The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] It is well known that the Gospel of Mark begins with the words: “This is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

[ 2 ] For anyone seeking to understand the Gospel of Mark in our time, even these very first words must actually contain three enigmas. The first enigma lies in the words: “This is the beginning…” The beginning of what? How can this beginning be understood? The second enigma is: “... the beginning of the Gospel ...” What is the word “Gospel” in the anthroposophical sense? The third enigma is now the one we have often spoken of: the figure of Christ Jesus himself.

[ 3 ] Anyone who is earnestly seeking knowledge and a deeper understanding of their own self must realize that humanity is in the midst of a process of development and progress, and that therefore the understanding of this or that matter, this or that revelation, is likewise not something static, not something that is complete within any given period of time, but rather that this understanding progresses; so that, fundamentally speaking, the deepest matters of humanity—for those who take the words “development” and “progress” seriously—necessarily require that, as time goes on, they can be understood ever better, more thoroughly, and more deeply. For something like the Gospel of Mark, in fact—and we will substantiate this with the first three riddles just mentioned—a certain turning point in understanding has only come about in our time, and slowly and gradually, but clearly, the groundwork has been laid for what can now lead to a true understanding of this Gospel of Mark, can already lead to understanding what it means: the Gospel begins. Why is this the case?

[ 4 ] We need only look back a little at what could have occupied people’s minds not so long ago, and we will see how the nature of understanding may have changed—indeed, how it must have changed—with regard to such a matter. We can go back beyond the 19th century and find that, as we go back to the 18th and 17th centuries, we are approaching a time in which those people who had anything at all to do with the Gospels in their spiritual lives were able to proceed from entirely different foundations of understanding than humanity today. What could a person of the 18th century say to himself if he wanted to place himself within the overall process of human development, if he did not belong to those—and there were very few of them in past centuries— who were connected in some way to this or that initiation, to this or that occult revelation, if, that is, he stood in life and had taken in what the outer exoteric life offers? Even the most highly educated, who stood at the pinnacle of historical consciousness, could not see back further than, one might say, the life of humanity over three millennia, of which one millennium—though already lost in a certain misty darkness—preceded the Christian era, and two millennia, not quite but approximately complete, since the founding of Christianity. He overlooked three millennia. When one looked back at this first millennium, the times of ancient Persia appeared as a completely mythical, dark prehistory of humanity. This, and whatever else there was in terms of, one might say, knowledge of the ancient Egyptian essence, was regarded as having preceded what constituted actual history, which began with the Greeks.

[ 5 ] Greek culture, in a sense, formed the foundation of the actual development of our era, and all who wished to gain a deeper insight into human life took Greek culture as their starting point. And within Greek culture appeared everything that originates from the most ancient times of this people and their work for humanity—from Homer, from the Greek tragedians, from Greek writers in general. Then one saw how Greek culture gradually came to an end, so to speak, as it was outwardly overgrown by Roman culture. But only outwardly, for in essence Roman civilization only politically overcame Greek civilization; in reality, however, it adopted Greek education, Greek culture, and the Greek spirit. So that one could also say: Politically, the Romans triumphed over the Greeks; spiritually, the Greeks triumphed over the Romans. And during this process, in which Greek civilization spiritually triumphed over Roman civilization—pouring its achievements into Roman civilization through hundreds upon hundreds of channels, from which they then flowed out again into all other cultures and into the world—during this process, Christianity flowed into this Greco-Roman culture, poured itself more and more into it, and underwent a fundamental transformation as the Nordic-Germanic peoples participated in the progress of this Greco-Roman culture. With this intermingling of Greek, Roman, and Christian elements, the second millennium of human history passed for the people of the 18th century—the first Christian millennium.

