The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within the human being a kind of source of destruction. I showed that as long as we remain within ordinary consciousness we retain memories only of the impressions of the world. We gain experience of the world, and we have our experiences through the senses, through the intellect, through the effects generally upon our life of soul. Later we are able to call up again our memory of the afterimage of what we have experienced. We carry as our inner life these afterimages of sense experiences.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror, but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. An ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects in the course of time the sense impressions we receive, causing one or another impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a spatial mirror, we see behind the mirror; we see into a realm we do not see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can, as it were, cease for a brief time—for how long a time depends upon our free will—and we can see more deeply into our inner being. As we look more deeply into our inner being behind the memory-mirror, then what I characterized yesterday as a kind of source of destruction meets our gaze.

There must be such a source of destruction within us, for only in such a source can the I of man solidify itself. It is actually a source for the solidification and hardening of the I. As I said yesterday, if this hardening of the I, if this egoity, is carried out into social life, evil arises, evil in the life and actions of human beings.

You may see from this how truly complicated is the life into which man is placed. What within the human being has a good purpose, without which we could not cultivate our I, must never be allowed outside. The evil man carries it into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it miscarried outside, it becomes wrong, it becomes evil. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the human I its rightful strength.

There is really nothing in the world that would not, in its place, have a beneficial significance. We would be thoughtless and rash if we did not have this source within us, for this source manifests itself in such a way that we can experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the outer world. In the outer world we see things materially. Everything we see, we see materially, and following the custom of present-day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of actual matter. In this source of destruction about which I spoke yesterday matter is truly annihilated. Matter is thrown back into its nothingness, and then we can allow, within this nothingness, the good to arise. The good can arise if, instead of our instincts and impulses, which are bound to work toward the cultivation of egoity, we pour into this source of destruction, by means of a moral inclination of soul, all moral and ethical ideals.Then something new arises. Then in this very source of destruction the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as human beings, take part in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as one can find in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our earth will one day face annihilation, and of how through all kinds of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will evolve, we must say the following. In the Jupiter existence there will be only the new creation that already is being formed today in the human being out of moral ideals, within this source of destruction. It is also formed out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoity. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a struggle between what man on earth is already bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos and what arises with the cultivation of egoity as the anti-moral. When we look into our deepest selves,therefore, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into its nothingness.

I went on to indicate how matters stand with the other side of human existence, with the side where sense phenomena are spread out around us. We behold these sense phenomena spread around us like a tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them in order to discover within these sense phenomena laws that we then call the laws of nature. With ordinary consciousness, however, we never penetrate through this tapestry of the senses. With ordinary consciousness we penetrate the tapestry of sense impressions just as little as we penetrate with ordinary consciousness the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, one does penetrate it, and the human beings of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. They beheld that world in which egoity cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. There the egoity is dimmed, because beyond the tapestry of the senses lies the world where, to begin with, the I-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence the world conception of the ancient Oriental, who developed a peculiar longing to live behind the sense phenomena, used to speak of Nirvana, of the dispersing of the egoity.

Yesterday we drew attention to the great contrast between East and West. At one time the Oriental cultivated all that man longs to behold behind the sense phenomena, and he cultivated the vision into a spiritual world that is composed not of atoms and molecules but of spiritual beings. This world was present for the ancient Oriental world conception as visible reality. In our day the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of development of this inner yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena, while the human being of the West has cultivated his egoity, has cultivated all that we have characterized as the hardening and strengthening taking place within the source of destruction in man's inner being.

In saying this we are already on the way to suggesting what it is that must necessarily be absorbed into man's consciousness, now and in the near future. If the pure intellectualism that has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century were to continue, humanity would fall entirely into decline, for with the help of intellectualism one will never penetrate beyond either the memory-mirror or the tapestry of the world of the senses spread out before us. Man must, however, acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must acquire a consciousness of these worlds if Christianity is again to be able to become a truth for him, for Christianity actually is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this most clearly when we look at the modern development of the idea of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any such development at all. The truth is that for modern man in the present stage of evolution it is impossible to arrive at an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts and ideas that he has been cultivating as natural science since the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

These things must be regarded in the following way. The human being beholds the world all around and uses the combining faculty of his intellect, which he now has as his modern consciousness, to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point at which it is possible for him to say, “This world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature are apprehended in thoughts and are actually themselves the thoughts of the world.” If one follows the laws of nature to the stage at which one is bound to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as physical being, one has to say, “Within that world which we survey with our ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element is living.” One must actually be ill, pathological, if, like the ordinary atheistic materialist, one is not willing to acknowledge this spiritual element. We live within this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we emerge into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. What is observable within the physical world can only be contemplated inadequately if one fails to see as its foundation a universal spiritual element.

We are born as physical beings from physical stock. When we are born as little babies, we are actually, for outer, physical perception, quite similar to a creature of nature. Out of such a creature of nature, which is basically in a kind of sleeping condition, inner spiritual faculties gradually develop. These inner spiritual faculties will arise in the course of future evolution. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Then one comes to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, whereas before, in one's consideration of outer nature, one built up only abstract laws. One comes, in other words, to an affirmation of what may be called the Father God.

It is very significant that scholasticism in the Middle Ages maintained that knowledge obtainable by ordinary observation of the world through ordinary human reason included knowledge of the Father God. One can even say, as I have often expressed it, that if anyone sets out to analyze this world as it is given for ordinary consciousness and does not arrive at gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must actually be ill, pathological in someway. To be an atheist means to be ill, as I have said here once before.

With this ordinary consciousness, however, one cannot go farther than this Father God. This far one can go with ordinary consciousness, but no further. It is characteristic of our times when such a significant theologian as Adolf von Harnack⁵ says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels, that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus actually has a place in the Gospels only insofar as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads people to recognize, even in theology, only the Father God and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message of the Father God. In the sense of this theology, Christ has worth only insofar as He appeared in the world and brought to human beings the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be found by an ordinary study of the world. The Scholastics still maintained that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were to speak of God the Son. That people can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels actually speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has been cultivated as the peculiarly Western method.

In early Christian times until about the third or fourth century A.D., when there was still a good deal of Oriental wisdom in Christianity, human beings occupied themselves intently with the question of the distinction between the Father God and God the Son. One could say that these fine distinctions between the Father God and the Son God, which so engaged people's attention in the early Christian centuries, under the influence of Oriental wisdom, have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in cultivating egoity under the influences I described yesterday.

A certain untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. What man experiences inwardly, through which he arrives at his analysis and synthesis of the world, is the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ; he wants to acknowledge Him but through inner experience no longer actually has the Christ. He therefore takes what he should apply actually only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology does not actually have the Christ at all; it has only the Father, but it calls the Father “Christ,” because at one time it received the tradition of the Christ being in history, and one wants to be Christian, of course. If one were honest, one would be unable to call oneself a Christian in modern times.

All this is altogether different when we go further East. Already in Eastern Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev.⁶ You find in him an attitude of soul that has become a philosophy and speaks with full justification, with an inner justification, of a distinction between the Father and the Son. Soloviev is justified in speaking in this way, because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The human being of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you wish to make a distinction between the Father God and Christ the two become confused. For Soloviev such a thing is impossible. Soloviev experiences each separately, and so he still has a sense for the battles, the spiritual battles, that were fought during the first Christian centuries in order to bring to human consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing to which modern man must come again. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. One must not make a pretense of worshipping the Christ, attributing to Him only the qualities of the Father God. To avoid this, however, one must present truths such as I indicated yesterday. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness with which modern man is raised, and which actually does not permit the recognition of more than the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot present such things before the world at large today in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been prepared sufficiently by spiritual science and anthroposophy. There is always the possibility, however, of pointing out even to modern man how he carries in his inner being a source of destruction and how in the outer world there is something in which the I of man is, as it were, submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—just as in earlier times people were told about the Fall of Man and similar things. One must only find the right form for these things, a form that would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness—even as the teaching of the Fall of Man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, a form that would have a different authority from our teaching concerning the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with ways of looking such as those we have expounded here. Our science wishes to recognize in the inner being of man only the laws of nature. In this source of destruction, however, of which I have often spoken here, the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within our inner being matter, and with it all the laws of nature, is annihilated. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos, and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, saturated with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this source of destruction is below our memory-mirror. If we let our gaze penetrate far below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe what actually is always within the human being. A human being is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. Man must learn to reflect on what he is and how he lives.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in the human being and are able also to become conscious of how into this inner evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into its chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the creating spirit within us, for when we behold moral laws working upon matter that has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become conscious of the concrete, spiritual activity that is within us and that is the seed for future worlds.

What can we compare with what is announced in our inner being? We cannot compare it with what our senses at first convey to us of outer nature. We can compare it only with what another human being communicates when he speaks to us. Indeed, it is more than a metaphor when we say that what takes place in our inner being speaks to us when moral and anti-moral impulses unite themselves with the chaos inside us. There actually is within us something that speaks to us. There we have something that is not mere allegory or symbol but actual fact. What we can hear outwardly with our ears is a language toned down for the earthly world, but within our inner being a language is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, because it speaks out of what contains the seeds of future worlds. There we truly penetrate into what must be called “the inner word.” In the weakened words that we speak or hear in conversation with our fellow men, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, whereas in our inner being, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we have a substantiality where speaking becomes at the same time hearing. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The inner word speaks in us, the inner word is heard in us.

We have at the same time entered a realm where it no longer makes sense to speak of subjective and objective. When you hear another human being, when he speaks words to you that you perceive with your sense of hearing, you know that this being of another person is outside you, but you must give yourself up, must surrender yourself, as it were, in order to perceive the being of another person in what you hear him saying. On the other hand, you know that the actual word, the audible word, is not merely something subjective but is something placed into the world. Hence we find that even with the toned-down words that we hear and speak in our conversation with other human beings, the distinction between subjective and objective loses meaning. We stand with our subjectivity within objectivity, and objectivity works in us and with us in that we perceive. It is the same when we dive down to the inner word. It is not merely an inner word; it is at the same time something objective. It is not our inner being that speaks: our inner being is merely the stage upon which speaks the world.

It is similar for one who has insight to see, behind the tapestry of the senses, a spiritual world, a world wherein spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies rule and weave. To begin with, he perceives these beings through an imagination; for his vision, however, they become permeated with inner life in that now he hears the Word, apparently sounding to him through himself but in reality from out of the world.

By means of love and devotion man therefore penetrates the tapestry of the senses and sees beyond; and the beings who reveal themselves to him when he thus offers up his own being in full devotion—these beings he comes to perceive with the help of what he recognizes in his inner being as inner word. We grow together with the outer world. The outer world begins to resound cosmically, as it were, when the inner word is awakened.

What I have been describing to you exists today in every human being, but he has no knowledge of it and therefore no awareness, no consciousness of it. He must first grow into such a knowledge, into such an awareness. When we learn to recognize the world with the ordinary consciousness that provides us with our intellectual concepts, we really come to recognize only the passing and the past. When we behold in the right way that with which our intellect provides us, we basically have a view back upon a world that is passing away. We can, however, find the Father God with the intellect, as I have said. What sort of consciousness,then, do we develop in relation to the Father God? The consciousness that the Father God lies at the foundation of a world revealing itself to our intellect in the course of passing away.

Yes, it is indeed so—since the middle of the fifteenth century man has developed through his intellect a special faculty for studying and observing what is perishing in the world. We analyze and test the world-corpse with our intellectual, scientific knowledge. And theologians such as Adolph Harnack, who hold to the Father God alone, are really expounders of that part of the world that is perishing and that will pass away with the earth and disappear. They are backward-pointing individuals.

How is it then, finally, for a person who has entered so much into the spirit of what from childhood has been crammed into him as the modern natural scientific way of thinking? He learns that out there in the world are outer phenomena that arise and pass away but that matter persists, matter is the indestructible thing, and that if the earth comes to an end matter will never be destroyed. Certainly, he is told, a time will come when the earth will be one vast cemetery, but this cemetery will be composed of the very same atoms and molecules, or at least the same atoms, as are already there today. One thus applies all one's attention to what is perishing, and even when studying what is unfolding, one really studies only how what is perishing plays into what is unfolding.

It would never be possible for an Oriental to participate in this; we can see this even in the European Orient, in Eastern Europe, in the subdued philosophical feeling of Soloviev. He does not bring it to expression clearly—at least as clearly as it will have to be expressed in general consciousness in the future—but it is evident that Soloviev has still enough of the Oriental in him to see everywhere, within what is perishing, crumbling, dissolving into chaos, what is unfolding anew, the birth of what shall be in the future.

If we wish to see the reality, the actuality, we must envision it in the following way. All that we see with our senses, all that we also see of other human beings with our senses, will no longer exist one day; whatever makes itself known to eye, ear, and so on, will at some time in the future cease to be. Heaven and earth will pass away, for what we see of the stars by means of our senses also belongs to the things that are transient. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the inner word that is formed in the inner chaos of the human being, in the source of destruction, will live on after heaven and earth are no longer there; it will live on just as the seed of this year's plant will live on in the plant of next year. In the inner being of man are the seeds of world-futures. And if into these seeds human beings receive the Christ, then heaven and earth may pass away, but the Logos, the Christ, cannot pass away. Man bears in his inner being what will one day exist when all he sees around him will have ceased to be.

He must be able to say to himself: I look up to the Father God. The Father God lies at the foundation of the world that I can see with my senses. The world of the senses is His revelation, but it is nonetheless a perishing world, and it will drag the human being down with it if he is completely absorbed in it, if he is able to develop a consciousness only of the Father God. Man would then return to the Father God; he would be unable to evolve any further. There is also a new world unfolding, however, and it takes its beginning from man himself. When man ennobles his ethical ideals through the Christ consciousness, through the Christ impulse, when he forms his ethical ideals as they should be formed through the fact that the Christ has come to earth, then something comes to life in the chaos within him, seed is sown for the future, which is now not a perishing but an unfolding world.

One must have a strong feeling for the perishing and the unfolding worlds. One must feel how there is in nature a perpetual dying. Nature is colored, so to speak, by this death. In contrast to this, however, there is also in nature a continual unfolding, a continual coming to birth. This does not color nature in a way visible to the senses; yet if we approach nature with open hearts it is perceptible there.

We look out into nature and see the colors, all the colors of the spectrum, from the red at one end to the violet at the other, with all the shades in between. If we were now to mix these colors in a certain way—make them “color” one another—they would receive life. They would together become the so-called flesh color [Inkarnat], the color that emanates from man. When we look at nature, we are looking in a certain sense at the outspread colors of the rainbow, the sign and symbol of the Father God. If we look at man, however, it is the flesh color that speaks out of the inner being of man, for in man all the colors interpenetrate, thus taking on life, becoming living in their interpenetration. When we turn to a corpse, however, this power to take on life is entirely absent. There, that which is man is thrown back again into the rainbow, into the creation of the Father God. For the source of what makes the rainbow into the flesh color, making it into a living unity, man must look into his inner being.

Yesterday and today I have tried to lead you, perhaps in a complicated way, to an understanding of this inner being of man in its true significance. I have shown you how outer matter is thrown back into nothingness, into chaos, so that the spirit may become newly creative. If one looks at this new creativity, one realizes that the Father God works in matter, bringing it to its completion (see drawing below, bright). Matter confronts us in the outer world in the greatest variety of ways, so that it is visible to us. Within our inner being, however, this matter is thrown back into its nothingness and then permeated with pure spiritual being, with our moral ideals or anti-moral ideas (red). There new life springs up.

The world must appear to us in its double aspect. We see first the Father God, creating what is outwardly visible; we see how what is outwardly visible comes to an end in man's inner being, where it is thrown back into chaos. We must feel intensely how this world, the world of the Father God, comes to its end; only then will we be able to reach an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will become clear to us through this how the very thing that comes to an end, the creation of the Father God, is endowed with life once more by God the Son; a new beginning is made.

Everywhere in the Western world it can be seen how since the fifteenth century there has been a tendency to study and investigate only the perishing, the corpse-like part of nature, which is all that is accessible to the intellect. All so-called education or culture [Bildung] has been formed under the influence of a science that concerns itself only with what is dead. This kind of culture is directly opposed to real Christianity. Real Christianity must have a feeling for what is living but must also be able to separate this feeling of what is reviving from what is passing away. Hence the most important idea that must be connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, is the idea of the Risen Christ, the Christ Who has vanquished death. What matters is to comprehend that the most important idea is that of Christ Who passes through death and rises again. Christianity is not merely a religion of salvation; the Oriental religions were also that. Christianity is a religion of resurrection, a religion that awakens again to life what would otherwise be nothing but matter crumbling away into nothingness.

Out in the cosmos we have the crumbling away of matter in the moon, and in the sun we have a perpetual coming into being, forever new and fresh. Seen spiritually, seen through spiritual vision—when we get beyond ordinary sense perception and reach the point where Imagination is active—we can see in the moon a continuous process: it is continuously splintering and scattering itself abroad. There, where the moon is situated, its matter splinters and disperses like dust into the world. The matter of the moon is perpetually being gathered from its environment and then splintered and scattered (see drawing, above). If one looks at the moon in the consciousness of Imagination, one sees a continuous convergence of matter in the place where the moon is; it gathers there, and then it splinters and is scattered like dust into the world. The moon is actually seen like-this (drawing, below): first a circle, then a smaller, narrower circle, becoming ever narrower until the circle becomes the moon itself. Then it dissolves, splinters; it is strewn out over the entire world. In the moon, matter cannot tolerate a center. Matter concentrates toward the center of the moon but cannot tolerate it;it stops short there and disperses like cosmic dust. It is only to ordinary, sensory vision that the moon appears peaceful.It is not peaceful. It is continuously gathering matter together and scattering it.

When we come to the sun, we find it is all quite different. Already in Imagination we are able to see how matter does not splinter in this way at all; true, it does approach the center, but then it begins to receive life in the rays of the sun that stream out from the center. It does not splinter and disperse; it becomes living and spreads out life from the center in every direction. Together with this life it develops astrality. In the moon there is no astrality; there the astrality is destroyed. In the sun, astrality unites itself with all that streams forth. The sun is in truth something that is permeated with inner life, where the center is not only tolerated but has a fructifying influence. In the center of the sun lives the cosmic fructifying activity. In the contrast between sun and moon we thus see a cosmic manifestation of two opposite processes: in the moon matter is thrown back into chaos, while in the sun it is perpetually unfolding, springing and welling up with renewed life.

When we dive down into our inner being, we look into our inner chaos, into our own moon nature. That is the inner moon. Matter is destroyed there, as in the outer world it is destroyed only where the moon is. Then, however, the radiance of the sun penetrates our senses; the sun's radiance enters our inner moon nature. The matter inwardly dissolving there into dust is renewed by the sun's radiance. Here, in the inner being of man, matter is continuously falling under the moon influence, and just as continuously man absorbs through his senses the radiance of the sun (see drawing, left). Such is the relationship in which we stand to the cosmos, and so one must have the capacity to perceive these two opposite activities in the cosmos: the moon nature directed toward splintering and scattering, and the quickening, life-giving radiance of the sun.

Through both these experiences one comes to behold, in what is splintering and crumbling to dust, the world of the Father God, which had to be there until such time as the world changed into the world of God the Son, which basically has its physical source in what is sun-like in the world.What is of the moon nature and the sun nature relate to one another as Father God to Son God.

During the early Christian centuries these things were seen instinctively. Now they must be known again with full presence of mind if the human being wishes to be able to say of himself in all honesty: I am a Christian. This is what I wished to present to you today.

• 5 . Adolf von Harnack, church historian, 1851–1930.
• 6 . Vladimir Soloviev, Russian philosopher, 1853–1900.

This lecture was given at Dornach in September of 1921, and is included in Volume 207 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 11 from the lecture series: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Vol. I It is also known as: At the Center of Man's Being: II, or Natural Law and Moral Law.

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within man a kind of centre of destruction. I showed how as long as we remain within the limits of ordinary consciousness, we retain memories of the impressions made upon us by the world, but that this is as far as we can go. We receive our impressions from the world; we turn them into experience through our senses and through our understanding, through all the manifold effects they have upon our soul; and later we are able to call up again pictures of what we have experienced. We bear these pictures within us; they are for us our inner life.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror; but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. For the ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it in space, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects the sense-impressions we receive, and reflects them in the course of time. Something or other—at some later moment—causes this or that impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a mirror that is in space, then we can see behind it; we can look into a realm we cannot see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can as it were cease for a time—for how long a time depends upon ourselves—and we can look more deeply into our inner being. As we do this, as we look within behind the memory-mirror, then what I described as a kind of centre and heart of destruction meets our gaze.

There must needs be such a centre within us, for only in such a centre can the Ego of man establish itself. It is a centre for the strengthening and hardening of the Ego. But, as I said, if this hardening of the Ego, if this egoism is carried out into social life, then evil ensues, evil in the life and actions of men.

You may see from this how complicated is the life into which man is placed. Here you have something which has its good use and purpose within man, for otherwise he would not be able to develop his ego, but something which must never be allowed outside. The bad man carries in into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it is carried outside, it becomes evil and wrong. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the Ego its right and proper strength.

After all, there is really nothing in the world that would not bring blessing to man, were it only in its right place! We should be thoughtless and unreflecting, if we lacked this centre within us. For this centre enables us to experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the external world. In the external world we see objects in a material sense, and following the custom of present day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of matter. But in this centre of destruction it really happens that matter is destroyed. Matter is thrown back into nothingness, and we have the power within this nothingness to cause the good to arise. We do so, if instead of instincts and impulses, which are bound to work in the direction of egoism, we pour moral and ethical ideals into the centre of destruction. Then, in this very centre of destruction, the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as men, take part there in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as you may read in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our Earth will one day suffer dissolution, and of how out of all manner of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will eventually be evolved, then we have to see it in this way. The Jupiter existence will contain nothing but the new creation that is being formed to-day in man within this centre of destruction. It is being formed out of man's moral ideals, but also out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoism. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a battle between the good which man, already here and now, is bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos, and the unmoral and anti-moral which is due to the presence of egoism.

Thus, when we look into our deepest selves, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into nothingness.

I went on to indicate how it is with the other side of human existence, where we are surrounded with sense-phenomena. We behold these phenomena spread around us like a carpet or tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them and discover within them laws, which we then call the laws of nature. But with ordinary consciousness we never get beyond this tapestry of the senses. We penetrate it just as little as we penetrate the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, we do come through it. Then men of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. And then they looked upon a world where egohood cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. When we fall asleep, the Ego is dulled, and the reason is that beyond the tapestry of the senses lies that world where, to begin with, the ego-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence it is that the ancient Oriental, who had a peculiar longing to live behind the phenomena of the senses, used to speak of Nirvana, of the end and disappearance of egohood.

This brings us to the great contradiction between East and West. In times past the Oriental developed a longing to see behind the sense-phenomena, and in so doing acquired a power of vision into a spiritual world which is not composed of atoms and molecules but of spiritual Beings. This world was there in visible actuality for the perception of the ancient Oriental. In our days the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of this yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena; while the man of the West has developed his Ego, has allowed that hardening and strengthening to take place within the centre of destruction which we have described.

In saying this we are already on the way to seeing what it is that must enter into man's consciousness, now and in the early future. For if the pure intellectualism that has been developing ever since the middle of the 15th century were to continue, mankind would fall into decline; for intellectualism will never help us to pass either behind the memory-mirror or behind the tapestry of the world of the senses. And it is essential that man should acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must do so, if Christianity is again to become a truth for him; it is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this clearly when we look at the modern conception of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any idea of Christ at all. The truth is that we are living in a stage of evolution when man cannot possibly come to an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts which he has been developing since the 15th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

Man looks round about him on the world, and uses the combining faculty of his intellect to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point when he could say: “The world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature can be apprehended in thoughts; they are in reality the thoughts of the world. If I follow up the laws of nature I am bound eventually to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as a physical being, and then I have to admit that within the world I survey with my ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense-perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element lives.” One must needs be ill, pathologically ill, if like the atheistic materialist one is not willing to recognise this spiritual element. We live in this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we come forth into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. But what is observable within the physical world must be inadequately contemplated if one fails to see behind the physical world a universal spiritual element.

When we are born as little babies, we are really for external perception not unlike some creature of nature. Then out of this being of nature, that is virtually in a kind of sleep condition, spiritual inner faculties gradually develop. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Thus we come to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, where before, in our consideration of external nature, we only built up abstract laws. We come, in other words, to an affirmation of what we may call the Father God.

Scholasticism held—you will remember—that knowledge obtainable by ordinary rational observation of the world includes knowledge of the Father God. It is indeed true that if anyone sets out to analyse the world as it is given for ordinary consciousness, and does not end by gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must be in some way ill. To be an atheist is to be ill; that is how I put it here once before.

With the ordinary consciousness, this is as far as we can go. With the ordinary consciousness we can come to the Father God, but no further. It is symptomatic of our times when a theologian of such standing as Adolf Harnack says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels; that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus has place in the Gospels only in so far as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads men to recognise even in theology only the Father God, and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message and tidings of the Father God. Thus in the sense of this theology Christ is of account only as having appeared in the world and brought to men the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be read by a study of the world in the ordinary way. The Scholastics still held that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were there to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were there to speak of God the Son. That men can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has developed as the peculiarly Western method.

For in early Christian times, up to about the third or fourth century, when there was still a good deal of the Oriental wisdom in Christianity, men were occupying themselves intently with the question of the difference between the Father God and God the Son. These fine differences that engaged attention in the early Christian centuries have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in developing egohood as a result of the influences I have described.

A kind of untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. Through inner experience, through his analysis and synthesis of the world, man comes to the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ, he wants to acknowledge Him—but through inner experience he has Him no longer. Therefore he takes what he should apply only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology has not the Christ at all; it has only the Father—but it calls the Father “Christ,” because it has received the tradition of the Christ Being in history and, quite naturally, wants to be Christian. If we were honest, we should simply be unable to call ourselves Christians in modern times.

