The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. Christmas: A Festival of Inspiration

[ 1 ] In our work within the spiritual science movement, we look forward—forward to the future of humanity—and imbue our souls and hearts with that which we believe should become part of the currents and forces of development in the future of humanity. And even when we look up to the great truths of existence, look up to the forces, powers, and beings that reveal themselves to us in the spiritual world as the causes and foundations of what we encounter in the outer sensory world—even then we are inspired by the conviction that the truths we thus bring down from the spiritual worlds must gradually take root and do take root in the souls and hearts of the people of the future.

[ 2 ] Thus, for most of the year, our mental gaze is turned either toward the immediate present or toward the future. All the more do we feel compelled, on the significant days of the year, on the festivals that, like fixed memories of what pre-humanity conceived and devised, reach out to us from time and its vicissitudes, to feel our connection with this pre-humanity, to immerse ourselves a little in what led the souls and hearts of people in the past to place those landmarks in the course of time, which appear to us as the festivals of the year.

[ 3 ] Is Easter a festival that, when we understand it, evokes within us thoughts of human strength and the ability to overcome all that is base through that which is higher, and of the spiritual overcoming all that is outwardly physical—is it a festival of resurrection, of awakening, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual powers that can be awakened in the human soul—then, on the other hand, Christmas is a festival of feeling in harmony with the entire cosmos, a festival of feeling grace, a festival that can bring us closer and closer to the thought: However things may turn out around us, however the harshest doubts may creep into our faith, however the worst disappointments may mingle with our boldest hopes, however all the good things of life may falter around us—there is something in human nature and being that the properly understood idea of Christmas can tell us: it needs only to be set before the soul in a living, spiritually, to reveal to us forever that we are descended from the forces of the good, from the forces of the right, from the forces of the true. — The idea of Easter points us toward our victorious forces in the future. In a certain sense, therefore, the idea of Christmas points us to the origin of humanity in the distant past.

[ 4 ] On such an occasion, one can truly see how the unconscious or subconscious reason and spirituality of human beings stand far, far higher than what a person can then comprehend with their conscious mind. We often have reason to admire far more what people established in the past from the hidden depths of their souls than what they established from their intellectual thoughts and from what they could grasp conceptually. How infinitely wise it seems to us when we open the calendar and find recorded for December 25 the feast of the Nativity of Christ Jesus, and then see recorded in the calendar for December 24 “Adam and Eve.” One might say: Vividly, sensibly, and spiritually, this could have come to mind from the dim, subconscious creative work of the Middle Ages, when here and there around Christmas time the medieval Christmas plays were to be performed by people from this or that place. When, as they were called, the “Singers” set out for their Christmas plays, the “Tree of Paradise” was carried in front. Just as “Adam and Eve” appeared in the calendar before the feast of Christ’s Nativity, so in the medieval Christmas plays the Tree of Paradise was carried at the head of the troupe as they set out to perform these plays. In short, there was once something that prompted the deep, hidden recesses of the human soul to directly link the earthly origins of humanity with the feast of Jesus’ birth. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, December 25 was not yet celebrated as the Feast of the Nativity. For it was in 354 that the Feast of the Nativity was celebrated for the first time on December 25, even in ecclesiastical Rome. Previously, a festival was observed that evoked a similar sense of significance to the later celebration of Jesus’ birthday, namely January 6 as the day commemorating John’s baptism in the Jordan, the day marking the descent of Christ from the spiritual heights and Christ’s immersion into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This was originally the birth of Christ within Jesus, the commemoration of the great historical moment symbolically represented by the dove hovering over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. January 6 was the day of remembrance for the birth of Christ within Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 5 ] But by the 4th century, the emerging materialistic worldview of the West had long since lost the ability to grasp the profound idea of the union of Jesus and Christ. Like a mighty light, this idea was present for a brief moment among the Gnostics, who in a certain sense were contemporaries or immediate successors of the event at Golgotha and were in a position such that they did not have to seek the depth of this wisdom of “Christ in Jesus” in the way that we must seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance; rather, with the Gnostics, it was the case that through the final flickering of precisely those ancient, original human clairvoyant powers, they beheld—as if in the light of grace—what we must reclaim regarding the great mysteries of Golgotha. Thus, many things were illuminated for the Gnostics that we must reclaim for ourselves, such as, in particular, the mystery of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism by John in the Jordan.

[ 6 ] But just as with clairvoyance in general, that peculiar outburst of the highest clairvoyant powers—the highest Christmas light of humanity—which had been present among the Gnostics, also faded away for humanity. And by the 4th century, Western Christianity had long since lost the ability to comprehend this great idea. Consequently, by the 4th century, the true Feast of the Epiphany—in which Jesus revealed himself—had lost its meaning for Western Christian culture. People had forgotten what this Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, actually signifies. For a time, indeed right up to the present day, the sense of the Christ figure in human evolution had to be buried beneath all manner of materialistic intellectual debris. And while people could not grasp that the Highest Being had revealed Himself to humanity in the baptism of John in the Jordan, they could still, because this did not contradict materialistic consciousness, understand that the physical body destined to receive the Christ was something significant. Therefore, the spiritual birth, which actually came to light in the baptism of John in the Jordan, was shifted back to the birth of the child Jesus of Nazareth, and the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus was substituted for the Feast of the Epiphany.

