The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! The question of the Christ is arousing interest in the widest circles today. In our so enlightened age, this question is about to become one of the most significant. 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 the present time, in certain considerations, this figure seems to be disappearing, to be falling out of hands. Before the gaze of historical research, the figure of Christ is, as it were, dissolving. 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. “Did Jesus live?” is a question often asked today. Such a question deeply affects all minds. As with all historical phenomena, one may ask whether the Christ Jesus was a historical being. But the Gospels are not documents like others, [like ordinary historical documents]. From the point of view of present-day historical research, there is a certain justification for the belief that the figure of Christ must be simply shattered in those who seek a historical basis. This is one reason why [in the past] the impulse had such a profound effect on people and why [today] such great interest must be shown in this research: precisely because of [people's] fear of losing a well-founded belief in the figure of Christ.

Now, from the spiritual scientific point of view, something, even if only a sketch, is to be said about this problem that has just been characterized. [But what this spiritual science has to say is that from it arises the well-founded hope that The Christ, who was irretrievably taken away from people outwardly, can be given back to them again.] The figure of Christ, as it emerges from spiritual science, is something that goes against the general convictions and judgments, it is downright repugnant to them. What is to be said this evening will not only meet with opposition, but it will also be taken as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy. It is not possible to gather everything on this question in the context of a single lecture, but by communicating what spiritual science has found, one or two things may come out afterwards. Actually, the question only becomes clear when we look back over the centuries at the different conceptions that people have had of the Christ.

It must be admitted: the Christ conception of the first centuries has something strange for present-day people; [this was already the case then, and to gain an understanding later on [in the course of time] is becoming more and more impossible. So the present point of view has developed: with regard to Christ, spiritual science comes to a similar conclusion as the Gnostic science of the first centuries. The Gnostics are often called sects, but they rose to the highest heights of human thought and feeling, which today's people cannot have much interest in. The followers of Gnosticism were far from adopting monistic views – a noble word for “materialistic”. The Gnostic does not find the original human being in the animal kingdom, but [for him] he is still a spiritual being; this being has not externally assumed a carnal body in the animal kingdom, but as a spiritual human being has brought himself more and more into alignment with the laws of the physical body. Incorporation has brought man to the situation in which he now is.

[And so the Gnostics asked:] How do we find the [original] human being? Each one [in] himself? On the one hand, we find what we have also become in terms of our soul life; on the other, we find a striving, a belief in a higher human nature. This enables the human being to unleash certain powers within himself so that he can uplift himself. He discovers [his] higher nature. Thus a sum of forces is hidden in the higher human nature. This is the view of the Gnostics: man is destined for a life in higher spheres; his life on earth is lower, lies below what he could be in spirit. Man's [physical] life does not correspond to his higher nature; but it is not lost; it is only important for physical progress [on earth]. The higher self has been preserved in the spiritual world. Eventually, this superhuman being was able to descend and work in human nature; at a certain point in time, a primeval human being, so to speak, was able to descend and work in human nature, who had been preserved in the spiritual world until then. This being is what Gnosticism conceived of as the Christ. He contains within himself the impulse to the highest that man can achieve. This moment [of descent] coincides, symbolically speaking, with the baptism of John.

[From the point of view of Gnosticism] people are sometimes more and sometimes less advanced. Gnosticism revered Jesus of Nazareth as the highest, most outstanding person in the development of the earth. We can characterize what happened to him at the age of thirty without shocking people: A person grows up, shows this or that development, until a certain point in life when a break occurs, something completely new enters the soul life, for which there seems to be no preparation at all. Some present this as something impossible, but there are upheavals, radical breaks in human life. Imagine such an upheaval - taken to the highest degree. Even if this turnaround is made on the smallest scale, the person feels like a new being, which he was not before. (The Gnostics assume such a turnaround when they speak of what occurred in Jesus of Nazareth at the age of thirty.)

The original man has found his way into the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. He was like an outer vessel; in the sense of the Gnostics, he is seen as the bearer of Christ. Thus, one cannot say that the Christ is identical with Jesus of Nazareth. But there was no new developmental epoch in the life of Jesus of Nazareth: that which had always been there in the heights of heaven, which had been preserved from the beginning, descended to earth and lived in the body of Jesus for three years. This is the infinite spiritual depth of the thought: the development of humanity has ascended to the Most High with God, has been saturated with the power of the Most High. A small circle of Gnostics could grasp the great significance of what had been given back to humanity.

We cannot go through all the individual stages of the Christ-ideas, but we can name a few, for example, in the case of the deep thinkers of the Middle Ages. They had the most intense faith, but it was not possible for them to elevate it to Gnostic ideas. It was impossible to think about Christian Gnosticism in the Middle Ages. Such thinking would have appeared to be fantasy. In the Middle Ages, the view was limited to what lies below the sphere of the Gnostics. They drew from Aristotle, [from the world of thought created by him] four hundred years before Christ; Aristotle was then the “tone-setter”. 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. He was interested in what can be recognized according to law, he was only interested in a unified God. [According to his view] the human soul separates from the unified divine substance with every birth. But after death, the soul does not return to the divine, but remains in the spiritual world as an individual human being. For Aristotle, the entire transcendental world is purely cognitive. Man looks back on his life on earth [after his death] and then finds his reward or his torment, eternal punishment and reward. This is related to the science of Aristotle – Franz Brentano, [a great connoisseur of Aristotle, has commented on it at length in his works]. The medieval scholars did point to a knowledge of the spiritual world, but for them [the cognitive approach to the spiritual] was excluded – that is the realm of gnosis, which is attained through knowledge.

[And so one can ask:] What is missing from the faith of medieval man? Well, what he lacks is the awareness, the conscious realization that man has also fallen intellectually. From this unconscious, spiritual science wants to raise him; this is then a new Christ consciousness, apart from all mythological and legendary aspects. The penetration of the ruling spirit into Jesus of Nazareth was only faith, but not knowledge. Thus humanity came to no longer be able to imagine what it means when the Christ takes possession of Jesus; it is nonsense for the materialistic thinking of the new age that from spiritual heights [the Christ presence as] something real descended to men. Only Jesus of Nazareth remains as an excellent human being.

Now, contradictions arose with ease when one sought clarification in the four documents [the gospels] and found differences. It is really child's play to show that they [in many ways] do not agree. [And one wonders:] Didn't they notice that earlier? It is easy to ascribe any folly to our ancestors, [as if] they had never read the Gospels. Thus Jesus of Nazareth became more and more blurred, [for many in modern times] he is only an exceptionally good person. That is flattering for the modern person; for him, Jesus of Nazareth is a person like all the others, only a little higher: like Plato, Socrates. Thus Jesus became the “simple man of Nazareth.” The simpler, the more general [his image became], the more people liked it, the more they believed that it corresponded to the historical truth. That is called “impartial research.” Only what is recognized as objective is objective. The greatest theologians believed that one should approach the subject without prejudice, assuming nothing to be true, but [what do they do?] They go and simply cross out [what is not apparent to them in the gospels]. Hence the question arises: “Did Jesus live?” No other result was possible [with such a way of thinking]. Outwardly, historically, the existence of Jesus cannot be proven. [Professor] Drews cum suis is absolutely right in the way he presents it. [He is consistent in his thinking]. Anything else would be like struggling for something that cannot be proven.

Spiritual science places itself in the context of culture; [it uses certain methods to gain insights into the spiritual course of human development], as discussed in the book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. This title was not chosen at random: it is not Christian mysticism that is meant, but rather that the Christ impulse is to be understood as the driving force of that which is found in external, physical reality. The most important impulse in the development of the earth is the Christ impulse; it is the center of gravity of this entire historical development. Spiritual science ties in again with what Gnosis wanted, but it does so from its own resources, quite independently. In pre-Christian times, the human soul functioned quite differently than it does today. It is a bad habit not to want to recognize that the human soul was different. [...] In the past, dream-like clairvoyance was a third state between sleeping and waking. Man knew then that there are spiritual beings, just as he knows today that there are plants and animals. The old legends and myths are images of what man has seen. The myths are transposed old clairvoyant experiences. But this clairvoyance had to be lost, because it was a prelude to the development of the ego in human evolution, to the development of the full ego of man in the physical world, of man's self-built existence.

This is the course of human development: from dim clairvoyance, it is to come to clear, conscious clairvoyance, firmly grounded in the future. In ancient times, there was no knowledge of the reasons for existence that was acquired other than through clairvoyance. [Although] Deussen [claims the opposite, it must be said] that only since the Greek period did [intellectual] knowledge of the external world emerge, actually only with Thales; Thales was the first. What comes from atavistic clairvoyance is not [philosophy]. In ancient times, the places where man rose above the ordinary state were the mystery schools, [from today's perspective, something between a university and a church. In these mystery sites, people could gain initiation]. The initiates recognized: the spirit reveals itself only in the ego, not in the powers of the soul; the ego is the center of the soul's being. But at first the spirit revealed itself only as God, who lived in all the people, as with the ancient Hebrews. Man's deepest being is directly divine; body and soul are only indirectly so. Through certain practices and exercises, the soul life can become independent of the body. The divine lives in the ordinary human being as he is in life; it reveals itself from the core of his being, the I. There were various initiation instructions, essentially four. The mysteries become an historical fact in the mystery of Golgotha - that was the Christ impulse! The Christ is the universal spirit; his life took place on the physical plane before all humanity, and is not lived out in a small way - as insignificant, before individuals, before the apostles and others - but representatively before all humanity. Thus there was a replacement of the old mysteries by the One. In the I, in the innermost being of the soul, lies the highest power of humanity. So we can rise again from the Fall.

The time since the I has been dependent on itself was preceded by the Christ impulse by only six hundred years. From this point on, man is completely placed in the world, which is perceived only through the outer senses. In natural development, we are dealing with leaps everywhere, and this also applies to the development of humanity. Thus, every time is a time of transition and our time is very special.

Some old forms are fading away, both moral and intellectual. Man is placed at the pinnacle of his own personality. Until today it was a time of preparation, [you could take it to heart or not]; but now increased powers must play in human nature. Souls are experiencing an increase of their powers. The last time this happened was in Greek times, six hundred years before Christ; then [this impulse] entered into human development [as the beginning of independent thinking]. Today we are at a similar point in time as six hundred years before Christ. But then the human soul was guided outwards into the physical world, now its only support is the ego; and in this ego of man the Christ consciousness must be established. It is a kind of repetition, but now inwards, internalized.

The center of the world is in this I. With our internalization, the highest impulses that can live in a person at all will arise - [it is] a spiritual return of the Christ within; [soul powers are developed] that can grasp the Christ in a new form; [can be experienced] by spiritual perception, not in the physical world. [This experience is not identical with the experience of the inner, mystical Christ, that is, with something that was already there.] Spiritual science shows us the inner, mystical Christ and the historical Christ. Anyone who only wants to believe in the inner, mystical Christ, not in the historical Christ, is mistaken. One also needs the historical Christ, because there would be no inner, mystical Christ without the historical Christ. The Christ-feeling in us depends on the spiritual sun as the eye depends on the light: it depends on the historical Christ. Without the latter there is no possibility of the inner Christ – it is the historical Christ who created the organ for the Christ-experience in the hearts of men.

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that the topic of this evening's lecture is one that is at the center of intellectual interest in many respects in the present day. It could easily appear as if it was chosen with regard to the various party opinions and intellectual currents that are asserted in relation to this topic today. However, those of the esteemed listeners to whom I have often been privileged to speak about spiritual-scientific matters will have seen from the overall attitude and tenor of these reflections that the world view presented here does not directly interfere with the pros and cons that arise today with regard to such questions. In view of all this, it is certainly not without interest to hear a word on the subject of “Christ in the twentieth century” from the side that has set itself the task of considering the spiritual development of humanity and the whole of cultural life from the point of view of objective spiritual science.

Perhaps one could believe that the very term “Christ in the twentieth century” is open to dispute from the point of view of objective spiritual science, since the human heart and soul already have an image of something that cannot be subject to the changing views of the centuries when it comes to the name “Christ”. But if we turn our gaze to the past of Christianity, we will be able to see for ourselves, when we visualize the various spiritual activities of humanity, how a clear change in the views of Christ has actually taken place over the centuries. And if we can speak in our time, in a certain respect, of a kind of revision of all spiritual questions, then what is connected with the tasks of the present in relation to spiritual matters must also shed light on the Christ problem. And if not elsewhere, then the discussions of the present time, which are quite lively in some cases, show above all how there is a desire in the hearts of today's humanity to come to terms with this problem, which is not only at the center of the spiritual present, but of the history of human development in general.

If we speak of development in all fields of knowledge today, then everything that exists in terms of ideas, perceptions and feelings in connection with the Christ-problem can also be brought into the light of development. Spiritual science aims to explore everything that lies behind the existence of the senses, beyond what the mind, which is bound to the brain, can comprehend. I have often indicated the sources and the nature of the research in this field. One does not research in the same way as in external science, nor does one observe and contemplate the world in the same way as in external life as one does in spiritual science. Tonight, these things can only be hinted at. More details can be found in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Spiritual science assumes that it is possible for a person to awaken certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in his soul. It provides the methods by which these powers can be awakened. The soul that applies these methods to itself does indeed come to engage in an inner life that is independent of the senses and all physical functions, and is also independent of the mind, which is connected to the brain. An inner life is possible through which one can see into a spiritual world and observe what is supersensible and what is behind the events that have taken place in the course of human development. How can one observe without physical organs? That is the methodological question of spiritual science. The results of this method are then what is communicated as spiritual science.

This spiritual science approaches the public in the same way as the other sciences, which [explore the phenomena of the world through experiments and observe them with apparatus in laboratories and observatories, and then contemporaries come and examine the things with common sense]. Spiritual science also makes use of the experiment, the spiritual experiment, and the apparatus, the soul apparatus. What the soul can make of itself when it has broken away from the outer body and leads an inner life within itself, what it can then explore in the spiritual realm, is communicated in the same way as the results of astronomy and biological research are communicated. Common sense can judge this if it is only willing to engage with it, even though in our time it does not yet feel much inclination to do so. It is obvious that in a single lecture not all paths can be shown that lead the soul, thus liberated, to Christ, nor can all the proofs for this path be adduced now. My task this evening is solely to indicate the point of view of spiritual research regarding this Christ-being and to give an idea of how this spiritual-scientific view of the Christ-problem can be integrated into what our other spiritual culture has to say about the Christ.

Before this is possible, we must take a few glances at the development of the Christ question over the centuries since the founding of Christianity. It is not at all intended to develop everything that people have done in terms of theological and other religious squabbling, but rather to point out the main lines and currents.

A very liberal contemporary scholar, William Benjamin Smith, has pointed out a very curious fact that is likely to correct many a modern judgment about the times in which Christianity was founded. The ideas about Christ that gradually spread in the first centuries cannot be understood without taking a look at what in the first centuries was called Gnostic Christianity. Spiritual science is not a warmed-over Gnosticism, but we must concern ourselves with Gnosticism because we want to orient ourselves regarding the ideas that the past has produced about Christ. In particular, the following fact should be noted in Smith. He says: “From about fifty years before the founding of Christianity until one hundred and fifty years after its founding - and this is not said by a spiritual researcher or an orthodox theologian, but by a liberal researcher! - the greatest theosophical geniuses lived, those people who tried hardest to fathom, through their wisdom and science, what Christ actually is in the context of the whole development of mankind.

The present time has little inclination to hear such a word; it only likes to hear the word that the Christ Being is such a Being that even the simplest mind can still approach with full understanding. So why must comprehensive wisdom and knowledge be summoned to approach Christ, who is supposed to be accessible to the simplest mind? It cannot be said that anyone who raises such an objection is necessarily wrong; the tremendous power of the Christ Impulse really does lie in the fact that it is accessible even to the simplest mind. But such an objection must also be considered in another light. 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. Similarly, the highest wisdom is necessary to truly penetrate to the essence of Christ. The theosophical Gnostics, says Smith, were those geniuses who, at the beginning of Christianity, out of the bold courage of their souls, tried to truly understand the Christ Being. That which is still useful today for the truly unbiased soul from this Gnosticism should, for once, come before our soul.

For Gnosticism, the Christ Impulse was an impulse that is absolutely necessary for the entire development of humanity on earth. Above all, Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus represented this main developmental idea of Gnosticism. Of course, the spiritual doctrine of evolution of Gnosticism will perhaps fiercely reject what is today called the monistic theory of evolution. However, this so-called monistic theory of evolution differs from the Gnostic one in that, when it looks back to earlier states, it only , while the Gnostic doctrine of evolution goes back to the times when only the spiritual existed as the origin of existence, from which then not only the human soul but also the material developed, depending on the spiritual.

I have often pointed out the purely logical contradiction of the materialistic theory of evolution. It says: We go further and further back in time, come to times when primitive human conditions prevailed, then assume that humans developed from animals, and finally come to times when only animality was on earth. And we go back even further than when life was not yet on earth at all. We can say that this materialistic doctrine goes back to such hypothetical conditions when the earth was a part of the cosmic fog within the solar system, from which the sun with its planets would then have developed. The logical error in this whole materialistic doctrine can be seen from a comparison that is often made when this doctrine is to be explained to the student. This is illustrated by taking a drop of oil floating on water. Then you cut a small piece of paper, stick it on a pin, bring it into the drop of oil and then turn it. As smaller droplets then separate out, you can show the student the formation of a miniature planetary system. The same thing, so they say, happened outside with the great nebula. Therein lies the ground plan of the monistic theory of evolution. However, a big mistake is made in the process; the teacher has forgotten something. He has forgotten that the whole thing only turns when he does it himself. Therefore, the comparison only applies if one assumes a great professor in space who turns the whole thing. Of course, one does not need to assume this if one stands on the monistic point of view.

Spiritual science, however, assumes that if we go back in time from epoch to epoch, we do not come across anything material at all, but rather that the origin of the earth and also of a planetary system lies in a sum of spiritual beings. Spirit is the origin of existence; this was also a fundamental Gnostic idea. And this spirit, which is the origin of all existence, can be recognized today when the soul is freed from the body. If one wants to deny the spirit behind all existence, then such a denial can be compared to what someone might say who looks into a container of water in which pieces of ice are floating, and then wants to say: That is only ice. In the same way, someone who has only opened their eyes to material existence can only see matter and not the spirit. But material existence is embedded in the spirit; it has developed out of the spirit in accordance with natural law; it is a condensation of the spiritual, and all material beings have arisen out of the spirit. Those who only want to accept matter overlook the spiritual only because they have not opened their spiritual eyes, as Goethe says. In primeval times, according to the Gnostics, all material things did not yet exist. These developed out of the spiritual through condensation; they are a consequence of the spiritual, a condensation of the spiritual: all material beings from stones to human beings are products of the spiritual.

