The Rudolf Steiner Archive

18. The Reality of God's Impulse That Has Passed Through Death

[ 1 ] My task today is to discuss a number of points related to topics that will also be the subject of the public lecture here, but which cannot be addressed in a public lecture in the same way as they can be with those who, through prolonged study in a theosophical branch, have prepared themselves to receive this information.

[ 2 ] The first thing we wish to discuss is something that is, in our present time, of extraordinary importance to all those who are engaged in theosophy and who turn their interest and longing toward it. Although the question we wish to address here has often been discussed, one cannot speak often enough of the theosophical views that are meant to provide strength and inspiration for people of the present and the near future. Today I will highlight one aspect of what the theosophical movement means in the world, and that is that in our present time we have such an extraordinary need to give what we might call our world body a kind of soul.

[ 3 ] World-body! Indeed, just as we can speak today of a world-body, so too, until relatively recently in the course of human development, it was not yet possible to speak of a world-body. We need only look back a little way in the historical development of humanity, and we will find that, until relatively recently, the idea of a world body inhabited by a humanity that forms a whole had not yet entered human consciousness. There we find cultures that formed a whole and existed within narrow boundaries. Among individual peoples separated by mountains, seas, or rivers, who led a self-contained existence, Indian, Persian, and other cultures unfolded, guided by the national spirits of the respective cultures.

[ 4 ] Such cultures certainly still exist; we are right to speak of an Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, and German culture. But alongside all this, when we let our gaze wander across the globe today, we notice that something uniform and uniform is spreading across the entire globe—something that unites the peoples of the globe in a single entity and that extends from the most distant peoples to the most distant peoples. We need only think of industrialism, of railroads, of the telegraph, of the inventions of recent times. In the same way, checks are written and cashed, railroads and telegraph lines are laid across the entire globe, and so it will be with the inventions that are just around the corner.

[ 5 ] Let us now ask ourselves: What is so distinctive about all this that extends across the globe in the same way, so that it is the same in Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, and London? All of this provides humanity with bread, clothing, and an ever-increasing array of luxury goods. A material culture has spread across the entire globe, without distinction between nation and nation, between race and race. And this material culture has been spreading for the past few centuries. Greek culture unfolded in a small area of the earth, and outside this area, little was known of it. Today, news travels around the entire globe in a matter of hours, and who would doubt that this material culture could be called a global culture! And this culture will become increasingly material; our earthly body will be ever more enveloped by this culture.

[ 6 ] But those who recognize the necessity of the Theosophical Movement will increasingly come to understand that a body can never exist without a soul. Just as material civilization encompasses the entire physical world, so Theosophy is to be the soul that spreads across the whole earth, without distinction of nation, color, race, or people. And just as the method of building railroads and telegraphs is applied in the same way across the entire Earth, so too will people soon need to communicate across the entire Earth regarding the questions that concern the souls of humanity. That which will increasingly arise in these souls as longing and questions demands an answer to these questions. And from this arises the necessity of a spiritual movement. Something will then unfold on a grand scale, just as in external culture in the interaction of individual peoples. Like a communication from soul to soul, it will spread across the entire globe. And what will be woven there from soul to soul, we can call an intimate understanding regarding all that is sacred to individual souls across the globe: how they relate to the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] In the not-too-distant future, there will be a deep understanding throughout the entire world of what, in times past, brought the most bitter struggles and the most terrible disharmony upon humanity, as long as it was fragmented into separate cultural regions that knew nothing of one another. What will unfold on a grand scale across the Earth as a spiritual movement encompassing all of humanity must also unfold on the smallest scale, from soul to soul. How far apart are Buddhists and Christians from one another now, how little do they understand one another, how much do they reject one another when they stand firmly on the ground of their own creeds! But the time will come when there will be more and more Buddhists who, from within Buddhism, will be Theosophists, and more and more Christians who, from within Christianity, will be Theosophists. And these will show each other the fullest, deepest understanding.

[ 8 ] That humanity is striving toward such an intimate understanding, toward such mutual comprehension, is evident today in the fact that even within the secular sciences, efforts are taking hold that we refer to as the comparative study of religion. The merits of this discipline should not be diminished; it has accomplished great things. But what does it bring to light by recounting the various teachings of the different religions? Even if it is not explicitly stated, what lies behind what comparative religious studies brings to light is nothing other than that which in religions is childish belief—something those who have grasped the core of these religions have moved beyond: this is what it seeks to appropriate.

