The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today, I would first like to point out that it is very easy in our time to misunderstand the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, in that it is not easy to become aware of how difficult it is for ordinary knowledge, which is sought today, to even establish a relationship, a deeper relationship, with this Mystery of Golgotha. It is very easy, for example, to believe that if you immerse yourself mystically, if you seek a mystical inner life, the God within you, you will find the Christ. Most people who speak in this way in our time and have done so for a long time do not find the Christ in this way. One does not find the Christ by saying, as some who call themselves Theosophists do, that one must perceive in one's own inner being the divine connected with this own inner being, and then the Christ would arise in the human being. That is not the case. At most, what can arise is something that can appear in the inner being as an inner light, but this can never be called the Christ in the right way of understanding it. It could only be called a divine being in general. And just because people today are not accustomed to distinguishing even theoretical things, some mystics believe that they can come to the Christ through what is usually called mysticism, through mysticism that is left to its own devices, as it were. That is not the case. And it is important to bring this home to one's soul, just as it is important to note that the philosophies of the past, from the nineteenth century to the present day, have produced religious philosophies as part of themselves, and that these philosophies often believe they can speak of the Christ. In truth, they can find nothing else – and one also finds nothing else in these philosophies – except that which can be called a divine Being in general, but not the Christ. Take a philosopher like Lotze, who sought a certain depth. Read his philosophy of religion and you will find that he speaks of a divine essence in general, but he does not speak in such a way that he could designate this divine essence, of which he thinks, with the name of Christ. Nor can the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha be found in the paths sought through such mysticism and philosophy. To see this more clearly, let us bring before our soul some of the characteristics of the conceptions of the Mystery of Golgotha. I would like to say, first of all, that we want to bring these conceptions of the Mystery of Golgotha before our soul as mere assertions.

[ 2 ] First of all, if the Mystery of Golgotha is to be at all what is necessary for humanity in its historical development on earth, it is part of the essence of this Mystery of Golgotha is that the entity, the Christ-entity that is, which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha has accomplished something with the Mystery of Golgotha that is related to the entire world order. If we do not wish to use this expression, we can say, to the entire cosmic order. If we do not want to use the term, we can say, to the entire cosmic order. If we do not see a relationship between the being that went through the Mystery of Golgotha and the whole world, then we no longer have this being, then we can speak of some divine being in general, but we cannot speak of the Christ being.

[ 3 ] There are many things that need to be understood, and we will mention a few today. Another thing that must be understood if we are to approach the Mystery of Golgotha correctly is this: what is actually the idea of what Christ Jesus Himself calls faith? Today, faith is far too theoretical and abstract. Consider what people today very often imagine when they speak of the opposite of faith to knowledge. He imagines: that which can be proved by something is knowledge; that which cannot be proved by something, but which one nevertheless believes to be true, that is faith. It is important to man to recognize something in a certain way, to see something. Only when he calls this recognition, this insight, a belief, does he remember that one cannot completely prove this recognition, this insight.

[ 4 ] Compare this belief with the idea that Jesus Christ evokes. I will just point out the gospel passage: If you believe that the mountain standing before you should plunge into the sea, and you have real faith, it will plunge into the sea! — What a tremendous gulf there is between this concept of faith of today's humanity, which is actually a mere surrogate concept for knowledge, and that concept of faith which, I might say, is perhaps paradoxically but radically expressed in these words of Christ! But if you pay just a little attention, you can immediately find out what the essence of the belief that Christ gives is. What is faith for? It should effect something, bring something forth. It should not just awaken an idea, a knowledge; when you have it, faith, something should be able to happen through faith. Look at the gospels with that in mind. Wherever you can find them, and wherever you find the terms “trust” and “faith,” you will find that it is this active idea that you should have something through which something is done, something is done, through which something happens. This is extremely important.

[5] And today I want to mention a third important point. In the Gospels, there is frequent mention of the secrets of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven. In what sense are we talking here about secrets? In what sense are we talking about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven? This is a notion that is somewhat difficult to grasp. But anyone who has studied the Gospels a great deal, especially from an occult point of view, comes more and more to the conclusion that in the Gospels every sentence is built as if out of granite, and not even the flourish of a sentence is something trivial, but something tremendously important. All the criticism that one can comprehend, when it begins with a view of the Gospels, all criticism ceases when one penetrates deeper and deeper into the Gospels from the point of view of spiritual-scientific knowledge. Now, in order to be able to speak to you about this secret, about this mystery, about which there is talk, I want to point out something extraordinarily characteristic.

