The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Faith, Love, Hope: Three Stages of Human Life I

My dear Theosophical friends!

[ 1 ] This evening and tomorrow evening, we will attempt a coherent examination of the nature of the human being and its connection to the occult foundations of our present time and the near future. From various hints I have already made here in this series, and which you may have heard elsewhere, you will have gathered that, in a certain sense, we are currently facing a kind of new revelation, a new proclamation to humanity. If we consider the recent history of human development, we can best understand what is to come in our time by bringing it into connection with two other important revelations that have been made to humanity. In doing so, however, we are considering, so to speak, only what has unfolded chronologically as the most recent of humanity’s revelations. These three revelations under consideration—our coming one and the two others that preceded it—can best be understood when we compare them to the development of a growing child, that is, of the human being as such.

[ 2 ] If we observe the child closely, we find that the child first enters the world in such a way that it must be completely nurtured and cared for by its surroundings, that it is not yet able to express in any way what lives within it, and that it is also not yet able to articulate for itself, in clear thoughts, what moves the soul. The child cannot yet speak, it cannot yet think; therefore, everything that needs to happen for the child must be carried out by those who have taken it into their circle. Then the child begins to speak. Anyone who observes closely—and this is also mentioned in my little book on “The Education of the Child from the Perspective of Spiritual Science” —will know that at first the child babbles and speaks, that it first learns to speak through a kind of imitation of what is spoken in its surroundings, and that, in fact, in the early stages of speaking, it does not yet possess what one might call a conceptual understanding of language. It is not as though language in the child arises from thought, but rather the opposite is the case. The child first learns to think through language, gradually learning to understand in clear thoughts what it speaks from obscure feelings and underlying impulses. Thus we have three successive periods in the child’s development: the first period, when the child can neither speak nor think, when everything must come from the outside; a second period, when the child can speak but not yet think; and a third epoch, when the child learns to grasp the thought content of its own language in its consciousness. These three periods of child development can be compared, my dear Theosophical friends, to what humanity has gone through and is still going through, roughly since the time that elapsed one and a half millennia before the Christian era and throughout the Christian era.

[ 3 ] The first revelation to the evolving human soul of the present human cycle that we can speak of here is the revelation that flowed down from Sinai and found its expression in the Ten Commandments of Moses. Anyone who reflects more deeply on the true meaning of this revelation to humanity, as given in the Ten Commandments, will be able to observe something wondrous precisely in the Ten Commandments. However, these things are such that they have, so to speak, already become part of humanity’s everyday spiritual heritage, something over which people no longer reflect deeply. But when they begin to reflect, they will have to say to themselves: Strange, for in these Ten Commandments there is something given that, as a law, has been circulating throughout the world ever since it was given, and which, in essence, still applies today; which, in essence, underlies the legislation of all countries of the world, insofar as they have gradually integrated into modern culture or have integrated over the course of the last millennia. Something comprehensive, magnificent, and universal has been revealed to humanity, as it were, when it was told: There is in the spiritual world a primordial being whose counterpart here on Earth is the ego, and this primordial being can so infuse itself into the human ego, so pour itself into it, that the human being follows those norms, those laws, which are given in the Ten Commandments.