One can follow how, little by little, the planetary and the natural kingdoms arose out of the spiritual, and how, at a certain point in the development of the earth, man also emerges out of the spirit and enters the earth. This was the idea of the Gnostics, which still seems correct to true spiritual science today - the Gnostics, who, with bold human wisdom, tried to fathom the nature of Christ. They assumed that at a certain point in the development of the earth, man came into being in such a way that a certain amount of what was predetermined in the spiritual world for man – a certain amount of the human soul that was present in the spirit and destined for the physical human being, found its way into the earthly human being, so that from a certain point in the development of the earth, he was endowed with this spiritual-soul, which became human. But they also assumed that something of this spiritual-human aspect had been left behind in the spiritual world when it emerged into human development, so that only part of the whole human aspect survived in the generations on earth. So people developed down on earth, but it was not the full spiritual-human aspect that was in them; rather, a part had remained behind in the spiritual world and continued to develop there, beyond the human level.

If we take the development of the earth in the sense of gnosis, we can say: From the time when man appeared on earth, we have a twofold developmental current. Firstly, the souls in people develop on earth from generation to generation, but the full spiritual, which humanity should have received from the spiritual world, does not develop. And a second developmental trend is about material existence, is about the cosmos, the spiritual realm. Then, according to the Gnostic view, something occurred in the development of humanity that could only occur at a later point in time.

Why did humanity have to develop for a time without its highest spiritual link? This had to happen because people were to complete a kind of descent within the material in their development, were to fully enter into the material; they had to become aware of themselves in the material, so that when this remaining spiritual approaches them at a later point in time, they would be able to feel and receive it all the more freely and independently. Man had to become entangled in the material so that he could then, by distinguishing the spiritual from the material, feel this spiritual in its purest meaning when it descended.

When did the spiritual descend? Gnosis says: The descent of this spiritual, which has developed in the cosmos, is indicated by what is symbolically stated in the Gospels as John's baptism in the Jordan. If we want to understand this, we can say that every person can know that the individual human being not only develops successively, but that there are moments in the existence of many souls when they feel as if something completely new has entered them, as if something has been awakened in them. For the development of Goethe, for example, it is easy to indicate when one has to make a cut in the nineties, when something completely new entered into the soul of Goethe. There are many souls that know that they not only progress little by little, but that the soul has tremendous moments of reversal and development, where they feel as if a world is flowing into them, where they take in something completely new.

This is for individual souls on a small scale what Gnosis saw on a large scale in the appearance of John the Baptist in the Jordan. Then this spiritual approached the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. Until then, Jesus' development had progressed in such a way that he was prepared by it to experience the greatest possible change through this John the Baptist. Not only did a great change occur in this soul, but that which had remained behind in the spiritual-cosmic regions at the origin of human development entered into it; that which had developed separately in the regions of the supersensible entered into the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. It took possession of him and remained in his soul for three years, until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who want to apply the usual sequence of cause and effect from history to such things will not be able to understand this, but those who take into account the factors that are given in my book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact' , will find that factors of a supersensible nature play a part in historical development, and that what is assumed by Gnosticism cannot be rejected out of hand as something effusively mystical.

What did Gnosticism say? It assumed that there are two developmental currents that lead people to the point where they are grasped by the first, the material; above this material current is a supersensible-spiritual one. At the time of the baptism in the Jordan, the second current approached the person of Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that through this event humanity was fertilized with that part of the universal cosmic human being that it had not yet been able to absorb at the beginning of the development on earth. We have here a spiritual fertilization – the fertilization of humanity with that impulse that had to remain behind in order to develop further until humanity had matured materially enough to be able to receive it. Just as it is not a contradiction that some germ in nature must first develop and then be fertilized in order to reach full development, so it is not a contradiction that humanity must first develop materially and then be fertilized by the spirit at a certain point in time.

That is one of the ideas, and indeed the main idea, of Gnostic thought. Today, everyone believes that they can move beyond the Gnostics and dismiss them as fantasists and enthusiastic mystics, although theologians – for example, Harnack in his “History of Dogma” – say that we must turn back to them, because in Gnosticism lies the real starting-point for all later religious and theological speculations; and Smith admitted that these Gnostics were the greatest theosophical geniuses! And if we want to characterize the fundamental position of such a Gnostic with regard to the Christ problem, then we find that the Gnostics had the boldness to say: The human soul is capable, through its own efforts, through the development of what lies dormant in it, of really developing such powers of knowledge that it can survey the spiritual developmental impulses of humanity. If we want to speak more trivially, we can say that these Gnostics dared to gain knowledge of the supersensible path of human development from their souls. Such a Christ-idea, as it was held by these Gnostics, thus comes to meet us at the beginning of the Christian era. If we then continue to observe the development of the Christ-question within the evolution of mankind, we comprehend the necessary process that can be recognized in relation to the Christ-problem right up to the twentieth century.

We can make a small leap from the Gnostics into the Middle Ages. Do we find the same fact there? For a few individuals, yes, but not to the extent that there was such bold confidence in the general intellectual life, such trust in the powers of perception for the supersensible. The medieval view says: That which relates to the Christ-being, that which relates to the supersensible at all, has been revealed to man in Scripture. This revelation from Scripture is accepted as it is. The essential point of the medieval view is that it says: Man can only go so far with his own powers of knowledge; but then all human knowledge must stand still and wait for what tradition and revelation give as a supplement to what man can investigate himself. With his powers of knowledge, man can only recognize nature and what appears out of it, but in relation to the depth of the supersensible, man must rely on what Scripture has handed down to him. Man cannot penetrate with his powers of knowledge into that which is revealed to mankind. The boldness and confidence of Gnosticism have vanished. One no longer admits or recognizes that man can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through his spiritual powers. Thus the development went further.

In more recent times, the epoch is now dawning that has brought about what the spiritual researcher will always acknowledge: namely, the great achievements of natural science, the knowledge of material existence and its laws, the great achievements of industrial, commercial and social life. But in relation to the spiritual, a consequence has necessarily arisen from this material progress. This could only be achieved by man's leaning towards the sensual, the material. Something pushed its way into his thinking habits, causing him to lose his inclination towards the supersensible: while in the Middle Ages divine revelation was still accepted, the more recent epoch only agreed that man should not reach into the supersensible. But then this judgment was revised and it was said: So we leave the supersensible entirely and we also only adhere to the external-material. This was the case [from the Middle Ages] until the nineteenth century.

The view of religious matters, especially of the Christ problem, was also [shaped] in this way. What were the consequences of this? The idea of a being that had developed supersensibly and then entered into human existence was something people no longer wanted to know anything about. Christ as a supersensible, cosmic being that took possession of the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the supersensible Christ in the physical, sensual man Jesus – the new age did not want to go as far as this supersensibility. The result was that it lost the Christ and held only to Jesus. And the whole stream of development took shape as we see it now in the closing nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century as the so-called “Jesus conception”.

Truly, this view has produced many beautiful and glorious things. I would like to draw attention to something from the very last days, to the book by the Nuremberg theologian Rittelmeyer; it is called “Jesus”. And when you read this booklet, you get the impression that the author has gained something in his understanding of Jesus that corresponds to an ideal personality, which gives him nourishment for soul and spirit, to which he devotes himself, which gives him the certainty that all great human things, all that is truly meaningful, are real, that all great impulses of humanity are not a dream but reality. Rittelmeyer has in his soul what one would wish for every soul; he has the certainty in view of Jesus that he has a faithful counselor. His description is so vivid as if he could look at the living Jesus as on a brother who is both hope and salvation for him. Such phenomena have produced the Jesus conception, but it has also produced something else, which has led to significant discussions.

Then came the purely materialistic research, and why should it not also approach this problem? What I mean is quickly indicated. The historians have become accustomed to stating only that which can be proven and substantiated from historical sources, for which one can present historical documents. With the culture of the Occident it is very strange in this regard. I would like to show this with an example. The following is said about the great historian von Ranke: When von Ranke was already advanced in years, he said to a friend: One cannot simply leave out the figure of Jesus from history – and yet, if we look at von Ranke's historical view, he leaves the Jesus impulse out of consideration. Then Ranke himself became suspicious and said: “If we examine the historical facts, we find that the impulse of Jesus plays a part in them everywhere.” This did not become clear to him from the historical sources, but from his instinctive consciousness he felt that one could not simply leave Jesus out of history.

But now the question is: Does a Jesus of Nazareth even exist? — This question would have been quite impossible for the Gnostics. They knew that man can develop to the knowledge of the supersensible, and that the Christ then comes to meet him when he considers the supersensible in the course of human development. One could even say that there is an ancestral relationship between Paul and Gnosticism. Paul, although a contemporary of Christ Jesus, could not be convinced by what had happened in Jerusalem. Certainly, everything was accessible to him, but that could not convince him; he remained an unbeliever. How did he not only become a believer, but also the most important representative and founder of Christianity? Through a supersensible experience! Out of the supersensible the truth about Christ appeared to him in the so-called “Event of Damascus”. And as he saw the Christ event out of the supersensible world, he knew that it was not something nebulous. He also knew that what now lives again in the supersensible — the Christ — once lived on earth in a human body. From the supersensible he received the conviction of the historical Jesus. Thus it was also quite natural for the Gnostics that the Christ lived in Jesus. This view continued well into the Middle Ages. Therefore, the question of the historical Jesus was not yet significant at that time.

It only became significant when people had lost the Christ and only clung to the material, to Jesus. Then the historian stepped in and demanded documents, and now historical radical criticism comes along and shows that in the sense in which we today call documents historical, the Gospels are not documents. No other documents are available. You must not misunderstand me. The Gospels are fully recognized by spiritual research, but in a sense other than a purely historical one. Through spiritual research, one relives the experiences of the Gospel writers, not the other way around. The Gospels are not evidence for the historical Jesus. Harnack said: All the historical traditions about Jesus can easily be written on a quart page. Everything is contestable, and when the purely historical method of research approaches the Gospels, then only what has happened could have happened, namely that Drews has shown in a brilliant way that there is no historical proof of Jesus. That is the movement that has emerged recently. Drews is not alone in this view; Smith is on the same ground. All of them have made a discovery that was highly astounding to them. They first realized that the historical Jesus cannot be established. They say: We have no documents, and therefore the Jesus can just as well be denied. But they made a discovery: They came to the conclusion that there is a Christ, that Jesus was a god. Drews, Smith and others admit that Jesus was not just a man but a god in the time in question, that all the accounts in the Gospels are accounts of a superhuman-divine being. So what do they do? They direct the view to the Christ idea; they come back to the Christ. And what results from that, you can find in Drews or in Smith's “Ecce Deus,” published by Diederichs in Jena.

[These people say:] What the Gnostics believed, what was believed in the Middle Ages, what Origen believed, that is not applicable to a human being. And this proves to us that by Christ is meant a superhuman, a divine being. Thus, in the Being at the source of Christianity, we have not a human being but a God — a Being to whom only spiritual and supersensory attributes can be applied, who has a supersensory significance for humanity. But such a Being does not exist, these people say, and therefore one cannot speak of such a Being; it did not exist in Jesus! So this newer spiritual current has discovered the Christ, has recognized that he is a god, and therefore breaks with the Jesus view; because now that he is a god, he certainly could not have existed. Smith says: If Christ is a god, then it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the existence of Jesus at all. This is how Christ was (re)discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but at the same time the whole Christ being was annulled. That is how it is now!

Look, what does Drews, for example, give us as a living Christ, as a living impulse that has intervened in the course of human development, as a spiritual-living being? Drews is not a materialist, is not a monist - he is quite religious -, but he assumes a development of humanity in general; he says: everyone can undergo an inner development, everyone can come to a certain inner elevation and religious experience in their soul, so that everyone then finds something in themselves, something like a higher self, like a higher human being. This higher self suffers in the ordinary human being and wants to be redeemed from it. - And further he says: At the time when Christianity was founded, this need to develop the higher human being was particularly strong, and so the common idea of such a superhuman Christ being was formed in an early Christian community. This idea of man is the actual Christ impulse. Because Christ is a god, he cannot have existed as a human being, but only as an idea. Drews is in a sense a spiritualistic idealist. He does not deny the Christ, but for him he is merely an idea. There was no man Jesus in whom a special cosmic entity had entered, but rather a human community was once seized by the idea that something higher lives in man, a human God, and that this is the suffering God who wants to redeem himself within humanity.

Thus, from all that the development of contemporary spiritual life has been able to achieve so far, we have an idea instead of the living Christ. Just as in recent times, perhaps out of an awareness of the times, people speak of “ideas of history” in such a way that they imply that only natural human beings exist, not spiritual powers that intervene in history, so too is the Christ himself said to be only an idea. This idea of Drews is a profound idea, but if one goes deeper, one can say: one can indeed find an idea as a characteristic law of world development, but an idea creates just as little as a painted painter will create a picture. What the Christ really is is quite different from what has been conceived as a general idea by some community, just as a painted image of a painter is different from a real painter who creates a picture. The mere idea of Christ could never have produced such an impulse as the Christ event has produced in man.

But that real, genuine Being that descended at the moment of John the Baptist's baptism, that Paul experienced at the moment of the Damascus Event – that is precisely what the present needs, since it cannot relate to an abstract idea. And that is what makes the contemplation of Jesus so acceptable to many people; for how can someone who is oppressed in his soul, who is in suffering and misery, ever find great hope, consolation and confidence, and believe in the redemption of mankind by looking at a cold idea? What makes the conception of Jesus so acceptable is that in this view one is dealing with a being just like any other ordinary human being. But one is dealing with a supersensible entity when one regards the Christ as a real, living entity. And this is how spiritual science regards him. It does not want to revive the old Gnostic teaching, but approaches the Christ as it approaches other facts of the material and spiritual world. And when spiritual research approaches the Christ today, it also finds the development of mankind as it can be understood in the sense of the old Gnosis. And it finds that what man can find as the way to the Christ must indeed take its starting point from within the human being. All spiritual research takes the inner man as its starting point; it says: the soul can develop, it can bring dormant powers to revelation within it, so that it looks into the spiritual world.

Now, on the basis of its research, this science adds to today's views something that is only slowly finding its way into our present education, but which used to be fairly widespread. We first find it in Lessing's “Education of the Human Race”; he speaks of the fact of repeated lives on earth. Just as we live now between birth and death, we are not living here for the first time; our soul has often been embodied in physical bodies and will often be again. What is the meaning of all this re-embodiment? The meaning is that our soul, as it passes from life to life, always develops different powers, always different nuances of character, always different qualities. It is not that we always return in the same way. All the souls that are embodied today were embodied in the time of the ancient Persians or the ancient Egyptians for my sake, and a progression of the souls takes place through these repeated lives on earth. When we consider this progression, the Gnostic teachings make sense: our time was preceded by a time in which man first had to mature in order to then be able to receive the Christ impulse. From life to life, every soul was present in the pre-Christian era, and from life to life it found its way more and more into the physical existence so that it became more and more mature in each new existence. Then the Christ impulse came, and the souls developed further.

Today we may say: we can only understand ourselves as human beings if we look back to the distant past. Our present state of consciousness – the way we think and have a world view today – has only developed over time; in earlier periods of the earth's development, consciousness was more dream-like, but in return people were clairvoyant. The myths and legends are the reproduction of what the clairvoyant soul has seen; they are not fictitious. Man at that time had no freedom and clarity of consciousness, but he still had something instinctively divine in him. Man at that time could not have concluded from the functionality of the world that there was a divine reason for it, but the soul was still connected to the divine spirit. In clairvoyance, man was still connected to his God. In certain intermediate states, the soul was, as it were, lifted out of its body, then a divine spiritual aspect was added to it.

But that was the meaning of further development, that man had to live more and more in the material world. In this way he came to know physical nature, but lost his divine inner consciousness. The inner God, which man experienced within himself, faded away; but what could be seen with human eyes and grasped with the human mind became clear to man. Therefore, science did not begin in primeval times, but only when people began to focus on their physical surroundings, while we have myths and legends from ancient times in which man grasped the divine-spiritual in a dream-like clairvoyance. Such was the descent of the human soul. When we consider this, a word of the Baptist appears to us in a very special depth. He focuses on the characteristic of his time. In the past, the soul had a connection with its God, but now this connection no longer exists. The Baptist could say: The meaning of human beings has changed, they have lost their connection with their God. But he could also say: human development is not only a descent, but also an ascent. For this, the Christ impulse was taken up at a certain point in time; what humanity had left behind in the way of spirituality descended upon Jesus as the Christ and through him enriched humanity. Then, Jesus' body had to pass over into death. Whoever wants to understand that death was necessary for the entire Christ impulse, that the sacrificial death is something most real, can reflect on the fact that the seed must also rot before it can bring forth a new plant and bear fruit. The original divine-spiritual, which preceded the two developmental currents [of which Gnosticism tells us – that which remains in the spiritual and that which leads into matter –] descended, passed through death and became the seed on Earth, in order to now fertilize the soul, so that it may ascend again from the material and find the way back into the spiritual.

Anyone who finds this repulsive and mystical may do so, and must also find it mystical that infinite chemical and physical effects are concentrated in the sun and expand throughout the cosmos and our earth. Just as material life is concentrated in the sun, so is the entire spiritual life of our earth concentrated in that entity, which, as the Christ-being, through that which is indicated by the baptism of John, flowed into Jesus, lived in him for lived in him for three years and then had to go to his death, in order to radiate from there and express its effects over the entire development of humanity, so that linked with the Christ Being is the impulse that came into the development of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The earth has become a different place as a result. When we look back today at the embodiments of people before the Mystery of Golgotha, we have to say: people were not in a position to allow what had come into the spiritual development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha to enter into their souls.

Spiritual science points out that behind what a person experiences in their everyday life, in the depths of their soul, lie subconscious depths. In that which a person is aware of, in that which lives in their higher soul, the Christ does not yet live directly for many people. Only in exceptional cases has he opened himself up, as he did to the apostle Paul. He was able to perceive the truth about the Christ through that which lived in the depths of his soul. But just as the soul has descended, so too does it ascend again. And anyone who has an eye and an understanding for this - not only the spiritual researcher who can penetrate to the certainty of these things - may say: We are now at an important starting point of human soul development. All the signs are there, if one can see into the present, that the matter is as follows.