[ 6 ] Then we see how the second Christian millennium—the third in human civilization for the people of the 18th century—begins. We see how, even though everything seems to be continuing in the same way, everything is different in this third millennium when we look at things more deeply. One need only consider two figures, a painter and a poet, who, even though they appeared only a few centuries after the turn of the millennium, nevertheless essentially demonstrate how something fundamentally new began for Western culture with the second Christian millennium, something that continued to have an impact thereafter. These two figures are Giotto and Dante, Giotto as a painter, Dante as a poet. These two figures mark the beginning of everything that followed. And what they contributed became the foundation for the further development of Western culture. — These were the three millennia that were overlooked.

[ 7 ] But then came the 19th century. Today, only those who wish to look more deeply into the entire development of the culture of that era can grasp everything that happened in the 19th century, everything that had to change. All of this is contained within people’s minds and souls; very few today are able to fully grasp it. The perspective of 18th-century people thus extended only as far back as Greek antiquity; the pre-Greek era was something vague. What happened during the 19th century, what few understood, what is still little appreciated today, is that the Orient, and in a very intense way, made its way into Western culture. It is this entry of the Orient in a very peculiar way that we must take into account for the transformation that occurred with the cultural development of the 19th century. Essentially, this penetration of the Orient cast both light and shadow on everything that gradually flowed into culture and will continue to flow in more and more, requiring a new understanding of things that humanity had previously understood in a completely different way.

[ 8 ] If one considers the individual figures and personalities who influenced the formation of the Western world—and in whom one can find just about everything that a person of the early 19th century carried in their soul when they were concerned with intellectual life—one can cite David, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, who was just then making his mark on the world. Future historiography will be quite clear about the turn of the 18th to the 19th century that the spiritual content of the people of that time was determined by these five figures. More than one can simply assume, what might be called the sentiments, the truths of the Psalms, lived on down to the finest stirrings of the soul; what is essentially already found in Homer, what took on such a grandiose form in Dante, lived on then—and what, even if not present in Shakespeare himself, was already expressed in Shakespeare in the same way that it lives in the people of modern times. Added to this is the human soul’s struggle for truth, which found expression in the portrayal of “Faust” and which lives in every soul in such a way that it has often been said: Every person striving for truth has something of a Faustian nature within them.

[ 9 ] Added to all this was an entirely new perspective that extended beyond the three millennia encompassed by the five figures mentioned. In ways that are at first completely inscrutable to external history, an inner Orient entered the spiritual life of Europe. It was not merely that the works mentioned were joined by what the Vedas the Bhagavad Gita; not only that people became acquainted with these Eastern works of poetry, thereby giving rise to a nuance of feeling toward the world that differs fundamentally from the nuance found in the Psalms or in the works of Homer or Dante—but something emerged that penetrated through secret paths and became increasingly visible in the 19th century. One need only recall a single name, which caused quite a stir around the middle of the 19th century, and one will immediately realize how something from the Orient penetrated Europe through mysterious channels: one need only point to the name Schopenhauer. What strikes one most about Schopenhauer, if one looks not at the theoretical aspects of his system but at what, as a content of feeling and sensibility, pervades his entire thinking? The deep kinship of this man of the 19th century with the Oriental-Aryan mode of thought and disposition. Everywhere in Schopenhauer’s sentences—one might say, in the emphasis of his emotions—lives what one might call the Oriental element in the Occident. And this was passed on to Eduard von Hartmann in the second half of the 19th century.

[ 10 ] As was just mentioned, this took hold through mysterious ways. One comes to understand these mysterious ways ever more clearly when one sees that, in fact, in the course of the 19th century’s development, a complete transformation—a kind of metamorphosis—of all human thinking and feeling took place, not only in one part of the world, but in spiritual life across the entire globe. To understand what happened in the West, it suffices to take the trouble to compare anything written in the 19th century about religion, philosophy, or any aspect of spiritual life with what belongs to the early 18th century. There one will already see how a fundamental transformation and metamorphosis has taken place, how all questions regarding the highest mysteries of the world have become loosened within humanity, and how humanity strove toward entirely new questions, toward entirely new ways of feeling—how what religion, with all that belongs to it, had previously given to people could no longer be given to human souls in the same way through it. Everywhere people were demanding something that was to be even deeper, even more hidden in the depths of religion. But not only in Europe. And this is precisely the characteristic feature: that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, throughout the civilized world, people, driven by an inner urge, began to think differently than they had thought before. If one wishes to gain a clearer mental image of what is actually taking place here, one must observe how a—one might say—general convergence of peoples, national formations, and national creeds is occurring, such that adherents of the most diverse religious creeds in the 19th century began to communicate with one another in a quite remarkable way. Let us cite a characteristic example that can place us right in the midst of what we wish to suggest here.