[ 4 ] The second revelation came about through the Mystery of Golgotha. What can we say about this Mystery of Golgotha? Indeed, what we can say about this Mystery of Golgotha was already touched upon yesterday in the public lecture. Just as we must trace all physical humanity back to a primordial human couple on Earth, and just as we can only understand this physical humanity as emerging generation by generation from this primordial human couple, so too must we—if we are to correctly understand that which is the most precious asset of our I, that which must sink ever deeper into our I during our earthly existence—derive this from the Mystery of Golgotha. If we—even if the ancient Hebrew tradition may differ in this regard from today’s scientific view, that is not the point now—if we trace human blood kinship, the physical connection of humanity, back to the primordial human couple, Adam and Eve, who thus once stood on Earth as physical primordial personalities, the first parents of humanity, and we must therefore say that what flows through human veins as human blood ultimately leads back to this original human couple, then we can say, on the other hand, that what we can take into our souls as the most precious, as the holiest and most cherished treasure, which works an everlasting miracle in human souls, what we can take in as the awareness that something can live in our soul that is higher than our ordinary ego—if, then, we wish to investigate the origin of what is humanity’s most precious soul asset, what must, as it were, become the blood of the soul—then we must turn to that which rose from the grave on Golgotha. For what rose from the dead at that time lives on in those human souls that experience an inner awakening, just as the blood of Adam and Eve lives on in physical human beings. We must see in the risen Christ a kind of ancestral or primal fatherhood: the spiritual Adam who enters into the souls of human beings when they experience their awakening and brings them to their full self, to that which animates the self in the right way. Just as Adam’s physical life flows through the physical bodies of human beings, so does that which rose from the tomb of Golgotha flow into the souls of those who find the path to it. This is the second revelation that has come to humanity, that they have received knowledge of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 5 ] If the Ten Commandments gave people something that guided them from the outside, we can compare this external guidance to what happens to a child from the outside before it can speak or think. What the child’s environment accomplishes within the child, the guidance of the ancient Hebrew law accomplishes in humanity, which, as such, in a certain sense cannot yet speak or think. But humanity has also learned to speak; in other words, it has learned something that can only be compared to a child learning to speak, namely: Humanity has received the message of the Mystery of Golgotha in the Gospels. And the way in which people first had to understand the Gospels can be compared to a child learning to speak. Through the Gospels, a kind of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached human souls and hearts, an understanding that has taken root in the feelings, in the sensibilities, in those soul forces that come to light when we, let us say, allow the profoundly meaningful, vivid images and scenes from the Gospels created by the great painters, or even when we allow the traditional images to affect us—those depicting the adoration of the Child by the shepherds, the adoration of the Child by the Magi from the East, the flight into Egypt, and so on. What has come into the world, what people have allowed to work upon their souls since that time, ultimately leads back to the Gospels; it has come to be understood by people in such a way that they have, as it were, learned to speak in their own way about the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 6 ] We are now approaching the third stage in this process, which can be compared to a child learning the content of thought in its own language and becoming aware of what is contained within that language. We are approaching that revelation which is to bring us the full content, the intellectual content, the spiritual and soul content of the Gospels. For the Gospels have not been understood by humanity any better than language is understood by a child who is learning to think. In a world-historical sense, people are to learn to think through spiritual science the intellectual content of the Gospels. Only now should they allow the entire profound spiritual content of the Gospels to take effect within them. This, however, is connected to another great event that humanity can sense approaching and that will come to humanity before the end of our twentieth century. This is the event that we can picture in our minds in the following way.

[ 7 ] If we return once more to the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that what arose from the tomb on Golgotha through Christ remained with the Earth—remained with the Earth in such a way that it can directly touch every single human soul and awaken the “I” within every single human soul to a higher stage of existence. Christ became the Earth Spirit, we might say, when speaking of the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. And he has remained the Earth Spirit ever since. But in our time, a significant change is taking place in Christ’s relationship to humanity, which will, of course, be linked to what you all more or less already know: the new revelation of Christ to humanity.

[ 8 ] But this new revelation can also be described in other ways. In doing so, however, we must take into account what happens when a person passes through the gates of death. What must now be said is something that has not yet been able to be described in books.

[ 9 ] When a person has passed through the gate of death and has lived through that period in which they can look back on their earthly life thus far, has lived through the time up to the point where they have shed the etheric body, when a person enters the Kamaloka period, they then stand before two figures. Usually only one of these is mentioned, but for the sake of completeness we can say—and what I am now telling you is a real fact for every true occultist: Before entering the Kamaloka period, the human being stands before two figures. However, what I am now describing applies only to people of the West and to all those who have had a connection with the culture of the West over the past millennia. There, after death, the human being faces two figures: Moses is one—the human being knows full well that he is facing Moses—who holds up the tablets of the law to him; in the Middle Ages, this was called “Moses with the sharp law,” and the human being has a clear awareness in his soul of the extent to which he has deviated from the law down to the very depths of his soul. The other figure is the one called “the Cherub with the flaming sword,” who judges this deviation. This is an experience that a person has after death, so that we can say in our theosophical sense: What confronts the person through these two figures—through Moses with the strict law and through the cherub with the flaming sword—essentially determines the karmic balance.