[ 7 ] But even if people were rarely willing to express this clearly, there were always profound feelings—lofty, sublime feelings—in what Christmas came to mean for humanity. Something significant always stirred in the human soul as Christmas approached. What came to life was what one might call: When a person views the world in the right sense, they can, in the face of certain things—in the face of all the dangers and misfortunes of existence—be revitalized by faith in humanity; a person can be revitalized in the depths of their soul by a feeling of love and peace in the face of all the disharmony and strife of life.

[ 8 ] This is something that always comes to mind in connection with Christmas, the celebration of Jesus’ birth. For what, exactly, was it that people remembered? Let us consider what was remembered from a spiritual-scientific perspective. We know what significant, great, and momentous events human evolution had to undergo so that the Mystery of Golgotha could break into this human evolution. A human being had to be born who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, one of the two Jesus-children. But there also had to be born the one for whom the actual Feast of the Nativity was the feast of remembrance; there had to be born the one who, in terms of his soul substance, had remained behind in the spiritual worlds. As long as humanity had gone through everything that could be endured through heredity across the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—all other human souls had passed through the generations—for that long had everything been absorbed that had crept into the blood as destructive forces. Only a single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest mysteries and the purest places of worship, and was then poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the one described in the Gospel of Luke, that Jesus-child to whose birth, in particular, all memories and all depictions of the Christian festival, of Christmas, are linked.

[ 9 ] At Christmas time, people recalled the origins of humanity, the human soul, before it had descended—before it itself had descended into Adam’s nature. He wanted to say that in Bethlehem, in Palestine, that soul substance was born which did not participate in the descent of humanity, but remained behind and actually entered a human body for the first time by being embodied in the boy Jesus of Luke.

[ 10 ] One can believe in humanity; one can have faith in humanity—this is how the human soul can feel when its thoughts are allowed to turn to the fact that: However much strife, however much unbelief, however much disharmony have taken root within human development—and they have taken root through everything that has poured into humanity from the time of Adam to the present day— when one looks back upon what the ancients called “Adam Kadmon,” which then became the concept of Christ, then trust in the righteousness of human power is kindled in the human soul, and trust in the original nature of peace and love within humanity is kindled. Thus, the subconscious soul brought the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus directly together with the Feast of Adam and Eve, in that human beings actually see their own nature in the Christ Child who is born, but their own nature in its innocence, in its unspoiled state.

[ 11 ] Why, then, has the divine child been presented to humanity for centuries, for millennia, as that which is most worthy of veneration for the human soul? For the reason that when a person looks upon the child—at a time when this child has not yet reached the stage where it can say “I” to itself—they can see and know that it is still working on the human body, the temple of the eternally divine, and because the child, which does not yet say “I,” still clearly bears the mark of its origin in the spiritual world. Through this view of the child’s nature, a person learns to have complete trust in human nature. Where the human being can gather their thoughts most deeply, where the sun shines least and warms the earth, where the human being is not occupied with the management of external affairs, where the days are shortest and the nights longest, where all conditions on earth are such that the human being can best gather their thoughts, best turn inward, where all external splendor all external beauty withdraws for a while from the external gaze—it is there that Western cultural development placed the feast of the birth of the divine child, that is, of the human being who enters the world uncorrupted, and who, through this uncorrupted entry into the world, can give humanity, at the time of its most intense contemplation, the strongest, the highest confidence through the awareness of its divine origin.

[ 12 ] It is as if to reaffirm the great truth that one can learn much from children when one sees that a child’s birthday celebration is embedded in the course of time as a grand, significant celebration of trust for the development of humanity. And so we admire the subconscious, spiritual wisdom of the people of antiquity who placed such milestones within the course of time. We then feel like decipherers of strange hieroglyphs, which have been inscribed into the script of time by the people of antiquity through the placement of such celebrations; we feel at one with these people of antiquity. While our gaze is usually turned toward the future, while we are usually willing to place our best efforts at the service of the future, to strengthen and reinforce all faith in the future, on such festive days we try to live in memories that convey ancient thoughts to us as if embodied, that teach us that although we can currently think only in our own way, what underlies the outer world in the spiritual realm, yet in ancient times—in a different way, though no less true, no less magnificent and significant—the true and the sublime were conceived and felt through empathy with humanity, with all that is meant to carry humanity to its heights. This is our spiritual-scientific ideal: that one may feel at one with what humanity of ancient times created, sometimes from the most hidden depths of the soul. The festivals ensure this, especially the great festivals, if only we can paint before our souls their hieroglyphic symbolic meaning, inscribed in the script of the ages, through the truths of spiritual research.