[ 6 ] I have already pointed out in earlier discussions of the Gospels that significant passage where it is about the healing, or one could also call it a revival, of the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus. We are talking here among adults, so I can cite this, I would like to say, deeper medical-occult knowledge that arises from this awakening for those who penetrate it spiritually. The little daughter is twelve years old. Christ Jesus approaches her – you can read the details in the Gospels – to heal her, who is already thought to be dead. It is strange that one can never come to an understanding of such things if one does not examine such a passage in terms of what precedes and also what follows. People tend to just extract individual parts from the Gospel, always reading this or that, but they are all connected. Immediately before – you will remember – there is a passage in the Gospels where Christ goes, called to the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, where he is touched, his cloak is touched by the so-called woman with the issue of blood, by the woman who had had blood flowing for twelve years. She touches his garment. What happens? She is healed. He feels a power flowing out of him. The word is spoken again, which can only be understood if the aforementioned belief is properly understood: Your trust, your faith has made you well. — Now it is said in depth at this point in the Gospel: She had the disease for twelve years; and the little daughter is twelve years old, lived here on the physical earth for twelve years. What did Jairus' daughter lack? She cannot reach maturity; she cannot reach maturity; she cannot reach what the woman had twelve years too many of. And by healing the woman who has twelve years too much, He feels the power flowing out of Himself. He now transfers this by going to the twelve-year-old daughter, giving her the opportunity to mature, that is, awakening in her the strength without which she would have to wither away, and thereby, as it were, awakening her to life. What is going on here? Nothing less is at hand than the Christ living not in himself with his entire substantial being, but living in his entire surroundings and able to transfer the forces from one person to the other; that he transforms the forces in which he lives selflessly outwardly from one person to the other. This is present. He can go out of himself, actively go out of himself. This is in the power that he is currently feeling, as it arises in him when the woman touches his cloak and has great trust.

[ 7 ] This is why he often said to his disciples: You who are my disciples may learn the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God; but those who are outside may not learn them. Suppose the secret of which we have now spoken – I do not mean merely the theoretical description, but that which is to be done to bring about this transformation – suppose we communicated the secret to the scribes and Pharisees. What would happen if they were able to transform the forces that adhere to the one human being? They would not always transform them correctly. You can see when you read through the Gospel that the Christ does not always assume this of the Pharisees, much less of the Sadducees and others. They would not always use their powers to take them from one person and give them to another correctly, but would cause disaster after disaster. Because that is their mentality. That is why it must remain a secret to the initiated, what he means. I wanted to explain it using a particularly drastic example to show what it is about.

[ 8 ] You see, we have three important things above all. I could mention many more. The day after tomorrow we will say a few more things about it, but I just want to lead over to the most important thing. We have three things that we have to characterize when we speak of everything that is connected with the great, towering world significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will be obliged to speak more aphoristically this evening in order to teach something about our subject, at least to some extent.

[ 9 ] I just said that we have to get an idea of what is implied in the words: the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is something very concrete, as we have been able to illustrate with the example. Now John the Baptist says on the occasion of performing the baptism: the Kingdoms of Heaven or the Kingdoms of God are at hand. There we have this idea. And what does John the Baptist do? Evidently – this emerges from the whole context – because the Kingdoms of Heaven, the Kingdoms of God are at hand, he does the following. He baptizes with water, as he himself defines. He baptizes with water for the remission of sins; and he foretells that there shall come One who shall baptize with the Holy Spirit. What is the difference between the baptism that John the Baptist performs and the baptism that he speaks of as being the baptism with the Holy Spirit?

[ 10 ] Unless one is trying to approach the matter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, it is difficult to understand what is actually meant by baptism with water – I have already described the manner in which it was performed on several occasions. For years I have endeavored to get to the bottom of these things with the help of the means that spiritual science provides. It suddenly dawns on you that the whole characteristic in which John the Baptist confronts us is something very, very significant. What is it, in the final analysis, that John baptizes with? Of course, outwardly it is the waters of the Jordan. But we know that the people being baptized were completely submerged, so that in fact, during the submersion, a kind of loosening of their etheric body from the physical body took place, so that for a moment they could see themselves clairvoyantly. That was the real meaning of John's baptism and similar baptisms. But John does not mean that alone when he speaks of baptism with water, but he means above all a reference to that passage in the Old Testament where it says: The spirit of the gods hovered over the waters. For what is to be achieved through baptism with water in the Jordan? Through the baptism in the Jordan River, it should be achieved that the baptized, in their consciousness, through the loosening of the etheric body, through all that is happening to them, feel transported back to the time before what is called the Fall of Man. In a sense, everything that has happened since the Fall of Man should be completely erased from their consciousness; they should be restored to the original state of innocence, so that they may see what man was before the Fall. In a sense, the baptized should realize: Through the Fall, man has embarked on a wrong path, and if he continues on this wrong path, it cannot end well for him. He must turn back to the beginning, he must, as it were, pluck from his soul everything that has entered that soul through the wrong path.