In today's world, where we have come the farthest in the loss of Christ, in the denial of the historical Christ, where we have lost touch with the mystery of Golgotha, where we see how souls are educated by the scientific way of thinking of the new time, we also see how this way of thinking, when applied correctly, matures the souls to a new knowledge of Christ, which is the knowledge of Christ in spiritual science. One must start from the innermost part of one's soul in relation to the path to Christ. When the spiritual researcher does this, he comes to find something real, not in the conscious mind, but in that which lives in the unconscious part of his soul and which he can see as something that was not always on earth, but entered into earthly development at the time of the Mystery at Golgotha. If today the student of the soul is able to look within and draw forth from himself the deeper forces of his knowledge, he beholds something different than in pre-Christian times. He beholds the Christ in the spiritual world; in pre-Christian times he could not behold him. We can find him in ourselves, but the people of pre-Christian times could not find him in themselves. The historic Christ is the cause of the mystical Christ, which we can find in us, as true as the outer physical sun is the cause of our eyes. If the sun had never poured out its light, the eyes could not have developed. It is true that today's human soul, when it applies the methods of spiritual research to itself, finds the Christ within, because the Christ is in the soul's foundations. In the soul's undergrowth, Christ is in it and shows himself to us in such a way that through this inner Christ we realize: He is in us only because he was once there historically and entered into the development of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This Christ is not just an idea of the higher self, but he is the higher self; he is the one with whom we are connected in our deepest consciousness. This is the intimate relationship that we can gain with the Being that descended into a human body and suffered all that is human; but because it suffered divinely, it could be a helper for all people, so that at the same time it became the most intimate for the soul. Today man can say: What I find in me, what is most human in me, that lived as Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. He has become my brother, he is closest to my humanity. One understands the intimacy of the Christ of God only when one realizes His activity in the human soul from the following words of Christ: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Man only then has an intimate relationship with Christ when the spiritual essence, which as divine has participated in all that is human, mediates understanding between him and the other person, when the human soul says to itself: the Christ lives in me and also in you; when the Christ-being in one soul can seek the Christ-being in the other soul in love. This is how spiritual science speaks of the Christ. And at the same time, it finds that the human soul does not go from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, without meaning, but that it continues to develop.

If you compare the souls of people today with those in the eighth century, for example, you will find that the human soul powers were quite different from today. If you look at the nature of today's souls compared to the past, you will find that human souls are on the way to searching within themselves; and the more they search, the more they will find the Christ within themselves. Therefore, spiritual science may say: human souls are on the way to Christ. In the time in which Christ has been lost as God, in the time in which the historical Jesus is increasingly being lost through a radical criticism, man - so says spiritual science - is increasingly being driven into his inner being through the development of the human soul. In today's world, this is still masked and concealed, but the further development of the soul happens through one thing turning into its opposite and thereby bringing forth the other.

Materialism, when people take it very seriously, when it has reached its peak, will automatically lead to its opposite. When man is closed off from the supernatural, then the countervailing forces will awaken, and we are in the twentieth century in the time of the awakening of these countervailing forces. But when these deepest human soul powers awaken, then the Christ appears in the souls, and these souls experience the event of Paul of Damascus. Every soul in our time is living towards this, and just as Paul was convinced of the historical Jesus, so this event will increasingly evoke a living conviction in humanity that once upon a time Jesus was the Christ. “This is a bold fantasy,” some may say, ”but I cannot remain silent about it, even if it sounds bold: it is the truth! Such things are not immediately taken up by the time; there will be many obstacles before one comes to such a conviction, but it can still be given as a suggestion. One who has seen through everything is truly convinced. Those who look without prejudice at the souls of our time may speak of them as being on the path to the indicated knowledge of Christ.

The souls will become ever more mature in order to behold Christ in spirit. And this beholding in spirit is the real return of Christ, that is what can be called the “return” of Christ. What has entered the earth as divine-spiritual substance through the Mystery of Golgotha will not be seen in any physical way, but because, as human evolution progresses, souls will become ever more mature and thus [ever more capable of] seeing the supersensible realm as well. Direct participation in the Christ-consciousness, sharing in the Christ-consciousness, intimate communion with Christ Jesus – that is what lies ahead for humanity. By stating this, spiritual science penetrates directly into the heart; it does not bring dull theories, but leads to life in many areas of everyday life, but also to life where it is important for humanity.

If you look at Christ correctly, if you see him as a matter of humanity, not just as a personal matter, then you can also find the way to the historical Jesus through him. But the recognition of repeated earthly lives is a basic condition for truly grasping the Christ principle. If you ask: Was it not unfair for pre-Christian people that they could have no relationship with Christ? Then you do not recognize repeated earthly lives. But we answer: In pre-Christian times, people were not yet ripe for the Christ experience. They died and then came back down to earth and matured to receive the Christ within themselves. — Thus the Christ comes into the whole development of humanity — little by little into every soul — so Christ becomes an important impulse for the development of humanity by becoming an important impulse for each individual human being. But anyone who only allows the soul to be there once can at most rise in the soul to an idea of the Christ. Therefore, it is right that the theoretical philosophy of the present can only come to an idea of the Christ. It is the living human soul that passes from life to life that gains a relationship to the living Christ.

And how this Christ-idea, which will be the experience of the Christ of the twentieth century, expands into something of wonderful beauty, which is still little understood today! When this Christ-idea will be the foreseeable one of the twentieth century, when it will live in the souls, then something else will come. This idea will be as alive as a man of flesh and blood. It bears the stamp that the Christ is truly historical, as Paul recognized at the time. But something else is connected with this Christ-idea.

This Christ-idea cannot be conceived otherwise than that the human being expands his view from the individual human soul to all human souls. In this way, the human being looks, on the one hand, to the Christ, to whom he can turn in the most intimate moments as to the one who is most akin to the human soul; people will experience what is directly within them, but they will also experience that He is the impulse that has poured over the whole earth and all humanity, and this latter will be something very beautiful if it is truly understood by people. However, it will only be understood slowly! But once it is understood, people will say: the Christ is a reality, and inasmuch as he is a reality, he is this not only for those who recognize him, but for all of humanity. - Then we will be able to face every person of a different faith, whether he is a Hindu or a Chinese, whether he has this or that belief, and we will be able to regard him as a Christian because he is a human being. 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. Regardless of whether people know it or not, the Christ is the all-encompassing, the fulfillment of all humanity! And this correct understanding of Christ will confirm the word spoken by Christ: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Many a saying attributed to Christ can easily be misunderstood, such as: “Whoever does not leave father and mother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” This was not meant to break the old law, to sever the blood ties that were formerly based on love alone, but to add to the intimate human the general human. And to be a disciple of Christ means to find within oneself that which concerns all humanity, that which is comprehensive and intimate in every human soul, in terms of earth and humanity. 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. Today it lies latent in the development of humanity. There are, for example, some brilliant researchers of the present day who work with the deepest scientific earnest, such as Smith, whom I mention as a typical example. They made the discovery that what is told in the Gospels is not about a human being, but about a God. Now they say – and one cannot reproach them for this – that it would be childish and simple-minded to believe in the earthly existence of this God. So the Christ is only a symbolic fiction, and that is how one can prove that the Christ could not have lived in physical embodiment.

Now, however, spiritual science has to put up with childish and simple-minded people, including the most learned scientific minds, because it has made the discovery that Christ was not just a god, a spiritual being, but that he also really entered into a human life. And for this one person, he became what he has always been for countless people and will increasingly become for more and more people. And spiritual science knows very well that what Christ is must be found within the soul, just as the sun can only be found through the eye. With Goethe, spiritual science says:

If the eye were not like the sun,
The sun could never see it;
If God's own power were not within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

But it not only says that we need an eye to see the sun, but also that if we had only lived in darkness, we would have had no eyes at all. From the original state of man, the sun brought forth the eyes; through the sun, through the light, man has received eyes. It is true that man cannot find the Christ unless he finds him within himself. But it is also true that the Christ can only be found in our inner being because he once lived on earth. It is historically true that the Christ is the sun of spiritual development on earth and that rays emanate from him that have sunk into us. By confirming what has been lost, spiritual science returns the Christ to the twentieth century as a living being, by recognizing both the historical Christ and the [living] Christ, who can be found as the spirit-sun when one delves into oneself. If it is true what Goethe said about the connection between the inner and the outer, about the sun and the divine, then something else is also true, to which Goethe would undoubtedly have given his approval. So let us summarize Goethe's saying in the spirit of our present reflection and pour it into the words, which may sound like an extension of Goethe'

saying:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to God's fulfillment?

Dear attendees! The theme of this evening's lecture was not chosen with the intention of linking the observations of spiritual science to a well-known historical phenomenon – as it is done in many other fields – and thus to have the opportunity to speak about spiritual science with regard to a well-known phenomenon. Rather, this theme has arisen from the fact that, in the light of spiritual observation of our time, certain aspects of the artistic phenomenon of Raphael can indeed present themselves to the modern spiritual researcher, and these aspects virtually demand a spiritual-scientific way of looking at things, especially in the case of this subject. This can happen to you, as it has to me, when you observe a phenomenon such as that which can be observed in the literary and artistic activity of Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, is known to have written a “Life of Michelangelo,” which, however much it may be outdated in details today, makes a great impression on every receptive soul through the breadth of its points of view and the coherence of its approach.

Herman Grimm then also made an attempt – he himself characterizes it only as an attempt – to write a 'Life of Raphael'. With this 'Life of Raphael', Herman Grimm has now experienced something quite peculiar, and what happened to him, so to speak, will be able to make a great impression on those who, through an ever-deepening immersion in Herman Grimm's way of presenting and looking at things, recognizes that, despite some justified criticism that can be made of him, he has precisely what one can call a sense of shared experience with his observed subject in all its particulars, a struggle to gain the insights and opinions to which he advances. Well, he made the attempt – in the 1860s – to write about the life of Raphael; and at the end of his life, he admits that the attempt was not enough for him and that he repeatedly started to approach this task in a different way. We have an interesting fragment from Grimm's estate, “Raphael as a World Power,” in which he once again approached this task shortly before his death and in which he confesses that nothing he has written before can satisfy him. He died while working on the final version of his views on Raphael. 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. He needs a significant, longer introduction, and this longer introduction is actually a piece of world history. It is a reflection on the nature and essence of Roman culture, a reflection on the impact of the Christ impulse on this Roman culture, a reflection on the further development of this Christ impulse within European spiritual culture, and then follows a further reflection on the renewed impact of Greek culture on the Roman spiritual culture of Raphael's time. And in this, Herman Grimm maintains that it is necessary to consider all this in order to understand this painting by Raphael, 'The Marriage of the Virgin', because what is expressed in this painting appears to him so comprehensive, so arising out of the entire development of the human spirit, so that everything that has been felt, thought and seen within the European spiritual life since the impact of the Christ impulse until the creation of this picture appears to him as mysteriously embedded in Raphael's creation. The title of this Raphael fragment, as given by Herman Grimm, was also derived from feelings that arise from such an opinion. It means – one might be tempted to find it strange – “Raphael as world power”, because Herman Grimm actually feels inclined to place Raphael in all the causes, effects, and connections of all modern spiritual life in order to understand him. Anyone who has an intuitive sense of how certain all-embracing ideas arise in a human soul when contemplating any object or any entity will be able to understand what took place in Herman Grimm's soul when he wrote the words in this, his last Raphael fragment:

Raphael is a citizen of world history. Like one of the four rivers, he is, who, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.

There may be many scholarly discussions about the significance of Raphael, but one would like to say: Compared to all of them, it seems to be something tremendously significant that a contemplative human soul has been moved to make such statements about this spirit.

If you let something like this sink in, so to speak purely from the intellectual life of our time, which in Herman Grimm is not yet strongly influenced by what we today call [in our circles] spiritual science, you have to recognize the urge to a deeper contemplation of Raphael – the urge to look at him in such a way that what he has created for the intellectual eye grows out of the continuous stream of human development. And indeed, to anyone who delves into Raphael's soul with an open mind, it appears – especially in view of a certain kind of isolation from everything around him – as a kind of revelation, because, try as one might, one cannot succeed in immediately in the environment in which Raphael lived, as reasons for explaining how it comes about that this extraordinary phenomenon enters into the spiritual path of humanity and presents to humanity precisely that which has had such a profound and powerful effect on the individual devoted spirits. I would like to note from the outset that, naturally, it is not possible to go into details in the course of this lecture, because individual pictures can only be fruitfully discussed if one is able to show reproductions. [Rather, the aim is to use such presuppositions, as they have just been given and which arise from our present spiritual life, to lead in a very natural way to a consideration of Raphael from the point of view of spiritual science.]

In a sense, Raphael seems comprehensible to us only if we take him as a very young child, somehow out of his environment. He was born, as is well known, in Urbino in 1483. The first impressions of his soul come from the palace building of Urbino, which was an extraordinary event for that time and through which the soul of the very young Raphael was able to absorb what was expressed not only in architectural forms, but also in all artistic decoration and the work associated with this palace building. These were impressions that can be said to be capable of shaping the soul through themselves. But then we see Raphael transferred to Perugia, and when we look at life in Perugia at the time when Raphael was an apprentice painter there, the peculiar, isolated nature of Raphael's soul immediately becomes apparent to us. We see, when we follow life in Perugia, how it is filled with events that are in part repulsive to our modern consciousness. Strife between the individual classes rages among the passionate people of Perugia, and there is no doubt that Raphael was able to see there what was taking place in the way of stirring hatred and antagonism in human nature.

If we start from there and take a look at what Raphael's art gave in its serenity, which already meets us in the “Marriage of the Virgin”, created in the twenty-first year of his life, then we find that it is justified to say: this Raphael appears to us as a personality as if he were only externally present in this whole life of touched it with the hem of his garment, and actually only looked at it in reference to something which I would not describe in the abstract, but rather in the concrete, by directing the thoughts to a historian of the time, who quite vividly describes a scene that took place in Perugia in the nineties of the fifteenth century. There we really become witnesses, through the vividness of the description, of how the leader of an exiled family from the neighborhood invades Perugia; we are told how this leader of an exiled family, Astorre Baglione, enters the city on horseback and acts like a Saint George, but at the same time slaughters everything that comes his way. We feel from the description of the chronicler Matarazzo how something grand, powerful, but uncomfortably cruel lay in the scene. When we let Raphael's painting, “Saint George,” take effect on us in its entire composition, it seems as if Raphael had known this scene from reality, but as if all of the cruel background of reality had not existed for his eyes, as if he had lifted the flower from this cruel background and elevated it to a creation of pure spiritual beauty and greatness. It is precisely in the way in which it enters into the whole way of creating Raphael, the way in which it flows into his soul, that one sees how peculiarly isolated this soul is from its surroundings, and how these surroundings only touch it, but how he can only produce what he takes from them from his own soul. Thus this soul appears [to the observer] as a revelation, as something that is placed in this environment and cannot be explained from within it. When we take a look at the pictures of Raphael's teacher in Perugia, the Perugino, we see how, despite the greatness of the Perugino, these pictures show us that something is being presented to us in the individual holy persons of the Christian view that is a reproduction of what a person can absorb when Christianity lives all around him. We see the individual figures of Christian legend juxtaposed as only someone who, though a great painter, only knows things from the outside can do. As these paintings appear to us, we feel the path from Christian tradition, from what was alive in the Christianity of the time, to Perugino's canvas everywhere. Then we follow the creations of his student Raphael. There the matter appears different to us: we look at a soul that brings everything that the other, Perugino, presents to life from within. Everywhere we see Raphael's soul itself, a spirit that has not absorbed Christianity as it lived in its environment at the time, but we see a spirit to which all the origins of Christian impulses are linked. It is perhaps no exaggeration to use the following expression: it is as if Christianity itself conjured up its soul on a canvas painted by Raphael.

And then we follow him further as he arrives in Florence in 1504 and in Rome in 1508. In Florence, he arrives at a time when the momentous wave of spiritual renewal, I might say, had just passed over Florence, which is linked to the name of Savonarola. We encounter an atmosphere that is tired of [these struggles] - the drama of Savonarola has taken place, and many of its repercussions are still present. It is interesting to juxtapose these two figures: Savonarola and Raphael. Both present the impulses of Christianity to their contemporaries [in their own way]; they present them in such a way that we perceive the fire of an inner enthusiasm everywhere, but [in Savonarola's case] also an enormous fanaticism that leads to the impossibility of living out the impulses in the face of one's contemporaries. When we look at Savonarola, it is as if a person were standing before us who, in all phases of his soul, in the best that his soul can feel and sense, was seized by the greatness and power of Christianity, a person who now radiates what has had a very elementary and direct effect on his soul, and who then stands up for what has become so great in his soul itself. And now to Raphael: He presents himself in very strange contrast to a figure like Savonarola. We see, when we look at Raphael's paintings, that Christian impulses are expressed in a, one might say, superhuman greatness. We see these Christian impulses brought to soulful life in many details. We really see Christianity shining through in these paintings. But at the same time, we feel and sense that a soul that had only just been directly touched by the Christianity in the world around it could not have attained the same calmness, naturalness, and serenity as Raphael's soul.

While with Savonarola one has the feeling everywhere that his soul is only appropriating the greatness of Christianity during his lifetime, with Raphael one has the feeling that his soul is already born as if it were entering the world with the — with such impulses that, by passing from early childhood into the whole human being, take hold of the whole human being and, through this development, can reach heights that these ideas and forms never reach in a human being when they first appear in an elementary, direct way. And if we are not pedantic, if we have a certain feeling for the real life of a human soul, we will no longer be able to doubt that a soul like Raphael's soul, as a soul, as a spiritual being, brings with it from the supersensible worlds from the outset everything that could never live itself out if it had to first flow through the whole of personal education and development. Of course, such things cannot be proven in one evening; the supersensible truths cannot be proven - as I discussed the day before yesterday - in the same way as the external truths of natural science; but they can be proven nonetheless, because they show themselves in their effects. One must first find the way to recognize from the effects what is present as the cause behind them. Then we follow Raphael back to Rome, where he encounters an atmosphere that is strangely related to Christianity. Pope Julius II becomes his patron. Raphael paints the greatest pictures on his behalf, which many people believe are among the greatest pictures in human painting; they capture the human soul and spirit in the very depths. And he paints them in such a way that the entire spirit of Christianity lives in them, and lives in them in a completely natural way. He paints – it could not be any different – to the satisfaction of the Pope. But what kind of Pope was this Julius? He was a Pope who, according to today's somewhat different concepts, perhaps cannot really be called a Christian at all. Machiavelli, who was not particularly moral, said that he was a devilish character, a man who was primarily concerned with power and external position – with fame, perhaps not for himself personally, but for the greatness and power of the church. He was a personality who was not choosy about the means he used to achieve his ends, who was not at all Christian when it came to acquiring power, fame and greatness. That is Raphael's patron. And in other respects, too, if we consider the Rome of Raphael's time, it stands in quite a remarkable contrast to him. But it is precisely from this contrast that something as powerful as what is presented to our eyes even today in the two pictures “The School of Athens” and “Disputa” arises, even though these pictures have often been painted over. In them, a magnificent pictorial representation of the course of human development presents itself to us, a pictorial representation that is steeped in the spirit of Christian impulses.

