The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. The Path of Christ through the Centuries

[ 1 ] I would like to deliver this evening’s lecture in an aphoristic style. I would like to present something that I feel is particularly important to discuss with our friends at this moment.

[ 2 ] We have often linked our reflections on Spiritual Science to the Christ impulse—that impulse which has been running through human evolution ever since the Mystery of Golgotha took place. And it is to the Christ impulse and its significance for human development that I would like to direct our reflection this evening. In doing so, let us immediately emphasize that there must be a difficulty, even right up to the present day, in viewing this Christ impulse in the right way, and this is because one can really only view the Christ impulse to some extent if one disregards the various Christian denominations that have developed up to our time, and the teachings about Christ, taking as little account of them as possible. Perhaps you will say: Well, how can one even consider the Christ impulse if one wishes to disregard the teachings about Christ entirely? Do we not learn about the effects of the Christ impulse through anything other than the confessions of the centuries? To this one must reply: Everyone will admit that it would be problematic if one had to wait for the effects of the sun on individual people on Earth until a generally accepted doctrine about the sun had spread. The sun exerts its effects regardless of what hypotheses people on Earth formulate about the sun. Science, too, always emphasizes that it does not yet know what electricity actually is; nevertheless, people make use of electricity. Thus, one can certainly speak of an effect of the Christ impulse without believing that anything in the consideration of the Christ impulse depends on what people have thought about the Christ over the various centuries. That, in turn, is connected with something else.

[ 3 ] The Mystery of Golgotha—the entry of the Christ impulse into our earthly sphere—took place at a specific time, and that time is determined with at least approximate accuracy, for in the West we base our calendar on it. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, as we know, the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of humanity on Earth. What kind of time was that? Well, we know that various ages have passed in the development of humanity. If we consider only the post-Atlantean era, we know that the following periods have elapsed: the Proto-Indian, the Proto-Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin period—and our own, in which we ourselves are still living. These various epochs are characterized, among other things, by the fact that they also possessed different kinds of human understanding and human wisdom; and in a certain sense, a high, intense human understanding and a deep human insight into certain mysteries of the world were present during the ancient Indian epoch. During that time, what we call the human etheric body was the predominant force at work in human nature. Then, in the course of evolution, the etheric body receded more into the background, and in the ancient Persian period the feeling body, the astral body, was the predominant force; in the Egyptian-Chaldean period the feeling soul, in the Greek-Latin period the intellectual soul or emotional soul, in our time the conscious soul, and in the future the age of the Spirit-Self will come. Because such different aspects of human nature prevail in human beings during the various epochs, human beings also approach the world with an ever-changing understanding. The relationship was different in the Greco-Latin period, different in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, different in the Persian period, and so on.

[ 4 ] Now we can observe a peculiar fact, and this fact, striking as it is, sheds an immense amount of light on the matter. We can date the Greco-Roman period—the period of the intellectual or emotional soul—from around the 8th century B.C., roughly from the time of Rome’s founding, up through the 14th and 15th centuries. It is during this period that the intellectual or emotional soul develops; it is here that those forces in human nature come to the fore that are most closely bound to these spiritual forces of human nature. We thus have a span of just over two millennia that particularly develops this aspect of the human soul. Since the 15th century, we have been in the process of developing the conscious soul within this context. We have not yet progressed very far in this, for only when our century and one more century have passed will a third of the time allotted for the development of the conscious soul have elapsed. Then other epochs will follow that will awaken entirely different capacities in the soul; there are seven such epochs for the post-Atlantean era.

[ 5 ] Let us now ask ourselves: Which of these historical periods was least suited to grasping the essence of Christ? After all, the understanding of human nature varied across these different eras. Which one, then, was least suited to forming proper concepts of the nature of Christ? — It was the age of the intellectual or emotional soul, from the 8th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. And it was precisely during this age that the Mystery of Golgotha took place! This fact of human evolution unfolded in such a remarkable way.

[ 6 ] If—hypothetically speaking—Christ had truly appeared on Earth, for example among the holy rishis of ancient India, there would have been a profound understanding of the nature of the Christ Being; the same would have been true in ancient Persia, where the Sun Spirit was taught. There, if the Christ had descended into a human body at that time, people would have seen: this spirit walking on Earth in a human body is the Sun Spirit who has descended to Earth. Something similar could also have happened in the time of Egyptian temple wisdom. But it was precisely during the time when humanity was furthest removed from an understanding of the nature of Christ that Christ appeared among them.

[ 7 ] It is actually not easy to add anything to this peculiar fact that might illustrate it, for one can draw the important conclusion from this fact that, naturally, there is hardly anything to be found about the nature and essence of Christ in the teachings that were formed about Christ at that time, and one will understand that only future centuries will have a greater understanding of what Christ is.

