The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Do you know how the soul came into the world?
2. Do you know how the soul leaves the world?
3. Do you know the difference between the path of the fathers and the path of the gods?
4. Do you know why that world is not full?
5. Do you know why, at the fifth revelation, the waters begin to speak with the voice of man?

The three lower principles of man are held together and enclosed by the etheric sheath in the same way as the three upper principles are held together and enclosed by the auric sheath. It is the etheric body that prevents the physical cells from falling apart.

Prana is only a part of Shiva, enclosed and thereby separated, existing in its own right. Kama and Kama-Manas lie in the template of the etheric body, which, on the way back to an incarnation, is formed by the soul by drawing from the general Rupa-Manas and Kama-Stoff precisely those components that made up its Kama and Rupa body before its Arupa stay. Every soul has an arupa stay, because only through this it is soul, that is, a causal body, that the foundation for unselfish mental life is laid. Even the savage has the germ for this, and however small this germ is, it provides him with the passage through the arupa sphere, through Devachan. Our thoughts, building themselves into mental matter, usually still have undefined, imprecise forms because they have so many shells to break through, to push against.

We only take their essence, their germ, with us into the Arupa sphere, where they swell up and only then live their own life. Before each new incarnation, the human being must pass through the state of semen, that is, through the Arupa sphere of Devachan. On the way back, the seed must, through the magnetic power of its own previous formations, that is, actions, feelings and thoughts, clothe itself again with the substance of which they were composed. In the astral sphere, the thought image, which has become precise, finds the forms and templates that have been created by itself and assigned to it by Lipika, the Lord of Karma, according to eternal laws. The Maharajas supply the etheric substance to these templates, as it were, and they carry it from all four winds. This is how the lower personal covering, the etheric double body, is created, which then sinks into the physical body.

We understand the world of our desires as the 'fathers' path', which still chains us to enjoyment; only when we have become accustomed to regarding the three lower realms merely as a hall of learning and no longer demand anything from them, are we ready for the 'gods' path', which opens up life in the spirit.

Devajani, Pitrijani. As long as we still strive for selfish happiness, that world, Devajani, cannot be full. Only when we renounce the fruits of our deeds are we not bound to the world of the fathers, the world of Kama. The deed alone does not bind us.

The first sacrifice: the division of unity into trinity. The second and third: the outpourings of the third Logos; the fourth: the ensoulment by the second Logos; the fifth: the material world is spiritually fertilized by the first Logos, man arises, the Word becomes flesh.

Dear guests!

Last time I concluded with a reference to the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Today I would like to follow on from this remark that the Gospel of Matthew begins by tracing the birth of Christ back to a forty-two-member family tree. In fact, this beginning of Matthew's Gospel shows us how the nature of Jesus Christ was understood by those from whom Matthew actually took his view of this nature. The forty-two ancestral line can only be understood if we manage to understand that we are dealing with the Egyptian view of the 42 judges of the dead, before whom the one who wants to ascend to divinity, i.e. who wants to become "Osiris", has to appear. This is also a factor in the Essaean doctrine. [The Essaeans] know this series, which must be gone through. According to the Essaeans, every person who is on the path to becoming God is about to pass through these 42 stages. They symbolize the 42 points of passage. When he has then reached the forty-third stage, he is already in the higher spheres, where becoming God already begins, or - if I express myself in Egyptian terms - where he becomes "Osiris". The fact that there are still divisions there, too, is of little interest to us for the time being.

The main point is that man now appears on a level in which he is "Osiris, divine being. I have said that these are views that Matthew has simply adopted. This can be seen from the fact that Matthew speaks of 3 times 14 ancestors = 42 ancestors. However, since he only really lists thirteen in the end, we can assume that he is well aware that the number 42 plays a major role, but that he has unconsciously omitted the last step. We therefore have to look less at how the matter is expressed in detail.

We are therefore dealing with the view in Matthew that man has 42 stations on his path to ancestors and that when he has passed through [these stages], he enters divinity

ness. These stations, these ancestors, can be spread over many lives. But only the one who has passed through forty-two stages can enter the world as Buddha" or "Christ. It is quite the same. Buddha also had to go through the same series of ancestors. With Buddha we also have 6 times 7 = 42 stages or embodiments. It is therefore the case that we not only have a deep similarity between Jesus and Buddha, but that we also have before us in the transcendent Jesus nature the same thing that is in the Buddha nature. We are dealing with a person at a higher stage of development who has gone through all the stages that one has gone through when one has survived life with all its trials and when one has entered the stage where one can be the judge of the dead. He will return again after he has come down to judge the living and the dead, he will enter the realm of the judges of the dead, he, Jesus, who has passed through the forty-two-link chain of the judges of the dead. It is just as it says in the Buddhist legend, where the Buddha passed through forty-two stages. He then entered the stage where he himself became God; the man who has become God is now no longer dependent on passing through the eternal necessity of the limbs. He appears on a divine counsel. Hence we are told with Jesus and Buddha that they are sent by divine decree and [...] by the will of the Father. The individual links in the chain of ancestors proceeded according to a world order.

So with the Essaeans we are dealing with a Christ, with the Buddhists with a Buddha, with an entity which, after having undergone all the trials that have to be passed through, appears within mankind as a man who has become God. This tells us nothing other than the Egyptians' and the Buddhists' way of looking at things. We are therefore dealing here with a real Buddha and a real Christ.

This can only be understood from this point of view. You will [otherwise] never understand how Matthew came to juxtapose the chain of ancestors and [the supernatural descent] of Jesus. He says in chapter 1, verse 17: "All the links from Abraham to David are fourteen links. From David to the Babylonian captivity are fourteen members. From the Babylonian captivity to Christ there are fourteen members." [Up to verse 17] you have given the natural genealogy of Jesus and immediately afterwards you have told how Joseph is told by the angel that there is a supernatural birth and that it is about Jesus coming into the world through the Holy Spirit. This is a complete contradiction in terms. However, it is a doctrine that must stand as such, a doctrine that we find everywhere where it is a question of indicating the reincarnation of a personality that has already reached the "Osiris stage". Such a personality experiences a double birth.

It is extremely difficult to talk about this. For Theosophy and for a real Theosophist, this is incredibly elementary. For those who have already penetrated a little deeper into the Theosophical teachings, it seems understandable when they say that they have reached the forty-second stage. For others, however, it is quite incomprehensible. Perhaps I can make myself understood by suggesting a path that almost every modern, thinking person will have to take if he wants to move from the most modern views into Theosophy. This path throws a weighty light on all these things. We must indeed say that for the Occident, at least for our European education, there is no more plausible way of arriving at those things which we find expressed here in such a difficult-to-understand way than from natural science. This is also the same path that leads to what underlies what Matthew drew from. I am convinced that - more than all Western religions are capable of - this path will lead to the goal if the teachings of natural science are to flow into Theosophy.

I would like to shed some light on the path that natural science will take in order to reach the point where Theosophy stands when it draws on ancient wisdom teachings. We must not take a completely pessimistic view of our Western development of spiritual life, even if we see how disregarded some people are of religious beliefs. This is because they have no idea of what is esoterically written in these scriptures. When we also see how amateurish the latest phenomena are.

It was only a year ago that a detailed discussion of Messiah Consciousness was published by Wrede, not August Wrede. Before that, one could be pessimistic. But science can no longer do anything other than end up where Theosophy seeks to take Western humanity. This is not too difficult to say. But in order to fully feel the thought, to penetrate it completely, to understand its full implications, where it shines into the whole of spiritual life, where it no longer lets us go once we have grasped it, [for this it is necessary to have suffered from the scientific ideas and to have carried them around with us as a confessor; for this it is necessary for those who go through the natural science of our days with their minds, the realization, the metamorphosis of that process, without getting completely caught up in this materialism. ]

Anyone who has confronted materialism and - like Goethe - has seen it with spiritual eyes, and who is able to see and understand these mysteries in their full scope, will not be able to harbor pessimistic views, even if he looks at the natural sciences of the last decade in particular.

I have personally had the best experiences with the natural sciences. In 1889, I wrote an essay in which I stated that, according to our scientific findings, the concepts of substance, matter and force are not even scientifically clear in the sober, mindless conception of force and substance found in Büchner and Strauss. Anyone who penetrates the facts of nature scientifically comes to the conclusion, directly as an experience, that natural science provides us with the proof that there is no substance, but that everything we call substance is nothing other than another form of spirit. Substance is only an apparent form of spirit that is expressed in a certain way. The world is spirit. That will have to become our confession.

The person who knows how to look at natural science with the eyes of the spirit comes to this realization. At that time I stated that what natural scientists have imagined as matter does not exist, that matter is nothing other than the lowest manifestation, the lowest form of spirit, and that natural science itself will come to this realization. Soon afterwards, in the richly fragmented literature of natural science, a natural scientist emerged with a work in which he expressed exactly the same thing in almost the same words as I did.

Whoever realizes that [natural] science can only be a factor in spiritual life, only a part of spiritual life, must be pleased when a chemist comes along who explains that what has been regarded as a substance cannot be justified scientifically as long as the substance is regarded as the carrier of natural science.

Unfortunately, Ernst Haeckel could not bring himself to accept what sprouted from our natural science. There is no doubt that we are no longer dealing with the old theory of matter. Only [today] the chemist - and also the physicist - will say that he is dealing with energies, because he is only dealing with expressions of force. The other, however, sees spirit in it. Natural science will go its own way in order to finally rise to the view that even that which underlies an apparently material process is nothing other than that which underlies the Indian wisdom teachings, that it is nothing other than that which materializes the Logos. Pessimism no longer clings to us today.

Natural science has incorporated a great good into us, namely the idea of development. Science has rediscovered this idea for itself in the field of biology. It has treated a special chapter in the way in which the theosophists of all times have regarded spiritual beings. They have looked at living beings from the point of view of development. And what does this development consist of? You need only put together the views of an eighteenth-century naturalist and those of a nineteenth-century naturalist. Linn& says that there are as many plant and animal species on earth as were originally created by so many acts of creation. The natural sciences of the nineteenth century allowed the juxtaposed forms to emerge one after the other, one after the other. What came into being later arose from what came before. In this way, natural science has eliminated the miracle from the world. In the past, there were only juxtaposed miracles. Theosophy has always stood on [the standpoint of development]. It transformed everything side by side into a succession. When a higher living being leads back to an earlier product of life, he who looks at it from a spiritual point of view sees stages of development.

The human being who has reached a higher stage, who has attained a higher degree of perfection, has not done so through a genius fallen from heaven. Genius, of which those who do not know what it is speak the most, is nothing other than the miracle transferred to natural science. Natural science has long since set aside this concept, which is still in use today - especially among the so-called aesthetes - in its own field, and has long since consigned it to the dustbin. Theosophy has never regarded genius as a miracle, but as a higher stage of development [of the personality]. It has seen in it nothing other than a personality that has gone through exactly the same thing as any other individuality, only it has gone through what another individuality goes through in this period in an earlier stage of development. What is experience for me today, what is stored up in me today, appears to me [later] as something self-evident, as a mature product, seemingly like a miracle. But it is only what I have acquired. I had to practise for a long time before I acquired, let's say, a movement that I then perform unconsciously. I also had to learn for years to grasp mathematics. But once I have the concept, it soon becomes a habit.

This is theosophy. Transfer that to the big world whole, to the big world events. What you have absorbed as experience appears as that which reappears on a higher level. In this way we can explain the most varied experiences of life and natural science through spiritual insight and deepening and make them fruitful for Theosophy. By contrasting two personalities, you will see that there is a spiritual explanation for a large number of things and phenomena in ordinary life, and that basically we are not dealing with anything other than attention and spiritual comprehension. You can thus see the beginnings of theosophy in scientific books.

[Perhaps take an elementary book of natural science, such as Topinard's "Anthropology", which explains how the individual organisms have developed. It tells us how the lowest levels of organization developed first, then we come to animals, apes and humans. Topinard repeats how Ernst Haeckel wrote about these things and says that Haeckel forgot something; he forgot to enumerate "the twenty-third degree in which Lamarck and Newton shine". You can continue to write this anthropology for the spirit, you can transfer what the natural scientist undertakes to the spiritual. There are countless degrees in the spiritual life. When you consider this, you realize what it is all about.

Goethe and Schiller are the two personalities I am referring to. They attended a meeting of natural scientists in Jena. Batsch had given a lecture, but it did little to satisfy Schiller and Goethe. Basically, Schiller and Goethe lacked the intellectual bond, the big picture. Schiller sensed this. And when he left the meeting with Goethe, he said: "It is dreary to see plant after plant lined up next to each other without an overview of the whole. There must be something common in all plants." Goethe answered him by talking about the original plant, of which all the others are only special forms. Then he said, "But that can be made clear in another way," took his pencil and drew the original plant with a few strokes, noting that it does not exist, but that this original plant can be recognized in every plant. Yes, said Schiller: "But that's not experience, it's an idea." But you can only achieve this if you go through all the plants and examine what they have in common. Then you get the general idea. "If that is an idea," Goethe replied, "then I see my ideas with my eyes." In fact, Goethe did not need to know all the plants. He only needed to see the essence of the individual plants. He saw the spirit, the truth of the plant. Schiller is quite right from his point of view when he says that [this was an] idea. And Goethe is also right when he says that he sees this idea, sees the whole thing at a glance. He is on a higher level. That is also what Schiller recognized without envy. This can be seen from Schiller's letters, where he described Goethe's nature in a magnificent way. We can see from this that such a spirit also had to go through this work. You can study this throughout Goethe's life. His whole conception was to see the spirit in nature. A seven-year-old boy does not otherwise do what Goethe did at that age. The embodiment of Goethe is a further, higher stage of development that Schiller still had to go through in Goethe's life. The seven-year-old Goethe took the stones from [his father's] mineral collection and used them to build himself an altar on the music stand, took a small incense burner and lit it through a burning glass by the light of the sun because he wanted to offer his service in this way.

Why does Goethe see the idea of the primordial plant and Schiller does not? Either we do not see the spiritual in the same way or we absolutely must extend our view of nature to the spiritual. Then we arrive at that spiritual development which is a content of all times.

I need not tell those who are familiar with theosophical literature that theosophical authors would present us with miracles in exactly the same way as the natural science of the eighteenth century, which presented the individual plants and animals and their genera as miracles. But through the ability to judge the spiritual as well as the physical, the views of the advanced natural science of the nineteenth century have passed over to the theosophical point of view. It is a question here of being able to judge the spiritual in the same way as the physical.

It is undoubted that with consistent thinking and when the natural sciences are supplemented by younger forces, a spiritual science will emerge from the natural sciences, as has already happened in the field of chemistry. Whoever thinks scientifically and has the inner courage to extend this scientific way of thinking to the spiritual world and to observe it after awakening the spiritual sense organs, must be led from natural science to Theosophy and its views.

Let us now turn again to Matthew's views on the personality, the essence of Jesus. We are dealing here with the view that sees Jesus as a personality who emerged after attaining the greatest possible number of re-embodiments. It is a personality that has reached the highest level of developmental possibility, which brings into the world as a finished disposition everything that other personalities are only on the way to achieving. Out of it is born that which others must first struggle for. That which appears as the spiritual when the transition from the forty-second to the forty-third stage takes place is the beginning and the transition of the human into the divine. Just as the purely physical and chemical in the organism has a higher nature and perception, so the physical on the level of divinity also has a higher nature and perception. The physical body, the physical organization is no longer what it was or what it is. It disappears in relation to the spiritual process. In fact, it has a metaphysical, transcendental past within itself. Just as it is born of the flesh, it is born of the divine. We must be clear about the fact that a new higher level of development of materiality has been reached and that the material itself has spiritualized to a higher level, so that we are not dealing with a birth out of the physical, but with a taking up of the physical birth by higher divine powers. We are therefore dealing with a direct emergence from primordial matter, which only becomes worldly at the moment of birth. There this primordial matter, which was not yet embodied, which was still decided in the pure spiritual, first passes over into the material. So in the forty-third degree, on the forty-third stage, we are dealing with the birth of primordial matter that has not yet entered into union with physical matter. This is what the ancient teachings refer to. The Egyptians say of the birth of Horus that the eye of Osiris shone above Isis, that a purely spiritual birth took place. In the birth of Horus you have the birth of the god out of still virgin matter.

If we go back to the Egyptian myth, we are dealing with three eternal great symbols for what we call the father, the mother and the child. This juxtaposition of Osiris, Isis and Horus is the original symbol. The child has remained on the Christian cross. The material on the one side has become merely evil, the father principle on the other side merely good. On Golgotha we see this symbolized in the three crosses. On the left we have evil, on the right good and in the middle the child. This symbol has been transformed, has become something else.

Now I come to a very important point. The striking thing that confronts us is the following: We can still trace the origin of the Christian symbol from the Egyptian symbol in the Christian myth of the earliest times. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in all the other contemporary literature - apart from the Gospels themselves - although this myth is discussed in the most diverse ways, including by Jewish mystics, we do not find one thing that we actually only find in Matthew and Luke, namely the Holy Spirit. This is something that is actually not present. This is in addition. This Holy Spirit is nothing other than the transformed Isis. As a result, the virgin birth, which is still conveyed in the Osiris myth, was actually replaced by the real, natural birth. God the Father brought about this virgin birth through his magical influence, so that this birth is mediated on the one hand by the Father and on the other by the Holy Spirit, who is now the representative of the Father.

We encounter this Holy Spirit in the first period of Christianity [...], where the Christian view [of the virgin birth] emerges. We can therefore say that because the Holy Spirit first appears in Christianity, we see in it a division of the originally feminine principle of the world symbol. We have a spirit that gives the child its origin. [The origin from the divine tree arose within the Essaean community, where one actually stood on the standpoint of asceticism, where one already saw something evil in the sexual in itself. There it was impossible to receive the feminine in the same way as in ancient Egyptianism, as was the case with the Osiris service of the Egyptians, where the overshadowing of Osiris by Isis is transformed into the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit]. This is a temporary means by which the ancient Egyptian teaching was transformed into the Christian one. We have thus seen that we are actually dealing with the same way of looking at things. The Christian view sees in the Christ-personality a deified human being in exactly the same way as the Mystery Cult has always seen these [deified] human beings.

What doctrines may have underpinned this whole view? Anyone who really knows how to read the Gospels sees nothing in the Gospels other than, I would say, a more detailed account of the ritual, which was intended to initiate the Mystics into the Mysteries. And if we visualize what the initiation is about, if we want to be clear about what such a Myst wanted to achieve, should achieve, why he, the Myst to be initiated, the Myst was placed on a cross, why he was placed in a death-like state, we must say to ourselves, remember, that it is about the awakening of a higher life force, that it is about bringing him to resurrection on the third day. And if we ask ourselves how the initiation was accomplished for the mystics, we must say to ourselves that the mystical view was clear about the fact that the individual human being has to go through the whole process of creation in his own body. This was presented as a return to the Godhead, as a continual deification of the world.

Matter is what the spirit pours itself into in order to return to divinity via a detour through matter, in order to be as a soul what it originally was as a spirit. That is where we get the path. The Myste should bring matter within himself to the point of dying so that matter is no longer the ruling force in him. His soul should be reborn so that his material body also reaches a higher level. They were to be spiritualized at higher levels. It was not a higher scientific education that the myst was striving for, but for the myst to spiritualize matter, to bring matter one step further in its development. Everything that the myst had to go through had as its goal the [resurrection] with a spiritual body, with a reborn body.

The Myste had to go through this path of [returning] the soul to the Godhead. It was also made clear to him that he was not going through what he was going through for himself, but as part of the great universe, which was going through a degree of development in him. We know that the whole process at the initiation is described to us in such a way that when the sun awakens the Mystic on the third day, the thunder rolls, just as it did at the resurrection of Jesus. These events are told to us as components of the mystical process.

The mystic should be made aware that his own process has its foundation in the cosmic world process, that God has carried out the world process with the help of the Creator Word, the Logos, that this God is himself, and that the world process is carried out in reality in the mystic, that the process which man has to go through is like the world process. The world process is synonymous with the description of the path that the mystical individuality has to go through. This was an important part - not only with the Egyptians - of what was demonstrated to the mystics and then became flesh and blood.

Take together what is communicated individually, but which we must keep together. Take the whole parallelism between the Gospels and the Old Testament [and the Egyptian tradition], then if you follow the matter in this way, you will indeed be able to see that indeed the most devout confessors of Christianity in the later centuries had traces of the human process being the great cosmological world process. In some passages of St. Augustine's "Confessions" you can find such traces and hints. They may not be entirely clear, but he shows that in the individual events such as the birth, transfiguration, ascension of Christ and so on, he is dealing with nothing other than a repetition of the cosmic process. Thus he says at one point: "God also created the Christ of our earth. Our earth was desolate and empty. Ignorance weighed upon us. We left our darkness and turned to you. We were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord." - He describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ with the words of Genesis. So here there was still an awareness of what was in the Mysteries themselves. In the Mysteries there was no difference between the process that the Myste had to undergo and the cosmic process. Therefore, every ritual was written in the same way as the description of the creation of the world. If we could compare within the Egyptian teaching the description of the path of the Egyptian mystics, we would see that it is one and the same as the cosmic development process. It is translated into the microcosmic what has taken place in the macrocosmic.

I would like to point out that such traces are not only to be found in Augustine. We also find them in other church scholars [for example in Eusebius] when they describe the life of Jesus. However, we have to go back to the fourth century, where the descriptions were even more fluid; we even have to go back to the third and second centuries. When we read or hear descriptions of the whole course of life, when we hear stories of the resurrection and ascension, then for those who are able to judge these things, it sounds like the translation of the Mystery initiation process.

After all, the Gospels, which later became authoritative and in which the view was crystallized and fixed, can no longer be interpreted. Eusebius was still Myste. So I think that if we look at the Gospels, we can still see from the style that something has remained of these old institutions of correspondence between the cosmological process and the initiation or initiation process:

Take the Gospel of John. What is it but a betrayal of the mystical - in style and layout nothing but individualized cosmogony? "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God" and so on. This beginning of the Gospel of John starts in exactly the same way as Genesis. We are dealing with a Genesis. These phenomena show us directly the clear traces of the fact that we are actually dealing with initiatory writings in the Gospels, which did not exist in the first centuries of the Christian era. Only [oral] tradition existed at that time. We essentially owe the Gospels to the second century.

If we hold all this together, we will see even in the Gospels how this trace is still present of the correspondence between cosmogonic and individual development. Such a thing as is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew cannot be understood at all if it is not interpreted theosophically, if the same thing is not seen in it that the Buddhists have gone through in forty-two stages. We are absorbed by God and born out of him again.

He who has developed this way of looking at things within Essaeanism, who has stepped out of the first teachings before he stepped out, must have been deeply imbued with this fact, must have had clearly before his eyes through a higher revelation what every other man must first laboriously gather together. It must have dawned on him in a single great glance.

Now we have in the Gospels - and this is the question I still have to raise - the indication that we are dealing with a personality who, in a single glance, encompassed everything that can be described as teachings of the past, as the result of past experiences. In a single vision we have the content of the Gospel, and now we must ask: Is it a real renewal in this period of time of this world mystery that is otherwise present in the symbol, this world mystery that is present to us in Father, Mother and Child? Is there such a view? I believe that it is the whole personality, the real personality, which underlies this, which radiates out as if renewing the past. This seems to me to be the apparition on the holy mountain, the apparition that Jesus had when he had only his most intimate disciples with him - Peter, James and John, his brother - and the apparition of Moses and Elijah.

If we visualize this apparition, if we understand it in this way and interpret it, then it becomes clear to us what we are dealing with here. Only from this apparition can we come to a full understanding of what this personality was through whom Christianity came into the world.

We can now understand what was going on, and once we have understood that, then we come to a mystical understanding of Christianity. This is the most important moment of this vision, where the founder of Christianity is not actually something isolated, but something in which the deepest mystery of existence was resolved, in which the deepest experience of man is concentrated.

It is impossible, since the time is too far advanced, to show what is radiated in the teachings and in the life of Jesus. When we understand this phenomenon, the necessary light will spread within us.

Today, my task will be to contribute further to the fundamental theme in our quest to understand the problems of our time. It is justifiably required that man should be awake, and pay due heed to the many spiritual influences that affect and transform him over comparatively short periods of time, and also that he acquaint himself with what must be done to further the particular spiritual and cultural impulses at work in our time.

I have tried from various viewpoints to draw your attention to the greater post-Atlantean period, by describing wider aspects as well as details from it, because only our understanding of that period makes our own comprehensible. To allow the whole of mankind's post-Atlantean evolution to work upon us awakens understanding for our own time.

I want today to speak about that same period by bringing before you some different characteristic aspects. However, in order to understand what I want to describe I must ask you to bear in mind what has been said about humanity as such becoming ever younger and younger. I described how, immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe, mankind's age was 56 and that by now it has dropped to 27. This means that modern man develops naturally up to that age. After the age of 27 he develops further only if he cultivates impulses received directly from the spirit out of his own inner initiative. So let us turn our attention to how the 27 year old human being of today came to be as he is.

Let us look back once more to the time immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe. I have pointed out how very different, compared with today, man's social feelings and in fact his whole social structure then were. I would like to draw special attention to the unique soul constitution of the first post-Atlantean people, particularly of those in the southern part of Asia, and also remind you of certain facts, already known to you from my writings, about that ancient Indian culture. There was at that time a complete absence of what modern man can hardly imagine a social structure without, namely the concepts of laws and rights. You will be aware of the immense importance attached to these and related concepts today. Things of this nature were never mentioned; they were unknown in the first postAtlantean epoch. It would have been impossible at that time to imagine what might be meant by laws and rights, whereas we cannot visualize society without them. When guidance was needed concerning what ought to be done or left undone, or about arrangements to be made either in public or private life, one turned to the patriarchs, i.e., to those who had reached their fifties.

It was assumed, because it was self-evident, that those who had reached their fifties were able to recognize what ought to be done. They had this ability because people remained capable of development in the natural sense like children right into their fifties, by which time they had also attained in the same natural way a certain worldly maturity. No one disputed the fact that people of that age were wise and knew how life should be arranged and human affairs conducted. It would never have occurred to anybody to doubt that people who had developed normally into their fifties would know the right answers to life's problems. When a human being today, in the course of his natural development, reaches puberty, a change takes place in his inner being. In that ancient time inner revelations came to people in their mature years, simply because natural development continued until late in life, the consequence of which were the capabilities I have indicated. Thus, when advice was needed, one consulted the natural lawgivers, the elders, the wise ones.

Why exactly did they have this extraordinary wisdom? The reason they were so wise was that they experienced themselves at one with the spirit, more particularly with the spirits that live in light. Today we sense the warmth in our environment; we are aware of the air as we breathe it in and out; we sense a force in water as it evaporates to come down again as rain, but we experience this only physically, through our senses. The people of the first post-Atlantean epoch did not experience things that way. When they were in their fifties, they felt the spirit in warmth, in currents of air, in circulating water. They did not just experience the wind blowing but the spirits of wind; not just warmth but the spirit of warmth; when they looked at water, they saw also the water spirits. This caused them, when they had reached a certain age, to listen to the revelations of these elemental spirits, though only in certain states of wakefulness. What the elemental spirits revealed to them formed the basis for the wisdom they were able to impart to others. When people who had reached that age had gone through normal development, they were geniuses; in fact, they were much more than what we understand by genius.