If we look at the one painting, the so-called “School of Athens” – it is not my view that this designation is justified, but it is the easiest way to communicate – and let it take effect on us, we see, perhaps without being fully lived in Raphael's consciousness, that it represents what the human soul can recognize when it turns its gaze to the external, sensual reality and makes use of the intellect that is tied to the human brain, to the human personality. This is presented to us in a wonderful way in all its details. If we turn our gaze to the right group in the picture, we see how all kinds of things are determined and calculated astronomically, and then we feel: not only the usual calculations are being done, but great events in world history are being deduced from the movement of the stars – science is being unfolded in a cosmic sense. And if we then turn our gaze to the left, we see in the expressions of [the figures] connecting the right with the left, how what is read on the right from the star constellations is written down on the left, and if we could really get the books in front of our eyes, we could see how the secrets of the world are written on the left, which are then determined by sensory observation [on the right]. We see this, but Raphael need not have been aware of it; the tradition of the time lay in this, as in the deep mystery that constitutes the essence of [the rise of Christianity over Greece]. And whether we take the view of those who see Plato and Aristotle in the central figures, or whether we see an evangelist on the left-hand side, in both cases what is being discussed is perfectly understandable.

Then we turn to the other side of the “Camera della Segnatura” and find that magic has been poured over the whole picture, illustrating how the development has progressed from the contemplation of the sensual world by the human spirit to a deepening into the supernatural, the invisible. This immersion of the human soul in the supernatural reigns and weaves in the picture of the so-called “Disputa”. The symbolic arrangement of the stars, in connection with the scenes below, must show that something significant has happened in the course of human development, in that man has become inwardly focused through the impact of the Christian impulse on the spiritual development of humanity, which on the one hand signifies a deepening of the human soul, and on the other hand, through this inward deepening, leads to the realization, to the intuition of supersensible worlds. These can only be reached when the human soul educates itself and thereby acquires those powers through which it can sense or see the worlds that lie behind the [sensory] worlds.

It is not my intention to explain such images pedantically, for example by means of theories, but one must use words that are not just comments on images, but that are intended to suggest what one feels naturally. Otherwise, it could be as unappealing as the comments in travel guides, and one would not be interested at all in what the individual figures mean, but what is interesting is ] the artistic, the sensation that moves through the soul, and we are not placed directly on the horizon of human spiritual development by abstract reflection, not by abstract reason, but by sensation. We feel the impulse that lives and moves through the history of human development. And again, If we now disregard these images and look into Raphael's soul, we have to say that she lived in the midst of an environment that showed nothing of the intimacy and soulfulness that lies in these images, and [despite this] Raphael managed to conjure up the innermost impulses and the innermost forces of Christianity in the course of world history into these images.

This is the case with many of the other works we see, and if we then go on to what can still make the deepest impression on the viewer today, when we go on to that which is the culmination of Raphael's to the “Sistine Madonna”, if one lets this remarkable picture in Dresden take effect on oneself, then one comes to a very special understanding of this so self-evident Raphael soul, then one comes to the active spiritual Christ impulse. If, on the other hand, one stands purely intuitively before this “Sistine Madonna”, then one has the impression that something lifts one above the ordinary human. That is the first impression, but it is one that becomes ever stronger and more powerful; it lifts one up above ordinary human feeling. One becomes a participant in another world through one's soul, and if one then asks oneself, “Why is that so?” perhaps it is best to let the feelings of spiritual science enlighten one. How can these feelings of spiritual science arise?

Let us turn our gaze away from the point of view of spiritual science and look at the whole development of humanity. This puts us on the ground of a serious, comprehensive theory of development, but one that is very different from the materialistic one, which is today considered by so many to be an absolute gospel. This theory does follow phenomena back to a certain origin - tracing them back to these origins is justified for sensory perception. One arrives at material origins that show very simple forms and that, through slow perfection and development, have resulted in today's point of view. This theory of evolution is particularly proud of the fact that it understands man as a being that gradually rises from other beginnings of primitive living beings, to his present size, as he appears to us today as a physical human being. Some materialists see this as the very essence of the human being. Spiritual science also takes us back into the past, but when we turn our spiritual gaze back using methods described the day before yesterday, we do not arrive at other material life forms from which humans are thought to have developed, but we ultimately arrive at a spiritual beginning of development. We arrive at origins that are purely spiritual. And on the one hand we see matter itself emerging from the spirit, and on the other hand we see the spiritual developing into later spiritual forms in accordance with its original spiritual purpose.

If we look at the human being himself, at the whole human being, at the spiritual and soul aspects within the human being, and trace the development back, we come to an ancient and distant past in which the human being already appears; he is already present before the other beings that surround him today in the three kingdoms of nature have come into being. These prove to be a kind of descending side currents, so to speak, flowing away from the great line of development: man is the original, he is there first, but as a spiritual being, and as he develops further, he repels the other kingdoms of nature from his undercurrent, as it were. We can choose an image for this development. Let us assume that we have a liquid in a glass, mixed with something that can maintain itself purely. The finer part of the liquid remains at the top, the coarser part settles at the bottom. So we have the fine part at the top and the solid part at the bottom.

In spiritual science, we return to the origin in which man exists as a spiritual-soul being; he develops in his spiritual life into purer forms, which lie precisely in his later mission and which [compared to] the original form signify a finer development of his soul nature. In order for this abstract soul to emerge purely, he must separate the other natural kingdoms: These are there, as it were, to provide the basis for man's higher development. If we allow this thought to take effect in us, not in its conceptual form but as a feeling, if we transform it into feeling, then, when we turn our gaze to all that surrounds us in the physical realm of nature, we have the present us; but if we turn our gaze to what emerges from the human soul, we perceive something that we cannot understand - if we merely let our gaze wander over the external earthly nature and do not direct it upwards to something supermundane. We feel that the present humanity could only come into being within its earthly mission because it is the result of something that comes to us from other spheres, which is a higher humanity that has, as it were, descended to fill the earth with the present nature kingdoms. We feel that human nature tells us of its origin in spiritual heights. We feel how humanity is elevated when we, in our feelings, rise to what spiritual science can speak of.

If you disregard all theory and now stir within yourself the feeling that can arise when we sense the human being in his supersensible approach to his sensual mission, then we have - one must compare the feelings - the same feeling as when we visualize Raphael's “Madonna Sixtina”, in which we also encounter the image of Isis with Horus. And anyone who can really get into the unearthly origin of man can have similar feelings when he sees the “Sistine Madonna” floating in from the etheric spheres with the child Jesus, the exalted humanity, and when he can see the clouds as the foundation, the etheric foundation from which comes that which is the true, spiritual, supermaterial origin of man. It must be said, however, that such considerations need not have been present in Raphael's soul, but we have repeatedly emphasized that this human soul had a twofold nature, that something was going on in the upper regions of consciousness that the [lower] human did not need to know about, but which was no less real; and the impulses, the impulses of feeling and emotion, which worked as just described, alone make it possible to understand how precisely this image could have arisen from Raphael's soul.

I have tried to make all these observations for the reason that I would like to make understandable what appears to me to be in harmony with spiritual science in Raphael: we have before us in his soul, isolated from its surroundings, something that is predetermined from the outset, that is called to realize the spiritual impulses in their Christian nuances in a pictorial way. In the “Sistine Madonna,” Raphael rises in a certain way to a super-Christian point of view, to the point of view that goes beyond the historical, beyond the traditional Christian, in that he feels and artistically represents the spiritual-cosmic origin of the human being. Seen in this light, the soul of Raphael does not allow itself to be equated with that of another soul, such as that of Savonarola.

With Savonarola, we can show, so to speak, at every point in his development, how he connects with Christian ideas, how everything becomes and gushes forth; with Raphael, it seems self-evident that the Christian view is already given to him at his birth. We feel that the Christian impulses are connected with Raphael, but we do not feel anything else: we do not feel that which is connected with the soul of Raphael and which it particularly needed from its surroundings, and that was Greek culture. This Greek element is embedded in the spiritual development of humanity in a very special way. I have often pointed out that we spiritual scientists have to look at human development in such a way that, as we go further and further back into ancient times, we find human souls with different states of consciousness than they have today; everything is in development – the human soul especially! and when spiritual science is recognized in its true value, people will see how one-sided it is to look at evolution in a purely materialistic way, going back to human forms in which the soul would develop its consciousness in a more animal state. If you go back in spiritual science, you will find a completely different state of development, and today you may already be able to find truth in what spiritual research has to say about older states of the human soul from older spiritual products, myths and legends.

We are coming to understand that in primeval times, human souls were endowed with an original clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance. What we today call our clear sensory perception, our sharply defined intellectual concepts, our self-awareness, was not present in the human soul in primeval times. For this to come about, the original clairvoyance had to fade away, to be subdued. This state cannot be compared to ordinary dreaming today, but rather to a dream-like life, which is organized in images in the manner of dream images, but which are nevertheless images of spiritual realities. In primeval times, the human soul was endowed with such a dream-like clairvoyance. This clairvoyance diminished, and now we stand in development where the old clairvoyance had to fade away in order to develop self-awareness and sharply contoured concepts of the mind.

When something is to develop to perfection, other things must recede. This law of balance governs all of nature, so that when we ascend to full self-awareness – in the distant future, humanity will once again associate a certain clairvoyance with it – we have, as it were, a descending line of human development from the original clairvoyance and now an ascent of sorts through [the development of] self-awareness, intellectual concepts and external scientific observation to clairvoyance. And what do we feel in the middle? We feel the Greek element – this Greek element, which is so remarkable precisely because on the one hand it signifies the conclusion of the ancient dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance and on the other hand the beginning of the consciousness of external objects. Therefore, we see this Greekness with its very special characteristics, which consist in the fact that the Greek experienced the spiritual much more directly, but not in the way that man in prehistoric times experienced it, seeing it, so to speak, externally, but in the way that the Greek felt his own personality interwoven with all external existence. He still felt himself in the cosmos, standing inside the outer world, and felt the laws that weave and live through the outer world in his own being.

It may seem hypothetical, but anyone who engages in spiritual science will find what I am saying to be true: when the Greeks created their sculptures, which have only come down to us in an imperfect form, they did not need models in our sense. When they depicted anything, especially the human form, they did not depict it in imitation of the external model, but from inner consciousness. He knew what forces are at work in space, and his consciousness of these forces was formed in such a way that he had an awareness of the inner forces from the form of space. And so he imprinted what he saw inwardly in the external material as a form from the inside out. Just as prehistoric man felt that images of space arose and was so connected in his soul to the entire cosmos that these images reflected reality, so the Greek was connected to the laws of the world, which he felt permeated the body. He created what he experienced, and in turn he created this in a sculptural work. If he wanted to depict Zeus, then he knew how Zeus's physiognomy was connected to those experiences that express themselves in external forms. He created what he experienced inwardly in the external material. We can look at Greek culture in this way; it is still a worldview in which a feeling is bound to an immediate human consciousness.

It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the genuine Greek and his relationship to nature and to the whole of existence, and a personality who, in essence, is separated from the impact of the Christ Impulse on humanity by only three or four hundred years, a personality such as, say, St. Augustine. Read any work by this Father of the Christian Church, who was also a great philosopher, and try to compare what Augustine gives through his innermost experience of the soul, through his inner feeling for the nature of the human soul, with everything that was given in Greece, be it philosophically or poetically. In the Greek spirit, we feel how it cannot detach itself from the external, how it is one with the external world, perceiving the course of the external world flowing into itself and experiencing itself as belonging to the external world. In Augustine, we see the gaze directed inward to the inner, soul world. This makes this inner creation appear in a form that is unthinkable for any creation of ancient Greece. It could not internalize itself because its greatness was still connected with the consciousness of the outside world. It was an enormous impact on the whole spiritual development of mankind, and one does not need to be on the ground of positive Christianity to see this enormous impact. One could even go so far as to say, paradoxically, that even someone who had never heard of Christ, when considering the Greeks and Augustine in their peculiarity, would have to say to themselves: something has happened in the ongoing development that has turned the external into the internal; and this internalization is the fundamental impulse of Christianity, growing out of the external and growing into the internal.

If we look at it this way and then look back at Raphael, we can say: What appears to be the basic nerve of Christianity lives in Raphael's soul as this soul passes into existence through birth. We see this in its development, if you approach the work without prejudice and do not want to read everything into this Raphael soul with a materialistic-historical sense. If we look at it impartially, it appears as if it has already brought with it, through birth, the Christian impulses that we have to describe as its very own. But now Raphael is born at that turning point of the whole spiritual development of mankind, placed in that time when that which was memory was to be reborn, reborn in a certain outer sense. And here we see a great law of development that can only be penetrated with the help of spiritual science. Usually, we imagine development as a simple succession of cause and effect. But things do not happen that way, because a close examination shows us that such a linear development is a fantasy. The real development proceeds in such a way that a certain current progresses from one point to another, and when it has arrived at a certain point, an old one is taken up again. The later connects with the earlier, which has not passed through a developmental current, but has been preserved in its original form. We have a falling back upon and a taking up of something that has remained at an original stage and that connects with something later.

Thus, in Raphael's work, we see that what, in his time, seemed to be a character of mere inwardness has once again become an external revelation. Just imagine how St. Francis of Assisi is depicted in the works of Giotto. We see how, even in painting, everything remains inward; it does not transition into form and color. We must go back to the inner event everywhere, and when we transition to the inner event in Giotto's work, the outer representation is the less interesting part. This is not the case with Raphael. Here, we never feel the need to look beyond what he reveals to us directly, beyond what is there, what stands before us in color and form; rather, in Raphael's work, everything interior has flowed into the exterior. For this, Raphael's soul, though born with the internalized impulse of Christianity, needed the assimilation of Greek culture. In Raphael, we now see how this earlier state of development is being revisited, even though it was fundamentally new to him. It is remarkable how, on the one hand, this Greek style rested in the bosom of the earth until Raphael's time, so that Raphael's contemporaries were the first to see again what came to the surface at that time [through the excavations], and how, on the other hand, Greek style was awakened again in Raphael, only now transformed into the inward, which had created Greek style in the external sculptural form. What the Greeks had achieved in the form of sculpture was not immediately suitable for Raphael; but what was incumbent on him was to bring the inner life to external expression. To do this, painting, which, unlike sculpture, can make the inner into the outer, had to adopt Greek forms again. It adopted them in particular from Raphael. It is well known to me that one could list many other names, but nowhere else does this phenomenon occur as characteristically as in Raphael. Thus, in Raphael, we see how he acquires Greek influence through the Christian impulse. If we consider his soul from this broader point of view, it appears to us as if it had brought with it all Christian impulses at birth, but not the Greek ones – these play in from the environment. From picture to picture, one can follow how Raphael, translated into painting, appropriates more and more Greek art.

Now, anyone who delves deeper into spiritual science – let it be a mere hypothesis for my sake – will see how such a hypothesis gradually offers certainty, though not in a convenient way. When we look at Raphael's soul from this perspective, we see that it already contains the Christian impulses at birth. It therefore appears as if Raphael's soul had already made a pact with these before birth. While we can see the direct impact of the Christian impulses in Savonarola [through his environment], it seems to us that Raphael's soul already contains these Christian impulses. Just as Savonarola appropriated the Christian impulses directly through the effect of his environment in his Savonarola existence, so Raphael's soul developed them in an earlier earthly existence in such a way that it could not appropriate the Greek impulses at the same time in this earlier existence. It comes from an existence in which it has appropriated the Christian impulses so that, after the soul has gone through a life between death and a new birth, these have become a matter of course for it, as we then encounter in Raphael's paintings. And what Greek culture has achieved is only acquired by this soul, which in its previous life on earth may have been “Greek-like”, in this later Raphael life. In the soul of a Raphael, we see how what we can intuitively place in an earlier life on earth and what in later lives on earth merges with what we already bring with us at birth. Whenever I have studied this, just as Herman Grimm repeatedly made a fresh start [to write about Raphael's life], the spiritual-scientific view was really drawn to this fact by itself. It is to be assumed that Herman Grimm would not have agreed with his last presentation either, even if he had completed it, because, you see, certain things that are connected with the spiritual life of humanity only begin to become clear when one takes into account the fact of repeated lives on earth. Such a merging of the Christian impulses with the Greek ones, as was the case with Raphael, can only be understood if one is able to call the explanation from repeated earthly lives to help. It may still be foreign to our contemporaries today, but I have often used the comparison [with what] Francesco Redi said. He said that it is wrong that animals can arise from river mud; living things can only come from living things. — And in the same way, spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. ]

[Today, you would be branded a heretic if you tried to point out that a human life cannot be explained only in terms of its immediate environment. If one examines these things more closely, one will realize that when something flashes up in a human soul that cannot be explained by its environment, this leads back to a previous earthly existence, to something that this soul acquired in a previous earthly existence and that, when the soul has passed through death and a new birth, takes on the form of the self-evident in its new earthly existence, as something connected with the being, as something belonging to it. Thus, the Christian impulses are naturally connected with Raphael's being, so connected that Raphael cannot be thought of without them.

[If one presupposes the spiritual-scientific realization that the human soul goes through repeated earthly lives, then it becomes understandable that what a person has acquired in an earlier earthly life becomes forces in a later earthly life. One experiences and observes how they enter the soul and go through the stages that a person goes through between death and rebirth, and there they become one with the soul. And when the person then enters a new existence, he works with these forces on his entire inner physical form and makes his body in such a way that what he creates in the next life on earth seems to emerge naturally from his being. 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.