[ 9 ] But what does Theosophy seek with regard to religions? It seeks to recognize precisely what scientific scholars of religion cannot recognize—that which is contained within the individual religions as the deepest truth.

[ 10 ] What is the starting point of Theosophy? It is the belief that humanity originated from a common God, and that the primordial wisdom of all humanity—which stems from this common divine origin—has, over time, been distributed among the various peoples and groups of people, much like light refracted into a multitude of rays. To rediscover this primordial truth and wisdom, unclouded by this or that creed, and to restore it to humanity—that is the ideal of Theosophy. Therefore, it can engage with the individual religions. However, it does not focus on the external rites and ceremonies, but rather on how this ancient core of wisdom is contained in this religion just as in that one. To theosophy, the religions are so many channels through which, in individual rays, that which once poured out evenly over all of humanity now pours forth.

[ 11 ] While the Christian of outward confession, who knows nothing other than what the outward denomination has instilled in the human heart over the centuries, says to the Buddhist: “If you want to come to the truth, you must believe the same things I believe”—and the Buddhist, in turn, asserts what is sacred to him, so that no understanding could be reached between Christian and Buddhist—Theosophy takes a different approach to these questions.

[ 12 ] Anyone who penetrates to the core of both Buddhism and Christianity through the new clairvoyant methods comes to know what constitutes the very essence of Buddhism: they come to know exalted beings who have emerged from the human realm and are called Bodhisattvas. And the Christian, too, hears how a Bodhisattva has emerged from humanity and learns to recognize how such a Bodhisattva acts and works among humankind. He hears that among these Bodhisattvas there was one who was born six hundred years before our era as Siddhartha, the prince of Suddhodana, that he ascended to Buddhahood in the twenty-ninth year of his life, and this theosophical Christian comes to recognize that such a being, who has ascended from Bodhisattva to Buddha, need not return to Earth in a physical body.

[ 13 ] Religious scholars also pass down such teachings to us, but they cannot make sense of a being such as a Bodhisattva or a Buddha. They cannot look up to what is actually the core of such a being, nor can they comprehend how such an entity, even though it does not live in a physical body, nevertheless continues to guide and lead humanity from the spiritual worlds.

[ 14 ] But as Theosophical Christians, we can face this Bodhisattva with just as much faith as a Buddhist. We understand this through our Theosophical development. And we say exactly the same thing that a Buddhist says about his Buddha. We understand that, too. The theosophical Christian says to the Buddhist: I understand and believe the same things that you understand and believe. — And no one who has made the effort to embrace theosophy within the Christian tradition would ever dare, as a Christian, to say: The Buddha will return in the flesh. - He would know that this would surely hurt the Buddhist’s deepest feelings and that such a statement would fail to capture the true character of those beings who have ascended from Bodhisattva to Buddha. He has come to know and understand these beings through his Christianity.

[ 15 ] And how will the Buddhist who has become a Theosophist behave? He will hear that Christianity must be characterized in a particular way in terms of its underlying principles. He would say: Christianity, like other world religions, does indeed have a founder. The Theosophical Buddhist would characterize this founder in such a way that he would say: This founder is Jesus of Nazareth. Much could be said about this personality, about what has become associated with him over the centuries. But the Christian views the personality of Jesus of Nazareth differently than the Buddhist views the founder of his religion. In the East, it is said: Whoever is a great founder of a religion has risen to a state of complete equilibrium of all passions and desires—in short, of all human, personal qualities. Compare this with Jesus of Nazareth. Does he display such complete equilibrium? We read that he becomes angry, that he overturns the tables of the money changers, drives them out of the temple, that he utters words of passionate anger. There we see that he does not possess what is expected of a religious founder of the East. We could point out many other things, but these matters are not part of the discussion. What is significant is that Christianity differs from all other religions of the world in that they point to a religious founder as a great teacher. But anyone who believes that the deepest essence of Christianity lies in such a figure does not recognize the essence of Christianity. It is not a matter of tracing it back to Jesus of Nazareth, nor of pointing to a great teacher. The origin of Christianity points to a fact. It proceeds from an impersonal fact: the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 16 ] How was this possible? It was possible because, for three years, there was present in the person of Jesus of Nazareth a being whom we might call the Christ, if we were to choose a word for it. But this name does not encompass the divine Spirit that we recognize in Christ. A human name, a human word, cannot capture the Divine. And in the case of the Christ, we are dealing with a great divine impulse that sweeps across the world: the Christ impulse that entered into Jesus of Nazareth through his baptism in the Jordan. This is the essence of Christianity: this Christ impulse that came to Earth through a physical personality, that entered into the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth, who bore the Christ within his physical form. The Christ wore this physical form because the course of world development unfolds in such a way that it first descends and then ascends again. At the lowest point of the descent, we have the Mystery of Golgotha. And this was necessary because only from it could the power spring forth to lead humanity upward again.