[ 10 ] This situation is about to change in our time. And it is a significant change. One can express this change by saying, my dear Theosophical friends, that in our age, the Christ will become the Lord of Karma for all those people who have undergone what has just been discussed after their death. The Christ will assume his office as judge.

[ 11 ] Let’s take a closer look at this fact! We all know from the theosophical worldview that we have a karmic life account, that for certain deeds recorded on one side of our karmic ledger—for all wise deeds, all beautiful deeds, all good deeds—we must experience a certain karmic balance, but also for all evil, ugly, and untruthful deeds and thoughts. On the one hand, it is important that a person, in the course of their earthly life, works through this karmic account for themselves; but it is also important that a person can work through—in a wide variety of actions—what they can work through by having good deeds and beautiful deeds in their karmic account, or what they must work through because they have evil deeds. It is not clearly determined how we, so to speak, find balance through this or that deed in our future life. Let us assume that a person has done this or that evil deed; then they must do a good deed that balances out the evil. But this good deed, they can perform in two ways: in a way that perhaps requires the same effort for them if it benefits only a few people, or in a way that requires the same effort for them if it brings salvation to many people. That our karmic account may be balanced in the future—that is, placed within such a world order for the future—once we have found the path to Christ, so that the nature of our karmic balance may bring about the greatest possible human salvation for the remainder of Earth’s development: this will be the concern of the one who, from our time onward, becomes the Lord of Karma; it will be the concern of Christ.

[ 12 ] However, this transfer of the office of judge over human deeds to Christ is linked to the fact that this Christ also intervenes directly in human affairs. Not in a physical body, but nevertheless for those people who will increasingly acquire the ability to perceive this Christ—for them, Christ will intervene in the destiny of humanity on Earth. There will be, for example, people who will have done this or that, who will have performed some deed. Then these people will feel the urge—and there will be more and more such people in the next three millennia, beginning with our twentieth century—to step back somewhat from their deed. For something like a strange dream image will arise within them. In this dream image, they will see, as if in a dream, something that looks as though it were their own deed, yet they will not be able to remember ever having done what appears in this image. But those who have not prepared themselves for the fact that something like this will come in the development of humanity will be able to regard it only as the product of a wild imagination or a sick soul. But those who have sufficiently prepared themselves through the new revelation coming to humanity in our time through spiritual science—through this third revelation of the last human cycle—will know that these are the emerging new abilities of human beings, abilities that can look into the spiritual world. And they will know that the image that appears before their soul is a foreshadowing of that karmic deed which must take place at some point in the future—whether in this life or, more specifically, in the next earthly lives—in order to create a balance for what we have committed. In short, people will gradually acquire the ability to see the karmic balance—the balancing act that must occur in the future—as if in a dream image. From this fact, we can already see, as may be said even in our time, much like John the Baptist said at the Jordan: Change the state of your souls, for new times are coming in which new human abilities will awaken.

[ 13 ] But what has been said about a certain perception of karma will become even more evident in the coming humanity through the fact that, in such vision, one will directly encounter here and there the etheric form of Christ—the real Christ as he lives on the astral plane, not incarnated in a physical body, yet appearing on Earth— visible to the newly awakened faculties of human beings as a guide, as a protector of those who need counsel, help, or comfort in the loneliness of their lives. There will come times when people, let us say, will feel saddened and miserable because of this or that. Times will increasingly become such that what one person offers as help to another will have less and less significance and value, because the power of individuality, the individual life of the human being, is growing ever more, while it becomes ever less common—as was directly the case in ancient times—for one person to be able to helpfully influence the soul of another. Instead, however, the great Counselor will appear here and there as an etheric figure.