[ 8 ] People of our time—people since the 15th century—might now begin to take pride in our intellectual power and believe that perhaps better times for understanding Christ have now arrived. Such times have, in a certain sense, arrived with our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and yet, in a certain sense, they have not.

[ 9 ] What, then, of the spiritual powers of people today—that is, since the 15th century? In general, these spiritual powers have by no means become any higher than they were in previous eras. In a certain sense, human beings have immersed their souls even more deeply into matter, and they had to do so in order to reach the conscious soul. Thus we see how Spiritual Science, which had been preserved in memory even before the 15th and 16th centuries, disappeared, and how materialism increased more and more. We see Spiritual Science—which we find flourishing in a certain way among individual minds of the Middle Ages, and which, as it were, reached a certain height through individual mystics emerging from the elemental realm—beginning to decline. In contrast, from the 11th and 12th centuries onward, we see something else taking shape. One symptom of this is that people began to prove the existence of God. Now, one would have to hold truly very strange views about the world if one did not soon clearly see what this means. What, after all, does one prove? Usually, that which one does not know, that which is unknown! One tries to prove that someone has stolen something if one did not catch them in the act of stealing. One had lost the inner experience of God; one no longer knew which path of the soul to take to seek God, so one began to prove God. This is irrefutable proof that one was beginning to lose the knowledge of God. The fifth age must be the materialistic age, for it is only because, since that time, man has been compelled to view nature as it presents itself to the senses and the intellect—so that it may be overcome through the senses—that the ego can come to consciousness in all its power.

[ 10 ] If we wish to understand what I actually mean, let us return once more to the ancient Persian period. In the ancient Indian period, this would have been even more evident; it was also present to a certain extent in the Egyptian period. It would have seemed very strange to a person of Persian culture to observe the movements of the planets and derive a world system from them, as Copernicus did. And now I must say something quite paradoxical. A person from ancient Persian culture would probably have been astonished if one had tried to teach him astronomy in the modern way. He would have said: Should I be so foolish that, when I want to walk, someone has to show me how to walk? When the sun travels its path through the cosmos, my soul travels there. Surely I must perceive that. — He knew this, just as a person today knows which path he is taking when his body walks. Based on this ancient insight, the ancient Persians drew a spiral that truly corresponds to the sun’s path through the heavens. This solar path was discovered through inner perception. The human soul felt itself connected to the soul of the Earth and traced the Earth’s path through the Caduceus—the staff of Mercury. The fact that humanity was so cast out of its spiritual environment that it had to speculate and calculate the Earth’s path as that of a planet—that arose only later.

[ 11 ] On the other hand, if human beings had remained unchanged in relation to the external world, they would never have been able to attain full self-awareness. They would have passed through the Greco-Roman cultural period; their intellect and emotions would have been dependent on themselves, as it were, delving within themselves; a state would have arisen in which the soul no longer knows directly how it relates to the world, but makes progress only within itself. The human soul had to transcend this as well and enter the age of the . Consciousness Soul. There, the human being is to learn to live in his ego, and only in his ego. He is to represent everything external as separate from his ego, and everything is to be recognized solely through logic. Thus, the human being is cast out of the spiritual content of the world.

[ 12 ] In the Greco-Roman era, the soul still possessed within itself the immediate, active principle of the intellect; although it no longer experienced events directly in the external world, it still had God within itself. In the new era, humanity lost God even within itself. Aristotle would never have thought of proving the existence of God, for the intellectual or emotional soul still experienced God within itself. It could not prove the existence of Christ, but it still had God within itself. Then, beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries, that too was lost. When this too has passed, humanity will be able to arrive at an idea of God directly through its own power.

[ 13 ] Thus, from the 15th century onward, for four hundred years, we have had human reason left to its own devices, which is incapable of penetrating the concept of God. Something very peculiar happened, and we were severely criticized for having noticed it. In the dawn of this era, in the 18th century, lived the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant did nothing less than confuse the peculiar nature of the human soul since the 15th century with the nature of the human soul in general. And thus he arrived at the strange conclusion that human beings could not possibly arrive at a knowledge of God from within themselves, whereas he should have merely stated that this had only been impossible since the beginning of the 15th century. But since Lucifer had a particular hold on him and made him a haughty man, he believed that this was the case for the entire human race in general.