[ 11 ] It was a trait of very many people of that time - history by no means describes it accurately here - to hark back to the time of innocence, to cast off what the aberrations had brought, to begin life on earth once more, so to speak, from the starting point before the original sin was committed; not to experience what has taken place and established itself in the social and national order since the Fall of Man and up to that Roman Empire or that Jewish Empire in which John the Baptist lived. Therefore, people who hold this view, that one should actually tear oneself away from what the world has brought about after the Fall, withdraw into deserts and solitude, leading a monastic life. This is described to us in great detail in John the Baptist, where he is portrayed as living in the wilderness and feeding only on honey and animals found in the wilderness, clothed in camel hair. Thus, John the Baptist is portrayed as the true man of the wilderness, the man of solitude.

[ 12 ] Compare this with a broad current in that time, which expressed what is implied in the Gospel of John in the most diverse ways. It was said that one must withdraw from matter, one must spiritualize. In Gnosticism this desire not to live with the world still has, I might say, its most spiritual echo. And it found expression in monasticism. Yes, but why was that so? Why did this strong trait of John's — he was relatively young — why did this trait come over the world? The answer lies in the sentence: The Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God is at hand.

[ 13 ] And here we must understand what we said last time about the souls, which have become worse and worse since the Fall, which were less and less suited to be to the human body what they should be to it, which, so to speak, were more and more corrupted. This could go on for a certain period of the development of the earth, but it had to come to an end, then come to an end when this whole development of the earth is seized by the development of heaven, when the development of heaven seizes the development of the earth. Men like John foresaw this prophetically: Now the time is coming when it will no longer be possible for souls to be saved; now the time is coming when souls must perish unless something special happens. Either the souls must withdraw from the whole of life since original sin, which has brought that through which the souls have been corrupted, so the development of the earth must be in vain – or something else must happen! This is what John the Baptist expressed when he said: “There will come one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” John could only save people from the consequences of the Fall by tearing them out of the world. Christ Jesus wanted to save them in a different way; he wanted to leave them in the world and still save them. He did not want to lead them back to the time before the Fall, but He wanted to let them go through the further stages of earthly development and still let them share in the Kingdom of Heaven.

[ 14 ] Another thing that must be understood is: What was actually in the will of Christ? It already pulsates through the Gospels, which lies in the will of Christ Jesus, but one must only feel it with all deep, deepest seriousness. You know, we have the four Gospels. Despite all seeming contradictions, each of these four Gospels contains a certain foundation of facts and truths that were done or proclaimed by Christ Jesus. But each Gospel contains, I would say infuses, this foundation in a very specific mood. And that is where what I mentioned when I referred you to Richard Rothe really comes into consideration. What comes into consideration is that one must read the Gospels differently than one does today: one must read them with that breath that permeates them, with that peculiar mood that prevails in them. One certainly reads the Gospels today in such a way that one dreams into them what one regards as such a general human ideal. During the Age of Enlightenment, people saw an enlightened man in Christ Jesus; from Protestant associations, an image of Jesus emerged in which Jesus is a real nineteenth-century Protestant unifier; Ernst Haeckel even managed to turn Jesus into a real monist of his kind. These are things that humanity will have to move beyond. The point is to really feel with the atmosphere of the time, to feel what is in the Gospels. But that must be felt more or less.

[ 15 ] Take the Gospel of Matthew first. One can ask the question: with what purpose was it written, what does the Gospel of Matthew want? It is very easy to be deceived by all sorts of things that one likes to accept in these gospels, but which one interprets wrongly. Nevertheless, the sentence is in there – yes, precisely because the sentence is in there: Of the law not one jot or tittle shall be changed – nevertheless, the following applies: the Gospel of Matthew was written by its author with the intention of developing full opposition to conventional Judaism. It is a refutation of conventional Judaism. The author of the Gospel of Matthew takes on all of conventional Judaism and declares that it was the will of Christ Jesus to completely abolish conventional Judaism.

[ 16 ] And the Gospel of Mark? The Gospel of Mark is written for the Romans, against that which had developed in the outer Roman Empire, in the empire of the world. It is written against the legal system of the Roman Empire, against the social order of the Roman Empire; it is a counter-writing against the Roman Empire. Those Jews knew very well what they meant, or actually, better said, what they felt, when they said: We must kill him, because otherwise the whole nation will follow him, and then the Romans will come and take our land and our empire. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark were written against Judaism and against Romanism. They are serious works of opposition, not against Judaism in its essence, of course, nor against Romanism in its essence, but against what Judaism and Romanism have become externally, what they were as empires of the world in relation to the empire of heaven or of God in those days. In our time, too, these things, like similar things, are certainly not taken with the seriousness with which they want to be taken; people are not even aware that they are not taken with the seriousness with which they want to be taken. A few years before the war, the tsar who has now been deposed wrote the following words by his own hand on one of his decrees: “I firmly trust that giants of thought and action will arise and will bring about the salvation and prosperity of Russia!” If what the tsar firmly believed in had come about, think of what he would have sent the giants of thought and action to: the Peter and Paul Fortress or Siberia, of course! That is the seriousness that lives behind the words today. But with this seriousness, one does not understand the depths of the Gospels.