[ 11 ] In the 1830s, a man appeared in England who was a Brahmin and who, within the Brahmin community, professed the orthodox Vedanta doctrine that he believed to be true, Ram Mohan Roy, who died in London in 1833, and who exerted a strong influence on and made a great impression on a large number of his contemporaries who were interested in such matters. What is remarkable about him is that, on the one hand, he stood as a reformer of Hinduism who was admittedly misunderstood, and on the other hand, with regard to what he said as such at the time, he could be understood by all Europeans who were, so to speak, at the forefront of their time; that he did not present them with ideas that could have been understood only through Orientalism, but rather ideas that one could say were understood through general human reason.

[ 12 ] How did Ram Mohan Roy present himself? He said something like this: I live in the midst of Hinduism; there, a number of gods are worshipped, the most diverse divine forms. If you ask people why they worship this or that god, the people of my homeland say: ‘It is an ancient custom; we know no other way; it was so with our fathers, and so with their fathers, and so on.’ And because the people, Ram Mohan Roy believed, were under this influence, the most blatant idolatry has arisen in my homeland—a completely reprehensible idolatry, an idolatry that brings nothing but shame upon what constitutes the original greatness of my homeland’s religious creed. There was once a creed, he said, which, though in part contradictory, is preserved in the Vedas, but which was brought into the purest form for human thought through the Vedanta system by Vyasa. To that, he said, he wished to profess his faith. And to this end, he had not only translated the various incomprehensible idioms into a language that could be understood in India, but he had also compiled excerpts from what he considered the true doctrine and disseminated them among the people. For what did Ram Mohan Roy intend by this? He believed he had recognized that within what is expressed among the many gods, what was worshipped in idolatry, lay a pure doctrine of a primal, unified God—a spiritual God who lives in all things, who is no longer recognized through idolatry, but who must once again penetrate the minds of people. And when this Indian Brahmin then spoke in detail about what he regarded as the true Vedanta doctrine, what he regarded as the true Indian creed, it was not as though one were hearing something foreign, but to those who understood him correctly, as though he were preaching a kind of rational faith to which, in essence, anyone could arrive if they turned from their reason toward the one God.

[ 13 ] And Ram Mohan Roy had successors: Debendranath Tagore and others. One of these successors—and this is particularly interesting—gave a lecture in 1870, as an Indian, on “Christ and Christianity.” It is extraordinarily interesting to hear an Indian speak about Christ and Christianity. What the actual mystery of Christianity is remains quite foreign to the Indian speaker; he does not touch upon it at all. It is clear from the entire course of the lecture that he cannot grasp the fundamental fact: that Christianity does not originate from a personal teacher, but rather from the mystery of Golgotha, from a fact of world history, from the death and resurrection. What he can grasp, however, and what makes sense to him, is that in Christ Jesus we have before us an immensely significant figure, one who is important to every human heart, a figure who must stand as an ideal for the whole world. It is remarkable to hear the Indian speak of Christ, to hear him say that when one delves into Christianity, one must conclude that this Christianity itself still needs to undergo further development in the West. For, he believed, what the Europeans bring to my homeland as Christianity does not seem to me to be true Christianity.