[ 14 ] One might say, then, that the prospects for recognizing the Christ-being must be even worse than in previous centuries. But that is not the case. For humanity possesses other cognitive faculties than those of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, and than those that are now required solely for a full understanding of the ego. These other cognitive powers lie more in the depths of the human soul; they must first be brought to the surface. But modern humanity does this only when compelled to do so. As long as human nature still had the possibility, on the surface, of attaining knowledge of God, humanity made no further effort to penetrate to its deeper powers. Now, however, in our age, since humanity cannot approach God, it is compelled by this reaction to dig deeper within itself and to draw forth powers other than those that lie on the surface of human nature. This is connected to the fact that we are moving toward a time in which an understanding of the Christ-being, built upon the deeper powers of human nature, is beginning to take hold.

[ 15 ] A few days ago in Kristiania, I had the opportunity to speak about a Fifth Gospel. This consists of teachings about the Christ-essence that are not found in the other Gospels. Through the Fifth Gospel, one comes to recognize aspects of the Christ-essence that go beyond what is written in the other four Gospels. This leads us even deeper into the nature of the Christ-essence. By speaking of such, in a sense, new things about the nature of the Christ-being, there can really be no question of committing an act of immodesty, for such things are only shared when the time demands it. But even what has been said here in Copenhagen, for example, about the Christ-being—which is, after all, available in print in the book *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity* and in various cycles—already belongs, in a certain sense, to this Fifth Gospel. Such things are simply spoken of when the time urges that humanity should learn them. If you take just this one thing discussed in “The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity”—namely, the two Jesus-children—you will surely admit that everything that constitutes understanding in our present age—that is, the forces of the human soul that lie on the surface—not only fails to understand these things but actually rages against them when they are spoken.

[ 16 ] We are thus faced with a new way of understanding Christ, one that will not be based on intellectual reasoning. While it will be possible to understand it, it will be discovered through deeper spiritual powers. If one wishes to gain a kind of preview of humanity’s future in the coming centuries—and in the next reincarnations of those now living—through the lens of clairvoyant research, then it must be said that the soul forces lying on the surface are indeed becoming ever weaker and weaker. Humanity will feel increasingly dependent on the revelations of the deeper soul forces.

[ 17 ] The Greco-Roman era is rightly praised for the fact that the people who truly lived within it possessed a certain inner coherence of character. Fundamentally, this can no longer be the case even today for healthy souls, and it will be less and less the case in the future. If, in the future, one were to teach humanity only what can be explored through superficial forces, then people’s souls would become increasingly desolate, desolate in a strange way.

[ 18 ] Today we have not yet reached the point where religious traditions are no longer taught in schools, but how many are already demanding that only what science provides be taught. In practical life, the demands of these people will become so powerful that, in a very short time, humanity will be utterly dehumanized. Today, people still learn to write. In the not-too-distant future, people will only remember that people in earlier centuries used to write. There will be a kind of mechanical shorthand that will be typed on a machine. The mechanization of life! I want to hint at it through just one symptom: Imagine the level of a culture in which people will excavate the historical truth that there were once people who had handwriting, just as we excavate what is found in Egyptian temples. Handwriting will be excavated just as we excavate the monuments of the Egyptians. But a reaction from the spiritual life against this will also occur. And just as it is true that our handwriting will be to the future what the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians are to us—something to be marveled at—so it is true that alongside this, human souls will strive to regain the direct revelations of the spirit. Outer life will become externalized, but inner life will demand its due.

[ 19 ] People may mock what we call Spiritual Science today, but in the face of humanity’s yearning for the spiritual world, materialists will have to retreat. And so people will begin to recognize Christ in those eras that will have an open sense of spirituality—though in those times, this will come about through a reaction against external life.

[ 20 ] To gain a deeper understanding of this, let us look at the matter from another perspective. Perhaps your hearts will resonate as I attempt to present the following before you. We can look at the image of the women who—according to the Gospel—go to seek the body of Christ, find the open tomb, do not find the body, but find the angel who says there: “The one you seek is no longer here; he has risen!” — He lives in the Spirit. For the one they sought in the material world subsequently appeared to the Apostles and taught them for some time, as exceptional human beings who had attained a receptivity and understanding for him. Thus Christ appeared in spiritual form. And he journeyed in the Spirit through Greece, Rome, up to the Germanic peoples, from east to west and from there to the north. We shall not seek an intellectual, conceptual, or scientific understanding of the Christ-being among the great Roman philosophers, who truly speak of Christ as something they do not understand. Nor, however, will we find an understanding of Christ among the, as it were, stammering Germanic peoples, who, though he captivates their souls, is truly not understood, but dwells only in their hearts.