[ 17 ] And the Gospel of Luke, the third Gospel? One can grasp its seriousness if one takes only the passage that is there after Jesus in the synagogue let himself be given Isaiah, after he read a passage from Isaiah, and then, following on from the Isaiah passage, spoke the words:

[ 18 ] "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.

[ 19 ] But then he interpreted what he actually meant; or rather, he interpreted the full depth that he meant in these words. And in interpreting it, he contrasted what lived in the words with what lived around them. He wanted to speak from the realm of heaven in contrast to the kingdoms of the world and characterized this by first speaking to the kingdom of the world of the Jews, by speaking in the synagogue of the Jews. He said:

[ 20 ] "You will surely quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And, ‘What was done in Capernaum may well be done here in your hometown.’ Truly I tell you, no prophet will be honored by his hometown. There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the sky held back rain for three and a half years and there was a great famine in the land; but Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a widow in Sarepta in the land of Sidon. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.

[ 21 ] Not one of the Jews was cleansed and healed by either Elijah or Elisha, but those who were not Jews. This he said by way of interpretation of his words, to characterize the environment in contrast to the Kingdom of Heaven. And what happened?

[ 22 ] “All those who were in the synagogue were furious when they heard this, stood up and pushed him out of the city. They took him to the edge of the cliff on which the city was built and wanted to throw him off. But he escaped from them.”

[ 23 ] You see, here in the Gospel of Luke it is not just the complete contrast to the Jews, as in the Gospel of Matthew, not to the Romans, as in the Gospel of Mark – it is the complete contrast to the passions, the emotions of people in general, as they lived around Christ Jesus. Therefore, one must take the whole great, significant impulse that lay in the words of Christ Jesus. That impulse, which did not go with the world, but which went out of the kingdom of heaven.

[ 24 ] The Gospel of John, the impulse of the Gospel of John goes even further. In the Gospel of John, not only a small nation like the Jews, or a great nation like the Romans, or all of humanity, as it has lived with its characteristics since the original sin, is spoken against, but in the Gospel of John, there is also talk against the spirits living behind the physical world, insofar as they have fallen away from the right path. And the Gospel of John can only be properly understood if one knows that, just as the Gospel of Matthew deals with the Jews, the Gospel of Mark with the Romans, and the Gospel of Luke with the people who fell into sin, the Gospel of John deals with the spirits of people and those of the spirits of humanity who fell together with humanity. And the Christ Jesus also settles accounts with the spiritual world itself. — In our materialistic time, it is all too easy to be dismissed as a fanatic when one speaks in this way. One must accept that, but it is the truth, nevertheless! And the more one delves into these matters, the more it becomes evident that it is the truth.

[ 25 ] This significant impulse, which is expressed in four ways, shows us that through Christ something is to be brought into the world that is not in it. The world does not love that. It never has. But this must be given at different times. And it is shown to us sufficiently, especially in the Gospels, that the word of these Gospels is only understood when it is placed in the whole cosmos, when it is regarded as belonging to cosmic events. This is best shown – take the shortest, the concise Gospel of Mark – when you answer the question from the Gospel of Mark: Who is the first to recognize that through Jesus, the Christ, something has come into the world that is a grandiose impulse of the kind just mentioned? Who recognizes it? One could say: John the Baptist. But he has more of an inkling; this is particularly evident in the description of the encounter between Jesus, the Christ, and John in the Gospel of John. Who then recognizes it first? The demons in the possessed, whom Jesus the Christ heals. They are the first to say, “You are the one sent by God” or “You are the Son of God” or the like. It is the demons. The Christ must first forbid the demons to betray him. They are spiritual beings first. There you see that we are first pointed to a relationship between the Christ-Word and the spiritual world. Before people know one iota of what lives in the world through the Christ, the demons tell us from their supersensible knowledge. They know it from the fact that He drives them out, can drive them out.