[ 14 ] From these examples we see that it was not only in Europe that minds began, so to speak, to look beyond religious creeds, but that even in distant India—and one could cite many places on earth—minds began to stir and approached what they had held for centuries and millennia from an entirely new perspective. This metamorphosis of souls in the 19th century will, of course, only be fully understood in the course of time. And only a later historiography will recognize that through such processes—which seemingly affected only a few, but which flowed into our hearts and souls through thousands upon thousands of channels, and which today all people who participate in any way in spiritual life carry within their souls—a complete renewal, a transformation of all questions and every kind of understanding in relation to the old views. Thus, everywhere out in the world, there is already today, in a sense, a magnificent deepening of the questions.

[ 15 ] What our spiritual movement seeks is an answer to these questions. This spiritual movement is convinced that these questions, as they are posed, cannot be answered by the old traditions, nor by modern natural science, nor by a worldview that works solely with the factors of modern natural science, but that Spiritual Science—research into the spiritual worlds—is necessary for this; in other words, that humanity today, after the entire course of its development, must ask questions that can only be answered through research into the supersensible worlds. Very slowly and gradually, those elements emerged from Western spiritual life that once again resonated with the most beautiful traditions of the East. You know that it has always been explained how the law of reincarnation follows from Western spiritual life itself, and how it need not be adopted from Buddhism as a historical concept any more than, for example, the Pythagorean theorem needs to be adopted today from historical traditions. This has always been emphasized. But because the idea of reincarnation emerged in the modern soul, a bridge was built to what extends beyond the three millennia we have described; for these millennia had not placed the doctrine of reincarnation at the center of their thinking—with the exception of the figure of the Buddha. The horizon was broadened, the perspective on the development of humanity was expanded beyond the three millennia, and this gave rise everywhere to new questions—questions that can only be answered through Spiritual Science.

[ 16 ] Let us ask right at the outset the question that arises from the beginning of this Gospel: that this Gospel of Mark is to present the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” And let us remember that these opening words are immediately followed not only by the characteristic passage from the ancient prophets, but also by the proclamation of Christ by John the Baptist, and that this proclamation by the Baptist is characterized in such a way that it can be summed up in the words: The time is fulfilled; the Kingdom of God is spreading down over earthly existence. What does all this mean?

[ 17 ] Let us try, in the light that modern Spiritual Science research can shed on the matter, to let the eras pass before us a little, eras that contain the “fulfillment” as if at their very center. Let us try to understand what it means: an old era is fulfilled, a new era begins. We will gain an understanding of this most easily if we direct our gaze to something that lies in earlier times, and then to something that lies in more recent times, so that between the two points to which we direct our gaze, as it were in the middle, lies the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us therefore take something that lies before the Mystery of Golgotha, and then something that lies after it, and let us try to delve into the difference in time, so that we may recognize to what extent an old era has been fulfilled, to what extent a new era has begun; and let us try not to indulge in abstractions, but to focus on the concrete.

[ 18 ] I would like to draw your attention to something that belongs, so to speak, to the first millennium of earlier reflections on human development. From the earliest times of this first millennium, the figure of Homer, the Greek poet and singer, stands out before us. Hardly more than a name has been preserved for humanity, so to speak, of the man to whom these two works of poetry—among humanity’s greatest achievements—are attributed: the Iliad and the Odyssey; hardly more than a name. And even this name was the subject of serious doubt in the 19th century. There is no need to go into that here. Homer stands before us like a phenomenon that one admires all the more the more one gets to know it. And one may say: For anyone who concerns themselves with such matters at all, the figures created by Homer—which we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey—stand before our eyes more vividly than any purely political figures of Greek civilization. A wide variety of people, having repeatedly engaged with Homer, have said that from the precision of his description, from the way he portrays things, one might actually assume that he must have been a physician. Others believe he must have been an artist, a sculptor; indeed, others believe he must have been some kind of craftsman. Napoleon admired the tactics and strategy in his depictions. Still others regard him as a beggar who wandered the countryside. If nothing else, these various interpretations bring out Homer’s quite unique individuality.