But when one directs one's human gaze to these great phenomena, which are so intimately connected with human development, with all that is the innermost impulses of the progressing human spirit, then something emerges from this contemplation that strengthens the human soul, giving it inner support, inner confidence, inner strength for work, as has often been discussed here. It leads the human soul not only to know but also to feel the germ of a following earthly existence, just as we feel how the plant has gathered its strength and summarized it in the germ and thus becomes aware that a new plant will emerge from this germ in summer. The soul can have this awareness, this feeling of having incorporated everything, as a guarantee for a future earthly life. What is already in the germ in this earthly life is transformed by the mere knowledge of immortality into a feeling of the immortal human germ, into a feeling for what builds up the future life.

Once again, it was very strange to me that it was precisely Herman Grimm's approach to such things, which were just being discussed, that compelled me to read a certain passage at the beginning of his book about Raphael. He who regards Raphael from the standpoint of spiritual science will naturally come to regard repeated earthly lives as necessary if he wants to understand Raphael quite concretely. And from the realization of repeated earthly lives we draw that strength which gives us the insight for what we will encounter in the future. Truly, it is surprising when one feels this as the effect of science: When someone approaches a phenomenon like Raphael and never comes to terms with it, but nevertheless, in the face of Raphael's greatness, receives a feeling, not yet of the reality of coming earth lives, but that in the face of this fulfilled human life, he feels a kind of desire for a coming earth life. The certainty of repeated earthly lives can only arise through spiritual science, but when contemplating Raphael's life, Herman Grimm felt a sense of security in the face of eternity, which he expresses with the strange word:

I see developments in humanity that I will be denied the opportunity to partake in, but which appear to me to be so brilliantly beautiful that it would be well worth starting human existence all over again for their sake.

It is now highly remarkable that we can translate the desire that arises in Herman Grimm through the contemplation of Raphael's life into the contemplation of a reality.

And so we can summarize what was the subject of today's contemplation in an overview of our feelings: It seems natural that in the face of a personality like Raphael's, where one feels so certain that a single life on earth is not enough to understand it, that for someone who allows this personality to have a complete effect on them, the desire that spiritual science describes as reality arises – the vision of repeated lives on earth. And so, an unbiased spiritual-scientific consideration of such great human beings as Raphael may lead to people being led more and more to develop such habits of thought through the contemplation of these great human beings. These habits of thought may still be very much opposed to today's opinions, but they will most certainly become part of people's spiritual life. As surely as the contemplation has become established – living things can only come from living things – so surely will the contemplation become established: spiritual and soul things can only come from spiritual and soul things. And it is precisely the contemplation of human greatness that can sink into our soul that which leads to such [new] habits of thinking. Wanting to try to understand human greatness also brings forth in us the opinion, indeed the certainty, that the truths of which we convince ourselves through an ever-deepening immersion in things and in the spirit of things, even if they initially meet resistance after resistance, will ultimately find their way into human hearts. No matter how narrow the chinks through which the truth must squeeze to reach the hearts of men, truth will find the way even through the narrowest chink. Those who can only see the germ of spiritual science today can be inspired by this sentence, which has been so deeply confirmed by the spiritual development of mankind, for it is only a germ. But he can also, by looking at this germ, develop confidence in his soul so that this germ will surely rise, blossom and bear fruit for the human soul. Answering

No question: I request that this lecture be printed.

Rudolf Steiner: In view of the number of lectures that have already been printed, I would prefer if nothing more were printed. What has been printed has not yet penetrated everywhere as far [into people's consciousness] as it could have.

Question: What do you do with the [standstill in development]? Is there [any] progress at all, [so that] the direction changes?

Rudolf Steiner: Anyone who has really listened will not easily be able to ask such a question. It is like this: [first there is] change, then [a] standstill. We see this in every house, [which was first built and then remains as a result for years].

Question: Is it possible for a person who can consciously leave their body to consciously remain in other spheres and no longer return to their body? And is the body then asleep or dead?

Rudolf Steiner: It is dead, of course. It is not about the real impossibility of returning, but about the moral one. Morally, one is obliged not to thwart one's karma. Natural laws and moral order are becoming more and more aligned. The natural law is increasingly becoming a moral natural necessity, and then such questions are no longer asked. [These are just as nonsensical as the question:] Could someone who has just made a watch pick up a hammer and smash the watch right away? Of course he could, but it wouldn't be reasonable.

Question: Is color blindness a hindrance to occult self-development?

Rudolf Steiner: Read my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” - it is, however, out of print: Gazing [into the spiritual world] does not depend on our sense organs, we are, after all, becoming free of them. It is in no way disturbing if any sense organ is imperfectly developed, not even blindness [is an obstacle]. It is a mistake to confuse what appears in spiritual science with ordinary clairvoyance. Ordinary clairvoyance is not clairvoyance that really takes place in supersensible worlds. Ordinary clairvoyance is based on a certain mood in the sense organs or at least comes about with their active participation. Two clairvoyants, one blind and the other not, have the same experience when they encounter the same thing. When one says of such an experience, “It is the same as what one experiences with the color blue (or red),” one means that the same thing is experienced as one experiences with the color blue (or red). That is why it is called that, but it is not the same as the external experience of color. Because most people have a normal development [of the senses], one can proceed from this point of view; but it may be necessary to choose different starting points for those born blind; but one arrives at the same [spiritual experience].

Question: Can one get an impression of spiritual science by reading Tolstoy's books?

Rudolf Steiner: From reading Tolstoy, one cannot come to the idea that there is a spiritual science.

Question: Is it permissible to anesthetize a dying person with opium, [or] if not, [then] as with operations?

Rudolf Steiner: In the ideal case, one should act according to the appropriate knowledge that applies [also to] one, which appears to be humanly possible. One should not resist [applying that which] can provide relief to a person; [otherwise] it would lead to impossibilities.

Question: Can devout prayer grant wishes?

Rudolf Steiner: Prayer should actually be a bowing of the soul to the divine spirituality that lives and permeates the world, so that prayer actually loses its meaning when it is selfish. And only that prayer is justified which ends in the words of the original prayer: “But not my will, but yours be done.” This postscript gives prayer the right mood. Then it is a right prayer, when it is not selfish, otherwise practical contradictions arise immediately. For what should the granter of wishes do when one farmer wants something to sprout and asks for rain, but the other in the same area asks for dryness, or when of two armies, each of which certainly wishes to win, one asks for victory, but the other also asks for victory? So one should not be selfish in prayer. Therefore, the question of whether wishes are granted or not has no real meaning, because a proper prayer cannot expect wishes to be granted. I know that this is offensive to many souls, but one should only look at the nature of things and one will find that things really are like that.

Question: What about vegetarianism [in the light of the Bible? There are] the words of Christ: “My oxen are slaughtered,” or the paschal lamb, or even the banquets. And what about alcohol at the wedding at Cana or at the Last Supper, [when] the bread is dipped in wine?

Rudolf Steiner: It would be going too far if the corresponding words of the Gospels were explained [now]. But it would be shown that many of the things one reads in the Gospels today are only translation errors. Apart from that, it can be said that the development of spiritual views can be facilitated by a vegetarian lifestyle. But it is nothing more than stating the fact that he [the vegetarian] can make his path easier, just as one makes many other things easier by abstaining from meat. But it is not the task of spiritual science to promote vegetarianism in a one-sided way. Spiritual science does not subscribe to one-sided propaganda. For spiritual science, precise thinking is necessary, not only for comprehension and understanding, but also for [better] engagement with the finer webs of thought. Many a person believes they have to object to this or that, but these objections only stem from thinking that has stopped halfway. These things are not based on the consistency of scientific thinking, but on habits of thinking, on a lack of logic. Spiritual science is based on the fact that only what is known is believed: this is the view of every science. But to penetrate [into spiritual science] in such a way that one can really participate, it is necessary to relieve one's thinking of its burdens, to make it finer, so that one is able to follow paths along which one would otherwise not be able to follow – and the vegetarian way of life contributes to this.

One should also consider the relationship to the other kingdoms of nature. Today, humanity cannot even think of making vegetarianism a general diet, because it is very personal whether a person wants to do that or not. One can thoroughly spoil oneself if one wants to live in an abstract vegetarian way. This applies not only to today, but to all periods of time. Of course, today we can claim things that made no sense 2000 years ago; what is true today does not have to be true for all time. This only applies to materialistic truths. When we talk about modern man and man at the time of Christ, we are not talking about the same thing; we are only obliged to use the same word. Many things change over time. The Easter lamb does not have to mean a slaughtered lamb. Even if what is written on the note is correct, it was a different time. It cannot be deduced from this that [vegetarianism] cannot apply to today, when the finer structures of human nature have become quite different from what they were then, and that it is not a means of helping spiritual science if one becomes accustomed to vegetarianism. Now, one should not believe that one can “eat one's way up” into the higher worlds, [because it is] irrelevant whether one eats or refrains from eating. [Vegetarianism is] only a means of facilitating, not a means of comfort.

Dear attendees! The subject of today's reflection will somewhat cross the boundaries that have usually been drawn here in such spiritual scientific reflections. Nevertheless, it seems useful to me to consider human spiritual life in a broader sense in relation to what the human soul can feel about the results of this spiritual science. Moreover, if we consider contemporary history, this evening's reflection, perhaps, as a kind of spiritual-scientific challenge, places itself directly into this spiritual life of the present, for the consideration of Raphael, if we consider it in the way it is usually done, presents people with many puzzles, really great spiritual-cultural-scientific puzzles.

And perhaps we may be confronted with the necessity of extending our spiritual-scientific considerations to such areas in particular, especially if we allow the fate of a significant contemporary art researcher in relation to Raphael to have some effect on our souls – an art historian who, I believe, is so not only in the scholarly, in the usual scientific sense, but who is so above all because the nineteenth century beat in his heart as directly as in few personalities: Herman Grimm. He is one of those art historians who were always not only with reason and intellect, not only with the usual scientific sense, but with the whole soul in their subject. And anyone who is familiar with Herman Grimm's art and cultural writings knows how much of what is directly moving the present intellectually pulsates within him, how his riddles about many subjects of intellectual life are the riddles of our era. And if spiritual science is to prove more and more fruitful, then it will have to seek contact with the way in which the entire spiritual cultural life seeks to approach such riddle-questions.

Herman Grimm – he was the son of Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm, the great linguist – was truly a nineteenth-century spirit. This great expert on Goethe and this significant spirit, who wrote the wonderful book about Michelangelo, died at the turn of the twentieth century.

Now it is, in a sense, characteristic that Herman Grimm also wrote a “Life of Raphael”. However, he felt differently about this “Life of Raphael” than he did about the Life of Michelangelo or even the Life of Goethe. Herman Grimm himself confessed that he had repeatedly tried to solve the riddle of Raphael and that at certain times he had indeed sought a kind of conclusion with his Life of Raphael; but every time he approached the riddle of Raphael again, he knew how imperfectly he had dealt with Raphael in his own soul. Again and again he made a new approach; and so we have a wonderful essay that he wrote shortly before his death, which is only the introduction to a book that should have been more extensive, in which he once again attempts, shortly before his death, to place the image of Raphael before his own soul, to solve the riddle of Raphael for himself in a certain way, insofar as such riddles can be solved by human souls at all.

Thus we see on the one hand a struggling spirit who, in accordance with his entire disposition, is immersed in artistic life and in the contemplation of artistic life, who creates a wonderfully rounded image of Michelangelo, we see how he is aware that he has really to have brought this image to a kind of conclusion; we see how this struggling soul fights throughout his entire life to present the enigma of Raphael, and does not finish it, so that he makes a new attempt immediately before his death, which again is not finished. Why is that? Yes, a mere scholar would have been finished in some sense, but not a mind like that, which immersed itself in its task with all its soul and wanted to resurrect the image of Raphael. The closer Herman Grimm approached Raphael, the more he wanted to resurrect the image of Raphael in his soul, the more it revealed itself to him as emerging in an enigmatic way from the entire human development; it presented itself to him in such a way that, the more closely one looks at it, one is led to delve into the deepest mysteries of the human soul itself and to gain an understanding of what such a human soul is, which grows out of the entire picture of human development as a great mystery. And when one follows the other side of Herman Grimm's work, one has the feeling that a mind such as his, which has grown so intimately together with the spiritual culture of the nineteenth century, is making attempts everywhere to find the way – yes, which way? The path that the spiritual researcher knows as his own. I can only gently hint here at the wonderfully intimate way in which Herman Grimm presents a death, a dying, at the end of his significant book 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Powers), and in this dying the detachment of what has been presented here more often than the detachment of the etheric body from the physical body. We see Herman Grimm's soul wrestling tenderly and intimately, but no less urgently, to find the paths that spiritual science in particular wants to unlock.

Thus, when one contemplates this remarkable art historian, one can really get the idea: something lives in him that is a question of our age in particular. And because the pulse of our time lived in him, this question lived with particular vibrancy in his soul - the spiritual-scientific question that we wanted to approach in all the considerations that have been employed here. But it is precisely in such a struggle as Herman Grimm's with Raphael's image that one sees that if one gets stuck in the nineteenth-century way of looking at things, one will not be able to cope with the greatest riddles, if one sincerely and without hypocrisy tries to solve such riddles with the awareness of having to delve into ever deeper depths. From the contemplation of spiritual science, the answer will emerge more and more, which I can only hint at, why Herman Grimm could not finish his contemplation of Raphael. However grotesque it may sound to some, the reason for this is that he was able to approach the gate of spiritual science everywhere, but could not unlock this gate anywhere according to the spirit of his century, according to the conditions of the whole becoming of the nineteenth century. So let the attempt be made to approach Raphael, not from some spiritual-scientific dogma or law, but with that which, as the whole mood of the soul, is able to penetrate into our minds when we face Raphael's painting. In spiritual scientific research it is much more important – and this is ultimately what impresses itself on our souls – that we look at the things of the world in a certain mood, than to apply all possible laws that may arise from spiritual research in a stereotypically abstract way. That is certainly not what the human soul should do in spiritual science.

How did Raphael appear to Herman Grimm, this nineteenth-century spirit? This man speaks strange words. 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. There Herman Grimm says:

Raphael is a citizen of world history. He is like one of the four rivers that, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.

No matter what scholars may think about it, someone who can open his soul to something very special will experience something special in his soul when he looks at a person like Herman Grimm, who has immersed himself in an object throughout his life and in whose feeling something lives that makes him speak about Raphael in such a way that he elevates him to a citizen of world history, to a being that stands out from the entire development of humanity. And Herman Grimm, too, may appear differently to others, if one wishes to do him justice from a certain emotional point of view. Herman Grimm said:

If Michelangelo were called away from the dead by a miracle to live among us again, and if I met him, I would respectfully step aside so that he could pass by; but if Raphael came my way, I would walk behind him to see if I could catch a few words on his lips. With Leonardo and Michelangelo, one can limit oneself to recounting what they once were in their day. With Raphael, one must start from what he is today. A soft haze has settled over the others, but not over Raphael. He is one of those whose growth is far from over. Generations of people living in the future can always conceive of new enigmas that Raphael will pose for them [...].

And so the question is raised: What riddles can Raphael's appearance pose to someone who has penetrated his soul through what comes from the spiritual-scientific contemplation of the world? Well, spiritual science speaks of development in time in a dual sense; this dual sense has been touched on here several times. First of all, spiritual science speaks of how humanity progresses from epoch to epoch in its earthly development, so that one recognizes that spirit and meaning are in this development, that spiritual laws can therefore be found. In terms of these spiritual laws, we can see how humanity in prehistoric times was led in a different way in its development across the earth than it was later; we can see how other, [new] impulses and impacts worked in accordance with these spiritual laws into our time. In the spiritual-scientific sense we distinguish precisely between the individual epochs, and therefore one cannot be satisfied with the trivial statement that natural development never makes a leap. This statement can certainly be quite correct if it is interpreted in a certain way; but just try to observe nature: you will see how such a saying, which is so easily spoken in a trivial way, has only a very limited meaning. Nature makes leaps: plants make a giant leap in their development between the root and the green leaf, then another giant leap between the green leaf and the blossom, and yet another between the blossom and the fruit. Nature leaps everywhere, and it is no different in the history of mankind. The individual epochs do not, as a comfortable worldview would have it, simply and successively merge into one another, but rather they are sharply distinguished from one another in character. And anyone who takes a close look at these human epochs will find that the human soul is capable of recognizing something special in each epoch, of experiencing something special. Even if one finds the word pedantic that Lessing used: that world history is an education of the entire human race - in a certain sense this word is justified. Just as the individual, starting from a primitive stage of his spiritual life, rises to ever new impulses, which he then experiences in the outer world and in his own inner being, so it is also the case for all of humanity throughout the earth. This is one way in which spiritual science views the development of humanity across the earth.

The other way of looking at it relates to the human soul's participation in this ongoing education. And here spiritual science - as has been explained so often and also the day before yesterday here - states as a result: the human being goes through this earth development in repeated earth lives, so that the human soul participates in the successive epochs that we, looking back, can ask ourselves how our own souls in earlier epochs of the development of the earth, in earlier lives on earth, participated in what the development of the earth could give the human soul each time. Again and again our souls were embodied on earth in bodies to absorb that which then became impulses for later epochs. Thus, in its successive lives, the human soul participates in everything that can flow into it from the impulses of the entire human development on earth.

There are, let us say, compassionate minds who forgive Lessing for speaking from such a point of view at the height of his life in his significant work “The Education of the Human Race” about repeated lives on earth, because only through this - [through this idea of repeated lives on earth] - did it become clear to him which forces actually carry the whole evolution of humanity through history: only through the fact that the human souls themselves carry over what they absorb in one epoch into other epochs, and the human soul does not belong to only one epoch in isolation, but recurring again and again to the successive epochs, so that it is a citizen of all of history. If we can start from this point of view, that in a very peculiar way, what each human soul has absorbed as impulses in earlier epochs, then it comes to us before the soul, as in particular an outstanding mind [like Raphael] can be found in the outcome of all that his soul has gone through in earlier lives on earth in any epoch.

We will not search pedantically and abstractly for cause and effect, but we will acquire a feeling for how a soul can become immersed in an epoch, and we feel in this soul, basically, in a very special way, the entire previous life on earth that such a soul - and every human soul - has lived through in its own unique way. If we now look at a relatively short period of time in terms of the development of the earth, but one that is close at hand for the present study of humanity, namely the historical millennia, and compare it with the millennia that preceded the historical ones , then something arises for spiritual scientific research that has been mentioned here often: the human soul itself has undergone transformations so that it was very different in ancient times than in later times or than in the present. It must be pointed out that our ordinary present intellectual thinking, which has achieved its triumph in science, is a product of development that has only gradually emerged. Spiritual science must take the word 'development' very seriously and see this development not only in the succession of external forms, but above all in the work of the human soul. Only in spiritual science does this development of the human soul present itself differently than in external science.