[ 21 ] And as we enter the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, it is not women who go to the tomb to seek the body of Christ and fail to find it—the body that could be physically grasped—but rather whole multitudes of European peoples who make their way to Christ’s tomb. We enter the era of the Crusades, as people journey from the West to the East toward the tomb where the women once went. And what do these multitudes, streaming toward the tomb, hear?: “What you seek is not here!” —Truly, what they sought sprang from their hearts, from what lived in their souls, but they understood it so little that they journeyed eastward to seek the physical tomb, and only after long disappointments, after much suffering, did they learn: He whom you seek is not here! —What, then, was it that they sought?

[ 22 ] On the one hand, we see the trends toward the East, and on the other, we see European mysticism taking shape in Tauler, Meister Eckhart, and later reaching a peak in Jakob Böhme. There was the one they sought in the East and did not find! He had gone there. But in a peculiar way, he lived there. When we examine this medieval mysticism, what is its most significant feature?

[ 23 ] These thinkers—Eckhart, Tauler, and the others—do not claim to understand God or Christ, but they wish, as they say, to lead a very “serene” life in order to experience Christ within their souls. And the more they experienced Christ within themselves, the more they knew that they wanted to allow themselves to be permeated by the divine, by Christ, in the sense of their time. The Crusaders had received only this message: “The one you seek is not here!” — What they had sought was revived in the form of European mysticism.

[ 24 ] We are once again living in a peculiar age. Not only the peoples of Europe, but also the peoples of America are involved in what we are experiencing. The strange spectacle we are witnessing can truly be seen in thousands upon thousands of symptoms. Let me characterize just one of them—from Berlin. A famous contemporary theologian uttered the following “brilliant” sentence on February 1, 1910: Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to bring me a single sentence attributed to Jesus Christ that I cannot prove was not already alive in pre-Christian spiritual life. — That is very much the way of today. One proves that what is contained in our Christianity was already there earlier, even the entire Lord’s Prayer. This theologian is thus expressing something that is entirely in keeping with our times, and one will hear similar things more and more. What impression can one have when one hears such a gentleman assert that all of Christ’s sayings were already there earlier? I once heard a very well-read man give a speech, and a child was standing nearby. The child was asked: “What did you hear?” The child replied: “He’s not telling me anything new; I already knew all those words!” — In the same way, the theologian hears all the sentences and hears nothing new that might resonate through them.

[ 25 ] These things should really go without saying, yet in the present day they are met only with opposition. For in our time, the belief that an educated person still has something to learn is rare, whereas the belief that one can judge everything on one’s own is widespread. With such a mindset, we have just witnessed a curious spectacle. As materialism rose in the last few centuries, people did not like to speak of Christ Jesus, and thus a “theology” arose that gradually expelled everything divine from Christ Jesus and spoke only of the human being—albeit of a superior human being—Jesus. This reached its peak in the 19th century and found a grotesque expression in Ernest Renan’s famous work, *The Life of Jesus*, published in 1863. He spoke of Jesus in wonderfully beautiful terms and with beautiful language. But even the miracle of Lazarus he describes as if Jesus had not actually raised a dead man, but rather had allowed his followers to report and spread the story that way. It would thus have been a concession to his followers, a sort of hocus-pocus or hoax, so that something of the nature of a sensational novel creeps into what is otherwise a truly beautiful work. One cannot really find any specific reason why Renan uses such reverent words, for the person he describes is truly not someone one could particularly revere. Yet for half a century, this has been accepted without question. This is just one example from the literature that seeks to regard Jesus Christ merely as a human being.

[ 26 ] Now, however, a curious discovery has been made: that much of what is reported about this Jesus Christ would be impossible if Jesus Christ had been a mere human being—especially the claim that Jesus considered himself to be the Christ, that is, something more than just a mere human being. People have come across many things that simply do not add up. Recently, people have found a way to replace the human figure with God once again—but with a God who exists only in the imagination. In this view, Christ Jesus appears merely as a shadow, a phantom, a fetish—but a spiritual fetish. A strange spectacle! For centuries, people had displaced God from Christ Jesus and made him a mere human being, and now we are witnessing that God is once again rendering the human being impossible. Thus it will go on and on, and this amply demonstrates that we are on a path where an understanding of the forces lying on the surface is impossible. This means that people in the 20th century have attempted a kind of crusade in search of the historical Christ Jesus. And once again the answer will come: You will not find the one you seek here. — For those who seek the historical man Jesus in this way will be just as unable to find him as the women at the tomb or as the crusaders who made pilgrimages to the tomb. But just as the Crusaders could not find Christ because they did not seek him within themselves, so too can today’s Crusaders not find Christ Jesus because they do not seek him with the powers that lie within the human soul, because they do not turn to those spiritual powers that alone can find Christ.