Today a child's soul development reveals itself gradually up to a certain age while the body's development takes place. In those days something similar happened in old age when wisdom arose from the bodily nature itself. It came about because many not only developed naturally during the body's thriving growth, but continued to do so during its decline when it became sclerotic and mineralized. The body's forces of decline, its calcification, caused the soul and spirit to develop, and this was bound up with another aspect of evolution. If you imagine vividly what I shall now describe, you will find it easy to understand. People who had reached the age when the body began to decline, clearly perceived the beings of the elements. At night the normal senses enabled man to perceive not only the stars but also imaginations. He saw the spiritual aspect of the starry sky. I have often drawn attention to old star maps with their curious figures. These figures are not as modern science would have it—creations of fantasy—but originate from direct perception.

Thus the ancients, the wise ones, were able to give counsel and regulate the social structure through what they directly perceived. They had an intimate relationship with that part of the earth they inhabited because they perceived its spiritual content. They perceived spirituality in the water that issued from it, in the air surrounding it, in the climatic conditions of warmth and so on. But these interrelationships differed from place to place. In Greece they were different from those in India and different again from those in Persia and so on. As a consequence the wise ones, the sages, had perceptions that were related to the particular section of the earth which they occupied. The ancient Indian culture developed the way it did through the relationships prevailing in that part of the earth. Likewise there arose in Greece a culture specifically related to the elements in that part. These differences were experienced quite concretely.

Today something similar is experienced only in regard to the human being. We would regard it as grotesque were it suggested that the ear could be situated where the nose is or vice versa. The whole organism is so formed that the nose could only be where it is and likewise the ear. However, the earth itself is an organism, but for that there is no longer any feeling or understanding. When a culture develops, it must of necessity have a certain physiognomy through the influence of the earth's elemental beings. What developed in ancient Greece could not have been transferred to ancient India or vice versa. What is so significant about ancient times is that cultures developed which reflected the earth's spiritual physiognomy. Nothing of this is known to man today because, when he reaches the age when he could know, his natural ability to develop ceases. People do not pause to wonder why it is that, when the white man immigrated to North America, the appearance of those who settled in the eastern part became different from that of those who settled in California. The expression in the eyes of the settlers in the east changed completely, and their hands became larger than they would have been in Europe; even the color of their skin changed. This applies only to the eastern part of America. The development of a civilization and its relationship to its part of the earth's organism is no longer taken into account. Man no longer knows what kind of spiritual entities, what kind of spiritual beings live in the elements of the earth. Man has become abstract; he no longer experiences things as they truly are.

What I have described applies to the first post-Atlantean epoch. Things changed in the following epoch, in the course of which mankind's age dropped to between 48 and 42. During this second post-Atlantean epoch the natural ability of the human being to develop lasted only into his forties. Therefore he did not attain the kind of wisdom he had attained in the first epoch. His soul-spirit being remained dependent on the bodily nature only in his forties. The ability to sense his relationship with the elements became weaker. However, the ability was still there, only weakened. People now became aware that when they were outside the body during sleep, they were in the spiritual world. They became aware of this once they had reached, their forties. They also became aware that when they awoke and plunged into the body once more, the spiritual world became dark. The teaching about Ormuzd and Ahriman, about Light and Darkness, originated from this experience. Man was aware that he was in the spiritual world during sleep, and he experienced the descent into the body as a descent into darkness. There was no longer the close dependence on the piece of land one inhabited; instead, there was an experience of participating in night and day. The constellations of stars were still seen pictorially through the faculty of imagination. This atavistic ability had remained from the time of Atlantis and enabled man to know that he had a living soul and that during sleep he was in a spiritual world which he could experience through imagination.

In the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, the ability to experience oneself so completely at one with the whole cosmos receded still further. In Persia it had been taught by Zarathustra, but had in general been known through tradition. During the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural epoch, in the course of normal evolution, man's sense perception became stronger while the old spiritual perception became weaker. As a consequence the main form of worship in the third epoch was a star cult. Earlier, in Persia there had been no star cults; the spiritual world had been experienced directly through imagination and music of the spheres. In the third epoch things were more interpreted rather than seen directly; the pictorial aspect became fainter. A proper star cult developed because the stars were clearly seen.

Then came the fourth epoch when the surrounding spiritual world had faded from man's consciousness. Only the physical aspect of the stars was perceived; the world was seen more or less as we see it. I have already described how man experienced the world in ancient Greece. That the soul lives in the body and expresses itself through the body—of this the Greeks were aware, but they no longer felt to the same extent that the cosmos was the soul's true home. I have often referred to Aristotle who, because he was not initiated, could not perceive the spiritual aspect of the stars; instead he founded a philosophy of the world of stars. He interpreted what he saw physically. His interpretation was based on his awareness that man's soul resides in the body between birth and death. He was also aware in a philosophical sense, that the soul has its home in that outermost sphere in which, for Aristotle, the highest God held sway, while lesser Gods held sway in the nearer spheres. He also evolved a philosophy of the elements, of earth, water, air, and fire or warmth; it was, however, philosophy, not experience. No philosophy of the elements had existed before when they were still directly perceived and experienced. By the fourth epoch it had all changed; mankind had been truly driven from the spiritual world. The time had come when something had to intervene: the Mystery of Golgotha.

In these lectures I have pointed to the deep significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. I explained that by the time it took place mankind's age had dropped to 33; man's natural development proceeded only up to that age, and Christ, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, experienced just that age. A truly wondrous coincidence! As I have described, immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe man remained capable of natural development right up to the age of 56, then 55, later 54 and so on. At the beginning of the second epoch this ability lasted only up to the age of 48, then 47 and so on. At the beginning of the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch it lasted only to the age of 42, receding to the age of 36. The Graeco-Latin epoch began in the year of 747 B.C. when man retained the ability of natural development only up to the age of 35, then 34 and when it receded to the age of 33 then—because this age is below 35 when the body begins to decline—man could no longer experience the cosmic spirit's union with the soul. Therefore, the spirit that is the Christ Spirit approached man from outside. You see how essential was the Christ Spirit's entry into mankind's evolution.

Let us look back once more to the patriarchs in ancient times who were, one might say, super-geniuses. They were consulted on all questions concerning the arrangement of human affairs because their natural inner development enabled them to embody the divine-spiritual element. The possibility of receiving higher counsel from human beings diminished ever more. When mankind's age receded to 33, Christ had to come from other worlds and enter the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Man had to receive from a different direction the impulse which through his natural evolution he had lost.

This allows us deep insight into the indispensable connection between mankind's evolution and the Mystery of Golgotha. Science of the spirit reveals Christ's entry into human evolution as an inherent necessity. The need for new insight and deeper understanding of the Christ Impulse can be seen at every turn.

I recommend you read the latest number of Die Tat (The Deed), for it contains much of interest. You will find an article by our revered friend Dr. Rittelmeyer¹ and also one of the last articles written by our dear friend Deinhard before his death.² In this same number there is also an article by Arthur Drews which is significant because here he again discusses the role of Christ Jesus in the modern world.³ I have often spoken about Drews. He came to the fore in Berlin at the time when the attempt was made, from the so-called monistic viewpoint to prove, among other things, that Jesus of Nazareth could not be a historical person. Two books appeared concerned with what was called the “Christ Myth” to show that it cannot be proved historically that a Jesus of Nazareth ever lived.

This time Drews discusses Christ Jesus from an odd point of view. In the June number of Die Tat you will find an article entitled “Jesus Christ and German Piety.” He builds up the peculiar idea of a piety that is German; this is just about as clever as to speak of a German sun or a German moon. To bring national differences into these things is really as nonsensical as it would be to speak of the sun or moon being exclusively German; yet such absurdities attract large audiences these days. It is interesting that Drews, who would not dream of evoking Eckart,⁴ Tauler⁵ or Jacob Boehme,⁶ here does evoke Fichte,⁷ although normally he would not do so even if philosophical matters were discussed. He takes the greatest trouble in his attempt to justify his idea of German piety, and also to show that, especially if one is German, the truth about Jesus Christ cannot be arrived at through theology or historical study, but only through what he calls German metaphysics. And says Drews, no historical Christ Jesus can be found through metaphysics.

Drews' whole approach is closely connected with what I have drawn to your attention in these lectures, that the only concept of God modern man can reach is that of the Father God. The name of Christ is interspersed in the writings of Harnack,⁸ but what he describes is the Father God. What is usually called the inner mystical path can lead only to a general Godhead. Christ cannot be found in either Tauler or Eckart. It is a different matter when we come to Jacob Boehme, but the difference is not understood by Drews. In Boehme the Christ can be found for it is of Him that he speaks. Christ is to be found neither in Arthur Drews' writings nor in Adolf Harnack's theology, but Drews is, from the modern point of view, the more honest. He seeks the Christ and does not find Him, because that is impossible through abstract metaphysics held aloof from historical facts. But the real facts of history can, as we have seen, enable us to understand the significance even of the age of Christ Jesus in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha. Drews fails to find Christ because he remains at abstract metaphysics, which is the only standpoint acceptable today. Certainly, the healthy person can through metaphysics find a general God but not Christ. It is an outlook that is directly connected with what I explained, that atheism is really an illness, the inability to find Christ a misfortune, not to be able to find the spirit a soul blindness. Drews cannot do otherwise than say, “What is discovered through metaphysics cannot honestly be called Christ; we must therefore leave Christ out of our considerations.” Drews believes he is speaking out of the spirit of our time, and so he is inasmuch as our time rejects spiritual science. He believes he is speaking the truth when he says that religion must be based on metaphysics, and therefore cannot, if it is honest, entertain any concept of Christ.

Let us now turn to the actual words with which Drews ends his extraordinary article: “Every historical tradition”—he means traditions depicting Christ historically—“is an obstacle to religion; as soon as the great work of reformation, only just begun by Luther, is completed, the last remnant of any faith based on history will be swept away from religious consciousness.”

I have often mentioned that spiritual science seeks to establish a faith based on history because it provides a concrete impetus towards the spiritual aspect of evolution which leads as directly to Christ as abstract metaphysics leads to an undifferentiated God. Drews says, “German religion must be either a religion without Christ or no religion at all.” That expresses more or less what I have often indicated, namely that the present-day consciousness is bound to remove Christ unless it comes through spiritual science to a concrete grasp of the spiritual world and thereby rekindles understanding of Christ.

Drews continues:

When one recognizes God and man to be essentially the same, [Imagine, to suggest, as is done here, that God and man are the same!] when every person is seen to have a natural tendency to become a “Christ”; i.e., to become a God-man, then there will be no room for a Jesus Christ. One can certainly draw attention to acts attributed to Christ in order to elucidate and illustrate certain religious procedures, as for example mystics have done. One can also refer to sayings of Christ to make one's own opinions clear, just as one can refer to words and doings of other outstanding individuals.

Here we have the peculiar situation that what is said never to have existed is yet referred to as if it had. On the one hand Drews sets out to prove that Christ never was, and on the other he says that it is permissible to refer to His words and deeds in order to elucidate one's own. He continues:

“German” religion of the God-man has no use for a historical redeemer or even for an exceptional human being who, like Jesus, haunts our liberal theologians. It needs no symbolic representative who only serves to confuse the issue. Such a symbol must be recognized as superfluous and even dangerous because it introduces into our “German” concept of religion not only an alien element which, however sublime, is nevertheless onesided, but also unacceptable Protestant ethics. It is this which has caused modern man's alienation from Christianity. Furthermore, such imposed ethics contradict the duties, so deeply felt at the present time, placed upon us by our own nature.

This is certainly a passage of which I can make no proper sense. How is one to come to terms with the way modern man thinks? That is something difficult to understand when one's own thoughts relate to reality. Drews continues:

All that is great and significant in the Gospels is not lost to mankind even if there never was a Jesus. The words attributed to him would then have come from some other source. In any case, our salvation cannot be dependent on whether there was a Jesus or not. Regarding Jesus as principle of salvation draws in its wake not only the whole dualistic metaphysics of Palestinian Judaism, which is incompatible with the modern spirit, but also makes religion inseparable from history. It introduces vague opinions and brings forward doubtful historical events as proof of external religious manifestations. The “German” religion of the God-man is not only a religion of freedom, but a religion of the most individual and deepest inwardness. It will no sooner have entered life than we shall be free both of external Church functions with their subsidiary demands, but also of Jesus Christ. As Fichte said: “It is through metaphysics, not history, that salvation is obtained! And metaphysics knows of no Jesus Christ.”

It would be well if people become conscious of the fact that without spiritual knowledge modern education leads logically to such a conclusion. To present a different result would be a compromise and therefore dishonest. If this were recognized spiritual science would not be seen as something arbitrarily introduced at the present time, but as the answer to the deepest and truest needs of the human soul.

Since the year 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha, man has lived in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch during which through human evolution he becomes ever more estranged from the spiritual world. We can find our connection with spirituality only through impulses that are no longer provided by man's bodily nature but are innate in the soul itself. People today succumb to the kind of abstractions I have described because as yet they are not sufficiently permeated by Christianity to sense the soul's necessity of union with the spiritual world. That is why nowadays all concepts, all ideas are abstract. Truly they go together—today's unchristian attitude and the unreality and abstraction of ideas. Indeed our concepts and ideas will remain unreal unless we learn to permeate them once more with the spirit, the spirit in which Christ lives. Through Him our concepts will again become as living and real as those of the ancient Indian patriarchs who through their personalities made concrete and effective what was instituted as rights and laws. Our rights and laws are themselves abstract. When a bridge is built and it collapses, one soon realizes that its construction was based on wrong concepts. In society such connections are not so easily detected; all kinds of incompetence may be practiced. The result reveals itself only in the unhappiness people suffer in times such as ours. When a bridge collapses, one blames the engineer who built it. When misfortune overtakes mankind because the inadequate concepts of those in charge are incapable of intervening in events, then one blames all kinds of things. However, what ought to be blamed, or rather recognized, is the circumstance that we are going through a crisis in which people no longer have any true sense as to whether a concept has any connection with reality or not.

I would like to give you an example taken from external nature to illustrate once more the distinction between concepts that are connected with reality and those that are not. If you take a crystal and think of it as a hexagonal prism, closed above and below by hexagonal pyramids, then you have a concept of a quartz crystal that is connected with the reality, because that is true of the crystal's form and existence. If on the other hand you form a concept of a flower without roots, you have an unreal concept, for without roots a flower cannot live, cannot have an existence in reality. Someone who does not strive to make his thoughts correspond to reality will regard the flower torn off at the stem as just as real as the quartz crystal, but that is untrue. It is not possible for someone who thinks in accordance with reality to form a mental picture of a flower without roots. People will have to learn anew to form concepts that correspond to reality. A tree which has been uprooted is no longer a reality to which the concept tree corresponds. To feel the uprooted tree as a reality is to feel an untruth, for it cannot live, but withers and dies if not rooted in the earth. There you have the difference.

No one whose thinking corresponds to reality could suggest, as professor Dewar does, that it is possible to calculate by means of experiments how the world will end.⁹ Such speculations are always unreal. It must become habit to train one's thinking to correspond to things as they truly are, otherwise one's thoughts about the spiritual world will be mere fantasy. One must be able to distinguish the concept of a living entity from that of a lifeless one, otherwise one cannot have true concepts of the spiritual world. One's thoughts remain unreal if a tree without roots, or a geological stratum by itself—for it can exist only if there are other strata lying below as well as above—is regarded as true reality. Those who think the way geologists or physicists and especially biologists do are not formulating real thoughts. Biologists think of a tooth, for example, as if it could exist on its own. Today, spiritual science apart, it is only in the realm of art—though not in pure realism—that one finds any understanding for the fact that the reality or unreality of something can depend on whether that to which it belongs is present or not.

These examples are taken from the external physical world, but today other spheres, such as national economy and political science in particular, suffer from unreal thoughts. I have pointed out the impossibility of the political science outlined by Kjellen in his book The State as a Form of Life.¹⁰ You know that I have great respect for Kjellen. His book is both widely read and highly praised, but if some aspect of natural science had been written about in a similar way, the author would have been laughed at. One may get away with writing in that way about the state, but not about a crocodile. Not a single concept in Kjellen's book is thought through realistically.

It is essential that man develop a sense for the kind of thoughts that do relate to reality; only then will he be able to recognize the kind of concepts and ideas capable of bringing order into society. Just think how essential it is that we acquire concepts enabling us to understand people living on Russian soil. Remarkably little is done to reach such understanding. What is thought about the Russian people, whether here or in the West or in Central Europe, is very far from the truth. A few days ago I read an article which suggested that Russians still have to some extent the more mystical approach to life of the Middle Ages, whereas since then in the West and in Central Europe intellectuality has become widespread. The article makes it clear that the Russian people should begin to acquire the intellectuality which other European peoples have had the good fortune to attain. The writer concerned has not the slightest inkling that the character of the Russian people is utterly different. People nowadays are not inclined to study things as they truly are. The sense is lacking for the reality, the truth, contained in things.¹¹

One of our friends made the effort to bring together what I have written about Goethe in my books with what I said in a lecture concerning human and cosmic thoughts.¹² From this material he produced a book in Russian, a remarkable book already published.¹³ I am convinced it will be widely read in Russia by a certain section of the public. Were it to be translated into German or any other European language, people would find it deadly boring. This is because they lack the sense for appreciating the finely chiseled thoughts, the wonderful conceptual filigree work that makes this book so striking.

What is so remarkable about the Russian character is that as it evolves something will emerge which is different from what has emerged in the rest of Europe where mysticism and intellectuality exist, as it were, apart. In Russia a mysticism will appear which is intellectual in character and an intellectuality which is based on mysticism. Thus it will be something quite new, intellectual mysticism, mystical intellectuality and, if I may put it so, quite equal to its task. This is something that is not understood at all. It is there nevertheless, though hidden within the chaos of Eastern Europe, and will emerge expressing the characteristics I have briefly indicated.

These things can be understood only if one has a feeling for the reality inherent in ideas. To acquire this sense, this feeling that ideas are realities is one of the most urgent needs of the present time. Without it abstract programs will continue to be devised, beautiful political speeches held about all kinds of measures to be taken which prove unproductive, though they need not be. Nor can there be any feeling for events in history which when followed up, can be an immense help when it comes to understanding our own time.

Let me give you a characteristic example. Concern about the problems facing mankind at the present time causes one to turn repeatedly to events that took place in the 18th century, particularly in the '60s of that century. At that time remarkable impulses were emerging in Europe. An attempt to understand them can be most instructive. As you know that was when the Seven Years War took place. England and France were deeply divided, mainly through their colonial rivalry in North America. In Europe, England and Prussia were allies; opposing them was the alliance consisting of France and Austria. In Russia a strong hostility prevailed against Prussia during the reign of Czarina Elizabeth. Therefore one should really speak of an alliance between Russia, France and Austria against Prussia and England. One could say that on a smaller scale conditions were similar to those of today; just as now there was then a danger of complete chaos in Europe. In fact, when the situation in the early 1760s is investigated, it is found to be not unlike the present one in 1917. But the remarkable incident I want to mention is the following.

I believe it was on January the fifth, 1762, that Czarina Elizabeth died; or to put it as the historians have done, her life, not very often sober, had come to an end; she had spent most of it inebriated. The Czarina Elizabeth was dead, and her nephew, her sister's son, stood before those authorized to place the crown upon his head. It was an extraordinary person who, on January the fifth 1762, prepared himself to be elevated to Czar. He was clad in his regiment's ceremonial uniform, consisting of green jacket with red collar and cuffs, yellow waistcoat and stockings, leggings to above the knee (he had already as Grand Duke made a habit of never bending the knees when walking as this, to him, seemed more dignified) long pigtail, two powdered coils, a hat with upturned brim, and as his symbol he carried a knobbed staff. As you know, his consort was Catherine, later to become Catherine the Great. History describes Czar Peter III as an immature young man.¹⁴ It is extraordinarily difficult to ascertain what kind of person he actually was. Very probably he was very immature, even backward. He became Czar at a significant moment in the history of Europe. At his side was a woman who already as a seven year old girl had written in her diary that there was nothing she desired more than to become the absolute ruler of the Russian people. Her dream was to become ruler in her own right. And she seemed to be proud that for the sake of direct succession she need never bear a child that was necessarily that of her husband, the Czar. When he became ruler, the war had been going on for a long time; everybody longed for peace. Peace would be a blessing if only it could be attained.

What happened next was that already in February—that is, soon after the feeble-minded Peter III had ascended to the throne of the Czars—all the European powers received a Russian manifesto. This event was very remarkable, and I would like to read to you a literal translation. The manifesto was sent to the embassies in Austria, France, Sweden and Saxony. Saxe-Coburg was at that time part of Poland. The document reads as follows:

His Imperial Majesty, who through good fortune ascended to the throne of his forebears, regards his first duty to be promotion and increase of the welfare of his subjects. It is therefore with great sorrow that he Witnesses the present war which has already lasted six years and is an immense burden to all the countries involved. Far from showing any signs of coming to an end, it is, to the misfortune of all the nations, spreading ever further the longer it lasts. The suffering of humanity through this calamity is all the greater because of the uncertainty concerning the outcome, which shows no sign of lessening. In these circumstances, out of humanitarian feelings and compassion for the useless spilling of innocent blood, his Imperial Majesty on his part wishes to put an end to this evil. He therefore finds it necessary to turn to Russia's allies reminding them that God's first commandment to sovereigns, namely the preservation of the people entrusted to them, must take precedence over all other considerations. They on their part would wish to secure the peace so necessary and valuable to them also, and at the same time to contribute as much as is possible to see peace established in the whole of Europe. To this purpose His Majesty is prepared to sacrifice the conquests made in this war by Russian forces. His Majesty hopes that the allies on their part will consider the return of peace a greater benefit than anything they could expect to obtain through a prolonged war and further bloodshed. Out of the best and deepest feelings his Imperial Majesty advises all to devote their best forces to achieve so great and beneficial an objective. St. Petersburg, February 23, 1762.

I do wonder if anywhere today there is a true feeling for the fact that this manifesto is absolutely concrete, is based completely on reality. One should be able to sense that it is a document that carries the conviction of truth. However, the diplomatic notes sent in answer to the manifesto are all declarations written more or less in the same vein as are today's declarations concerned with the entente, especially the ones sent by Woodrow Wilson. Everything in these diplomatic notes is utterly abstract with no relation to reality, whereas what I just now read to you, written on the 23rd of February 1762, is in a style of a different order, and contains something quite remarkable, all the more so in view of the Czar's condition, which I described to you. There must have been someone with power behind the scenes, with a sense for the reality of the situation, who could cause this action to be taken. Later, when the abstract replies had reached Russia—replies containing the same kind of abstractions as those used today, like “peace, free from annexation” or “freedom for the people”—Peter, the feeble-minded, sent an answer delivered by the Russian envoy, Count Gallitzin, to the Court in Vienna on the 9th of April. Listen to what it contains:

The friendship which has existed between the Russian Imperial Court and the Prussian Royal Court ever since the time of Czar Peter I has lately suffered a setback merely through accidental changes in the constitution of Europe. The war which is a result of these changes can neither last forever nor destroy the advantage of a friendship which for many years proved to be a useful confederation and could be so again. His Imperial Majesty therefore proposes to the King of Prussia that they conclude not only a lasting peace, but a treaty of alliance in their mutual interest and to their mutual advantage.

Please note the stroke of genius in what follows:

The reason for these deliberations on the part of his Russian Imperial Majesty is obvious and needs no lengthy explanation, as it is easy enough to demonstrate that no good can come of a general peace such as was concluded in Westphalia. Peace cannot be expected to last when there is an unending shifting of arms and such variety of intentions. Such a peace necessitates all conquered territories to be protected, as is the case in Westphalia. But now the matter hinges on pretentions which have only arisen out of the war. These can hardly be reconciled due to the eagerness early in the war to mobilize as many powers as possible with little consideration for possible consequences of hastily concluded treaties and amalgamations.

One cannot imagine a more ingenious diplomatic document. Think about it—if only somebody could recognize now that the pretentions made today have only arisen because of this war! The document continues:

The Russian Imperial Court alone has always insisted that, before a general congress is arranged, it is necessary that conflicting interests and demands are reconciled. It would appear that the Sovereign Court in Vienna also recognizes this, and therefore never directly answered the Russian Imperial communique. The Sovereign Court made only brief reference to points that were in its favor, passing over others in silence preferring, it would seem, to await possible fortunes with arms. ... The war that has since broken out between England and Spain only increases the general misery. Although it engages England at sea, it does nothing to lessen the war in Germany. Sweden is without hope and is suffering losses; her glory waning, she seems to have courage neither to continue the war nor to withdraw from it. The Sovereign Courts all appear to be waiting to see who will be the first to make a decisive move towards establishing peace. His Russian Imperial Majesty alone is ready to do so, through compassion and also in view of the complaisance shown by his majesty the King of Prussia. His Imperial Majesty wishes to take the necessary steps at the earliest possible moment, especially as this intention was communicated to all the Sovereign Courts as early as the 23rd of February, soon after the start of his reign.

Peace was established, and indeed as a result of what was initiated with this concrete document based on reality. It is of the greatest importance that a sense is developed for what history conveys, a feeling for the difference between concepts and ideas that are incapable of intervening in reality, and those that are themselves rooted deeply in reality and therefore have the power to affect it. One should not imagine that words are always mere words; they can be as effective as deeds if based on reality. It must be realized that mankind is going through a crisis. It is all-important that a new path, a new connection, be found to truth and reality. People are so alienated from what is real that they have lost the sense for truth and for the right way of dealing with things. It is important to see that the crisis we are in and the untruthfulness that abounds are related. Let me give you one small example: a periodical has appeared, calling itself The Invisible Temple, obviously a publication in which those inclined towards mysticism expect to find something very deep. “The Invisible Temple”—Oh, the depth of it! Subtitle? A Monthly Magazine for the Gathering of Spirits.¹⁵ I will say no more on that point, but in one issue monists and theosophists are mentioned. Various foolish things are said, including a passage I will read. The periodical is the mouthpiece for a society which is at present led by Horneffer.¹⁶ The society claims it is going to renew the world.

This is the passage:

Monists and theosophists may go in different directions; they may vigorously fight and despise one another; yet in one respect they are strangely alike. Both lay claim to the word “science.” Both insist that their pursuit is true science, and that everybody else's science is pseudo-science. You will find this stated in the writings of Haeckel as well as of Rudolf Steiner.

I request you to go through everything I have said or written and see if you can find anything of what is here maintained. But who today is prepared in a case like this to call something by its right name, and say that it is an outright lie, and a common one at that. That Horneffer should write such things comes as no surprise. When he published Nietzsche's works, I had to point out to him that he did not have the faintest understanding of Nietzsche. What he had compiled and published was rubbish. So what he writes now is no surprise. But people take such things seriously, and thus it comes about that the worst, most stupid foolishness is confused and mixed up with the earnest striving of spiritual science, and worse still, what is-truth is called lies, whereas lies are accepted as truth.

It must be learned that a new link to reality has to be found. In the first post-Atlantean cultural epoch the patriarchs when they reached their fifties, received the spirit into themselves as part of their natural development. We may ask if this has in any way remained through the Greek epoch up to our own? The answer is that all that has remained is what we call genius. When the faculty of genius appears today it is still to some extent dependent on man's natural development. However, the men of genius appearing during the fifth cultural epoch will be the last in earth evolution. It is important to know that no genius will appear in the future. We must face the fact that as a natural gift the faculty of genius will disappear. Instead, a new quality of originality will appear, a quality that no longer appears as a gift of nature but must be striven for. It will arise through man's intimate union with the spirituality that reveals itself in the outer world.