[ 14 ] The best advice that can be given to us for the future is to strengthen and fortify our souls so that we may come to understand more and more as we move toward the future, whether in this very incarnation—which is certainly the case for today’s youth— or in the next incarnation—that humanity’s newly awakened abilities may come to recognize the great Guide, who will also be the Judge of Karma for the coming humanity, the Christ in his new form.

[ 15 ] For those who are already preparing for this Christ event of the twentieth century, it will make no difference whether, when this Christ event occurs on a comprehensive scale, they are incarnated in a physical body or have passed through the gate of death. For even those who have passed through the gate of death, if they have prepared themselves here for the Christ Event, will be able to attain the proper understanding of and relationship to the Christ Event after death; but not those who have carelessly passed by the third great proclamation for humanity, Theosophy. For the preparation for the Christ Event must be gained here in the physical body. Those who pass through the gate of death without having turned their gaze toward Theosophy in the present incarnation will have to wait until the next incarnation before they can gain the proper understanding of the Christ Event. Indeed, whoever has never heard of this Christ event on the physical plane cannot gain understanding between death and rebirth; such a person must then wait until they are prepared for it again on the physical plane.

[ 16 ] Thus, regardless of when the human being dies in its present incarnation, it stands before the great event that has been foreshadowed, before Christ’s transition to his role as judge, before the possibility that Christ, in his etheric body, will intervene directly in human evolution from the astral plane, become visible among people, and appear here and there.

[ 17 ] But this is the peculiarity of human development: that old human characteristics, which are not so closely connected with spiritual development, are losing their significance more and more. If we survey human development since the Atlantean catastrophe, we can say: Of the great differences that were in the making during the Atlantean era, the differences we call racial differences have become ingrained in present-day humanity, and in a certain sense we can still speak of an ancient Indian race, a primordial Persian race, an Egyptian race, a Greco-Latin race; even in our own time we can speak of a kind of fifth race. But already now the concept of race ceases to have any real meaning in relation to the development of humanity. It will not be as it was, for example, in earlier times, that for what follows our own as the sixth cultural epoch, the spread of this culture essentially takes place from some geographical center; rather, what is important is that Theosophy is spreading among humanity, that it —as was said at its inception, when people still had a rather vague understanding of what the Theosophical Movement requires—must be a teaching without distinction of race, nation, or gender. From all races, those who have passed through Theosophy will come for the sixth cultural epoch and establish a new cultural epoch across the Earth, one that is no longer founded on a concept of race, in relation to which the concept of race no longer holds any significance. In short, that which has meaning in the world of Maya, of outer spatiality, is fading away. We must gradually learn to understand this as we continue to develop with the Theosophical Movement. This was not yet understood in the beginning. That is why we see how Olcott’s otherwise so commendable book *The Buddhist Catechism*, when we read through it, evokes the impression that races always unfold in the same way as wheels. But these concepts are losing their significance for the time to come, and we must be clear that these early stages of the Theosophical Movement are outdated and that, for the sixth cultural epoch, we can no longer attach any real meaning to the concept of race.

[ 18 ] Thus, everything that is spatially limited will lose its significance. Therefore, anyone who understands the full meaning of human development can also understand that the appearance of the Christ, as it approaches over the next three millennia, must not be such that the Christ is confined to a spatially limited body, which would inevitably be restricted to a specific territory. Even if means of transportation had advanced as much as they have, and someone in South America were to need help while the Christ were in Europe, if the Christ were confined to a physical body, he would at least have to travel to South America by balloon if immediate aid were to be provided there. Even if the speeds of traversing space can be imagined in any number of ways: what Christ will have to accomplish upon his return to Earth as aid to humanity will never be limited to what a being can accomplish in a physical body. Nor will it be limited to the fact that the Christ can be in only one place at a time: He will be able to help in one place and in another place at the same time. Because the spiritual being is not bound by the laws of space, the one who can be helped by the Christ in His immediate manifestation will be able to receive His help at one end of the earth just as much as the one who is to be helped at the other end. The new manifestation of the Christ is not bound by spatial limits nor by a fleshly, physical body. Only those who refuse to understand the progress of humanity toward spirituality—that which gradually transforms all significant events into spirituality—only they can declare precisely what is meant by the Christ-being to be bound to the physical body.

