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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 1361 through 1370 of 6456

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69c. A New Experience of Christ: From Jesus to Christ 01 Dec 1911, Nuremberg

Rudolf Steiner
Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?”
As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.
The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Christ in the 20th Century 22 Feb 1912, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
If one looks at the character of our entire culture, this interest is understandable. The figure of Christ was one that gave the deepest impulse to Western culture for many centuries.
In contrast to this, there is the tendency to seek only a deeper understanding of the essence of Jesus of Nazareth. But this figure is even doubted in its historical existence.
Spiritual flight was attributed to [the realm of] faith. Aristotle said: Everything that underlies the realms of nature is spiritual; only he did not accept the reincarnation of the human soul.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Christ in the 20th Century 16 Nov 1912, Hamburg

Rudolf Steiner
It is perfectly possible to say that a child, still completely uncomprehending, may delight in a flower and understand this flower with its mind, but one can also go further and say that the wise man will admit that his highest wisdom is not enough to truly understand this flower.
When Christians understand that in reality all people are Christians, when the Christ-problem is truly understood, then one will no longer make it dependent on religious denominations whether or not to call a person a Christian.
As simple as this may be expressed, it is still little understood today. But when the Christ-problem is spiritually grasped, then the Christ will shine forth and stream into the souls and hearts of men.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Raphael in the Light of Spiritual Science 11 Mar 1913, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
But it is still interesting to observe how such an important mind repeatedly approaches this task, how he undertakes the matter again in the twilight of his life and how he struggles to understand Raphael. You can see that from the fragment. His struggle to understand Raphael is particularly interesting, because he describes the world-famous painting 'The Marriage of the Virgin', which is in Milan, in an attempt to understand it.
It seems to me that there will certainly come a time in the development of humanity when people will realize, precisely through unbiased observation of the facts, that only the great phenomena can be understood from the law of repeated lives on earth. Then it will also be clear that it is not only necessary to look at the greatest phenomena, but that every single human life can be understood if one takes the view of repeated lives on earth.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Raphael's Mission in the Light of Science: From the Spirit 19 May 1913, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
I will quote them to you verbatim so that we can, so to speak, fully immerse ourselves in the way this man seeks to gain a personal relationship to his subject through his research. Thus Raphael appears to him as a spirit, to understand which he needs to draw on the most intimate depths of human development. Not on the basis of an epoch, but as if born out of the whole development of humanity – great and powerful on the background of human development, that is how he appears to him; and for those who can feel, words such as those written by Herman Grimm in the last fragmentary pages about Raphael, which he wrote as if born out of a final attempt to understand Raphael, have a profound effect.
Then humanity developed further, and our present understanding, our imagination and other things, as they are peculiar to present humanity, were incorporated as an element of a new impulse.
You can see this clearly when you look at the still existing pictures, at the mild, but still quite understandable face of Perugino from his time: This soul, living in these features, has sought to internalize the art from what he has conjured up on the canvas, from tradition; but the soul was not completely there.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Christ in the 20th Century 10 Jan 1914, Bremen

Rudolf Steiner
Only out of shortsightedness can one deny that conceptual knowledge also had to develop first. The epoch in which the human soul underwent this transformation is the time when the Christ entered into evolution; as a result, the human soul has become something other than it was before the Christ event.
But the souls that long to come to the inexplicable in themselves will ask themselves: How am I, how is my self connected to a spiritual world? If we look at these processes with understanding and soulfulness, a comparison suggests itself: When certain animals prepare for something special, they tend to go hungry.
In order for people to be able to find the Christ, he had to undergo birth, baptism, and death, and by conquering death, he has been poured out into the evolution of the earth.
69c. A New Experience of Christ: Christ in the 20th Century 08 Feb 1914, Pforzheim

Rudolf Steiner
One could also say: it is nourishment for the simplest and can never be fully understood by the wisest, because it contains such depths. Question: What does it mean to pray in the Christian sense?
Let us assume that a child has a poem by Goethe – it cannot understand it because it is too young, even though it may have heard all the words from the poem before. It hurts when such [superficial] judgments are made over and over again, because they hinder the progress of culture.
69c. From Jesus to Christ (single) 04 Oct 1911, Karlsruhe
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.
In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated.
Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.
69c. Christ in the 20th Century 06 May 1912, Cologne
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ. Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ. They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.
What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth.
69c. Jesus and Christ 15 Nov 1913, Hamburg

Rudolf Steiner
We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”
Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ.
In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so.

Results 1361 through 1370 of 6456

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