A very interesting man, a psychologist, died in March, 1917. I have often spoken about Franz Brentano.¹⁷ He was not only the most significant expert on Aristotle, but a characteristic thinker of our time. I have mentioned before that he began a work on psychology. The first volume appeared in 1874; the second was to appear that same fall and further volumes later. But neither the one expected in the fall nor any later volumes appeared. I became thoroughly familiar with Franz Brentano's characteristic way of lecturing when I lived in Vienna. I have read every published line of what he has written, so I am well acquainted with the direction of his thoughts. Because I know him so well I am convinced that Franz Brentano's innate honesty prevented him from publishing further volumes. There are clear indications already in the first volume of his struggle to reach a clear conclusion regarding immortality of the soul. However, without spiritual science—with which he would have nothing to do—he could not get beyond the first volume, let alone the fifth, in which he planned to furnish proof of the soul's immortality. There was no room for science of the spirit in his outlook. He is, in fact, the originator of the saying so much quoted by 19th-century philosophers: “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est” (”True science of the spirit can have no other method of research than natural science.”)¹⁸ He composed this sentence for his inauguration thesis when in 1866, having left the Dominican order, he became professor at the university at Wurzburg. Philosophy was already then rather scorned. The first time he entered the auditorium, where formerly a follower of Baader¹⁹ had lectured, he was met with slogans such as “sulfur factory” written on the walls.

Franz Brentano was a gifted man, and he worked out his chosen subject as far as it was possible for him to do. The reason he came to a standstill after the first volume of his intended work was his refusal to enter into spiritual science. His later writings are fragments. But one treatise, a rendering of one of his lectures, is extremely interesting. It is entitled Genius. Although he was a keen observer he was not someone able to ascend from physical observations to spiritual ones. The treatise is basically an attack on the idea of genius. He opposes the idea that from some unconscious strata of the soul could arise what is called genius. He argues that what comes to expression is just a quicker, more commanding grasp of things than is normally attained by ordinary people. As I said, Brentano's treatise is very interesting although he did not come to a spiritual-scientific viewpoint. He was a keen observer and for that very reason could not find, when observing life today, anything to justify the claim of genius. And because he was honest he opposed the idea.

The riddle of genius, among other things, remains inexplicable till one investigates the deeper aspects of mankind's evolution, unless one knows that in the future, what has been known as “genius” will be replaced in certain people by a new way of communion with the spiritual world. When they achieve this, they will receive impulses which will come to expression in the external world in ways that will be equivalent to what was created by geniuses in the past. To recognize that things were different in the past and will be different again in the future is to understand evolution rightly.

I know full well that one is ridiculed for saying such things, but they are the result of direct observation of concrete facts. They are also a contrast to the way people nowadays base their actions not on facts but on some idea with which they have become enamored. To give an example, a man concerned with healing got the idea that movement is good for certain illnesses, which is quite true. However, someone consulted him who had a complaint which the practitioner thought would benefit from movement. He recommended that the patient take plenty of exercise, to which he got the reply: “Forgive me, but you must have forgotten that I am a postman.” One must recognize that concepts are only the tool, not the reality, and also that one must never be dogmatic. I have sometimes referred to another unreal concept, frequently acted upon when it is said: “the best man in the right place!”—whereupon it is immediately found that one's nephew or son-in-law is the best man! What matters are the facts as they truly are, not the idea one is in love with. Unless a feeling for these things is acquired one will fail to learn what is to be learned from history, and fail also to recognize the real issues in things and events around one. And the possibility to find the Christ again will elude one.

We shall continue these considerations next week.

• 1 . Friedrich Rittelmeyer, 1872–1938, professor of theology, pastor in Nurnberg and Berlin, co-founder of the Christian Community.
• 2 . Ludwig Deinhard, 1847–1917, Das Mysterium des Menschen im Lichte der psychischen Forschung, Berlin 1910.
• 3 . Arthur Drews, 1865–1935, see: “Ist Jesus eine historische Perstinlichkeit?” in Hat Jesus gelebt?, Berlin and Leipzig 1910, and Die Christusmythe, Jena 1910 and 1911.
• 4 . Meister Eckart, 1260–1327, German mystic and preacher.
• 5 . Johannes Tauler, 1300–1361, German mystic and preacher.
• 6 . Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic and philosopher.
• 7 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German idealist philosopher.
• 8 . Adolf Harnack, 1851–1930, German Lutheran theologian.
• 9 . Professor Dewar, 1842–1923, chemist, lecturer at the Royal Institution in London.
• 10. Rudolf Kjellen, 1864–1922, Der Staat als Lebensform, Leipzig 1916.
• 11. See also Lecture VI, p. 117 and Lecture VIII, p. 157.
• 12. Rudolf Steiner, Human and Cosmic Thought (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967).
• 13. Boris Bugajeff (Andrej Bjelyi), 1880–1934. Rudolf Steiner and Goethe in der Weltanschauung der Gegenwart.
• 14. Peter III, Czar of Russia 1768–1762.
• 15. Der unsichtbare Tempel; Monatsschri ft zur Sammlung der Geister, Mtinchen 1916–1920, 5 volumes edited by the brothers Dr. Ernst and Dr. August Horneffer.
• 16. Ernst Horneffer, 1871–1954, professor in Giessen, followed Dr. Fritz Koegel as editor in the Nietzsche archives. See Nietzsches letztes Schaffen, Jena 1907.
• 17. Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 18. Franz Brentano, Das Genie, a lecture held in the Center for Engineering and Architecture in Vienna, published in Leipzig, 1892.
• 19. Franz Xavier Benedikt Baader, 1765–1841, philosopher.

On this day when we meet to celebrate our Christmas festival, it may be seasonable to depart from what has been our customary routine and, instead of seeking after knowledge and truth, to withdraw inwardly, foregathering for a time with that world of feeling and sensations which we are endeavouring to awaken by the aid of the light we receive through Anthroposophy.

This festival now approaching, and which for countless persons presents a time of joyousness—joyousness in the best sense of that word—is, nevertheless, when accepted in the way in which it must be accepted in accordance with our anthroposophical conception of the universe, by no means a very old one.

What is known as the ‘Christian Christmas’ is not coeval with the dawn of Christianity in the world—the earliest Christians, indeed, had no such festival. They did not celebrate the Birth of Christ Jesus. Nearly three hundred years went by before the feast of His Nativity began to be kept by Christianity.

During the first centuries, when the Christian belief was spreading throughout the world, there was a feeling within such souls as had responded to the Christ Impulse inclining persons to withdraw themselves more and more from contact with the external aspects of life prevalent in their day—from what had grown forth from archaic times, as well as from what was extant at the inception of the Christ-Impulse. For a vague instinctive feeling possessed these early Christians—a feeling which seemed to tell them that this Impulse should indeed be so fostered as to form anew the things of this earth—so forming them that new feelings, new sensations, and, above all things, fresh hopes and a new confidence in the development of humanity should permeate all, in contradistinction to the feelings which had before held sway—and that what was to dawn over the horizon of the vast world-life should take its point of departure from a spiritual germ—a spiritual germ which, literally speaking, might be considered as within this Earth.

Oft-times, as you will be aware, have we in the spirit transported ourselves to those Roman catacombs where, removed from the life of the time, the early Christians were wont to rejoice their hearts and souls. In the spirit have we sought admittance to these places of devotion. The earlier celebrations kept here were not in honour of His Birth. At most was the Sunday of each week set apart in order that once in every seven days the great event of Golgotha might he pondered; and beyond this, there were others the anniversaries of whose death were kept during that first century. These dead were those who had transmitted with special enthusiasm the account of that event—men whose impressive participation in the trend thus given to the development of humanity had led to their persecution by a world grown old. Thus it came to pass that the days upon which these Martyrs had entered into glory were kept as the birthdays of humanity by these early Christians. As yet there was no such thing as a celebration of the Birth of Christ. Indeed we may say that it is the coming—the introduction—of this Christ-Birth Festival, that can show how we in the present day have the full right to say: ‘Christianity is not the outcome of this or that dogma, it is not dependent upon this or that institution—dogmas and institutions which have been perpetuated from one generation to another—but we have the right to take Christ’s own words for our justification, when He says that He is with us always, and that He fills us with His Spirit all our days.’ And when we feel this Spirit within us we may deem ourselves called to an increasing, never-ceasing development of the Christian Spirit. The anthroposophical development of the Spirit bids us not foster a Christianity which is frozen and dead, but a new and living Christianity—one ever quickening with new wisdom and fresh knowledge, an evolution from within, stretching forward into the development of the future.

Never do we speak of a Christ Who was, but rather of an eternal and a living Christ. And more especially are we permitted to speak of this living and ever-active Christ—this Christ Who works within us—when the time is at hand for dwelling on the Birth-festival of Christ Jesus, for the Christians of the first centuries were alive to the fact that it was given to them to imbue what was, as it were, the organism of the Christian development with a ‘new thing’—that it was given to them to add thereunto that which was actually streaming into them from the Spirit of Christ.

We must therefore regard the Christmas Festival as one which was not known prior to the fourth century; indeed, we may place the date of the first ‘Christ-Birth’ Festival in Rome as having taken place in the year 354, and it should, moreover, be particularly borne in mind that at a time less critical than is the present, those who confessed themselves Christians were, imbued with the true feeling—a feeling which impelled them to be ever seeking and garnering new fruits from the great Christian Tree of Life.

This perhaps is the reason why we too feel that at such a season we may do well to rejoice in an outward symbol of the Christ’s Birth—in the symbol of the Christmas-tree now before us and around which through the coming days countless people will gather, a symbol whose true meaning it is the mission of Anthroposophy with ever deepening seriousness to impress upon the hearts and souls of men.

We should indeed almost be coming to loggerheads with the evolution of the times were we to take our stand by this symbol—for it is a mistake to imagine it to be an old one. It would be, however, quite easy to imagine that some such poetic belief giving credence to the Christmas-tree being a venerable institution, might arise in the soul of present-day humanity.

There exists a picture which presents the Christmas-tree in Luther’s family parlour. This picture, which was of course painted during the nineteenth century, perpetuates an error, for not only in Germany during Luther’s days, but also amid the surrounding European countries, there were as yet no such trees at Christmas.

May we perhaps not say, that the Christmas-tree of to-day is something which should be taken rather as the prophetic sign of times to come?—that this Tree may, as the years roll on, be regarded ever more and more as the symbol of something stupendous in its meaning—in its importance? Then, indeed, being trammelled by no illusions as regards its historical age, we may let our eyes rest on this Christmas-tree the while we call before our souls an oft-repeated memory—that of the so-called ‘Sacred Legend.’ It runs as follows: When Adam was driven forth from Paradise (this Legend, I should add, is told after many fashions, and I shall here only put the matter as shortly as possible)—when therefore Adam was driven forth from Paradise, he took with him three seeds belonging to the Tree of Life—the tree of which man had been forbidden to eat after he had once eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And when Adam died, Seth took the three seeds, and placed them in Adam’s grave, and thus there grew from out the grave a tree. The wood of this tree—so runs the legend—has served many purposes: From it Moses is said to have fashioned his staff; while later on, it is said, this wood was taken to form the Cross which was raised upon Golgotha.

In this way does a legend significantly remind us of that other Tree of Paradise, the one which stood second. Man had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge: enjoyment of the Tree of Life was withheld from him.

Yet within the heart of man has remained for evermore a longing, a desire for that Tree.

Driven forth from the Spiritual Worlds—which are signified by ‘Paradise’—into an external world of appearances, men have felt within their hearts that yearning for the Tree of Life.

But what man was denied unearned and in his undeveloped state, was nevertheless to be his through the struggle of attainment when with the aid of cognition he should in the course of time and through his work upon the physical plane, have made himself ripe to receive and capable of using the fruits of the Tree of Life. In those three seeds we have presented to us man’s longing for the Tree of Life.

The Legend tells us that in the wood of the Cross was contained that which came from the Tree of Life, and through the entire development there has been a feeling, a consciousness that the dry wood of the Cross did nevertheless contain the germ of the new spiritual life—that there had been ordained to grow forth from it that which, provided man enjoyed it in the right way, would enable him to unite his soul with the fruit of the Tree of Life—that fruit which should bestow upon him immortality, in the truer sense of the word, giving light to the soul, illumining it in such manner as to enable it to find the way from the dark depths of this physical world to the translucent heights of spiritual existence, there to feel itself as indeed participator in a deathless life.

Without, therefore, giving way to any illusion, we—as beings filled with emotion (rather than as historians)—may well stand before the tree which represents to us the tree of Christmas-tide, and feel the while we do so, something in it symbolical of that light which should dawn in our innermost souls, in order to gain for us immortality in the spiritual existence; and turning our gaze within we feel how the spiritual tendency of anthroposophical thought permeates us with a force which permits of our raising our eyes to behold the World of the Spirit. Therefore, in looking upon this outward symbol—the tree of Christmas-tide—we may indeed say: ‘May it be a symbol to us for that which is destined to illumine and burn within our souls, in order to raise us thither—even to the realms of the Spirit.’

For this tree, too, has, so to speak, sprouted forth from the depths of darkness, and only such persons might be inclined to cavil at so unhistorical a view, who are unaware that the thing which external physical knowledge does not recognise has nevertheless its deep spiritual foundations. To the physical eye it may not be apparent how gradually this Christmas-tree grows, as it were, to be a part of the outward life of humanity. In a comparatively short time, indeed, it has come to be a custom that brings happiness to man, one which has come to affect the world’s intercourse in general. This, as I have said, may pass unrecognised, yet those who know that external events are but impressions of a spiritual process, are bound to feel that there may possibly have been some very deep meaning at work, responsible for the appearance of the Christmas-tree upon the external physical plane; that its appearance has emanated from out the depths of some great spiritual impulse—an impulse leading men invisibly onward—that indeed this lighted tree may have been the means of sending to some specially sensitive souls that inspiration of the inward light whereof it furnishes so beautiful an external symbol. And when such cognition awakens to wisdom, then indeed does this tree—by reason of our will—also become an external symbol for that which is Divine.

If Anthroposophy is to be knowledge, then it must be knowledge in an active sense and permeated with wisdom—that is to say, it must ‘gild’—external customs and impressions. And so even as Anthroposophy warms and illumines the hearts and souls of men, present and future, so too must the Christmas-tree which has become so ‘material’ a custom recover its ‘golden glint,’ and in the light of this true knowledge rise once more to illustrate its true symbolical meaning in life, after having spent so long a time amid the darkened depths of men’s souls in these latter days.

And if we delve down even a little further and presuppose a deep spiritual guidance to have placed this impulse within the human heart, does this not also prove that thoughts bestowed upon man by the aid of the Spirit can attain to even greater depths of feeling when brought into connection with this luminant tree?

It used to be ancient custom common in many parts of Europe to go t into the woods some time before Christmas and collect sprigs from all kinds of plants, but more especially from foliage trees, and then seek to make these twigs bear leaf in time for Christmas Eve. And to many a soul the dim belief in ‘Life unconquerable’—in that life which shall be the vanquisher of all death—would thrill exultantly at the sight of all this sprouting greenery, branches artificially forced to unfold their tender leaves over-night at a time of year when the sun stands at its lowest. This was a very old custom—our Christmas-tree is of far more recent date. Where, then, have we in the first place to look for this custom?

We know how earnest was the language used by the great German mystics, more especially the impression created by the words of Johannes Tauler, who laboured so assiduously in Alsace; and anyone who allows the sermons of Johannes Tauler to ‘work upon him’ with the sincerity so peculiar to them will understand how at that time—a time when Tauler was more especially concerned in deepening the feeling of men for all that lay hidden within the Christian Belief—a peculiar, unique spirit must have prevailed, a spirit which of a truth was suffused with the Mystery of Golgotha. In those days when Johannes Tauler was preaching his sermons in Strasbourg, the passionate sincerity with which he delivered his ‘words of fire’ may well have sunk into the soul of many a listener, leaving there a lasting impression, and many such impressions may well have been caused by what Tauler was wont to say in his wondrously beautiful Christmas sermons. ‘Three times,’ said Tauler, ‘is God born unto men: Firstly, when He descends from the Father—from the Great All-World; again, when having reached humanity He descends into flesh; and thirdly, when the Christ is born within the human soul, and enables it to attain to the possibility of uniting itself to that which is the Wisdom of God—enabling it thus to give birth to the higher man.’

At all such seasons when the gracious habit of celebrating the Festivals prevailed, Johannes Tauler might be found round about the neighbourhood of Strasbourg dwelling earnestly upon the meaning of these deep verities, and more especially did he do this at the Christmas season. Indeed the words sinking at such times into receptive souls may have echoed on—for feelings, too, have their traditions—and what was felt within some soul’s depths in the hush of such an hour may—who knows?—still stir responsive chords from one century to the other. And so the feeling once possessing souls passed to the eye, and gave to this a capability of perceiving in that external symbol the resurrection—the birth of man’s spiritual light.

Taken from the point of view of material thought the coincidence may be deemed a pretty one: but for those who know the manner in which spiritual guidance permeates all that is physical it becomes far more than a coincidence to learn that the first record of a Christmas-tree having stood in a German room comes from Alsace, and indeed from Strasbourg in Alsace, while the date may be given as 1642.

How ill German Mysticism has fared at the hands of a Christianity wedded to outward forms may be seen in what happened to the memory of Master Eckhard, the great forerunner of Johannes Tauler, since posterity branded him a heretic after death—having omitted to do so while he lived!

Nor did the burning words of Johannes Tauler, words which flamed up from a heart fired with Christian passion, meet with much response; the outward Christianity of the times lacked the spiritual depth of the teachings proclaimed by these men, and this may fully account for the fact that in recording the news of this first Christmas-tree the ‘eye-witness’ alludes to it as ‘child’s play,’ and observes that ‘people would do better by going to places where the right Christian teachings could be proclaimed to them.’

The further progress of the Christmas-tree was a slow one. We see it figuring here and there about Middle Germany during the eighteenth century, but not till the nineteenth century did it become practically a regular ‘spiritual’ decoration intimately associated with the Christmas season—a new symbol of something that had survived throughout the centuries of time.

In such hearts, therefore, where the glory of all things can be truly felt—not in the sense implied by a Christianity ‘made up of words,’ but by the force of a true, a spiritual Christianity—sentiments of the highest human kind were ever prone to kindle in the tree’s illumined presence.

Another reason for placing the advent of the Christmas-tree at so recent a date may be seen in the fact that Germany’s greatest poets had left it unsung: had it been known in earlier times we may be sure that Klopstock, to mention only one, would have chosen this symbol for poetic treatment. And we may, therefore, gather additional certainty from this omission to strengthen our statement as to its being a comparative innovation.

More especially might we then dwell upon this symbol when the feeling of the spiritual truth of the awakening Ego wells up within our souls—that Ego which senses the spiritual bond ’twixt soul and soul, feeling it with intensified strength where noble human beings are striving in a common cause. And I will but mention one instance of how the fight of the Christmas-tree has streamed in to illumine the soul of one of humanity’s great leaders.

It was in the year 1821 that Goethe (whom we so often meet wherever we regard the life of the spirit in the light of Anthroposophy) was bringing his Faust to its close, and in so doing he came to find how essential the Christian symbols were in order to present his poetic intentions—that, in fact, they became the only possible ones. Goethe, indeed, experienced at this time most intensely the way in which Christianity weaves the noblest bond for joining soul to soul; and how this bond has to lay the foundations of a brotherly love not dependent upon the tie of blood, but on that of souls united in the spirit. And when we dwell on the close of the Gospels we are able to feel the impulse yet dormant within Christianity.

Gazing downward from the Cross upon Golgotha, Christ beholds the mother—beholds the son; and in that moment did He found that community which hitherto had only existed through the blood.

Up to that time no mother had had a son, no son a mother, without the tie being that of blood relationship. Nor were blood ties to be eliminated by Christianity; but to these were to be added spiritual ties, diffusing with their spiritual light those ties created by the blood.

It was to these ends, then, that Christ Jesus on the Cross spoke the words: ‘Woman! behold thy son!’, and to the disciple: ‘Behold thy mother!’ What had been instituted as a blood-tie became through the mediation of the Cross a bond of the spirit.

Wherever Goethe perceived a noble effort in furtherance of this spiritual union being made, he was moved to turn towards the true Christian spirit, and what possessed the heart soon yearned for outward expression. The year 1821 gave him a special opportunity for giving utterance to this desire. The residents of the little Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to the interests of which Goethe dedicated so great a measure of his powers, had united forces in order to found a ‘Bürger-schule’. The undertaking was, in fact, to be a ‘gift,’ as it were, to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Goethe, desirous of celebrating in some suitable manner the spiritual impulse that had led to so progressive a step, called upon various members to give poetic expression to thoughts respecting this undertaking they all had at heart. These verses Goethe then collected in a volume for which he himself wrote an introductory poem which was recited by Prince (later Grand Duke) Karl Alexander, then three years old, who presented the book to his father, Grand Duke Karl August—this little ceremony taking place beneath the Christmas-tree. So we see that the tree was, by the year 1821, already a customary symbol of the season and by this act did Goethe indicate the Christmas-tree as being the symbol of a feeling and sentiment for spiritual progress in things both great and small. His introductory poem written for this little volume is still preserved in the Weimar Library and runs as follows:

‘Bäume leuchtend, Bäume blendend,
Uberall das Süsse spendend,
In dem Glanze sich bewegend,
Alt—und junges Herz erregend—
Solch ein Fest ist uns bescheret,
Mancher Gaben Schmuck verehret;
Staunend schaun wir auf und nieder,
Hin und her und immer wieder.
Aber, Furst, wenn dir’s begegnet,
Und ein Abend so dich segnet,
Dass als Lichter, dass als Flammen
Vor dir glänzten allzusammen
Alles, was du ausgerichtet,
Alle, die sich dir verpflichtet:
Mit erhöhten Geistesblicken
Fühltest herrliches Entzücken.’¹

The above verses of Goethe are the first of what we might call Christmas poems, and when in connection with Anthroposophy we speak of ‘symbols’ we may well say that such symbols, which in the course of time surge up involuntarily within men’s souls, are indeed gilded over with the gold of wisdom.

We have seen that the first Christian Christmas was celebrated during the fourth century in Rome. It would seem, furthermore, a matter of divine dispensation that this Feast of Christ’s Birth has—as far as Middle and Northern Europe are concerned—been introduced at the very time when a most ancient feast—that of the Winter Sun, when the shortest days are chronicled—was also wont to be celebrated.

Now it must not be imagined that this change of the old time-honoured Festival into the new Feast, the Christmas Festival, was brought about in order, as it were, to conciliate the nations. Christmas was born purely and simply out of Christianity, and we may say that the way in which it became accepted by the more Northern lands was a proof of the deeply spiritual relationship connecting these peoples as well as their symbols with Christianity.

In Armenia, for instance, the Christmas Festival has never become customary, and even in Palestine the Christians were for a long time averse to its celebration, and yet it soon found a home in Europe.

And now we will try to understand in the right way the Christmas Feast itself when taken from the anthroposophical view—doing so in order that we may also be enabled to apprehend the Christmas-tree in its symbolic sense.

When, during the course of the year, we meet together, we allow those words—which should not be mere words, but rather forces—to permeate our soul in order that the soul may become a citizen of eternity. Throughout the year do we thus assemble allowing these words—this Logos—to sound upon our ears in the most varied manner, telling us that Christ is with us always, and that when we are thus assembled together the Spirit of Christ works in upon us, so that our words become impregnated with the Spirit of Christ. If only we enunciate these things being conscious that the word becomes a ‘carrier on wings,’ bearing revelations to humanity, then indeed do we let that flow in upon our souls which is the Word of the Spirit. Yet we know that the Word of the Spirit cannot entirely be taken up by us—cannot become all it should be to us if we have only received it as an outward and abstract form of knowledge. We know that it can only become to us that which it should be if it gives rise to that inner warmth through which the soul becomes expanded—through which it senses itself as gushing forth amid all the phenomena of world-existence—in which it feels itself one with the Spirit—that Spirit which itself permeates all that is outwardly apparent.

Let us, therefore, feel the Word of the Spirit must become to us a power—a life-force—so that when the season is at hand at which we place that symbol before us, it may proclaim to our souls: ‘Let a new thing be born within you. Let that which giving warmth can spread the Light—even the Word—rising from those spiritual sources, those spiritual depths—be born within you—born as Spirit-Man!’

Then shall we feel what is the meaning of that which passes over to us as the Word of the Spirit. Let us earnestly feel, at such a moment as the present, what Anthroposophy gives to us as warmth, as light for the soul, and let us try to feel it somewhat in.the following manner:

Look at the material world of to-day with all its perpetual activity, consider the way in which men hurry and worry from morning till evening, and the way in which they judge everything from the materialistic standpoint, according to the measure laid down by this outward physical plane—how utterly oblivious they are that behind all there lives and works the Spirit. At night people sink to sleep oblivious of aught else than that ‘unconsciousness’ enwraps them, and in the morning they similarly return to a sense of the consciousness of this physical plane. Thoughtlessly, ignorantly, man sinks to sleep after all his labours and worries of the day—never even seeking enlightenment as to the meaning of life.

When the anthroposophist has become imbued with the Words of the Spirit he knows that which is no mere theory or dogma: he then knows what can give warmth as well as light to his soul. He knows that were he day by day to take up naught but the presentments of the physical life, he would inevitably wither—his life would be empty and void. All he came by would die away were he to have no other presentments than such as the physical plane is able to place before him. For when of an evening you lie down to sleep you pass over to a world of the Spirit—the forces of your soul rise to a world of higher spiritual entities, to whose level you must gradually raise your own being. And when of a morning you wake again, you do so newly strengthened from out that spiritual world, and thus do you shed spiritual life over all that approaches you upon this physical plane, be it done consciously or unconsciously. From the Eternal do you yourself rejuvenate your temporal existence each morning.

What we should do is to change into feeling this Word of the Spirit, so that we may when evening comes be able to say: ‘I shall not merely pass over to unconsciousness, but I shall dip into a world where dwell the beings of eternity—entities whom my own entity is to resemble. I therefore fall asleep with the feeling, ‘Away to the Spirit!’, and I awaken with the feeling, ‘Back—from the Spirit!’ In doing this we become permeated with that feeling into which the Word of the Spirit is to transform itself, that Word which from day to day, from week to week, has been taken up by us here. Let us feel ourselves connected with the Spirit of the Universe—let us feel that we are missionaries of the World-Spirit which permeates and interweaves all outward existence—for then we also feel when the sun stands high in summer and directs its life-giving rays earthward that then too is the Spirit active, manifesting itself in an outward manner, and how—in that we then perceive His external mien, His outward countenance, mirrored by the external rays of the sun—His inner Being may be said to have retired beyond these outer phenomena.