[ 19 ] With this, however, my dear Theosophical friends, we have already characterized the state of affairs regarding the third revelation, and how that which is already emerging must appear in this third revelation for the purpose of elucidating and explaining the Gospel. The Gospel is the language; theosophy, in its relationship to the Gospel, is the intellectual content of the Gospel. Just as language relates to a child’s full consciousness, so does the Gospel, as it has been proclaimed, relate to the new revelation that comes directly from the spiritual world—to what theosophy is to become for humanity.

[ 20 ] We must be aware, my dear Theosophical friends, that we do indeed have a certain task—a task of understanding—when we first sense our connection to Theosophy from the depths of the soul and then feel it more and more clearly. We must regard it, so to speak, as a distinction bestowed by the World Spirit, as a grace from the creative, guiding World Spirits, when our hearts drive us today toward this new proclamation, which joins the proclamations from Sinai and the Jordan as a third. This is the task of this new proclamation: to enable us to recognize the whole human being, to point out to us deeply and ever more deeply that what the human being is initially conscious of is enveloped by other aspects of human nature, which, however, have their significance for the entire life of the human being. And it is necessary that our friends come to know, from the most diverse points of view, what the aspects of the human being are.

[ 21 ] Today, starting from the innermost being of the human being, we would like to say a few words about this essence of the human being. Our friends know, first of all, that when we start with the “I”—the very core of the human being’s being—we find, as the next layer, what we have more or less abstractly called the astral body. Moving further outward, we find the so-called etheric body, and still further outward, the physical body. However, when we look at real life, we can speak of these human sheaths in yet another way. And today we want to draw directly from life itself—though this can only be recognized through the concepts of occultism, it can be understood through an unbiased observation of life.

[ 22 ] Today, there are even some who, having become arrogant and haughty due to what is called a scientific worldview, claim: The age of faith is long past; faith belongs to humanity’s childhood stage; today, humanity has advanced to the realm of knowledge; today, one must know everything and can no longer simply believe.

[ 23 ] Well, that may all sound reasonable enough, but, my dear Theosophical friends, there is really no logic to it, for when it comes to such matters, one must raise many other questions besides the mere question of whether, in the course of evolution, knowledge has now reached humanity through external science. One must raise the other question: Does the fact of faith as such mean anything to humanity? Is it not perhaps part of human nature to believe? It could, of course, very well be that through this or that, people want to renounce or cast off faith. But just as people are sometimes permitted to run amok with their physical health for a short time without the damage becoming immediately apparent, so it could very well be—and indeed it is—that people may cast faith aside as one of their fathers’ obsolete legacies. But this is precisely like people recklessly squandering their health for a while and exhausting their old reserves of strength. When people today cast their faith aside as the outdated heritage of their fathers, they are nevertheless drawing upon the old spiritual assets of faith—inherited through traditions and customs—to sustain the vital forces of their souls. It does not depend on the individual at all whether to cast off faith or not, for faith represents a number of forces in the human soul, a sum of forces that belong to the soul’s vital forces. It does not depend at all on whether we want to believe or not, but on the fact that we must possess the forces expressed by the word “faith” as vital forces of the soul; that the soul withers, becomes desolate, and grows lonely if it cannot believe anything.