All this is quite changed when we go further East. Even in the East of Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev. You find in him an attitude of soul that becomes a philosophy and speaks with full justification of a difference between Father and Son. Soloviev is inwardly justified in so speaking because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The man of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you want to make a distinction between the Father God and the Christ, the two ideas become confused and involved. For Soloviev that would have been impossible. He experiences each separately, and so he has still an understanding for the spiritual conflict that was fought out during the earliest Christian centuries, in the endeavour to realise in consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing that modern man needs to learn. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. It must not be that we make a pretence of worshipping the Christ and attribute to Him only the qualities of the Father. But to avoid this we must bring forward truths such as I have been indicating to-day. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness in which modern man is born and bred, and which does not permit of more than the recognition of the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot set things before the world at large to-day in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been sufficiently prepared by Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy. Yet there are ways in which one can point out even to modern men how they carry in them a centre of destruction, and how in the world outside there is something wherein the Ego of man is as it were submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—as in earlier times men were told about the Fall and other doctrines of that kind. We in our time have only to find the right form for these truths—a form which would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness; they must become part of ordinary consciousness, even as the doctrine of the Fall of man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, in ways that were different in their effect from our teaching of the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with conceptions such as those we have expounded here. At present it is ready to recognise in man only the laws of nature. But in this centre of destruction of which I have been speaking the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within man matter is annihilated, and so are all the laws of nature. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos; and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, filled through and through with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this centre of destruction is below our memory-mirror. So that when we let our gaze penetrate deep down below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe it, though it is always within us. A man is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. And he must learn to meditate upon these facts.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in man, and are able also to become conscious of how into this evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the spirit within us in the act of creating. For when we behold moral laws working upon matter which has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become aware of the spirit concretely active within us, the spirit that is the seed of future worlds.

With what can we compare this finding? We cannot compare it with what our senses tell us of external nature. We can compare it only with a communication made to us by another human being through speech. It is indeed more than a comparison when we say of that which takes place in us, when moral and anti-moral impulses unite with the chaos inside us, that it speaks to us. There we have something that is no mere allegory or symbol, but actual fact. What we can hear externally with our ear is a speech toned down for the earth-world, but within us a speech is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, for it speaks out of that which contains the seeds of future worlds. There we penetrate into what we must call the “inner word.” In the words that we speak or hear in intercourse with other people, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, but in our inner selves, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we are in a region of being where speaking and hearing go on at the same time. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The “inner word” speaks to us, and is heard in us.

We have, in fact, entered a realm where it is meaningless to speak of subjective and objective. When you listen to your fellow man, when he speaks words to you that you perceive with your sense of hearing, then you know that his being is outside you, but that you have to give yourself up, to surrender yourself, in order that you may perceive his being in what you hear him saying. On the other hand, you know that the actual word, the audible word, is not merely subjective, but is something placed into the world. Hence we find that even with the toned-down words that we hear and speak in our intercourse with other men, the distinction between subjective and objective loses meaning. We stand with our subjectivity in objectivity; and objectivity works in us when we perceive. It is the same when we dive down to the inner word. It is not only an inner word; it is at the same time something objective. It is not our inner being that speaks: our being is merely the stage whereon speaks the world.

It is similar for one who has insight to see behind the tapestry of the senses a spiritual world, a world wherein spiritual Beings of higher Hierarchies work and weave. To begin with, he perceives these Beings by means of Imagination; but for his vision they become permeated with inward life when he hears the “word”, apparently sounding to him through himself, but in reality from out of the world.

By means of love and devotion and surrender, accordingly, man presses his way through the tapestry of the senses and sees beyond; and the Beings who reveal themselves to him when he thus offers up his own being in full surrender—these Beings he comes to perceive with the help of what he recognises as “inner word.” The world without begins powerfully to resound when the inner word is awakened.

What I have been describing exists to-day in every human being. Only, he has no knowledge of it and so he gives no thought to it. He must grow into this knowledge; must learn to have it in thought and remembrance. When we learn to know the world with the ordinary consciousness that provides us with our intellectual concepts, we really come to know only the passing and the past. What our intellect gives us, if we are able to look at it in the right light, is really a survey of a world in process of passing away. But we know that with the intellect—as I have said—we can find the Father God. What sort of consciousness, then, relates us to the Father God? The consciousness that the Father God is at the foundation of a world which reveals itself to our intellectuality is in course of wearing away.

Yes, it is indeed so—since the middle of the 15th century man has developed through his intellect a special faculty for studying and observing all that is dying in the world. We analyse and test the world-corpse with our intellectual scientific knowledge. And theologians such as Adolph Harnack, who hold by the Father God alone, are really expounders of that part of the world which is going down and will pass away with the earth and disappear. They are backward-pointing men.

How is it then, in the last resort, with a man who has completely absorbed the modern natural science way of thinking? How is it for him, when this way of thinking has been grafted on to him from early childhood? He learns that out there in the world are phenomena which arise and pass away, but that matter persists, matter is the indestructible thing. The earth may come to an end, but matter will never be destroyed. Certainly (he is told) a time will come when the earth will be one vast cemetery, but the cemetery will be composed of the very same atoms as are already there to-day. A man thus trained in thought centres all his attention on what is passing away, and even when he studies that which is coming into life, he really only studies how the dying plays into it.

An Oriental could never do this; we can see this even in the East of Europe, in the subdued philosophical feeling of Solovieff. He does not bring it to expression as clearly as it will have to be expressed in the future, but he shows unmistakably that he has still enough of the Oriental in him to see everywhere, within what is passing away and crumbling into chaos, the springing up of the new, the birth of what shall be in the future.

If we would understand how this really is, we must envisage it in the following way. All that we see of our fellow men with our senses will one day no longer exist; whatever makes itself known to eye, ear, and so on, will at some time in the future cease to be. Heaven and earth will pass away. For what we see of the stars by means of our senses—that too belongs to the things that are transient. But the “inner word” that is formed in the inner chaos of man, in the centre of destruction—that will live on after heaven and earth are no longer there; it will live on even as the seed of this year's plant will live on the plant of next year. Within man are the seeds of world-futures. And if into these seeds men receive the Christ, then heaven and earth may pass away, but the Logos, the Christ, cannot pass away. Man bears within him that which will one day be, when all he sees around him will have ceased to be.

We must put it to ourselves in this way. I look up to the Father God. The Father God is at the foundation of the world I can see with my senses. The world of the senses is a revelation of Him; but it is none the less a dying, sinking world, and it will drag man down with it if he is completely absorbed in it, if he is able to develop only a consciousness of the Father God. Man would then go back to the Father God; he would not be able to evolve any further. But there is also a new world arising, and it takes its beginning from man himself. When man ennobles his moral ideals through coming to a Christ-consciousness and receiving the Christ Impulse, when he forms and fashions them as they should be formed and fashioned through the fact that the Christ has come to earth, then something comes to life in the chaos within him, seed is sown for the future, a new world dawns within him.

We need to develop a keen and sensitive perception for these two worlds—the setting and the rising world. We must feel how there is in nature a perpetual dying. Nature wears, so to speak, a deathlike hue. But over against this there is also in nature a continual glow of new life, a continual coming to birth. This does not reveal itself in any hue visible to the senses; yet if we open our hearts to nature, it can be perceived.

We look out into nature and see the colours, all the colours of the spectrum, from the red at one end to the violet at the other, with all the shades between. But if we were now to mix these colours in a certain way—make them “colour” one another—they would receive life. They would together become the so-called flesh colour, Inkarnat, the colour that speaks out of man. When we look at nature, we are looking in a certain sense at the spread-out colours of the rainbow, the sign and symbol of the Father God. But if we look at man, it is the Inkarnat that speaks out of the inner being of man, for in man all the colours interpenetrate, and in such a way as to become alive. But when we turn to a corpse, this power to take on life is entirely absent. There, that which is man is thrown back again into the rainbow, into the creation of the Father God. But for the source of that which makes the rainbow into the Inkarnat, makes it into a living unity, we must look within ourselves.

I have tried to lead you, by what may have been at times a rather difficult path, to an understanding of this inner centre of man in its true significance. I have shown you how external matter is thrown back into nothingness, into chaos, so that the spirit may be able to create anew. Let us look at the whole process. The Father God works in matter, bringing it to completion. Matter confronts us in the external world in a great variety of ways, manifesting itself visibly to our senses. But within ourselves this matter is thrown back into nothingness and then permeated with pure spiritual being, filled through and through with our moral or anti-moral ideals. There is the upspringing of new life.

We have to see the world in this double aspect. We see first the Father God, creating what is outwardly visible; we see how this outwardly visible comes to an end inside man, and is thrown back into chaos. We need to feel quite intensely how this world, the world of the Father God comes to its end; only then we shall be able to reach an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will become clear to us how the very thing that comes to an end, in the sense of the creation of the Father God, is endowed with life once more by God the Son; a new beginning is made.

Everywhere in the Western world we can see how since the 15th century there has been a tendency to study and investigate only the corpse-like part of nature, only what is “setting” and passing away. In truth, this is all that is accessible to the pure intellect on its own account. All our so-called education and culture has been developed under the influence of a science that concerns itself only with what is dead. This kind of culture is directly opposed to real Christianity. Real Christianity must have a perceptive feeling for what is living, and for the distinction between everything that is springing into life and everything that is on the way down. Hence the idea most important for us to connect with the Mystery of Golgotha is the idea of the Risen Christ, the Christ who has vanquished death. Much depends on this. Christianity is not merely a religion of salvation; the Oriental religions were also that. Christianity is a religion of resurrection, a religion that awakens again to life that which would otherwise be nothing but matter crumbling away into nothingness.

Out in the cosmos we have the crumbling away of matter in the moon, and in the sun we have a perpetual coming into being, forever new and fresh. When we get beyond ordinary sense-perception and reach the point where Imagination is active, then we can see in the moon something that is for ever splitting up and scattering itself abroad. There, where the moon is situated, its matter splits up and disperses like dust into the world. The matter of the moon is perpetually being collected from its environment and then split up and scattered. If you look at the moon in the consciousness of Imagination, you have a perpetual convergence of matter to the place where the moon is; it collects there, and then it splits up and is scattered like dust into the cosmos. You see the moon like this: first a circle, then a smaller, closer circle, until the circle becomes the moon itself. Then it falls to pieces; it is strewn out over the cosmos. In the moon, matter cannot endure a centre. It concentrates towards the centre of the moon, but cannot endure it; it stops short there and disperses like cosmic dust. It is only to ordinary sense-perception that the moon appears quiet. It is not quiet. It is for ever compressing matter together and scattering it.

When we come to the sun, there we find it is all quite different. Through Imagination we are able to see how matter does not collect in this way at all; true, it does approach the centre, but then it begins to receive life in the rays of the sun that stream out from the centre. It does not split up and disperse; it becomes living, and spreads out life from the centre in every direction. And together with this life it develops astrality. In the moon there is no astrality; there is nothing; the astrality is destroyed. But in the sun astrality unites itself with all that streams out. The sun is in reality permeated through and through with inner life. The centre-point is not tolerated, any more than in the moon, but it has a fructifying influence. In the centre of the sun lives the fructifying activity of our cosmos. Thus in the contrast between sun and moon we can see a cosmic manifestation of the two opposite processes: in the moon matter is thrown back into chaos, while in the sun it is perpetually springing and welling up with life renewed.

When we dive down into our selves, then we look first into our own inner chaos, into our “moon.” That is the inner moon. Matter is destroyed there, as in the external world it is destroyed at one spot alone—where the moon is. But then comes the influence of the sun, entering through our senses; the sun penetrates into our inner “moon.” The matter which is dissolving there into dust is renewed by the sun. Here, within us, matter is constantly falling under the moon influence, and as constantly absorbing the activity of the sun. Such is the relationship in which we stand to the cosmos. We must become aware of these two opposite activities in the cosmos: the moon-nature directed towards pulverising and scattering, and the quickening, life-giving nature of the sun.

In this way we come to behold in that which is dispersing and crumbling to dust the world of the Father God, which had to be there until such times as the world changed into the world of God the Son. The world of God the Son has its physical source in the Sun-nature of the cosmos. Moon-nature and Sun-nature are related to one another as Father Godhead is to Son Godhead.

During the early Christian centuries these things were instinctively perceived. Now they must be known again with full consciousness and clarity of thought, if man wants to say of himself in all truth and honesty: I am a Christian.

Yes, my dear friends, I would like to supplement what I said yesterday. I wanted to offer it then already, but time was too short. This occasion gives us the opportunity to refer to our relationship we need to gradually re-establish with the Bible. The Bible, namely the New Testament, is a document which we must learn to grasp as a supersensible revelation, not in a dogmatic sense but through arriving at knowledge which indicates that religious documents originating up to about the time 4 AD were not only of human origin but were poured into the consciousness of humanity; knowledge which could not have come out of humanity. I would like to mention that you only need to bring humanity up to this point while a kind of instinctive atavistic consciousness still existed, presenting the most manifold images depicting the highest spiritual things and processes, yet these images were not conceptualised in human consciousness.

So it has come about that right at the time when intellectualism has become authoritative, religious documents are misunderstood in many areas. They are approached with intellectual thinking and basically it is quite natural that even with much goodwill, misunderstandings come to the fore. Thus it has happened that when today's presented texts are transcribed into a common language, they do not represent the original documents because a national language has an intellectual basis which is alien to the original elements in which the religious documents were embodied.

When religious documents, particularly the New Testament, are referred back to in its original language, it also becomes apparent that this original language can no longer be experienced in an adequate way in the constitution of souls of today. Actually, a kind of untruthful element enters into the understanding of ancient religious knowledge, also the New Testament. It is hopeless to think that translations done up to now can somehow be improved continually, because it must firstly involve finding the preconditions which will enable a kind of reawakening of ancient spirituality with the purpose of really understanding religious documents. This we can do, this everyone can basically do, if the trouble is taken to apply researchable spiritual scientific facts to, let's say, the New Testament.

I would like to give a small example and that from one of the most important places in the New Testament. I would like to stress from the start that representations in the New Testament are connected to a historic fact; the depiction in the New Testament can only be understood when it is very clear that the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha is placed within the rest of humanity's evolution, but as a fact which falls outside the rest of humanity's laws. The Mystery of Golgotha is a totally singular event and for its understanding should not be considered out of historical foundations but it should be grasped out of itself. Only when you take—I would like to call it super-historical fact—this cosmic fact in relationship with scientific spiritual knowledge about the development of humanity, only then can you actually start understanding the deep sense of the words and the sentence formation of the New Testament. If you don't do this, a far too strong trivial tone enters into the New Testament. We can remind ourselves of various impulses towards a possible understanding of the Bible where absolutely no preparatory understanding is regarded necessary and that it should simply be taken in a naive, primitive manner. You need to remind yourself of this fact in order to judge how strong the reluctance is to perceive the New Testament in its total profundity.

Just consider, my dear friends, that the Mystery of Golgotha, taken in its right sense, was fulfilled for the earth as a specific act of grace out of higher spiritual worlds at a specific time when a certain part of humanity was passing over from a previous state of consciousness to the next one. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the evolution of humanity's becoming in earthly life reached up to an inner ego reality. The “I” gradually unfolded at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha. We may not look for the connection between these two facts, whether causal or just as a connection. We may only consider it a connection when it is compared with one seeing something happening and something is done towards it out of free will. The Mystery of Golgotha appears as a cosmic fact of free will which has come about within the development of humanity in such a way, that the ego consciousness is awakened. Now, you know the remainder of the important facts which are linked to the appearance of the ego consciousness. Something extraordinary may be added to this. It is necessary to know that with the embodiment of the ego consciousness in evolution there was a condition where people looked up at every opportunity of their conscious lives to gods, or—where monotheism existed—to that God who has remained as an image of the Father God. As long as we stand in the imagination of the Father God, the imagination is fulfilled so that we can say: ‘When a human being is aware of his ego nature then he feels that within his ego is the inner working of the Father God in his soul.’ The Father God distils in a certain way a drop of his own Being which remains connected to the entire spiritual sea of the Father God, to the beings of individuals and every person can say to himself: ‘The Father God is alive in me, the abundance of the Father God lives in me.’ However, the entire humanity is permeated with the being of the Father God. Experiencing all of this at present is to say to yourself: ‘I am!’ That is: ‘The Father God is in me.’—To live in this way in present times is becoming increasingly impossible. You must come to your own “I” via your own consciousness which makes it a product of yourself. This production of the individual “I” is in connection with the entire cosmic-spiritual world only possible when individuals identify themselves with Christ, thus with the Son of God.

What can be said about the relationship between people blessed by Christ and people who have not been enriched by Christ? Upon looking back at the consciousness of unblessed mankind, therefore the individual being of their souls, can you say: ‘I am the only one who has been blessed with an “I”?’—No, the soul could only say: ‘Within me the Father God lives and because He lives in me it enables me to say “I” to myself.’—People had not been completely individualised, the individual was a child of God, but as if the child was still connected to God by an umbilical cord. What the soul could have when it was aware of this divine capacity, it could have no more, later on. The Christ-blessed humanity acquired it in such a way that each single soul could take up their “I” out of this divine substance.

In this way the Christ-blessed people were able to take their own “I” out of the substance of their individual soul being.

Thus the Christ brought the same as what the Father God had given humanity on earth, but He brought it in a new way in order for every individual to find a connection to the ego being born within. Thus the Christ could say to humanity: ‘I bring to you what you are used to recognise out of the Logos but I bring it in a new way. I bring it to you through what the Father God has given to me, what He had given directly to you before, but for another state of consciousness. As his messenger I bring this treasure from the Father God to you, to each independent consciousness of yours, to every single individual. I don't want to just make you into some kind of member of the whole cosmos, I will by virtue of the full authority given to me by the Father God make each single one of you, if you want to come, into an “I” filled person with a divine consciousness.’

That the manner in which the divine consciousness should come to people now in a different way to what it had been in earlier times, is because of the Mystery of Golgotha. Similarly, it also applies to the Words of the Gospels taking on quite a different sense as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is for instance possible to refer back to the stages of evolution of humanity from the contents of the Our Father prayer. It doesn't refer to the contents in this case but that the Our Father comes across in a different and in a newer way to the “I” filled conscious soul even though given in the same words, in the same sentences. Penetrating this event with spiritual powers makes it possible again for us to research it ourselves. This fact brings us back to the original meaning of the Gospels. This original meaning must be revealed again today. Humanity should not be allowed to be fobbed off with misunderstandings of Gospels not taken from a lofty view. One should overcome the point of understanding the matter in such a way as to ask oneself: Can you, when you are quite honest in your soul, today still, discover meaning in the words of John 17, verse 1 to 9?

My dear friends, much can be said and repeated about this if you want to disregard the facts that a clear understanding can't really be found. In an artificial way (of the commentator) no meaning can be linked to these words. Only through belief can meaning be connected to them because nothing actual is touched when you have one these sentences (of some or other terrible translation) in front of you. By contrast when you make an attempt to empathise with the (original) texts in a word-for-word translation into your mother tongue (original text says “German”—translator note), then a deeper meaning comes into it. You should not allow, if you are honest with yourself, to say these words would be simplified and be comprehensible to every ordinary human mind, through artificial comments. Actually you realise the deeper meaning in the original and this fact must be your starting point.

Humanity today would prefer not to have to search for such deep meaning in the Gospels. One can't escape the fact that there is deeper meaning which we need to discover. We can't deny it. It would be a subjective fantasy to say: ‘Don't interpret anything in the Gospels, simply remain with the contents.’ That as such is the interpretation. When we go back to the meaning which is there on quite a mundane level then we could translate it in the following way:

After Jesus saved him, he lifted his eyes to heaven and said: Father, the hour has come, let your son be revealed so that he may reveal you, as You have given him power over all who have flesh, so that he may give everlasting life to them. This now is everlasting life, that You are recognised as the only true God and Jesus Christ as your emissary. I have revealed Your being on earth, to fulfil the work You have given to me. And now reveal me, Father, with the light of revelation which came through You to me before the world began. I have brought You into manifestation to humanity which You assigned to me out of the world. They were Yours and You gave them to me and they have remained fulfilled with Your Word. Thus they can see that everything which You have given me comes from You. For the power of thought which You have given me, I have brought to them. You have linked yourself to them and seen how I come from You and that You have given them to me. I pray for each single individual, not for humanity in general, but for those you have given me, for they are yours, created by you.

As I have said to you before, this entire version is nothing other, my dear friends, than the facts of humanity's evolution depicted within the Gospels. The precise truth in the Gospels can be found when you enter into the spiritual facts within them. With this, the kind of awareness develops, I might say, for the right light to be thrown on the words. Is it not true, it is certainly not my intention to utter some idle criticism when I say it is not possible to say the words: “Father, the hour has come for You to reveal your son, so that Your son can reveal you.” If you are honest, you will admit: this doesn't really say anything, even by trying to make it comprehensible through the human heart. In contrast the truth becomes obvious by taking the Greek Text which says: “Father, the hour has come, reveal your son ...” which asks the Father to reveal the Son. The δοξα is no statement, the δοξα is to reveal, to announce, to-bring-to-recognition, and thus it is meant: “... so that your son is revealed out of You.” The mediation of the Father-contents through the power of the Son are expressed directly in these words in a naive idea. Earlier, humanity had the substance of the Father God within them, as described. Now the Father God has brought the Son to becoming the mediator for humanity. This is really written here and is no lie: “... as You have given him power over all who have flesh ...” The expression “flesh” (Fleisch) is difficult to translate here because it can be misunderstood in ordinary speech. In fact, it should say: “... as You have given him power over all human physical bodies so that he can give everlasting life for those given to him.”—When one contemplates these facts, that the human body originally had the consciousness of being filled with God and thus earned everlasting life, you realise that while this power no longer fills the consciousness, the bodies can no longer reflect back the gift of everlasting life. This is why the Christ had to be sent to humanity. ‘This now is everlasting life, that You are recognised as the only true God and Jesus Christ your emissary. I have revealed Your Being on earth, to fulfil the work You have given to me. And now reveal me, Father, with the light of revelation which came through You to me before the world began. I have brought You into manifestation for humanity which you assigned me out of the world. They were Yours and You gave them to me and they have remained fulfilled with Your Word.’

Christ Jesus has made it possible to stop the Word from dying and for the contents of the Father substance to remain in humanity. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, humanity would have forgotten about this content. The Father God would have been forgotten if the Son had not perpetuated the Fatherly content. Thus they have seen that everything which You have given me comes from You. For the power of thought which You have given me, I have brought to them. You have linked yourself to them and seen how I come from You and that You have given them to me. I pray for each single individual, not for humanity in general, but for those you have given me, for they are yours, created by you.

I add here ‘for humanity in general’ instead of ‘for the World’. This is no longer understood. This spiritual connectivity experience has just been referred to which at the time was an acceptable image: For them as individuals, not only for humanity in general.

In truth, the New Testament does not become less beautiful, magnificent and sublime through our understanding of its contents. This concerns your correct positioning in the present, in the spiritual life of the present, in a religious movement of the present to once again return to the reality contained in the Gospels. How often the request surfaces for the necessity to return again to original Christendom! It fails because nothing can be achieved by an attempt to grasp the Logos in its ancient meaning and then one repeatedly comforts oneself conveniently that the Gospels should be taken up as simple content. However, simple content would not fail if one would actually enter into what is written there. We may not forget, my dear friends, that words do essentially change in their feeling-value in the course of time. It is not possible simply to translate a word out of the ancient language lexicographically. Already today when one translates something lexicographically, the results are entirely different. This applies even more when translating historical events. It does not come down to directly taking the sentimental value attached to words of the present and applying this to ancient wording, but the task is to go back to the feeling within the contents of the ancient working. We can find examples of these facts everywhere in the New Testament where the Gospels were expressed in a time when revelation was given through grace from the spiritual cosmos to mankind which had not yet moved from the partially developed ego consciousness into the fully developed ego consciousness. All other facts need to be judged according to this basic fact. We may not remain fixed in an opinion and say that the earlier, the simple people emerging from the lowest levels could not understand the meaning in it. If the meaning of the Gospels is so simple to understand, we must reveal the other side of this wonderful fact: How were these simple people capable of relating such a profound meaning in the Gospels?—It is far more spiritual to say these simple people born from the folk could not have understood the meaning. Such a conclusion depends on another opinion.

I don't know if any of you—perhaps those of us who are older—have had this kind of experience of going with a loving heart among the country folk. You go there as an educated person feeling tremendously clever and you speak to the folk of what you've learnt. They don't understand you. Yet if you go along with them, you discover an unbelievable deep wisdom among these simple people which outshines anything you can offer out of yourself. The wisdom of naive people is actually deeper than that of educated people. The theory of simplicity among primitive people is an intellectual theory of educated people. For example, the meaning in some of Jakob Bohme's sentences could have been learnt from a herb gatherer forty years ago rather than in a university. This can't be denied. However faithfully an old text can be translated is something from which Professor Beckh can create a song for you, concerning Sanskrit in oriental texts. One will not be going too far by saying Indian philosophy becomes unrecognizable in translation, which for example was done by Professor Deußen (after the visit of Swami Viviknanda to Germany in 1896-translator note). If one wants to examine the original human contents of Deußen's translation, simply the straight forward word combination, you experience it as empty words in which no sense can be found at all. These things are of the utmost importance and are related to the deepest questions of our time. As a result, I do not want to hesitate to decide our future meeting in relation with this consideration, because I believe that it is necessary precisely at this time.

I hope you can experience it as the truth—what I mentioned yesterday—that for the Religious Movement the Act of Consecration becomes the deepest and most everlasting fact which is not merely rich in imagery but that it must become alive and remain capable of becoming ever new and more rich. I hope that we can continue with our working together in this lively unfolding way with which we have started with so much hope.

Werner Klein expressed in closing the wish of the good will remaining so powerfully in the work that in a year's time another meeting will be held where they could ask Dr Steiner's advice.

Rudolf Steiner: We wish for this as well and will hold this in our hearts.

Yesterday, we concluded with two significant questions resulting from considering the position of a personality such as John Scotus Erigena. In him, we discover a world view, dating from the first centuries of Christianity that throws its light into the ninth century. Based on everything we have learned recently, we can say that the manner of perception, the whole way of thinking, differed in the first centuries A.D. from what it was later on. As we already know, a great change occurred in the fourth Christian century. From the middle of that century onward, people simply thought much more rationally than they had done earlier. One could say that until that time all perception, all forming of concepts had sprung far more from a form of inspiration than later on when human beings became increasingly conscious of the fact that they themselves were working with thoughts. What we have found to be the consciousness of human beings prior to the fourth century A.D. is still echoed in statements such as that by Scotus Erigena that man makes judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but perceives as an angel. This idea Scotus Erigena brings up as an ancient legacy, as a kind of reminiscence, was acknowledged by anyone who thought at all prior to the fourth century A.D. It never occurred to people in those days to attribute to the human being thoughts that transmit knowledge or perception. They ascribed those to the angel working within man. An angel inhabited the body of human beings; the angel perceived, and human beings shared in this knowledge.

Such a direct consciousness had faded away altogether after the fourth century. In men like Scotus Erigena it emerged once again, drawn forth from the soul with effort, as it were. This proves that the whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of these centuries. That is why it is so difficult for people today to turn their minds back to the mode of thinking and conceiving prevalent in the first centuries after Christ. Only with the help of spiritual science can this be done again. We have to arrive once more at views that will truly correspond to what was thought in the first centuries A.D.