Where do we behold this Spirit of the Universe—this Spirit whom Zoroaster already proclaimed—when only the outward and physical rays of the sun stream in upon us? We behold this Spirit when we are able to recognise where it is He beholds Himself. Verily does this Spirit of the Universe create during summer-time those organs through which He may behold Himself. He creates external sense organs! Let us learn to understand what it is that from Springtime forward decks the earth with its carpet of verdant plants giving to it a renewed countenance. What is it? ’Tis a mirror for the World-Spirit of the sun! For when the sun pours forth its rays upon us, it is the World-Spirit Who is gazing down on earth. All plant-life—bud, blossom and leaf—are but images which present the pure World-Spirit, reflected in His works as they shoot forth upon this earth:—this carpet of plants contains the sense-organs of the World-Spirit.

When in the autumn the external power of the sun declines, we see how this plant life disappears—how the countenance of the World-Spirit is withdrawn—and if we have been prepared in the right manner we may then feel how the Spirit which pulsates throughout the universe is now within ourselves. So that we can follow the World-Spirit even when He is withdrawn from external sight, for we then feel that though our gaze no longer rests upon that verdant cover, yet has the Spirit been roused in us to so great a measure that He withdraws Himself from the external presentments of the world. And so the awakening Spirit becomes our guide to those depths whither Spirit life retires and to where we deliver over to the keeping of the Spirit germs for the coming Spring. There do we learn to see with our spiritual sight, learning to say to ourselves:

‘When external life begins gradually to become invisible for the external senses, when the melancholy of Autumn creeps in upon our soul, then does the soul follow the Spirit—even amid the lifeless stones, in order that it may draw thence those forces which in the Spring will once more furnish new sense organs for the Spirit of the World.’

It is thus that those who having in their spirit conceived the Spirit come to feel that they too can follow this World-Spirit down to where the grains of seed repose in winter-time.

When the power of the sun is weakest and when its rays are at their faintest—when outer darkness is at its strongest—it is then that the Spirit within us united to the Spirit of the Universe feels and proclaims that union in greatest clearness, by filling the grains of seed with a new life. In this way we may indeed say quite literally that by the power of the seed we also live within and permeate—as it were—the Earth. In Summer-time we turn to the bright atmosphere about us, to the budding fruits of the earth, but now we turn to the lifeless stones, yet knowing that beneath them reposes that which shall in its turn again enjoy external life, and our soul follows in the spirit those budding germinating forces which, withdrawing themselves from outward view, lie dormant amid the stones in Winter-time.

And when Winter-time has reached its central point—when the darkness is deepest—then is the time at hand when we may feel that the exterior world is nevertheless not capable of counteracting our union with the Spirit—when within those depths to which we have withdrawn we feel the flashes of the Spirit-light—that light of the Spirit for which the greatest Impulse received by humanity was given by Christ Jesus. In this way we are enabled to sense what the Ancients felt when they spoke of descending to where the grain of seed lay dormant in Winter-time in order that they might learn to know the hidden powers of the Spirit.

We then come to feel that Christ has to be sought for amid that which is hidden—there where all is dark and obscure, unless we ourselves kindle the light in the Soul—that Soul which becomes clear and illumined when penetrated by the Light of Christ. At Christmas-tide, therefore, we may well feel an ever-increasing sense of strength—strength due to that Impulse which, grace to the Mystery enacted on Golgotha, has permeated the human race. If truly experienced in this way the Christ Impulse becomes for us indeed the most powerful incentive, strengthening year by year this life which is leading us into the Spiritual Worlds where death—as known in the physical world—does not exist.

It is in this way that we are enabled to spiritualise a symbol which to present-day materialistic-thinking persons is no more than a token of material joy and pleasure, and we thus may also feel within our hearts what Johannes Tauler really meant when he spoke of Christ having to be born three times: once as God the Father Who permeates the world—once as Man, at the time when Christianity was founded—and since then again and again, within the souls of those who can awaken the Word of the Spirit within their innermost being. For without this last birth Christianity would not be complete, nor would Anthroposophy be capable of grasping the Christian Spirit did it not understand that the Word brought home to us year after year is not intended to remain theory and dogma, but is to become both Light and Life—a force, indeed, by which we may contribute spirituality to life in this world as well as gather spirituality for ourselves—and so be one with the other—incorporated with the Spirit for all Eternity.

No matter the step of evolution upon which we stand—we can nevertheless feel what was felt at all times by those who had been initiated and who therefore really did in this Holy Night descend at the midnight hour to gaze upon the spiritual Sun in the darkness of the Christmas Night—when that spiritual Sun could call forth from apparently dead surroundings and waken into life all budding nature, bidding it burst forth and proclaim a new Springtide.

This is the Christ Sun we should feel behind the physical sun: to it we ourselves must rise—rise to experience and see that which, by grace of those new forces man may develop, shall unite him with the Spirit—then shall it also be for us to

See the Sun
About the midnight hour,
And build with stones
Amid the lifeless clay,
Finding that as we pass
To the dark night of Death
Creations new come forth—
Young morns arise to power—
The heights above reveal
The Gods’ eternal Word,
And depths below shall guard
The peaceful Place of Rest.

Dwelling in Darkness,
Oh! create a Sun!
And while ye weave the web,
Oh I recognise
The blissfulness of Spirit.

• 1. The first verse is descriptive of the earthly joys—the union, of friends and the gifts interchanged at Christmas; while the second hints at the spiritual significance of the ceremony, the flames of light giving rise to feelings and sentiments which respond to Higher Planes.—Translator's Note.

Yesterday we contemplated the significance the Mystery of Golgotha has for human evolution on our earth. But as every event in the world is connected through literally endless interrelationships with the evolution of the whole cosmos, we will fully understand the Mystery of Golgotha in its true essentiality only by throwing light on its cosmic significance as well.

We already know that the Being we designate the Christ Being descended to our earth from supra-terrestrial regions and that It was seen in Its descent, so to speak: in ancient Persia by means of the clairvoyant faculty of Zarathustra It was perceived in the sun, then by Moses in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai, and finally by those who experienced the Christ event, in the presence of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

We know further that the events of this earth, and particularly the evolution of mankind, are related to our solar system; for we have shown that the development of humanity, in the form it has actually taken, could never have come about had not a cosmic body, in which our present sun and moon were still united with the earth, cast out first the sun and later the moon, thereby establishing for the earth a sort of position of equilibrium between sun and moon. Because man could not keep pace with the rapid development of the beings who sought the sun as their field of action, the earth had to be separated from the sun; and because a continued union of earth and moon would have entailed a rapid hardening, an ossification, for mankind, the moon, together with its substances and beings, had to be cast out as well. This made it possible for humanity to develop in the right way. But we learned yesterday that a certain remnant of this tendency to rigidity has nevertheless remained; and it would have sufficed to lead mankind into a state of corruption at the end of our Earth evolution had the Christ impulse not come. These considerations will give us an insight into our whole evolution.

At one time, then, sun, moon, and earth constituted a single cosmic body. Then the sun split off, leaving only earth and moon united. Finally our present moon withdrew, and the earth remained as the scene of human evolution. This occurred in the old Lemurian time, the period preceding the so-called Atlantean age which we have already discussed from various points of view. From that time forth, from the Atlantean into our own time, the earth has developed in such a way that the sun and the moon forces have acted from without. Let us now consider the further progress of earth development up to the entry of the Christ impulse, and let us concentrate on a quite definite moment of our earth development: the moment in which the Cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus. Let us focus our attention on this moment in the evolution of our earth.

Up to this point all that mankind had experienced had been determined by the entry, into the inner being of man, of the combined powers of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings; and we have seen that as a consequence of this intrusion man became amalgamated with the outer world in maya, or illusion: Ahriman prevented the outer world from manifesting itself in its true form, making it appear like a world consisting only of matter and solid substance—as though no spirit underlay all matter. For a long time, therefore—and this is still the case today regarding many factors in earth development—the human being was placed in a state brought about by error, because he receives from his environment only the material sense impressions which he then elaborates in his conceptions. So by reason of this influence of Ahriman, or Mephistopheles, he has a false picture of the outer world and forms illusory and erroneous conceptions of the spiritual world.

But all spirit is bound up with physical effects, and we have seen what physical effects accompanied this distortion of outward perception. We have seen that, as a consequence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, human blood became ever less fitted to provide the faculty of seeing the outer world in its true light: a steady aggravation of illusion was bound up with the blood's deterioration, with the dissolution of blood as it had been in the age of consanguinity, with the dispersion and killing off of blood by commingling it. No longer could men consult the old wisdom they had once possessed as a legacy, a wisdom that told them: It is an error to believe that the outer world is nothing but matter; for if you consult the remnants of the old wisdom you inherited, these will tell you that a spiritual world underlies the physical world.

But these remnants kept dwindling, with the result that man became ever more dependent upon the physical world in regard to his entire soul life and his knowledge. That is what transformed all his physical impressions into delusions and deceptions; and had it not been for the intervention of the Christ influence he would ultimately have lost his whole heritage of ancient wisdom by being gradually reduced to complete dependence upon the outer sense world and its impressions. He would have forgotten the existence of a spiritual world—that is what would inevitably have occurred: he would have become blind to the spiritual world.

It is now incumbent upon us to consider in all its gravity a truth such as this: the danger of man falling into ever greater delusion and error concerning the outer world. It is not a simple matter to do this—to contemplate in all its implications and its seriousness such a fact as man's lapse into error regarding the outer impressions of the sense world. Try to understand what it means to recognize as maya, as delusion, all external impressions of the senses as they confront us in the physical sense world. We are asked to learn that phenomena and impressions, as they exist in the sense world and as they impress us, are false; and that we must learn to see their true form behind the external impressions they give.

There is one event to which it is especially difficult, as a rule, to apply the truth, to say to oneself: The form in which it confronts me in the outer world is untrue, is illusion—maya. Can you think what event I have in mind? It is death. As a result of the sort of impressions we have described, our comprehension has come to grasp only external physical events; and for this reason death, when faced in the physical world, bears certain attributes that render it impossible of contemplation other than from the standpoint of the outer physical world. Death is a phenomenon concerning which mankind has inevitably become entangled in particularly erroneous and fatal views; and the inference we must draw from this is that the form in which death presents itself is but maya—a delusion.

Before our eyes in the outer physical world a great variety of phenomena present themselves. There are the stars that intersperse cosmic space, yonder, the mountains, the plants, the animals; here is the world of our minerals, and here, too, we have man, together with all the facts we can gather by means of sense observation. And if we enquire into the origin of these phenomena, of this outer physical-sensible world which appears to us as a world of matter, we must answer, Their origin is in spirit: spirit underlies our physical-sensible world. Then, were we to seek the primordial form of spirit from which springs all that is physical and of the senses, we could not regard it as other than the basis of all being. In Christian esotericism this is the aspect of divinity known as the Father principle. It underlies everything that is creature. So what exactly is it that was hidden from man when all things became obscured by maya, or illusion? It was the divine Father principle. Instead of the mirage of the senses, man should see everywhere and in all things the divine Father principle, of which all things and he himself are a part. The Father principle, then, does not appear in its true form. Because of the decline in human faculties, of which we have spoken, we see the Father principle veiled by delusion, by maya.
What do we find woven into this great delusion? Among all the phenomena we perceive, one stands out as essentially fundamental: death. Therefore we should tell ourselves that the outer objects confronting our senses are in reality the Father principle, are expressions of the divine-spiritual Father element. And since death is interwoven in the totality of the sense world, it is something that pertains to the divine-spiritual Father principle. Owing to the nature of man's development the divine Father principle has become obscured for him by many a veil, and ultimately by the veil of death. What must man seek? The Father, the cosmic Father; and just as he must learn to think of every object as being in truth the Father, so he must come to feel that death, too, is the Father. And why does a false picture of the Father appear to us in the physical sense world? Why is it distorted into the grotesque image appearing to us so deceptively as death? Because the Lucifer-Ahriman principle has been infused into every phase of our life.

What was needed, therefore, to disabuse man of this false, deceptive view of death and to provide a true conception of it was enlightenment arrived at by means of the facts in the case. Something had to occur whereby he could learn that what he had known about death, what he had felt about it—everything he had been impelled to do as a result of his conception of death—was untrue. An event had to take place which would show him the true aspect of death: its false form must be obliterated and its true one set forth. To substitute, through His deed, the true aspect of death for the false one, that was Christ's mission on earth.

It was owing to the interference of Lucifer-Ahriman in human evolution that death became the distorted image of the Father. Death was the consequence, the effect, of the influence of Lucifer-Ahriman. So what had to be done by Him Who would rid the world of this false face of death? Never could human life be released from this distorted form of death had not its source been removed—Lucifer-Ahriman. But that is something no earthly being could have accomplished. An earthly being can extinguish, within earth development, anything brought about by earthly beings themselves, but not the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This could be driven out only by a being that had not been on the earth but out in cosmic space when Lucifer-Ahriman intervened, a being that came to earth at a time when Lucifer-Ahriman had already fully entered the human body.

Now, this Being did come to earth and removed Lucifer-Ahriman, as we have seen, at exactly the right moment—eliminated the cause of all that had brought death into the world. This deed called for a Being having nothing whatever to do with any causes of death among men. It had to be a being in no way connected with any cause of human death—that is, with anything brought about by Lucifer and later by Ahriman, with any individual human deeds done under the Lucifer-Ahriman influence—in short, with anything whereby men became guilty, fell a prey to evil. For the death of a being affected by any of these causes would have been justified. Only an undeserved death, undertaken by one without guilt—an utterly innocent death—could extinguish all guilty death.

An innocent Being, accordingly, had to suffer death, wed death, submit to death; and by so doing He infused into human life those forces which will gradually create knowledge concerning the true aspect of death; that is, the realization that death as it appears in the sense world is not truth—that on the contrary, this death had to occur to provide for life in the spiritual world; that precisely this death forms, in fact, the basis of that life.

Thus the innocent death on Golgotha furnished the proof, which will gradually be comprehended by humanity, that death is the ever-living Father. And once we have achieved the right view of death, once we have learned from the event of Golgotha that external dying is of no importance, that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth there dwelt the Christ with Whom we can unite; once we have realized what Christ achieved, even though we see the image of death hung on the Cross, in rendering death a mere external event, that His life in the etheric body was the same before death as it was after this death, and that therefore this death cannot touch life—once we have understood that here is a death incapable of extinguishing life but is, rather, itself life, then the Christ on the Cross becomes the eternal emblem of the truth that death is in reality the giver of life. The plant comes forth from the seed: death is not the destroyer of life, but its seed. It has been sown in our physical sense world in order that the latter may not fall away from life, but may be raised into life. The refutation of death had to be furnished on the Cross by a contradictory death, by a death that was innocent.

We must now enquire what, exactly, was brought about by this event. From the previous lectures we know that as the fourth principle of his being man has an ego, and that as this develops, the blood is its outer physical instrument. Blood is the expression of the ego, hence with its steady deterioration the ego fell to an ever increasing extent into error, into maya, or illusion. Hence, also, man is indebted for the growing power of his ego to the circumstance that he is provided with blood. But this ego, in turn, he owes in its spiritual aspect to the fact of his having learned to distinguish himself from the spiritual world, of his having become an individuality. This capacity could not have been bestowed upon him otherwise than by temporarily cutting off his view of the spiritual world; and the agency that effected this was precisely death. Had man always known that death is the seed of life he would not have achieved independence for his ego, for he would have remained linked with the spiritual world. As it was, however, death appeared, gave him the illusion of being separated from the spiritual world, and so trained his ego to independence.

This ego principle, however, grew more and more independent: it exaggerated its independence, strained it past a certain point; and this condition could be counteracted only by the withdrawal of the force which had caused it. Hence the factor which would have induced exaggerated egotism, which would have fostered not merely the ego principle, egoism, but egotism—this factor had to be driven out. And this was accomplished in such a way that in the future it can be more and more eradicated from the individual egos as well: it was accomplished when death came on the Cross of Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds. In the blood flowing from Christ's wounds we have the factual symbol of the excessive egotism in the human ego. Just as blood is the expression of the ego, so the blood that flowed on Golgotha is the expression of excess in the human ego. Had not the blood flowed on Golgotha, man would have become spiritually hardened in his egotism and would have been doomed to the fate we described yesterday. But the blood that flowed on Golgotha gave an impetus for the gradual disappearance of the force that makes an egotist of the ego.

But every physical event has its spiritual counterpart, and as the blood flowed from the wounds on Golgotha there occurred a corresponding spiritual event: at this moment it happened for the first time that rays streamed forth from the earth into cosmic space, where formerly there had been none. We must visualize, then, as created at this moment, rays streaming from the earth into cosmic space. Darker and darker had the earth become with the passing of time—up to the event on Golgotha. Now the blood flows on Golgotha—and the earth begins to radiate light.

If in pre-Christian time some clairvoyant being had been able to observe the earth from a distant cosmic body he would have seen the earth's aura gradually fading out, and darkest immediately preceding the event on Golgotha. Then, however, he would have seen it shine forth in new colors. The deed on Golgotha suffused the earth with an astral light that will gradually become an etheric and then a physical light. Every being in the world continues to evolve. What is today the sun was first a planet; and just as the old Saturn became a Sun, so our earth, now a planet, will gradually develop into a sun. The first impetus in this direction was given when the blood flowed from the wounds of our Redeemer on Golgotha. The earth began to shine—for the time being astrally, visible only to the seer; but in the future the astral light will become physical light and the earth will be a luminous body, a sun body.

I have explained repeatedly that no new cosmic body comes into being through the agglomeration of physical matter, but through the creation, by a spiritual being, of a new spiritual center, a new sphere of activity. The formation of a cosmic body begins in spirit. Every physical cosmic body was first spirit. What our earth will ultimately become consists at present of the astral aspect of its aura which began to ray forth from the earth at the time we are here considering: that is the first nucleus of the future sun-earth. But what a man of that time would have perceived with his misleading senses is a phantom: that has no truth, it dissolves, it ceases to be; and the farther the earth moves toward its sun state, the more will this maya be consumed and perish in the fire of the sun. But through having been suffused at that time with a new force, through the newly created possibility for the earth to become a sun, it became possible as well for this same force to permeate man. This was the first impulse toward what I described yesterday: the radiating of the Christ force into the etheric human body; and thanks to the streaming in of this astral force it could start absorbing new vitality such as it will need in the distant future.

So if you will visualize the period in which the event of Golgotha occurred and then compare it with a later period—that is, if you compare a future condition of humanity with that which prevailed at the time of the event of Golgotha—you will find that at the time the Christ impulse intervened, the earth of itself had nothing left to infuse into the etheric bodies of men. Some time later, however, the etheric bodies of those who had found a contact with the Christ impulse were irradiated: men who understood the Christ absorbed the radiant force that has been in the earth ever since—the earth's new radiance. They have taken the light of Christ into their etheric bodies. The Christ light streams into the etheric bodies of men.

And here we must ask, What takes place, now that there is always something of the Christ light in human etheric bodies? What occurs in that part of the etheric body in which the Christ light has been received? What happens to it after death? What is it, in short, that gradually permeates the etheric body as a result of the Christ impulse? It is the possibility that was given at that time, as an effect of the Christ light, for something new to appear, something living and breathing and immortal, something that can never perish in death. While men on earth are still misled by the illusory image of death, this new factor will nevertheless be rescued from death, will have no part in it.

Ever since that time, then, the human etheric body has held something that is not subject to death, to the death forces of the earth. And this something which does not die with the rest, and which men gradually achieve through the influence of the Christ impulse, now streams back again—out into cosmic space; and in proportion to its intensity in man it generates a certain force that flows out into cosmic space. And this force will in turn create a sphere around our earth that is in the process of becoming a sun: a sort of spiritual sphere is forming around the earth, composed of the etheric bodies that have come alive. The Christ light radiates from the earth, but there is also a kind of reflection of it that encircles the earth. What is here reflected as the Christ light, appearing as a consequence of the Christ event, this is what Christ called the Holy Spirit. Just as the event of Golgotha provided the first impetus for the earth to become a sun, so it is true that beginning with this event the earth began to be creative, surrounding itself with a spiritual ring which, in turn, will in the future develop into a sort of planet circling the earth.

Thus a momentous process that commenced with the event of Golgotha has since been unfolding in the cosmos. When the Cross was raised on Golgotha and the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus, a new cosmic center was created. We were present when that occurred: we were present as human beings, whether in a physical body or outside this physical life between birth and death. That is the way new worlds come into being; and we must comprehend that while we behold the dying Christ we stand in the presence of the genesis of a new sun.

Christ espouses death, which on earth had become the characteristic expression of the Father Spirit. Christ goes to the Father and unites with His manifestation, death—and the image of death is seen to be false, for death becomes the seed of a new sun in the universe. If we feel this event, if we can sense this unmasking of death and realize that the death on the Cross becomes the seed from which a new sun will germinate, then we shall understand why mankind on earth must have felt and conceived of it as the supreme transition in human evolution.

There was once a time when men still possessed a vague, dim clairvoyance. They lived in a spiritual element; and as they looked back upon their lives—from their thirtieth to their twentieth year, from the twentieth to the tenth, and so on back to their birth—they knew that they had come to this birth from divine-spiritual heights. For them birth was not a beginning: as spiritual beings they saw not only their birth but their death as well, and they knew that something of spirit dwelt within them which this death could not touch. Birth and death in their present meaning did not exist as yet: they came later, and they acquired their untrue, deceptive form in the outer image of the Father. Death became the characteristic feature of this external aspect of the Father.

Then men, in contemplating death, saw it apparently destroying life, and death became more and more an image representing the contrast to life. Though life brought a large measure of suffering, death was considered the greatest suffering of all. What view of death must have been held by one who saw earth events from without, saw how these earth events were reflected in humanity before the appearance of the Christ? If he had descended from divine-spiritual heights as a higher being with views differing from those of men, he would have been constrained, in contemplating mankind, to speak as Buddha spoke. This Buddha had come forth from his royal palace where he had been reared, and where he had seen only what elevates life. Now, however, as he came forth, he saw a suffering human being, then an aged man, and finally even a dead man. These experiences wrung from him the utterance: “Sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering.” That is indeed the way it was felt by men; and in these words the common feeling burst forth from the great soul of Buddha.

Then Christ appeared. And then, after the lapse of another six hundred years—just as six hundred had passed between Buddha and Christ—there were those who understood, when envisioning the Cross and the dead Man upon it, that what hung upon the Cross was the symbol of that seed from which springs forth life in abundance. They had learned to sense the true nature of death. Christ espoused death, entered this death that had become the characteristic expression of the Father, united with this death; and from the union of Christ Jesus and death sprang the inception of a new life sun. It is a false picture that shows death as synonymous with suffering: it is maya, illusion. Death, if permitted to approach us as it did Christ, is in reality the germ of life; and in the course of future ages men will come to recognize this. What men will contribute to a new sun and a new planetary system will be proportionate to what they receive of the Christ impulse and then give of themselves in sacrifice, thus steadily adding to the radiance of the sun of life.

Here the objection might be raised, So says spiritual science; but how can you reconcile a cosmology of that sort with the Gospel?—Christ enlightened those who were His disciples; and in order to prepare them for the most comprehensive revelations He employed the method that is indispensable if the loftiest truths are to be adequately understood: He spoke to His disciples in parables or, as it is worded in the German Bible, in “proverbs” (Sprichwörter)—that is, in transcriptions and parables. Then came the time when the disciples, having steadily matured, believed themselves able to receive the truth without its being clothed in proverbs; and the moment arrives in which Christ Jesus is prepared to talk to His apostles without proverbs, without parables. The apostles craved to hear the name, the significant name, for the sake of which He had come into the world.

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. These things have I spoken unto you in parables: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in parables, but shall shew you plainly of the father.

Try to feel the moment approaching in which He would speak to His disciples of the Father.

At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray to the Father for you:
For the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.
I came forth from the Father ...

He had, of course, come forth from the Father's true form, not from the deceptive image.

I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

Now it dawns upon the disciples, whose understanding had ripened, that the world as it surrounds them is the expression of the Father, and that what is most significant precisely where the outer world is most densely shrouded in maya, in illusion, is equally the expression of the Father: that Death is the name for the Father. That is what came to them in a flash of comprehension. Only, the passage must be read aright.

His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no parable. Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.

Jesus answered them, Now ye believe. [1]

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.

These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

Did the disciples know whither He was about to depart? Yes, from now on they knew that He would go to meet death, to wed death.—And now read again what He said to them after they had learned the meaning of the words: “I came forth from death”—that is, from death in its true form, the life-Father—“and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And to this the disciples replied: “Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.”

Now the disciples knew that the true form of death bases in the divine Father Spirit; that death as it is seen and felt by men is a deceptive phenomenon, an error. Thus Christ reveals to His disciples the name of death behind which is hidden the fount of transcendent life. Never would the new life sun have come into being had not death entered the world and been overcome by Christ. Death, therefore, when contemplated in its true form, is the Father; and Christ came into the world because a false reflection of this Father had arisen in the aspect of death. Christ came to create the true form, a true image of the living Father-God. The Son is the issue of the Father, and His mission was to reveal the true form of the Father. Verily, the Father sent His Son into the world that the true nature of the Father be made manifest: life eternal, veiled behind temporal death.

All this is not a mere cosmology of spiritual science: it is what is needed to extract the full, profound import from the Gospel of St. John; and he who wrote that Gospel thereby established, so to speak, the loftiest truths of which he could say,

In these mankind will find sustenance for all future time.

And in proportion as mankind learns to understand and practice these truths it will attain to a new wisdom and will grow into the spiritual world in a new way. But as this will come about only by degrees, it was necessary that in the meantime the guides of Christian development should provide for the creation of what may be called auxiliary books to function side by side with the Gospel of St. John, books not intended only for the most willing and understanding—such as is the John Gospel, meant as a legacy of Christ for all eternity—but suitable for the immediate present.

Thus there appeared in the first place a book from which people of the first Christian centuries could learn, in the measure of their understanding, the essence of what they needed to comprehend the Christ event. Even here, of course, there were but few in proportion to the whole of mankind who could glean from this auxiliary book the exact nature of what it contained for them. This first book of its kind, not intended for the innermost circle but still for the chosen ones, was the Gospel of St. Mark. This Gospel embodies precisely those features that held an intimate appeal, so to speak, for a certain type of understanding then prevalent (we shall come back to this). Then it gradually became less intelligible, human comprehension turning more in the direction of seeing most clearly the full force of Christ in its inner value for the soul and in a certain contempt for the outer physical world.

Next followed a period in which men were imbued with the feeling: 'Worthless are all temporal goods; true riches are found only in the properly developed inner self of man. This was also the time in which, for example, Johannes Tauler wrote his book, Von armen Leben Kristi (The Pitious Life of Christ): the time in which the Gospel of St. Luke was the one best understood. Luke, a disciple of Paul, was one of those who gave Paul's own gospel a form adapted to the time, stressing the “pitious life” of Jesus of Nazareth, born in a stable among poor shepherds. We recognize das arme Leben Kristi as mirroring the account in the Luke Gospel, a second subsidiary book for the further development of humanity.

In our time there will be those who can best learn what they are able to understand, as it accords with our age, from the Gospel of St. Matthew. People of our period, though perhaps referring less frequently to the name “Matthew,” will nevertheless select more and more what corresponds with the Matthew Gospel. The time will come when people will point out that it is impossible to understand the super-sensible events that took place at the Baptism in the Jordan, as we have described them. That is an understanding which will come to many only in the future. We are approaching an epoch in which He Who, in the thirtieth year of His Life, received the Christ into Himself, will be increasingly thought of as“the simple man of Nazareth”—even by theological research.

