who want to hold back the progress of humanity by opposing the anthroposophical interpretation of the scriptures on the one hand and the works of nature on the other, just as he turned against those who would only accept Moses and the prophets. Sometimes it is really well-meaning people who would like to convey a vague sense of peace here and there. All such people should take to heart what Christ Jesus himself said in the Gospel of Luke.

[ 13 ] One of the most beautiful and powerful parables in Luke's Gospel is the one commonly called the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1-13). It tells of a rich man who had a steward who had been told that he was squandering his property. He therefore decided to dismiss this steward. But the steward was greatly distressed and asked himself, “What shall I do? I cannot become a farmer, for I do not know how to farm, nor can I become a beggar, for I am ashamed to beg.” Then he came up with a plan. He said to himself, “As steward, I always treated the people I came into contact with in such a way that I only looked after my master's interests. That is why they do not particularly like me, because I did not look after their interests; I must do something so that they will take me in, lest I perish; I will do something so that the people will see that I have goodwill toward them.” So he came to one of his master's debtors and asked him, “How much do you owe?” — and had him write off half the debt. He did the same with the others. In this way he sought to gain the goodwill of the debtors so that when his master drove him away, he could go to the people and find acceptance and not die of hunger. That is the purpose. Now the Gospel goes on to say something that may surprise some readers of Luke's Gospel (verse 8): “And the master commended the unjust steward because he had acted shrewdly.” There are indeed people who explain the Gospels today who have wondered which “master” is meant here, even though it is quite clear that Jesus himself praised the steward for his shrewdness. And then it goes on to say: “For the children of this world are wiser than the children of light in their generation.” This is how it has been written in the Bible for centuries. One might wonder whether no one has ever thought about what this means: “The children of this world are wiser than the children of light in their generation.” “In their generation” appears everywhere in the various translations of the Bible. If someone with just a little knowledge were to translate the Greek text—and of course they would have to translate it correctly—then it would read: “For the children of this world are wiser than the children of light in their nature!” That is to say, according to their nature, the children of the world are wiser than the children of light; according to their understanding, they are wiser, said Christ. Those who have translated this passage for centuries have simply confused the expression “in their nature” with a word that sounds very similar in Greek: ri” yerear = (ten genean). They have confused it with ‘generation’ because, under certain circumstances, this word can also be used for the other concept. Is it possible, one might ask, that such a thing could have been perpetuated for centuries and that newer people could appear who are said to have produced good Bible translations and to have endeavored to produce the correct text, yet who do not do anything differently? This is precisely the case with Weizsäcker, for example! Strange as it may seem, it is just as if people forgot their very first school lessons when they set out to explore the true form of the biblical documents.

[ 14 ] Above all, the spiritual-scientific worldview will have to lead to the biblical documents being restored to the world as they are. For the world today does not have the Bible, and it cannot even imagine what these books are like. One might well ask: Are these the biblical books? No, in their most important parts they are definitely not! I will show you this in more detail.

[ 15 ] What is the point of this parable of the unjust steward? It is clearly expressed. The steward thought to himself: If I have to leave here, then I must make myself popular with the people. He realized that one cannot serve “two masters.” So you must realize, said Christ to those around him, that you also cannot serve two masters, the one who is now to enter into your hearts as God, and the one whom the scribes have proclaimed until now, who have interpreted the books of the prophets; for you cannot serve the God who is to enter into your souls as the Christ principle and bring humanity forward in its development by a powerful force, and the God who would stand as an obstacle to this development. For everything that was right in a past age becomes an obstacle in later development. In a certain sense, development is based on the fact that what is right for one time becomes an obstacle when it is carried over into a later time. The forces that direct these obstacles were called Mammon in technical terms at that time. — You cannot serve the God who wants progress and Mammon, the god of obstacles. Look at the steward, how he, as a child of the world, realized that one cannot serve two masters, not even with ordinary mammon! So you must realize, as you rise up, that you are children of light, that you cannot serve two masters (Luke 16:11-13).

[ 16 ] Likewise, those who live in our time must realize that there is no mediation between the god Mammon of our time—between the scribes and natural scientists—and the direction that must give humanity the nourishment it needs today. That is Christian speaking. This is expressed in words appropriate to our time, which Christ Jesus, in the spirit of Luke's Gospel, wanted to say to those around him in the parable that one cannot serve two masters, as he illustrated with the example of the steward.