[ 19 ] Let us now focus on just one of his characters: Hector. I ask you, when you have a moment, to look at the character of Hector in the *Iliad*, to see how vividly he is portrayed, and how he is depicted in such a way that he stands before us as a fully rounded and complete figure. Look at his relationship to his hometown of Troy, how he relates to his wife Andromache, his relationship to Achilles, his relationship to the army and to military leadership. Try to conjure this man before your mind’s eye, this man with all the tenderness of a husband, this man who was deeply attached to his hometown of Troy in the ancient sense, this man who could be subject to delusions—I ask you to think of his relationship with Achilles—as can only be the case with a great man. A man of great, of comprehensive humanity stands before us in Hector, as Homer depicts him. Thus he looms out of ancient times—for of course what Homer describes predates his own time and thus stands even more in the mists of the past—and looms out as a figure who, like all of Homer’s figures, is already mythical enough for modern man. I draw your attention to this one figure. Skeptics and all manner of philologists may doubt that there ever was a Hector, just as they doubt that there ever was a Homer. But anyone who considers everything that can be considered from a purely human perspective will come to the conviction that Homer describes only facts that existed as such, and that Hector, too, is a figure who walked in Troy, just like Achilles and the other figures. They still stand before us as real figures of earthly existence, and we look upon them as people of a completely different kind, who are difficult to understand today, but who, through the poet, can appear before our minds in every detail. Let us once imagine a figure such as Hector, who is defeated by Achilles, as a real figure of one of the principal Trojan commanders. In such a figure we truly have something that belongs to the pre-Christian era of humanity, by which one can gauge what people of that time were like, when Christ had not yet lived.

[ 20 ] I would now like to direct your attention to another figure, a figure from the fifth century B.C., a great philosopher who spent much of his life in Sicily, a remarkable figure: Empedocles. Not only is he the one who first spoke of the four elements—fire, water, air, earth, and of the fact that everything that happens in the material world takes place through the mixing and separating of these four elements according to the principles of hatred and love that reign within them, but he is also the one who, above all, made his mark in Sicily by establishing significant state institutions, traveling about, and guiding people toward a spiritual life. It is a life as adventurous as it is deeply spiritual that we look back upon when we consider Empedocles. Let others doubt it; Spiritual Science knows that Empedocles walked in Sicily as a statesman, an initiate, and a magician, just as Hector walked in Troy, as Homer describes him to us. And to characterize Empedocles’s remarkable relationship to the world, we are confronted by the fact—which is not invented, but true—that he ended his life by throwing himself into Mount Etna and burning in its fire, thereby uniting with all existence that surrounded him. Thus stands before us a second figure from the pre-Christian era.

[ 21 ] Let us now examine such figures using the methods of modern Spiritual Science. We know, first of all, that such figures will reappear, that the souls will return. Let us set aside the question of in-between incarnations and seek them, in a sense, in the post-Christian era; then we gain some understanding of the transformation of time, some insight into what can help us grasp how the Mystery of Golgotha has impacted human evolution. If one can say: Figures such as Hector and Empedocles have reappeared; how do they walk among humanity in the post-Christian era? — then one has illustrated for oneself the impact of the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfillment and the new beginning of time, precisely in the souls. Since we gather here as serious anthroposophists, we need no longer shy away from the insights of true spiritual science, which can indeed be tested against what is outwardly present.