[ 13 ] Oh, it is a wonderful thought that blends with a wonderful feeling in our souls when we see how, in the centuries that followed the fourth—which first moved the celebration of Jesus’s birthday to December 25 , the very awareness of the trust to be awakened by the childlike nature pours into the souls of those people, as is shown everywhere in paintings and Christmas plays: how the beings of all the earthly realms bow before the infant Jesus, before the divine Child, before the divine origin of humanity. We are met by the wondrous nativity scene, where the animals bow before the first human; linked to this are those marvelous tales, such as the one in which, when Mary carried the infant Jesus on the journey to Egypt and the border had been crossed, a tree bowed—an ancient tree—before Mary with the infant Jesus. That on Christmas night the trees bow to the great event in a wondrous way is a legendary theme found in the folklore of nearly all of Europe. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria; everywhere we encounter legends of how certain trees bear fruit at Christmas, how they bow at Christmas: all wondrous symbols meant to herald how the birth of the infant Jesus is in fact revealed as something connected to the very life of the earth.

[ 14 ] And when we recall what we have so often said: How the ancient spiritual currents were bestowed upon humanity by the gods, and how people in primeval times possessed clairvoyant insights into the divine-spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually faded so that human beings could come to master the ego— when one imagines how something like a withering, a drying up of the old divine powers, is taking place throughout the entire human organism, and how the withered divine powers are being infused with new life-giving water through the Christ impulse, through which that which took place through the Mystery of Golgotha is being accomplished: then this appears to us in a wondrous image when the Christmas legends tell us how the withered and dried-up roses of Jericho always spring up of their own accord on Christmas Eve. This was a legend found recorded everywhere in the Middle Ages: that the roses of Jericho sprout and unfold on Christmas Eve because they had first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, while carrying the infant Jesus on her journey to Egypt, had walked over a spot where a rosebush had grown. A wonderful symbol of what happened with the human-divine forces, that even such dry, lifeless things as roses, which one might find withered by the wayside, seemingly dead, spring up again, sprout anew through the Christ impulse that enters into the course of history.

[ 15 ] The fact that what was originally intended for humanity was only truly given to humankind at that time is expressed in the Feast of the Nativity, the celebration of the birth of the infant Jesus. Even before Adam and Eve existed, humanity was destined—so the Christmas legend tells us—for that which still lies in the completely uncorrupted divine childlike nature of the human being. But in truth—because of the influence of Lucifer—humanity was only able to attain this after the entire course of time had unfolded from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha. Oh, one must say, it truly stirs a deep feeling in our soul when, as if compressed into the single night from December 24th to 25th, we have before us for our reflection and for our empathy what humanity has become through the Luciferic forces from Adam and Eve to the birth of the Christ in Jesus. When we feel this, we already sense the significance of this festival sufficiently and also perceive what could be presented to humanity through it.

[ 16 ] It is as if humanity, by taking the opportunity to use these milestones of time as subjects for meditation, might truly come to realize its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. By lifting our gaze to the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little into the mysteries of the universe through Theosophy—through true spiritual wisdom— only then can humanity once again become ripe to comprehend that a higher stage of the festival of Jesus’ birth is what was once understood by the Gnostics as the Festival of the Birth of Christ—the Festival of the Birth of Christ that should actually be celebrated on January 6, the festival of the birth of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But, as if to enable one to delve into the twelve universal forces of the cosmos, the twelve holy nights stand there between Christmas and the feast that should be celebrated on January 6, which is now the Feast of the Epiphany, and which is actually the feast that embodies these forces.

[ 17 ] Once again, without science having fully grasped it until now, there they stand, these twelve holy nights, as if established from the hidden, wise depths of humanity’s soul, as if they were saying: Feel the full depth of the Christmas festival, but then, during the twelve holy nights, immerse yourselves in the holiest mysteries of the cosmos! — That is, in the realm of the universe from which Christ descended to Earth. For only when humanity has the will to be inspired by the thought of the holy, childlike divine origin of the human being, to be inspired by that wisdom which penetrates the twelve forces, the twelve sacred forces of the universe—symbolically represented in the twelve signs of the zodiac, but which are truly revealed only through spiritual wisdom — only when humanity immerses itself in true spiritual wisdom and learns to recognize the course of time in the vast cosmos and in the individual human being, only then will the humanity of the future, fertilized by spiritual science, find for its own salvation the inspiration that can come from the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus to penetrate the most confident, most hopeful thoughts of the future.

[ 18 ] Thus we may allow Christmas to work upon our souls as a festival of inspiration, as a festival that so wonderfully brings before our souls the idea of humanity’s origin in the holy, divine Child of Humanity. That light which appears to us on that holy night, as a symbol of the light of humanity, at its very source; that light which, in more recent times, is symbolized for us by the lights of the Christmas tree: is, when properly understood, the very light that can give our souls the best and strongest forces as we strive for true, genuine world peace, for true, genuine world bliss, and for true, genuine world hope.

[ 19 ] Do such thoughts of past deeds and past resolutions strengthen us with the impulses we always need for the future: Christmas thoughts, memories of humanity’s origins—thoughts that are at once deeply rooted, yet capable of unfolding into the truest, most powerful plant of the soul, into a genuine human future.