[ 24 ] Incidentally, there were also people who, without any knowledge of the natural sciences, were far wiser than those who espouse the scientific worldview today. They did not say, as is commonly believed: “I believe what I do not know”—but rather: “I believe what I know, all the more so.” - Knowledge is merely the foundation of faith. We must know so that we can increasingly rise to the powers that are the forces of faith within the human soul. We must have within our soul that which can look toward a supersensible world—that which directs all our thoughts and ideas toward a supersensible world. If we do not possess these powers—which the word “faith” expresses—then something within us withers; we become barren, drying up like autumn leaves. Humanity might manage for a while, but then it will no longer be possible. And if humanity were truly to lose its faith, it would see within the next few decades what that would mean for its development. Then, due to the loss of the powers of faith, people would have to go about their lives in such a way that no one would really know what to do with themselves to find their way in life, that no one could actually survive in the world because they would be filled with fear, worry, and anxiety about this and that. In short, that life which is meant to spring forth fresh in our souls can only be given to us through the powers of faith.

[ 25 ] This is so because, in the hidden depths of our being—at first imperceptible to our outer consciousness—there lies something in which our true self is embedded. And that in which our I rests, which asserts itself immediately if we do not enliven it, is what we can call that human shell in which the forces of faith are alive, what we can call the soul of faith or, if you will, the body of faith. And this is the very same thing we have hitherto referred to more abstractly as the astral body. The forces of faith are the most important forces of the astral body, and just as the term “astral body” is correct, so too is the term “body of faith.”

[ 26 ] A second force that must exist in the hidden depths of the human being, my dear Theosophical friends, is that which is expressed by the word “love.” Love is not only something that binds people together through appropriate bonds, but also something that the individual human being needs. The person who cannot develop the power of love becomes desolate and withers away in their very being. Just imagine a person who is so full of selfishness that they cannot love. It is, in essence—even if such people exist only to a certain degree and can thus be observed—quite sad to see such figures who cannot love, who spend their lives in some incarnation without generating within themselves that living warmth that is produced only when we are able to love something, this or that in the world. There is something quite sad about seeing such figures, who are incapable of this, striding through the world in their barrenness and dryness; for the power of love is a life force that kindles and keeps alive something that lies even deeper within our being—a force even deeper than faith itself.

[ 27 ] And just as we are embedded in a body of faith—which we also call the astral body from other perspectives—so too are we embedded in a body of love, which we have come to know in theosophy as the etheric or life body. For the forces that initially rise up to us from the depths of our being through our etheric body are the forces that express themselves in the fact that human beings can love—love at every stage of their existence. If a human being could completely remove the power of love from their being—which even the most selfish person cannot do, for, thank God, the ability to love something is part of what a human being can strive for even in a selfish way; let us say, to use an obvious example, that when someone who can no longer love anything else often begins, when he becomes quite miserly, to love money, and thus at least replaces a benevolent power of love with a power of love arising from thoroughgoing selfishness— then this shell, which is sustained by the forces of love, would shrink completely if there were absolutely no love left in the human being, and the human being would indeed have to die of a lack of love. The human being would truly die physically from a lack of love. The shrinking of the forces of love is the same thing we can call the shrinking of the forces of the etheric body, for the etheric body is at the same time the body of love.

[ 28 ] Thus, my dear Theosophical friends, at the center of the human being lies the central core of the being, the I. Surrounding this I is its next layer, the body of faith, and surrounding the body of faith, in turn, is the body of love.

[ 29 ] If we continue, we come to another class of forces that we need in life. If we cannot have these forces—if we are simply unable to have them—then, yes, then this is expressed in our outward humanity in a very significant way. What we need in life as the most vitalizing forces are the forces of hope and confidence in the future. Without hope, a human being cannot take a single step in existence, insofar as it pertains to the physical world. People, however, sometimes have strange excuses when, for example, they refuse to acknowledge that it is, in a certain sense, necessary for human beings to know what happens between death and birth. They say: Why do we need to know that? We don’t even know what will happen to us tomorrow morning—why should we bother acquiring knowledge about what happens between death and birth?