[ 26 ] Let us now tie in with what I characterized earlier in a specific case, with the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, from which Christ Jesus gave such impulses. You see, if we ask ourselves, according to the method of today's knowledge, what was the special magic power through which Christ Jesus worked, then we will achieve nothing with the means that today's historical science usually seeks when it wants to recognize. We will achieve nothing with it, because times have changed much, much more than one assumes today. Today one assumes: Well, two or four thousand years ago, people looked much the same as they do now. They have become much cleverer, but in general, human souls were as they are now. And then you count back, and you get millions of years. I said the other day in a public lecture: You keep counting the millions of years and you come to the end of the world. It has been calculated very nicely what the individual substances will be like: milk will be solid but will glow. I would like to know how this milk will be milked, but let's not go into that further. Dewar at the Royal Institution presented this a few years ago, by explaining the end of the earth as calculated by physicists. Well, I had used a comparison at the time by saying: Such calculations by physicists are just like someone going and observing what changes take place in the human stomach or human heart in two or three years, and then multiplying and calculating what changes will take place in two hundred years, what the human body will look like in two hundred years. They are just as ingenious: only, the person will have long since died in two hundred years. But it is the same with our Earth. What the physicists calculate so beautifully, what will happen after millions of years, that is calculated correctly, only the Earth's humanity as a physical humanity will have died out long before that. And what geologists calculate back millions of years, that is, when calculated by the same method, as if one took a stomach and calculated back after the child had reached the age of seven, what the child's organism was like seventy-five years ago. People do not realize what they are actually doing in their thinking, because at the times to which geologists calculate, humanity as a physical humanity did not even exist. Because strong remedies are needed against many fallacies of our time that appear with great authority, one must not be afraid to sometimes also use a strong remedy against these things for those who can use them. Strong remedies such as saying: You calculate what a human organism will be like after its changes in two hundred years; but of course it will no longer live as a human organism in two hundred years! As I have found out through purely occult research, one can counter this – I know, of course, that this is considered foolishness by today's science, but it is true – with the fact that, just as humanity is now, it will no longer be able to exist in 4000 years from today, just as a person who is twenty years old today will no longer be alive in two hundred years. For it can be found out through occult research that in the course of the sixth millennium, human women, as they are organized today, will become sterile, will no longer bear children. And a completely different order will arise in the sixth millennium! This is what occult research shows us. I know that to someone who thinks in terms of today's science, it will seem completely nonsensical to say this; but it is so. And so one must say: what history is, what the course of history is on earth, is something about which, especially today in the materialistic age, the most confused ideas are held. That is why we no longer understand the subtle allusions to differently constituted souls that have come down to us through history, even relatively recently.

[ 27 ] You see, there is a very nice passage by the church writer Tertullian, around the turn of the second and third centuries, two or three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. He says that he himself had seen the desks of the apostles, where their successors in various places read from the letters of the apostles that were still in the apostles' own handwriting. 'And as they were read, says Tertullian, the voice of the apostles came to life. And by looking at the letters, the figures of the apostles came to life before the mind. For those who investigate these things occultly, these are not empty words. The believers sat before these chairs in such a way that they could discern the sound of the voices of the apostles from the timbre of the voices of the successors of the apostles, and that they could imagine the figures of the apostles from the handwriting. So that even at the beginning of the third century, the figures of the apostles could still be vividly portrayed and their voices could still be heard in a figurative sense. And Clement I, the Roman Pope who held the papal chair from 92 to 101, still knew apostle-disciples himself, knew some who had actually seen Jesus Christ. We already have a continuous tradition in this time! And through this passage something sounds through that can be verified occultly. Those who, as the apostle disciples, heard the apostles, could hear from the sound of the words the tone in which Christ Jesus spoke. And that is something tremendously significant. For one must above all reflect on this sound, on this whole peculiar essence that was in the speaking of Christ Jesus, if one wants to understand why the listeners said that a special magic power was inherent in his words. There was something like elementary power that seized the listeners, something about the words that had such an elementary power that was not otherwise the case with any other. But why is that? Why, indeed, should it?

[ 28 ] I have already mentioned Saint-Martin. Saint-Martin is one of those who have understood the expression in the words of the Spirit of Christ. One can see that he understands it. Nineteenth-century Masonic societies did not understand it. You see, Saint Martin understands it, the expression in those words, that language that was once common to all people, to all beings on earth, which only later differentiated into different individual languages; it was close to what the inner word is. Of course, outwardly, Jesus the Christ had to express himself in the language of those who listened to him; but the inner word before his soul was such that it was not in keeping with the outward form of the words of speech, but it had within itself the lost power of the word, the undifferentiated power of speech. And without forming a conception of this power, independent of the individual differentiated languages, which is in man, when the word completely spiritualizes him, one cannot ascend to the power that lived in Christ, nor to the meaning of what is actually meant when we speak of Christ as the 'Word', with which he completely identified, through which he worked, and through which he also accomplished his healings and exorcisms. This word had to be lost, of course; for that lies in the evolution of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. This word must only be sought again. But for the time being we are in a development that does not yet offer much prospect of finding the way back.