[ 17 ] Following the Atlantean catastrophe came the Proto-Indian epoch, whose spiritual depth was never again attained in subsequent epochs, but will only be reached at the end of human development, during the ascent of the seventh epoch. The Indian epoch was followed by the Proto-Persian, then the Chaldean-Egyptian epoch. Even if one traces the development of humanity only superficially, it becomes clear that spirituality declined more and more. Then we come to the culture that stood entirely on the ground of the earthly: the Greco-Latin culture. There we see the clash between the marvelous—what could be created in terms of the marriage of spirit and form in what the Greeks created in their works of art—and in Roman culture, in the Roman bourgeoisie, where the human being becomes master on the physical plane. But the spirituality of Greek culture is characterized by the saying: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows.”—A dread of the world that lies beyond the physical plane is expressed in this, a dread of the world that man is to enter after death. There, spirituality has descended to its lowest point.

[ 18 ] From that point on, however, humanity needed an impetus to turn back toward the spiritual worlds, and this is provided to it in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch by the fact that something took place during this period that was, in essence, removed from the entire physical plane.

[ 19 ] The Mystery of Golgotha—how did it unfold on that remote corner of the earth in Palestine? In such a way that we can say: it unfolded in an international, interdenominational manner. In solitude, in secrecy, this Mystery of Golgotha took place. The outside world knew nothing of it; the Romans, who were the rulers of the small piece of land where it took place, knew nothing of it. And they were certainly not followers of Christ, and even less so were the Jews.

[ 20 ] Who, then, was actually present when this Mystery of Golgotha took place? Who did the one who was permitted to receive the Christ at the age of thirty gather around him? Did he gather disciples around him, as Confucius, Laozi, or Buddha did? If one looks closely, he did not even do that. For were his disciples already his apostles up to the Mystery of Golgotha? No! They scattered; they went away when the one they had followed until then began his path of suffering. It was only through this that they became his apostles—that he, passing through death, gave them the certainty that something lives that is victorious over death. Only then did they become his true apostles and carry his power out among the peoples of the earth. Before that, however, they did not even understand him. And the one who, after the Mystery of Golgotha, does the most to spread Christianity, in turn understands him only when he has appeared to him in the spirit.

[ 21 ] So we see: Essentially, Christianity does not consist, as is the case with other religions and their founders, of a great teacher gathering disciples around him and having them spread his teachings further, but rather in a divine impulse descending to Earth, passing through death, and becoming the cause of the upward impulse for humanity. Only when the personal element is gone, having passed through death, does the power that came to Earth through the Christ begin to take effect. It is not a personal teaching that continues to work, but the fact that the Christ was in Jesus, that he underwent the Mystery of Golgotha, and that a power radiates from this throughout the entire subsequent development of humanity.

[ 22 ] This is the difference between what Christianity places at the starting point of its development and what other religions place at theirs. When we consider the starting point of Christianity, the task is to characterize what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha. Paul says: Through Adam—that is, the one who, even before the Fall, even before he was actually human, set humanity on this downward path, and who was therefore not really a personality in the first place—through Adam, humanity is set on the downward path; through Christ, it is set on the upward path.

[ 23 ] If all this is to become a true feeling and perception, it requires a full engagement with all the occult truths that flow to humanity. To understand everything that lies in this fact, it is necessary to allow oneself to be inspired to understanding through the most intimate and profound occult truths. Once one understands this, one will find it comprehensible that, even in the regions where Christianity has spread, the highest ideas and deepest truths of Christianity could not be grasped immediately. To grasp the fact of the divine impulse that passed through death, to consider that such a fact cannot occur a second time, that by falling into the deepest point of human development it radiates the power through which humanity can now ascend once more—to think and comprehend all this was accessible to only a few. That is why the people of the centuries that followed turned to Jesus of Nazareth; they sought him; they could not yet grasp the Christ. Through Jesus, the Christ impulse also flowed into works of art. People want Jesus, not the Christ.