[ 22 ] I would like to draw your attention to something else, something that took place in the post-Christian era. One might again say that we are dealing with a fictional character. But this “fictional character” is actually based on a real person who lived in history. I draw your attention to the figure Shakespeare created in his Hamlet. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s basic character—as far as one can know him externally, but especially those who know him through Spiritual Science—knows that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was merely the transformed real Danish prince who once lived. The character of Hamlet that Shakespeare created really lived. I cannot go into detail now to show how the historical figure underlies Shakespeare’s poetic character. But I would like to address the result of Spiritual Science, and show you here, using a striking example, how a spirit of antiquity reemerges in the post-Christian era. The real figure underlying what Shakespeare shaped as Hamlet is Hector. The same soul lived in Hamlet that lived in Hector. It is precisely through such characteristic examples, where the diversity of the soul’s self-expression stands out strikingly, that one can grasp what has actually happened in the intervening period. A personality like that of Hector stands before us, on the one hand, in the pre-Christian era. The Mystery of Golgotha strikes into the development of humanity, and the spark that strikes into Hector’s soul gives rise within him to the archetype of Hamlet, of whom Goethe said: a soul that is not equal to any situation, and for whom no situation is sufficient; a soul to whom a task is assigned, but which it cannot fulfill. One might ask: Why did Shakespeare express it this way? He did not know. But whoever looks into these connections through Spiritual Science knows what forces lay behind them. The poet creates in the unconscious, because, as it were, the figure he creates stands before him first, and then—like a tableau of which he knows nothing—the entire individuality associated with it. Why does Shakespeare single out certain character traits of Hamlet and emphasize them so sharply—traits that perhaps no contemporary observer would have noticed in the figure of Hamlet? Because he observes them against the backdrop of time: he senses how different a soul has become in the transition from the old life to the new. The doubter, the skeptic Hamlet, who is unfamiliar with the situations of life, the procrastinator—he has, at first, emerged from the unerring Hector.

[ 23 ] I would like to draw your attention to another figure of modern times who, once again, first approached people through the poetic image—through a work of poetry whose central character will certainly live on in humanity for a long time to come, even if the poet himself will be remembered by posterity in much the same way as Homer and Shakespeare are today: in such a way that we know nothing at all about one and terribly little about the other. People will long since have forgotten what the collectors of anecdotes and biographers of Goethe have to say; they will long since have forgotten what it is that interests people so much about Goethe today, despite the art of printing and other modern means, if the Faust figure that Goethe created still stands in living grandeur and vivid plasticity. Just as people know nothing of Homer but very much of Hector and Achilles, so will they one day know little of Goethe’s personality—and that will be a good thing—but they will always know of Faust.

[ 24 ] Faust is once again one of those figures who, as he appears to us in literature and then in Goethe’s work as a kind of culmination, leads us back to a real person. He lived as a figure of the 16th century; he was there—though not in the way Goethe depicts him in his Faust character. But why does Goethe portray him that way? Goethe himself did not know. But when he turned his gaze to Faust as he had been handed down—whom he already knew from the puppet plays of his youth—forces began to work within him from what lay behind Faust, from what was a previous incarnation of Faust: Empedocles, the ancient Greek philosopher. All of this shone into the figure of Faust. And one might say: When Empedocles throws himself into Mount Etna, uniting himself with the fire element of the earth—what a wonderful spiritualization, what a wonderful spiritual elevation of this, one might say, pre-Christian nature mysticism, which thus becomes a reality—that is the final tableau of Goethe’s *Faust*, the ascent of Faust into the fire element of heaven through the Pater Seraphicus, and so on! Slowly and gradually, a whole new spiritual creation is taking shape in what people strive for on a deeper level. For a long time now, the fact has been asserting itself for the deeper spirits of humanity, without their knowing anything of reincarnation and karma, that when they contemplated a soul that was all-encompassing, which they wished to portray from the very foundations of their inner life, they were portraying what shines through from earlier incarnations. Just as Shakespeare portrayed Hamlet as we know him, even though he knew nothing of the fact that the same soul lived in Hector and Hamlet, so Goethe portrayed Faust as if the soul of Empedocles, with all its peculiarities, stood behind him, because the soul of Empedocles was indeed present in Faust. But it is characteristic that this is the course and progress of the human race.