[ 29 ] I remind you of only one thing. A significant fact runs through the whole Gospel, which must be emphasized very strongly. That is that Jesus Christ never wrote anything down. There is nothing that he wrote down! There has even been a dispute among scholars as to whether he was even able to write, and those who want to affirm that he was able to write only know of the passage about the adulteress, where he made signs in the ground. But otherwise there is no evidence that he was able to write. But quite apart from that, in any case, he did not write down his teachings like other religious founders. This is no coincidence, but is intimately connected with the power of the word, the full power of the word.

[ 30 ] One must, however, otherwise one would be too suggestive, especially with regard to our time, only characterize with reference to Christ Jesus. You see, if Christ Jesus had written, had committed his words to writing, had expressed them in the symbols that language had at that time, Ahrimanic elements would have crept in; for Ahrimanic is whatever is fixed in any form at all. The written words have a different effect than when the group of disciples is standing around and is solely dependent on the power of the spirit alone. One should not imagine that the writer of the Gospel of John sat next to Christ Jesus when he spoke and took down his words in shorthand like the gentlemen here. The fact that it did not happen is based on an enormous power, an enormous significance. This significance can only be fully grasped when one learns to understand, I would say, from the Akasha Chronicle, what actually lies in the words that Christ Jesus always has to object to, especially against scribes, against those who have their wisdom from the scriptures. He has to object to them on the grounds that they have taken them from the scriptures, that in their souls they are not directly connected with that source from which the living word flows directly. In this he sees, and must see, the falsification of the living word.

[ 31 ] But one does not understand the full significance of the fact if one imagines the memory of the people who lived around the Mystery of Golgotha at that time as that sieve of the soul that is called memory today. Those who heard the words of Christ Jesus kept them faithfully in their hearts and knew them word for word. For the power of memory in those days was quite, quite different from what it is today; but then the power of the soul was quite different too. But it was a time in which great changes took place in a short time. This is not noticed today. Not true, one does not pay attention at all today: Oriental history was already written in such a way that people saw in it what they either have today or what they at most took over from Greek history. Greek history was such that it had a great similarity to Jewish history; but Oriental history was quite different, that is, in the Oriental period the abilities of the soul were quite different. And so one has no conception of how enormous changes have taken place in a short time, how the giant power of memory that people had in that twilight state of old atavistic clairvoyance was lost relatively quickly, so that the necessity arose for people to write down the words of Jesus. Thus, these words of Jesus were consigned to the same fate that Christ Jesus encountered among the scribes, against whom he rebelled. And I leave it to you to consider what would happen if some student who only remotely resembled Christ Jesus were to appear today and speak with the same impulse with which Christ Jesus spoke in his time. Whether those who call themselves Christians today would behave differently from the high priests of that time is something I leave to you to consider.

[ 32 ] Now, however, it is a matter of considering the mystery of Christ's dwelling in Jesus himself, based on these very premises. As we said, it is important to go back, in a sense, along the path that has been taken since the eighth council of 869, to rediscover body, soul and spirit as the members of the human being. Without considering this, it will not be possible to approach the Mystery of Golgotha.

[33] Body: We observe what the human body is from the outside. After all, it only appears to us in the external world. And when we observe our own body, we only observe it from the outside. Perception from the outside provides us with the body. And science, what is called science, deals with this body.

[ 34 ] Soul: I tried to lead you to the soul by referring you to Aristotle. When dealing with the soul, it must be clear that Aristotle's ideas are not entirely wrong. For the soul, that which can be called the soul, does indeed arise more or less with each individual human being. It's just that Aristotle lives in a time in which he can no longer fully understand the soul's connection to the cosmos. Therefore, he says: When a human being is conceived, the physical existence arises with the soul. He represents that which can be called creatianism, but he allows the soul to live on after death in an indeterminate way. Aristotle does not comment on this further, because the knowledge of the soul was already clouded in his time. How this soul lives on after death is in fact connected with what is now more or less symbolically - or however one wants to call it, it does not matter what - called original sin. Because what is called original sin really affected the soul. And this had the effect that around the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, human souls were in danger, were so corrupted that they could not find their way back into the realms of heaven, that they were connected with earthly existence, or rather with what becomes of earthly existence. So this soul aspect goes its own way. We will characterize it further in these lectures.