[ 24 ] But we are only at the beginning of true Christianity; it is only just beginning to stand on its own. And when people now say: “Don’t take away the personal Jesus who comforts and uplifts us, on whom we lean; don’t give us an impersonal fact in his place”—then people must learn to realize that this is nothing but selfishness. Only when they outgrow this personal selfishness, only when they realize that they may call themselves Christians only when they derive their Christianity from the event that took place in magnificent solitude on Golgotha—only then will they truly be able to draw near to Christ. But this will only be understood in a later age.

[ 25 ] If there were people today who said that Christ should not have been crucified, or that upon his return—since, of course, there can be no question of a return in a physical body—the crucifixion would have to be avoided, this would merely reflect a human opinion and nothing more. These people do not distinguish between what cannot be and what is a very ordinary misunderstanding. For that which entered into the development of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha could only have originated from a divine impulse that endured all the sufferings and pains of humanity, all the misery and all the wretchedness, all the mockery and all the scorn, all the contempt and all the shame, as it happened through Christ. And all of this was much, much harder for a God to endure than for an ordinary human being.

[ 26 ] Nor can one prove the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha in the same way as other historical events. The very fact that the crucifixion took place at all cannot be proven. There are no external authentic documents regarding it. But there is a good reason why it cannot be proven, for it stands apart from the rest of human development. For the Mystery of Golgotha is—and this is its fundamental character—something that does not concern itself with what is directly and primarily related to human development.

[ 27 ] What, then, is it concerned with? With humanity’s descent along a downward path and what is to lead it back up again, with the Luciferic influence on humanity. Lucifer, with all that belongs to him, is not a human being; Lucifer and his followers are superhuman beings. And Lucifer did not have the tendency or the desire to lead people down a slippery slope through his actions, but rather to rebel against the higher gods. He wanted to defeat his enemies, not to lead people down a slippery slope. The progressive, higher gods and Lucifer with his hosts of the lower, restraining gods fought one another, and humanity has been drawn into this conflict among the gods from the very beginning of Earth’s development. This was something the gods in the higher worlds had to settle among themselves, but through the conflict of the gods, humanity was drawn deeper into the world of matter than they should have been. So the gods had to restore the balance once again. Humanity had to be brought back up; Lucifer’s deed had to be undone. And this could not be accomplished by a human being. It could only be accomplished through a divine act. This divine act is to be described as it truly is.

[ 28 ] When we explore our Earth, we find that birth and death are its greatest mysteries. The fact that beings can die is, after all, the fundamental problem for humanity’s quest for knowledge. Death and dying exist only on Earth; in the higher worlds there is no death, but rather transformation and metamorphosis. Death, however, can be traced back to that which entered humanity through Lucifer, and had something not been done on the part of the gods, all of humanity would have become increasingly entangled in a tendency leading to death. A sacrifice had to be made on the part of the gods: one of their own had to descend and experience death, which can only be experienced among the children of the earth, as an act to balance the Luciferic deed. And from this death of a god radiates the power that can also shine into human souls and in turn lift them out of the darkness into which they have fallen through Lucifer’s deed. A god had to die once on the physical plane.

[ 29 ] This does not directly concern human beings; they were merely observers of a divine matter. It is no wonder that what pertains to the higher worlds cannot be depicted by physical means, for it lies beyond the physical world.

[ 30 ] But the fruits of this divine act, which had to take place here on our earth, fell to humanity, and Christian initiation gives people the strength to understand this divine act. And just as the origin of humanity—the emergence from the bosom of the Deity—could take place only once, so too could the overcoming of what entered the human soul at that origin take place only once.