Already in the days of John Scotus Erigena controversies such as the one over Communion and man's predestination began. These were unmistakable indications of the fact that what was earlier more like an inspiration people did not argue about had now moved to the level of human debate. This came about because, as time went on, many things were simply no longer understood at all.

Among the things that were no longer understood, for example, is the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in the form generally known. If we take this beginning of the Gospel of John seriously, it actually states something that is no longer present in subsequent centuries in the general consciousness of those who profess Christianity. Consider that this Gospel starts with the words: “In the beginning was the Word”—and then it says further that through the Logos all things were made, that is, everything came into being that belongs among created things, and nothing was created except through the Logos.

If we take these words seriously, we have to admit: They signify that all visible things, all the things of the world, came into being through the Logos and that the Logos is therefore the actual creator of all things. In the Christian thinking after the fourth century A.D. the Logos, rightly identified with Christ in the sense of the Gospel of John, was certainly not regarded as the creator of all visible things. Instead, Christ is contrasted with the Creator as the Father, as God the Father. The Logos is designated as the Son, but the Son is not considered the Creator; it is the Father Who is made into the Creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the Gospel of St. John. You cannot take this Gospel seriously and not regard Christ as the Creator of all things visible, and instead view the Father God as the Creator. You can see, my dear friends, how little this Gospel was taken seriously in later Christian times.

In our mind, we have to place ourselves in the whole mode of thinking of the first Christian centuries, which, as I have said, experienced a change at the point in time indicated above. This way of thinking was in turn structured on the basis of insights into the spiritual world left behind from ancient pagan times. In particular, we have to understand clearly how people viewed the Last Supper, which then continued in the Christian Sacrifice of the Mass. We have to understand the view concerning Communion, the main content of which is contained in the words: “This is my body”—pointing to the bread—and “This is my blood”—pointing to the wine. This content of Communion was truly comprehended during the first Christian centuries; it was even understood by people who were by no means educated but simply gathered together in remembrance of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. But what did people actually mean by that? They referred to the following.

Throughout antiquity, people were in possession of a religious doctrine of wisdom. Fundamentally speaking, the further back we go in time, the more we find this religious teaching of wisdom based on the being of the Father God. When we consider the religions of very ancient times, preserved in decadent form in later religious faiths, they exhibit in all instances a certain worship of what had remained behind from the ancestor of a tribe or a people. In a sense, human beings worshiped the ancestral father of a tribe. You know from Tacitus' Germania¹ how even those tribes who then invaded the Roman empire and made possible the new civilization, definitely retained such memories of tribal deities although in many cases they had already changed to a different form of worship, namely, to that of local gods—something I have mentioned in the public lectures of the last course.² They believed that while generation after generation had passed since a certain ancient ancestor had lived who had established the tribe or nation, the soul, the soul-spiritual element of this tribal father, still held sway in the most recent generations.

This presence was believed to be connected with the physical community of the bodies in the tribe. After all, these bodies were all related to each other. They all had the same ancestry. The common blood flowed through their veins. The body and the blood were one. As people looked up in religious devotion to the soul-spiritual element of the tribal father, they also experienced the presence of the deity to whom the tribal father had returned, the god through whom this ancestral father now affected the whole tribe or nation by means of his soul-spiritual nature. The rule of this deity was seen in the bodies, in the blood that ran down through the generations. A profound mystery was sensed in the mysterious forces of the body and the blood.

In those ancient pagan times, people actually beheld the forces of the deity in what held sway in the body and circulated in the blood. Therefore, it is possible to say that when a follower of such an ancient world view saw an animal's blood or, what was more, human blood run out, he beheld in this blood the corporeality of the deity. In the bodies of his race or tribe, which were built up by the blood, he beheld the forms, the image, of the deity. People today no longer have any idea of how the divine-spiritual was worshiped then at the same time as the material substance.

Truly, through the blood of the generations flowed the power of the deity; through the bodies of the generations the deity formed its image. The soul and spirit of the ancestor rose up to this deity and hence worked upon the descendants with divine power and was worshiped as the ancestral god. Not only in regard to these ancient beliefs, but above all in regard to actual truth, the elements working in the human body depend on the forces of the earth. As you know, the body's origins lie in much more ancient times but the forces of the earth are active in the human body as it is today—containing the mineral kingdom—and in the blood.

In the human blood, for example, not only those forces are active that enter the human being through foods but also those that are effective in the whole planet earth. For instance, due to the fact that a person lives in a region rich in red soil, hence a region possessing certain geological characteristics and certain metallic inclusions in the soil, an effect proceeds from the earth to the blood. In turn, the formation, the body, of man is dependent on the earth. The body develops one way in warmer, another way in colder regions of the earth. The corporeality and the elements active in the blood depend on the forces working in the earth. This truth, which we are approaching once again today through spiritual scientific research, was immediately clear to people in antiquity due to their instinctive perception. They know that the earth forces pulsate in the blood.

Today we say that when we connect a telegraph machine in station A by wire to one in station B, we connect the machines one-sidedly. We transmit the electrical current through the wire but the circuit must be closed. It is closed when we make the so-called ground connection. You probably know that if we have a telegraph machine at one station, we guide the wire over the telegraph poles. Yet the circuit is then not closed and it must be closed. We transmit the current into the plate sunk into the ground at one station and do the same at the other station but do nothing more. We could run a different wire there, but we do not do that; we mount an earth-wire plate on both ends of the wire, and the earth takes care of the rest. We know this today as a result of science. We have to presume that electricity, the electric current, works within the earth.

Now people in antiquity knew nothing of electricity and electric currents. Instead, they know something about their blood. They stood on the earth and knew that something was in the earth that also lived in the blood. They looked at the matter differently; they did not speak of electricity but of an earthly element that dwelled in their blood. We no longer know that the earth's electricity lives in the blood. We only speak out of attempts to grasp the matter outwardly through mathematical and mechanistic conceptions. This is why human beings linked their conception of God to the earth's body as such. They realized that the divine element worked in the blood and in the body through the earth. This was what appeared in the concept of the Father God because people considered the primal ancestor, the father, of the tribe or their folk as the point of departure for the influence of the divine element. The primal ancestor was believed to be working through the earth as his means, and the effects of the earth in the blood and the whole human body were seen to be the effects of the divine.

Now these people of old had still another conception. They said, The human being is not only affected by the earthly element. It would be fine if only the earth influenced mankind, but that is not the case. The neighbor of the earth, the moon, works together with the earth's forces. Therefore, they said, it really is not the earth alone but earth and moon together that are effective. With this combination of earth and moon forces, they now linked conceptions of not only one uniform deity of the earth, but many subordinate deities who were then present in the pagan world. All the conceptions that existed of the deity, the elements that affected the human being through the body and blood, all these were the primal source that fed any view of God in this ancient period.

It is not surprising that all search for insight turned in antiquity to the earth, the moon, and the earth's influences and therefore people had to figure out what affected the earth. Thus, a most sophisticated form of science was developed. An echo of this science of the Father God still influenced the first three books by John Scotus Erigena I spoke about yesterday. Basically though, he was not really familiar any more with this primal wisdom, for he lived as late as the ninth century, but bits of this science had been handed down and been preserved. They referred to the insight that the Father God, Who was not created but creates, dwells in everything surrounding the human being on earth, that the other deities, who have been created but also create, live in it as well. They are then the various entities of the hierarchies. Furthermore, the visible world is spread out around man, the created as well as the noncreating. Finally, human beings are to await the world in which the deity as a noncreating and not created, hence, as a resting divinity, holds sway and receives all else into its bosom. This is what is contained in Scotus Erigena's fourth book.

As I have told you, this fourth book deals mainly with soteriology and eschatology. It presents the history of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection and the gifts of grace, but also the end of the world and the entering into the resting Godhead. The first three chapters of the great book by Scotus Erigena clearly show us a reflection of ancient world views, for basically only the fourth chapter is really Christian. The first three chapters are permeated with a number of Christian concepts but what predominates in them really dates from ancient pagan times. We also find this unchanged pagan wisdom in the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries. We can say that through nature, through what the human being saw in the creatures surrounding him, he beheld the region of the Father God. He saw a world of ideals behind nature; he saw certain forces in nature. He also saw the rule of the Father God in the sequence of generation, in the development of mankind in individual tribes and nations.

In the first Christian centuries, another insight had joined this knowledge, which has been almost completely lost. The first Christian Church Fathers referred to something their later critics thoroughly eradicated. They said it was true that the Father God worked in the element flowing in the blood through the generations and expressed in the bodies, but He did so in constant conflict and together with His opponent powers, the nature spirits. This was a particularly vivid conception in the first Christian centuries, namely, that the Father God had never been quite successful in exerting His influence exclusively. Rather, He was waging a constant battle with the nature spirits who rule in any number of things in the outer world. Therefore, these first Christian Church Fathers said, The ancients of pre-Christian times believed in the Father God, but they really could not distinguish Him from the nature spirits, they actually believed in a kingdom of the Father God that included the domain of nature. They believed that the whole visible world has its source in it. This, however, is not true, so they said. All these spiritual beings, these various nature deities, do work together in nature, but first of all they crept into the things of the earth. Now, these earthly things we see around us with our senses, the things that have come about on earth, neither originate from these nature spirits nor from the Father God Who actually expressed His creative being only in the metamorphoses preceding the earth. What we see as earth does not originate from the Father God nor from the nature spirits. It comes from the Son, from the Logos, whom the Father God let spring forth from Himself so that the earth might be created by the Logos. And the Gospel of St. John, a mighty, significant monument was written in order to indicate: No, it is not as the people of old believed; the earth was not created by the Father God. The Father God made the Son come forth from Him; and the Son is the creator of the earth.

This is what the Gospel of John was supposed to state. This was basically what the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries struggled for. This then became so hard to grasp for the developing human intellect that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Everything the intellect creates is positive theology and does not penetrate into the regions containing the actual mysteries of the universe. We can enter into them only if we negate all predicates, if we do not speak of the existence of God but of God's existence transcending existence, if we do not refer to the personality but the personality transcending personality. Hence, human beings only enter into them if they transpose everything into its negative. Then, through negative theology, he takes hold of the actual secret of existence. So Dionysius and his successors, such as John Scotus Erigena, who was already completely imbued with the intellect, did not believe that the human being was at all capable of explaining these mysteries of the universe with human intellect.

Now, what is implied by saying that the Logos is the creator of everything? We need to recall what was present in all the ancient pre-Christian times and endured in diminished form until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. People believed that the deity works through the blood and through the body. This led them to believe that when the blood flows through the veins of the human being or the animals, it is really taken away from the gods. It is the rightful possession of the gods. Therefore, human beings can approach the gods if they return blood to them. The gods really wish to keep the blood for themselves; humans have taken possession of it. In turn, human beings must give the blood back to the gods, hence the blood sacrifice of ancient times.

Then came Christ and said: This is not what counts; this is not the way to approach earthly things. They do not originate from those gods who desire the blood. Look upon what works in the human being prior to the earth's influence on him; take bread, something that nourishes human beings, and look at how they initially partake of it. They partake of it by means of the sense of taste. The food in human beings goes to a certain point before it is transformed into blood. For it is only changed into blood after having passed through the walls of the intestines into the organism. Only there does the earth's influence begin; as long as the food has not been taken hold of by the blood, the earth's influence has not yet begun. Therefore, do not view blood as something corresponding to the god; behold that in the bread before it turns into blood and in the wine before it enters the blood. There is the divine element; there is the incarnation of the Logos. Do not look upon the element that flows in the blood, for that is an ancient legacy from the Moon age, the pre-earthly time. Before it turns into blood, food has to do with what is earthly in the human being. Therefore, do away with the conceptions of blood, body, and flesh. Instead, turn your thinking to what has not yet become blood nor flesh; direct your minds to what is prepared out there on earth, to what is of the earth without the moon having had an influence on it, to what comes from the sun's influence. For we behold the things through the light of the sun; we eat bread and drink wine, and in them we eat and drink the force of the sun. The visible things have not come about through the Father God, they have come into being through the Logos.

With this, the whole realm of human thought was directed to something that could not be attained from the whole of nature in the way people in the past had done. It could be attained only by looking upon what the sun lets shine forth upon the earth. Human thinking had been turned to something purely spiritual. Human beings were not supposed to extract the divine element from the physical things of the earth; they were supposed to behold this divine element in the purely spiritual, the Logos. The Logos was contrasted to the ancient conceptions of God the Father. That is, people's minds were directed toward a purely spiritual element. In pre-Christian times, people beheld the deity only through what was in a manner of speaking, organically brewed up in them and then arose within them somewhat like a vision. They did indeed behold the divine arising out of the blood. Now they sought to grasp it in the purely spiritual element. They were to view the visible things around them as a result of the Logos and not of what had only slipped into them, as the result of a god who had been creative in pre-earthly times.

Only by thinking in this manner do we actually approach the concepts of the first Christian centuries. Human beings had been told not to use any force other than that of their consciousness to attain the concepts with which to arrive at the comprehension of the deity. Human beings were being directed toward the spirit. Therefore, what could be said to them? They could be told: Formerly, the earth was so powerful that it bestowed upon you the concepts of the divine. That has ceased. The earth no longer gives you anything. Through your own efforts you must come to the Logos and to the creative principle. Up to now, you have basically worshipped something that was creative in pre-earthly conditions; now you must revere the creative principle in the earthly realm. But you can grasp this only through the power of your I, your spirit.

The first Christians expressed this by saying: The end of the world is near. They meant the end of the earth condition that bestows insights on man without his working on these insights with his consciousness. In fact, a profound truth is expressed in these words concerning the end of the world, for human beings had formerly been children of the earth. They had given themselves up to the forces of the earth. They had relied on their blood to give them their knowledge. This, however, was no longer possible, The kingdoms of the heavens drew near, the kingdoms of the earth ceased to be. Henceforth, man can no longer be a son of the earth. He has to turn into the companion of a spiritual being, a being that has come down to earth from the spiritual world, the Logos, the Christ.

The end of the world was prophesied for the fourth century A.D.: the end of the earth, the beginning of a new kingdom, the dawn of that age when man is to experience himself living as spirit among spirits. This is probably the most difficult to picture for people of our present age, namely, that our present manner of dwelling as human beings would not have been considered by people of the early Christian centuries as living in an earthly manner. It would have been seen as life in the spirit realm, after the destruction of the earth as it was when it still bestowed faculties upon the human being. If we properly understood the first Christians' way of thinking, we would not say that they superstitiously believed in the end of the world, which did not take place. As the first Christians saw it, this end did occur in the fourth century A.D.

The way we live today would have been considered by the first Christians as the New Jerusalem, the kingdom where the human being lives as spirit among spirits. However, they would have said: According to our view, the human being has actually entered heaven, but he is so worthless that he does not realize it. He believes that in heaven everything overflows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits against whom he has to defend himself. The first Christians would have said: Formerly, these evil spirits were contained in the things of nature; now they have been let loose, flit about invisibly, and human beings must withstand them.

Hence, in the sense of the first Christian centuries, the end of the world definitely did occur, but people simply did not comprehend this. It was not understood that instead of the god dwelling in the earth, a god whose presence is announced through events on the earth, now the supersensory Logos was present who must be recognized in the supersensory realm and to whom human beings must adhere by means of super-sensory faculties. Now, assuming this, we can comprehend why in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a feeling of the end of the world was present again in civilized Europe. Again, people awaited the world's end. They did not know what the first Christians had meant by it. Out of this frame of mind of anticipating the end of the world, which spread over all of civilized Europe during these centuries, something developed that caused people to seek Christ in a more physical manner than they ought to have looked for him. People should realize that we are to find the Logos in the spirit, not based on nature's phenomena. This search for the Logos in the spirit is something that these people, who once again were in a mood of expecting the end of the world, did not understand. Instead, they set about this search in a more materialistic way. Thus, this mood gave rise to the Crusades, the material quest for Christ in his tomb in the Orient. People adhered to Christ in this mood of the world's end, in the misunderstood mood of the end of the world.

However, Christ was not found in the Orient. People received approximately the same answer his disciples had received when they sought him tangibly in his tomb—He whom you seek is no longer here—for He must be sought in the spirit.

Now, in the twentieth century, once again a mood of the world's end prevails—and these phenomena will increase—although people have become so lethargic and indifferent that they do not even notice this anticipation of the end of the world. But the man who did speak of this mood of the world's end in his Decline of the West³ made a significant and noticeable impression, and this frame of mind will become increasingly prevalent.

Actually, we do not need to speak of the end of the world. It has already ended in the sense that humanity can no longer find the spirit based on nature; it is a matter of realizing that we live in a spiritual world. Humanity's error of not knowing that we live in a spiritual world has brought misfortune over us. It causes wars to be bloodier and bloodier. It is becoming increasingly evident that human beings act as if possessed. Indeed, they are possessed by the evil forces who confuse them, for their speech no longer expressed the inherent content of their I. They are as though possessed by a psychosis. This psychosis is much talked about but little understood.

What the first Christians meant by the end of the world, and what they understood by it, did take place. The new age is here, but it must be recognized. People must realize that when the human being perceives, he does perceive as an angel, and when he becomes conscious of his own self, he becomes self-aware as an archangel. The significant point is that the spiritual world has already descended and human beings must become conscious of it. Many have thought that they take the Gospel seriously. Yet, although the Gospels clearly say that all things that were made, hence, all things under consideration should not be explained based on their earthly forces but originated through the Logos, people professed the Father God. He should be acknowledged as one with the Christ but as that aspect of the Trinity that was active until the earth was formed, whereas the actual ruler of the earth is the Christ, the Logos.

These matters could hardly be comprehended anymore in the ninth century when Scotus Erigena was active. This is why, on the one hand, his book about the divisions of nature is so great and significant. On the other hand, as I told you yesterday, this is why it is chaotic as well. This is why you only begin to find your way in it when you view it from the spiritual scientific viewpoint as we have done yesterday and today.

Well, as I said, in the fourth chapter, Erigena speaks of the uncreated entity that is not creating. If we understand the true meaning of what Scotus Erigena describes here, namely, the resting deity in which everything unites, then the necessary step has been taken. The world that is described in the preceding three chapters has come to an end. The world of the resting Godhead, the noncreated and noncreating being, is here.

Insofar as it is nature, the earth is declining. I have often called attention to the fact that this is the case by indicating that even geologists say nowadays that by and large, nothing new originates anymore on the earth. Certainly, as an aftereffect, plants develop, and so forth, plants, animals, and human propagate. But the earth as a whole has turned into something other than what it was. It is becoming fragmentized; it is splitting. The earth as a whole is already in a state of disintegration as far as its mineral kingdom is concerned.

The great geologist, Suess,⁴ expressed this in his work The Countenance of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde) by saying that we walk around on the corroding crust of the earth. He points to certain regions on earth where this corrosion is evident. He stresses that in the past this was different. This is what the world view and conception of life in the first Christian centuries referred to, though not based on facts of nature but on the moral facts of humanity's evolution.

Indeed, it is true that since the beginning of the fifteenth century we live even more in the resting Godhead than did Scotus Erigena. This Godhead awaits our attainment of Imagination and Inspiration through our own efforts. Then we will be able to recognize the world around us as a spiritual world. We will perceive that we are indeed in a spiritual world that has thrown off the earthly one. This deity awaits our realization that we are living after the end of the world and that we have arrived in the New Jerusalem.

It is indeed a strange spiritual destiny for human beings that they dwell in the spiritual world and neither know it nor wish to know it. There is no substance in any of the interpretations aiming at representing true Christianity as mixed up with some half-baked conceptions of an end of the world, which, after all, did not occur and was only meant symbolically, and so on. What we find in the writings of Christianity must be comprehended in its true meaning. It must be grasped in the right way. There must be clarity concerning the fact that the early Christian views referred to a world that had already changed after the fourth century A.D.

The teachings in the first Christian centuries stood in awe of the abundant wisdom of paganism, and the Christian Church Fathers attempted to connect it with the secret of Golgotha. Matters were actually viewed the way I described it today. Yet, it was not believed that mankind could understand them offhand. This is why the secrets of ancient time were preserved in dogmas meant only to be believed, not to be understood. The dogmas are by no means superstition or untruth. The dogmas are true, but they must be comprehended in the right way. They can only be understood, however, if this comprehension is sought for with the faculty that has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

When Scotus Erigena lived, human reason was still a force. Scotus Erigena still sensed that the angel within him comprehended. After all, this human intellect was still a force in the best minds of that period. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we have only the shadow of this reason, this intellect. Since that time, we have developed the consciousness soul. Yet we still retain the shadow of the intellect. When a person develops his concepts today, he is indeed far from having any idea that an angel is comprehending something within him. He simply thinks: I am figuring something out concerning the things I have experienced. He certainly does not talk about the presence of a spiritual being that is perceiving, much less of a still higher spiritual being, which he is by virtue of his self-awareness. The faculty with which we try to know things is only the shadow of the intellect that had developed for the Greeks, for example for Plato and Aristotle, and even for the Romans and that had still been alive for Scotus Erigena in the ninth century A.D.

But this is the point, my dear friends. We no longer need to be misled by the intellect; this insight can help us to progress. Today, people follow a shadow, the reasoning or intellect within them. They allow themselves to be misled by it instead of striving for Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, which in turn would lead once again into the spiritual world that actually surrounds us. It is really beneficial that the intellect has become like a shadow. Initially, we established external natural science with this shadowlike intellect. On the basis of this intellect we have to work further, and God rests so as to allow us to work. The fourth stage is completely here today. We just have to become conscious of it. If we do not become aware of this fact, nothing can develop further on earth. For what the earth has received as a legacy is gone; it is no more. New things must be inaugurated.

An individual such as Spengler beholds the fragments of the old civilizations. After all, they were prepared in sufficient numbers. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the mood of the imminent end of the world prevailed. Then came the Crusades. They really accomplished nothing new, for people sought in the material realm something that should have been sought in the spirit. Now, because the Crusades had brought no results, the Renaissance came, so to speak, to the rescue of mankind. Greek culture was again disseminated in what prevails today as education. Greek culture was present again but not as something new. The mathematical and mechanistic concepts of external nature developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century were the only new elements. But the ruins of antiquity were there, too, and they are crammed into our young people in the secondary schools. They then form the basis of civilization. Oswald Spengler encountered these fragments of the Renaissance. Like erratic blocks, they float on the sea that is intent on producing something more. Yet if you merely look upon these floating ice blocks, you behold the decline. For what has been retained from the past is characterized by a mood of decline, and nobody can galvanize our modern education. It is perishing. Out of the spirit, through primal creation, a different civilization must be created for the fourth stage is here.

This is how Scotus Erigena must be understood, who brought along his wisdom—already difficult to understand for him, I would say—from the Irish isle, from the mysteries that had been cultivated in Ireland. This is how we must interpret Scotus Erigena's work. Thus, not only the primal knowledge that can be attained through spiritual science, but also the documents of former times express this meaning if we are willing really to understand them, if we are willing finally to free ourselves from the Alexandrianism of the modern philosophic science that calls itself philology. For we must admit that the way things are handled today, we do not see much of either philology or philosophy. If we observe the methods of cramming and the way examinations are conducted in our educational institutions, very little is present of philo, of love. That has to emerge from a different direction, but we are in need of it once again.

It was my intention, first of all, to present the figure of Scotus Erigena to you. Secondly, I wanted to point out that the ways to properly grasp the buried primordial wisdom have yet to be sought. Nowadays people pay no attention to the fact that the Gospel of St. John clearly states that the Logos is the creative principle, not the Father God.

• 1. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, around A.D. 55 until 120, Roman historian and consul. His work, De origine et situ germanorum, is the oldest surviving source concerning the geography and ethnography of the Germanic peoples.
• 2. Contained in Die Naturwissenschaft und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung der Menschheit seit dem Altertum, six lectures, 1921. GA 325, 1969.
• 3. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, philosopher of history and culture.
• 4. Eduard Suess, 1831–1914, geologist. Das Antlitz der Erde, 3 vol., 1885–1909.

The writings of John Scotus Erigena emanate from a mode of thinking which shines over from the first centuries of Christendom into the 9th century. The mental process, the whole life of thought and idea in those first centuries of Christendom was different from what it came to be later on. A great and fundamental change occurred in the 4th century of our era. From the middle of the 4th century onwards, the thinking of men consisted to a far greater extent in an exercising of the reasoning faculty. Until that time, all knowledge and all mental life sprang far more from a kind of inspiration than later on when, with increasing consciousness, men began to work out their own thoughts for themselves. Now the kind of consciousness that was natural before the 4th century still echoes on in sayings like that of John Scotus Erigena—that man forms judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but knows as an Angel. This idea—which springs up in John Scotus Erigena as a kind of reminiscence, as a heritage from an earlier form of knowledge—was a fact acknowledged by anyone who thought at all in the days before the 4th century of our era. It never occurred to men in those days to attribute thoughts to the human being as such. Thoughts were attributed to the Angel working within the human being. An Angel indwelt the body of a man; the Angel was the knower and the human being shared in the knowledge.

Consciousness of these things died away altogether after the 4th century and in men like John Scotus Erigena it flashed up once again, was drawn forth as it were with effort from the soul. This very fact indicates that man's whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of that century. And that is why it is so difficult for us today to understand the mode of thinking of the first centuries of Christen' dom. Indeed, this understanding can only come from Spiritual Science. It is a question of forming true and really adequate conceptions of the thought and outlook of men in those early Christian times.

The Eucharistic controversy, as it is called, had already appeared on the scene in the days of John Scotus Erigena, and discussion was rife on such subjects as predestination. This is an unmistakable indication of the fact that what was previously more of the nature of inspiration, removed altogether from the domain of controversy, had now been drawn into the sphere of discussion and debate. But as the centuries took their course, many things were no longer understood at all, as, for example, the first verses of the Gospel of St John in the form in which they are commonly rendered. If we read the first verses of this Gospel carefully, we find a statement that has been overlooked altogether by adherents of the Christian Faith throughout subsequent centuries. Think of the first verses of the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. And then: ‘All things were made by him [i.e.: by the Logos]; and without him was not anything made that was made.’

If these words are taken literally, their purport is quite clear: namely, that all things visible were made by the Logos, that the Logos, therefore, is the creator of the things of the world. In the Christian mind after the 4th century, the Logos—rightly identified with the Christ in the sense of St John's Gospel—is not regarded as the creator of things visible, but the Father God is substituted for the Logos. The Logos is known as the Son, but the Father, not the Son, is conceived as the creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the words of the Gospel of St John. One cannot take this Gospel literally and maintain at the same time that the creator of things visible is the Father God and not the Christ.