[ 35 ] The third is the spiritual. We find the bodily when we follow the path: Father – Son. The son becomes a father again, the son becomes a father again and so on, the qualities are inherited from generation to generation. The soul, which is created as such with the emergence of a human being, remains after death. Its fate depends on how closely the soul can remain related to the realm of the heavens. The third is the spirit. The spirit lives in repeated lives on earth. You see, for the spirit it depends on what bodies it finds in its repeated lives on earth. On the one hand, there is the line of inheritance. Of course, the spirit also plays a role here; but the line of inheritance is permeated by the physically inherited characteristics. What characteristics the spirits find when they incarnate during re-embodiments depends on how humanity ascends or degenerates. You cannot make the bodies the way you want them from the spirit. One can choose those that are relatively best suited to the spirit that wants to embody itself; but one cannot make them as one wills.

[ 36 ] This is what I wanted to express in my Theosophy when I wrote the passage I read to you the other day about the three paths: spirit, soul and body. Here we have something that must be clearly understood. For one always arrives at the general idea of God by following the path of external observation to its conclusion, by observing the body. By observing the body, one arrives at the general idea of God, at the idea which this mysticism, which I mentioned at the beginning today, and this philosophy alone, find. But if one wants to contemplate the soul, then one needs the path to that entity which is called the Christ, and which one cannot find in nature, although He has relationships with nature; one must find Him in history as a historical being. Self-contemplation then refers to the spirit and to the repeated earth-lives of the spirit.

[ 37 ] Contemplation of the cosmos and nature leads to the divine essence in general, which underlies our being born: Ex deo nascimur.

[ 38 ] Contemplation of real history leads to the knowledge of Christ Jesus, if we only go far enough; to the knowledge we need if we want to know about the fate of the soul: In Christo morimur.

[ 39 ] Introspection, spiritual experience, leads to the realization of the essence of the spirit in repeated lives on earth and, when connected to the spiritual, to the contemplation of the Holy Spirit: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

[ 40 ] Not only is the trichotomy of body, soul and spirit at the root of this, but also the trichotomy of the paths we have to follow if we really want to come to terms with the world. You see, our time, which thinks in a chaotic way, naturally does not easily come to terms with these things and often does not even seek to do so. You know that there are atheists, those who deny God; there are also those who deny Jesus; there are spirit-deniers, materialists. Becoming an atheist is actually only possible if one has no inclination to observe the processes of external nature, of the body, clearly. But this is only possible when the physical powers are too dull. For if the physical powers are not dull, one cannot really become an atheist; one experiences God continually. Atheism is a real illness of the soul. Denying Jesus Christ is not an illness, for one must find him in the development of humanity. If one does not find him, then one does not find the power that saves the soul beyond death. That is misfortune for the soul. To be an atheist is a disease of the soul, a disease of the human ego. To be a denier of Jesus, to be a denier of Christ, is misfortune for the human soul. Mark well the difference. — To deny the spirit is self-deception.

[ 41 ] It is important to meditate on these three terms: being an atheist is a disease of the soul; being a Jesus-denier is a misfortune of the soul; being a spirit-denier is self-deception. So you have again the three significant aberrations of the human soul: soul disease, soul misfortune, soul deception - self-deception.

[ 42 ] All this is basically necessary if one wants to gather building blocks to approach the mystery of Golgotha, because one must get to know the relationship of Christ Jesus to the human soul. But then one must also carefully consider the fate of the human soul itself in the course of its earthly development. Then again, one must consider the repercussion of that impulse, which goes out from the Christ to the human soul, on the human spirit.

[ 43 ] Now, today, to finish, I can perhaps best give you something in the following way as a preparation, so that we can all reflect on it a little until the day after tomorrow, in order to consider the deeper aspects of the Mystery of Golgotha here.

[ 44 ] You see, after being educated, people today look at nature. It follows its natural laws. According to these natural laws, one reflects on the beginning, middle and end of the earth. Everything is considered in terms of these natural laws. Alongside this, we have the moral world order. Certainly, one feels - especially Kantians do this, for example - subject to the categorical imperative: one feels connected to the moral world order. But think how weak even in our time has become the thought, the idea, that this moral world order has an objective reality of its own, like nature. Not so, even Haeckel, even Arrhenius and so on, however much materialists they may be, they think: certainly, the Earth is heading towards a process of glaciation or a similar process or towards entropy, or whatever you want to call it. But they think: the little idols they call atoms will drift apart, but at least they will persist. Thus, the conservation of matter is also explained! In this respect, the current world view is more or less in order. But these ideas about matter do not allow for the consideration: If the earth is once frozen over or has reached the state of entropy, what will become of the moral world order? There is no place for it in the whole of earthly existence as conceived! Once the physical human race has disappeared, where is the whole moral world order? That is to say: the moral ideas to which one feels bound, to which conscience pushes, pushes people, these moral ideas certainly appear necessary; but if one is completely honest, they have no connection with the natural order, with what is really necessary, what is called necessary by the view of nature! They have become weak, the ideas. They are so strong that one organizes one's actions accordingly; they are so strong that one feels bound to these ideas by one's conscience; but they are not so strong that one could think: What you think up today about some moral idea is something that is really effective! For that, something is needed so that it can be really effective. Where is that which makes what lives in our moral idea really effective? That is the Christ – that is the Christ! That is one side of the Christ-being!