[ 30 ] Do we really not know what tomorrow will bring? There is something we do not know about tomorrow that is significant for the details of our spiritual life. To put it more bluntly: We may not know whether we will still be physically alive. But one thing we do know: provided we are physically alive, the next day will have a morning, noon, and evening just as today does. And if we have made a table today as a carpenter, it will be there the next day; and if we have made boots today, someone will be able to wear them the next day; and if we have sown seeds, we know that they will sprout next year. We know exactly what we need to know about the future. If it were not the case that the events of the future unfold in a rhythmic manner, in a way that can be anticipated, life in the physical world would be impossible. Would anyone make a table today if they could not be sure it would not be destroyed overnight? Would they plant seeds if they had no idea what would become of them next year? It is precisely for physical life that we need hope, for hope holds all physical life together and sustains it.

[ 31 ] Nothing can happen on the outer physical plane without hope. Therefore, the forces of hope are also connected to the outermost layer of our human being, to our physical body. Just as the forces of faith are to the astral body and the forces of love are to the etheric body, so are the forces of hope to the physical body. Therefore, a person who could not hope, a person who must despair of what they must assume for the future, would go through the world in such a way that it would be clearly noticeable in their physical body. Nothing expresses itself as much as hopelessness in the deep furrows, in the life-destroying forces of our physical body. We can say: Our central core of being is enveloped by the body of faith or astral body, by the body of love or etheric body, and by the body of hope, the physical body. And only then do we grasp the physical body in its true significance when we consider what it is: that in truth it does not possess external physical forces of attraction or repulsion—that is the materialistic view—but rather what we know in our concepts as forces of hope. That is in truth what is within our physical body. Hope builds up our physical body, not forces of attraction and repulsion. It is precisely in this regard that we can see that the new revelation—theosophical or of Spiritual Science—gives us the truth.

[ 32 ] What does this spiritual science offer us? By introducing us to the all-encompassing law of karma, to the law of repeated earthly lives, it gives us—in the spiritual realm—the same sense of hope that the awareness that the sun will rise tomorrow and that seeds will grow into plants gives us on the physical plane. It shows us that what can still be seen by us on the physical plane as that which is perishing, as that which is being reduced to dust when we pass through the gate of death, that this physical body will be rebuilt in a new life by the forces that permeate us as forces of hope when we understand karma. Spiritual science, theosophy, endows humanity with the strongest forces of hope.

[ 33 ] If this Theosophy were rejected by people as a new revelation in the present age, people would naturally reappear on Earth in future lives. For life does not cease simply because people are unaware of the laws of this life. People would be reincarnated, but something very strange would come to pass in these human reincarnations. For in these reincarnations, people would gradually become a race with wrinkled and withered bodies, a race that would eventually have bodies so feeble on this Earth that people would no longer be able to perform any tasks. In short, a process of dying off and withering would come upon humanity in future incarnations, were it not for the consciousness—and from there, the most hidden depths of the human being down to the physical body—being enlivened by that strong hope which comes to us through the certainty of the knowledge we gain from the law of karma and from the law of repeated earthly lives. Humanity is already tending to produce withering, decaying bodies—bodies that in the future would become increasingly rickety, even in terms of the skeletal system. The new revelation will bring strength to the bones and vitality to the nerves; it will assert itself not merely as a theory, but as life-giving forces, above all as life-giving forces of hope.

[ 34 ] Faith, love, and hope are three aspects of human nature that are integral to overall health and life, without which a person cannot exist. And just as a dark room cannot be a workspace if it is not illuminated, so the human being cannot exist in its fourfold nature if its three sheaths are not permeated, infused, and energized by faith, love, and hope—by those forces that are the fundamental powers of our astral body, our etheric body, and our physical body. And consider, my dear Theosophical friends, just this one instance regarding the manner in which the new revelation, which permeates the old language with its spiritual content, is entering the world! Do not the three wondrous words rise up to us from the Gospel revelation, resounding through the ages, so to speak, as words of wisdom: Faith, Love, Hope! But they have not been understood in their full context for human life, so little understood that only in some regions is the correct order observed. One does indeed sometimes say: Faith, Love, Hope, because that corresponds to the correct order, but the conceptual content has been so little understood that one often says: Faith, Hope, Love, which is wrong, because one cannot say: astral body, physical body, etheric body, when one wants to list them in order. This has been jumbled up in much the same way as a child who has not yet grasped the conceptual content of language sometimes mixes things up in speech.