Those who feel this way about it, those to whom the simple man of Nazareth is of supreme importance and who attach less significance to the Christ than to the lofty initiate—those, in short, who want Jesus of Nazareth—will feel the Matthew Gospel to be preeminently significant, at least in its import. A materialistically thinking age can say: We open the Matthew Gospel and find a genealogic record, a table of heredity that shows us the ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth chronologically. It runs from Abraham down through three times fourteen generations to Joseph; and we are told that Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on and so forth. It runs to Joseph and Jesus of Nazareth; and the reason this is stated is to make quite clear the possibility of tracing back to Abraham the physical line of heredity of that body into which Jesus of Nazareth, as an individual, had been born. Leave out Joseph, and the whole table becomes meaningless. To speak of a super-sensible birth in the face of this table robs the latter of every vestige of sense; for why should the writer of the Matthew Gospel take the trouble to trace a line of ancestry through three times fourteen generations if he intended to follow this by saying that in respect of the physical flesh Jesus of Nazareth was not descended from Joseph? The only way in which the Gospel of St. Matthew can be understood is by stressing the fact that through Joseph the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth was born into a body which had actually descended from Abraham. The purpose of this table was to emphasize the impossibility of omitting Joseph, within the meaning of the Matthew Gospel; and it follows that neither can Joseph be ignored by those who fail to understand the super-sensible birth in the sense of the Baptism in the Jordan.

But the Matthew Gospel was originally written in a community which placed the greatest value not upon Christ, but upon the individuality that stood before men in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the initiate. Underlying the Matthew Gospel was the initiate wisdom known to the Ebionite Gnostics, and this Gospel bases upon a document from that source as its model. Prime importance was placed on the initiate, Jesus of Nazareth; and all else connected with the matter becomes far clearer still by reason of its being embodied in the Ebionite gospel. But this is precisely what makes possible a certain approach to the Matthew Gospel—one which is not exactly demanded by it, for actually it is not implied, but which can be read into it: The Gospel of St. Matthew may be interpreted as implying that we are not dealing here with a super-sensible birth. On the other hand, what is presented in the Matthew Gospel may be regarded as the symbol of a God—one who is simply called a God, one who, as a God, is really only a human being—even though this was not what Matthew meant. But those who nowadays base their standpoint upon Matthew—and they will do so more and more—will interpret the matter in that way.

In order that no man wishing to approach the Christ may be denied the opportunity of doing so, the Matthew Gospel provides for those who are unable to rise from Jesus to Christ: it is a rung in the ladder which they can ascend to Jesus of Nazareth. The mission of spiritual science, however, is to guide men upward to an understanding of the Gospel of Gospels, the Gospel of St. John. Every other Gospel should be regarded as complementary to it. In the John Gospel are to be found the reasons for the existence of the others, and we shall understand these aright only by studying them on the basis of the John Gospel.

A study of the Gospel of St. John will lead to a comprehensive understanding of what took place on Golgotha; to an understanding of the Mystery by means of which death, in the untrue form it had assumed in human evolution, was refuted. And men will further learn to grasp the fact that through the deed of Golgotha, not only was it revealed to human cognition that death is in reality the source of life, but man was provided with an attitude toward death which permitted him to infuse more and more life into his own being, until ultimately it will become wholly alive—that is, until he will be able to rise from all death, until he has overcome death. That is what was revealed to Paul when he saw the living Christ on the road to Damascus—when he knew: Christ liveth—as he gazed with his newly found clairvoyance into what constituted the environment of the earth. As an Old-Testament initiate he knew that until then the earth had lacked a certain light, but now he saw that light in it; hence the Christ was present; hence also, He Who had hung on the Cross was the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus there came to Paul, on the road to Damascus, an understanding of what had taken place on Golgotha.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now, today we would like to add something about the question concerning Christianity. Unfortunately, I could not speak last Saturday because I had to go to Liestal. We have tried to say something about what can be described as the actual essence of Christianity, what Christianity has adopted in the development of humanity. We then spoke of the struggles that actually arose around Christianity in Europe and which, as I said, were essentially based on the fact that one party emphasized the father principle more, as did Christianity in the East, while the other party emphasized the son principle more, as did the Roman Catholic Church, and a third party, the Protestant Church, emphasized the spirit principle more.

It is actually difficult to talk about these things today because most people think: Is it worth arguing about such things in the world? Today, the world is concerned with completely different things that are worth fighting for; and the fact that people once waged war on each other in the most horrific way for the very reason that they emphasized one principle or the other is difficult for people to comprehend today. But, you see, gentlemen, one must also understand such things, because there will come a time when people will not be able to understand why people fought over today's issues! This will perhaps be in the not too distant future. And when you consider that, you will also understand why the older people fought over something completely different than today. But you should know what people fought for, because it still lives among us.

What then is the outward view that has been preserved in the strongest possible way from Christianity? The strongest view of Christianity was, for long periods, the dying Jesus – the cross, and on it the dead Jesus. Not right at the beginning of Christianity did people look at the dead Jesus in this way. If you go back to the very earliest times, you find that the most common and widespread image of Christ is one that shows Christ as a younger man with a lamb around his shoulders and as a shepherd. And that was called the Good Shepherd. In the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Christian centuries, that was actually the most widespread image, the Good Shepherd. And it was only in the sixth century AD that images began to appear depicting Christ hanging dead on the cross; as they say, depicting the Crucifixus, the crucified one. The first Christians did not actually depict the crucified one.

There is also something important behind this. You see, the first Christians still had the view that the Christ had come into Jesus from the sun, that the Christ is an extraterrestrial being. The whole thing was misunderstood later. Because the whole thing was later turned into the dogma of the so-called immaculate conception, according to which Jesus, when he was born, was conceived and born not in the ordinary human way. Only when this was no longer understood, that Jesus was a human being at first, albeit a very important human being, and that only in the thirtieth year of his life did the spirit, which is called the Christ, come into him as a sun spirit - at the time when this no longer understood this, on the one hand they conceived the idea of depicting the dead Christ on the cross, the dying Christ, and on the other hand they already spiritually placed the coming of Christ at the moment of birth. This was a misunderstanding that only arose in the sixth century. But that gives us a very, very deep insight. For between the time when Christians still depicted Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd and the time when he was depicted as the Crucified, a very specific fact lies in between, namely the fact that at a council it was decided that man does not consist of three parts, body, soul and spirit, but only consists of two parts, body and soul, and the soul, it was said, had some spiritual properties.

This is very important, gentlemen! You see, throughout the Middle Ages, trichotomy, the division of man into three parts, was considered a heretical view. No one who was orthodox was allowed to believe in the tripartite nature of man. One was not allowed to say: Man also has a spirit; but one had to say: Man has body and soul, and the soul has some spiritual qualities. But by virtually abolishing the spirit, the whole path of human beings to the spirit has been blocked, and only today must the science of the spirit arise again to restore to humanity what has been taken from it.

Above all, the first Christians realized that that which lives in them as Christ cannot be born and die at all. That is not something human. Man is born and dies. But the Christ, who has gone in Jesus during his lifetime, was not born in a human way, and when Jesus died on the cross, he could not have been touched by death either, but rather, just as a man puts on another robe and remains, he took on another form, namely a spiritual form. But if you want to depict something that is spiritual – you can't see that with your eyes – then you have to represent it figuratively. And the fact that the spirit watches over man, that the spirit is a good advisor to man, that is what they wanted to depict by depicting Christ Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

And something has remained, it is just that people today no longer understand it. It is very often the case that only part of an image remains. Even today, when speaking of Christ, one often says, “the Lamb of God.” This was seen in the images that were there in the first centuries; part of it, depicting the lamb that Christ had on his shoulders, has remained. And only this part has been retained. In older times, people were referred to by some part of their body. Let us suppose, for example, that there are such names. Someone is called Kappa – Cappa, which was once a small headdress. Certain people got their name from this headdress. If someone is called 'Eagle', it means that they once had an eagle in their coat of arms, and so on. Isn't that right? The name 'Lamb of God' also remained because it was a part of the older images.

Now, in the sixth century, all sense of the spirit had actually already disappeared, and the consequence of this was that people believed that they could only look at what had taken place in the human destiny of Christ Jesus. They did not look at the living Christ, who is spirit, but at the mortal man Jesus and interpreted it as if He were the Christ. Therefore, from the sixth century onwards, this event of dying became particularly important.

Yes, you see, materialism already plays a role here. And we see, especially when we follow the development of Christianity, how materialism develops even more. And as a result, many things came about in later times that would not otherwise have come about.

I have told you, gentlemen, that this knowledge, that the Christ is a being from the sun that lived in the man Jesus, is expressed by this sign, which can still be seen on the altar at every high mass: This is the Holy Sacrament, the monstrance (see drawing p. 128): the sun in the middle and the moon on which the sun is. As long as it was known that the Christ was a being from the sun, it made sense. For what is it that is inside the monstrance? It is caked flour. How could this caked flour come about? It could come about through the sun's rays falling on the earth, through the sun's light and warmth falling on the earth, through grain growing and flour being made from that grain. So that is a real product of the sun. It is really, if you want to put it that way, a body made of sunlight. As long as one knew that, the whole thing had a meaning.

Furthermore, the moon was depicted in this form because the crescent moon appears to be the most important thing. And I have told you: man has received the powers that give him his physical form from the powers of the moon. The whole thing had meaning as long as people knew how these things are. But these things are gradually losing all their meaning. I will tell you one thing that shows you the significance of such things.

Do you think that the Turks, that is, the Mohammedans, as I told you, again merely worshipped the one God, not the three figures; they again attributed everything to the Father God. What did they have to accept as a sign? Of course, the moon! That is why the Turks have their image: the crescent moon.

Christianity should know that in this symbol of theirs it has the one in which the sun conquers the moon. And that was mainly depicted by the first Christians: that the sun has conquered the moon through the Mystery of Golgotha. But what does that mean? You see, now everything is actually going haywire in the spiritual realm! Because if you understand what the image of the sun represents, you say to yourself: the one who knows about this solar image assumes that man has free will in life, that something can still enter into him that has a meaning for life. The one who only believes in the moon thinks that man has received everything at birth, that he can no longer make anything out of himself. Yes, but that is precisely the fatalism of the Turks! And the Turks actually know something about it. In some respects the Turks are cleverer than the Europeans, because the Europeans once had the sun as their sign, but have forgotten what it means.

Now, when you consider that in the 6th century they actually no longer knew anything about the spiritual Christ, then you will also understand why in the Middle Ages - in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, and then a little later - they suddenly began to argue: What does it actually mean, this thing called the Lord's Supper? It only means something to the one who accepts a picture of the spiritual. But they were no longer able to do that; so now they argued. Some said: On the altar in the church, the bread really does change into the body of Christ. The others did not believe this, because they could not imagine that the bread, which looked exactly the same afterwards as it did before, had become flesh. They could not understand this. And so those medieval disputes arose, which led to such terrible results. For those who said: It is all the same to us whether people understand the matter or not, we believe that the bread is real flesh – that was the one party that became Roman Catholics. The others said: We cannot believe that, but at most what happens can have the meaning, the symbolic meaning. – Those were the ones from whom Protestantism then arose.

And it was actually over this issue that all the religious wars of the Middle Ages broke out, which came to a head in the terrible Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648. This Thirty Years War began with Catholics and Protestants getting mixed up. As is well known, the Thirty Years War began with the so-called Defenestration of Prague. The imperial governors in Prague were thrown out of the window by the opposing party; they only fell, despite falling from the second floor, so well that it did them no harm because they fell on a dung heap! But the dunghill was not made of cow or horse dung, but of shredded paper and the like, because at that time in Prague there was an order that shredded paper, envelopes and so on were simply thrown out of the window. But it did serve a good purpose, because when Catholics and Protestants quarreled and the imperial governors Martinitz and Slawata, together with the secret writer Fabricius, were thrown out of the window – that was often done at the time, it was something that was not that uncommon – all three were saved. But that was when the Thirty Years' War started.

Of course, you must not believe that the entire Thirty Years' War was just about fighting out religious disputes. In that case, the Thirty Years' War would probably have ended earlier. What was added then were the disputes between the princes. They took advantage of the fact that people were attacking each other. One took the side of one party, the other that of the other, and then they pursued their own aims under the guise of religious disputes, so that the Thirty Years' War lasted for thirty years. But it really started for the reasons I have told you.

Well, you see, it was not until the Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, that it lasted into the 17th century; it was not so long ago that people fought over such things. And it was actually out of this dispute that Protestantism, the Protestant Church, grew.

You will now say: Yes, but if the spirit was actually abolished, how can you tell us that of the three divine beings, the Protestant, the Evangelical Church adopted the spirit? - Yes, gentlemen, it must be said that the Evangelicals did not know that they were worshiping the spirit, because the spirit had actually been abolished. They did not know it. But I have already told you: just because you are unaware of something, it does not mean that it is not there. And there was a spiritual activity going on in the Protestant Church, even if it was not a very large spiritual activity. It was just that the Protestants were unaware of it. You see, if there were no such thing as what the professors, for example, are unaware of, well, how much would there be in the world? Gentlemen, that is precisely the point: we must be clear that we can speak of something that a person does even if he knows nothing about it! And so, when it comes to the origin of Protestantism, we can already say that this third figure, the spirit, was actually the active one.

You can literally see materialism emerging there! The older people in Christianity did not need to argue that this flattened flour physically turns into real flesh, because it never occurred to them to think such a thing. It was only when they wanted to think everything materially that it was also thought materially. That is very interesting in general. Materialism actually has two forms: First, all spirituality was conceived materially, and only later was the spirit denied. That is actually the path that materialism takes.

It is now interesting to see how even later, even after the 6th century, a much more spiritual view of Christianity is present in Central Europe than later. Christianity first became materialistic in the south. In Central Europe there are two very beautiful poems. One of them originated in Alsace in the 9th century and is called Otfried's “Evangelienharmonie”. The other poem, however, originated in areas that are now Saxon and is called “Heliand”, savior. If you read the “Heliand”, you will notice one thing. You will say to yourself: Now, this monk – because it was a monk from a farming background who wrote the “Heliand” – has indeed described Christ Jesus, but he describes him in a very particular way; he describes him roughly as the Germans describe a duke who rides at the head of German masses of soldiers, fighting and conquering his enemies. When you read the “Heliand,” you feel you are in Germany, not in Palestine. Of course, it recounts the same events as the Gospels, but it does so as if Christ Jesus were actually a German duke, a German prince. And the deeds of Jesus are also told in this way.

Yes, gentlemen, what does that mean? It means that the man who wrote the “Heliand” was completely indifferent to the external facts that could once be seen with one's own eyes in Palestine; he did not want to describe them faithfully at all. He was indifferent to the external image. He wanted to describe the spiritual Christ and thought to himself: It does not matter whether he travels around the world in the human form of a German duke or in the form of a Palestinian Jew. So at the time when 'Heliand' was written, people in Central Europe still truly believed in the spiritual Christ, they had not yet become materialistic. In the south, this was already the case at that time; the Romance peoples, the Greek peoples, had already become materialistic. But in Central Europe there was still a certain sense of the spiritual, and so this Saxon monk who wrote the “Heliand” actually still described the Christ, only in the image of a German duke. From this you can see that even here in Central Europe one finds the possibility of proving that the Christ was at first conceived entirely spiritually, precisely as the Spirit of the Sun, as I described him.

And if one then goes into the character of the Christ in this Heliand, one finds that the main point of view is that the Heliand, the Christ, in this Saxon book is a “free man”, that is, he has the sun within him, not just the moon, so he is a free man.

It is really the case that the whole connection of the Christ with the world outside of Earth has simply been forgotten and is no longer recognized today.

But now I would like to tell you something else. If we go back to those mysteries that I told you about, which in ancient times were places of learning, religion and art at the same time, if we go back to these old mysteries, we find that festivals are celebrated in them that are connected with the year. In spring, the festival of the so-called resurrection was always celebrated. Nature also rises at Easter time. That is when the festival of resurrection was celebrated. People said to themselves: the human soul can celebrate a resurrection just as nature does. Nature has the Father. In spring, nature's powers become new. But in the human being, if he takes proper care of himself, if he works on himself, the powers of the soul become new. And that was what was striven for in the old mysteries, by the people who actually knew, by the people who were said to have wisdom, that the soul should have an experience which I might call a kind of springtime experience in human life. You see, a springtime experience, when you can say of yourself: Oh, what I knew before, it's all nothing! I am reborn! Once in a lifetime, the realization can dawn on you that you are reborn, that is, reborn out of the spirit. As strange as it may sound to you, in the whole of Asia Minor, people were divided into those who were born once and those who were born twice. Everywhere one spoke of twice-born people. Those who had been born only once were born through the powers of the moon and remained so throughout their entire lives. The others, the twice-born, had been taught in the mysteries, had learned something and had known: Man can free himself, man can follow his own forces. - But that was represented in the picture.

You can go back far, far: Everywhere around the springtime there is a particular festival where in the mysteries they depicted how a god, present in human form, dies and is buried, and then rises again after three days. That was a real depiction that was always given in the old mysteries in the springtime. People came together. The image of this god in human form was there. They depicted how the god died; they buried the image. After three days, the image was taken out of the grave again and carried in solemn procession through the area, and everyone shouted: The savior has risen again for us! During the three days in which the savior figuratively lay in the grave, they had a kind of mourning festival, and this was followed by a celebratory festival.

You see, gentlemen, that means a lot; because it means that what happened at Golgotha was always enacted in the mysteries every year.

When it is said in the Gospels that there was a cross on Golgotha, that Christ died there, that is a historical event. But the image of it was present throughout antiquity. And that is why the first Christians felt that what really happened was a fulfilled prophecy. And they said: Those who lived in the ancient mysteries were the prophets of what happened as the mystery of Golgotha.

So you see: even in ancient times there was, so to speak, a Christianity. Only that Christianity was not the Christianity of Jesus Christ, but it was a spiritual Christianity that was celebrated in the image.

You see, one of the most important saints of the Catholic Church is St. Augustine, who lived in the 4th to 5th century. This Saint Augustine was initially a pagan, then converted to Christianity and later became one of the most respected priests and saints of the Catholic Church. Now, in the writings of this Augustine, you will find a strange saying. He says: Christianity was already there before Jesus Christ; the ancient sages were already Christians, only they were not yet called Christians.

Yes, gentlemen, it is something tremendously significant that even in the time of Christianity it is admitted that what was present as Christianity in the ancient mysteries was only presented by Jesus Christ in the time when the mysteries were no longer present, so that it had to remain as a unified event for the whole earth.

And the awareness that Christianity had already existed in ancient paganism has also been lost. Materialism has simply destroyed an enormous amount of what mankind had already found. And in this image, where the resurrection of the dead human god was always depicted in springtime, the wise man of antiquity saw his own destiny depicted. He said: I must become like that; I must also develop a science within me by which I say to myself, death has only one meaning for that in me which has come into being through natural forces, but not for that which later came into being in me for the second time, which I acquire through my own human powers.

There was still something in the early Christianity where people said to themselves: Man must, in order to be immortal, awaken the soul within himself during life; then he is immortal in the true sense. Of course, a false view could not actually be opposed to something like that. But a false view did fight. For while in the first centuries Christianity was spread in such a way that people said: One must cultivate the soul of man so that the soul of man does not die -, later the church preached a different view: It no longer wanted man to take care of his soul, but it wanted to take care of his soul itself! The Church is supposed to take more and more care of the soul of the individual, not the individual himself. This has led to the fact that people no longer see the actual way in which the soul is properly cared for, namely, that the spirit is reborn in the soul, that the sun-like element is reborn. You cannot take care of the sun-like element in a materialistic way. How then could one provide for the soul in a materialistic way? Yes, one would have to equip an expedition and always bring from the sun what one should give to man! But of course one cannot do that. And so the whole thing was presented in a false way.

You see, gentlemen, everything I have to tell you shows you how, over time, materialism has actually become more and more widespread and how the spiritual in man has actually no longer been understood. Today it is already the case that this principle, not letting the soul of man take care of itself, but letting the church take care of the soul, has not yet led to the death of the human soul. But if the same principle were to continue, it would not be long before souls died with their bodies. Today, people's souls are still alive; they can still be awakened when a true spiritual science comes. In a century or two they could no longer be awakened if a spiritual science does not arise, if the old ways continue.

What would happen if materialism were to remain? Yes, you see, gradually this materialism would have to laugh at itself; because even in education one must proceed in a spiritual way. You cannot educate and teach without speaking of the spirit. But if it really comes to that, as it is already evident in some places, materialism will either have to laugh at itself when it speaks of the spirit, or it will have to become honest.

When I and some other anthroposophical friends had spoken at the congress in Vienna in 1922, an article was published afterwards that ended with the author saying, “We have to fight against the spirit!” He wanted to dismiss us by saying, “We have to fight against the spirit!” But if we honestly continued the fight against the spirit, where would it lead? Then one would say, if one honestly wanted to start educating a six-year-old child: Gosh, that's matter, that presupposes the spirit! Let's rather prescribe a powder or something else for the child to change its matter; then it will become clever, then it will know something! That is what comes out when materialism becomes honest. He should let children come to school, and, as one might vaccinate against smallpox today, so one child after another should be vaccinated with cleverness; because if cleverness is materialistic, then it must be vaccinated. So human children should be vaccinated with cleverness. That would make materialism honest. Because if someone says that he does not think with his soul and spirit, but with his brain – and the brain is a material substance – then one must also make the brain clever in a material way, not in a spiritual way. Materialism would end up in such terrible contradictions. The only way to save itself is to learn again to know something of the spirit. A spiritual science was bound to come in our time, because otherwise the human souls would die.

[ 1 ] Dr. Steiner: Have you any questions to-day?

[ 2 ] Questioner: What was the cause of the darkening of the sun for three hours at the time of Christ's death?

[ 3 ] Dr. Steiner: That, of course, is a most significant question and one which, as you may imagine, has occupied me very deeply. I can well believe that the questioner too considers it important, because it indicates that such things are really no longer credible to the modern mind. That is why the nineteenth century solved it simply by asserting: It is not true, it is only imagery and no great importance need be attached to it.—That, however, is wrong. Careful study of the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science leads to the discovery that at the time of Christ's death there was an eclipse of the sun, or at all events the sun was obscured to such an extent that when the death took place, darkness fell over the district. Such things should not be brushed aside and simply denied; quite obviously they call for explanation.

[ 4 ] Let me here remind you of something I have often mentioned in your presence. In ancient records you will everywhere find evidence that importance was attached to the time of the day, the time of the year, and so forth. No notice is taken of this to-day. In the New Testament a great deal is said about the miracles of healing performed by Christ, about the way in which He healed the sick. Emphasis is laid upon the fact that He adopted a definite practice in His acts of healing. In those days it was much easier to effect cures than it is to-day and this is a fact that is entirely ignored. Owing to the way in which humanity has developed—particularly in Europe—healing must start to-day from the body. But it was not always so. At the time when Christ lived on the earth, and above all in earlier epochs, it was still possible for healing to start from the soul. In a modern man the soul no longer has a very strong influence because as a result of upbringing and education his thoughts are entirely abstract. Thoughts of the kind that are universal to-day were absolutely unknown in those olden times. The human being was deeply and inwardly moved by what he thought. There was no such thing as “abstract, logical thinking.” Man's life of soul was quite different. To-day you may tell a human being something of supreme importance ... but it has no effect whatever upon his body because his soul is detached from the body. It is believed that the men of old were instinctively clairvoyant because they were not so closely bound up with their bodies, but this is simply not true; they were more deeply rooted in the body, they felt everything in the body itself and for this reason influences from the soul could work directly upon the body. When a particular name was uttered, a picture arose simultaneously before the soul. To-day ... well, a word may be uttered but no picture arises. In olden times a picture, definite and complete, arose before men and this picture would give them goose-flesh, cause a burst of laughter, or some other physical symptom; an immediate effect was produced in the body. Now this was made much use of in healing. But to be effective, the forces in the environment of a man must be used in the right way. That is why, when the Gospels are referring to Christ's acts of healing, we find the words: When the sun had set He gathered the sick and the suffering around Him. … “When the sun had set”—not, therefore, when the sun was shining in its full strength. If that had been the case, the words (which were addressed to the soul) would have been without effect. It was only when men came to Him in the evening twilight that the words could serve their purpose.

[ 5 ] Such things are ignored to-day but they are connected, nevertheless, with the life of man. Whether the sun is shining at the full, whether it is twilight, whether the season is spring, or autumn—all these factors have a mighty influence, And so it is, too, with other manifestations of nature. We see the life of Christ Jesus unfolding from the birth to the baptism in the Jordan and then through the three years until His death: everything drew to a climax. And the contributory factors were not the decree of the High Council alone, not the, revolution among the people alone, but also what was happening in the heavens and in the whole of nature!

[ 6 ] The Moon forces have an influence upon the human being during embryonic life which culminates in birth. Later on, the forces of the Sun and of other heavenly bodies have an influence upon him.¹ He is influenced by all the happenings of external nature.

[ 7 ] The attitude of people to-day to happenings in nature is really remarkable and is due to the fact that they never get away from their abstract thinking. It is known, for example, that after about eleven to twelve years, sunspots reappear in considerable numbers. But although it is known that a period of sunspots invariably coincides with unrest in some form on the earth, people cannot accustom themselves to take real account of the influence which plays down upon the earth from the super-earthly world and comes to expression in the sunspots. Nevertheless the influence is a reality! When it rains, human beings consciously abandon certain activities. When it is raining cats and dogs you cannot go on with gardening or work of that kind. There, you see, nature has an influence upon the conscious life of man. But upon his unconscious life, the whole surrounding universe of stars has a very great influence. Obviously, therefore, the effect of the sunlight upon man is by no means the same when the Sun is partly obscured.

[ 8 ] It cannot be said that in this way man's freedom is affected. But wherever deeper, spiritual laws come into consideration one must build on these in freedom, just as securely as a man, when he is on the first floor of a house, assumes that the floor will not develop a hole and precipitate him down to the ground floor. The laws of nature must be taken into account, also the great laws which rule outside in the universe.

[ 9 ] The deep sorrow caused in the hearts of certain men by what came to pass in Palestine at that time was accompanied by anguish in the world of nature. The anguish in human hearts and the anguish in nature were simultaneous. Just as the blood flows in the body and man's health is dependent on this blood, so do the living forces contained in the sunlight flow into the blood.

[ 10 ] Think of this.—A man dies on some particular day. Examination of his blood some two months or so before death would reveal to careful scrutiny that it is already on the way to becoming lifeless. Just as before the death of a human being the blood is gradually becoming lifeless, so—even at the time of Christ's birth—what lives in the light was already on the way to that condition of darkness which set in when the death actually took place. There was a close and intimate connection between happenings in nature and the life of Christ. And it may be said that just as Christ consciously chose twilight as the time for healing the sick, so His unconscious depths of soul chose the darkening of the Sun as the time of death. That is how one must picture these things in order to interpret them truly; their meaning can only be suggested in a delicate and intimate way for they do not lend themselves to crude explanation.

[ 11 ] Question: Have the Jews, as a people, fulfilled their mission in the evolution of humanity?

[ 12 ] Dr. Steiner: Discussion on this subject is unfortunately all too apt to lead to propagandism. But what must be said quite objectively on the subject has nothing whatever to do with propaganda in any shape or form.