And now we must try to understand the kind of thinking in which such a fundamental change came about in the 4th century. In the early Christian centuries, thought was based upon the knowledge of the spiritual world that had survived from ancient paganism. We must try to understand the attitude of men living in the first centuries of Christendom to teachings such as those now living on in the form of the Eucharist. The essence of the Eucharist is, as we realise, contained in the words: ‘This is My body’ (the bread); ‘this is My blood’ (the wine). There was a real understanding of this mystery in those early centuries, even among men who were by no means learned but whom the Eucharist drew together in simple devotion to Christ. What did such a mystery really signify to these men?

Teachings of religious wisdom permeated the whole of antiquity. The further we go back in time, the more deeply was this teaching founded upon the nature of the Father God. When we study the religious beliefs of very ancient times—beliefs which then survived in decadent form—we find everywhere that veneration was paid to the element flowing down from the primal ancestor of a tribal stock. In his Germania, Tacitus speaks of the peoples who, having found their way into the Roman Empire, became the founders of the new civilisation, and of how they still harked back in remembrance to these tribal deities, although to some extent they had already adopted a different form of worship, the worship of Gods of locality. The conception, therefore, was that generation after generation had passed by since the existence of an ancient ancestor who had founded the tribal stock, and that the soul and spirit of this father of the tribe still held sway, down to the very latest generation. Men thought: the bodies of all who constitute the tribal stock are under this ancestral sway. These bodies are all related, they have one common origin. One common blood flows through the veins of them all. The body and the blood are one. And in revering the soul and spirit of the father of the tribe, men felt the sway of the Divinity behind this tribal ancestor whose soul and spirit worked upon and through them as a people. They beheld the sway of this Divinity in the bodies, in the blood flowing through the generations and they felt the presence of a mystery in the forces of the body and of the blood.

In the days of ancient paganism men had a real perception of the forces of the Divinity ruling in the body and flowing through the blood. Whenever an adherent of that ancient view of the world saw blood flowing from animals or from human beings, he saw in the blood the body of the Godhead and in the bodies that were built up by this blood, the bodies of the members of the tribe, the form, the image of the Godhead. People of today have no longer any real conception of how the Divine-Spiritual in those times was worshipped in this material form.

And so, the power of the Godhead flowed through the blood of the successive generations. The Godhead shaped His image in the bodies of the generations. The soul and the spirit of the father of the tribe had been in the presence of the Godhead and as the primal ancestor he then worked with divine power upon and through his progeny. The father of the tribe was worshipped as the divine ancestor.

Now it must be remembered that the forces working in the body of man are of the nature of the forces of the Earth. This is not merely an ancient belief but an actual truth for, as you know, the origin of the human physical body lies in still more ancient times, and now, when the physical body has the mineral kingdom within it, the forces of the Earth are working in the body and in the blood of man.

In human blood there work not only the forces introduced with the foodstuffs but the forces that are active in the planetary body of the Earth as a whole. If a man lives in a region where the soil is red, or its geological constituents include certain metallic substances, his blood is influenced by the Earth. Again, the bodily form of the human being is itself affected by the Earth. In warmer zones the human body is not the same as in colder zones. The bodily nature and the forces working in the blood are fundamentally influenced by the forces of the Earth. This truth—which can only be revealed today by spiritual investigation—was a matter of course in the instinctive knowledge possessed by the men of old. They knew that the forces of the Earth pulsate in the blood. When we today connect the telegraphic apparatus in station A by means of a wire with the telegraphic apparatus in station B, this is only one part of the connection. The current of electricity must be led through the wire. But the current must be ‘circuited’, as we say. You know quite well how this is done—simply by sinking plates in the Earth. The Earth does the rest. This has been discovered today by modern science. We presuppose that the electric current works in the Earth. In olden times men knew nothing about electricity or electric currents, but on the other hand they knew something about their blood. Standing on the Earth they knew: there is something in the Earth which also lives in the blood. They did not speak of electricity but of an earthly force living in their blood. We no longer know that Earth-electricity is living in the blood. We are content to rely on mathematical formulae and the science of mechanics. But the men of old connected their picture of the Godhead with the very body of the Earth. They felt the sway of the Godhead in the blood, in the body, in the Earth. It was their picture of the Father God. This picture of the Father God was based upon the principle of the primal ancestor of the tribe, which the people conceived as the initial focus of the forces of the Godhead. But the Earth was the medium through which this Godhead manifested and the forces of the Earth in the blood, in the whole human body, were held to be workings of the Godhead.

Now another conception too was associated with this picture of the Father God in the days of antiquity. Men said to themselves: Every' thing would be well if the earthly forces only were working upon the being of man, but this is not the case. The Moon is working in the neighbourhood of the Earth. In short, the Earth is not working alone, but together with the Moon. And with this mingling of Earth and Moon forces there was associated the idea not only of one single Godhead of the Earth but of the many subordinate gods of paganism. All the forces working upon body and blood were woven into this ancient conception of the Godhead.

No wonder that all striving for knowledge in those times was directed to the forces of the Moon and of the Earth. A subtle and intricate body of knowledge grew up, a ‘science’ as it were of the Father God, and we have an echo of this in the first three sections of the great work of John Scotus Erigena, On the Division of Nature. He himself no longer possessed the knowledge in its real form, for he lived in the 9th century after Christ. None the less his books contain fragments that are a direct heritage from primeval wisdom, fragments in which we read that in all material existence there lives the Father God—creating but not created—and the other Divinities who both create and are themselves created. These other Divinities are the Beings of the Hierarchies.

I he visible world spread around the human being is created and does not create, and man is to look forward to a world wherein the Godhead rules as the Godhead at rest—neither creating nor created but receiving all things into himself. Such is the substance of the fourth section of the work of John Scotus Erigena.

This fourth section treats of soteriology and eschatology. It speaks of the history of the Christ Jesus, of the Resurrection, of the gifts of the Divine Grace, of the ending of the world and the return to the Godhead at rest. The first three sections, particularly, echo the conceptions of antiquity for, as a matter of fact, the thoughts become genuinely Christian only when we reach the fourth. The first three sections contain (Christian thoughts, but are derived, in essence, from ancient paganism. And so, it was among the Church Fathers of the first centuries of Christendom. Their conceptions were relics of the ancient era of paganism. Let me put it in these words: In Nature, in the created world around him, man gazed upon the region of the Father God. Behind Nature he saw an Ideal world. He beheld the workings of certain forces in nature; and in the succession of the generations, in the development of humanity itself in the different races and peoples he saw the ruling of the Father God.

Now in the first centuries of Christendom there was added to this conception another sphere of knowledge which has been entirely lost. The earliest Church Fathers spoke as follows, although such doctrines have been exterminated altogether by their later exponents. They said: The Father God has worked in the blood flowing through the generations and in all that has shaped itself into the bodies of men, but the Father God has been engaged in perpetual warfare with the powers who oppose him, namely the Nature Spirits. The minds of men during the first centuries of Christendom were imbued with the idea that the Father God had never succeeded in working alone but had been obliged to wage perpetual warfare against the Nature Spirits ruling in the things of the outer world. The teachings of the earliest Church Fathers were to the effect that in the pre-Christian era men believed in the Father God but could not distinguish him from the Nature Spirits. What these men of old really believed in was the whole world of the Father God combined with the kingdom of Nature. It was from this that they conceived the visible world to have proceeded. But, said the Church Fathers, this is an error. All these different Nature Gods are working in Nature but at a certain stage they insinuated themselves into the things of the Earth. The things of the Earth we perceive with our senses, the things that are outside us, that have become earthly, do not proceed from these Nature Spirits, nor from the Father God who worked creatively only in the metamorphoses of pre-earthly existence. The Earth we see proceeded not from the Father God and not from the Nature Spirits, but from the Son, from the Logos whom the Father God sent forth in order that He (the Logos) might create the Earth. And the Gospel of St John is there as a token and a memorial that the Earth is not, as the ancients believed, created by the Father God. The Father God sent forth the Son, and the Son is the creator of the Earth.

It was for the upholding of the teaching contained in the first verses of the Gospel of St John that the early Fathers of the Christian Church were fighting. So difficult was it for the growing faculty of human intellect to understand this teaching that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Whatsoever is created by the human intellect is Affirmative Theology, but Affirmative Theology does not penetrate into those regions where the real mysteries of the world are contained. These regions can only be attained by the negation of all predicates, by speaking of God not as essentia but as super-essentia, by speaking not of personality, but of super-personality. In other words, when everything is negated, then, through Negative Theology alone can the real mystery of existence be fathomed. But neither Dionysius the Areopagite nor a successor like John Scotus Erigena (who was already permeated by the forces of intellect) believed that human reason was in any way capable of explaining these mysteries of world existence.

And now try to think what is implied by the assertion that the Logos is the creator of the world. Think of what was present all through pre-Christian antiquity but had grown somewhat dim at the time of the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. Men said to themselves: The Godhead works through the blood, through the body. And they associated with this the conception that when the blood runs in the veins of human beings or of animals, the Gods have been deprived of it. The blood, they said, is the lawful possession of the Gods. Therefore, we can draw near to the Gods if we give the blood back again to them. The Gods desire the blood for themselves. Men have taken possession of it and it must be given back again to the Gods. Hence the blood sacrifice in the days of antiquity.

But now came the Christ Who taught that the things of the Earth have not proceeded from the Gods who desire the blood for themselves. Christ directed the minds of men to all that works in their being before the forces of the Earth work upon them. Think of the bread—the substance wherewith man is nourished. He takes bread into his body. It is a means of nourishment and passing through the organism reaches a certain point before it is transformed into the forces of the blood. But it is not changed into blood until it has passed through the whole digestive tract. Only then do the forces of the Earth begin to work. As long as the foodstuff has not passed over into the blood, the earthly forces have not begun to work. Christ, therefore, taught men to see God not in the blood but in the bread before the bread becomes flesh, and to see God in the wine before the wine passes into the blood. There is the Divine, there is the incarnate Logos. Look not upon what flows in the blood, for what flows in the blood is a heritage of man from the Moon period, from pre- earthly time. Away, therefore, with the conceptions of the blood, of the body, of flesh. Turn your minds to what is not yet blood and not yet flesh, to what is prepared on the Earth around you without the influence of the Moon; turn your minds to what comes from the Sun! For we see things through the light of the Sun and when we eat the bread and drink the wine we receive in them the powers and forces of the Sun. Things visible exist not through the Father but through the Logos—the Son. Such was the message of Christ.

Here, you see, the mind of man is turned not to the kind of knowledge derived by the ancients from Nature, but in the direction of the Sun, to the forces poured down by the Sun to the Earth. Instead of deriving his conceptions of the Divine from physical, earthly things, man must behold the Divine in the Spiritual, in the Logos. The Logos superseded those ancient conceptions of the Father God. In other words, the mind of man was directed to the Spiritual. In pre-Christian times man had perceived the Divine with forces generated in his own organic being and these forces then arose within him in the form of vision. A vision of the Divine also proceeded from the blood. But now man must seek for the Divine in acts of purely spiritual contemplation. He must regard the things visible around him as having proceeded from the Logos, not from those beings who subsequently had insinuated themselves into the Earth as a result of the activity of a God who had created in pre-earthly existence.

Only in the light of this knowledge can we begin to understand the ideas and mental outlook of those who lived in the first centuries of Christendom. All that I have been describing was an indication to men that their conceptions of the Divine must be drawn from the forces of their consciousness alone, and from no other source. Men were directed to the Spiritual and the time had now come when it was possible to say to them: In the days of the old dispensation the Earth was so powerful that it was the source of your conception of the Divine. But those days have passed away. The Earth can no longer give you anything. Your own forces and your own forces alone must lead you to the Logos, the creative principle. Hitherto you have worshipped only the Godhead who created in pre-earthly existence; now you are to revere the principle that is creative in earthly existence. And this must be done through the power of your Ego, of your Spirit.

The early Christians, therefore, were wont to say: The end of the world is at hand. They meant the downfall of that Earth from which man drew his knowledge without conscious effort. To speak of this ‘world ending’ was to voice a profound truth, because hitherto the human being had been a son of the Earth, had relinquished himself to the forces of the Earth, relying upon his blood to give him knowledge. But this era had passed away. The kingdom of Heaven had drawn near, the kingdom of Earth had come to an end. Man was not, nor could he be henceforth, a son of the Earth. He must make himself a companion of I he Spiritual Being Who had come down to the Earth—of the Logos, of the Christ. And so, this downfall of the world was prophesied for the 4th century of Christendom. It signified the downfall of the Earth and the dawn of that kingdom in which man would feel himself dwelling as a Spirit among Spirits—it is our own time. The modern mind will find it exceedingly difficult to realise that in the first centuries of Christendom men did not look upon their existence as earthly, but as an existence within the kingdom of the Spirit after the Earth, as it had been when men drew their powers from its sources, had come to an end. Nobody who has ever really understood the thought-life of the earliest Christians will say that their belief concerning the end of the world was superstition because it did not come to pass. In the form in which the early Christians held this belief it did actually come to pass. The early Christians would have regarded the condition in which man lives as a Spirit among Spirits as the ‘new Jerusalem’. Only they would have said: We hold that man has entered already into the kingdom of Heaven, but he is so sinful that he knows it not; he imagines that Heaven flows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits in Heaven against which he must protect himself. The early Christians would have said: Hitherto these evil spirits were within the things of Nature; now they have been released and are whirling in their hosts invisibly around the human being who must guard against them.

In the sense of early Christian thought, then, there had been a world ending. But it was not realised that in place of the God indwelling the Earth, the God who proclaimed his being in the events of Earth, there had come the supersensible Logos Who must be known in the Supersensible and to Whom men must aspire with supersensible forces. If we recognise this we shall find that over the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries too, there hovered another mood, another feeling of a world ending. Once again men were expecting the downfall of the world. They did not yet understand the thoughts of the early Christians but out of this mood which spread over the whole of civilised Europe in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries there came the urge to seek the path to Christ in a more material form than that in which it should properly have been sought. Men ought to have recognised that the Logos must be found in the Spirit and not in the phenomena of the natural world. This finding of the Logos in the Spirit was not understood by men who once again were imbued with the feeling of world ending, and they sought to find the Logos by a more material path.

Out of this feeling grew the mood which gave rise to the Crusades. Men set out to find the Christ in His grave in the East, and to hold fast to him in the throes of this misinterpreted feeling that the downfall of the world was at hand. But the Christ was not to be found away yonder in the East. Those who had sought to find Him visibly in the tomb were told: He Whom thou seekest is not here. Seek for Him in the Spirit.

And now, in the 20th century—and it will be so increasingly in the days to come—there is again the same mood of world downfall, albeit in their lethargy and indifference men no longer give heed to it. Nevertheless, the writer of The Decline of the West [Oswald Spengler] has made a deep and perceptible impression upon his time. This mood of world downfall will become more and more widespread.

Yet in truth one need not speak of the downfall of the world. World ending there has been, in the sense that the Spiritual can no longer be derived from the source of Nature. The question now is for man to realise that in very truth he is living in a spiritual world. An error is responsible for the loss of the direct knowledge that he is living and moving in a spiritual world. This is the error that has brought calamity upon us and that will make the bloodshed of wars more and more terrible. Human beings are as if possessed—possessed by the evil powers who cast their minds into confusion; and they no longer speak as if they were voicing what lives in the Ego. They are possessed as by a psychosis—a psychosis much talked about, but little understood.

The downfall of the world conceived by the first Christians has come about and the new era is upon us. But the new era must be recognised and understood. It must be realised that in very truth when the human being ‘knows’, he knows as an Angel; when he becomes conscious in his own true being, he is conscious as an Archangel. The spiritual world has come down to us and it is only a question of being conscious of it. That is the all-important thing. Many people imagine that they take the words of the Gospel literally and in all earnestness. Yet in spite of the unequivocal statement in the Gospel of St John that all created things are not to be explained on the basis of their sub-earthly forces but as having been created by the Logos, in spite of this, men have adhered to the Father God who is, indeed, to be recognised as one with the Christ but as that Person of the Trinity who was creative until the Earth took shape. The true Regent of the Earth is Christ—the Logos.

Understanding these things was hardly possible any longer in the days of John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century of our era. And that explains why his book On the Division of Nature is on the one hand so grand and significant but on the other so chaotic that Spiritual Science alone can help us to make anything of it.

As I have said, in the fourth section John the Scot speaks of the Being who is not created and does not create. If we really understand John Scotus Erigena when he speaks of the Godhead at rest, of the Godhead to whom all things return and in whom they are united, then we have the further stage. The world that is described in the first three sections of the work has come to an end. The world of the Godhead at rest—the Being who is not created and does not create—is upon us. The Earth is going towards its end—in so far, that is to say, as the Earth is Nature. I have reminded you many times that even our geologists today are saying that nothing more is really coming into being on the Earth. It is, of course, quite true that plant life continues; animals and human beings continue to come into existence through propagation. But the Earth, taken as one great whole, is not the same as it once was. It is breaking up, falling to pieces. In its mineral sphere the Earth is already disintegrating. The eminent geologist Suess makes this statement in his book Decline of the Earth. He says that we are moving about on the disintegrating ashes of the Earth. He speaks of a certain region where this is clearly evident and shows that it was not so in earlier epochs. Such was the view of the world and of life in the first centuries of Christendom—derived, of course, not from the natural but from the moral facts of human evolution.

We have been living since the beginning of the 15th century more within the ‘Godhead at rest’ than did John Scotus Erigena. The Godhead at rest is waiting until we are active enough to attain to Imagination and Inspiration wherewith we may see the world around us as a spiritual world, knowing that we are verily within that spiritual world from which the earthly world has been cast off, that we are living after the world ending has come to pass and that the new Jerusalem is with us.

Truly it is a strange destiny of men that living in the spiritual world they know it not, nor are willing to know it. All interpretations which present true Christianity as if it were bristling with inadequate ideas, such as that of a world ending which has not come to pass and is merely a figure of speech, all such interpretations are empty and futile. It is only a question of understanding the real meaning of the Christian writings. We must realise that the conceptions of men during the first centuries of Christendom related to a world that was altogether different after the 4th century.

The Church fathers of the early Christian centuries tried to bring the teachings of the old pagan wisdom into connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, but they did not believe that, to begin with, men would be capable of understanding them. Therefore, they preserved the mysteries of olden times in the form of dogmas which were to be matters of belief, but which men were not supposed to understand. These dogmas are not superstitions or untruths. They are, after all, quite true in themselves, only they must be understood in the right way, namely, by the application of those faculties and forces which have been developing in man since the time of the 15th century.

Since the middle of the 15th century the Consciousness Soul has been developing. When a man is evolving his thoughts and concepts today he is altogether lacking in any realisation that in his acts of knowledge he is an Angel. He will say: But I am simply thinking about the things I have experienced. And most certainly he will not say that in his ‘knowing’ he is a spiritual being, nor that in self-consciousness he is a yet higher spiritual being. Men seek for knowledge today with the shadow of that kind of intellect which lived among the Greeks, in Plato and in Aristotle, nay even among the Romans, and was still alive, to some extent, in a man like John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.

The very fact that we need no longer allow ourselves to be led astray by the intellect can be a help to us. Today men are running after a shadow—after the shadow that is their intellect. They allow themselves to be misled by this intellect instead of striving to attain Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition which will lead them into the spiritual world. The fact that the intellect has faded into shadow is good in itself. But with shadowy intellect we have evolved our natural science and this sphere of knowledge must now be worked upon further. The Godhead has come to rest in order that we ourselves may labour. The fourth condition is upon us. It only remains for men to become conscious of it. And if they do not, then nothing new can come into being on the Earth, for what the Earth once received as a heritage has passed away. The new has to be created.

A man like Spengler saw the ruins which still remain of bygone civilisation. They lie before us clearly enough. The frame of mind in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries was that of a world doomed. Then came the Crusades—achieving nothing because men were seeking in the material world for what ought to have been sought in the Spirit. And when the Crusades failed, the Renaissance came as a kind of makeshift. Greek culture was brought to light once again and is still being offered to human beings in the form of education. Greek culture is there, but it did not come to light in the Renaissance as a new thing. The only new thing that has come into being since the beginning of the 15th century consists of the mathematical and mechanical conceptions we apply to outer Nature. But the ruins of antiquity are forever with us. They are inculcated into the minds of the young in the form of their academic training and so constitute the basis of civilisation. Oswald Spengler gazed at these ruins of the Renaissance. Like great erratic blocks they float across the ocean of life that is travailing to give birth to something new. If we have eyes only for these floating blocks, then we see nothing but downfall. Nobody can galvanise our civilisation in the form in which it exists today. It is going to pieces, falling into ruin. A new civilisation must be brought into being from out of the Spiritual by a primal power of creation, for the fourth condition is upon us. This is the sense in which we must interpret the writings of John Scotus Erigena, whose wisdom—which he himself found difficult to under' stand—was drawn from the Mysteries still cultivated in Ireland.

What I have told you here is not only the result of Spiritual Science. Ancient documents tell us exactly the same, that is, if we really understand them and shake off Alexandrian influences in the form of science that goes by the name of philology. One cannot help saying that in their modern form these things show few traces either of real philology or real philosophy. In our methods of ‘cramming’ and in our examination schedules today there is exceedingly little room left for the ‘philo’. That must be brought from somewhere else, but we stand in dire need of it.

In this lecture I wanted first of all to speak of John Scotus Erigena and, secondly, to show you the paths along which we can come to an understanding of the now faded wisdom of antiquity. The Gospel of St John states quite clearly: The Logos, not the Father God, is the creative principle. But facts like this pass by unheeded in our time.

The question that was asked, gentlemen, is quite a detailed one, and we will need to discuss some of its aspects a few more times.

Today, however, I would like to say a few more specific words about the later spread of Christianity. When viewed today, Christianity takes three forms. These three forms must be considered if one is to go back from today's concepts to what actually happened as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Let us first consider the matter in relation to Europe. I already told you the other day how it was: we have Asia over there, and Europe is actually a kind of peninsula of Asia. As you know, it looks like this (a map is drawn). Here would be Norway, here it goes over to Russia, here we come over to the German north coast; here we then have Denmark. From there we come over to Holland, France, and Spain would be here. From here we come to Italy, Greece; the Black Sea would be here, and from there it goes over to Asia. Africa is at the bottom.

Now, you see, in our time it is difficult to talk about the spread of Christianity, because special circumstances also prevail in relation to these things at present. But if you look at Christianity in these areas of Russia, as it was before the world war, then you come to the conclusion that Eastern Christianity still has more of the original religious character of Asia, of which I have spoken to you in its various forms among the Egyptians, the Indians, the Assyrians. Much of what was customary in terms of religious practices, for example, sacrificial rites, which were very well understood in Asia, has been incorporated into the religion that was then permeated by Christianity in these eastern regions. When you get to know the religion in these eastern regions, you immediately have the feeling that the cult is actually much more important than the teaching. The teaching wants to express in human words what belongs to the spiritual world, or at least what human feeling can grasp of the spiritual world. The teaching is also that which the human being wants to approach with his reason. The cult, on the other hand, is something that one has, that remains much more conservative. And where the cult is particularly dominant, religion also takes on a conservative character. So one has to say: Eastern religion here takes on a conservative character, places much more emphasis on the cult than on the actual inner impetus of religion, of religious life in man, than the more Western religions.

Now, the second current of Christianity started from Rome and spread to the north, and was then strongly influenced by Ireland, where the missionaries came from. This southern Central European Christianity, influenced from Rome, also retained the cult, but placed much more emphasis on the doctrine than the eastern essence. Therefore, the cult is felt much less in its importance by Roman Catholicism than the sermon, the doctrine. And there were many more disputes within the Roman Catholic Church about the actual content of the doctrine than in the eastern church.

But this Christianity has also experienced another influence. You see, Christianity originated at the beginning of our era. About six centuries after that, five or six centuries after that, Islam originated. I recently drew Arabia for you. If I draw Asia Minor again, we come down here to Arabia, would go over to India here; Africa would be there, Egypt here. Now, here in Arabia, Islam was founded by Mohammed. This Islam spread very quickly in the second half of the first Christian millennium. It spread from Asia, first towards Syria to the Black Sea, then across Africa to Italy, Spain, and up into western Europe. This Islam has a special peculiarity: it combines the fantastic element with an extremely sober, rational element in its religion. The main tenet of the Muslim religion, which spread rapidly across southern and western Europe and across Asia in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, is that there is only one God, proclaimed to you through Muhammad.

We must now only properly understand what this actually means in world history, that Muhammad proclaimed the principle: There is only one God. Why then was this so strongly emphasized by Mohammed? Mohammed was already familiar with Christianity; and Christianity does not have three gods, but it does have three divine figures. You just don't feel that anymore today. You don't feel today that Christianity did not have three gods from the beginning, but it has three divine figures: Father, Son and the so-called Holy Spirit.

What does that mean? You see, in the Latin language, “person” originally meant nothing other than a figure, a mask, that which reveals itself to the outside world. And in original Christianity, people did not speak of three gods, but of three figures in which the one God reveals himself. And they also sensed how it is with these three figures.

Let us take a look at what the situation is with these three forms. Not true, today, when there is a distinct science alongside religion, one can no longer understand this at all. For science is pursued quite independently of religion today, and one does not really look to religious life when speaking of scientific life. That was not the case in ancient times, nor in the early days of Christianity; rather, religion was received along with all the science that had existed. There were no special priests or special teachers, but there were those who were both priests and teachers. This was particularly the case with what I have described to you as the last mysteries.

Now, it was first seen that man is a natural being. Man is a natural being in that he is born out of the mother's womb as a physical human being with the help of natural forces. These forces are at work in man, as was thought and felt. When I look at how man comes into being as a physical being, I see forces that I also find when I see a tree growing outside, and that are ultimately also present when water evaporates and rain falls. They are natural forces. But in ancient times, people saw spiritual forces behind these natural forces. Spiritual forces are at work everywhere in nature. When a crystal forms inside a mountain, when a stone grows, spiritual forces are at work. When a plant emerges in spring, spiritual forces are at work. When water evaporates, clouds form, and rainwater falls, spiritual forces are at work. The same spiritual forces are at work in man when he develops as a human germ in his mother's body. The same spiritual forces are at work when his blood flows through his veins and his breath comes in and out. In everything that was seen as spirit in nature, which is also seen in the physical human being, the father principle, the father, was seen, because natural science was also religion.

They said to themselves: He who has attained the highest enlightenment in the mystery is an image of this Father-Spirit, who knows everything that is everywhere in nature. That was the seventh degree, the degree that man could take in the mysteries when he had ascended to the dignity of the Father.