[ 17 ] We must understand the Gospels in a living way. Spiritual science itself must become something living! Therefore, everything it touches should come to life under its influence. The Gospel should be something that flows into our own spiritual abilities. We should not just talk about how, at the time of Christ Jesus, it was possible to reject the scribes and Pharisees, because then we would only be thinking of a time that has passed. Instead, we should know how this comes alive in our time and where in our time we can find the successor to what Christ Jesus called Mammon in his time. That is living understanding. But that is also what plays a profound and significant role in what is told to us in the Gospel of Luke. For it is connected with this view that has just been clarified, with the parable that is found only in Luke's Gospel, one of the most important concepts in the Gospel at all; and we can only write this most important concept of the Gospel into our minds if we are able to establish once again, in a certain other way, the relationship between the Buddha and the influence he gave to Christ Jesus.

[ 18 ] We have said that Buddha presented the great teaching of compassion and love to humanity. Here we have one of the cases where what is said in occultism must be taken very precisely; for otherwise someone might say: You speak of Christ bringing love to earth, and then at another time you say that Buddha brought the teaching of love. But are both statements the same? In one case, I say that Buddha brought the teaching of love to Earth, and in the other, that Christ brought love itself as a living force to Earth. That is the great difference. When it comes to the deepest things for humanity, one must listen very carefully; otherwise, things that are communicated in one place, when they spread, appear in a completely different form in another place, and then it is said: Yes, in order to do justice to everyone, he actually established two proclaimers of love. It is precisely in the field of occultism that it is important to listen carefully. When we truly understand the significant truths clothed in words in this way, they appear to us in their proper light.

[ 19 ] We know that the description of the great teaching of compassion and love as brought by Buddha lies in the eightfold path, and we ask ourselves: What is the goal of this eightfold path? We can also ask the question this way: Where does the person arrive who, from the depths of his soul, sets the eightfold path as his ideal in life, when he sets this goal before himself in such a way that he says: How can I become most perfect? How can I purify and refine my ego in the most perfect way? What must I do to place my ego in the world in the most perfect way possible? He will say to himself: If I observe everything that is said in the eightfold path, then my ego will become as perfect as conceivable, for everything leads to the purification and ennoblement of the ego; everything that can radiate from this wonderful eightfold path should, so to speak, work its way into us; everything is the work of our ego toward its perfection. That is the essence. So if humanity were to continue to develop within itself what the Buddha called the “wheel of the law,” as the technical term goes, it would gradually come to have the most perfect egos possible, or rather to know which are the most perfect egos. In thought, as wisdom, humanity would have the most perfect egos. We could also say: Buddha brought humanity the wisdom of love and compassion, and if we assert our astral body in such a way that it is entirely a product of the eightfold path, then we know what we need to know about the laws of the eightfold path.

[ 20 ] But there is a difference between wisdom, thought, and the living force that works. And there is a difference between knowing how the self must be and allowing the living force to flow into oneself, which can then flow out again from the self into the whole world, just as this force flowed out from Christ and worked on the astral bodies, etheric bodies, and physical bodies of his surroundings. To know what the content of the teaching of compassion and love is has become possible for humanity through the impact that the great Buddha brought. What Christ brought, on the other hand, is first and foremost a living force; it is not a teaching. He gave himself up, he descended, not merely to flow into the human astral bodies, but into the I, so that the I might have the power to radiate the substance of love. Christ brought to earth the substance, the living content of love, not merely the wise content of love. That is what this is all about.

[ 21 ] It is now nineteen hundred years and about five centuries since the great Buddha lived on earth. And there will still be—this is something that occult facts teach us—about three thousand years of earth evolution. Then, a greater number of people will be ready to develop the eightfold path, the wisdom of Buddha, out of their own moral convictions, out of their own souls and hearts. Buddha had to be there once. From there emanated the power that people will gradually develop as the wisdom of the eightfold path. Then, about three thousand years from now, they will have it as their own. People will be able to develop this teaching themselves, not just take it in from outside, but develop it from within themselves and say: This eightfold path springs forth from us as the wisdom of compassion and love.

[ 22 ] If nothing more had happened than the great Buddha setting the “wheel of the law” in motion, then humanity would indeed have attained the ability to know the teaching of compassion and love after three thousand years from now; but it is something else entirely to have also attained the power to truly live within it. And that is the difference: not only to know about compassion and love, but also to develop this power under the influence of an individuality. This ability came from Christ. He poured love itself into human beings, and it will continue to grow. And when human beings have reached the end of their development, they will know in wisdom what the content of the teaching of compassion and love is; they will have this to thank the Buddha for. But at the same time they will have the ability to let love flow out of the I onto humanity; humanity will have this to thank Christ for.