Spiritual science turns its gaze back to ancient times, to times even earlier than the historical ones, and finds that the human soul was endowed with a kind of primitive clairvoyance. Today I can only hint at these things; they are explained in more detail in other lectures. What our intellectual thinking is today, through which we come to self-awareness and recognize ourselves inwardly as human beings, had to develop first. In ancient times, the whole imaginative life of man was such that he had certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, like dream images. These were not mere dream images, but they were symbolic expressions of the reality that surrounded him. He perceived in a kind of ancient clairvoyance. 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.

Now we find a significant break in the great period of human development that precedes us, which presents itself to us through a very wonderful epoch of this human development. That is the time of Greek culture. For those who look at human development with the trained eye of a spiritual researcher, Greek culture appears as a kind of middle ground between two separate lines of development in human history. If we look at Greek culture, then, because our present consideration is to culminate in the view of an artist, the artistic aspect is the most important for us. This artistic aspect was, however, in full harmony with the whole Greek spirit, and this Greek spirit only appears to him who, shortsightedly, regards the development of humanity — as today's spirit does — in such a way that human souls were actually about the same as they are today. For those who look closely at the characteristic features of human development, the picture is quite different.

I would like to start with a specific example: when an artist approaches his art today, let us say sculpture, it is quite natural and self-evident for our present time, because it lies in the character of our time, now, let us say it dryly, that he works from a model, that he has the model of nature before him, that he imitates nature. This corresponds to our current view, our current environment, which artistically suggests the soul's contemplation that confronts nature and seeks the truth by conjuring up images of things in the soul. This is what modern science does, and in a certain way this is also what modern art does. [But this is only right and proper for our time, for this is what the intellectual contemplation of the world wants; it wants man to gain the true or the false image of nature through contemplation and to create images of nature in his imagination, which he then confronts as a self-aware human being. This was not yet the case in Greek times, and those who believe that the Greek artist did it the same way as the modern artist are wrong. The modern artist has to do it this way because the human soul has become more and more internalized; because in our time the human soul is no longer able to form that intimate bond with nature by immersing itself in the objects themselves. It presents itself as distinct from the things, it imitates them. This is how today's man acquires his power of judgment, but it is also how he acquires his full self-confidence in the world.

It was different in the Greek world. In the Greek world, the soul was still intimately connected with all that is physical, corporeal; and because it was more intimately connected with all this, it was also intimately connected with what the physical, corporeal is connected with, with the surrounding nature. What lives and moves in nature, experienced this in the human soul as it really is in nature. The human soul did not stand opposed to nature, it was in nature, living with the foundations of nature. If a Greek artist wanted to create any old statue in sculpture, spiritual research shows us that it would have been quite unnatural for him to imitate something externally. If he wanted to depict a statue, say of Mars or Zeus — figures that he all humanized —, it was his primary concern to feel what the soul of Mars or Zeus experienced. And because the soul impulses and feelings poured directly and objectively into the soul, the artist felt in every gesture, in every movement, in every posture, in every look, what the soul experienced. He was actually inwardly Mars, Zeus, and therefore knew what a hand, what a muscle looked like. He created his immediate inner experience. He did not create according to nature because the soul did not merely experience the soul, but also experienced what was bodily in the environment. This separation [of the soul's co-experience from nature] – that has only come about.

In ancient Greece, the soul was still part of natural existence. But if we go back even further than ancient Greece, we come closer and closer to the times when there was still a kind of clairvoyance, when man went beyond the physical and felt the spiritual that lay behind it – and was connected to the spirit that hovers behind the sensual world. From the innermost depths of the world, from the laws that do not resemble the external, the soul created those forms that now correspond all the more to the laws of the external world. Even in philosophers such as Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates, we find human souls that still reach down below the surface. In Greek thought, the soul is not yet internalized in the human personality; it is still rooted in the world of the senses. Modern man has freed himself; he can only confront nature and imitate it. But in this way the soul, having become stronger, attains inner stability and a firm footing within itself. Thus the human soul of primeval times was unfree and dependent on the all-pervading spirit; thus the Greek soul was directly within nature, not yet separating spirit and nature; and thus the modern soul is set apart from its surroundings, grasping itself in its inwardness.

Now there is no period of time for art that shows us as clearly as in a leap in the characterized sense how this art, on the one hand, still demands the greatness and significance of experiencing nature and, on the other hand, has to reckon with the deepened inwardness of the human soul - [it is the time in which great artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their works]. It is characteristic that the event falls into the time of Greek culture, which gave the human soul internalization above all else and which, through its impulses, contributes to the education of the human soul: the emergence and establishment of Christianity. And it seems mighty and wondrous to us when we look at the development of humanity from the most comprehensive interdenominational point of view, regardless of any narrow-denominational point of view, and see how, from the time of the emergence of Christianity, what we can call the internalization of the human soul arises in a lawful manner, and which I am now trying to characterize.

You can particularly see this when you try to look at a mind from the first Christian centuries, a mind like Augustine's. Just delve into something like the “Confessions” of Augustine – worth reading for anyone who wants to delve into the spirit of the times, in the best sense of the word. And one thus gains a sense of the infinite inwardness of human soul experience, which breaks into human development and shows itself in a soul like that of Augustine. And compare the whole life, the whole inward nature of Augustine's soul life with what [all of] Greek art, even the harrowing tragedies of an Aeschylus, of a Sophocles, could give. In the great Aeschylus and the great Sophocles we find the connection between man and his environment everywhere. However ingenious the characterizations may appear to us, the people everywhere do not stand out in such a way that we can speak of an internalization of the soul life to the same degree as in the powerful and forceful way in which this inwardness of the human spirit appears to us in Augustine.

We will only be able to see the whole spiritual course of human development when we recognize this impulse of internalization as an historical law, even if we do not want to tie in with the Christ impulse in any conventional way. For these things are present, as surely as the sun is present in space. They can be grasped spiritually as the effects of the sun on the planets in space. [This development has particularly led to a certain inartistic way of looking at things in the so-called Renaissance, the golden age of human-spiritual development.] But art will never be able to disappear from human development; it will only seek for itself that which is possible for it in the lawful general character of an age. And so we see in the epoch at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, in which Raphael's life also falls, how there is a struggle, firstly, to make art possible and, secondly, to take into account in art what has also occurred in the development of art in a lawful manner with the internalization of the human soul.

In this mighty transitional epoch, Raphael's spirit matured. And how does he appear to us? In a wonderful way he appears to us! Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a goldsmith who was also a painter and from whom he received his first painting lessons. Orphaned at an early age, Raphael was apprenticed to the most important painter in Italy at the time, Pietro Perugino in Perugia. From Perugino, we see Raphael receiving, so to speak, the first stimulus for what would then rise to such tremendous greatness. But when you consider Raphael's environment, first in Urbino, then in Perugia, and then again Raphael's soul itself, this consideration becomes a mystery wherever you look; for this Raphael soul stands within its environment like something that does not grow out of this environment itself, but that places itself within this environment as if coming from completely different home climes. And only those who are short-sighted with regard to these things can still strive to explain Raphael in terms of what surrounded him.

Raphael grew up in Perugia, where he learned from the most important painter in Italy at the time. If we first look at the master himself, we see a thoroughly Christian man, counting on the Christian moment of the soul's interiorization. If we let the overall impression of his pictures sink in, we find this justified everywhere. Yes, out of the traditions of his time, this master of Raphael painted the Christian figures, the inner soul of man seeking the paths of eternity. He painted the figures of the holy legend in such a way that the struggling, searching human soul, in need of eternity, finds satisfaction in these figures. But in every stroke of these paintings by Perugino, we also see that he was not present with the innermost fibers of his soul in what he painted from tradition. 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. This not fully internalized tradition, that was the essential thing that Raphael had of his master.

If we consider the surroundings of Perugia, we see wonderful nature that awakens in every sentient human soul a feeling for the riddles of natural existence, for the eternal values that lie in earthly existence. But what took place in this environment? Struggle after struggle within a passionate people. And it must be assumed that the place where Raphael grew up learning was characterized by struggles, by terrible struggles, which the individual families and clans fought among themselves in the struggle for supremacy in the city. Entire families moved out and then besieged those left behind in the city. Raphael was surrounded by all this. Try to imagine someone who grew up in Perugia and compare him to Raphael. You would see how the former would have lived with all of this and absorbed the life around him – you can almost touch it.

There is a promising tale told by a chronicler, a historian who was just such a person, who was there; he tells how, among these warring factions, one of the heroes of such a faction rode into the city like a sort of St. George or Mars, riding into the city on horseback, powerfully fighting for his followers, and how he rode down everything that opposed him with his horse - a picture from Perugia at that time! We see this scene, as described by the chronicler, depicted in a painting by Raphael - elevated to the spiritual and soul realm, in which everything that has a direct effect on the observer of this scene is swept away. We see how a life confronts us here that only a soul can experience, which hovers above the whole and only captures what is inwardly, spiritually presented in such a scene, and then later conjures it onto the canvas. This is how Raphael appears to us: at home in worlds that do not belong to this sensual world, at home in spiritual realms with which his soul is completely interwoven in its inwardness. And the immediate environment in which he is placed gave him nothing else than that he was allowed to look at it. A spirit, as if from completely different homelands, who can never be explained by his environment for clear thinking and clear observation, who brings something with him, adds something that is not in the environment.

And what did Raphael learn from his master? It is precisely that which makes Raphael the wonderful phenomenon of artistic and human development that he did not learn from his master. For we feel with Raphael that the main feature of the newer period, the internalization of the human soul - the self-evident internalization that is connected with everything he creates - is precisely what is missing in Perugino, but that it is present in every fiber of Raphael and pours directly into what he lives out in his forms, in his art. We feel how a piece of Raphael's deepest inwardness lives on the canvas everywhere when we immerse ourselves in his paintings. This was something that Raphael took from the heights of heaven and not from Perugino, something that he brought in like a messenger from completely different worlds. Whoever tries to grasp this internalization not only in dogmas and doctrines, in external laws that can be grasped in concepts, but with the whole soul, will feel it flowing out of every creation of Raphael, so that in Raphael's greatest creations we have precisely that which we can say: It is now something quite different from what lies in Greek art. There lived that which man has directly experienced in soul and body and at the same time shaped in forms. In Raphael, we see the inner soul of man as poured out and confronting us in forms, the soul that has separated itself from natural existence, pouring out and confronting us as a new world, as a creation of the most inwardly human soul - not in a certain way in nature, but like a new creation - the interior of the human soul striving outwards again and artistically embodying itself there.

Those who call only those a Christian who believe in Christian dogmas, we want to leave to themselves for today's reflection. Those who recognize the Christian trait in the inwardness of the human soul, who see this Christian impulse at work, who see how the human soul breaks away from the outer world and turns inwards to reflect, how it seeks the Christ impulse within - because the human being, having separated from nature, needs such a point of support - will understand why this impulse was given precisely at this time. Those who are able to recognize and feel this more than dogma-less Christianity, this Christianity that is no longer regarded as Christian by some, will understand when the spiritual scientist researcher feels how in Raphael's soul, even before his birth, the basic trait of Christianity was alive, how in all that Raphael felt and experienced, a Christian soul was born, a soul that entered the whole environment as a Christianized soul, a soul with which the Christian way of life was born at the same time, a soul that was Christian through everything that lived in it. And this Christianity in Raphael's soul cannot be explained by anything in the environment. When it is put this way, it looks like an assertion, and it cannot be proven with mathematical certainty; such things arise through intimate immersion in the essence of such a soul. You can see in Raphael, when you let his soul pass before you, how it stands out and differs from another soul that only during its life entered into the internalization of Christianity. By contrasting Raphael with another figure, we can see the difference between a soul that is born a Christian and therefore incorporates the Christian message into every line of its creations, and a soul that only gradually embraces Christian impulses.

Let us continue to observe Raphael in relation to his immediate surroundings. When he was transferred to Florence in 1504, he came into an environment where the after-effects of Savonarola were still vividly felt and where the atmosphere was still strongly influenced by what Savonarola had brought to Florence. The spirit of Savonarola himself was still perceptible in the followers and opponents of Savonarola in Florence, for example in Fra Bartolommeo, who was one of Raphael's friends. When you place a soul like Savonarola's side by side with Raphael's, so to speak, as a contemporary soul, you notice a difference. How naturally the Christianized, the way of the whole Christianized soul, comes to us in Raphael; this soul of Raphael does not first have to become Christian, it does not fanatically represent Christianity; it never does that. Raphael's soul does not need to indulge in Christian dogmas either; this soul draws such lines, applies such colors, as correspond to Christian interiorization; it lives Christian from birth. How different is the soul of Savonarola! He assimilates Christianity in such a way that he fights for the heroic, the great, the significant, and the moral of Christianity bit by bit. He is kindled bit by bit during his development by what one can feel as an impression of Christianity. She is a soul who is only becoming familiar with Christianity, who is fanatical about Christianity, and we can see how she is gradually drawn to Christianity and lives so close to Christianity that the internalized Christian soul must pour out again - powerfully, and therefore one-sidedly and fanatically. There is an enormous difference.

If you do not dogmatize, but consider how, in the moment when one ascends to spiritual-scientific contemplation, everything becomes infinitely versatile, where the evidence does not arise as in the field of mathematics, where everything has sharp contours, then it becomes clear to him who is not merely acquainted with scientific dogmas and laws but has imbued himself with the impulses of spiritual science that this, which has just been attempted to be developed, is illuminated with infinite clarity by the two souls. When spiritual science shows us how Raphael's soul - I only want to hint at these things gently, not roughly, as it must be done in spiritual science when one comes across individual concrete facts - when spiritual science illuminates for us how a soul like Raphael's was already in an earlier life , how it absorbed the power of Christianity and passed through life between death and a new birth with this power of Christianity, then one can also understand the transformation by which he can now live out in a serene form in soul-spiritual powers that which he once experienced with strength. The only way to make sense of the riddle is to say to oneself: Yes, that which has direct Christian impact, right down to the dogmatic, has not been experienced by a soul like Savonarola in the past, but was only in that life at the time of Raphael that it was able to gradually live its way into Christianity from other forms of life, into a stage that the Raphael soul had already passed through in an earlier life.

Of course, I too find it natural that a large part of humanity today still finds what has just been said absurd and ridiculous. I will never be surprised - together with all those who know the fundamentals of spiritual science - when something like this is found to be absurd and ridiculous. But the time will come when people will realize how deeply rooted is what can be said about human souls through the spirit, which has just been used to explain the very different nature of the soul of Savonarola compared to that of Raphael. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives will prove fruitful.

And yet another trait comes to light when we study Raphael's soul. If we probe his soul in this way, we find that it is so thoroughly Christian that Raphael was not at all disturbed by the unchristian environment of the popes when he came to Rome. Indeed, a soul in which Christianity lived so naturally could more easily cope with the environment, not taking offense at Julius II, the pope of whom Machiavelli, who was certainly not particularly moral himself, said that he was a devilish soul, a man who would have liked to bare his teeth at anyone who crossed him. And of the following popes, with whom Raphael lived, there is not much of a Christian tale to tell either. A soul like Savonarola's clashes with such popes. He confronts them as the Baptist once confronted people in his apt words, but not the soul of Raphael, who has already gone through this in some previous life, which we will not talk about here. Raphael's soul remains untouched in its Christian self-evidence.

But artistically, his soul must be active. Artistry must be a continuation of what appeared as art in the Greek world. He must seek what he does not have within himself, and he must seek it in his surroundings. We see him, for example, walking around among the excavated ruins and ancient tombs in Rome, taking in everything, really absorbing from the outside that which is peculiar to Greek art, which he must marry with that which is self-evident to him, with Christian inwardness. It is as if Raphael's soul in a previous life had had the opportunity to be so close to Christianity that Christianity was born as a matter of course with this soul in the existence of Raphael, but that in a previous life it had been far removed from Greek culture and now had to absorb this Greek culture from the outside in order to marry it with the Christianity that he brings with him as a matter of course from a previous life. It is as if what appears out of the spiritual as a necessary result of a previous existence on earth grows together with what this soul must now take in from the outside - in contrast to the Savonarola soul. Thus the two kinds of forces that confront us in this Raphael soul grow together. And it will no longer be absurd and ridiculous to look for Raphael in an earlier life somewhere in a Christian environment that was far removed from Greek culture, which at that time poured powerful impulses into this soul, which remained dormant until this soul life had been transformed - until the next birth, of course, now without any fanaticism and without many other things that are only remotely similar to fanaticism. When this soul was reborn, it sought, because it had been far removed from Greek culture, to find it where it could, in order to absorb this Greek culture into itself.

If we can recognize the spiritual currents that came together in Raphael from a spiritual scientific perspective, can we grasp them, then we learn to understand how both had such a significant effect on this soul: [on the one hand] the natural Christian internalization through his individuality and [on the other hand] the Greek element, through the environment into which the soul was drawn because it lacked that which was an important, a great point of passage through all epochs of human development. We see how Raphael, through the merging of these two things, one individual and one rooted in the general development of humanity and not received from Raphael's earlier incarnation, rises on the great tableau of general human development as if to a [special] summit. Then we understand that what arises in his soul, so infinitely internalized, is what now confronts us from his creations. If Raphael is a typically Christian soul and in it the Christian principle and the general human element of Greek culture are combined in a lawful manner, if Raphael thus absorbs the great currents of the present cycle of human development, then we may assume that something lives in his soul itself that is like an image of the lawfulness of human progress.

And so that my explanations do not seem too “mystical” to you and the “fantasy” does not seem too grotesque to you, I would now like to show you how a soul takes in something like an image of the great currents of world development , how it presents, as it were, small epochs within itself like images of great human epochs – for it is in such epochs that the development of humanity takes place – I would like to show, not with my words, but again with the struggling Herman Grimm, who says something very remarkable. In his last work, Herman Grimm wants to depict the most important highlights of Raphael's work, but how strangely he speaks of this creative, creating soul of Raphael, how curiously. For Herman Grimm, the development of Raphael's creations becomes a law of the whole world – he regards seven works as the greatest in Raphael's development. And of these seven works he says:

At twenty-one years of age he painted the Marriage of the Virgin, four years later the Entombment; four years after that the Camera della Segnatura was completed, four years after that the cartoons for the tapestries were painted and soon after that the two Madonnas. The “Transfiguration” stood at the foot of the deathbed.