The next dignity - I have told you - was that of the sun spirit. What did they understand by the spirit of the sun, which was later called the son? What did they understand by it? I have already explained to you that the Christ called himself the spirit of the sun. They said to themselves: 'Of course, man is born through natural forces, through the same forces that make plants grow and so on; but when he lives on earth, he develops. Just as he is born through natural forces, so, for example, one can no more speak of good and evil in him than in a plant. It will not occur to you to call a deadly nightshade evil because it acts as a poison on humans. You will say: it cannot help it. There is no will in the deadly nightshade, as there is in man. And so one cannot say, when the child is born, that it can be good and evil through the forces of nature. It then becomes good or evil as its human will gradually develops. And in contrast to the forces that work in nature, that which works in the human will, that which can become good or evil in man, was called the son of God or the spirit of the sun. And the one who was able to ascend to the sixth level in the mystery was only his representative. All these individual representatives of the sixth level were representatives of God on earth. And then it was known that the sun is not just a gas body; the sun not only gives light and warmth, but also the forces that develop the will. Therefore, not only light and warmth come from the sun, but also the spirit of the sun. The God-son is at the same time the one who is the spirit of the sun. So that one said: The Father-Godhead is everywhere in nature; the Son-Godhead is everywhere present where human beings develop free will.

But now they felt something very peculiar. They said to themselves: Yes, but does man, by developing free will and being under the son of God, become more worthy or less worthy as a result? - This question was also asked at the time when Christianity was founded.

Gentlemen, just take a look at any natural product, even animals, if you like. Of course, when a cow has grown old, you can still say that you pay less for this cow than you paid when she was young. So she would be worth less than when she was young. Now, that is quite true; but that is not the point. Rather, it is clear that the cow has not become less valuable because of something that works as a will within her, but rather she has become less valuable because of the course of nature. But the person who acts in a bad way, who develops his will in a bad way, becomes less valuable than he actually is by nature! Therefore, man needs a third deity to guide him to make his will good again, to make it completely good, to sanctify his unhealthy will. And that was the third form of the deity: the Holy Spirit, who was depicted everywhere in the mysteries through the fifth stage of initiation, which was thus designated by the people.

And so these old people said: There are three ways in which the deity reveals itself. - You see, they could have said: There is a god of nature, a god of will, and a god of spirit, where the will is again sanctified, spiritualized. - They also said it that way, because the old words mean that perfectly. “Father” actually means something that is connected with the origin of the physical, something natural. Only in the newer languages has the meaning of these words been lost. But then these old people added something when they said: There is a God of nature, the Father; a God of will, the Son; and a God who heals everything in man that can become diseased through the will, the Holy Spirit; but - they added - these three are one. So they said that their most important sentence, their most important conviction, is: There are three forms of the Godhead, but these three are one.

And then they said something else. When you look at a human being, they said, you see a great difference in relation to nature. When you look at a stone, what is at work in it? The Father. When you look at a plant, what is at work in it? The Father God. When you look at a human being as a physical person, what is at work in him? The Father God. But if you look at a person as a spiritual being, in his will: what is at work in there? The Son of God. And if you look at the future of humanity, how it should become, if everything in the will should become healthy: there the Spirit God is at work. All three gods, it was said, work in man. There are three gods or divine figures; but they are one, and they work in man as one unit.

This was the original conviction of Christianity. And if we go back to the early days of Christianity, people still expressed a conviction. They said: Now, this healing, this health-giving Spirit must work in two ways. Firstly, because nature can become ill, it must work on the physical, on that which comes from the Father-God. And because the will must also become healthy, it must act on that which comes from the Son. So they said: This Holy Spirit must work in such a way that it emanates from the Father and the Son at the same time. That was the original conviction of Christianity.

Now, Muhammad actually did get a certain fear. He saw how the old paganism, which had many gods, would degenerate, become corrupt, and ruin humanity. Now he saw Christianity emerging and said to himself: That would also have the danger of idolatry, namely, having three gods. He did not see through that these are three divine forms. Therefore, he entered into opposition and particularly emphasized: There is only one God and Mohammed proclaims him to you. Everything else that is said about the gods is wrong.

This doctrine was then spread with tremendous fanaticism. Now, as a result, in Islam, in Mohammedanism, this thinking of the three divine figures was not there at all. They confined themselves more to speaking of the unified God, whom they then actually felt to be the Father of everything. And that is why Islam has always thought more: Now, just as the stone has no free will to grow as it is, just as the plant has no free will but gets yellow or red blossoms from nature, so everything in man also grows up from nature. - This is how this rigid idea of fate arose in Islam - fatalism is what it is called - that man must actually submit to an absolute, rigid fate: If he is happy, it is ordained by the Father God; if he is unhappy, it is ordained by the Father God. He must simply throw himself into this, as it is called, fate.

You see, gentlemen, that was the religious side of Mohammedanism. But precisely because Mohammed saw everything in man as it is in nature, he was able to absorb all ancient art and all earlier life into himself much more easily than Christianity could. Christianity, after all, mainly saw the way in which human will can be healed. Mohammedanism did not concern itself with that. Why should it? If it is determined that man will become bad, then it is determined by the Father God. In Christianity it has been said: The old pagans, they mainly looked to the Father God; so you have to put the Son of God in contrast. - Mohammed, and especially his later followers, did not say that; they said: The old pagans, even if they had many gods, also worshiped the natural world, in which, of course, the one God also works. Therefore, much of the ancient science and art has continued into Islam. And it was already the case that while, for example, in the ninth century in Europe, Charlemagne ruled in the Frankish Empire, who is known as one of the greatest rulers of the Middle Ages and is mentioned everywhere in history – he had trouble learning the letters, he could not yet write – what he achieved in art and science was a mere trifle compared to what had emerged in Asia under the ruler – his name was Harun al-Rashid – who, during the time of Charlemagne, was active in Islam, in Mohammedanism. There was a great deal of art and science that had remained from ancient paganism. And such art and science then found its way into Europe via the south to Spain.

Now, Christianity spread out from Rome. From Asia, I would like to say, Christianity was bypassed by Mohammedanism. There were also strong struggles between Christianity and Mohammedanism. Truly, Mohammedanism did something very strange there. You know that when an army is stationed somewhere, you can achieve a lot in strategy if you can go around it unnoticed and then attack it from the other side. That is actually what Mohammedanism did to Christianity; it bypassed Christianity in the south and then attacked it from the left flank.

But, gentlemen, if that had not happened, if only Christianity had spread, we would still have no science today! The religious element of Mohammedanism has been repelled, that has been fought through wars. But the intellectual element, which did not deal with religious disputes but which propagated the old science, that came to Europe with Mohammedanism. And what the Europeans learned there has flowed into today's science. Therefore, in our souls today in Europe we actually have two things: we have religion, which was inspired by Christianity, and we have science, which was inspired by Mohammedanism, albeit in a roundabout way. And Christianity was only able to develop here in such a way that Mohammedanism influenced it scientifically.

But this has led to an even greater desire to defend Christianity in this western part of Europe. Wherever cultus is dominant, religion needs less defense; cultus exerts a great influence on man. Here, starting from Rome, cultus was less dominant, although it was preserved; the doctrine became dominant. But now it had to be constantly defended against the onslaught of Mohammedanism. Actually, the whole of the Middle Ages passed under the shadow of these struggles that had been left over from Mohammedanism, struggles that were initially military struggles but later became spiritual struggles. In the second half of the Middle Ages, what is called European culture or civilization gradually developed. What happened gradually?

In the East, as far as Russia and even Greece, Christianity could not but remain true to the old traditions in its cult. But what does that mean? It means performing external acts, even if they are only symbolic. Here one must follow nature. One is much more inclined to emphasize the Father God than the Son God. And just as this principle of destiny arose intellectually in Mohammed, that one must strictly submit to what the Father-God ordains, so this Father-God also came more into his own in Eastern Christianity, in the sense that he came more into his own than the Son-God. Only a remarkable shift in thinking has taken place: these people in the East have always held fast to the Christ, but they have transferred the attributes of the Father God to the Christ. They have somewhat obscured the story here, have not spoken so much of the Son of God, but they have become Christian, recognized Christ as their God, but they saw him with the attributes of the Father God. So that actually for this eastern religion the view arose: Christ, our Father. And that actually lives in all of this eastern religion: Christ, our Father.

And when you come to Europe, a pervasive concept of the three divine persons arose precisely because people wanted to defend themselves against Mohammedanism, against the mere unity of God, which has no three forms.

Now, you see, gentlemen, you will know that you can argue for a while; people can sit down together and argue and argue and argue; one says one thing to the other, the other says another thing to the first! Well, they will argue. But what usually comes of it? They finally separate, go their separate ways! The end of the dispute is that they disagree, that they go their separate ways. Agreement is reached only in the rarest of cases, especially when the disputes are extensive. You know, at first there was a socialist party; they argued a lot. There was a left wing and a right wing. But later the wings became their own party lines. And so it was with the spread of Christianity. It spread. In Asia, that is, in the East, more was given to the Father God, but the Christ was definitely retained; in Europe, more was distinguished between the Father and the Son. There was discussion about it, arguments about it until the 9th or 10th century. Then the great church schism occurred. The eastern church, which is called the Orthodox Church today because it held on to the original, old things, and the western church, the Roman Catholic Church, separated from each other. So first this great difference arose between the eastern church, eastern Christianity, and western Christianity.

This continued for some time. In the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, people became accustomed to this Eastern and Western division. However, an event occurred that, in a sense, confused the whole matter. And that was the Crusades.

The people among whom Muhammad originally worked and who first accepted Islam were the Arabs. These Arabs had a distinct natural religion. They were therefore actually quite suitable for understanding the “Father”, for recognizing the Father-Godhead. And that is why, in the early days of Mohammedanism, this view of the Father-God, who is active through all nature and also through human nature, developed.

But then other peoples came over from the far reaches of Asia, whose descendants are the Turks today. Mongolian, Tartar peoples came. They fought in wars against the Arab people. And the peculiar thing about this Mongolian population, whose descendants are then the Turks, is that they actually had no nature god at all. They had what man in the most ancient times had: no eye for nature, which the Greeks then had so strongly. They have kept that. The Turks brought with them from their original dwellings no sense of nature, but a tremendous sense of a spiritual god, a god that one can only grasp in thought, that one cannot look at at all. And this particular way of looking at God now passed over to Islam, to Mohammedanism. The Turks adopted the Mohammedan religion from their defeated enemies, but they changed it according to their way of thinking. And while the Muslim religion actually adopted much from the ancient world, from art and science, the Turks actually threw out everything that was art and science, and actually became hostile to art and science. And they were the terror of the western population, the terror of all those who had adopted Christianity.

You see, for Christians, the area where Christianity originated, Palestine with Jerusalem, was a particularly sacred area. Many made the pilgrimage there from all over the West, at great sacrifice. There were many people who were very poor who had to pool together what they needed to make a trip to Palestine to the so-called Holy Sepulchre. Yes, but they made that journey! And it was only when the Turks came that this journey became dangerous, because the Turks extended their rule over Palestine, and they mistreated the Christian pilgrims who came there. And the Europeans wanted Palestine to be free so that they could come there. They wanted to establish their own European rule in Palestine. That is why they undertook these great military campaigns, which have become known as the Crusades, which did not achieve their goal, but which actually express the war, the struggle between Western Christianity, and also between Eastern Christianity and Muslim Turkey. Christianity was to be saved from Muslim Turkey.

Well, there were many people who initially moved to Asia as warriors. What did they see there? The Crusades began in the 12th century and lasted for several centuries, falling right in the middle of the Middle Ages. What did those who went to Asia as crusaders or crusaders see first? First of all, they saw that the Turks were terrible enemies. In the Turks, they were facing terrible enemies. But if one or the other of the crusaders had a little time to look around in days free of fighting, they might have some strange experiences. For example, he might meet some old man who had retreated to a poor room somewhere, who didn't care about Turks, Christians or Arabs, but who had continued to develop with remarkable loyalty what had existed in ancient paganism as culture, as science, as religious science. The Turks didn't care about that. All of this had actually been eradicated by official culture; but there were such people, many such people. And so the Europeans got to know a great deal of ancient wisdom, much of which was no longer present in Christianity. They brought this with them when they returned to Europe.

Now imagine, gentlemen, what was there. Even in earlier times, the Arabs had moved across Italy and Spain, bringing with them this art and this scientific way of thinking. It spread and became our science. Now the ancient Eastern science was brought over, and it mixed with our own. And as a result, something very special came into being in Europe.

You see, the Roman Church adopted the cult, although it cultivated it less than the Eastern Church; it adopted the cult, but it also emphasized the teaching very strongly. But this teaching, this instruction, this religious instruction, was dependent on the person in the old church. Right up to the time of the Crusades, it was dependent on the person. Whatever was proclaimed from the pulpit, whatever was approved by the councils that were held, that was taught. And then there was also the so-called New Testament, the Bible. But reading the Bible was actually forbidden to people who were not priests, and this prohibition was strictly adhered to. It was actually something terrible if, in those ancient times before the Crusades, someone wanted to read the Bible, the New Testament. That was not allowed. And so you actually only had what the priesthood taught. The Bible was not in the hands of laymen, of believers.

But now something had come about – because the Arabs had brought science, because people had become acquainted with the ancient wisdom of the East – that made a great many people feel: The priests don't know that at all, the ones who teach! There is much more wisdom than they teach. – And from that came the intention: Now let's see where they get their wisdom from. And so the tendency arose to actually read the Bible and get to know the New Testament. And from that arose the third form of Christianity: Protestant Christianity, which then found a special representative in Luther, but which actually had already emerged earlier in accordance with its intention.

Take, for example, these areas of present-day Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and Bavaria, or take these areas here on the Rhine, from Holland to Germany – I could also name many other areas – where fraternities formed everywhere. Here the “Brotherhood of Common Life” formed in Holland on the Rhine. Here (pointing to the drawing) the brotherhoods formed that were called the “Moravian Brothers”. What did these brotherhoods want? These brotherhoods said: Yes, true Christianity was not actually spread from Rome, but Christianity is such that one must actually first get to know it, through the inner life. - And at first this intention to get to know Christianity originally was actually something that was striven for inwardly. Only later did they say: One must get to know the Gospel. - But both arise from the same.

You see, that is the great difference between Hus, who worked in today's Czechoslovakia, and Luther. Hus paid even less attention to the gospel than to the fact that man experiences Christianity inwardly. Later, this became more externalized into learning the gospel.

But the gospel, the New Testament, was written under completely different circumstances. It was written in a figurative language that was no longer understood later on. Let me give you an example.

At one point in the gospel, it is told how Christ healed the sick. Now, at that time, when Christ healed the sick, there were many more of those diseases in the areas where he taught that are today called nervous, nerve diseases, than those diseases that are actually located in the organs. Now, nerve diseases can often be cured from person to person through encouragement, love and so on. Most of the healings of which there is mention go back to such healing. But then it says at one point: “When the sun had set, the Christ gathered the people around him and healed them.” This passage, when you read it today in the Gospel, seems to people as if it were meaningless, as if it were only intended to give the time. But why is the time given at this point? Because they want to say: The powers that a person develops when they want to heal others are stronger when the sun is not in the sky, when it comes through the earth with its rays, than when the sun is in the sky. - This is a very meaningful passage: “When the sun had set, the Christ gathered the people around him and healed them.” It is no longer heeded. The intention was to suggest how the Christ uses the natural forces inherent in human beings for healing. And so the gospel was only translated at a time when it could no longer be understood. Basically, the gospel is very, very little really understood.

Now, actually it happened in all these areas, both in Oriental Christianity and in Western and Protestant Christianity, as it has happened in some other cases that I had to deal with, where something that was originally well understood was retained later, but no longer understood. Christianity was no longer properly understood in any of its three forms. I would like to say that each of these three forms has taken one thing mainly: Oriental Christianity took the Father God, even if He is called Christ. The Roman Catholic Western religion took the Son God, looks up to the Father only as the old man with a flowing beard, who is still painted, but little is said of the Father God. And Protestant Christianity has the Spirit God. In Protestant Christianity, the main question discussed is: How do you get rid of sin? How is man healed of sin? How is man justified before God and so on? So actually, while Christianity originally had the one Godhead in three forms, Christianity has fallen apart into three denominations. Each confession has a piece, a real piece of Christianity.

But by merely uniting the three pieces, one will not recover the original Christianity. One must rediscover it from the right human power, as I have already begun to show in the presentation I recently gave. But I also wanted to show you this so that you can see how difficult it is today to arrive at original Christianity. Because, if you ask about Eastern Christianity: What is true Christianity? Yes, they will tell you everything that refers to the Father, and then they will call the Father Christ. If you ask the Roman Catholic Church about the essence of Christianity, they will tell you everything that refers to the sinfulness of man, the wickedness of human nature, that man must be redeemed from his suffering and so on. You are told everything that relates to the Son, to the Christ. If you ask what the essence of Christianity is in terms of Protestantism, you are told: Everything depends on the principle of the recovery of the will, of healing, of the recovery of the will, of justification before God. They then speak of the Holy Spirit and call it Christ.

And that is how we came to have everything we have today; not that people thought: Now we have to unite the three different sides of Christianity, but they said: Now we understand nothing at all! And that is how the mood of the present has come about and the necessity to rediscover Christianity.

And in this way I would like to talk to you next Saturday about the mystery of Golgotha. Then I will see that I come to an end with this answering of questions.

THE Festival of the Holy Night has for centuries been a great festival of remembrance in the whole of Christendom. And when we think of it as such we must be mindful of all that has been associated with this festival in the feelings and hearts of men. It must be remembered that the festival of the 25th of December did not become an institution in Christianity until the fourth century A.D. It was in the fourth century, for the first time actually in the year 354, in Rome, that the Festival of the Birth of Jesus was placed as it were before the Christian world as a great and memorable contribution to the times. It was out of the very deepest instincts of Christian evolution that such a contribution to the times was made in the fourth century of our era.

The peoples from the North were swarming down towards the South of Europe. Many pagan customs were still widespread in the southern regions of Europe, in Roman districts and in Greece; pagan customs were also rife in North Africa, in Asia Minor—in short, wherever Christian thought and Christian feeling were gradually beginning to spread. But by its very nature Christianity was not intended to be a sectarian teaching, destined for this or that circle of human beings. However many factors, both internal and external, have mitigated against its original purpose, Christianity was, as a matter of course, intended to nourish the souls and hearts of all men upon the earth.

In the religious consciousness of antiquity, Divine Powers were associated with the stars, and the mightiest Power of all with the sun. This consciousness was still alive in the pagan peoples both of the North and South of Europe, and within this pagan mind there lived the thought that the time when the earth has her darkest days, at the winter solstice, is also the time when the victorious power of the sun, working in all earthly fertility, begins again to unfold.

The feeling that at this season the earth is resting in her own being, shut off from the Divine Powers of the cosmos and living in loneliness within the universe, was superseded at the time of the winter solstice by the feeling of hope that once again the rays of light and love from the realm of the sun come to awaken the earth to fruitfulness. And a realisation of the nature of man's own soul-being was intimately associated with this other feeling.

In the life of the ancient pagan religions, man felt himself inwardly part of the earth, a limb or member of the earth. It was as though the very life of the earth were continued into his own body. And so in the days of summer when the earth receives the strongest forces of warmth and light from the heavenly sphere of the sun, man felt that his own being too was given over to that world whence the radiant, warmth-giving rays of the sun shine down upon the earth. During the time of midsummer he felt as if his whole being were given up to the wide cosmic spaces. At the time of the winter solstice man felt himself in intimate connection with the earth and with all the forces preserved in the earth from the warmth and radiance of the summer. Together with the earth he felt himself living in loneliness within the cosmos. And the return of the forces of the Divine-Spiritual cosmos to the earth at this time of the winter solstice was a deep and real experience in him.

And so into the thought of the Christmas Festival man laid all that his life of feeling, his life of soul and spirit brought home to him so intimately in connection with the universality of the cosmic Powers. This intimate experience at the festival of the winter solstice was closely connected with the Christian impulse and it was therefore quite natural that those who came into contact with Christianity should share in its most precious experience, namely, an experience connected with this festival of the winter solstice.

In line with the change that had taken place between the age described in the Old Testament and the age described in the New Testament, the most cherished experience of Christianity lay in the remembrance of the birth of Jesus. The peoples of the Old Testament expressed the great mystery of human life and death by saying: When the soul passes through the gate of death it enters upon the path which will unite it again with the Fathers. And what does this imply? It implies that in those times there was a longing to return to the Fathers, and this indeed was a cherished and intimate experience—an experience bound up with the conceptions expressed in the Old Testament.

In the course of the first four centuries of Christendom this longing for communion with the Fathers was replaced by something else. The souls of men were directed towards the birth of the Being Who is the centre around which Christendom coheres. The feeling that lived in the peoples of the Old Testament changed into a feeling connected with the events at Nazareth or Bethlehem, with the birth of the child Jesus.

And so, when it established the Christmas Festival in the fourth century, Christianity brought its contribution towards the union of men all over the earth. A cherished and intimate experience was bound up with the Christmas Festival. And if we think of the way in which this Christmas Festival was celebrated through the centuries, we find evidence everywhere that at the time of the approach of Christmas, the souls of men within Christianity were filled with loving devotion for the Jesus Child. And this loving devotion is the revelation of something of outstanding significance through the centuries which followed.

We must really have an inner understanding of what it signified when the Christmas Festival was instituted on the 25th of December, that is to say, more or less at the time of the winter solstice. For actually as late as the year A.D. 353, in Rome itself, this festival was not celebrated on the 25th of December, neither was it a commemoration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The festival was celebrated on the 6th of January as a commemoration of the Baptism in the Jordan. It was a festival of remembrance associated with the Christ Being. And this festival of remembrance included the thought that through the Baptism in Jordan, the Christ, Who was a Being belonging to a world beyond the earth, had come down from the heavens and united himself with human nature in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

It was the celebration of a birth that was not an ordinary birth. The festival was a celebration of the descent of the Christ Being, whereby new and quickening forces poured into earthly existence. The day was dedicated to the revelation of the Christ, to remembrance of the Mystery that a heavenly force had united with the earth, and that through this intervention of the heavens the evolution of humanity had received a new impulse. This Mystery of the descent of a heavenly Being into earthly existence was still understood in the age of the Event of Golgotha itself, and for some time afterwards. For at that time fragments were still present of an ancient wisdom that had been capable of understanding a truth only to be known in super-sensible experience. The old instinctive knowledge, the ancient wisdom which was poured into human beings born on earth as a gift of the Gods—this wisdom was gradually lost. It faded away little by little as the centuries went by. But at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, enough wisdom was still left to give man some insight into the mighty Event that had come to pass.

And so in the early centuries of Christendom the Mystery of Golgotha was understood by the light of wisdom. But by the time of the fourth century after Christ, this wisdom had almost completely disappeared. Men's minds were occupied with what was being brought to them on all sides by the pagan peoples, and understanding of the deep mystery connected with the union of the Christ with the man Jesus was no longer possible. The possibility of understanding the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha was lost to the human soul. And so it remained, on through the subsequent centuries. The ancient wisdom was lost to humanity—and necessarily so, because out of this wisdom man could never have attained his freedom, his condition of self-dependence. It was necessary for man to enter for a while into the darkness in order, out of this darkness, to develop, in freedom, the primal forces of his being. But a true Christian instinct substituted another quality in place of the wisdom which the world of Christendom had brought to the Mystery of Golgotha—a wisdom which illumined the discussions that were held on the nature of this Mystery. Something else was substituted for the quality of wisdom.

Modern Christianity has very little knowledge or understanding of the profundity of the discussions that were carried on among the wise Church Fathers in the first centuries of Christendom as to the manner in which the two natures—the Divine and the Human—had been united in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. In the early Christian centuries this was a Mystery which addressed itself to a living wisdom—a wisdom which then faded away into empty abstraction. Very little has remained in Western Christianity of the holy zeal with which men tried to understand how the Divine and the Human had been united in the Mystery of Golgotha.

But the Christian impulse is mighty and powerful. And it was the power of love which came to replace the wisdom with which the Mystery of Golgotha was greeted at the time when its radiance shone over the earth. In marvellous abundance, love has been poured out through the centuries from the minds and hearts of men to the Jesus Child in the manger. And it is really wonderful to find how strongly this power of love is reflected in the Christmas Plays which have come down to us from earlier centuries of Christendom. If we let these things work upon us, we shall realise how deeply the Christmas Festival is a festival of remembrance. We shall realise too that, just as the peoples of the Old Testament strove in wisdom to be gathered to the Fathers, so the peoples of the New Testament have striven in devotion and love to gather together at Christmas around the sinless Child in the manger.

But who will deny that the love poured out to the wellspring of Christendom by so many hearts has little by little become more or less a habit? Who will deny that in our age the Christmas Festival has lost the living power it once possessed? The men of the Old Testament longed to return to their origin, to be gathered to their Fathers, to return to their ancestors. The Christian turns his mind and heart to human nature in its primal purity when he celebrates the Festival of the birth of Jesus. And it was out of this same Christian instinct—an instinct which caused man to associate the Christmas Festival with his earthly origin—that the day before Christmas, the 24th of December, was dedicated to Adam and Eve. The day of Adam and Eve preceded the day of the birth of Jesus. And so it was out of a deep instinct that the Tree of Paradise came to be associated as a symbol with the Christmas Festival.

We turn our eyes first to the manger in Bethelehem, to the Child lying there among the animals who stand round the blessed Mother. It is a heavenly symbol of the primal origin of humanity. Our feelings and minds are carried back to the earthly origin of the human being, to the Tree of Paradise, and with this Tree of Paradise there is associated the crib, just as in the Holy Legend the origin of man on earth is associated with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Holy Legend tells that the wood of the Tree of Paradise was handed down in a miraculous way from generation to generation until the age of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that the Cross erected on Golgotha, the place of the skull—the Cross on which Christ Jesus hung—was made of the very wood of the Tree of Paradise. In other words, the heavenly origin of man is associated with his earthly origin.

In another sense too, the fundamental conception of Christendom tended to obliterate understanding of these things. Nobody in our days can fail to realise that men have very little insight into the truth that the Godhead may be venerated as the Father Principle but that the Godhead can also be conceived as the Son. Humanity in general, as well as our so-called enlightened theology, has more or less lost sight of the difference in nature between the Father God and the Son God. And because this insight had been lost, we find the most modern school of orthodox theology proclaiming the view that in reality the Gospels treat of God the Father, not of God the Son, that Jesus of Nazareth is simply to be regarded as a great Teacher, the messenger of the Father God.