[ 27 ] A deepening of spiritual and soul forces is taking place within the bosom of the spiritual current. And while more and more of the spiritual forces on the surface will deny Christ, deeper soul forces will emerge that will seek Christ ever more. There will be an increase in the number of people who will see the Christ who will enliven the etheric sphere, and who will find those who are receptive to this. That is why we speak of an etheric presence of the Christ in the 20th century. Then we will know from our own experience that, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being called Christ has truly entered the Earth sphere, and more and more people will know who Christ is, for they will see him.

[ 28 ] Familiarity with Spiritual Science will deepen the souls to such an extent that people’s eyes will be opened to Christ. A wonderful perspective opens up for the clairvoyant-prophetic gaze! The outer, superficial soul forces are becoming increasingly inadequate, and people will gradually be born in such a way that they will relatively quickly outgrow these superficial soul forces in their inner lives. But an age is soon upon us that will, in a remarkable way, recall the Christ event. |

[ 29 ] In the thirtieth year of his life, Jesus of Nazareth saw the Christ enter into him. A new spiritual life began within the body of Jesus of Nazareth, for the Christ had entered him in place of the Zarathustra-I, which had left him. This was at the beginning of our era. A time is now at hand in which there will be an ever-increasing number of people in whom, from the thirtieth year of their lives onward, not Christ in his fullness, but the knowledge of Christ will enter as if through an illumination. In the thirtieth year of life, a new, comprehensive spiritual life will begin for these people through their beholding Christ in his ethereal essence.

[ 30 ] One can understand our time from the perspective of Spiritual Science by gaining an understanding of this viewpoint. When the souls living today are reincarnated again—many of whom will be reborn earlier than according to the normal, average rule—though for some it will happen even sooner—people will, from a certain age onward, feel something drawing into them through their own experience, something they previously could only know through instruction. They will be able to say: “Insight is entering my life, and I now know for myself who the Christ is; I have gained understanding through seeing.” — Then people will no longer want to prove the existence of the Christ, for the number of those who can report that they find the Christ walking on earth as a spiritual being will grow ever larger. People will no longer seek merely the historical Christ.

[ 31 ] These are the two sides of the vision of the future: on the one hand, a process of desolation will increasingly take hold due to the soul forces located on the surface; on the other hand, as a reaction against this desolation, the soul forces lying in the depths will be called forth. To recognize this, we spread anthroposophy.

[ 32 ] People must not allow the impressions they receive—which usually arise only faintly—to pass them by carelessly, for only rarely do intense impressions occur. Through the spread of true anthroposophy, human souls will become such that they will not carelessly let enlightenment pass them by when it comes, for otherwise it would not be possible to attain it over the course of several incarnations. But the others, who proceed from superficial soul forces, will denounce precisely those who have attained enlightenment as fools, as madmen. A start has indeed already been made in a terrible way. Psychiatrists have already thrown themselves into research on Jesus Christ. The Gospels are being studied for symptoms of madness. One should not pass over such phenomena carelessly, but should come to realize through them that the other side is in great need of care; that other side which represents an understanding of the Christ who entered humanity at a time when he could be least understood and who continues to work to prepare the understanding that will come in future times.

[ 33 ] A person who looks to the future should not dismiss what the future holds with an abstract, general phrase. The future reveals itself from two sides: from the side of desolation, of being absorbed in materialism, but also from the birth of a new spiritual world—not merely in thought, or, let us say, in conception, but for actual existence. For Christ will stand by humanity and become its counselor. This is not meant merely as a figure of speech; in reality, people will receive the counsel they need from the living Christ, who will be their counselor and friend, who will speak to human souls just as a person walking physically beside us. If humanity needed a prophetic foreshadowing back then, when the Christ was to appear physically in a human body, it needs it even more now that he is to come to humanity in an etheric manifestation. Therefore, regard what has been said as a preparatory proclamation of what is to come and must come.

[ 34 ] Do not harbor any illusions about the future. But we are not harboring any illusions about the future when we consider what external material life looks like, when we start from the premise that in the future people will speak of handwriting just as we speak of the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. The last remnants of a spiritual culture still exist; a physiognomy of the soul still appears in writing, but soon the trace of the spiritual will have vanished from external culture just as Egyptian culture has for us. Many things that are still spiritual to us will be spoken of as belonging to a long-gone past. But the same mouth that will proclaim that there once was such a thing as a human handwriting will proclaim, from the spiritual, from the spiritual realm, that Christ walks among humanity once more, alive in the Spirit. People will have to exchange the spirit of mere thought for the spirit of direct perception, of direct empathy and shared experience of the Christ who walks spiritually and vividly at the side of all human souls.