[ 23 ] These two had to work together, and this had to be described in order to make the Gospel of Luke understandable. But this also immediately becomes clear to us when we know how to interpret the words given to us in the Gospel of Luke in their true sense (Luke 2:13-14). There are the shepherds who hurry to receive the proclamation. Above them is the host of angels, which is nothing other than the spiritual imaginative expression of the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha. What is proclaimed to them from above? The revelation of the wise God from on high! This is proclaimed to them by the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, who hovers as a host of angels above the Nathanian baby Jesus. But something else is added: “And peace to people on earth below who are filled with good will,” that is, those people in whom the real living power of love is sprouting. This is what must gradually be realized on earth through the impact that Christ has made. He added the living power to what was the “revelation from on high.” He brought this into every human heart and gave every human soul something from which it could overflow. He did not merely give it something that was a teaching that could be taken in as a thought or an idea, but a power that can flow out of this human soul. And no other power than that which can work in the human soul as the power of Christ, and which can cause the human soul to overflow, is that which is constantly referred to—for example, in the Gospel of Luke and in the other Gospels—as the power of faith. That is faith in the sense of the Gospels. The one who has faith is the one who takes Christ into himself so that Christ lives in him, so that his I does not live in him merely as an empty vessel, but has an overflowing content. And this overflowing content is none other than the content of love.

[ 24 ] Why was Christ able to set that great example of “healing through the word” with his words? He was able to do so because he was the first to set in motion the “wheel of love” — not the “wheel of the law” — as a free ability and power of the human soul, because he had love in himself to the highest degree, so overflowing and effervescent that it overflowed into those around him who were to be healed; because the words he spoke — whether “Arise and walk” or “Your sins are forgiven” or any other words — sprang from the love overflowing within him. He spoke words that were spoken out of an overflowing of love beyond the measure of the ego. And those who were able to fulfill themselves a little with this fact, Christ called believers. We must now connect this thought with the concept of faith — one of the most essential in the New Testament. Faith is the ability to go beyond oneself, to flow out beyond what the ego can initially do for its own perfection. Therefore, having entered into the body of the Nathanic Jesus and united himself there with the power of the Buddha, Christ does not teach: How can the ego perfect itself as much as possible? — but rather: How can the ego overflow? How can it go beyond itself? — He often says this in simple words, as the words of Luke's Gospel can speak to the simplest hearts. He says: It is not enough that you give something only to those whom you know will give it back to you, for even sinners do that. If they know that they will get back what they have given, then they have not done it out of overflowing love. But if you give and know that you will not get it back, then you have done it out of real love; then it is the love that does not enclose the ego, but which the ego must release from itself as a force that flows out of the human being (Luke 6:33-34). And in the most varied ways, Christ says how the ego should overflow, how out of the abundance of the ego, out of a feeling that can come out of itself, one should work in the world.

[ 25 ] These are the warmest words in Luke's Gospel, where this overflowing love is spoken of. Luke's Gospel contains this power of overflowing love, if we allow the words to work on us in such a way that we find this overflowing love, that it permeates all our words so that they have the corresponding power to have an effect in the outside world. Another evangelist, who, due to his background, placed less emphasis on this overflowing love, summarized this mystery of Christianity in a few words when he said: Love flows from the abundance of the self. And it should, of course, also flow into everything we say and do. In the Gospel of Matthew, you still have the genuine, original words in the Latin translation as a brief summary of all the beautiful praises of love contained in the Gospel of Luke. There it says in Latin: “Ex abundantia cordis os loquitur”: Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34). One of the highest Christian ideals! The mouth speaks from the overflowing heart, from what the heart does not contain. The heart is moved by the blood, and the blood is the expression of the I. This means that from what the heart does not contain, an overflowing I speaks, an I that radiates power from itself—for this power is the power of faith. These are the words that truly contain the power of Christ: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” This is a cardinal statement about the essence of Christianity.

[ 26 ] And now read today's Bible. What does it say here? “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” These are words that have served to obscure a cardinal principle of Christianity for centuries. Humanity has not realized what an absurdity it is to say that when the heart is full, it pours itself out. Usually, things in the world only spill out when they are more than full, when they overflow. Thus, humanity—and this is not meant as a criticism—has necessarily spun itself into a concept that has virtually obscured one of the most important, cardinal tenets of Christianity, and has not even noticed that what is written here is completely impossible. When it is said that the German language cannot tolerate a literal translation of “Ex abundantia cordis os loquitur” as “Aus dem Überfließen des Herzens spricht der Mund” (Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks), and when this is substantiated by the fact that one cannot say that the excess heat from the tiled stove warms the room, this is simply absurd. For if you heat the tiled stove only enough for the heat to reach its walls, the room will not become warm; it will only become warm when there is an excess of heat, so that the heat escapes from the stove. This brings us to an important point. A cardinal tenet of Christianity, on which part of the Gospel of Luke is based, is being covered up, so that humanity does not have what is written in the Gospel at the most important point.