[ 13 ] The way in which the development of the Jewish people proceeded in olden times was a most important preparation for the subsequent rise of Christianity. Before Christianity came into the world, the Jews had a deeply spiritual religion but, as I have told you, it was a religion which took account only of the spiritual law of nature.—If a Jew were asked: Upon what does the coming of spring depend?—he said: Upon the will of Jehovah!—Why is so-and-so an unrighteous man?—Because Jehovah wills it so!—Why does famine break out in a country?—Because Jehovah wills it!—Everything was referred to this one God. And that was why the ancient Jews did not live at peace with the peoples around them, whom they did not understand and who did not understand them. The neighbouring peoples did not worship this one and only God in the same way but recognised spiritual beings in all the phenomena of nature—a multiplicity of spiritual beings.

[ 14 ] These many spiritual beings are actually present in nature and anyone who denies their existence denies reality. To deny that there are spiritual beings in nature is just as if I were to say now that there is not a single person in this room!—If I brought in a blind man and you were not laughing loudly enough for him to hear, he might believe me. Deception in these things occurs very readily.—Friedrich Nietzsche's sight was very poor and when he was a professor in Basle only a few dilatory students came to listen to his lectures although they were extremely interesting. Nietzsche was always deeply sunk in thought as he went to the desk and proceeded to deliver his lectures. He lectured on one occasion when not a single person was present but because his sight was so bad he only noticed this when he was going out of the lecture-hall! In the same way a blind man could be made to think that a room is empty.—People disbelieve in spiritual forces and influences because they have been blinded by their education and all that happens in modern life.

[ 15 ] It is important for man to realise that he has a great deal to do with these myriad nature-spirits; but there is a power within him that is mightier than anything wrought by these nature-spirits. This is the basis of the conception of the ONE God, the Moon-God. The Jews came first to the recognition of this one God and repudiated all other spiritual beings in the phenomena of nature. They acknowledged the one God, Jahve or Jehovah. Jahve means, simply: I AM.

[ 16 ] Now this has been a very important factor in world-history. Think of it: veneration of the one and only Godhead is accompanied by the disavowal of all other spiritual beings ... Suppose two peoples are at war in spite of the fact that each of them recognises the one God; only one of the two peoples can be victorious. The victors say: Our God has given us the victory.—If the other side had gained the victory, the same would have been said. But if the same God has allowed the one people to be victorious and the other to be defeated, then this God has Himself been defeated. If Turks and Christians have the one God and both pray to this one God to bring them victory, they are asking the same God to defeat Himself. The real point is that one cannot, with truth, speak of a single Divine-Spiritual Being. In daily life, too, it is the same: somebody wants it to rain and prays for rain ... somebody else wants the sun to shine and prays for this on the selfsame day. Well ... it just doesn't make sense! If people noticed this there would be greater clarity about such matters—but they do not notice it. In the great things of life human beings often lapse into a thoughtlessness which they would not entertain in small things. Nobody, presumably, will put salt and sugar into his coffee at the same time; he will put in the one or the other, not both. Generally speaking, men are very lax about clarity of thought—and this lies at the root of the many disorders and confusions in life ...

The Jews introduced what is known as Monotheism, the belief that there is but the one God.

[ 17 ] I once said to you very briefly that Christianity thinks of three Divinities: God the Father, living in all the phenomena of nature; God the Son, working in man's free spiritual activity; and God the Holy Spirit, who awakens in man the consciousness of having within him a spirituality that is independent of the body. Three distinct spheres are pictured. If there were not three spheres it would have to be assumed that by the same resolve this one God allows the human being to die and then wakens him to life again. If there are Three Divine Persons, death belongs to the sphere of one Godhead, passage through death and beyond to another, and the awakening in spirit to yet another. Christianity could not do otherwise than picture the spiritual Godhead in three Persons. (In three Persons: this is not understood to-day but the original meaning was that of threefoldness, the Divine manifesting in three forms.)

[ 18 ] Now because Judaism conceived only of this one God, it could make no image of the Godhead but could only grasp the Divine with the innermost forces of the soul, with the intellect. It is easy to understand that this led to an intensification of human egoism; for man becomes remote from what is around him if he sees the Spiritual only in and through his own person. This has produced a certain folk-egoism in the Jewish world—there is no denying that it is so; but for this very reason the Jews are by nature adapted to assimilate what is not pictorial; they have less talent for the pictorial. If a Jew becomes a sculptor, he will not achieve anything very great, because this is not where his talent lies; he does not possess the gift of pictorial representation, nor does he readily develop it. But if a Jew becomes a musician he will generally be a very fine one, because music is not a pictorial art; it does not take visual form. And so you will find great musicians among the Jews but—at the time when the arts were at their prime—hardly ever great sculptors or painters. The style in which the Jews paint is quite different from that of Christian or oriental artists. The actual colour in a picture painted by a Jew has no very great significance; what it is that is being expressed, what the painter wishes to say by means of the picture—that is the essential. Judaism is concerned above all with the non-pictorial, with bringing into the world that which transpires within the human “I.”

But to maintain this adherence to the one God is not as easy as it seems, for if such adherence is not strongly forced upon them, men readily become pagans. It is among the Jews that this tendency has been least of all in evidence. Christianity, on the other hand, tends easily in the direction of paganism. If you observe closely you will find many indications of this. Think, for example, of how ceremonies are revered in Christianity. I have told you that the Monstrance actually depicts the Sun and the Moon. The meaning of this is no longer known but men unenlightened in this respect actually pray to the Monstrance, they pray to something external. Men are easily inclined to pray to something external. And so in the course of the centuries Christianity has developed many pagan characteristics, whereas in Judaism the opposite has been the case.

[ 19 ] This is most obvious of all in one particular field. Fundamentally speaking, Christians of the West—those who came from Greece, Rome and Central Germany—were almost incapable of continuing the principle of ancient medicine because they were no longer able to perceive the spiritual forces contained in the remedial herbs. But Jews who came from the East, from Persia and so forth, saw the Spiritual—that is to say their One Jehovah—everywhere. The Jews played a tremendously important part in the development of medicine in the Middle Ages; the Arabians were occupied more with developing the other sciences. And whatever medical knowledge came through the Arabians had been elaborated with the help of the Jews. That is why medicine has become what it is to-day. Medicine has, it is true, retained a certain abstract spirituality but it has assumed, so to speak, a “monotheistic” character. And if you observe medicine to-day you will find that with few, very few exceptions, all kinds of properties are ascribed to every sort of medicament! The exact effect which a particular medicament will produce is no longer known with certainty any more than Judaism knew how the myriad nature-spirits work. The abstract, Jehovah-influence has made its way into medicine and remains there to this day.

[ 20 ] Now it would be natural if the number of Jewish doctors in the different countries of Europe were proportional to the population. I am not for one moment saying—I beg you not to misunderstand me—that this should be adjusted by law. It would never occur to me to say such a thing. But in the natural course one would expect to find Jewish doctors in proportion to the number of Jews. This is certainly not the case. In most countries a relatively far greater number of Jews become doctors. This is a survival from the Middle Ages. The Jews still feel very drawn to medicine because it is in keeping with their abstract thinking. This abstract, Jehovistic medicine fits in with their whole mode of thinking. Anthroposophy alone, in that it takes account of the diverse nature-spirits, can recognise the forces of nature in the different herbs and mineral substances and so again establish this knowledge on sure foundations.²

[ 21 ] The Jews worshipped the one God Jehovah and men were thereby saved from wholly losing their way in polytheism. A natural consequence has been that the Jews have always kept themselves distinct from other men and so too—as always happens in such a case—have in many respects evoked dislike and antipathy. The right attitude to take to-day is that in the times to come it will not be necessary to segregate any particular culture in order to prevent its dissipation—as the Jews have been doing for centuries—but that this practice must be superseded by spiritual knowledge. The relation between the single Godhead and the multiplicity of spiritual beings will then be intelligible to men and no one people need be under the sway of subconscious impulses. That is why from the very outset I was apprehensive when the Jews, not knowing which way to turn, founded the Zionist movement. The attempt to set up a Jewish State denotes a decidedly reactionary drift, a retrogression that leads nowhere and runs counter to progress. A very distinguished Zionist with whom I was on friendly terms once told me about his ideal in life, which was to go to Palestine and found a Jewish kingdom there. He was, and still is, taking a very active part in the attempt to bring this about and he holds an important position in Palestine. I said to him: Such a cause is not in keeping with the times; what the times demand is something with which every human being can be allied without distinction of race, nation, class and so forth—that is the only kind of cause one can whole-heartedly support to-day. Nobody can expect me to join the Zionist movement, for there again one portion of humanity is being separated off from the rest. For this quite simple, natural reason, such a movement to-day cannot prosper in the real sense of the word—it is essentially retrogressive ... The advocates of such movements often use a remarkable argument. They say: But the course of history has shown that men do not really want the “human-universal”; they desire everything to develop on the basis of race.

[ 22 ] The conversation of which I have just told you took place before the Great War of 1914–18. And a factor leading up to that War was men's refusal to accept the great principle of the human-universal. The fact that men set their faces against this principle and wanted to separate from one another, to develop racial forces and interests, ultimately led to the outbreak of that War. Thus the greatest disaster of this twentieth century was due to an urge that is also present in the Jews.—And so one can say: Since everything that the Jews have achieved could now be achieved consciously by all human beings, the Jews would serve their own interests best if they let themselves be absorbed into the rest of mankind, be merged in the rest of mankind, so that Judaism, as a race or people, would come to an end. That would be in the nature of an ideal—but many Jewish habits and customs, and above all the hatred meted out to them, still militate against it. These are the kind of impulses that must be overcome and they will not be overcome if everything remains the same as it has been in the past. If the Jews feel hurt when they are told, for example: you have little talent for sculpture ... they can say to themselves: It is not necessary for every race of people to be sculptors; with their own particular faculties they can achieve something in a different domain! The Jews are not naturally gifted for sculpture. One of the Ten Commandments decrees: “Thou shalt make no graven image of thy God ...” it is because the Jewish people are averse to making any picture or image of the Supersensible. Now this is bound to lead back to the personal element.

[ 23 ] It is quite easy to understand this.—If I make an image or a picture, even if it is only in the form of a description as often happens in Spiritual Science, another person may impress it on his memory, learn from it, see truth in it, think what he likes about it. But if I make no image, my own personal activity must be in operation; the thought does not separate itself from me. For this reason it has a personal character. So it is in Judaism. Men must learn to perceive the Spiritual in their fellow-men. The Jewish world is still dominated by the racial impulse. The Jews marry among themselves, among their own people; their attention is still focused upon the racial, not upon the spiritual.

[ 24 ] Therefore to the question: “Have the Jewish people fulfilled their mission in the evolution of human knowledge?” the answer is: They have fulfilled their mission, for in earlier times the existence of a people who brought a certain form of monotheism into being was a necessity. To-day, however, what is required is spiritual knowledge. The mission of the Jewish people has been fulfilled. Hence this particular mission is no longer a necessity in evolution; the only right course is for the Jews to intermix with the other peoples.

[ 25 ] Question: Why was it that the Jewish people were destined to live in exile?

[ 26 ] Dr. Steiner: It is important to bear in mind the whole character of this “exile.” The Jewish people among whom Christ died were living at that time among people of quite a different kind, namely, the Romans. And now, suppose that the Roman conquest of Palestine had been complete; suppose they had killed everybody they wanted to get rid of and turned out the rest. Suppose that already at that time the Jews had intended or felt the urge to intermix with the other peoples ... what would have happened? Well ... the Romans would have captured Palestine and a number of Jews would have been put to death; others—as one says to-day in every country—would have been expelled and would have been able to continue their existence somewhere or other outside Palestine.

[ 27 ] But the Jews had neither the intention nor the urge to intermix with the other peoples; on the contrary, wherever they were, even when there were only a few of them, they always lived among themselves. They scattered far and wide; and only because they lived exclusively among themselves, intermarried among themselves, has it been noticed that, as Jews, they constitute a foreign element. The idea of an exile would otherwise not have arisen. It was this natural urge in the Jews that gave rise to the idea of their exile. It is all part of the intrinsic character of Judaism. And posterity is now astonished that the Jews were dispersed, were obliged to live as strangers. This has happened nearly everywhere. Other peoples intermixed and so were unnoticeable. By its very nature, Judaism has held tenaciously together. In this particular connection one is obliged to say that because human beings have held together, attention has been called to things that would not, otherwise, have been noticed.

[ 28 ] It is grievous and heartbreaking to read how in the Middle Ages the Jews lived in the ghettoes, in quarters of the towns where alone they were permitted to dwell. They were not allowed to go into the other parts of the towns; the gates of the ghettoes were locked, and so forth. But these things are talked about because it was noticed that the Jews in the ghettoes clung tenaciously together, lived entirely among themselves. Other men, too, have had equally terrible things to endure, although in a different way. The Jews stayed in their ghettoes, clung together there and people knew that they were not allowed to come out of their quarters. But just think of it.—Other men who were forced to work every day from early morning until late evening could not come into the towns either, although there were no gates to keep them out. Their sufferings, too, have been great. It must be admitted, therefore, that such things are often based solely upon their outer appearance ... they are based, as are many things in world history, upon outer appearance.

[ 29 ] The time has come when these things must be penetrated by the light of reality. And here we are led to the conception that when a destiny is fulfilled it is—to use an Eastern expression—karma, it is inner destiny. The characteristics of the Jews themselves has helped to give the story of exile the form it has assumed; the Jews are a tenacious people, they have held their own in foreign lands; and that is why in later times this has been so noticeable and is talked about to this day.

[ 30 ] On the other side, the natural result of all this is that the Jews are differentiated from other peoples and they are accused of all sorts of things of which the causes are not known. Does it not happen that if, in some district where people are superstitious, a man is murdered by an unknown hand and an unpopular Jew happens to live there, the whisper goes round that at Easter-time the Jews need human blood for their rites—therefore it is they who have killed the man ... The reason why such things are said is because the Jews are differentiated from the others; but the Jews themselves have done a great deal to cause this state of affairs.

[ 31 ] In considering these matters to-day it is essential to lay stress upon the human-universal, in contrast to the racial principle.

[ 32 ] Question: What was the significance in world-history of the seventy souls of the original family of Israelites?

[ 33 ] Dr. Steiner: Peoples of diverse character have lived on the Earth since ancient times. From the present age onwards, this diversity ceases to have real meaning, for as I have said, the human-universal must become the essential principle. Nevertheless if we study the earlier phases of the evolution of mankind we find the population of the Earth divided into all kinds of different peoples. The Spiritual is a living reality in the phenomena of nature; the Spiritual is also a living reality in the peoples of the Earth. In every people there is a guiding Folk-Spirit. As I have said in my book, Theosophy, “Folk-Spirit” is not merely an abstract term. When one speaks today of the French people and the rest, what does this suggest to the materialistic thinking of to-day? It suggests an accumulation of some 42 millions of human beings in the West of Europe—a pure abstraction; the traits and qualities of the people in question are a very secondary consideration. But it really is not so! Just as the seed lives in the plant, so something seed-like exists, which lives in the spirit of a people and then unfolds. A Spirit, a real Being, lives and works in the whole people.

[ 34 ] I have told you that the mission of the Jews in human history was to spread the belief in the One Godhead, and it will be clear to you that it was necessary for them, as a people, to be prepared for this. Therefore it came about that when the Jewish people originally came into existence, the several Folk-Spirits, each of whom worked individually in a particular people, all concerned themselves with the Jewish people. Thinking of the different peoples, we say: Indians—Indian Folk-Spirit; Egyptians—Egyptian Folk-Spirit; then Greek Folk-Spirit, Roman Folk-Spirit, and so on. Each Folk-Spirit had to do with a particular people. (Drawing on blackboard.) But if we take the Jewish people, then, in that corner of the Earth called Syria where the Jews had their home, the influences and will of all the Folk-Spirits operated in this one people.

[ 35 ] Let me try to make this clear by a simple analogy.—Imagine that each of you is in your own family circle, attending to its affairs. Each of you has a particular sphere of activity. So it was in the case of these Folk-Spirits.—But now, suppose you want to support, let us say, the cause and interests of the workers as a body: if that is so you will not remain in your own circle but you will hold a meeting and discuss among yourselves what proposal shall be put forward by you all, acting as a whole. And so we may say: In the peoples other than the Jews, each of these Folk-Spirits worked as it were in his own sphere; but what the Folk-Spirits achieved through the Jewish people was the outcome of a spiritual assembly. This influence worked with varying strength upon the members of the Jewish people. The Bible gives an indication of this when it speaks of seventy Folk-Souls entering into the people of Israel. All the Folk-Souls were in operation. This strong and potent influence has in a certain respect made the Jews into a cosmopolitan people and accounts for the tenacity that has remained characteristic of them. No matter where they might be, they were always able to gather together and preserve Judaism, simply because they had everything within them.

[ 36 ] It is very remarkable how Judaism has everything within it. In Orders or Societies of Freemasons, Oddfellows and the like, in which there is no new spiritual knowledge but an antiquated kind of knowledge they themselves no longer understand, you will find in the very words of the rites, elements deriving from all kinds of different peoples: Egyptian rites and words, Assyrian and Babylonian words and signs—but especially elements from the Jewish Kabbala and so forth.

[ 37 ] In this respect Judaism is truly cosmopolitan; it adapts itself to everything but also preserves its original impulse which is still alive within it. The same is true of the Hebrew language in which there is great richness of content, both spiritual and physical. Every Hebrew word is always full of meaning. It was a peculiarity with the Jews to write only the consonants; later on, the vowels were indicated by means of signs. The vowels themselves were not written; everybody might pronounce them in his own way, so that one man said: J-e-h-o-v-a ... another said: J-e-h-e-v-a ... a third said: J-e-h-a-v-e ... a fourth, J-o-h-a-v-e.—The vowel sounds were pronounced as they were felt. And that is why such a designation as the name “Jehova” which had been instituted by the priests in this particular form, was called the “unutterable Name” ... because it was not permissible to make arbitrary use of the vowels.

The very tenacity which characterised Judaism was an indication of the way in which the several Folk-Souls worked upon this one people. When you see the Jews in different countries you will need very keen perception to be able to recognise those Jews who have really mingled with the other peoples. You know, of course, that the most important statesman of the nineteenth century was a Jew. Jews who have really merged into the other peoples are no longer distinguishable from them. In a sentence spoken by a Jew, an experienced person will at once recognise the typical Jewish style—if, that is to say, there is no imitation which is a very common practice to-day. But the Jews seldom imitate. It is noticeable that a Jew invariably takes his start from something that is inwardly fixed or registered in a concept. This is very characteristic and it is connected with that assembly of the Folk-Souls and their co-operation. To this day, when a Jew makes a statement, he believes that it must be unconditionally valid. He proceeds on the basis of individual decision. It is really very interesting! Suppose a number of people—three, four, five—are together; one is a Jew, the other four are not. The men are representatives of a community of one kind or another. (I am not telling you about an imaginary situation but one which I have actually experienced) ... In this community, people have diverse views. Now these five men, of whom only the fifth is a Jew, begin to speak. The first says: It is very difficult to bring all these people into any harmony; the only thing to do is to bring persuasion to bear upon the minority and then upon the majority so that a compromise is reached. (That, after all, is how compromises are made—by people talking among themselves.) The second man says: Yes, but I have lived among the people, who compose the minority and I know how difficult it is to persuade them! The third, a representative of the minority, says: We don't want to have anything to do with it; it just won't work! The fourth man says: After all, one has to take one side or the other. When these four have spoken the Jew begins: All this is futile! Concept of compromise: compromise consists in balance being reached among different opinions and in certain people giving way.—You see, he comes out with an abstraction: “Concept of compromise”; he does not start from any particular point, but leaving out the article, begins: Concept of compromise ... thereby demonstrating his inborn tenacity. When somebody says: What, exactly, is this concept of compromise? ... he already has a mental picture of some kind. But the Jew does not begin in this way; he says: Concept of compromise!—This is an example of the Jehovistic conception: Jehovah says ... No thought is given to how it works out in a particular instance, but what has been registered and fixed in a concept is simply laid down as a principle. That is why the Jew always thinks he can develop everything out of the concept. As long as the Jews keep tenaciously among themselves, things will naturally remain as they are; once the Jews have merged into other peoples they will lose the habit of saying: “Concept of compromise!” ... and they will have to be in line with the others. All this is connected with the way in which the Folk-Souls have worked upon them.

• 1. See the previous lecture.
• 2. See: Spiritual Science and Medicine. Twenty lectures given by Rudolf Steiner to doctors and medical students. Dornach, 21st March to 9th April, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

[Dearly beloved present]

After we have been able to see from our previous observations how the then prevailing mystery views were used in the formation of Christianity, today we want to look at two main representatives of early Christianity to see how they placed themselves in the whole development, in the formation process.

There is no doubt that Paul saw in Christ the mediator between God and man, a personality at such a high level of the development of existence that this person undoubtedly overcame death in Paul's opinion and really appeared to him in a spiritualized body in the hour of his conversion. That is Paul's faith. This is also what gave him the confidence to teach. Convinced of the mediator between God and man, of the risen Jesus Christ, he went out and preached the gospel.

Where did the components [of these teachings] come from, which presuppose a very specific philosophical conception, and especially those which came to us as a reinterpretation of the [ancient initiation] rituals? Where is the origin of the life of Jesus to be found? We can certainly say: within the sermons preached to the large Christian community in the first century. Within it, Paul probably did not hold the view that we encounter in the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus is the second form of God who became man. Paul never held this strictly metaphysical, theosophical view. But John [did]. Since the Apocalypse is undoubtedly from John, we are dealing with a spiritualized personality in the school of John, which understands Christ as God incarnate - not merely as the mediator between man and God, not merely as an exemplary personality - but we are dealing with a spiritualized personality in the personality that is based on John. We see a spiritualized personality taking hold.

We know that John spent time in Ephesus, that he wrote his most important writings there and then had a relationship with the presbyter John. Whether the teachings of the Logos are taken from Egyptian-Greek philosophy is more or less irrelevant to us. But it is clear that the metaphysical-theosophical conception came from John.

There was a whole series of Christian communities in Ephesus and Asia Minor. There were certainly many more than seven. Strictly speaking, the Apocalypse is only addressed to seven churches to whom the teaching is to be revealed. When John comes to Ephesus, he plays a very special role. He is one of the most important personalities. He doesn't actually have any special influence in the administration of the church. The administrators are completely different. If one such church leader dies, another is simply elected without any thought of putting John at the head. All the statements that we know from this time indicate that there was a certain opposition [to Paul] - but not conflict - that John's direction and Pauline Christianity must have gone side by side. This is a very important fact. It can only be explained by the fact that, in view of the completely different Jesus figure in John's Gospel and in view of something else that I will say later, we see in John's school a special school [in which was taught] what was not preached to the great masses. We even know that John's teachings were first considered dangerous for the masses. In the school of John we are probably dealing with a kind of secret school, a mystical community, from which the Gospel of John emerged and which also influenced the Synoptic Gospels. It was not written down in the form of history, but only the teachings were written down. The language became the universe. But the story was not written down until the end of the first century at the earliest.

This indicates that we are dealing with the great

Christian community in Ephesus and the surrounding area - and with a mystical theosophical school of John. Everything that we have in terms of historical-allegorical moments in Christianity emerges from this school of John, while in Pauline Christianity we have nothing other than the Christ who died for humanity and what he taught, including that he introduced the communion of the Lord's Supper. That was the common bond by which the Christians of that time recognized each other.

The fact that we are dealing with a mystical church can be seen from the fact that we are dealing with seven churches [in the Apocalypse]. Right at the beginning of the Apocalypse we are dealing with an allegorical school, while in the Gospel of John we are dealing with a mystical-theosophical school. The school of John was not the only one. We may get to know another one today, if there is still time.

So what came into Christianity through the St. John school? The things I have already mentioned. The resurrection of Lazarus, which is nothing other than the representation of an initiation process. These [things] come from schools that were very familiar with the mystery rites. This raising of Lazarus is undoubtedly part of a secret school, and [it was not included in the Synoptic Gospels]. The facts speak for this.

What we need to look at now is: Within the secret school must have arisen what is called the Apostles' Creed. This is nothing other than a result of the mystery cults[, those mystery cults which can be read in the presentation which I have given to the members. Those who have embarked on the path of initiation have had to make a profession of faith, into the meaning of which they have been initiated. I would like to outline such a creed for you. It cannot be made up arbitrarily, but is based on what has been handed down to us:

1. [The person to be initiated] must first believe in a supreme deity, because the deity is deeply hidden, but a perspective opens up for those who want to walk the highest path to the [mysteries]. [God] is the Father of all things. That was the first article.

2 Then he has to believe in the second Logos. The first Logos was the Father himself, who then entered into things. This is how he came to take the form of the second Logos.

The second Logos is therefore a kind of image of God, a spiritual reflection of God. It descends and takes on material form. This is called "the absorption of God in a material existence. It condenses and takes on material form. The world at large is nothing other than the materialized second Logos, which develops up to the human soul in order to find its way back to God from there.

When man searches through matter, he finds the spirit in matter. However, this is nothing other than the spirit that previously entered matter. This descent is presented to us mystically in the figures of Dionysus, in the various mystical figures such as Osiris, Isis and so on. In the mythological processes we have the various transformations of this process. In short: I believe in the materialized Logos.

[B-] Why did God make this sacrifice of materialization? Why did he descend? It means the whole process of development itself. The world would not be there. The Initiator professes this. The Logos has descended into matter and is now in its ascent again.

This general view was repeated microcosmically, as it were, in every single person. There was the view that the same procedure takes place in man as took place with God.

The initiation cults were there to make this particularly clear to the person being initiated. As a rule, such mystery cults were held near lakes. And in Athens they were also held near ponds. The lake, the water - as we know from the Egyptian initiation ritual - were regarded as a symbol of material existence. The descent into material existence was to be reflected by those seeking initiation [by descending into the water]. Water was regarded as a symbol of material existence. That is why this cult was held near lakes.

Something very strange happened. You can find this if you follow the Apostles' Creed, which was established by the various councils: The whole processes that are described there in the Creed are nothing more than the same points, the same processes, which can also be found in the initiation process. The Apostles' Creed still clearly shows the initiation process. If you leave out [for the time being] only the words "suffered under Pontius Pilate", you will see that it is an initiation process. A confession is made of God, then of the materialized God, the second Logos, then of the ascent [of the Initiator]. Three days in sleep, the descent to hell, to be awakened again on the third day and then to emerge from the process as an initiate.

However, there is the difficulty that on the one hand we have the second Logos, Christ Jesus - the Gospel of John identifies Jesus with the second Logos - and on the other hand the personality of Jesus, so that we can assume that [in the creed] we are dealing with a reinterpretation of the second Logos into the personality of Jesus. So [the second Logos] has been Christianized.