[ 25 ] I have singled out two characteristic figures through whom we can see how the great figures of antiquity, in the modern post-Christian era, are so deeply shaken in their very souls that they find it difficult to find their way in life. Everything that was once within them is still there. When one allows Hamlet, for example, to take effect upon oneself, one feels how all the power of Hector is within him. But one feels that this power cannot emerge in the post-Christian era, that it initially encounters resistance in the post-Christian era, that something has acted upon the soul there that is a beginning, whereas in the figures we encounter in antiquity, we are dealing with an end. Both Hector and Empedocles represent a conclusion. They stand before us as vividly complete figures. But what continues to work within humanity must find new paths into the new incarnations. So with Hector in Hamlet, so with Empedocles in Faust, who embodies all that is an abysmal striving for the depths of nature, who possesses the entire Empedoclean element within himself, who alone, through this profound nature, can say: I will put the Bible under the bench for a while, I will be a naturalist and a physician, and I will no longer be a theologian; he who had a need to deal with demonic beings, which causes him to roam the world, which leaves him in awe but also in bewilderment. Here the Empedoclean element continues to exert its influence, but it cannot find its place in what a human being must be now that a new era has dawned.

[ 26 ] Through this discussion, I wanted to show how a tremendous transformation manifests itself in significant souls—souls about whom anyone can learn—and that this tremendous transformation becomes evident precisely when one delves into the depths. And if one asks: What has happened between the old incarnations and the new incarnations of such an individual? — one always receives the answer: The Mystery of Golgotha, that which John the Baptist announced when he said: The time is fulfilled; the realms of the Spirit—or the realms of the heavens—are passing into the human realm. Yes, the realms of heaven seized this human realm with tremendous force! And those who view this seizure from the outside simply cannot understand it. They seized it so powerfully that the solid, compact, ancient figures had to begin anew with evolution on Earth, so that it is precisely in them that we see, up to the end of the old age, up to the Mystery of Golgotha: something has come to an end that has found its fulfillment, which places human beings in such a way that they stand before us as personalities complete in themselves. But then something occurred that made it necessary for souls to make a new beginning with themselves, that everything had to be reshaped and recast, and that souls who were great appear to us as souls who are small, because they must transform the soul into childhood, because something entirely new is beginning. This is what we must inscribe in our souls if we are to understand what is meant right at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark: a “beginning.” Yes, a beginning that shakes the souls to their very core, that brings a completely new impulse into the development of humanity, a “beginning of the Gospel.”

[ 27 ] What is the “Gospel”? It is that which descends from the realms we have often described in the hierarchies of higher beings—where the Angeloi and Archangeloi dwell—and which descends through the world that rises above the human world. There one gains a perspective on a deeper meaning of the word “Gospel.” An impulse that descends through the realm of the Archangels, the Angels, is the Gospel; it is that which arises from these realms and enters into humanity. All abstract translations, in essence, capture very little of the essence of the matter. In truth, the very word “Gospel” is meant to suggest that at a certain point something begins to flow down to Earth that previously flowed only where the angels and archangels are, that has come down to Earth, that stirs the souls here—and the strongest souls most of all. And this beginning, which thus has a continuation, is recorded. That is to say, the Gospel continues. The beginning was made in that time, and essentially we will see that the entire development of humanity since that time is a continuation of the beginning of the downflow of the impulse from the realm of the angels, which can be called the Gospel.

[ 28 ] One cannot delve deeply enough into the study of the individual Gospels; and it is precisely the Gospel of Mark that will reveal to us how it can only be understood if one grasps human evolution in the proper sense—with all its impulses and everything that has occurred in its course. I did not wish to characterize this for you in an external way, but rather to characterize it for you in terms of the soul and to show how it is only through the recognition of the fact of reincarnation—which, when it becomes genuine research, reveals to us the life course of a soul such as that of Hector or Empedocles—that the full significance of the impulse brought about by the Christ event can be brought before our souls. Otherwise, one can present very beautiful things, but one remains stuck only on the surface. But what the Christ impulse was behind all external events is actually revealed only by shining into the depths of the human soul through spiritual research, by recognizing not only how life unfolds as an individual existence, but also in the succession of incarnations. One must take the idea of reincarnation seriously; one must truly introduce it into history in such a way that it becomes a vitalizing element of history. Then the effect of the greatest impulse—the event of Golgotha—will become evident. And this impulse, which we have described many times before, will manifest itself especially in the souls.