[ 45 ] Let everything that lives in stone, plants, animals, in the human body, everything that lives in the warmth and air element of the earth, let it follow the paths that natural science speaks of, and let all human bodies find the grave at the end of the earth. According to natural research, what we have lived by morally would then, well, one cannot even say, be scattered, because that would be too strong a notion – according to the Christian conception, the power lies in the Christ-being, which takes our moral conceptions and forms a new world out of them: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” It is the power that carries over the morality of the earthly world to Jupiter.

[ 46 ] Now, if you imagine the earth as physical nature, just as you imagine the plant, the moral order as the germ of the plant, and the Christ-power as that which causes the germ to rise as the future earth, as Jupiter: you have then rebuilt the whole gospel idea from spiritual science!

[ 47 ] But how can that be? How can that which lives only in thought according to naturalistic conceptions, which is only a conception to which one feels morally connected, how can that be transformed into such reality as that which burns in the coal mine or explodes in the air with the shotgun bullet? How can it be a solid idea, which is so thin as a moral idea? It needs an impulse. This moral idea must be seized by an impulse. Where is this impulse? Now you remember what we said before: faith should not just be a surrogate for knowledge; faith should have an effect. What it should do is make our moral ideas real. It should carry them over and form a new world out of them. What matters is that the beliefs are not just an unproven knowledge, something that one believes because one does not know, but what matters is that in what one believes lies the power to actualize the germ of “morality” into a world body. This power had to be brought into the evolution of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. This power had to be instilled into the souls of the disciples by speaking to them of that which was no longer available to those who had only the written word. It depends on the power of faith. And if one does not understand what the Christ brings in, precisely because the words “trust” and “faith” are so often spoken, one does not understand what was brought into the evolution of the earth at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

[ 48 ] And now you can also see that it is a cosmic significance. For that which we have as the outer natural order goes its natural way. But just as at a certain stage of development the natural plant develops its germ within itself, so the Mystery of Golgotha appeared as a new germ that will become the future Jupiter evolution, in which the re-embodied human being will participate.

[ 49 ] From the contemplation of the Christ-Being's own nature, you have, I would like to say, indicated how this Christ-Being is part of the whole cosmic, how it carries a young power into this earth-becoming at a certain point of earth-becoming. This sometimes comes to light in a magnificent way, but only for those who grasp it in imaginative knowledge. But the writer of the Gospel of Mark did, for example. When Christ is captured as a result of Judas' betrayal, when the writer of the Gospel of Mark looks at this scene in spirit, he sees a youth among the fleeing crowd, clothed only in a shirt. The shirt is torn from him, but he breaks free and flees. This is the same youth who, in the Gospel of Mark, announces at the tomb, wearing a robe and a white garment, that Christ has risen. The place is thus contained in the Gospel of Mark through imaginative knowledge. There you have glimpsed the meeting of the old body of Christ Jesus and the new germ of a new world order in imaginative knowledge.

[ 50 ] Please consider this in connection with what I said recently, that actually the human body in its original meaning is not organized to die, but that it is organized as a body for immortality. And think of this in connection with the truth that the animal is mortal through its organization, but that man is not mortal through his organization, but through his soul, which is corrupted, but whose corruption is taken away again through Christ. Think about that, then you will understand that something must happen to the human body through the real power that is poured out into the evolution of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. At the end of the evolution of the earth, the power that was lost through the Fall of Man, which dissolves the human body, will be regained, will be given back again through the power of Christ, and the human bodies will then really appear in their physical form. If one recognizes the trichotomy of body, soul and 'spirit, then the 'resurrection of the flesh' also gains its meaning. Otherwise one cannot understand it. Certainly, today's Enlightenment thinker will consider precisely that to be one of the most reactionary ideas, but the one who, from the source of truth, recognizes the repeated lives on earth also recognizes the real meaning of the resurrection of human bodies at the end of earthly existence. And if St. Paul rightly said: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” this testifies to it, as we also know from spiritual scientific considerations. If this is true, then the opposite is also true: if the evolution of the earth does not lead to the preservation of the form that man can develop physically within the process of becoming, if this form perishes in the process of becoming, if man cannot be resurrected through the power of Christ, then the mystery of Golgotha is in vain, and so is the faith that it has brought. This is the necessary complement to Paul's words.