Now I come to a hypothesis - I will call it a hypothesis for now - I mean the words: "suffered under Pontius Pilate". We have them from the writings of the time, but we know nothing of the events. We know that Pilate existed, if not in Jerusalem, then at least in the Assyrian Empire. But that cannot convince us that a very strange process must have taken place. So we cannot help but see the Apostles' Creed as a transformed initiation rite. The second Logos has been transformed into a personality. So how does "suffered under Pontius Pilate" come into it? You only need to omit a single letter from Pontius and instead of Pontius just say Pontus and take Pontus in the sense of the sea. This may seem a little daring. But such insertions - don't call them forgeries, because they are made in good faith - occurred every now and then in the first centuries. This confession describes the various stages of initiation according to the Mystery rituals. However, these were held in various individual places, almost always on a lake. It has also always been said that these things took place at some lake here or there. We would therefore be quite surprised if the fact that the event took place on a lake were not to be found in a mystery ritual. We therefore have reason to assume that we are dealing with the [view of an initiatory process], so that it would mean nothing other than the descent [of the Logos] into matter or the undergoing of the process of initiation.

We are therefore dealing with an application of the ritual and with a fusion of what was taught and what flowed into Christianity from various cults. In the most diverse places, the most diverse cults have also been cultivated within Christianity.

Paul started out from a teaching that pointed towards Judaism. He also accepted Gentiles, but always paying attention to what was already there. He also says: "The Jews put more emphasis on signs, the Greeks more on wisdom. I treat both the way they want to be treated." He did not create something that perplexed people, but he shaped what he had before him. To a much greater degree, the others seem to have done the same. To imagine that Christianity was a uniform doctrine from the beginning would be a childish notion.

Paul and Peter were highly divided, and there were also disputes in the churches. Paul often tried to settle such disputes. So [early Christianity] was not a strictly uniform doctrine, but one could see the rays coming together from the most diverse points. The centralization took place much later.

In addition to the popular Christianity of Paul, there was also an esoteric view, the school of John. We owe the related information to a series of written works. They emerge in the sixth century AD and later form the basis of various church writers. Later they are attributed to the [Areopagian writer] Dionysius, who is said to have been converted to Christianity by Paul in Athens. All this has often been considered false. But you can't understand what that means. Perhaps the only way to understand it is that Dionysius did not write the writings himself. But if we follow these writings, we find an even deeper understanding of Christianity. The author is not named, but the references made by church writers show that these writings existed. All traces indicate that they were not present in [early] Latin Christianity, but that we received them quite late. We are therefore dealing with writings that reflect the views of the early church fathers of the Greek Church. The author presents them to us as a development of the old mystery relationships, as the belief in God that is only accessible in a mystical way.

We are then shown how the imperfect beings emanate from this God and in this way a descent takes place to the forms to which man himself belongs. Then it is shown how a return to the God is to take place through the various forms. We find more detailed accounts in Scotus Eriugena, who wrote his "Classification of Nature" in this spirit. What we learn in these writings indicates that from the second century onwards we are dealing with such a mysterious school, very similar to the school of St. John in Ephesus. It too cultivated such mystical-theosophical teachings.

So such traditions, which aim to show that we are dealing with a "pseudo-Dionysius", indicate that such a school existed, which did not write down its teachings, but propagated them orally, and that these teachings can be traced back to Dionysius, who was converted by the apostle. Such secret schools undoubtedly existed in the early days of Christianity. We must therefore distinguish between the popular view and the view held by the individual initiate himself.

When we follow the writings of [Hermas], we can almost grasp with our hands what lies behind the form of expression. [Hermas] does not break with the [Christian mystical] tradition, but stands on the same point of view.

However, we are dealing with teachings that have a deeper understanding of Christianity, which they strive to translate into symbolism, in the creed, which is built up piece by piece in the councils and built up in the ritual acts and rites.

We can almost follow this in the writings of the Church. Sometimes we cannot understand what is contained in such a symbol, but we must accept such a symbol with faith and believe that the meaning will gradually become clear to us. Now if this man [- Hermas -] speaks of there being four degrees of initiation, as described in the scriptures, then we can only say that there must have been an esoteric teaching in addition to the exoteric teaching.

Whoever received the symbol, [to whom] for example the sacrifice of the Mass was presented, is not disturbed by the fact that something is presented to him [which he does not understand], but is given a symbol. Soon he will penetrate the mysterious meaning of the symbol.

In the church writers of the third and fourth centuries we see that the [students of the] deeper teachings of Christianity have to go through various stages of initiation. For the great masses, the esoteric teaching was brought to light in the symbol.

Now let us see how the esoteric teaching has developed and how the esoteric has adapted itself to the exoteric. And how the church strives for worldly power as a result. We want to see how this [esoteric] character has gradually been lost and how traces of it have evaporated right into scholasticism. This is connected with the most important events that took place in church history and with the transfer of events in Christianity from Ephesus in Asia to Rome in Italy.

In the first and beginning of the second century, the most important center for the spread of Christianity was Ephesus. This seat then moved from Ephesus to Italian Rome. We also speak of Ephesus as an Asian Rome, and of a direction that did not concern Johannine Christianity but Pauline Christianity. So we see an esoteric Christianity in the doctrine of John, while in the Pauline direction we have the popular form.

Answer to the question:

Pontus = lake. Pontius Pilate was governor of Caesarea. ["Suffered under Pontius Pilate" therefore means suffering caused by passing through the stages of matter.

"I am Osiris N. Growing among the blossoms of the fig tree is the name of Osiris N."

"Go thy way", see in the Book of the Dead.

Pontius Pilate is mentioned by the Roman or other writers as governor of Caesarea.

The Holy Spirit is nothing other than the third Logos, which we find in matter and in our souls.

The resurrection of the flesh points to the doctrine of reincarnation. Not demonstrable in the Johannine school, probably did not even exist. The Church replaced initiation with inspiration with faith. The secret teachings were canonized [dogmatized]. Why the doctrine of reincarnation was not popular is quite clear to me today. Even today it is difficult to make it popular. It is seen as a political danger. The doctrine of reincarnation in its true form cannot be popularized. The doctrine of reincarnation has led to the wildest superstitions, [the doctrine of] transmigration through animals and so on.

Christianity does not regard the doctrine of reincarnation as a doctrine that could be handed over to the masses. Substitutionary atonement in Pauline Christianity is something that cannot be reconciled with reincarnation and karma.

The verses in St. Mark's Gospel which we were endeavouring to elucidate in the last lecture are followed by remarkable words in many ways similar to those found in the other Gospels, although their full significance can best be studied in that of St. Mark. The words are to the effect that after the Baptism and the experiences in the ‘wilderness’, Christ Jesus went into the synagogue and taught the people there.

The sentence is usually translated: ‘And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.’—To a man of the present age, however orthodox a believer in the Bible, this sentence conveys little more than that His teaching was powerful and impressive—unlike that of the scribes. But in the Greek text the sentence translated ‘as one that had authority and not as the scribes', is: ὴν γαρ διδἁσχῳv αὐτοὐς ώς ἐξουαίχν ἕχων, χαὶ οὐχ ώç οί γραμματῑç

(ēn gar didamaskōn autous hōs exusiān echōn, kai ouch hōs hoi grammateis)

If we try to grasp the meaning of this significant passage we shall be led a step further towards understanding the secrets of Christ's mission. I have already called your attention to the fact that like other genuinely inspired writings, the Gospels are not easy to understand and that to grasp their real meaning we must bring together all the thoughts and ideas about the spiritual world acquired in the course of many years. Such ideas alone can give us insight into what is meant when it is said in the Gospel that He taught in the synagogue as one of the Exousiai, as a Power and Revelation, and not as those who are here called: γραμματῑç (scribes).

To understand a passage such as this we must remind ourselves of what we have learnt about the higher, supersensible worlds. We have learnt that man, as he lives in our world, is the lowest member of a hierarchical Order, that his place is at the lowest step of the ladder of this Order. Immediately above him in the supersensible world, at the first level, are the Beings called in Christian esotericism, Angeloi, Angels. They are the supersensible Beings of the rank immediately above man, who influence his life. Above them come the Archangeloi or Archangels, then the Archai or Spirits of Personality; then the Exousiai, Dynameis and Kyriotetes, and finally the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim.

Thus above man there are nine ranks of hierarchical Beings. And we shall now try to picture how these different supersensible Beings intervene in human life.

The Angeloi are the Beings who as messengers of the spiritual world to the individual man in his life on Earth, are nearest of all to him. They exercise a perpetual influence upon the destinies of individuals on the physical plane. The Archangeloi are spiritual Beings whose activities embrace a wider sphere. They are the Beings whom we may call ‘Folk-Spirits’, who regulate and guide the affairs of whole groups of peoples. When a man of the present day speaks of a ‘Folk-Spirit’ he thinks, purely in terms of number, of so many thousands of individuals who happen to populate the same territory. But in Spiritual Science we mean by a Folk-Spirit the actual Folk-Individuality, not such and such a number of people but a real individuality just as we speak of an individuality in the case of a single man. The spiritual guidance of a whole Folk lies in the hands of the Archangelos. All these higher Beings are supersensible entities having their own spheres of activity. The Archai, Spirits of Personality or the ‘Primal Beginnings’, are again different from the Archangeloi or Folk-Spirits. If we speak of the French, the German, the English Folk-Spirit and so on, this points to different regions of the Earth. But there is something that is common to all men to-day, at least to all Western peoples, and affords them a basis for mutual understanding. In contrast to the single Folk-Spirit we speak here of the Time-Spirit: there is a Time-Spirit in the period of the Reformation, another in our own day. The Time-Spirits, the Archai, rank above the individual Folk-Spirits, and are the leaders of successive epochs.

At a still higher level we come to the Exousiai. They are supersensible Beings of an essentially different order. To form an idea of how the Beings of these still higher Hierarchies differ from the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, let us remind ourselves that there is no essential difference between a member of one Folk and a member of a different Folk as regards his outer, physical make-up and what he eats and drinks. It cannot be said that, except as regards soul and spirit, the peoples differ essentially from each other. The guiding spiritual Beings (the Time-Spirits) of the successive epochs are concerned with things of the soul and spirit only. Man does not, however, consist only of soul and spirit. It is the human astral body that is essentially influenced by whatever is of the nature of soul and spirit. There are also denser members of man's being which do not differ greatly from each other as far as the activities of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are concerned. But creative influences are exercised upon these denser members of man's nature by spiritual Beings belonging to ranks from that of the Exousiai upwards. Language and current modes of thought belong to the sphere of the Folk-Spirits and the Time-Spirits—Archangeloi and Archai. But men are also influenced by the light and air and climate of a particular region. One type of human being thrives below the Equator, another in the regions nearer to the North Pole. We shall not agree with a German professor of philosophy whose view, presented in a very widely read book, was that civilisations of essential importance would have to develop in the Temperate Zone because the human beings responsible for such culture would freeze at the North Pole and scorch at the South Pole! But we can certainly speak of the different effects of food upon human beings living in different climates. External conditions are by no means without influence upon the character of a people—for example, whether they live in mountain valleys or on plains. We see there how the forces of nature penetrate into and affect the whole of man's constitution. Knowing from Spiritual Science that supersensible Beings are active in all the forces of nature and work upon men through these forces, we can make a distinction between Archai and Exousiai, and say: The Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai influence man through what concerns the soul and spirit only—language, current modes of thought, ideas, and so on, but they do not work through the forces of nature; their operations do not directly affect the etheric body or the physical body, which are the lower members of man's organism.

On the other hand, spiritual Beings from the rank of the Exousiai upwards work not only upon man but also in the forces of outer nature; they are the ‘Directors’ as it were of air and light, of the different ways in which foodstuffs are produced in the kingdoms of nature. They are the Beings who hold sway in these kingdoms of nature. The phenomena of thunder and lightning, rain and sunshine, how one kind of foodstuff grows in one region, other kinds in another, in short the whole ordering of earthly conditions we ascribe to spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies higher than the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. We see the effects of the activity of the Exousiai, for example, in the light that works upon us as well as upon the plants, not only in the invisible effects which are the manifestations of the Time-Spirits.

Let us now consider what it is that civilisation gives to men, what they have to learn in order to make progress. Every individual has at his disposal what is yielded by his own epoch, but also, to a certain extent, the fruits of earlier epochs. Now it is only what derives from the lowest Hierarchies up to and including the Time-Spirits that can be preserved as history and be taught and studied as such. What streams directly from the kingdoms of nature cannot be preserved in tradition. Nevertheless, men whose powers of knowledge enable them to penetrate into the supersensible worlds can pass beyond the Time-Spirits to still higher forms of revelation. Such revelations are recognised as belonging to a realm higher than that of the Time-Spirits, as having greater weight than anything deriving from the Time-Spirits, and as affecting men in a very special way. Every rational human being should ask himself now and then whether his soul is affected more profoundly by what can be learnt from the traditions of the several peoples and Time-Spirits of historical epochs, or by a glorious sunrise, which is a direct manifestation of nature and of the supersensible worlds. Individuals may well become conscious that a sunrise in all its glory can stir the soul infinitely more deeply than all the science, the learning and the art of the ages. Suppose we have been deeply moved by the works in the Italian Galleries of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and others, and later on climb some Swiss mountain and contemplate the spectacle there presented, we shall be vividly conscious of what nature can reveal. We shall ask: Who is the greater artist: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, or the Powers who have painted the sunrise to be seen from the Rigi?—And the answer can only be that wonderful as are the achievements of men, what comes before us as a revelation of divine-spiritual Powers is far greater.

Now when the spiritual leaders of mankind, the Initiates, appear before the world, their teachings are not based upon or drawn from tradition but flow from original sources, and their revelations are like the revelations of nature herself. What is merely repeated by others can never have an effect as powerful as that of a sunrise. Compared with what tradition has handed down of the teachings of Moses or Zarathustra and what the Time-Spirits and Folk-Spirits have communicated through forms of external culture, the effect made by nature herself is far the greater. It was only when the revelations of Moses and Zarathustra sprang from immediate experience of the supersensible worlds that their effect was as powerful as that of the revelations of nature. The wonderful thing about these original revelations to mankind is that they are like the revelations of nature herself. We should remember here that the Exousiai are the lowest Hierarchy of Beings who work in the forces and powers of nature.

What, then, was experienced by those who were gathered in the synagogue when Christ Jesus came among them? Hitherto they had been taught by the ‘Scribes’, by men who were cognisant of what the Time-Spirits and Folk-Spirits had communicated. To such teaching the people were accustomed. But now there came One who did not teach as the Scribes taught, whose words seemed like a revelation from the realm of the supersensible powers in nature, in thunder, or in lightning. Knowing that the higher the rank of the Hierarchies the greater are their powers, we can understand in all their depth these words in the Gospel of St. Mark.

If we can feel the supersensible reality behind the creations of men such as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and others of their calibre, we can still glimpse in the relatively small number of pictures that have come down to us, something of the original inspiration. Great works of art, works of spiritual genius, are always echoes of what was originally revealed. And if we can perceive something of what Raphael, for example, expressed in his pictures, or form a living idea of the work of Zarathustra, we shall be able to hear something of what comes from the Exousiai.

But in the teachings given in the synagogues by the Scribes, that is to say, by men whose knowledge stemmed from the Folk-Spirits and Time-Spirits, there was nothing that could even faintly echo direct revelations of nature. Hence these words in St. Mark's Gospel are an indication that in men living in those days an inkling was beginning to dawn that something entirely new was speaking to them; that through this man who came among them something revealed itself which was like a power of nature herself, like one of the supersensible Powers behind the phenomena of nature. Men began gradually to divine what it was that had entered into Jesus of Nazareth and was symbolised in the Baptism by John. The people in the synagogue were very near the truth when they said: When he speaks it is as though the Exousiai were speaking, not merely the Archai, the Time-Spirits, or the Folk-Spirits.

It is only through knowledge of Spiritual Science that we shall be able again to instil a full and living content and meaning into the barren abstractions abounding in modern translations of the New Testament, and to realise what is involved when efforts are made to penetrate to the core of the Gospels. Generations must pass before there can be any prospect of fathoming, even approximately, the deep meanings which our own times can dimly surmise. Actual investigation of a great deal in the Gospels will be possible only in the future.

Fundamentally, what the writer of St. Mark's Gospel wished to present was an elaboration of the teaching of Paul, one of the first to recognise the nature and essential being of the Christ through direct supersensible perception. We must understand what Paul actually taught and what he experienced through the revelation that came to him on the road to Damascus. Although the event is described in the Bible as a sudden revelation, those conversant with the real facts know that this kind of illumination can come at any moment to one who is striving to reach the spiritual world and that as a result of his experiences he becomes a changed man. And in the case of St. Paul it is abundantly evident that through the revelation at Damascus this was what happened.

Even a superficial study of the Gospels and of the Pauline Epistles will make it clear that St. Paul regards the Event of Golgotha as the central point of the whole evolution of humanity and that he links this Event directly with what is described in the Bible as the creation of Adam, the first man. St. Paul's teaching is to somewhat the following effect: The being we must call the spiritual man, the real man, of whom in the world of maya there is only an illusory image, came down in ancient Lemurian times to this world of illusion, facing the experiences he was to undergo in the flesh during successive incarnations. He became man in the form assumed throughout the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs and in post-Atlantean times until the coming of Christ. Then came the Event of Golgotha.

Paul was unshakably convinced after his vision near Damascus that in the Event of Golgotha something occurred that was exactly comparable with the descent of man into the flesh. For therewith the impulse was given gradually to overcome those forms of earthly existence into which man had entered through Adam. Hence Paul calls the Being who appeared in the Christ, the ‘new Adam’, whom every man can draw to himself through union with Christ.

Thus from Lemurian on into pre-Christian times we have to see the gradual descent of man into matter—whether we call him Adam or by some other name. Then he was given the power and the impulse to ascend again so that he might eventually return, enriched by the fruits of earthly existence, to the original, spiritual state that had been his before he descended into matter.

Now if we are to understand the essential meaning of evolution, we must not ask: Could man not have been spared this descent into matter? Why was it necessary for him to pass through different incarnations in order to re-ascend into the state that was his at the beginning? Such questions could spring only from complete misunderstanding of the spiritual meaning of evolution. For man takes with him from Earth-existence all the fruits of his experiences and is enriched with the content of his incarnations—a content that was not previously his.

Think, hypothetically, of a man descending and passing through his first incarnation: there he learns certain things. In his second incarnation he learns more; and so on through all the incarnations. Their course, to begin with, is one of descent: man becomes more and more deeply entangled in the physical world. Then he begins an ascent and can rise to the extent to which he receives the Christ Impulse into himself. One day he will find his way again into the spiritual world; but he will then take with him whatever he was able to acquire on the Earth.

And so Paul sees in the Christ the central point of the whole process of man's earthly evolution, the power that gives him the impulse to rise into the supersensible world enriched with all the experiences of life on the Earth.

But from this standpoint, how does Paul regard the sacrifice on Golgotha, the actual Crucifixion? It is not easy to relate to our modern ideas the way in which St. Paul—and also the writer of St. Mark's Gospel—understood the sacrifice on Golgotha, this most essential fact of human evolution. Before this can be attempted we must familiarise ourselves with the thought that man as he stands before us is a Microcosm, and we must study all the implications of this fact.

Two periods of development, each very different from the other, are apparent in man's life between birth and death in every incarnation. In various ways I have already called attention to the difference between the two periods—for our study of Spiritual Science is more systematic than people usually imagine. One of these periods lies between birth and the point at which an individual's memory begins. If you follow your memories back, you reach a certain point beyond which they cease. You were already in existence then and may have heard from your parents or relatives about your doings; hence you have some knowledge of them but you yourself remember nothing beyond a certain point of time. Normal remembrance breaks off at this point, the most favourable age for which is somewhere about the third year of life. Before that point of time a child is highly impressionable. Just think how much is taken in during the first, second and third years of life; yet modern man has no remembrance at all of how the impressions were made.—Then follows the period through which the thread of memory runs continuously.

We must pay careful attention to these two periods of development for they are very important in man's life as a whole. We must observe the development of the human being closely and accurately and avoid the prejudiced views of modern science. The facts of science confirm what I have to say, but we should not attach too much weight to biased views that deviate widely from the truth. Close observation of man's development makes it evident that his life as an individual in society is conditioned by whatever forms part of the thread of memory which begins, approximately, in the third year. Within the span of this thread of memory lies every principle by which we consciously direct our life; it embraces whatever rules of conduct we consciously accept as worthy to be followed. Our Ego has no consciousness of what lies before this point; of that, nothing finds its way into the thread of our conscious life.

Thus before our conscious life begins there are certain years during which our relation with the surrounding world is quite different from what it is later.

The difference is radical. Penetrating observation of a child before the period back to which memory extends when he is older, would show that in those first years he feels himself to be within the universal, macrocosmic, spiritual life. He does not separate or isolate himself from that life but feels part and parcel of the whole environment. He even speaks of himself as others do. He does not say: ‘I want’, but, ‘John wants’. It is only later that he learns to speak of himself as ‘I’. Modern child psychologists pick holes in this explanation but the truth is not controverted by their arguments which are just evidences of their lack of insight. In his earliest years a child still feels part of the world around him; it is only at the point from which his memories begin that he gradually detaches himself from his environment as an independent being.

It can therefore be said that the principles a man may accept for the guidance of his life and the whole content of his consciousness belong to the second phase of development beginning at the point of time referred to. In the first phase he has a quite different relation to the environment; he feels much more closely connected with it. The only way to understand this thoroughly is to imagine what would happen if the form of consciousness which has produced this feeling of direct connection with the surrounding world in early childhood were to remain in later years. If that were the case human life would take a very different course. Man would not feel so isolated; even in later years he would feel himself to be an integral part, a member, of the Macrocosm, the Great World. As things are he loses his feeling of oneness with the Great World and believes himself to be isolated from it. In ordinary life this isolation comes into a man's consciousness in an abstract form only, for instance, in his egoisms, or in a tendency to shut himself off more and more within his own skin. The view that man's life is enclosed within his skin is complete nonsense. Whenever he exhales he becomes part of the outer world for the breath previously indrawn is now outside. Man's picture of himself is pure maya but his form of consciousness makes this inevitable. Human beings nowadays are neither particularly inclined nor indeed mature enough to understand karma. If, for instance, anyone gets his windows broken he is apt to take this as an offence directed against himself, and he is annoyed by it because he feels himself to be an isolated being. But were he to believe in karma he would feel related to the whole Macrocosm and would know that in point of fact it is we ourselves who have broken the windows. For in truth we are interwoven with the whole Cosmos and it is sheer nonsense to imagine that we are enclosed by our skin. But it is only in very early childhood that this feeling of oneness with the Cosmos exists; in later life it is lost at the point to which memory reaches.

It was not always so. In earlier times, by no means very long ago, the consciousness belonging to early childhood extended, in some degree at least, into the later years of a man's life. This was in the times of the ancient clairvoyance; and with it went a very different kind of thinking and a different way of expressing facts. This is an aspect of human evolution about which the student of Spiritual Science must be quite clear.

When a male child is born nowadays he is simply regarded as the son of his father and mother: and if he has no birth or baptismal certificate bearing the names of his parents to identify him as a citizen, nothing is officially known about him and in certain circumstances his very existence is questioned. To the modern mind a human being is simply the physical offspring of his father and his mother.

This was not how people thought in a past not so very far distant. Scholars and researchers to-day do not, however, know that in earlier times not only was men's thinking different but the content and implications of the words and designations used were different. Hence interpretations of ancient legends do not convey their real meaning. We are told, for instance, of Orpheus, a Greek singer. I refer to him because he belongs to the period several centuries before the rise of Christianity. We may think of him as the one responsible for the organisation of the Greek Mysteries. This fourth post-Atlantean epoch of which he was an important figure in the opening stage, was a preparation for the Christ Event and what humanity was to receive through it. Thus in Greece Orpheus was the great Preparer.

If a man of the modern age were to encounter a figure such as Orpheus, he would simply say: he is the son of such-and-such a father and such-and-such a mother—and science might possibly look for inherited characteristics. There is, for example, a bulky tome in which all the hereditary characteristics of Goethe's families are set forth in an endeavour to present him as the sum-total of those characteristics. That is by no means how people thought in the days of Orpheus. The man of flesh and his physical attributes were not what really mattered to them. The essential qualities were those that enabled Orpheus to be the leader and organiser of pre-Christian Greek culture—certainly not the physical brain or nervous system. The essential thing was the fact that he had within him—in his own field of experience—a quality derived from the supersensible world and united with the material-physical element provided by his personality. The eyes of the Greeks were directed, not to the physical figure of Orpheus descending from father and mother, perhaps also from grandfather and grandmother; this figure was more or less unessential, being merely the outer expression, the sheath. The essential element was what had descended from a supersensible source and had united with a material entity on the physical plane. Hence a Greek would have said to himself: When Orpheus is before me, the fact that he descends from a father and a mother need hardly be taken into account; what is of importance is that his soul-qualities, which have made him what he is, stem from the supersensible, from a supersensible reality which has never hitherto had anything to do with the physical plane; a physical-material element has here been able to unite with the supersensible reality in his personality.—And because the Greeks regarded a purely supersensible quality as the hallmark of Orpheus, they said he was the offspring of a Muse, the son of Calliope, not of a physical mother but of a supersensible reality which had never had any previous connection with the physical and material.

But as the son of Calliope and nothing more than that, Orpheus could have given expression only to manifestations of the supersensible world. In keeping with the nature of the age in which he lived, it was also his mission to give expression to what would be of service to physical life in that epoch. Hence he was not only a mouthpiece for the Muse, for Calliope, as in much earlier times the Rishis were merely mouthpieces for supersensible Powers, but his own life gave expression to the supersensible in such a way that the physical world also was important to his life. His teaching was connected with and suited to the climate of Greece, to what was part of outer nature in Greece—and so Orpheus was made the son of Oeagrus, the Thracian River-God.

This shows us that to the Greeks what mattered most in their view was what was living in Orpheus’ soul. In those days men were characterised by the quality of their souls, by their spiritual value, not, as in later times, by saying: he is the son of so-and-so, or, he comes from such and such a town. It is very interesting to see how deeply involved the Greeks felt in the destiny of a man such as Orpheus, who descended on the one side from a Muse and on the other from a Thracian River-God. Unlike the ancient prophets, Orpheus was subject not only to supersensible influences but to material influences as well—to all the influences exercised by the physical-material world.

Now we know that man consists of several members: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego, the ‘I’. A man such as Orpheus, descended from a Muse—you now know what that means—was still able to see into the spiritual world; but on the other hand, his capacity for experiencing the spiritual world was weakened by the life he led on the physical plane as the son of his father, the Thracian River-God.

The Leaders in the second and third post-Atlantean culture-epochs who became mouthpieces for utterances of the spiritual worlds were able to perceive their own etheric body separated from the physical. In the civilisations where ancient clairvoyance prevailed—and it was the same even among the Celts—when a man was to be made aware of something he was called upon to communicate to his fellow-men, it was revealed to him in this way: his etheric body emerged from the physical body and became the bearer of forces which streamed down into it. If those who proclaimed the utterances of the spiritual worlds were men, their etheric bodies were female and they consequently saw in female form whatever communicated messages to them from the spiritual worlds.