[ 27 ] This power, which can overflow from the human heart, is the power of Christ. “Heart” here stands for “I.” What the I can achieve beyond itself flows out through the word. Only at the end of earthly evolution will the I be such that it has the whole Christ within itself. For the time being, Christ is something that bubbles up from the heart. If one only wants to have a full heart, one does not have Christ at all. Therefore, one covers up Christianity when one does not take this statement in all its seriousness and dignity. The most important things, the essence of Christianity, will come to light through what spiritual science has to say as an explanation of the high documents of Christianity. By reading in the Akashic Records of the spiritual world, it reveals the original meaning and is thus able to read the documents in their truth.

[ 28 ] And now we will understand how humanity is advancing into the future. The one who developed from Bodhisattva to Buddha five to six centuries before our era has thus ascended into the spiritual world in such a way that he now works as Nirmanakaya. He has thus been raised to a higher level and no longer needs to descend into a physical body. The modes of activity he had as a Bodhisattva are present again in a different form. When he became a Buddha, he handed over the office of Bodhisattva to another. Another became his successor, another became a Bodhisattva. Buddhist legend expresses this through something that is a profound truth for deeper Christianity. It is said that before the individuality of the Bodhisattva descended to become Buddha, he took off the heavenly tiara and placed it on the head of the Bodhisattva who followed him. The following Bodhisattva continues to work with his slightly different mission. He too is destined to become a Buddha. At the very moment when a number of people have developed the teaching of the eightfold path on their own—in about three thousand years—the one who became a Bodhisattva when his predecessor became a Buddha will become a Buddha himself. Five to six centuries before our era, he was entrusted with his mission; he will become a Buddha after three thousand years, counting from our time. This is the one whom Eastern teachings know as the Maitreya Buddha. In order for the current Bodhisattva to become Maitreya Buddha, a large number of people must have developed the teaching of the eightfold path from their own hearts; the people will then be wise enough in large numbers to be able to do so. Then the one who is now Bodhisattva will bring a new power into the world.

[ 29 ] If nothing else were to happen until then, he would indeed find people who, through inner contemplation, could conceive the teaching of the eightfold path, but not people who, from the innermost being of their souls, possessed the overflowing power of love, living love. This living power of love must flow in during the intervening period so that the Maitreya Buddha will find not only people who understand what love is, but people who have the power of love within themselves. For this reason, Christ had to descend to earth, a being who was only on earth for three years but who had not previously been incarnated on earth, as you have been able to gather from all the explanations given to you so far. The three-year presence of Christ on Earth—from the baptism of John to the mystery of Golgotha—was the reason why love will continue to pour more and more into the human heart, into the human soul, into the human I, in other words, so that human beings will be more and more permeated by Christ, so that at the end of Earth's development, the human I will be completely filled with Christ. Just as the teaching of compassion and love first had to be inspired by the Bodhisattva, so the substance of love had to be brought to Earth by the one who brought it down from the heights of heaven and gradually made it the property of the human I. We cannot say that love did not exist before. It was not the love that could be the immediate property of the human ego; it was a love that was inspired, that Christ allowed to flow down from cosmic heights, flowing in just as unconsciously as the Bodhisattva had previously allowed the teaching of the eightfold path to flow in unconsciously. Just as the Buddha relates to the eightfold path, so the Christ being relates to what it was before it could descend to take on human form. It was a step forward for Christ to take on human form. That is the essential point here.

[ 30 ] The successor of the Buddha, who is now a Bodhisattva, is well known to those who are versed in spiritual science, and the time will come when these facts will be discussed in detail, when the name of this Bodhisattva, who will then become Maitreya Buddha, will also be mentioned. Now that so many facts unknown to the outside world have been revealed, we must limit ourselves to merely pointing them out. When this Bodhisattva appears on earth and becomes Maitreya Buddha, he will find the seed of Christ on earth. These will be the people who will say: Not only is my head filled with the wisdom of the eightfold path, I not only have the teaching, the wisdom of love, but my heart is full of the living substance of love, of that which overflows and radiates out into the world. With such people, Maitreya Buddha will then be able to carry out his further mission in the development of the world.

[ 31 ] This is how things come together, and only then can we understand the Gospel of Luke in its depth. It does not speak to us of a teaching; it speaks to us of that essence that flowed substantially into earthly beings, into the human organization. This is a fact that is expressed in occultism as follows: The bodhisattvas who become Buddhas can redeem earthly human beings in terms of their spirit through wisdom, but they can never redeem the whole human being. For the whole human being can only be redeemed when not only wisdom but also warm love flows through his entire organization. To redeem souls through the flood of love that Christ brought to earth was the task of Christ. To bring the wisdom of love was the task of the bodhisattvas and the Buddha; to bring the power of love to humanity was the task of Christ. We must distinguish between these things.