When people of to-day speak of Christ, they still associate with His flame certain memories of the Holy Story, but they have no clearly defined feeling of the difference in the nature of the Son God on the one hand and of the Father God on the other. But at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled in the realm of earthly existence, this feeling was still quite living. Over in Asia, in a place of no great importance to Rome at the time, the Christ had appeared in Jesus of Nazareth. According to the early Christians, Christ was that Divine Nature Who had ensouled a human being in a way that had never before occurred on the earth, nor would occur thereafter. And so this one Event of Golgotha, this one ensouling of a human being by a Divine Nature, by the Christ, imparts meaning and purpose to the whole of earthly evolution. All previous evolution is to be thought of as preparatory to this Event of Golgotha, and all subsequent evolution as the fulfilment, the consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The scene of this Event lay over yonder in Asia, and on the throne of Rome sat Augustus Caesar. People of to-day no longer realise that Caesar Augustus on the throne of Rome was regarded as a Divine Incarnation. The Roman Caesars were actually regarded as Gods in human form.

And so we have two different conceptions of a God. The one God upon the throne of Rome and the other on Golgotha—the place of a skull. There could be no greater contrast!

Think of the figure of Caesar Augustus, who, according to his subjects and according to Roman decree, was a God incarnate in a man. He was thought to be a Divine Being who had descended to the earth; the Divine forces had united with the birth-forces, with the blood; the Divine power, having come down into earthly existence, was pulsing in and through the blood. Such was the universal conception, although it took different forms, of the dwelling of the Godhead on earth. The people thought of the Godhead as bound up with the forces of the blood. They said: Ex Deo nascimur.—Out of God we are born. And even on lower levels of existence they felt themselves related to what lived, as the crown of humanity, in a personality like Caesar Augustus.

All that was thus honoured and revered was a Divine Father Principle. For it was a Principle living in the blood that is part of a human being when he is born into the world. But in the Mystery of Golgotha the Divine Christ Being had united Himself with the man Jesus of Nazareth—united Himself not, in this case, with the blood, but with the highest forces of the human soul. A God had here united with a human being, in such a way that mankind was saved from falling victim to the earthly forces of matter. The Father God lives in the blood. The Son lives in the soul and spirit of man. The Father God leads man into material life: Ex Deo nascimur.—Out of God we are born. But God the Son leads man again out of material existence. The Father God leads man out of the super-sensible into the material. God the Son leads man out of the material into the super-sensible. In Christo morimur.—In Christ we die.

Two distinctly different feelings were there. The feeling and perception of God the Son was added to the feeling associated with God the Father. Certain impulses underlying the process of evolution caused the loss of the faculty to differentiate between the Father God and God the Son. And to this day these impulses have remained in mankind in general and in Christianity too. Men who were possessed of the ancient, primordial wisdom knew from their own inner experiences that they had come down from Divine-Spiritual worlds into physical and material life. Pre-existence was a certain and universally accepted fact. Men looked back through birth and through conception, up into the Divine-Spiritual worlds, whence the soul descends at birth into physical existence.

In our language we have only the word ‘Immortality.’ We have no expression for the other side of Eternity, because our language does not include the word ‘Unborn-ness.’ But if the conception of Eternity is to be complete, the word ‘Unborn-ness’ must be there as well as the word ‘Immortality.’ Indeed all that the word ‘Unborn-ness’ can mean to us is of greater significance than what is implied by the word ‘Immortality.’

It is true that the human being passes through the gate of death into a life in the spiritual world, but it is no less true that an exceedingly egotistical conception of this life in the spiritual world is presented to man to-day. Human beings live here on the earth. They long for Immortality, for they do not want to sink into nothingness at death. And so, in speaking of Immortality, all that is necessary is to appeal to the instincts of egotism.

If you listen carefully to sermons you will realise how many of them count upon the egotistical impulses in human beings when they want to convey an idea of Immortality to the soul. But when it comes to the conception of Unborn-ness it is not possible to rely upon such impulses. Human beings are not so egotistical in their desire for existence in the spiritual world before birth and conception as they are in their desire for a life after death in the spiritual-world. If a life hereafter is assured them, then they are satisfied. Why, they say, should we trouble about whence we have come? Out of their egotism men want to know about a Hereafter. But when once again they unfold a wisdom untinged with egotism, Unborn-ness will be as important to them as Immortality is important to-day.

In olden times men knew that they had lived in Divine-Spiritual worlds, had descended through birth into material existence. They felt that the forces around them in a purely spiritual environment were united with the blood, were living on in the blood. And from this insight there arose the conception: Out of God we are born. The God Who lives in the blood, the God whom the man of flesh represents here on earth—he is the Father God.

The other pole of life—namely, death—demands a different impulse of the life of soul. There must be something in the human being that is not exhausted with death. The conception corresponding to this is of that God Who leads over the earthly and physical to the super-sensible and superphysical. It is the God connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Divine Father Principle has always been associated, and rightly so, with the transition from the super-sensible to the material, and through the Divine Son the transition is brought about from the sensible and material to the super-sensible. And that is why the Resurrection thought is essentially bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha. The words of St. Paul that Christ is what He is for humanity because He is the Risen One—these words are an integral part of Christianity.

In the course of the centuries, understanding of the Risen One, of the Conqueror of Death, has gradually been lost and modern theology concerns itself wholly with the man Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus of Nazareth, the man, cannot be placed at the same level as the Father Principle. Jesus of Nazareth might be regarded as the messenger of the Father but he could not, according to the arguments of early Christianity, be placed beside the Father God. Co-equal and co-existent are the Divine Father and the Divine Son: the Father Who brings about the transition from the super-sensible to the material—‘Out of God we are born’—and the Son Who brings about the transition from the material to the super-sensible—‘In Christ we die.’ And transcending both birth and death there is a third Principle proceeding from and co-equal both with the Divine Father and the Divine Son—namely, the Spirit—the Holy Spirit. Within the being of man, therefore, we are to see the transition from the super-sensible to the material and from the material to the super-sensible. And the Principle which knows neither birth nor death is the Spirit into which and through which we are awakened: ‘Through the Holy Spirit we shall be re-awakened.’

For many centuries Christmas was a festival of remembrance. How much of the substance of this festival has been lost is proved by the fact that all that is left of the Being Christ Jesus is the man Jesus of Nazareth. But for us to-day Christmas must become a call and a summons to something new. A new reality must be born. Christianity needs an impulse of renewal, for inasmuch as Christianity no longer understands the Christ Being in Jesus of Nazareth, it has lost its meaning and purpose. The meaning and essence of Christianity must be found again. Humanity must learn again to realise that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended only in the light of super-sensible knowledge.

Another factor, too, contributes to this lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. We can look with love to the Babe in the manger, but we have no wisdom-filled understanding of the union of the Christ Being with the man Jesus of Nazareth. Nor can we look up into the heavenly heights with the same intensity of feeling which was there in men who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In those days men looked up to the starry worlds and saw in the courses and constellations of the stars something like a countenance of the Divine soul and spirit of the cosmos. And in the Christ Being they could see the spiritual Principle of the universe visibly manifested in the glories of the starry worlds. But for modern man the starry worlds and all the worlds of cosmic space have become little more than a product of calculation—a cosmic mechanism.

The world has become empty of the Gods. Out of this world which is void of the Gods, the world that is investigated to-day by astronomy and physics, the Christ Being could never have descended. In the light of the primeval wisdom possessed by humanity, this world was altogether different. It was the body of the Divine World-Soul and of the Divine World-Spirit. And out of this spiritual cosmos the Christ came down to earth and united Himself with a human being in Jesus of Nazareth. This truth is expressed in history itself in a profound way. All over the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha there were Mysteries, holy sanctuaries that were schools of learning and at the same time schools for the cultivation of the religious life. In these Mysteries, indications were given of what must come to pass in the future. It was revealed in the Mysteries that man bears within his being a power that is the conqueror of death, and this victory over death was an actual experience of the Initiates in the Mysteries. In deep and profound experience the candidate for Initiation knew with sure conviction: Thou has awakened within thyself the power that conquers death. The Initiate experienced in a picture the process that would operate fully in times still to come, in accordance with the great plan of world-history. In the Mysteries of all peoples, this sacred truth was proclaimed: Man can be victorious over death. But it was also indicated that what could be presented in the Mysteries in pictures only would one day become an actual and single event in world-history. The Mystery of Golgotha was proclaimed in advance by the Pagan Mysteries of antiquity; it was the fulfilment of what had everywhere been heralded in the sanctuaries and holy places of the Mysteries.

When the candidate had been prepared in the Mysteries, when he had performed the difficult training which brought him to the point of Initiation, when he had made his soul so free of the body that the soul could be united with and perceive the spiritual worlds, when he was convinced by his own knowledge that life is always victorious over death in human nature—then he confronted the very deepest experience that was associated with these ancient Mysteries. And this deepest experience was that the obstacle presented by the earth, the obstacle of matter, must be removed if that which is at the same time both spiritual and material, is to become visible—namely, the sun. It was to a mysterious phenomenon—although it was a phenomenon well-known to every Initiate—that the candidate was led. He beheld the sun at the midnight hour, saw the sun through the earth, at the other side of the earth.

Instinctive feeling of the most holy and most sacred things have, after all, remained through the course of history. Many of these feelings and perceptions have weakened, but to those who are willing to look with unprejudiced eyes, the old meaning is still discernible. And so we can read some thing from the fact that at midnight leading from the 24th to the 25th of December, the midnight Mass is supposed to be said in every Christian Church. We can read something from this fact when we know that the Mass is nothing more nor less than a synthesis of the rites and rituals of the Mysteries which led to initiation, to the beholding of the sun at midnight. This institution of the midnight Mass at Christmas is an echo of the Initiation which enabled the candidate, at the midnight hour, to see the sun at the other side of the earth and therewith to behold the universe as a spiritual universe. And at the same time the Cosmic Word resounded through the cosmos—the Cosmic Word which from the courses and constellations of the stars sounded forth the mysteries of World Being.

Blood sets human beings at variance with one another. Blood fetters to the earthly and material that element in man which descends from heavenly heights. In our century, especially, men have gravely sinned against the essence of Christianity, inasmuch as they have turned again to the principle of blood. But they must find the way to the Being Who was Christ Jesus, Who does not address Himself to the blood but Who poured out his blood and gave it to the earth. Christ Jesus is the Being Who speaks to the soul and to the spirit, Who unites and does not separate—so that Peace may arise among men on earth out of their understanding of the Cosmic Word.

By a new understanding of the Christmas Festival, super-sensible knowledge can transform the material universe into spirit before the eye of the soul, transform it in such a way that the sun at midnight becomes visible and is known in its spiritual nature. Such knowledge brings understanding of the super-earthly Christ Being, the Sun Being Who was united with the man Jesus of Nazareth. It can bring understanding, too, of the unifying peace that should hover over the peoples of the earth. The Divine Beings are revealed in the heights, and through this revelation peace rings forth from the hearts of men who are of good will.

Such is the word of Christmas. Peace on earth flows into unison with the Divine Light that is streaming upon the earth. We need something more than the mere remembrance of the day of the birth of Jesus. We need to understand and realise that a new Christmas Festival must arise, that a new Festival of Birth must lead on from the present into the immediate future. A new Christ Impulse must be born and a new knowledge of the nature of Christ. We need a new understanding of the truth that the Divine-Spiritual heavens and the physical world of earth are linked to one another and that the Mystery of Golgotha is the most significant token of this union. We must understand once again why it is that at the midnight hour of Christmas a warning resounds to us, bidding us be mindful of the Divine-Spiritual origin of man and of the fact that the revelation of the heavens is inseparable from peace on earth.

The Holy Night must become a reality. It is not enough to give each other presents at Christmas in accordance with ancient custom and habit. The warm feelings which for centuries inspired Christian men at the Christmas Festival have been lost. We need a new Christmas, a new Holy Night, reminding us not only of the Birth of Jesus of Nazareth, but bringing a new birth, the birth of a new Christ Impulse. Out of full consciousness we must learn to understand that in the Mystery of Golgotha a super-sensible Power was made manifest, was revealed in the material earth. We must understand with full consciousness what resounded instinctively in the Mysteries of old. We must receive this impulse consciously. Again we must learn to understand that when the Holy Night of Christmas becomes a reality to man he can experience the wonderful midnight union between the revelation of the heavens and the peace of earth.

This is the meaning of the words which will now be given and which are dedicated to Christmas. They synthesize what I wanted to bring to your souls and hearts to-night. They try to express, out of consciousness of the anthroposophical understanding of Christ, how we can come again to the wisdom that once lived in men instinctively and remained to this extent, that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still some who knew how to celebrate the revelation of the Christ Being. We, in our day, must achieve understanding of the Christ as a Cosmic Being—a Cosmic Being Who united Himself with the earth. The time at which this understanding is accessible, to the greater part of men on earth, is the time of the cosmic Holy Night whose approach we await. If we understand these things, then we can make alive within us the feelings which I have tried to express in the following verse:

Behold the Sun
At the midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation's new beginning,
Young morning's strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit!

On many occasions we have emphasized that the present historical moment of human evolution is the one in which intellectual life predominates. The epoch which has been characterized as the fourth post-Atlantean age, as the Graeco-Roman age, was a preparation for the present epoch. And you also know, from certain soul characteristics of man which developed during these epochs, that we reckon the Graeco-Roman age from the Eighth Century B.C. to the Fifteenth Century A.D. Since that time we must take into account the epoch in which we are now living, in which the soul qualities of western humanity must unfold, and which we look upon as the present moment in history.

Before the Fifteenth Century man's whole relation to the world of the intellect was quite different from what it was later on. Since the Fourth Century A.D. the human soul had a certain inclination towards the intellectual life which existed in ancient Greece and was about to set; nevertheless we find in this second period of the fourth post-Atlantian epoch a soul mood which can only be fully grasped if we immerse ourselves with a feeling soul into the characteristic of the ancient Greeks, particularly during the time which history describes in a rather superficial way, when Greek life was beginning to evolve, and the time of Socrates and Plato until the end of the Greek era.

From all that shines through an external—one might say, superficial historical description—it is possible to recognize, even without a spiritual-scientific deepening, that when the ancient Greek gained what we now call an intellectual world conception, this gave him pleasure, or at least a sense of satisfaction, and when by his intellectual power he could form a picture of the universe, after having passed through the different stages of learning of that time, he believed that he had risen to a higher stage of human development. When he could grasp the world intellectually, he believed that he was a human being in a higher sense. During the fourth post-Atlantean age, there existed in full measure inner joy and satisfaction derived from the life of the intellect.

This may also be observed in the historical characters of a subsequent epoch. For example, the way in which John Scotus Erigena of the Ninth Century formed and described his ideas, shows us that he believed to have in them something which may arouse inner enthusiasm. Even though later on a somewhat cooler form of discussion set in, we find this soul attitude in the men who sought to gain an intellectual picture of the world through Scholasticism, and who were frequently alone in their striving, isolated from the rest of the world. It was the course of development during the past centuries which induced men to believe that by rising up to intellectual thoughts they must lose their inner soul warmth.

But by going back to a time which does not lie so very far back, by considering, for example, the intellectualistic world conception still existing in Schiller, or even to the extraordinary exact morphology developed by Goethe, we may observe that these men painted their picture of the world in a very marked ideal-intellectualistic way and believed to be human beings in the true sense of the word only if they could bring inner warmth into their ideas. Not so very long ago, the world of ideas was not yet described in such a pale, cold way as is so frequently the case today.

This fact is connected with an important law of human development. It is connected with the fact that man himself adopted an entirely different attitude towards the world of ideas grasped through his intellect; it was an entirely different attitude from that of past epochs. In earlier times, the world of ideas was linked up with the living essence of the universe, for the universe was looked upon as a living organism. I might say: True insight into older forms of thinking can show us that in the past everything dead, everything that was not alive, was really looked upon as something which falls off from the world's living essence, and this was thought of as being spread over the whole universe; it fell off from it, like ashes fall off from burning substance. Man's feeling attitude towards the universe was quite different from his present attitude. He looked upon the universe as a great, living organism, and its lifeless part, for example, the whole extent of the mineral kingdom, was to him ashes falling out of the universal processes, and these ashes were dead, because they were nothing but the refuse of the world's living essence.

During the past centuries, this feeling towards the universe underwent an essential transformation. Scientific knowledge, for example, is now fully valued—or this was the case—only insofar as it deals with lifeless substances and processes. In an ever-growing measure, the longing arose to look upon everything living only as a kind of chemical combination of lifeless substances. The idea of spontaneous generation from lifeless substances became prevalent.

On many occasions, I have already mentioned the following: During the Middle Ages, when people tried to produce the homunculus in the retort out of certain ingredients, they never connected this with the idea of spontaneous generation in the meaning of modern scientific investigation, but they looked upon the homunculus as a definite living essence conjured up from an indefinite living universe. For they did not yet think of the universe as something lifeless, as a mechanism. Consequently people believed in the possibility of conjuring up a definite living essence out of an indefinite living essence. Never did it occur to a medieval mind to connect lifeless with living things. These things are very difficult to grasp without the aid of spiritual science, because modern people are accustomed to form their ideas by assuming that their thoughts are absolutely correct and have become so perfect, because mankind has left behind the stages of childhood.

Although people boast of modern progress, the thoughts which they now form have never been so rigid in the past. Indeed, this rigidity, particularly in regard to man's cognitive power, is a subjective element. When man turns his thoughts and ideas to lifeless things, this is something quite passive. For he can form his thoughts with the greatest ease and comfort; the lifeless world does not change, and he forms his concepts of physics without being disturbed by the fact that in approaching Nature with his lifeless thoughts, Nature itself, with its living changing character, demands from him to be just as living and mobile in his thoughts.

Goethe still had the feeling that when single phenomena had to be drawn out of the whole extent of facts and grasped in the form of ideas, then inwardly living thoughts are needed, not sharply outlined ones, but thoughts conforming with the ever-changing, living form of existence, with the ever-changing, living beings.

Expressed more paradoxically, we may say that modern man likes thoughts which can be formed without much effort. This tendency to rigid thought, to thoughts with sharp outlines, can only be applied to lifeless things, to things which do not change, so that the thoughts themselves remain unchanged and rigid; but these rigid thoughts, which really ignore life in the external world, nevertheless gave man—as I have frequently described—the inner consciousness of freedom.

Two things have arisen through the fact that man lost life completely in the sphere of his thoughts: One is the consciousness of freedom, the other the possibility to apply these rigid thoughts, drawn out of lifeless things and applicable only to lifeless things, to the magnificent, triumphal technical achievements, based on the realization of the rigid system of ideas.

This is one aspect of mankind's modern development. We must grasp that man separated himself, as it were, from the living world, he became estranged from it. But at the same time we should also grasp the following: If man does not wish to remain within the lifeless essence of the world, but wishes to take into his soul the impulse of life, he must discover the world's living essence through his own power, whenever he faces the lifeless world.

When we go back into ancient times, we find that each cloud formation, the lightning coming out of the cloud, the rolling thunder, the growing plant, etc., gave man a living essence; through knowledge, he breathed in life, as it were, and thus he existed in an immediate way within the world's living essence. He only had to take in life from outside. In accordance with man's present stage of development, which only enables him to grasp lifeless thing in his thoughts, so that the external world no longer gives him a living essence, he is obliged, in the present epoch, to draw this living essence out of the innermost depths of his own life; he himself must become alive. History cannot be grasped theoretically, through the intellect. It would be too monotonous. With our whole soul we should penetrate into the way in which people experienced history during the different epochs. We shall then discover what a great change took place in all the pre-Grecian epochs, if I may use this expression, which Anthroposophy traces back as far as the Atlantean age, that is to say, as far as the Seventh and Eighth Centuries B.C.—we shall discover the great change which took place from the time of ancient Greece until now. Let me describe to you this change of human feeling in connection with the universe—let me describe it to you quite objectively. I wish to describe how this change of feeling in human souls facing the universe appears in the light of a spiritual conception.

When we go back into ancient times—only faint traces of this remote past are known to ordinary history, for in order to grasp these things we must penetrate into them in a spiritual-scientific way, through the methods which you have learned to know—when we go back into ancient times, to the men of the pre-Grecian age, for example to the Egyptian culture, the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, or even to the ancient Persian culture, we shall find that everywhere men had come down to the earth from a prenatal, pre-earthly life, and that they still bore within them, as an after-effect, all that the Gods had implanted into them during their pre-earthly existence.

In the past, the human being felt that he lived on the earth in a way which made him say to himself: I am standing here on the earth, but before I stood upon it, I lived in a soul-spiritual world, imaginatively speaking, in a world of light. But this light continues to shine mysteriously in my inner being. As a human being, I am, as it were, a covering sheath for this divine light that continues to live in me.

Man thus knew that a divine element had come down with him to the earth. In reality, he did not say—and this may be proved philologically—I am now standing upon the earth, but he said: I, who am a human being, enfold the God who came down to the earth. This is what really lived in his consciousness.

And the farther back we go into human evolution, the more frequently shall we find this consciousness: I, who am a human being, enfold the God who came down to the earth. For the divine element was manifold. One might say: In the past, man was conscious of the fact that the last gods of the godly hierarchy reaching down to the earth were human beings. Those who do not distort Oriental culture in the terrible way in which Deussen distorted it for Europe, those who do not perceive in a superficial, external way, but in a truly feeling manner, the state of consciousness of the ancient Indian who felt himself at one with his Brahman whom he enfolded, will also be able to feel what really constituted the true essence of soul life in ancient times.

Out of this developed the consciousness of the Father, man's attitude towards God the Father. He felt that he was, as it were, a son of the Gods. He did not feel this in connection with his body of flesh and blood, but in connection with that part of his being enfolded by his flesh and blood, though according to many people of ancient times, these were not worthy of being the involucre of a God. Not the human being of flesh and blood was looked upon as divine, but that part which came from a spiritual world and entered man's physical-earthly part, the being of flesh and blood.

Man's religious connection was thus felt above all in the relationship to God the Father. In the ancient Mysteries the highest dignity, the highest rank was that of the Father. In nearly all the Mysteries of the Orient the candidate of initiation had to pass through seven different stages. The first stage or degree was one of preparation, in which he gained a soul constitution giving him a first idea of what the Mysteries revealed to him. The subsequent degree, up to the fourth, enabled him to have a full understanding of his folk soul, so that he no longer felt that he was a single human being, but the member of a whole group of men. And by rising to the higher stages, the fifth and sixth degree, he felt in an ever-growing measure that he was the involucre of a divine essence. The highest degree was that of the Father. People who had attained this stage realized in their external life and existence this divine archetypal principle which could be experienced by man, and which could really be brought in connection with man. The whole external spiritual culture was entirely in accordance with this central point of religious life: to experience in human consciousness a relation with the creative principle of God the Father. Everything which could be grasped by man's inner being was experienced accordingly: Man felt that the light of knowledge which could be kindled within him came to him from God the Father. In his own intellect he felt the influence of God the Father. Cults and rituals were arranged accordingly, for they were only a reflexion of the path of knowledge which could be followed in the Mysteries.

Then came the Greek Age. The Greek is the most perfect representative of that stage of human development coming out of those older soul conditions which I have just described to you. The ancient Greek felt that man was more than man, not only the involucre of something divine. But this Greek feeling was of such a kind that a person who had passed through a Greek training—let us call it the Greek school of the intellect, or Greek art, or Greek religious life—felt, as it were, that the divine essence had completely identified itself with man. The ancient Greek no longer thought that he enfolded a God, but he felt that he was the expression of God, that he set forth a divine being. But this truth was no longer pronounced as openly as the other truth in older epochs. In ancient Greece this truth: As a human being, thou art a divine being, a son of the Gods, was only revealed to the disciple of the Mysteries at a definite stage of his development. It was deemed impossible to describe this secret of human evolution to people who were not adequately prepared for it. But a Greek who had been initiated into the Mysteries knew this truth. This explains the fundamental feeling of that epoch was not a clearly outlined idea, but a fundamental feeling of the soul.

We come across this fundamental soul feeling in Greek art, which sets forth the Gods as if they were idealized human beings. This way of setting forth the Gods as idealized men proceeds from this fundamental feeling. The Greek therefore took back, as it were into the chastity of feeling, his relationship to the Divine.

When the Greek world conception had completely set, an entirely new soul mood came to the fore in the Fifteenth Century. No longer did the human being feel that he enfolded a divine essence or set forth something divine, as he experienced himself in ancient Greece, but he felt that he was a being that had risen from less perfect stages to the human stage and that he could only look up to a divine essence transcending the physical world. Modern man called into life natural science based upon this fundamental feeling, which is, however, still unable to discover man's connection with his own self.

It is the task of Anthroposophy to rediscover man's connection with his own self and the divine essence. This may be thought of as follows: Let us transfer ourselves into the soul of a man living before the time of ancient Greece. He will say: I enfold a divine essence. By enwrapping it with my body of flesh and blood, I set it forth less worthily, in a way which is not in keeping with its true essence. I can only draw it down upon a lower level, as it were. If I wish to set forth the divine essence purely, I must purify myself. I have to pass through a kind of catharsis, cleanse myself, so that the god within me may assert himself.

This is in reality a return to the archetypal principle of the Father and it comes to expression in many forms of past religious life, through the fact that people thought that after death they returned to the ancestors, to their distant forefathers. Religious life undoubtedly reveals this trait, this tendency towards the archetypal, creative principle of the Father. Man does not yet feel quite at home upon the earth. And he does not yet strive from a kind of alien position, as it were, to a transcendental God; he rather strives to set forth man as purely as possible, in the belief that God might then express himself through man.

In ancient Greece life undergoes a change. Man no longer feels so closely connected with the divine principle of the Father, as in the past. As a human being, he feels himself intimately connected with the divine essence, but at the same time also with the earthly one. He lives, as it were, in equipoise between the divine and the earthly. This is the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. It is the epoch in which one could no longer say only: “In the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God (by this one meant the Father-God), and the Logos was God.” One had to say instead: “And the Word was made Flesh.”—The Word, originally looked upon as being one with the Father-God, was now looked upon in such a way that it had found an abode in man, it dwelt fully in man, and man had to seek it within himself.

The Mystery of Golgotha met this mood which had arisen in mankind. God the Father could never be imagined in human shape; he had to be imagined in a purely spiritual form. Christ, the Son of God, was imagined to be divine-human. In reality, the longing felt by the ancient Greek, or what he set forth as an artistic realization, reaches its human fulfillment in the event which took place in the Mystery of Golgotha.

We should not bear in mind details, but the essential; namely, that a divine essence entered man, in his quality of human being living upon the earth.