Now it was also the purpose of the legend to show that although Orpheus was in direct contact with the spiritual Powers, as the son of a Thracian River-God there was always the possibility that he would be unable to retain what was revealed to him through his own etheric body. The more thoroughly he made himself at home in the physical world and lived his life as a son of his country, the more did his power of clairvoyance recede. The story relates that Eurydice, the transmitter of his revelations, his soul-bride, was torn away from him through the bite of an adder—a picture of his human failings—and carried off to the underworld. He could win her back only by passing through an Initiation.—Whenever we are told of a journey into the underworld, an Initiation is meant.—In order to win back his bride, Orpheus must pass through an Initiation. But he was already too closely enmeshed in the physical world. He had indeed acquired the capacity to make his way into the underworld, but on his return, when his eyes again encountered the sunlight, Eurydice vanished from his sight. Why was this? It was because on seeing the sunlight he did something that was forbidden him: he turned and looked back. That is to say, he disobeyed a strict command given him by the God of the underworld, namely, that physical man, living on the physical plane, must not look back beyond the point of time I have indicated, to the period of the macrocosmic experiences of childhood; if these experiences were to penetrate into the consciousness normal in later life, they would give rise to clairvoyance in its ancient form. Hence the command of the God of the underworld that no man may seek to penetrate the mysteries of childhood, to remember where the Threshold is fixed.—But this was what Orpheus did, and he consequently lost the faculty of clairvoyance.

Something of great delicacy and subtlety in connection with Orpheus is set before us in this story of the loss of Eurydice. One consequence is that man is sacrificed to the physical world. With a nature still deeply rooted in the spiritual he is also, partially, the sort of being which it is his destiny to become on the physical plane. And so all the forces of the physical plane press in upon him and he loses Eurydice, his own innocent soul—which it is the fate of modern man also to lose. These forces tear Orpheus to pieces; in a sense, he is sacrificed.

What is it, then, that Orpheus experienced as representative of the transition between the third and fourth epochs of post-Atlantean culture? In the first place he experienced the stage of consciousness which the child leaves behind—the connection with the Macrocosm. This does not pass over into his conscious life and therefore in his essential being man is torn to pieces and killed by life on the physical plane which in the real sense begins at the point of which we have been speaking.

And now keep in mind this man living on the physical plane; he is normally able to remember back only to a certain point of time; beyond this lie the three years of earliest childhood. With this thread of memory he is so enmeshed in the physical plane that, in his own being, he cannot endure it and he is torn to pieces. Thus it is with the true spirit of man to-day—here is a proof of how deeply he is enmeshed in matter. This is the spirit which in Pauline Christianity is called the ‘Son of Man’. Here is a concept which you must grasp—the concept of the Son of Man who can be found in a human being onwards from the point in his life to which his later memory extends, and includes everything he has acquired from the civilisation around him. Keep this ‘man’ in your mind, and then picture to yourselves what he might become if there were added to him all that presses in upon him from the Macrocosm in the first three years of his childhood. This could be a foundation only, because at that stage the developed human ‘I’ is not yet present. But if it did merge into the consciousness of a developed ‘I’, we should witness a happening comparable with what took place at the Baptism in the Jordan at the moment when the Spirit descended from above into Jesus of Nazareth: the three innocent years of early childhood merged with the rest of the human being. That is the immediate fact. And the consequence was that this innocent childhood-life, as it sought to develop on the physical Earth, could evolve for three years only—as is indeed always the case—and then met its end on Golgotha. It could not merge with what man becomes at the point in time from which in later life his memory normally begins.

Think what it would be like if; in one man, we saw mingled together all the interconnections with the Macrocosm which show themselves dimly and indistinctly in the early years of childhood but which cannot really light up in the child because he is as yet without Ego-consciousness. Think further, and picture to yourselves how, if the reality did dawn in this way in a later consciousness, something would take shape which has its origin, not in man's own nature but in the depth of those cosmic worlds out of which we are born. If you think of all this you will get an idea of the meaning of the words spoken in connection with the event portrayed as the descent of the Dove: ‘This is my beloved Son; this day have I begotten him.’ That means: Here the Christ is incarnated, begotten, in Jesus of Nazareth, born in him at the moment of the Baptism by John. In the Christ there was present, in its highest form, the consciousness otherwise belonging only to the early years of childhood; now, mingling with it, there was feeling of oneness with the Cosmos which a child would feel if it could be fully aware of its experiences during the first three years. In that case there would be still another meaning in the words: ‘I and the Father’—that is, the cosmic Father—‘are one’.

If you ponder deeply about these things you will get an inkling of what was experienced by St. Paul as a first, basic element in the revelation near Damascus and finds expression in the beautiful words: ‘Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven.’ Among many meanings of this saying there is the one indicated by St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me—the Christ, that is, who has a macrocosmic consciousness such as a child would have if it could somehow combine the consciousness belonging to the first three years with the Ego-consciousness of later life. In the normal man of to-day these two forms of consciousness are separate: indeed they must be separate, for they are incompatible. Nor were they any more compatible in Christ Jesus Himself; after those three years, death was bound to supervene and to occur in the circumstances as they actually were in Palestine. These circumstances were not matters of chance but came about because these two lived within each other: the Son of God (which is man from the moment of his birth until the development of the Ego-consciousness) and the Son of Man (which is what he is after Ego-consciousness has been attained). The events which then culminated in the happenings in Palestine were the outcome of the living together of the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The remembrance of this Christmas Festival will be strongly imprinted on the souls of many, for a sharper mental contrast can scarcely be imagined than that which arises, when we lift our souls to the voices which sounded to the shepherds, presenting an eternal truth for all human progress of the post-Christian times:

‘Divine revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill,’

when we raise our souls to the ‘peace upon earth to men’ and then look at the facts of the present day which we find outspread over a great part of the civilised world.

By reason of this contrast, this Christmas Festival will be a permanent token in the memories and hearts of men upon the earth. For certainly, if we preserve that which we must always preserve within the fields of our occult thought, if we preserve our uprightness of heart and our inner sincerity of soul, we cannot celebrate this Christmas Festival with the same feeling with which we have celebrated others; for it must stimulate us to more profound reflection, must stimulate us very specially to that which arises from our occult deepening as ideas for the future of humanity—to that which can lead human hearts to the ages which will be so different from our own.

In the course of years we have registered much within our souls, which can indicate to us the sort of soul-condition which such ages will bring. Let us ask ourselves, what is that, of which we must feel that it is still so much needed at the present time? If we call up before the eyes of our soul that which has frequently formed the centre of our consideration, we shall see that within the depths of the human soul a true knowledge is wanting of that which drew into the world upon the day which we celebrate every year in this wintry Christmas.

The whole significance, the whole profundity, of that which took place in the time which we call to remembrance in this Christmas Festival, is truly not expressed unavailingly, but profoundly and significantly, in the passage which humanity of earth has accepted from affection, one might say, the passage which runs thus:

‘Divine revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill,’

The simplest things are often to the human heart the most difficult of comprehension, and simple as this verse sounds, we do well if we make it ever clearer to ourselves that all the future ages of the earth existence will be able to understand this verse more and more profoundly, to enter more and more deeply into the significance of these important words.

It is not without reason that out of all the secret history of the appearing of Jesus upon the earth, the Festival of Christmas has become the most popular—nothing has become more popular than the entrance of the Jesus-child into earth life. For with this we have the possibility of placing before the souls of men something which is received lovingly even by the heart of a little child, in so far as he is able to receive external sense impressions, even though perhaps not yet from words, and yet at the same time it is something which sinks deeply into the depths of those human souls through which the gentlest and yet at the same time the strongest love flows warmly.

Truly the humanity upon earth is not yet advanced beyond a childish comprehension of the Mysteries of Christ Jesus, and epoch after epoch will still have to elapse ere human souls again acquire those forces, by means of which they will be able to absorb the complete magnitude of the beginning of the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus on this occasion may no Christmas consideration as in other years be brought before your souls, but something which may show us how much we are wanting in that depth which is necessary in order to let the Mystery of Golgotha flash up rightly within our souls.

In the course of the last few years we have often spoken of the fact that on occult grounds we really have to celebrate the birth of not only one Jesus child but of two, and it may be said that because through the observations of Spiritual Science this mystery of the two Jesus children has been revealed, a faint beginning has been made to a new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Only slowly and gradually could this Mystery of Golgotha grip the minds of men. How it has been absorbed into human minds can be brought before our souls when, for example, we glance at the fact that, to a certain extent, that which Christian humanity has gained in the idea of the Christmas child had to struggle through from East to West, by making its way through other versions of a Divine Mediator between the highest Divine-spiritual Beings and the human soul.

We have often considered the fact that, running parallel with the stream of Christian life from East to West, another stream of revelation flowed from the North, over the Black Sea, along the Danube, upwards to the Rhine, to Western Europe. The worship which we know as the worship of Mithras disappeared in the early centimes of the Christian era. But in the first centuries of the Christian era it had gripped as many hearts in Europe as had Christianity itself, and impressed itself deeply and extended in the regions of central and Eastern Europe. To those who followed this worship, Mithras appeared just as sublime and great a Divine Mediator descending from spiritual heights into earth existence, as the Christ appeared to the Christians. In the same way we hear of the entrance of Mithras into earth existence in the Winter Holy-night, the shortest day! In the same way we hear that he was born secretly in a cave, that shepherds were the first to hear his Song of Praise: in the same way was Sunday dedicated to him in contradistinction to the other more ancient feast days. And if we ask what is the characteristic feature in the descent of this Mithras-figure, we must say as follows: Mithras was not represented as was the Christ within Jesus. When an image, a symbolical representation, was formed of him, it was known that it was only a symbolical representation. The true Mithras was only to be seen by those who had the faculty of clairvoyance. Certainly he was represented as a mediator between man and the spiritual Hierarchies, but he was not represented as having been incarnated in a human child. He was represented in such a way that when he descended to the earth, in his true being he was only visible to the Initiates, to those who had clairvoyant vision. The idea did not exist in the Mithras worship that that spiritual Being, who was represented as a mediator between the Spiritual Hierarchies and the souls of men, was incarnated in an earthly body as a child. For the worship of Mithras depended upon the fact that the ancient primitive clairvoyance was still in existence in a large number of human beings.

If we investigate the path of worship of Mithras from East to West, we find that amongst the people who were worshippers of Mithras a large number were those who could see in those intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping, when the soul lives not in dreams, but in spiritual reality. These could see in such intermediate conditions the descent of Mithras from aeon to aeon, from stage to stage, from the spiritual world down to the earth. Many could see and bear witness that such a Mediator had arisen for man, a Mediator in the spiritual worlds.

That which lived as the cult of Mithras was an externalisation of the more or less symbolical representation seen by the seer. What is it really that we meet with in this worship of Mithras? Our whole understanding of the Cosmos makes it impossible to believe that the Christ has only been known since the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates and their pupils also knew Him in the pre-Christian times as that Spirit Who was to come. The Initiates always pointed again and again to Him Whom they saw as the Sun-spirit descending from the heights, Who was approaching the earth in order to take up His abode within it. They designated Him as the One Who was to be, the One Who was to come. They knew Him in spirit and saw Him descending.

Then the Mystery of Golgotha took place. We know what it signifies. We know that through this Mystery of Golgotha that Spirit through Whom the earth has gained its meaning drew into a human body. We know that since then this Spirit is connected with the Earth and we know how man is to develop in order, in no very distant future, to see again in spirit the Christ Who through the Mystery of Golgotha united His Own Life with the life of the earth I humanity. We are expressing nothing figurative when we say that That Which the ancient Initiates saw in the various Sanctuaries of the Spiritual is since then to be recognised as pressing through, streaming through, pulsating through, living through the earth-life.

But the clairvoyant perception had to be lost more and more, and with it the power to look up into the spiritual spheres to behold the Christ, Who had now descended to the earth. For now those who could not perceive clairvoyantly could see that He was permeated with divine love, that He was That Which they were always to possess as the highest treasure of the earth-man. Thus men were to feel fully that they had to receive within their earthly habitation the great gift of cosmic Love, the Christ, sent by the God Who is called the Father-God; they were to learn to know Him fully as the Being Who henceforth was to remain connected with the ages as the meaning of the earth evolution; they were to learn to know Him fully in His life, from the first respiration as a Child to the spiritual deed of Christ on Golgotha which can be revealed to the hearts of men.

In the course of later times, it has been possible for us to fill this gap by means of the Fifth Gospel, which has been added to the other Gospels, as in our age it was destined for us to know every step of this Divine Life upon earth yet more minutely. And thus because men were, as it were, to become familiar with Christ Jesus as with a brother, as with One Who from love of man has drawn out of the wide spiritual realms into the narrow valley of earth, because men were to learn to know Him in the most familiar, most intimate knowledge, therefore had the powers of perception and love in the human mind to be gathered together in order to perceive intuitively in a purely human-divine manner, I might say, that which was enacted among men as the beginning of a new age, the Christian age.

For this end the power of man had to be concentrated upon the life of Christ Jesus: for a time it had to be diverted from the vision upwards into the spiritual spheres by means of That Which had drawn into the Child of Bethlehem, Which had descended from cosmic heights. But to-day, we are living in a time in which the vision must again be extended, in which human progress and human evolution must again dominate evolution if the Christ, as descending from divine spiritual heights, is to remain what He is in the life of the earth.

The worship of Mithras was a last powerful remembrance of the Christ Who had not yet reached the earth but was descending. For humanity was destined to receive the Christ ever more into the soul in such a way that even the smallest child could receive Him; in such a way that with it there came a closing of the spiritual vision with regard to the spiritual world, that vision by means of which we know that the Christ is a Cosmic Being, by means of which we know what importance He has for the valley of the earth.

Slowly and gradually the worship of Mithras flowed away, owing to the fact that Christ could appear to man as a Cosmic Being. The worship of Mithras was an echo of the old clairvoyant perception.

Then we see how, with the gradual flowing away, the clairvoyant perception also diminished, how even for those who still had the clairvoyant perception of the old sort, a flowing away of the clairvoyant capacities began, and how, with this flowing away, the possibility also ceased of perceiving the Christ completely in His true nature. He was perceived in His true nature when He was perceived not only in His earthly activity, but in His heavenly glory. The possibility gradually diminished, disappeared, of seeing Him in His heavenly glory beside His earthly existence. We see that it again appeared in a weakened form, in spite of the greatness of the teaching in other respects, in the founder of Manicheism. The Manu pointed to Jesus, but it was not an indication which was suited to simple, primitive, believing minds, because in this spirit which founded Manicheism the ancient clairvoyance still existed.

Yet there was nothing in it which could be counted as an opposition with regard to the comprehension of Christianity. Christ Jesus was for the Manu a Being Who had not taken on earthly corporality but had lived in a phantom body, as it were, in an etheric body upon the earth.

Now we see that with regard to the comprehension of the appearing of Christ Jesus a struggle began. Why was this? There was a striving to look upwards, as it were, to see how the Being of Christ descended. They were not, however, yet capable of seeing how the descending Being actually took up His abode in human flesh. A struggle of soul was inevitable before this complete comprehension was possible.

Again we see the teachings of the Manichees extending from East to West, a teaching which still looked up towards the Divine Spirit Who was descending, looked towards everything which the old conception of the world possessed, looked towards the permeation of the world not merely with the physical Being which presented itself to the human sense existence, but also with the Being which with the movements of the stars pervades the Cosmos.

The linking of human fate, of human life, with cosmic life, this pervaded the soul of the Manichee, this was deeply rooted within him, shunning the evil, which rules in human life in common with the activity of the good God. Deeply, deeply did Manicheism look into the riddle of evil. But this riddle of evil at the same time can only appear before the human soul when we are able to grasp it in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, when we penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha with the riddle of evil in Manicheism.

Truly those who were called upon to yield their souls in the deepest, most intense manner, to the Mystery of Golgotha, have contended with that which shone into more modern times from the residue of the ancient clairvoyant perception. We need only think of one great leader of the West, St. Augustine. Before he struggled through to the Christianity of Paul he was given up to the teaching of the Manichees. A yet greater impression was made upon him when he was able to perceive how from aeon to aeon the Being of the divine spiritual mediator descended from divine spiritual spheres. This spiritual vision also illumined for Augustine in the first period of his struggle the perception of how the Christ had taken up His abode upon the earth in a fleshly body, and how with Him the riddle of evil was solved.

It is striking to see how Augustine conversed with the celebrated Bishop Faustus of the Manichees, and only because this Bishop was not able to make the requisite impression upon Augustine, he turned away from Manicheism and towards the Christianity of Paul. Here we see the flow and ebb of that which we can call the perception of the super-earthly Christ as He was before the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the main, only with the raising of the new age of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch did that completely disappear which was the residue of the old clairvoyant perception.

This old clairvoyant perception knew the heavenly Christ. Even in the beginning of Christianity He could be felt, but to see how He descended was only possible for the old clairvoyant perception. Deeply, deeply, must it affect us when we perceive how in the first age of the spreading of Christianity those who had drawn their perception from the old clairvoyance wished to picture the Christ; how in order to perceive the Christ they looked not merely towards Bethlehem but into the spheres of heaven, in order to see how He descended from thence to bring salvation to men.

We know that besides the worship of Mithras, and besides Manicheism, there existed in the West the Gnosis which wished to connect the old clairvoyant perception of the great Sun-Spirit, Who descended from the divine sphere, with the perception of the course of earthly life of Christ Jesus. And then it is striking to see how the human mind wished to concentrate itself ever more upon the earthly connections of Christ Jesus. It is striking to see how this simple human mind which can find nothing simple enough to represent it, is afraid of the greatness of the feeling which had to be experienced with regard to the lofty conception of the old Gnosis. The early Christians were afraid of these lofty conceptions. Up to our own age the fear strikes those who come into touch with spiritual knowledge that it is easy for the mind to come into confusion if it raises itself into the ages in which it could be seen that Christ descended from the loftiest heights in order to be able to dwell in a human body.

That which the Gnostics were able to say regarding the heavenly Christ beside the earthly Christ affects us very deeply and I should like to say that our soul-vision of the earthly life of Christ Jesus will in no way be blunted if, through Spiritual Science, it is shown the way to the new clairvoyance in order to find the Christ as He descended from the heights of heaven. Here we have a verse evidently of Gnostic origin:

‘Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath, this being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill.
Lo, ill, perplexed, it flies the deadly chaos—how can it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, victory to bring,
I traverse all the aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God’s image be manifested,
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
“Gnosis” it is called for you.’

We feel that the new Spiritual Science must again lead us into these things in order that we, in our conceptions, may be able to weave round the Christ- Event the spiritual Aura which for good reasons, as we have often emphasised and had to mention again to-day, was for a time lost to humanity. We must do it slowly and gradually: we must, to a certain extent, try to express that which Spiritual Science is able to reveal to us in such a way that the human mind, which to-day is far from the science of spiritual knowledge, may be able to grasp it.

And so we have endeavoured to express the whole anthroposophical wisdom concerning the Christ-Event, and especially concerning the Christmas night and its connection with the human mind, in simple words which are here presented to you:

In the eyes of the soul reflected
In the light of the cosmic hope,
In the human heart to the spirit exalted wisdom speaks:
The eternal love of the Father
To the earth has sent His Son
Who, filled with grace, on the human path sheddeth the light of heaven.

It is to be hoped that a time will come for earthly evolution in which more, much more can be expressed, and in far, far clearer words, regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, simple words in which for the whole world can be expressed that which Spiritual Science has to say to humanity regarding the Mystery of Golgotha.

We see how, up to the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period, even up to the beginning of the fifth, the old clairvoyant perception ebbed away in such a maimer that the last remains which were still left to man fell into disrepute. We see this downfall, as I might call it, embodied in that form which appeared in Europe and spread much further than is thought during the ebb of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the figure of the popular adventurer (for he was an adventurer), who was still able to exhibit the last sign of clairvoyant perception—“Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, Magus Secundus, philosophus philosophorus, fons necromanticorum, chiromanticus, agromanticus, pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.” So ran the complete title of that Faust who lived in the sixteenth century as a representative of the moribund clairvoyance, that Faust who still had a vision into the spiritual worlds, even though the vision was chaotic. But it no longer happens in modern times that when the human soul is passive in certain conditions it can see spiritually, as in ancient times. For it can only see what is material and can acquire that which the intellect can combine out of the material. The whole tragedy of the final spiritual vision is brought to expression in the primitive communications regarding Faustus junior. By giving himself such a title we can perceive that he is, as it were, the final offshoot of those who were able to see into the spheres through which the Christ descended. He called himself Faustus junior, in allusion to the Manichee Bishop Faustus.

We know that he knew all about the Bishop Faustus for whom Augustine had longed, for the writings of Augustine were never so widely spread in Europe as at the time in which the writings of Faust junior appeared. And he called himself Magus Secundus, referring to the Magus Primus, the Simon Magus of old, who for those who were yet able to see, represented one whose vision towered up into the spheres of heaven, and of whom they stood in awe who were only desirous of concentrating within themselves the heavenly power.

Faustus alluded to him. And he alluded to yet another of whom we know through our observations of Spiritual Science that his vision unfolded in order to see into spiritual spheres. He called himself Pythagoras Secundus as the successor of that Pythagoras who was called Primus in this art.

We see the last glimmering evening-glow of that which existed as the ancient clairvoyance and we see how incomprehensible this ancient clairvoyance already was to men. Indeed that was actually realised which has been represented so strikingly to us in the legend of Faust, that Augustine longed for Faustus senior and that he became acquainted with the teaching of Faustus senior through an old man, a doctor. In the same way, carried forward into different circumstances, Faustus junior encounters us in the popular legend, and the old man again appears here, warning him: but he had already made his compact. He entrusted to Dr. Wagner his inheritance. When in surveying the ages and that which arose therein as conceptions of a spiritual world we see the age of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch approaching, we have to say: That is the legacy entrusted to Dr. Wagner. The question is how such a legacy can be administered. In the case of Faust, it is still a seeing into the spiritual worlds; in the case of this Dr. Wagner it is what can be described by saying that a man digs greedily for treasure and rejoices if he finds a glow-worm.

Such is the materialistic conception of the world of our modern times. It is no wonder that in this materialistic conception of the world the whole view of the heavenly Christ was lost, so that to-day people are afraid of the expansion of that picture upon which the earth-forces up till the present should have been concentrated. For we also know that the earth-humanity would have to lose, completely lose, all comprehension of this, if through a new spiritual view it were not able to weave a new aura round the touching picture of the Christ-child and His growth through thirty-three earth years. Spiritual Science will be called upon, as those souls who seriously apply themselves to Spiritual Science will perceive, again to quicken the vision of human minds for the heavenly Christ beside the earthly Christ. Then will the Christ be known for all the future earth-ages in such a way that He can never be lost to the progress and the salvation of mankind.

When wisdom shall again press upwards into the heights where, in the divine spheres, the fire of love bums, then will the human soul certainly not lose all that is wonderful, all that presses into the profoundest life-springs of men, all that human knowledge can know regarding Christ Jesus. And infinitely much will be acquired in addition: there will be acquired that which must be acquired if the evolution of humanity is to advance as it should.

The fresh springs of a new spiritual knowledge have already been opened; nevertheless, that which we are able to say to-day is truly such that we celebrate it at this time still in the symbol of the Christmas Festival. Deep, deep humility overcomes him who rightly experiences that which is to-day our occult knowledge. For we can only very dimly sense that which Spiritual Science will become for humanity in future days. For that which we are able to know of it to-day is in the same relation to that which in the days to come, when many, many ages have passed away, will be presented to humanity as that of the little Christmas child to the full-grown Christ Jesus. To-day in our newly-arisen Spiritual Science we have truly still the child. Hence the Christmas Festival is rightly our festival, and we perceive that, with regard to what can hold sway in the evolution of the earth as human light, we are to-day living in the profoundly dark winter night. Also with regard to our present-day knowledge we are actually standing before what is revealed in the profound wintry darkness of the earth evolution, just as once the shepherds stood before the Christ-child which was first revealed to them. With regard to the comprehension of Christ Jesus we can feel to-day exactly as did the shepherds at that time. We can so truly implore the springs of spiritual life which can ever more and more flow to mankind, implore them that indeed they may more and more bring to pass the Divine Revelation in the spiritual heights and through this revelation give to the human minds that peace which is in truth good for them. Then this Christmas Festival appears to us as a token. We still know little of that which the world will have as Spiritual Science in the days to come. We dimly sense what is to come, we dimly sense it in profound humility. But if we allow that little truly to enter our hearts, how does it appear to us then?

Let us cast a glance over present-day Europe—how the peoples think of one another, how each one seeks to lay the guilt of what is taking place upon the others. If the true anthroposophical conception is really impressed on our minds, then we shall understand the guilt which is now sought for by one people in the other, by one nation in the other. Truly, the guilt belongs to someone who is really and truly international, who guides his steps from nation to nation. But he is only spoken of in the circle of those into whose hearts a little Spiritual Science has penetrated. There we speak of Ahriman, the truly international being, who in conjunction with Lucifer is the truly guilty one. We do not find him if we turn our glance always to others, but if we seek the way to knowledge through self-knowledge. There, below in the chaotic depths, he goes; we feel him, this Ahriman. We shall learn to know him rightly and to know him in connection with that which the Mystery of Golgotha can be to us, namely, the proclamation of the revelation of wisdom and of peace in the heights and depths of the valley of the earth. Then only do we perceive what the whole fire of the Love is which can ray forth from the Mystery of Golgotha, which knows none of the limits which are set between the nations of the earth.

Much is contained in that which as Spiritual Science stands before our souls. Yet if we look at that which had already been manifested before this our chaotic present and which has now found an expression so convulsing, so sad and so painful, then we find how very very small is that dwelling, that soul-dwelling, in which to-day must dwell the new comprehension of the Christmas child which is to come to the earth. That Christmas child had to appear to poor shepherds, had to be born in a stable, concealed from those who at that time governed the world. Is it not again the same with regard to the new comprehension of that which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha? Is not that which appears to us to-day outside in the world far removed from this comprehension? How far removed is the world at the beginning of our age from that which was revealed to the shepherds in the words:

Divine Revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill.

Let us celebrate this Christmas Festival of the renewed Christ comprehension in our hearts and in our souls if we wish to celebrate a true Christmas Festival, let us feel, as did the shepherds, far away from that which has now gripped the world. And through that which is revealed to us, as it was to the shepherds, we realise what had to be realised at that time, the promise of a certain future. Let us build within our souls confidence in the fulfilment of this promise, confidence that that which we feel to-day as the child which we must worship (the new Christ-comprehension is this child) will grow, will live, will grow to maturity in the near future, so that in it can be embodied the Christ appearing in the etheric, just as the Christ could be embodied in the fleshly body at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us fill ourselves with the light which through the confidence in this out-pouring can shine into the deepest inner being of our souls. Let us permeate ourselves with the warmth which can flow through our minds. If we feel thus with regard to the heights in which the light of Spiritual Science appears before our souls, then alone can we be certain that it will some day fill the world.

When we thus think, we celebrate a genuine Christmas Festival even in this grave and painful time, for not only is it the profoundly dark winter night of the time of the year, but there is over the horizon of the nations the result of the Ahrimanic darkness which has been growing up since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. And just as the announcement of the Christ could only come at first to the shepherds but then filled the world ever more and more, so will also the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha fill the world ever more and more, and times will come which as times of light will replace for humanity the time of winter darkness in which we are living to-day.

Thus let us feel as did the shepherds with regard to that which is still a child, with regard to the new Christ-comprehension, and let us feel that in all humility we can permeate with the new meaning the verse which is not only for ever to be preserved within the progress of the evolution of the earth, but is also to become more and more full of meaning. Let us with our minds and with heightened consciousness make ourselves one at this Christmas time with the motto so full of promise:

Divine Revelation in spiritual heights,
Peace ever and yet more peace
To all the souls of men on earth
Who have goodwill.