How Do I Find the Christ?
Summary
There is a threefold inclination towards the spiritual world in the human soul:
- To know the Divine behind the world.
- To know Christ in His relation to men.
- To know the Spirit in its working in the world.
The denial of the Divine is a physical sickness. The denial of Christ is a soul-calamity. The denial of the Spirit is a sign of spirit-defectiveness.
Man's task today is to find the Christ. The present Fifth epoch in Post-Atlantean evolution began in the fifteenth century. It followed the Graeco-Latin epoch, 747 B.C.–A.D. 1413. Each epoch marks a new development in human consciousness.
The effect of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Deed of Christ, in the Fourth epoch was chiefly upon man's feeling, and, through feeling, on his will. The present epoch marks the development of scientific thinking, and of the intellectual approach to Christian theology and the Bible. But the scientific historical approach will never understand the Mystery of Golgotha. That requires super-sensible perception.
The middle point of the Fourth epoch, the Age of the Intellectual Soul, was A.D. 333. Up to that point the powers of the Age increased; after it they began to decline. But the Mystery of Golgotha, which had taken place three centuries before that middle point, influenced the subsequent course of events. How?
None of the purely human powers of that Age could have understood the Mystery of Golgotha. Even Christ's disciples could only glimpse its meaning, as far as He had enlightened them. Soul-knowledge grows after death, but it was not until more than 200 years in the spiritual world that they fully understood. Then they inspired Christian thinkers on earth, the Church Fathers. Of these, Tertullian is a notable example.
But the Mystery of Golgotha also saved mankind in that Age from a threatened calamity. Certain spiritual powers, hostile to man, inspired the Graeco-Persian thinkers of the Academy of Jundi-Shapur with a diabolical idea. They planned to give man certain knowledge two millennia before it was due. This would so bind his soul to his body that the soul also would partake of physical death, and would have no future spiritual evolution. This was to have taken place about A.D. 666.
But before it could take place, the Mystery of Golgotha had wrought a counter-effect through the revelation that had come in the third and fourth centuries, whereby the soul was drawn into a specially close relation to the spirit. This defeated the Arabian plan to unite the soul with the body.
The effort of Jundi-Shapur, however, had some effect. It left a poison in the physical organism of Western humanity in scientific materialism, resulting in a widespread tendency to deny the Divine. Even the Catholic Church was affected by it, in its denial of the spirit in man at the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 869.
The answer to this infection today is the rediscovery of the real knowledge of Christ, as the Healer of man in the sickness of his thinking. Mankind brings from earlier lives in the first centuries of Christianity, both on earth and in the spiritual world, an unconscious reflection of his past experience of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this, even without direct super-sensible experience, any man today can find the Christ. It depends upon two experiences: that of his feeling of powerlessness in the face of evil, and the experience of victory through the Christ. This leads to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
The ineffectiveness of the physical can be seen in the ineffectiveness of the spoken word to convey real truth. The remedy is the Christianising of the word.
Rudolf Steiner, How Do I Find the Christ? GA 182, 16 October 1918, Zürich.