The Mystery of Golgotha thus stands at the centre of the whole human evolution on earth. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha entered history at a moment when the Greeks strove to set forth the divine in man from an external aspect, from the aspect of the earth, as it were, should not be considered as an historical coincidence. We might say, and this is more than a poetical image: The Greeks had to set forth the divine in man artistically, out of the ingredients of the earth, and the cosmos sent down to the earth the God who entered man, as a cosmic answer to the wonderful question sent out into the world's spaces, as it were, by the Greeks. In the historical development we may sense, as it were, that with their humanly portrayed gods the Greeks addressed the following question to the universe: Can Man become a God? And the universe replied: God can become Man. This reply was given through the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

On many occasions I have explained that it is only possible to grasp the real, original essence of the Mystery of Golgotha by approaching it not only with the knowledge of lifeless things applied by modern men, but with a new living knowledge, a knowledge that is once more pervaded with the spirit.

We thus reach the point of saying to ourselves: Man has reached on the one hand his consciousness of freedom, and on the other hand, with the aid of lifeless thoughts, the technical and mechanic progress in external culture; he cannot, however, remain standing by this inner lifelessness. Out of his soul's own strength he must gain the impulse of life, of something that is spiritually living; that is to say, he must again be able to win ideas which are inwardly alive, which do not only seize the intellect, but the whole human being. Modern man should really attain what I have indicated in my book on Goethe's world conception; he should once more be able to speak not of lifeless ideas and abstractions, but rise up to the spirituality in which he is pervaded by ideas, and take into this sphere of ideas all the living warmth that may gleam in his soul, the brightest light which his enthusiasm may kindle in his soul. Man should again bring into his ideas the whole warmth and light of his soul. Inwardly he should again be able to carry his whole being into the spirituality of the world of ideas. This is what we have lost in the present time.

We may say: In modern literature there is perhaps nothing so deeply moving as the first chapter of Nietzsche's description of Greek philosophy, which he himself designates as “The Tragic Age of the Greeks.” Nietzsche describes the philosophers before Socrates: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras—and for those who have a real feeling and an open heart for such things, it is deeply moving to read Nietzsche's description of how at a certain moment of Greek life, the Greek rose up to the abstraction of mere existence. From the manifold impressions of Nature filling the human soul with warmth, he passed over to the pale thought of existence.

Nietzsche says more or less the following: It gives one a chilly feeling, as if one entered icy regions, when an ancient Greek philosopher, for example Parmenides, speaks of the abstract idea of the encompassing existence. Nietzsche, who lived so completely in the modern culture, as described to you the day before yesterday, felt himself transferred to glacier regions.

Nietzsche failed, just because he could only go as far as the coldness, one might say, the glacier character, of man's world of ideas. A truly spiritual clairvoyance can bring soul warmth and soul light into the intellectual sphere, so that we can reach that purity of thought, described in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” without becoming inwardly dried out, but filled with enthusiasm. By abandoning the earthly warmth of the life of the senses, we can feel in the cold regions of intellectualism the warm sun forces of the cosmos; by abandoning the shining objects of the earth and by experiencing inner darkness through the intellectual world of thought, the living soul impulses, which we bring into this darkness, can receive the Cosmic Light, after having overcome, as it were, the earthly darkness.

Everywhere in Nietzsche we find this longing for the cosmic light, the cosmic warmth. He cannot reach them, and this is the true cause of his failure. Anthroposophy would like to indicate the path leading to a goal where we do not lose earthly warmth, earthly light, where we preserve our keen interest in every concrete detail of earthly life, and rise to that height of concept where the divine essence becomes manifest in pure thought; as modern men we then no longer feel this divine essence within us, as did the human beings of past epochs, but we ourselves must first find the way to it, we must go to it.

This is the mood which truly enables us to experience the Mystery of the Holy Ghost. And this constitutes the difference between the spiritual life of modern and ancient man. The man of older epochs absorbed his spirituality from every single creature in Nature. As already explained: The cloud spoke to him of the spirit, the flower spoke to him of the spirit. Through his own forces modern man must animate his concepts, which have grown cold and lifeless: then he will come to the Holy Spirit that will also enable him to see the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way.

When we thus pervade our ideas—let me say it quite dryly—in an anthroposophical way with soul warmth and soul light, then we draw something out of humanity and take it with us. For unless we take this along, we cannot go beyond the dry, banal, abstract character of the world of ideas. But if we rise up to a comprehension of the world, with the aid of that knowledge which is contained in anthroposophical books, our ideas will remain as exact as mathematical or other scientific ideas. We do not think in a less precise way than the chemist in his laboratory, or the biologist in his cell; but the thoughts which we thus develop require something which comes from the human being and accompanies them. When an anthroposophist speaks out of imagination and inspiration, and sound common sense really grasps this imagination or inspiration, these confront him in the same way in which mathematical or geometrical figures confront him in mathematics; but the human being must bring along something, for otherwise he does not grasp these ideas in the right way. What he must bring with him is love.

Unless knowledge is pervaded with love, it is not possible to grasp the truths given by Anthroposophy; for then they remain something which has the same value as other truths. The value is the same when, in accordance with the ideas of some materialistic natural scientists you state: Marsupials, human apes, ape-men and men … or whether you say: Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. Only the thought is different, but not the state of mind. The soul, the state of mind, only change when the spiritual comprehension of man within Nature becomes an inwardly living comprehension. But there can be no real understanding unless knowledge is accompanied by the same feeling, the same state of mind, which also lives in love. If knowledge is pervaded with the experience of love, this knowledge can approach the Mystery of Golgotha. We then have not only the naïve love for Christ, which is in itself fully justified—as already stated, this simple, naïve love is quite justified—but we also have a knowledge which encompasses the whole universe and which may deepen to the comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. In other words: Life in the Holy Spirit leads to life in Christ, or to the presence of Christ, the Son of God.

We then learn to grasp that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Logos actually passed over from the Father to the Son. And then the following important truth will be revealed to us: For the men of ancient times it was right to say: “In the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God and the Logos was a God,” but during the Greek epoch they had to begin to say: “And the Logos was made flesh.” Modern man should add: “And I must seek to understand the Logos living in the flesh, by raising my concepts and ideas and my whole comprehension of the world to the spiritual sphere, so that I may find Christ through the Holy Ghost, and through Christ, God the Father.”

Undoubtedly this is not a theory, but something which can penetrate into the direct experience of modern man, and this is the attitude towards Christianity which grows quite naturally out of Anthroposophy.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed indispensable that modern man should grasp the necessity of treading a spiritual path. He needs it in view of the present lifeless culture consisting in the mechanism of modern life—which should not be despised, for, from another aspect, it must be greatly valued. But an inner push is needed, as it were, so that modern man may set out along this spiritual path. And this inner push—recently I spoke of it as a real awakening—is a development which many people prefer to avoid. The opposition of modern people to Anthroposophy is really due to the fact that they have not experienced this push, this jerk, within their soul. It is uncomfortable to experience it. For it casts us, as it were, into the vortex of cosmic development. People would much rather remain quiet, with their rigid sharply outlined thoughts that only turn to lifeless thing which are not on the defensive, when the world is to be grasped, whereas everything that is alive defends itself, moves and tries to slip out of our thoughts, when we try to grasp it with lifeless concepts. Modern people do not like this. They feel it. They cloak it in all manner of other things and become quite furious when they hear that a certain direction, coming from many different spheres of life, calls for an entirely different way of grasping the world.

This mood alone explains the very peculiar things to be observed among opponents of Anthroposophy. It suffices to mention a few recent examples, for these can show us the strangeness of it all.

We were hit by the great misfortune of losing our Goetheanum. We know quite well that in spite of all efforts to built it up again, the first Goetheanum cannot rise up again; it can only remain a memory, and it is an immense grief for us to have to say: The Goetheanum wished to set forth a style of art in keeping with the new spirituality, and this style of art, which was meant to exercise a stimulating influence has, to begin with, vanished from the surface of the earth with the Goetheanum. When we only mention this fact, we can feel the immense grief connected with the loss of the Goetheanum.

Generally, in the face of misfortune, even opponents cease to use a pitiless, scornful language. But just the misfortune which deprived us of the Goethanum, induced our opponents to speak all the more scornfully and insultingly. They think that this is right: this is so peculiar. It fitly belongs—but in an unfit way—to the other thing mentioned above.

The Anthroposophical Movement began as a purely positive activity. No one was attacked—our only form of “agitation” was to state the facts investigated by anthroposophical methods of research and we waited patiently until the human souls that undoubtedly exist in the present time, should come to us led by the impulse which lived in them, in order to gain knowledge of the truths which had to be revealed out of the spiritual world. This was the tendency of our whole anthroposophical work; we did not intend to agitate, to set up programs, but we simply wished to state the facts obtained through investigation of the spiritual world, and to wait and see in which souls there lived the longing to know these realities.

Today there are many people who are opponents of Anthroposophy without knowing why; they simply follow those who lead them. But there are nevertheless some who know quite well why they are opponents of Anthroposophy; they know it, because they see that out of the anthroposophical foundation come truths which call for that inner jerk which has been characterized above. This they refuse. They refuse it for many reasons, because these kinds of truths were always to be preserved within more restricted circles, in order to emerge from the rest of mankind as small groups forming a kind of spiritual aristocracy. Consequently their hatred is directed particularly towards that person who draws out the truths from the spiritual world for all human beings, simply because this is in keeping with the present age. At the same time these opponents—I mean, the leading opponents—know that truth as such cannot be touched, for it finds its way through the smallest rifts in the rock, no matter what obstacles it may encounter. As a rule, they do not therefore attack these truths: for the truths would soon discover ways and means of ousting the foe. Observe the opponents, indeed in our anthroposophical circles it would be most advisable to study our opponents carefully: They renounce attacking the truths, and lay chief stress on personal attacks, personal insinuations, personal insults, personal calumnies. They think that truth cannot be touched, yet it is to be driven out of the world, and they believe that this can be done by personal defamation. The nature of such an opposition shows how well the leading opponents know how to proceed in order to gain the victory, at least for the time being.

But this is something which Anthroposophists above all should know; for there are still many Anthroposophists who think that something may be reached by direct discussion with the opponent. Nothing can do us more harm than success in setting forth our truths in the form of discussion; for people do not hate us because we say something that is not true, but because we say the truth. And the more we succeed in proving that we say the truth, the more they will hate us.

Of course this cannot prevent us from stating the truth. But it can prevent us from being so naive as to think that it is possible to progress by discussion. Only positive work enables us to progress; truth should be represented as strongly as possible, so as to attract as many predestined souls as possible, for these are far more numerous in the present time than is generally assumed. These souls will find the spiritual nourishment needed for the time when no destructive, but constructive work will have to be done, if human development is to follow an ascending, not a descending curve.

There is no way out of the present chaos if we follow the materialistic path. The only way out is to follow the spiritual path. But we can only set out along the spiritual path if the Spirit is our guide: to choose the Spirit as our guide, to understand how we should choose it, this is the insight which Anthroposophists should gain; this is what they should learn to know in the deepest sense.

In my second public lecture here, I tried, as far as is possible in a public lecture, to describe in broad outline the life of man between death and rebirth. We shall go more deeply into this subject in the next two lectures, in order to gain a clearer understanding of our life here in the physical world. The preparation provided by the previous lectures was necessary before we could go further. This course of lectures will provide the means whereby we can enter more deeply into this subject than was possible in the public lectures.

I have often said that if a person wants to know and understand the spiritual worlds—and these are the worlds in which we live between death and rebirth—he must make certain conceptions and ideas his own, which cannot be gained from experience here on earth, but which, if once gained, will be of infinite importance to life on the physical plane; and this importance will increase more and more.

To begin with, let me now explain one difference between the experience in the spiritual world and the experience on the physical plane, which when heard for the first time must seem astonishing and strange, so that we might easily think that these things would be difficult of comprehension. But the deeper we go in Spiritual Science, the more we shall find that these things become ever more comprehensible. When we live on the physical plane and are affected by the experiences of the physical plane, one thing must, upon recollection strike us forcibly. That is, that on this physical plane we are confronted with what we call reality, existence, being. One might say that the more unspiritual a person is, the more does he rely upon what he has before him on the physical plane as the ‘reality’ that presses in upon him. But as regards what we wish to acquire on the physical plane as ‘knowledge,’ knowledge of this reality, the case is different. As children we have to be taught to develop the capacities for acquiring the knowledge of the physical plane and then we have to work further and further. The acquisition of knowledge demands mental work. Nature, that is to say external reality, does not of itself yield up the contents of its wisdom and its laws; we have to acquire this knowledge. Indeed, all human striving after knowledge consists in actively acquiring from passive experience, the wisdom and the law that Nature contains.

Now matters are quite different when either by the exercises which lead to spiritual investigation, or by passing through the portal of death, we enter into the spiritual world. The relation of man to the surrounding spiritual world is not, under all circumstances, what I am now about to describe; but it is so in important moments, during important experiences. In our life on the physical plane we are not always striving after knowledge, for sometimes we pause in this labour. So also, what I shall now describe is not continually necessary in the spiritual world, but it is requisite and necessary for us at certain times. The astonishing thing is that man has no lack of wisdom in the spiritual world. A person may be a fool in the sense-world, but simply through his entrance into the spiritual world wisdom streams towards him in its reality. Wisdom that we acquire with trouble in the physical world, that we have to work for day after day if we wish to possess it, is already ours in the spiritual world, just as surrounding nature is ours in the physical world. It is always there, and it is there in the greatest abundance. To a certain extent we may say that the less wisdom we have acquired on the physical plane, the more abundantly does this wisdom stream towards us on the spiritual plane. But, we have a special task, with respect to this wisdom on the spiritual plane.

In recent lectures I told you that on the spiritual plane the ideal of humanity stands before us, the content of the religion of the Gods, and that we have to strive towards it. We cannot do this, if we are incapable of so exercising our will—that is, our feeling-will, our willing-feeling—that we continually diminish this wisdom, continually take something away from the wisdom which for ever streams towards us and which there surrounds us as the phenomena of nature do here. We must have the power to deplete more and more the wisdom which there comes towards us. Here, on the physical plane we have to become wiser and wiser; there we have to endeavour so to exercise our will and our feeling that we diminish and darken the surrounding wisdom. For the less we are able to take from it, the less strength do we find within us whereby to fill ourselves with the necessary forces to approach the ideal of humanity as real being. This approach has to consist in our taking more and more away from the surrounding wisdom. What we thus take away we are able to transform within us so that the transformed wisdom becomes the life-force which drives us towards the ideal of humanity,. This life-force we have to acquire during the period between death and rebirth. It is only by changing into life-force, the wisdom which flows into us so abundantly, that we can approach a fresh incarnation in the correct way. When we return to earth, we must have changed so much wisdom into life-force, we must have diminished the wisdom by so much, that we have sufficient organising spiritual life-forces to permeate the substance we receive through heredity from father and mother. Thus we have to lose wisdom more and more.

When we find a thorough materialist again after his death, one who on the physical plane did not recognise any reality in spirit, who said during his life, ‘All that you say about spirit is nonsense; your wisdom is nothing but fantasy; I will have nothing to do with it. I admit nothing but what is to be found in external nature’—in the case of such a person, when met with after his death, one sees wisdom stream towards him so abundantly that he cannot escape it. From all sides spirit streams towards him. To the same extent that he did not believe in spirit here, he is overflooded by it there. His task is now to change this wisdom into life-forces, so that he may produce a physical reality in his next incarnation. He is to produce what he called reality from this wisdom, he is to diminish this wisdom; but it will not permit itself to be diminished by him, it remains as it is. He is unable to form reality out of it. This dreadful punishment of the spirit confronts him, namely, that whereas in his last life here on the physical plane he relied only upon reality, whereas he entirely denied spirit, he is now unable to save himself, as it were, from spirit and he is unable to produce anything real out of this spirit. He is always faced with the danger of not being able to come again into the physical world through forces which he himself produces. He lives continually in the fear—‘Spirit will push me into the physical world and I shall then have a physical existence which denies everything that I recognised as true in my previous life. I shall have to allow myself to be thrust by spirit into physical reality, I shall not have produced reality by myself.’ That is a most astonishing thing, but it is a fact. To be a great materialist and deny spirit before death is the way to be drowned, as it were, in spirit after death and to find in it nothing of the only reality one had formerly believed in, A man is then choked or drowned in spirit.

These are ideas which we have to acquire more and more in the course of our. study of spiritual science; for if we do acquire them they lead us onward harmoniously even in physical life and they show us, to a certain extent, how the two sides of life have to supplement and balance each other. We form the instinctive desire really to introduce this balance into our life.

I might give you another example of the connection between physical and spiritual life. Let us take a concrete, individual example. Suppose we have told a lie to someone on the physical plane—I am speaking of actual cases. When we tell a lie to someone, it happens at a certain point of time and what I shall now describe as the corresponding event in the spiritual world also takes place at a certain point of time between death and rebirth. Let us suppose we have told a lie to someone at some particular time on the physical plane; then, during our sojourn in the spiritual world, be it through initiation or through death, there comes a certain time when our soul in the spiritual world is entirely filled with the truth we ought to have expressed. This truth torments us; it stands before us and torments us to the same degree in which we deviated from it when we told the lie. Thus one need only tell a lie on the physical plane in order to bring about a time in the spiritual world when we are tormented by the corresponding truth, the opposite of the lie. There the truth torments us because it lives in us and burns us, and we cannot bear it. Our suffering consists in our seeing the truth before us. But we are in such a condition that this truth gives us no satisfaction, no joy, no pleasure; it torments us. One of the peculiarities of our experience in the spiritual world is that we are tormented by what is good, by the things which we know ought to uplift us.

Take another example. In our life in the physical world we may be lazy in doing something which it is our duty to do industriously; then comes a time in the spiritual world when we are filled with the industry we lacked in the physical world. Industry most surely comes; it is alive in us when we have been lazy in the physical plane. The time comes when from inner necessity, we have to exercise this industry unconditionally. We devote ourselves to it entirely and we know that it is something which is extremely valuable; but it torments us, it makes us suffer.

Let us take another case which is perhaps less under the control of human volition, but depends upon other processes of life which go on more in the background of existence and are connected with the course of our karma; let us take the case in which we have passed through an illness. When in physical life we have had an illness which has caused us pain, we experience at a certain point of time in the spiritual world the opposite feeling, the opposite condition, namely, that of health. And this feeling of health strengthens us during our sojourn in the spiritual world to the same degree that the illness weakened us. This is an instance which perhaps may not only shock our intellect, like the other things we have mentioned, but it may enter much more deeply into the emotional aspect of our soul and irritate it. We know that the things of Spiritual Science must always be grasped through our feelings; but in this case we must remember the following. We must clearly understand that something like a shadow lies over this connection between physical illness and the corresponding health and strength we have in the spiritual world. The connection exists, but there is something in the human breast which prevents the feelings from rightly coming to terms with this connection. We must indeed admit this connection has another result when we really understand it, and this result may be described as follows:—

Let us suppose that a person takes up Spiritual Science and devotes himself seriously to it—not in the way in which other sciences are taken up. These may be studied theoretically; one may receive what they give merely as thoughts and ideas. Spiritual Science ought never to be taken up in this manner. It ought to become a spiritual life-blood within us. Spiritual Science ought to live and work in us; it ought also to awaken feelings through the ideas it gives us. To one who really hearkens to Spiritual Science in the right way there is nothing it has to give which does not either, on the one hand, uplift us, or on the other, allow us to see into the abuses of existence in order that we may there find our way aright. The student who understands Spiritual Science correctly always follows what it says with the appropriate feelings. Spiritual Science when accepted will transform his soul, even while in the physical world, simply through the ideas that live in him and through his acquiring the habits of thought and feeling which we have just mentioned as being necessary. I have often said that the earnest study of Spiritual Science is one of the best and most deeply-penetrating of all exercises.

Something remarkable gradually appears in one who takes up Spiritual Science. A person who performs exercises—possibly he does not do it in order to become a spiritual investigator himself, but only tries earnestly to understand Spiritual Science—such a person may perhaps not be able for a very long time to think of seeing clairvoyantly for himself. He will be able to do it sometime; though this may perhaps be a far-off ideal. But if he really allows Spiritual Science to act upon his soul in the manner we have indicated, he will find that the instincts of life, the more unconscious impulses of life change. His soul really becomes different. No one can take up Spiritual Science without it influencing the instinctive life of the soul. It makes the soul different, it gives it different sympathies and antipathies, it fills it with a sort of light, so that it feels more certain than it did formerly. This may be noticed in every realm of life; in every realm of life Spiritual Science expresses itself in this way. For example, a person may be unskilled; but if he takes up Spiritual Science he will see that without doing anything else than filling himself with Spiritual Science, he will become more apt and capable, even to the manner in which he uses his hands. Do not say: ‘I know some very unskilled people who follow Spiritual Science; and they are still very unskilled!’ Try to reflect to what extent these have not yet really permeated themselves inwardly with Spiritual Science according to the necessities of karma. A person may be a painter and exercise the art of painting to a certain degree; if he takes up Spiritual Science he will find that what we have just mentioned will flow instinctively into the actions he performs. He will mix his colours more easily; the ideas he wants will come more quickly. Or suppose he is a teacher, and wishes to take up some science. Many who are in this position will know how much trouble it often costs to gather together the literature required to clear up some question or other. If he takes up Spiritual Science, he will not go as before to a library and take down fifty books that are of no use, but he will immediately lay his hands on the right one. Spiritual Science really enters into one's life; it makes the instincts different; it gives us the impulse to do the right thing.

Of course what I shall now say must always be thought of in conjunction with human karma. It must always be kept in mind that man is subject to the law of karma under all circumstances. But taking into consideration the law of karma, the following is still the case. Let us suppose that a certain kind of illness attacks someone who has taken up Spiritual Science in the way described and it is in his karma that he may be cured. Naturally, it may be in his karma that the disease cannot be cured; but, when considering an illness, karma never under any circumstance says that it must run a certain course in a fatalistic sense, it can be cured or it cannot be cured. Now, anyone who has earnestly taken up Spiritual Science acquires an instinctive feeling which helps him to oppose the illness and its weakening effect with the proper remedy. That which in the ordinary way is experienced as the result of the illness in the spiritual world works back into the soul, and, in so far as one is still in the physical body, it acts as instinct. One either succumbs to the illness or finds within oneself the way to the forces of healing. When the clairvoyant consciousness finds the right remedy for an illness, it happens in the following way: such a clairvoyant is able to call up before him the picture of the illness. Let us suppose that he has the picture before him of the illness which approaches a person in such or such a way and has a weakening effect on him. Owing to his clairvoyant consciousness there appears to him the counterpart of the illness, namely, the corresponding feeling of health, and the strengthening which springs from this feeling. That which can now happen to man in the spiritual world as the corresponding cure for that from which he is suffering in the physical world, is perceived by the clairvoyant. Through this the clairvoyant is enabled to advise the man for his good. Indeed, one need not even be a fully developed clairvoyant, but this may appear to one instinctively from seeing the picture of the illness. But the cause of that which to clairvoyant consciousness appears as compensation in the spiritual world, belongs to the picture of the illness as much as the swing of a pendulum to one side belongs to the swing to the other side.

From this example you will see how the physical plane is related to the spiritual world and how fruitful for the guidance of our life here the knowledge of the spiritual world may be.

Let us go back once more to the first concrete fact we mentioned, namely: that just as nature surrounds us on the physical plane, so what is spiritual, wisdom-filled spirit, surrounds us in the spiritual world and is always there. Now, if you understand this thoroughly, an extremely important light is cast on what takes place in the spiritual world. In the physical world we may pass by objects and observe them in such a way that we may ask: What is the principle or nature of this object? What is the law of this Being, or this process? Or, on the other hand, we may pass stupidly by and ask nothing at all. We shall never learn anything intelligently on the physical plane if we are not impelled, as it were, by the object itself to ask questions, if these objects do not present problems which we recognise as such. By merely looking at objects and processes, we should never on the physical plane arrive at being a soul that guides itself. On the spiritual plane this is different. On the physical plane we put our questions to objects and processes, and we have to make efforts to investigate them in order to find the answer to our questions from the things themselves. On the spiritual plane things and Beings surround us spiritually and they question us, not we them. They are there and we stand before them and are continually being questioned by them. We must now have the power to draw from the infinite ocean of wisdom the answer to these questions. We have not to seek the answers in the objects and processes, but in ourselves; for the objects question us; all around us are objects questioning us.

At this point the following comes under consideration. Let us suppose that we confront some process or some Being in the spiritual world; inevitably it asks us a question. We cannot approach it without its doing so. We stand there with our wisdom, but we are unable to develop sufficient will, sufficient feeling-will, or willing-feeling to give the answer from out this wisdom, although we know that the answer is within us. Our inner being is infinitely deep; all answers are within us—but we are unable really to give the answer. The consequence of this is that we rush past on the stream of time and fail to give the answer at the proper time, because we have not gained the capacity—perhaps through our previous evolution—we have not become mature enough to answer the question when the time comes for it to be answered. We have developed too slowly with respect to what we ought to answer; we can only give the answer later. But the opportunity does not recur; we have missed it. We have not made use of all our opportunities. Thus we pass by objects and events without answering them. We have experiences such as this continually in the spiritual world. Thus it may come about, that in our life between death and rebirth we stand before a Being which questions us. We have not developed ourselves sufficiently in our earthly life and the intervening spiritual life, to give the answer when we are asked. We have to pass on; we have to enter into our next incarnation. The consequence of this is that we must receive the impulse once more, in our next incarnation, through the good Gods, without being conscious of it, so that we shall not pass by the next time when the same question is asked. This is how things come to pass.

I have often mentioned that the further we go back in human evolution the more do we find that humanity did not then possess our present mentality, but had a kind of clairvoyance on the physical plane. Our present mental outlook developed from a dull, dreamy clairvoyance. The more primitive and elementary the stages of mental development of some races still are, the closer connection we find in their thought and feeling to this original clairvoyance. Although the primitive atavistic clairvoyance is becoming less and less frequent, we still find in unexplored regions of the earth people who have preserved something from former times, so that we still find echoes of the ancient days of clairvoyance. This clairvoyance reveals—although in a dim, dreamy form, because it is a seeing into the spiritual world—it reveals peculiarities which reappear in the developed clairvoyance; only in the latter case it is not dim and dreamy, but clear and distinct. Spiritual Science shows us that when a man of the present time goes through life between death and rebirth, he has progressively to answer the questioning Beings more and more at the proper time; for on his power to answer depends his true development, and his approach to the ideal of the Gods—the perfect man. As we have already said, in former times people had this experience in the domain of dreams and we have the remains of it in a great number of fairy-tales and sagas. These are gradually disappearing, but they run somewhat as follows. A certain person meets a spiritual Being. This Being repeatedly questions him and he has to answer. And he knows that he must give the answer by a certain time, when the clock strikes, or something of that sort. This ‘question motif’ in fairy-tales and sagas is very widespread and is a form of dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness which now reappears in the spiritual world, in the way have described. On the whole, the description of what takes place in the spiritual world provides in all cases a valuable clue to the understanding of myths, sagas, fairy-tales, etc., and enables us to place them where they belong. This is a point which shows that everywhere, even in the mental culture of the present day, evolution is standing, as it were, at the door of Spiritual Science.