A spirit that appears to the unprejudiced observer as if it were to incorporate the epochs of human development, such a spirit appears to the art observer, who looks for the characteristic, in his development in such a way that he ascends from year to year to higher and ever higher peaks; and because the last four years are not complete, the last work is also not finished.

It is often said that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm; an epochal spirit like Raphael appears to us here as a microcosm of human and spiritual development itself. And how does he embody this? We need only turn our gaze to the two large and powerful, if now, one might say, poorly overpainted and poorly preserved, two rooms in the Vatican in the Camera della Segnatura, one of which - whether rightly or wrongly, it remains to be seen - is called “The School of Athens” and the other “The Disputa”. The whole of human development is depicted in these two pictures, which are placed opposite each other and touch the human soul so deeply. In one of the pictures, Greek culture is represented by the ennobled figures on the left and right, as it were expressing itself in the question: [Where has humanity come to, to what point has it progressed in the entire age of Greek culture,] where man still lived with the immediate surroundings of the outside world? Everything, down to the architecture, reflects the spirit of this development in this single image.

It is wrong to comment on it or interpret it in a pedantic, philistine way; it is right to try to summarize in a feeling what humanity has received on its way to Greek culture, where life in the external world has been replaced by the internalization of the human soul of the human soul, if one summarizes the entire life of humanity in an elapsed time with everything for which the human soul has longed, what it has striven for, has achieved, in one feeling: It flows towards us, it lives in this image that which this feeling fulfills with content. It is not necessary to paint the individual figures. I consider it a bad thing when travelers stand in front of a painting with a “Baedeker” in their hands and read: This is such and such - Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Pythagoras. What do we care about all the names, what do all the comments and explanations give us? The artistic breath that comes down from this picture is also what streams out of the Greek work of art – the breath that is there from the development of humanity itself, when we look at it with a sensitive, artistic heart. Then the epoch of interiorization on the opposite wall: above, the symbols of the supernatural; below, representing people, how the supersensible flows into their souls in order to interiorize them. The whole mighty contrast of an ancient time and the time of internalization, and again the breath of the new internalization itself, they flow towards us from what is called - again rightly or wrongly - “Disputa”.

From what Raphael's soul had grown, he conjured it into these scenes. And one feels it so clearly, if one can feel truthfully what lies in the souls in these two different cycles of human development, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian times. If one abstains from all intellectual judgment, all inartistic commenting – that nonsense of subjective interpretation that has become so widespread, especially in theosophical circles – and abandons oneself to direct sensation, if one artistically immerses oneself in the things one feels drawn to Raphael, to a human soul that has married interiorization in artistic creation with kinship with all spiritual things in nature, as it was present in earlier epochs.

Again – when you cross over from Florence to Bologna and have the picture in front of you: in the middle the female figure, looking upwards in a visionary manner – I don't need to mention the name, you may assume, for my sake, that this is the “Saint Cecilia” - so expressed that in every gesture, in every line, in every color scheme, the soul's detachment from the physical is shown. She looks up, so that both from the central figure, as from the four surrounding ones, it is clear: The earthly instruments fall to the ground directly from the feeling; but the soul, which is directed upwards – we feel that its tones have fallen silent – listens to what is born as if from the supersensible, what sounds through the world, warming it like the music of the spheres, in the presence of which earthly music fades away. Only a soul that feels so inwardly as the Raphael soul could conjure this on the canvas, on the wall. And only a soul that was like the Raphael soul could create the highest that the human soul can feel, straight from the depths of the human soul. If spiritual science in its universality wants to elevate the human soul to the origin of human existence, then it comes to what has been explained here many times: that we may be surrounded by many things on earth, that we may look at many things, but that precisely that which presents itself to us in strict spiritual scientific contemplation as the innermost part of our nature, that is of extra-terrestrial origin – it lives, as I said the day before yesterday, in the spiritual and soul that surrounds us, just as the Earth's atmosphere physically surrounds us; and we feel that this, which is the most human of all, is born out of the spirit.

If we want to have a representation of that, of the most human of the human, if we want to feel and experience in our soul what spiritual science is able to stimulate in the soul, then we feel the earth with everything that belongs to the earth, we disappear and the most human of the human floats by, our soul is absorbed in the extra-terrestrial worlds. It turns its gaze outwards to seek in these extra-terrestrial worlds that which is the origin of man; and it transports itself outwards, seeking to sensualize the supersensible in the cloud-forming regions. From the cloud-forming regions, we find the image of the most human of humanity pressing towards the earth, as Raphael lets this mysterious union of mother and son float in, born out of the stylized clouds. Our soul rises from the feeling that flashes in us in the figure of the so-called “Saint Cecilia” to the delicately tangible supersensible feeling of the mystery of man originating from extraterrestrial worlds.

And when we allow this feeling, which awakens an infinite warmth in our soul, to be just feeling – it is the one feeling into which the currents of spiritual scientific contemplation ultimately converge – when we allow this feeling to prevail within us and seek a satisfactory representation – seek something that meets the feeling from the outside – then we imagine the “Sistine Madonna” from Dresden. The spiritual feeling grows together with what Raphael has depicted in this picture. Line and color, hand movement and gesture present to us what is meant: the encounter of spiritual ideals with the highest artistic ideals, with the religious feelings in us, the encounter of that feeling which, in all that is pictorial, is able to flame, the encounter of this feeling with what flows towards us from Raphael's creation, the encounter of the feeling with the creature of the imagination, which itself has grown out of such a feeling.

One may gladly fall silent when one has reached the description of the feelings that ultimately lead to the grasp of the supersensible. Raphael, however, appears to us as a riddle that is the task of spiritual science. And deep down we can understand why someone like Herman Grimm, who everywhere penetrates to spiritual science and longs to find in Raphael's figures something that corresponds to spiritual science, but because he cannot find it, leaves his observation unfinished. Such an example shows quite clearly what has had to be said so often: the legacy of the nineteenth century consists in the fact that the external science of that century, the external observation and the external recreation of nature, was destined to reach a peak that cannot be admired enough. But it has left behind riddles, so that in our age this external science must lead to spiritual science.

One is enriched and stimulated to occupy oneself with Raphael spiritually when one considers the peculiar struggle of Herman Grimm. And then one can feel how peculiar it must have been in the soul of Herman Grimm, and one comes to say the same thing that has been attempted here with all too inadequate means. It is strange that in the introduction to his consideration of Raphael we find a peculiar thought sprouting up in Herman Grimm's soul – just as thoughts sometimes arise from the deep, subconscious regions of the soul – a peculiar thought that makes one wonder: why precisely this thought when considering Raphael's soul?

I see developments of humanity that I will be denied the opportunity to participate in...

- he doubts that the soul will truly live again in later incarnations.

... but which seem to me so gloriously beautiful that for their sake it would be well worth while to begin human existence all over again.

It is strange, one might say, grotesquely dryly: precisely where Herman Grimm cannot approach Raphael's life because he cannot view it from the point of view of repeated earthly lives, the idea of repeated earthly lives occurs to him. When one looks at Raphael, he says, one is drawn to the thought of starting life all over again.

We need not comment further on such a thought, but merely let it hint, as it does from the subconscious in Herman Grimm, who will one day be the solution to the Raphael riddle. And if we must see the solution to many of the riddles that live in every human soul - the smallest as well as the greatest - in the fact of repeated lives on earth, then the great riddles of human development will also become particularly understandable to us at their peak if we are able to draw on the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. Then an infinitely deep meaning flows into the developmental history of humanity.

And when we are imbued with the feeling that souls like Raphael's themselves put the forces of humanity into them, in order to apply them in a new life in new forms, then we feel vividly towards Raphael what Herman Grimm once concluded and at the same time began his reflection on Raphael with, and with what we also want to conclude what should be explained by today's reflections on Raphael. Particularly when one sees, in the sense of spiritual-scientific observation, how deeply Raphael's soul is rooted in the whole sense of human development, then one really feels what Herman Grimm suggests at the beginning of his consideration of Raphael. And here too spiritual science shows us, not in abstract forms, what the inner life of the soul is, but it kindles devotion to everything that is full of spirit, full of strength and fruitful in human development. What Herman Grimm was able to say from the depths of his soul can only emerge from such a contemplation as we have given today. Yes, with such a feeling we may look up to Raphael, and so we can say:

Everyone wants to know about the life's work of such a person. Raphael has become one of the elements on which the higher education of the human spirit is based. We want to approach him because we need him for our well-being.

Yes, and the development of humanity is intertwined with such a power, which flows into its sphere because it will, must live in ever new aspects in this soul, and this power will in turn flow out into other souls. So spiritual research can also express the same words that Herman Grimm said:

People will always want to know about Raphael. About the young, beautiful painter who surpassed all the others. Who had to die young. Whose death was mourned by all of Rome. Even if Raphael's works are lost, his name will remain ingrained in people's minds.

And spiritual science can add: The power that was in his soul will live on and on, in ever new and new forms, in ever more creative development of humanity!

Dear attendees! Since I have often been allowed to speak here about spiritual science and its results, may I be allowed to speak this evening about a special chapter that undoubtedly lies infinitely close to many souls: the Christ-question - not only because circles in our time there is an ever-increasing need to approach this question, but also because spiritual science in particular has something to say about this question, about how the Christ-question has to be integrated into our culture. Spiritual science does not want to be a germ of a new religion, but to show the way how to penetrate into areas that are not accessible to the ordinary senses, to modern science. It will not be possible to talk about what we want to deal with without briefly pointing out the many changes that have taken place in human hearts with regard to this question. For this, a brief review is necessary.

If we simply visualize Christianity's emergence into the world, we can initially say that at the beginning of our era something happened that gave the whole development of humanity a new impetus, a turn upwards. Even the non-believer will have to admit, for historical reasons alone, that the impulse that came through Christianity was a powerful one. At the time when the Christ Impulse entered the world, the human soul was in a very different condition than it is today, and a change in this condition will have to occur in the future simply because new powers of knowledge will awaken in the human soul. One thing is of historical significance: The most enlightened minds of the Occident, equipped with the deepest knowledge, had to recognize - under the highest tension of the powers of knowledge, through the greatest that they could muster in mental acuity - that something powerful had entered into the life of humanity through the Christ impulse. Let us first consider the view of the Gnostics, who are called “religious geniuses” by the most highly qualified and outstanding scholars of the present day. We do not want to talk about the cognitive value of Gnosticism, but we want to ask: What did the Gnostics think about Christ? We want to try to characterize the Gnostic attitude towards Christ. Gnosticism is a theory of evolution that must seem fantastic to people today. When we talk about evolution today, we ask: How did the human body develop through the various stages? - The Gnostic, on the other hand, said: “If you think impartially, you are led not to a material but to a spiritual origin; if you focus on the point where man came down from the spiritual into matter, you find that something was left behind in the purely spiritual heights in order to later penetrate into the development of mankind. Man could only progress by becoming more and more entangled in matter. If he had not done so, he would never have attained freedom. He had to become estranged from the spiritual in order to find his possibility of freedom in matter. Then, at the point in time when man was most deeply entangled in matter, that which had been held back earlier in the spiritual world at the origin of man had to pour into earthly development in order to prevent man from completely sinking into matter. That which flowed down from the spiritual worlds has been connected with the earth ever since, and Christ lives on with the development of mankind.

If we ask, with the means of spiritual science, how the Gnostics arrived at such ideas, we see on careful examination that these ideas, which the Gnostics brought forth from the deepest spiritual powers, come from an epoch when there was still direct vision, because in previous times the human soul was still attuned quite differently. From this original knowledge, ideas such as the Gnostic ones developed. Gnosticism seems like an heirloom of ancient knowledge. Here we encounter a lofty concept of Christ, which even those who consider Gnosticism fantastic must acknowledge: the Gnostic idea is bold and grandiose. We can quickly pass over the first Church Fathers who worked to establish the [Christian] dogmas. What the Fathers dared to do in those days, men later completely abandoned. In the middle of the Middle Ages, this view was completely abandoned. It was said: Human knowledge is not sufficient to reveal the heights to which Christ's entry into the earthly sphere could reach. Faith was substituted for real knowledge. Thus we see how the conception of Christ changes over the centuries, just as the character of the times changes with culture.

In the sixteenth century, we enter the age of great advances in the natural sciences. A [new] knowledge had to arise for this - a [new] kind of knowledge, which was primarily concerned with recognizing the material world and its laws. This knowledge emerged as an important developmental factor that transformed all commercial and industrial life. Medieval humanity still fully surrendered to faith; the Middle Ages believed what the Gnostics once recognized. The external world, which is our physical environment, shaped the new era. Thus, the whole concept of Christ was transformed: While the Gnostics could speak of a divine being that had only taken up residence in a human being, in more recent times it became increasingly impossible to imagine God incarnate. It would be interesting to show how, in the individual phases, the earlier conception increasingly recedes in favor of a [more outwardly] tangible Christ. Due to their inner state of mind, people were forced to refrain from seeing God incarnate and instead to see in him more and more the human being, albeit one of the most outstanding kind. In a human soul, in the man of Nazareth, one seeks today the starting point of Christianity, instead of seeing in this man only the gate through which the Christ entered [into the earthly sphere].

Enlightened minds, far removed from all theology, have wrestled with the question: How can a modern person relate to the Christ event? It is interesting, though, that the three personalities, who were all born in the same year just over a hundred years ago, endeavored to come to terms with this Christ event. Otto Ludwig wrestled with the material in order to shape it into a drama; Friedrich Hebbel noted the plan for a Christ drama. What they both wrote down shows that they could not cope with the problem, it was too big for them. We also know that Richard Wagner worked on this task and could not finish it.

As for this materialistic view of the mere human being Jesus, it must be said that it has not remained unfruitful; Jesus theology has also produced beautiful blossoms. Rittelmeyer's little booklet “Jesus” is just one example: it is something that can deeply touch the heart and soul. Modern theology has produced much of the same kind. Peter Rosegger, a justly popular poet of the present day, constructed a Jesus for himself. If you imagine Rosegger himself, highly idealized with all his beautiful, sympathetic qualities, you have his idea of Jesus of Nazareth.

Despite all the tremendous achievements of theology in recent times, a remarkable discovery has been made: that if you look at the Gospels with an open mind, Christ Jesus cannot have been a human being at all. Benjamin Smith, for example, claimed that all interpretations of the Christ as the simple man of Nazareth are a slap in the face of any scientific approach, that it is not possible, that it is incompatible with all tradition, to want to see only a human being, even if it is the most ideal, in the Christ; so one sees that the Christ Jesus must be a god. This realization comes at a time when humanity no longer has any conception of what a god is. And so the conclusion is drawn: since there can only be human beings on earth, but the Christ must be a god, he cannot have existed on earth at all. Under such circumstances, from such premises, there has been accomplished what for years has caused so much sensation: the denial of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In brief, this is the course of the conception of Christ through the centuries. How does spiritual science relate to the Christ event? How can it relate to the most important problem of human development? Spiritual science starts from the premise that the human being not only has knowledge based on observation of the external world, but that he can also ascend to higher knowledge by developing dormant powers.

Just as the chemist, by separating hydrogen and oxygen, makes something completely new out of water, producing a substance with very different properties, so too can something completely new arise in the human being through the use of appropriate methods. Just as we cannot see what is in the water, we cannot see what powers a person has within them. Through a kind of spiritual chemistry, using exercises that are described in more detail in my books, something new can be developed in a person; the soul can work beyond the body and become aware of itself in the spiritual world. This is still quite foreign to many people and will only gradually become more common. Today, at the beginning of an epoch in which this knowledge will gradually become common property, it is possible to recognize the spiritual world, [as was once the case with the] Copernican world view, which was also laughed at at first, but which nevertheless became established. Today they no longer burn heretics who speak of a body-free perception of the soul, but they ridicule them and make them look foolish.

If we approach gnosis from this point of view, something emerges that is not just a further development and revival of gnosis: namely, that the human soul carries over what has been achieved in earlier epochs into later ones. If we embrace the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, we arrive at a more precise characterization of the earthly epochs themselves. Historical progress must be observed by spiritual scientific means. Then it becomes clear that just as man comes to hunger and thirst [in a natural way], so in ancient times he came to recognize the inner secrets of existence in images and visions from his own organization. Then the human soul lost this ability; man had to develop the ability to create concepts himself. This ability only arose later - on the basis of ideas (of a pictorial-visionary kind). 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. In ancient times, man received through images that which was hidden behind sensual existence. That is the characteristic of the old world view, that man attained knowledge in the form of images of how he was connected to the cosmos and the gods. This is still the view of ancient Hebrew times, in which a connection existed between the spiritual and the sensual world through the prophets and seers, as it were. But this connection was felt to be growing weaker and weaker the closer it came to the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. If a special impulse had not come into the development of the earth at that time, the human soul would have felt more and more isolated, because man was left to his own resources, but at the same time man became isolated from that moment on. It is no exaggeration to say that we are heading towards the age of individualism. But with that, the possibility arose of finding something new that souls in the pre-Christian era could not yet find: the Christ presence. Since the emergence of Christianity, what was previously found in nature can be found in the spirit. Before the Christ event, man could no longer find the connection with the divine powers that he had in ancient times. The development of Christianity so far is only a preparation for the Christianity of the future; people will see that after a relatively short time the world situation will change completely.

There may be many who are satisfied with what is given by Bible and tradition; that is a selfish point of view. In rapid succession, souls will develop in such a way that they will no longer be able to approach the Christ in the old way. Man will stand more and more alone with [conventional] concepts and ideas. Man once felt as a spirit among spirits; the modern man can only feel as a body among bodies. 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. As a result, such processes take place within them that the forces of the organism that are released as a result flow in a different direction. And when we look at people, we see that they have acquired more and more knowledge about matter and its laws, but spiritually they have starved in terms of soul knowledge. At the same time, the direct perception of Christ was being prepared in the spiritual world. Over the centuries, the human soul has deprived itself of spiritual nourishment and thus, through starvation, developed those organs that will unfold in the future.

People are approaching a goal of development where they will find the Christ as they find a law of nature [today]. But they will not find him as a dead law, but as a living entity, and they will know: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, an entity has entered into the development of the earth that was not there before. Laws cannot comfort, they cannot help with pain, but the connection with the Christ can help, and this will be felt in the soul as strength. It will not be possible to find the Christ by dogmatic means; it will be possible to find the Christ in a completely different way; in a completely different way one will find the truth of the word: “I am with you until the end of the earthly days.” A time will come when it will not be considered impossible from a scientific point of view that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Spirit has been living in the earth, in the earthly development of mankind. Until now, only those who know something about the Christ are recognized as Christians. In the future, people will know that the Christ did not come to Earth only to bring a teaching, but to accomplish an act. Then one can also find the Christ-germ in the Hindu, the Japanese, the Mohammedan.