[ 35 ] This is true of everything related to the Second Revelation; it is permeated by its spiritual content. This is what we have sought to achieve, for example, in our explanation of the Gospels. What have these Gospels been up to now? Something that could edify people, that could fill them with great, powerful emotions, that could give humanity an understanding of the spirit and feeling of the Mystery of Golgotha. But just take the very simple fact that we have even begun to think about the Gospels at all! And as soon as we began to think, we immediately found contradictions, and only spiritual science will show how these contradictions can be explained. Only now will we begin to allow what has been given to humanity in the Gospels as a language of the supersensible worlds to take effect on the soul as a content of thought. With this, we have pointed to the very important and essential aspect of our time: the new appearance of Christ in the etheric body, which, precisely because of the whole character of our time, must not be bound to a physical body. We have pointed to the fact that Christ appears on earth in his office as Judge, as it were, in contrast to the suffering Christ of Golgotha as the triumphant Christ, as the Lord of Karma, who has already been foreshadowed by those who have depicted the Christ of the Last Judgment. If one paints or depicts this in pictures, one presents something that will take place at a specific moment in time. In truth, this is something that begins in the twentieth century and continues until the end of the world. The Judgment begins in our twentieth century, that is, the order of karma. And then we have seen how infinitely important it is for our time that this revelation comes to humanity, so that even things like faith, love, and hope can be truly appreciated.

[ 36 ] And now, my dear Theosophical friends, may those who can only ever believe in the material world do, for the time being, what many people do today with regard to the events in Palestine. While John the Baptist said: Change the state of your souls, for the kingdoms of heaven have drawn near; accept the human ego, which no longer needs to renounce itself in order to enter the spiritual world —this makes it clear and unambiguous what is at stake, stating that the time has come with the events in Palestine, where the supersensible can shine into the human ego, so that the heavens have descended down to the human ego—whereas formerly the ego had to plunge into the unconscious to reach them—those who interpret everything materially say: Yes, Christ, taking into account the weaknesses and faults, the prejudices of his time, proclaimed just as the gullible of his time did: The thousand-year kingdom would be realized, or a great earthly catastrophe would come. But that did not come at all.

[ 37 ] It was indeed a catastrophe—one that has truly come to pass—but it is perceptible only to the spirit. Those who are gullible, those who are superstitious, those who believe that Christ proclaimed a literal descent from the clouds—these are the materialistic interpreters of what Christ meant. So there may well be people today who interpret what is to be grasped in the spirit in material terms, and if it does not come to pass materially, then they think of the matter just as people thought of the events surrounding the realization of the millennial kingdom. How is it that today some look upon the Christ event almost with pity and say: Well, Christ was, in this respect, also influenced by the beliefs of his time; he thought the Kingdom of Heaven would soon come to earth. That was a weakness on Christ’s part, they say, and then one saw—even great theologians say this—that the Kingdom of Heaven did not come down to earth after all.

[ 38 ] It may well be that people will react to our new revelation in such a way that, after some time—when the enhancement of human abilities is already in full swing—they will say: “Well, nothing has come of all that you proclaimed!” They will not realize that everything is already here; they simply cannot see it. This will happen again. Theosophy as such is meant to bring together a large number of people until the time comes for the fulfillment of what has been said by those who know the true meaning—how the new revelation and the new supersensible realities will enter into human development in our century and, from that point on, initially proceeding in the same manner, becoming increasingly significant over the next three millennia, until new great revelatory facts will again come to pass for humanity.

[ 39 ] More on that tomorrow.