It is very interesting, that a book such as the one by my friend Ludwig Laistner, The Riddle of the Sphinx, which in many respects is a good and well-intentioned book, is unsatisfactory, because in order to be satisfactory, the ‘question motif’, with which Ludwig Laistner specially deals, would have had to be treated from the basis of occult knowledge; the author would have had to know something about the truths of occult science which enter here.

Bearing these examples in mind, we see that the conditions in the spiritual world depend upon something quite definite. In the spiritual world it is not a case of gathering knowledge as we do here; it is even a case of diminished knowledge and changing the force of knowledge into life-force. One cannot be an investigator in the spiritual world in the same sense as one can in the physical world; that would be an absurdity, for there a person is able to know everything, it is all round about him. The question is whether he is able to develop his will and his feeling, in contradistinction to his knowledge, whether in individual cases he is able to bring forth from the treasure of his will sufficient power to make use of his wisdom; otherwise he is stifled by or drowned in it. Whereas in the physical world wisdom depends on thinking, in the spiritual world it depends upon the adequate development of the will, the feeling-will, the will which brings forth reality out of wisdom, which becomes a kind of creative power. There we have Spirit as here we have Nature, and our task is to lead Spirit to Nature. A beautiful statement is contained in the theosophical literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, a statement made by Oetinger, who lived at Murrhardt, in Wurtemburg, and who was so far advanced in his own spiritual development that at certain times he was able quite consciously to help spiritual beings, that is, souls who were not on the physical plane. He made the remarkable statement which is very beautiful and very true: ‘Nature and the form of nature is the aim of spiritual creative power.’ What I have just brought down to you from the spiritual world is contained in this sentence. In the spiritual world creative power strives to give reality to that which at first heaves and surges in wisdom. Here, we bring forth wisdom from the physical reality; there we do the reverse. Our task there is to produce realities from wisdom, to carry out in living realities the wisdom we find there. The goal of the Gods is reality in form.

Thus we see that it depends upon will permeated with feeling, or feeling-filled-will being changed into creative force; this we must employ in the spiritual world in the same way as here in the physical world we have to employ great mental efforts in order to arrive at wisdom.

Now, in order that this should be possible, it is very important that we should develop our feeling and thinking in the right way, that we should prepare ourselves here on the physical plane in a manner which is right for the present cycle of evolution; for all that takes place in the spiritual world between death and rebirth is the result of what takes place in the physical world between birth and death. It is indeed true, that conditions are so different in the spiritual world that we have to acquire entirely fresh conceptions and ideas if we wish to understand them, but all the same the two are connected like cause and effect. We only understand the connection between what is spiritual and what is physical, when we recognise it really as the connection of cause and effect. We have to prepare ourselves while in the physical world and we might therefore now consider the question: How, at the present age, can we prepare ourselves in the right way, so that—whether we enter the spiritual world through initiation or through death—we shall really possess the spiritual power necessary to draw what we have need of from the wisdom that is there—so that we may bring forth realities from this surging flowing wisdom. Whence comes such power? It is important that these questions should be answered in a manner adapted to our present age. In the age when mankind thought in such a way, that the origin of what I have called the ‘Saga motiv’ resulted, the case was different; but from whence comes this soul-force in the present age?

In order that we arrive at the answer to this, may I bring forward the following?

We can study the various philosophies and inquire as to how philosophers arrive at the idea of God—there are, of course, philosophers who have sufficient spiritual depth to be convinced from the existence of the world that we may speak of a Divine Being who pervades it. In the nineteenth century we need only take Lotze, who tried to produce in his religious philosophy something that was in harmony with the rest of his philosophy. Others too were sufficiently profound to have with all their philosophy a sort of religious philosophy also. We find one peculiarity in all these philosophers, a very definite peculiarity. They think to reach Divinity with ideas gathered from the physical plane; they reflect, they investigate in a philosophical manner, and come to the conclusion—as is the case with Lotze—that the phenomena and beings of the world are held together by a divine First Cause which pervades all and brings all into a certain harmony. But when we go more minutely into the ideas of these religious philosophers, we find that they always have one peculiarity. They arrive at a Divine Being who pervades all; and when we consider this Divine Being more closely, this God of the philosophers, we find that it is approximately the God called in the Hebrew, or rather, the Christian religion ‘God the Father’. Thus far do the philosophers go; they observe Nature and are profound enough not to deny everything Divine in an empty-headed, materialistic way; they can arrive at Divinity, but it is God the Father.

One can demonstrate most exactly, after studying these philosophers, that mere philosophy, as thinking philosophy, can lead nowhere but to a monotheistic Father-God.

If in the case of individual philosophers, such as Hegel and others, Christ is mentioned; it does not spring from philosophy—this can be proved—it comes from positive religion. These people have known that positive religion possesses the Christ and therefore they can speak of Him. The difference is, that the Father-God can be found through philosophy, but Christ cannot be found by any philosophy, by any method of thought. That is quite impossible.

That is a statement which I suggest you should weigh well and consider; if rightly understood it leads us far into the most important probings and strivings of the human soul. It is connected with something which is expressed in the Christian religion in a very beautiful, symbolic and pictorial manner; namely, that the relation of this other God, Christ, to the Father-God is understood as the relation of the Son to the Father. That is a very significant fact, although it is only a symbol. It is interesting to notice that Lotze, for example, cannot make anything out of it. ‘One cannot take this symbol literally, that is obvious,’ says Lotze. He means that one God cannot be the son of another. But there is something very striking in this symbol. Between father and son the relationship is something like that between cause and effect; for in a certain way one may see the father is the cause of the son. The son would not exist if the father were not there—like cause and effect. But we must take into account one peculiar thing, namely, that a man who eventually may have a son, may also have the possibility of not having a son, he may be childless. He would still be the same man. The cause is the man A, the effect is the man B, the son; but the effect need not come about, the effect is a free act, and follows as a free act from the cause. For this reason, when we study a cause considering it in connection with its effect, we must not merely inquire into the nature of the cause, for by this we have done nothing at all; but we must inquire whether the cause also really causes; that is the important question. Now a characteristic of all philosophy is that it follows a line of thought, it develops one thought out of another; it seeks for what follows in that which has gone before. Philosophers are justified in doing this; but in this way we never arrive at the connection which comes about when we call to mind the fact that the cause need not cause at all. The cause remains the same in its own nature whether it causes or not. That changes nothing in the nature of the cause. And this important fact is presented to us in the symbol of God the Father and God the Son: this important fact, that the Christ is added to the Father-God, as a free creation, as a creation which does not follow in due course, but which emerges as a free act alongside the previous creation and which also had the possibility not to be; the Christ is therefore not given to the world because the Father had to give the Son to the world, but the Son is given to the world as a free act, through grace, through freedom, through love, which when it creates, gives freely. For this reason we can never arrive at God the Son, the Christ, through the same kind of truth by which the philosophers arrive at God the Father. In order to arrive at Christ it is necessary to add the truth of faith to the philosophical truth, or—as the age of faith is declining more and more—to add the other truth which is obtained through clairvoyant investigation, which likewise only develops in the human soul as a free act.

Thus from the ordered processes of nature it may be demonstrated that there is a God; but it can never be proved by external means from the chain of causes and effects that there is a Christ. Christ exists and can pass by human souls if they do not feel in themselves the power to say: That is Christ! An active up-rousing of the impulse for truth is required in order to recognise Christ in that which was there as Christ. We can arrive at the other truths which lie in the realm of the Father-God, if we merely devote ourselves to thought and follow it consecutively; for to be a materialist means at the same time to be illogical. Religious philosophy according to Lotze, and religious philosophy in general, has its origin in the fact that through thought we can rise to this Divinity of religious philosophy. But never can we be led to recognise Christ merely through philosophy; this must be our own free act. In this case only two things are possible; we either follow faith to its ultimate conclusions, or we make a beginning with the investigation of the spiritual world, Spiritual Science. We follow faith to its ultimate conclusion when we say with the Russian philosopher Solovioff: ‘With regard to all the philosophical truths man gains about the world, to which his logic forces him, he does not stand related as to a free truth. The higher truth is that to which we are not forced, which is our free act, the highest truth won by faith.’ Solovioff reaches his highest point when he says: ‘The higher truth, that which recognises Christ, is the truth which works as a free act, which is not forced.’ To the spiritual investigator and to those who understand Spiritual Science, knowledge comes; but this is an active knowledge which rises from thought to Meditation, Inspiration and Intuition, which becomes inwardly creative, which, when creative, participates in spiritual worlds and thereby becomes similar to what we have to develop when we enter into the spiritual world, whether we do so through initiation or through death.

The wisdom which we acquire with such difficulty on earth, surrounds us in all its fullness and wealth in the spiritual world—just as nature surrounds us here on the physical plane.

The important thing in the spiritual world is that we should have the impulse, the power, to make something out of this wisdom, to produce from it reality. To create freely through wisdom, to bring about something spiritual as fact, must become a living impulse in us. This impulse can only be ours if we find the right relationship to Christ. Christ is not a Being who can be proved by external brain-bound logic, but who proves Himself, who realises Himself in us as we acquire spiritual knowledge. Just as Spiritual Science joins up with other science as a free act, so knowledge about Christ is added to us as soon as we approach the world into which we enter through spiritual investigation, or through death. If in our present age we seek to enter the spiritual world aright, that is to say, if we wish to die to the physical world, our attitude to the world must be that attitude which is only gained when we relate ourselves to Christ in the right way. Through the observation of nature we can attain to a God who is like ‘God the Father’ of the Christian religion, Him we find through the observation of what is around us when we live in the physical body; but to understand Christ aright, apart from tradition and revelation, from pure knowledge alone, is only possible through Spiritual Science. It leads into the realm which man enters by dying—whether it be that dying which is a symbolical dying, the going forth from the physical body in order to know oneself in the soul outside the body, or the other dying, the passing through the portal of death. We provide ourselves with the right impulses to pass through the portal of death, when we find the true relationship to Christ. The moment when death takes place, whether it comes about through Spiritual Science or whether we actually go through the portal of death, the moment it comes to dying, to leaving the physical body, the important thing in the present cycle of time is that we should confront in the right way the Being Who has come into the world, in order that we may find connection with Him. God the Father we can find during life; we find the Christ when we understand the entering into the Spirit, when we understand dying in the right way.

IN CHRISTO MORIMUR
We die in Christ.

Mankind is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds.

Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being—even if he came from distant planets, Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth,—in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth.

We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings—even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls,—perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul.

What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being—Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.”

Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin.

The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural [necessities] were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body—compared to the World from which I am descended—I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed.

It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.”

Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.”

Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour.¹ To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe.

Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece—“Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades”—bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World.

But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man.

Men had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit before birth. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. The physical environment was now the real thing. The souls of olden time, looking out through the body into their physical environment, had seen in all the stars the pictures of the world of spiritual Being which they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. In the light of the Sun they saw the radiant Wisdom which they had indwelt, which had been their very breath of life. In the Sun itself they beheld the choirs of Divine Hierarchies by whom they had been sent down to Earth. These things mankind had now forgotten, and as the Mystery of Golgotha approached—in the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th centuries B.C.—they felt that it was so. If external History says nothing of these things, that is its failing. He who can follow History with spiritual insight will find it as I have said. He will see at the beginning of human evolution a wonderful consciousness of the Father God; he will see this consciousness gradually weakened and paralysed, till man at length should only see around him a world of Nature, void of spiritual Beings.

Much of these things remained unspoken in the unconscious depths of the soul. Strongest of all, in the unconscious depths, was a question unexpressed in words, but felt the more deeply by the human heart. Around us is the world of Nature, but where is the Spirit whose children we are? In the best of human souls, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., this question lived, unconscious and unformulated. It was a time of questioning, when mankind felt their estrangement from the Father God,—when human souls knew in their very depths: “It must be so indeed: Ex Deo nascimur. But do we know it still? Can we still know it?”

If we look still more deeply into the souls of those who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, the following is what we find:—First there were the more primitive and simple souls who felt, deeply in their subconscious life, their present separation from the Father. They were the descendants of primæval humanity, which was by no means animal-like as modern Science conceives; for within the outer form, however like the animal, primæval man had borne a soul, in the ancient dream-clairvoyance of which he knew full well: “We have come down from the Divine-spiritual world, and have assumed a human body. Into this earthly world the Father God has led us. Out of Him we are born.” But not only so; the souls of primæval humanity knew that they had left behind them, in the spiritual worlds, That which was afterwards called and which we now call the Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian authors said that the most ancient souls of humanity had been true Christians, for they too had looked up to the Christ and worshipped Him. In the spiritual worlds in which they dwelt before their descent to Earth, Christ had been the centre of their vision—the Central Being to whom they had looked with the vision of the soul. It was this communion with Christ in the pre-earthly life which they afterwards remembered when on Earth.

Then there were the regions of which Plato speaks so strangely, where pupils were initiated into the Mysteries—where the vision of super-sensible Worlds was awakened and the forces in the human being were liberated to gaze into the spiritual Worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the pupils of the initiates learned to know the Christ, with whom indeed all human beings lived before their descent to Earth. For by this time Christ was already a half-forgotten notion in the souls of men on Earth. But in the Mysteries the pupils learned to know Him once again in His full stature. Yet at the same time they knew Him as a Being who, if we may put it in these words, had lost His mission in the Worlds beyond the Earth. It was so in the Mysteries of the second and first centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, that as they looked up to the Being in super-sensible worlds who was afterwards called the Christ, they said: We still behold Him in the spiritual worlds, but His activity in those worlds grows ever less and less. For He was the Being who implanted in the souls of men what afterwards sprang forth within them as a memory of the time before their birth. The Christ-Being in the spiritual worlds had been the great Teacher of human souls, for what they would still bear in memory after their descent to Earth. Now that the souls of men on Earth were less and less able to kindle these memories to life, He who was afterwards called Christ appeared to the initiates as One who had lost His activity, His mission.

Thus as the initiates lived on, ever and increasingly there arose in them the consciousness: “This Being whom primæval humanity remembered in their earthly life—whom we can now behold, though with ever lessening activity, in spiritual worlds—He will seek a new sphere of His existence. He will come down to the Earth to re-awaken the super-sensible spirituality in man.” And they began to speak of the Being who was afterwards called Christ, as of Him who would in future time come down to Earth and take on a human body—as indeed He did, when the time was fulfilled, in Jesus of Nazareth. In the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha it was one of the main contents of their speech, to speak of Christ as the Coming One. And in the beautiful picture of the Wise Men of the East—the three Kings or Magi—we see the typical figures of initiates who had learned in their several places of Initiation that Christ would come to Earth when the time should be fulfilled, and the signs in the Heavens would proclaim His coming. Then must they seek Him out at His hidden place. Indeed, there resounds throughout the Gospels what is made manifest as a deeper secret, a deeper Mystery in human evolution, when we approach it once more with spiritual vision.

Meanwhile the simple and primitive among mankind felt as it were forlorn when they looked up to Worlds beyond the realms of sense. Deep in the subconscious they said to themselves, we have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of Nature around them, and there arose in their hearts the question of which I spoke above: “How shall we find the spiritual World again?” But in the Mysteries the initiates knew that the Being who afterwards was called Christ, would come down and would take on a human form. And they knew that what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre-earthly life, they would now experience on Earth by looking up to the Mystery on Golgotha.

Thus, not in an intellectual or theoretic way, but by the greatest fact that ever took place on Earth, answer was given to the question: How shall we come once more to the Supersensible—to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense? The men of that time, who had a certain feeling for what was taking place, learned from those who knew, that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. He had come down to Earth. He was the God whom mankind had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving towards Freedom. He, whom man on Earth had forgotten, appeared again in a new form, so that man could see Him and behold Him, and future History could tell of Him as of an earthly Being. The God who had only been known in yonder spiritual World, had descended and walked in Palestine, and sanctified the Earth inasmuch as He Himself had dwelt in a human body.

For those who were the educated men according to the culture of that age, the question was. How did Christ enter into Jesus, what path did He take? In the earliest times of Christianity the question about Christ was indeed a purely spiritual one. Their problem was not the earthly biography of Jesus. It was the descent of Christ. They looked up into the higher Worlds and saw the descent of Christ to Earth. They asked themselves, How did the super-sensible Being become an earth Being?

And the simple men who surrounded Jesus Christ as His disciples were able to converse with Him as a spiritual Being even after His Death. Nay, what He was able to tell them after His Death is the most important of all. Only a few fragments have been preserved, but spiritual Science can re-discover what Christ said to those who were nearest to Him after His Death, when He appeared to them in His purely spiritual being.

Then it was that He spoke to them as the great Healer—the Therapeut, the Comforter—to whom the great Mystery was known, how human beings had once upon a time remembered Him, because they had been with Him in super-sensible spiritual worlds before their earthly life. Now He could say to His disciples upon Earth: In former times I gave you the faculty to remember your spiritual life, your pre-earthly existence in higher worlds. But now, if you receive Me into your hearts and souls, I give you power to go forward through the Gate of Death, conscious of immortality. And you will no longer merely recognise the Father—Ex Deo Nascimur—you will feel the Son as Him with whom you can die and yet remain alive: In Christo morimur.

Such was the purport—though not of course expressed in the words I am now speaking—such was the meaning of what He taught to those who were near Him after His bodily Death. In primæval ages men had not known Death. Since ever they came to consciousness on Earth, they had an inner knowledge of the soul within them; they were aware of that which cannot die. They saw men die, but to them this Death was a mere semblance among the outer facts around them. They felt it not as Death. Only in later years, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, did men begin to feel the real fact of Death. For by degrees the soul within them had grown so closely united with the body that doubt could arise in their minds: How shall the soul live on when the body falls into decay? In olden times there could have been no such question, for men were aware of the living, independent soul.

But now there came the Christ Himself, and said: I will live with you on the Earth, that ye may have power to kindle your souls to life again, that ye may bear them, once more a living soul, through Death.

This was what St. Paul had not understood at first. But he understood it when the spiritual worlds were opened out before him and he received here upon Earth the living impressions of Christ Jesus. For this reason the Pauline Christianity is less and less valued in our time, for it requires us to recognise the Christ as One who comes from real worlds beyond the Earth, uniting with earthly man His cosmic power.

Thus in the course of human evolution, in the consciousness of man, the “Out of God—out of the Father God—we are born,” was supplemented by the word of life, of comfort and of strength, “In Christ we die”—that is to say, in Him we live.

In order to bring before our souls what came upon humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, I shall best describe the present evolution of mankind, and that which we must hope for the future, from the standpoint of the initiate of modern time. I have already sought to place before you the standpoint of the initiate of olden time, and of the initiate of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will now try to describe that of the initiate of our own time. The initiate is one who does not approach life with external natural Science alone, but in whom those deeper forces of knowledge have been awakened which can be kindled from depths of the human soul by proper methods. Such methods are indicated in the spiritual literature,² and I have referred to them in my other course of lectures in this College.

When the modern initiate enters into the Sciences of our time (which are the glory and triumph of the age, and in the study of which so many people, possessed even of a certain higher consciousness, feel the greatest satisfaction) he finds himself in a tragic situation. For when he unites his soul with that form of Science which is valued above all by the world to-day, the initiate feels it as a slow process of Death. A sphere of existence higher than all earthly things has risen up before his soul. And yet, the more he imbues himself with that which all the world to-day calls Science, the more he feels his soul to die within him. For the modern initiate, the Sciences are indeed the grave of the soul. While he acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern Science, he feels himself bound up, even in life, with Death. Again and again he feels this Death deeply and intensely. Then he may well seek the reason why, whenever he acquires knowledge in the modern sense, he dies. Why is it, he asks himself, that he has a feeling comparable even to the presence of a corpse—the odour of decay—just when he rises to the highest points of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he is truly able to appreciate, though to him it is the premonition of Death.

From his knowledge of spiritual worlds he finds the answer, which I will try to convey to you this evening, my dear friends, in a picture.

Before we come down to Earth, we human beings live in a life of soul and spirit. Now of that life in full reality of soul and spirit, in yonder pre-earthly realms, here upon Earth we retain only our Thoughts—our concepts and ideas. These are in our soul: yet how are they there? Look at the human being as he stands before you in the life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with the living flesh and blood. We say, he is alive. Then he passes through the gate of death. Of the physical man, the corpse remains behind, and this is given over to the Earth—to the elements. We see the dead physical man; we have the dead corpse before us, all that is left of the man who was filled with living blood. Physically he is dead.

Now we look back, with the vision of Initiation, into our own souls. There we behold our thoughts—the thoughts we have in the present life between birth and death—the thoughts of modern Science, modern wisdom. And we recognise; These thoughts are the dead corpse of what we were before we descended to the Earth. As the dead body is to the human being in the fulness of his life, so are our thoughts (the thoughts which we respect above all things in this age, which bring us knowledge of external Nature)—so are our thoughts to what we were in soul and spirit before we came down to Earth.

This is what the modern initiate discovers, and it is a very real experience. He experiences in Thought, not his real life, but the dead corpse of the soul. I am stating a simple fact. It is not uttered out of any sentimental feeling: on the contrary, it comes before the soul in modern time with all intensity, just when the soul's knowledge is active and courageous. It is not what the sentimental mystic says to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his being.

He who passes to-day through the Portals of Initiation discovers in his soul the real nature of the thoughts of man. For the very reason that they are unalive, they can make way for living spiritual Freedom. These thoughts are in truth the only ground on which man's spiritual Freedom grows. Because they are dead—because they are not alive—they have no power to compel. Man can become a free Being in our time because he has to do, not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. He can take hold of the dead thoughts and use them towards Freedom. And yet, it is with all the tragedy of Worlds that we experience these thoughts as the dead corpse of the soul—of the soul that was, before it came down to Earth. For in the pre-earthly life all this, which is a corpse in man to-day, was alive and filled with movement. In spiritual Worlds it lived and moved among other human souls—those who had passed through the gate of death and were now dwelling in those Worlds, and those who had not yet descended to the Earth. It lived and moved among the Beings of the Divine Hierarchies above humanity, and in the sphere of the elemental beings that underlie all Nature. There, everything in the soul was alive, while here, the soul possesses Thought as its heritage from spiritual worlds, and Thought is dead.

Yet if as initiates of modern time we fill ourselves with Christ, who made manifest His life in the Mystery of Golgotha; if we take hold in its deepest, inmost sense, of the word of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me,—then will Christ lead us even through this Death. We penetrate into Nature with our thoughts, yet as we do so Christ goes with us in the Spirit. He sinks our thoughts into the grave of Nature. For Nature does indeed become a grave, inasmuch as our thoughts are dead. Yet if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ Himself, we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, the clouds, mountains and streams, then we experience in modern Initiation the resurrection of dead Thought as living Thought out of all Nature. With the dead Thought, we dive down into the crystal quartz, letting Christ be our companion, according to the word: Not I, but Christ in me. Then the dead Thought arises again as living Thought out of the crystal quartz, out of all Nature. As from the tomb of the mineral world, Thought is lifted up again as living Thought. Out of the mineral world the Spirit is resurrected. And as Christ leads us through the plant-world of Nature, here too, where otherwise only our dead thoughts would dwell, the living thoughts arise.

Truly we should feel that we are sick and ill as we go out into Nature, or gaze into the Universe of stars with the restricted calculating vision of the astronomer, thus sinking our dead thoughts into the world. We should feel that we are sick, and indeed it would be a sickness unto Death. But if we let Christ be our companion, if accompanied by Him we carry our dead thoughts into the world of the Sun, the Moon, the clouds, mountains and rivers, the minerals, plants and animals and the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of Nature it all becomes alive, and there arises from all creation, as from a tomb, the living, healing Spirit who awakens us from Death: the Holy Spirit. Accompanied by Christ, in all that we have hitherto experienced as Death we feel ourselves called to Life again. We feel the living and healing Spirit speaking to us out of all the creatures of this world.

These things must be regained in spiritual knowledge, in the new Science of Initiation. Then only shall we take hold of the Mystery of Golgotha as the true meaning of all Earth-existence. Then shall we know that in this age, when through the dead thoughts human freedom must be evolved, we need the Christ to lead us into a true Knowledge of Nature. For He not only placed His own destiny upon the Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, but gave to the Earth the mighty liberation of Pentecost, in that He promised to mankind on Earth the living Spirit, which can arise through His help from all things on the Earth. Our Science remains dead—nay, our Science itself is Sin—until we are so awakened by the Christ that from all Nature, from all existence in the Cosmos, the living Spirit speaks to us again.

It is no formula devised by human cleverness: the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the Cosmos, and it becomes for us a living, not a dead, dogmatic knowledge, when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ who as the Risen One is the Giver of the Holy Spirit.

Then do we understand how it is like an illness if man cannot see the Divine out of which he is born. Man must be secretly diseased to be an atheist, for, if he is healthy, his whole physical being will find as it were its summation in the spontaneous inner feeling which exclaims: Out of God I am born. And it is tragic destiny if in this earthly life he does not find the Christ who can lead him through the Death that stands at the end of life's way, and through the Death in Knowledge. But if we thus feel the In Christo morimur, then too we feel what is seeking to come near us through His guidance; we feel how the living Spirit arises again out of all things, even within this earthly life. We feel ourselves alive again even within this life on Earth, and we look through the gate of Death through which the Christ will lead us into yonder Life that lies beyond. We know now why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit, for if we let Christ be our guide we can unite ourselves to the Holy Spirit already in this life on Earth.

If we let Christ become our leader, we may surely say: We die in Christ, when we pass through the gate of Death. Our experience here on Earth, with our Science of the world of Nature, is indeed prophetic of the future. By the living Spirit, what would otherwise be a dead Science is resurrected. Thus we may also say, when the Death in Knowledge is replaced by that real Death which takes away our body:—Having understood the “Out of the Father we are born,” “In Christ we die,” we may say as we look forward through the gate of Death: “In the Holy Spirit we shall be reawakened.” Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

• 1. German Heiland, Anglo-Saxon Hælend, meaning Christ the Saviour
• 2. See especially “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment” (“The Way of Initiation”) by Rudolf Steiner.