I am fully aware that I am not speaking from a medieval point of view, but from one that fully recognizes everything that science has achieved. But just as one recognizes the laws of electricity, radioactivity and so on, one will recognize that the mystery of Golgotha is a superphysical matter. 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.

We have gone through a preparatory time in which Christianity was [merely] taken as a teaching. A time will come when the Christ can be found by those souls who seek him because he is on earth. He always worked through his existence, and people will find his existence as something that can reunite humanity, because he will be the one [for all people], for every [individual] person, as people are becoming more and more individualized. This is the Christ idea [in a time when] man is heading for a future that is even more de-deitified than monism would have dreamed of.

Just as we relate to external substances through physical nourishment, so we relate to the Christ spirit through our soul life. A great spirit, a distinguished thinker of the present day, Eliot, has said that the old religion is a sad, painful one; in the future, a religion will arise that gives joy. There is no denying that pain and death are in the world, and because they affect man, he needs a strong impulse to overcome pain and death - [the Christ impulse]. Modern philosophy suffers from the fact that it cannot find a balance for pain and death. And humanity will advance from the learned Christ, the Christ as a world teacher, to the seen Christ. Those involved in spiritual science will not be afraid of being called a monist; it is not the one who denies the spirit who is a monist, but the one who recognizes the spirit as the origin of being, who finds the monistic principle in the spirit.

Spiritually and psychically, the human being is immortal. In pre-Christian times, the soul was still known to be connected with the gods of nature. It is only in the twentieth century that we will become aware of the spiritual connection between the soul and the spiritual world, with Christ. Angelus Silesius is absolutely right when he says:

A thousand times may Christ be born in Bethlehem, but if he is not born in thee, thou art still lost for ever.

The mystical Christ [of whom Angelus Silesius speaks] has only become possible through the historical Christ. [Just as Goethe says:] If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? [so one can say:] If Christ were not there for our souls, how could we rise up to him, how could the sense of Christ arise in our soul? The historical Christ Jesus is as real as the sun is in the universe. Without disregarding the [biblical] traditions, one cannot overlook the fact that Christ is a God. According to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinists, man is merely a link in the chain of development of living beings. But the Darwinists have a great opponent, the great Darwin himself, who writes that it is unmistakable that a God infused life into the beings at the beginning. He writes:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from a primal form into which the Creator breathed life.

This is something that the modern Darwinian would like to deny – in fact, this sentence is missing from the German translations. But the person who claimed this is none other than Charles Darwin.

If you look at these things, you can come to a surprising insight: the monistic natural philosophy actually had to deny the spirit, because [according to it] everything depends on natural laws. But then the difference between good and evil basically ceases. That is what one should actually draw as a consequence, but one does not do it. However, however one may think about the great symbol [of the scene of temptation] in Genesis, where Lucifer speaks to man: “You will be like God and know what is good and evil,” something meaningful is said with these words. It is not important to call our time a time of transition; it is only significant to recognize what makes it a time of transition. If humanity did not come to the realization that the Christ is the most significant force in the evolution of the earth, it would come to believe that the experiences of the human soul are only the most highly intensified animal soul forces. If one were consistent, the soul's ability to distinguish between good and evil would cease. Yet another tempter speaks in our time, but one does not have the courage to hear him murmur: You will be made of animals, and no longer distinguish between good and evil.

But there is such a thing as the Christ impulse, which lives to show us that we are of the spiritual world and are in contact with spiritual beings, that our moral world order is intimately connected with the Christ in that with him the principle of love has come into the earth. And his voice says: You will not be of the animals, you will be with me, with me you will distinguish good from evil.

The sonship will be felt effectively. That the son comes from the father is scientifically based. But the father does not necessarily have the son. The moral world is related to the natural world order like the son to the father. Just as the father does not have to have the son, so [from the rule of natural laws, morality does not follow by itself]. The concept of the son makes clear in a wonderful way [the transformation of the natural into a moral world order through Christ].

Spiritual science feels in harmony with what the best, leading spirits of humanity have fulfilled. Schiller, whom people no longer love as much as they used to, but whom they will love again, once said:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought
Leaped from the marveling brain.

Thought will find the way to the one who is meant here: to the Christ of the twentieth century.

Question: When the Bible speaks of both the “Ascension” and the “Descent of Christ into Hell,” where did the body of Christ go?

Rudolf Steiner: There are four [main] points of view regarding the Bible: Firstly, there is the point of view of the] believing mind. Here one simply says: Isn't the Bible enough for us? Secondly, we have the point of view of the free thinkers: here one becomes wiser than the believers. Thirdly, we see the advancement to a higher point of view: here the Bible stories are no longer viewed merely childishly, but everything has a “symbolic meaning”, is myth. Everyone can then interpret the Bible as they want, more or less ingeniously. Fourthly, there is the view that points to the spiritual facts. [If we take this point of view, we can say:] It is about an earthquake that took place; a crevice opened into which the body could fall and which then closed again. The clothes were blown around by the storm and then lay as described in John. This correspondence between spiritual vision and the Bible story is quite moving. The “descent into hell” expresses a “transformation” of life between death and a new birth through Christ.

Question: Can work alone be religion?

Rudolf Steiner: This question seems to me to be like saying: Can you feed everyone with apples? What is work? Everything that is done is work; the most physical of tasks and the most delicate of spiritual tasks are both work. Religion, on the other hand, has a relationship to divinity and to immortality. There is not much to begin with in such a question.

Question: What is meant by the “ascension of Christ”?

Rudolf Steiner: Those closest to Christ began to see that Christ had found the transition into the earthly atmosphere. This appears to the clairvoyant souls of his closest followers as his ascension.

Question: Why do we need spiritual science? Isn't the Bible enough?

Rudolf Steiner: Those who speak in this way are expressing a preference. One must draw from the facts that which appears to be one's duty towards humanity. Only superficial people today believe that they “have” the Bible. 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?

Rudolf Steiner: To engage with Christ. It is only questionable when it is done in an egotistical way. One person may ask for rain, the other for sunshine, and both pray to the same God. Similarly, when two armies face each other, about to fire bullets, both pray for victory. It does not even have to be the case that the bullets are consecrated, which has indeed happened. “But not my will, but yours be done” - that is the good tone that belongs to every prayerful mood.

Question: Is the Buddha a similar phenomenon to the Christ?

Rudolf Steiner: Buddha stands at the end of an epoch, Christ is the beginning of an epoch. Buddha's speeches were more heartfelt: for example, the parable of the chariot, [in which the sage asks the king, who has come by chariot, what the chariot is: the shaft, the wheels? And he teaches him: the chariot is] only name and form. Can you - Buddha asks - drive with the shaft and the wheels alone? Can you then drive with name and form alone? [Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together - wheels, shaft, carriage body and seat - so also the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and sensations of the soul of man do not hold together anything that can be described as a special reality, but is also only a name or a form.] – Goethe's words apply here:

Whoever wants to recognize and describe something living,
first seeks to expel the spirit,
then he has the parts in his hand
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

The Christian way of thinking provides this spiritual bond everywhere. Six hundred years before Christ, the Buddha said: illness is suffering, death is suffering; six hundred years later, the crucifix, the dead Christ on the cross, became the symbol of life; such are the changes of the times.

Question: Can music convey spiritual life?

Rudolf Steiner: It can be a help, but one cannot claim that it contributes to the elevation of the soul today.

Question: [Is Drews right when he describes the Greek logos as “vague” ?]

Rudolf Steiner: We certainly do not want to agree with Drews when he describes the Greek logos as vague. It is not unclear, but it would be inappropriate to enter into a debate about it at this time. We must not forget the development of time. Take today's astronomy with all its knowledge, for example: one could call Copernicus unclear in comparison, but he was a starting point, especially for today's astronomy.

Question: Judging by your lecture, Jesus could only be considered the Christ from the age of thirty: didn't the Jesus being already have divinity within it before the baptism in the Jordan?

Rudolf Steiner: It did not; [the Christ] first had to descend from the divine worlds. Today, people often think that Christ and Adonis are the same. This is like confusing a person who wore certain clothes ten years ago with a person who is wearing the same clothes today as that person wore ten years ago. A famous theologian in Berlin said: “Show me a single word in the New Testament that cannot be found somewhere else in the Bible.” [It depends on who says these words and in what context], because when a schoolboy speaks the same words as the schoolmaster, it is not the same. In the sayings of Christ, everything that has been said before becomes something quite different, something new. Robertson Smith believes that he has found the Lord's Prayer as an earlier, [pre-Christian] prayer because the wording sounds somewhat similar. 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. [That such judgments are taken seriously] stems only from people's belief in authority: science has proven it.

Question: Has humanity deteriorated since the Mystery of Golgotha?

Rudolf Steiner: Before [the Mystery of Golgotha] it deteriorated, then [after the Mystery of Golgotha] it improved.

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. 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.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. 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. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. 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.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. 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.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

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. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” 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.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. 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. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

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. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

When people pay attention to the interests of their soul, then the question to which our today's reflection is dedicated - the question of life and death - is certainly a recognized important and meaningful one, and the answer to this question must meet deep needs of the human soul life. Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk about such things in our present time, because it is difficult to strike a chord in the soul, because the concepts, views and ideas that our time has gained from seemingly established scientific concepts contradict what must be said from spiritual scientific research; and it is difficult to bring an unbiased approach to bear on these scientific concepts.

Now it could be that those who are trying to answer these questions today should be met with an unbiased approach, but one only has to pay attention to what is presented to us in the [contemporary scientific] literature and one will recognize how little healthy thinking, how few healthy concepts there are and have a broad audience.

The concept of “life” - let us take the “physiology” of one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, Huxley: here we have an exemplary book in terms of [contemporary] science, and in this book we find an examination of the concept of life. First, he talks about humans, and it is said that human life depends on the brain, lungs and heart, and if any of these elements do not function properly, then life is endangered. And then a curious transition is made. It is said that if you can, so to speak, deprive a person of his brain but artificially maintain the lungs and heart in operation, then life will continue. From a certain point of view, which is so popular today, this of course makes sense, but from the point of view of a world view that encompasses the whole human being, it does not make the slightest sense, because one would be grateful for a life that is not aware of the things one experiences. The true death occurs where this consciousness ends. Thus, the greatest naturalist of the present day is not at all capable of grasping the concept of “life” in the right way.

[In today's science, it is extremely easy to define life.] It is thought that life is the same in humans, animals and plants – everything is mixed up, while we should be clear about the fact that we have to consider each being in relation to this question at its [own level]. The most essential thing in the world view is ignored, because Huxley has become accustomed to looking at that in man which is most indifferent to human life and nature: the material of the body. And so he quotes Hamlet's saying quite seriously - and it is fitting for Hamlet, in his melancholy mood, to make such a statement and, looking at the material of the body, to pursue this material after the great Caesar has died, and to say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
Might well plug a hole from the raw north;
Oh that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might wall up a wall against wind and weather.

And Huxley points to an [imaginable] “Negro slave Caesar” or a “chained dog Caesar” and says: Even in this slave or in this dog could be the atoms of the great Caesar. In this way, one pursues that which is most indifferent to human life, and is not aware that one should pursue that which shapes the substance in such a way that it conforms to humanity. Physics will soon abandon these fantasies about atoms – radium research has already shown that atoms disintegrate in the hands of man.

So you see: even at the heights of knowledge, one does not form any real concepts about what life and death are. But science is at an important turning point today, and those who do not work from buzzwords, but rather approach scientific knowledge and observations, see that science is already beginning to grasp the spirit.

It cannot grasp the concept, and perhaps it cannot do so because it has no proper concept of life. The biologist Weismann says: Only the experience that death occurs can convince of the same; one cannot grasp it from life itself. There is talk of the immortality of single-celled organisms. It is said that one such organism splits into two, continues to live as two, and this goes on and on. One speaks of a multiplication in number, and these innumerable beings are the same as the first being. One cannot speak of death in this case. But the fact that Weismann sought a definition of death in this way has led to a calamity, which is characteristic of the way it is understood in the present day and which has turned out strangely. He says that the essence of death is that a corpse is present. Contemporary natural science is only able to speak of life when it is no longer there, and wants to recognize the relationship between life and death by the dead, by the corpse. Verworn, Haeckel's student, says that the individual living beings die, but that life persists. They have resorted to all sorts of things to solve the riddle of life and death, but the confusion has only grown.

Spiritual science does not have it so convenient to be able to throw everything together - [end of transcript; continued after second transcript].

First of all, it should be noted that death in plants and animals is quite different from that in humans. It is a characteristic phenomenon of many plants that they die when they produce a new being; at the moment of fertilization, they pass over into a different form of existence. Until that moment, they were permeated by the etheric body. It is not difficult to make fun of such things; however, it has been shown time and again that anyone who is deeply involved in observing life phenomena cannot get by without the assumption of the etheric or life body. The dying off and withering is based on the fact that the plant follows the physical and chemical laws. Through the etheric body, the plant is withdrawn from the effect of the physical and chemical laws. Where does what is taken from the plant go? It passes over into the new plant; it is the stream of life that passes through the ranks of plants. Even more lives in the animal than the etheric body: in order for consciousness to arise in it, it is provided with an astral body, which is the builder of the organs of consciousness. — In humans, the I is added.

The difference between animals and humans can easily be determined; one must not look for the differences where they are not. The desire to completely erase the difference, as materialistic monism is doing now, did not yet exist in the last century. But the difference in the lower jaw was emphasized with pathos - [so] Kant. Goethe did not like this approach because he was able to think spiritually. He studied anatomy and physiology in Jena and proved that it was nonsense to claim this difference. He demonstrated the small ankle bone, [the premaxillary bone], also in humans, and showed that it was only fused. These things will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming booklet on anthroposophy. We should look for the difference in the spiritual realm. In animals, the scope of their abilities is tied to their organs and to what they inherit through birth. In humans, various activities remain open, for which they must first develop the ability. Animals have certain abilities that humans must first acquire through intellectual effort. The monkey has a predetermined equilibrium; humans must first learn to walk and stand. Equilibrium is not innate in them; only the mind gradually works on it. Goethe says:

The ancients said that animals are taught by their organs; I would add that human beings are likewise taught by their organs, but they have the advantage of being able to teach their organs in return.

Today, efforts are being made to trace all human abilities back to heredity, and then the help of far-back ancestors is enlisted. But what interests us about the individual person, what determines his or her particular position, his or her task in the world, cannot be explained by the line of ancestors. The unbiased educator can even recognize a clear boundary between inherited traits and those inner forces of the person that arise from previous lives. The fact that animals can also be trained is not a valid objection for someone who is able to see the essential. We ascribe to animals a group, species or generic soul. It is a fact, however, that we take just as much interest in the individual human being as we do in an entire species of animal. In the case of animals, the spiritual individuality does not come into existence in the individual being, but in the whole species. One can compare the individual feelings of a human being with those of an individual animal and the whole human being with the animal species. The animal lives as long as the group soul has not lost interest in the individual specimen. Weismann cannot find the reason for the death of an animal because he overlooks this fact. In the case of man, something comes into existence through birth that is not found in animals, plants or minerals.

There are thinkers, however, who have overcome the opinion that man is only composed of inherited forces. They recognize that an individuality precedes physical existence and shapes it, but they do not find the solution by assuming repeated lives on earth; see Immanuel Hermann Fichte, “Anthropology”:

Parents are not the producers in the full sense: they provide the organic material, and not only that, but at the same time that middle, sensual-comfortable, which shows itself in temperament, in the peculiar , in a particular specification of the drives, etc., as the common source of which “imagination” has been shown to exist in the broader sense that we have demonstrated. In all these elements of personality, the mixture and peculiar combination of the parents' souls is unmistakable; to explain this as a mere product of procreation is perfectly justified, especially if, as we have to assume, procreation is understood as a real soul process. But the actual, concluding center of the personality is missing here precisely; because with deeper penetrating observation it turns out that even those cozy peculiarities are only a shell and a tool to grasp the actually spiritual, ideal facilities of the human being, suitable to promote them in their development or to take, but not capable of letting them arise from themselves. [...] Each preexists according to its basic spiritual form; for, spiritually considered, no individual resembles another, any more than one animal species resembles any of the others.

Francesco Redi was the first to claim that living things can only arise from living things. Only an inaccurate observation could lead to the belief in earlier times that hornets arise from rotten oxen, bees from horse carcasses and wasps from donkeys. Just as today's natural science protests against such superstition, so the spiritual researcher must protest against the fact that the spiritual soul can be explained by the line of inheritance. Human individuality points back to itself in earlier earthly lives.

A well-known objection to this is: If a person does not remember, then the earlier experiences have no value. But there is also a time between birth and death that is not remembered: the first years after birth – and yet one was there; the sense of self was just not yet strong enough. The point in time at which self-awareness first arises is also the limit for remembering back. Thus this being-in-it of the self forms the possibility of remembering. When a person learns to remember, he will remember. It is not easy to grasp this; only through a very specific mode of perception, absolute equanimity, and no fear of fate: with this, our self makes a leap forward. The theory of inheritance has produced strange results, for example that a genius is at the end of an inheritance line and not at the beginning. This is no more surprising than a man who has fallen into the water being wet when you pull him out. We all know Goethe's joke:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then is
original about the whole creature?

Well, what is original about the “creature” is something that humanity already knows. Our body is built up from the powers that we have acquired from previous embodiments; but the soul abilities that we acquire now in this embodiment create the conditions for the next life. In this body a soul has developed that has greater abilities than in the previous life; and we feel a sense of gratitude that this body dies, because when the senses become dull, the soul is already building itself another body and can discard what is not up to the further development of the soul. Modern natural science is already very close to this assumption. It has already been found that we only tire from activities that involve our consciousness; that is something. A modern naturalist, Thomson, says: The soul is to the body as the rider is to his horse. That is the thought that ancient art expressed with the centaur. There are, of course, people who claim that the ancient peoples of the East saw the wild peoples riding through the mists as if they were one with their horses, and that this inspired their imagination to create the centaur.

The spiritual researcher does not look at the corpse, but at what the corpse leaves behind:

The smallest man on earth
A son of eternity,
Will conquer death in new life
.