[ 31 ] If a Christian who has become a Theosophist were to present this essence of Christ to a Buddhist who has become a Theosophist, the latter would say: “I would be misunderstanding you if I were to believe that what you call Christ is something subject to reincarnation. No, it is never subject to reincarnation, just as you would not say that the Buddha could return!—Yet there is a great difference. The Buddhist points to the great teacher to whom he traces his religion, but the true Christian points to a fact of the spiritual worlds that unfolded in solitary isolation upon the globe, to something that is entirely impersonal, that has nothing to do with any particular denomination. At first, no one professed this fact; it had nothing to do with any particular spot on Earth; in majestic solitude, the divine power flowed from this fact into the entire subsequent development of humanity.

[ 32 ] Seeking truth in the various religions is the task of a theosophical worldview, and if we truly seek the core of truth in all religions, it means peace. No religion, when its adherent truly recognizes it in the light of Theosophy, wishes to impose its particular ray of truth upon another religion. Just as the Theosophical Christian cannot say that the Buddha will return, for then he would not have understood the Buddha, so too the Theosophical Buddhist could not say that Christ will return, for then he would not understand Christ. But the truth about the Buddha and the truth about Christ mean nowhere—if we do not harbor personal prejudices—discord and sectarianism, but rather harmony and peace. This follows quite naturally from the truth; it signifies and brings about peace in the world. All nations and all religions of the earth can belong to the Buddha, the great Teacher in the highest truth. And all nations and all religions of the earth can belong to the Christ, the divine power in the highest truth. And mutual understanding means peace in the world. And this peace is the soul of the new world. And Theosophy must lead to this soul, which, as the spiritual science of all people, is to reign throughout the entire earth in the midst of all earthly culture.

[ 33 ] Such insights were cultivated in the Rosicrucian schools of past centuries, beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They knew that such insights bring peace into the human soul. And they knew that many who cannot experience this peace here on Earth will, after death, perceive it as the fulfillment of their dearest ideals when they look down upon the Earth and see peace arising among the nations to the same extent that they open themselves to such insights.

[ 34 ] Just as I have spoken here today, so did the members of the Rosicrucian circles speak in small, intimate gatherings over the past centuries. Today, it can be spoken before larger audiences. Those who have the mission, within the Theosophical Movement, to act as executors of what flows into humanity from the Mystery of Golgotha, know that the Jesus who has the Christ within him visits the site where the Mystery of Golgotha took place every year at Easter. Regardless of whether Jesus is in the flesh or not, he visits this site every year, and there the disciples who have attained maturity can experience their union with him.

[ 35 ] A poet—Anastasius Grün—felt this: how an individual descends and visits the site where the mystery of Golgotha took place every year on the first day of Easter. He describes five such gatherings of the Master with his disciples. The first takes place after the destruction of Jerusalem, the second after the conquest by the Crusaders, the third: Ahasver lingering on Golgotha, the fourth a praying monk, hoping for salvation from the conqueror, as sects of various kinds are scattered across the earth and quarrel with one another, while the site of his ministry is overlooked by the one who brought the greatest message of peace to the earth. These are the four images of past visits by Jesus to the site of his ministry on Golgotha. Then, in the poem “Rubble,” Anastasius Grün conjures up an image of a future descent upon Golgotha. What he describes lies in the distant future: this future situation, which he senses as the power of the peace that will then reign on Earth. It lies in a Christianity that is not denominational but imbued with Rosicrucian sentiment. There he sees children playing. They are digging—though this image may still be a utopia even now—they are digging up an object made of iron, and they do not know what it is. Only those who still have distant memories of the long-past strife among people know that it is a sword. In times of peace, people no longer recognize the purpose of a sword and use it as a plowshare. And a farmer digs on, finding a stone object. Again, they do not recognize it. It had been banished from the earth for a while, say those who still know something of it. People no longer recognized it! Once they used it as a symbol of strife—it is a stone cross—but now, as people gather under the future impulse of Christ Jesus, now it becomes something else.

[ 36 ] And how does the poet describe this to us in 1836? This is how he describes this symbol of the mission of the correctly understood Christ impulse:

Whether they know it or not, it is full of blessings,
Standing tall in their hearts, in eternal charm,
Its seed blooms all around, along every path;
For what they never knew was a cross!

The stone cross, they set it up in the garden,
A mysterious, venerable relic of antiquity,
With roses all around and flowers of every kind
Climbing up, winding their way round and round.

Thus stands the cross amid splendor and abundance
On Golgotha, glorious, steeped in meaning:
It is completely hidden by its mantle of roses,
Long have the roses obscured the cross from view.