Course: The Festivals and Their Meaning 2The celebration of festivals is an important part of Waldorf/Steiner education. A festival is a joyous celebration of life, and has the quality of lifting us out of the ordinary and into the mysteries and magic of the rhythm of the seasons. Throughout history, festivals have emerged from people’s connection with their spiritual life and their search for the meaning of human existence. The celebrations are interwoven with the life of the earth and the cycles of nature. Many faith-based traditions recognize the spiritual realities behind different passages during the year, and that is why special observances cluster together on the calendar. In the Waldorf tradition, festivals are meant to reflect the spiritual reality of what is happening to the earth during important passages during the year. For example, we can experience the autumn in a natural way as we watch the colorful changing of the leaves, feel the crispness in the air, and taste the tartness of a newly picked apple. We can experience it also, in a spiritual way, if we begin to perceive the beauty around us. The awe of a special sunset can quicken a sense of reverence, stir us to voice a few poetic lines, or feel an inner peace. A common experience of joy and reverence is what allows a festival at a particular time of year to unite a whole community. Singing, dancing, stories, food and sharing are all a part of the festivals of the year.
The Waldorf/Steiner teacher should develop an inner appreciation and knowledge of the deep mysteries connected with the festivals. This inner experience of and reverence for the festivals can then flow outward into the celebration of the festivals with the children and the school community. The Waldorf/Steiner teacher needs to become a guide to and guardian of the festivals. The inner joy that we can experience when we approach the festivals and their celebration with a devotional attitude can spread outwards and inspire others: the children, colleagues, and the whole the school community. |
Course Outline
The Festivals and Their Meaning 1
Lesson 1: Michaelmas (Part 1) Lesson 2: Michaelmas (Part 2) Lesson 3: Christmas (Part 1) Lesson 4: Christmas (Part 2) Lesson 5: Reflection and Final Paper/Festivals and Their Meaning 1 The Festivals and Their Meaning 2
Lesson 1: Easter (Part 1) Lesson 2: Easter (Part 2) Lesson 3: Ascension and Pentecost (Part 1) Lesson 4: Ascension and Pentecost (Part 2) Lesson 5: Reflection and Final Paper/Festivals and Their Meaning 2 
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Tasks and Assignments for The Festivals and Their Meaning 2 Lesson 1
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Please study the study material provided and feel free to use additional resources as wanted and needed. Once you feel you are sufficiently acquainted with the subject please complete the following:
1. Summarize in your own words the study material provided. 2. Reflect on the study material and share your thoughts and feelings concerning the study material. 3. Create lesson plans with activities and celebrations that bring aspects of the festival(s) in question in an age appropriate way to the children in pre-school and kindergarten. Submit the completed assignment via the submission form or via email. 
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Study Material for The Festivals and Their Meaning 2 Lesson 1
Easter MeditationWhen the sun,
from all around the universe, speaks to my human senses--- And joy, from the depths of my soul, unites with light in a vision--- Then thoughts from the confines of myself move ever outward into the vast expanse of space--- And they unite, however dimly, the essence of my being with the being of the Spirit. - from the Calendar of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner |
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Easter: The Festival of Warning
by Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, April 2rd, 1920
Dornach, April 2rd, 1920
The Event at Damascus and the new Knowledge of the Spirit
Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday — a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces — when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.
Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.
The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the Man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.
To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.
We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul. Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul [was] still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life — so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an Initiate.
Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.
When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us, only when with the help of spiritual science, we are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind in a particular aspect. [I] have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age, The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age of life; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as out-ward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men — especially those of the Greek and Latin races — experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death.What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.
As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.
For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth — that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity — and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul.
When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.
It is good that we should confess to-day, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul — ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a man who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus — while professing at the time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an Initiate, to be of peculiar significance.
Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.
When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.
This is what Paul wanted to reveal to men. He told them how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena. He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.
People interpret Paul to-day in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.
Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light, (see Note 1) a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in Initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should any man think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.
This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth. (see Note 2) In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting men to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is there. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is there. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”
This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. To-day, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.
Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination — or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be — then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.
This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it — first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him — for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’ — through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless men bethink themselves in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.
And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough in these days to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.
Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe — namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge — for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus — if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?
We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest — for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter — these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology — that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!
Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.
During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind man, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more outlook into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.
Let me beg you to give these thoughts which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.
Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope — in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people to-day who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thought at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.
The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this — that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.
The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need to-day to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based — all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are to-day living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place — until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.
This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds to-day. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival — that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.
How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave — we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”
It is related of a learned English scientist (see Note 3) that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own force worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.
Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this word of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.
Note 1: See Epistle to the Romans, XIII, 12.
Note 2: See Epistle to the Galatians, IV, 3, 9.
Note 3: T. H. Huxley.
Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday — a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces — when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.
Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.
The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the Man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.
To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.
We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul. Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul [was] still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life — so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an Initiate.
Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.
When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us, only when with the help of spiritual science, we are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind in a particular aspect. [I] have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age, The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age of life; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as out-ward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men — especially those of the Greek and Latin races — experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death.What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.
As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.
For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth — that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity — and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul.
When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.
It is good that we should confess to-day, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul — ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a man who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus — while professing at the time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an Initiate, to be of peculiar significance.
Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.
When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.
This is what Paul wanted to reveal to men. He told them how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena. He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.
People interpret Paul to-day in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.
Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light, (see Note 1) a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in Initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should any man think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.
This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth. (see Note 2) In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting men to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is there. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is there. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”
This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. To-day, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.
Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination — or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be — then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.
This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it — first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him — for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’ — through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless men bethink themselves in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.
And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough in these days to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.
Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe — namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge — for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus — if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?
We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest — for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter — these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology — that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!
Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.
During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind man, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more outlook into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.
Let me beg you to give these thoughts which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.
Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope — in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people to-day who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thought at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.
The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this — that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.
The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need to-day to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based — all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are to-day living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place — until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.
This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds to-day. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival — that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.
How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave — we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”
It is related of a learned English scientist (see Note 3) that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own force worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.
Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this word of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.
Note 1: See Epistle to the Romans, XIII, 12.
Note 2: See Epistle to the Galatians, IV, 3, 9.
Note 3: T. H. Huxley.
The Blood-Relationship and the Christ-Relationship
by Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, April 3rd, 1920
Dornach, April 3rd, 1920
I SPOKE yesterday about the part played by the figure of Paul at the beginning of Christianity. Easter is an appropriate occasion for such study, and when we think of the numbers of people in the grip of materialism to-day who have no real right to celebrate an Easter festival, it is obvious that the subject is also very relevant to the conditions of the times. A true Easter impulse needs to be inculcated into present-day Europe and indeed into the whole of the civilised world in order to counter the rapid strides now being taken in the direction of decline. It is very necessary to realise how far men are from any real understanding of the Christ Impulse and how closely this lack of understanding is connected with the symptoms of decline in evidence at the present time. These symptoms show themselves clearly to-day in statements often made by well-intentioned people.
In the Basler Nachrichten yesterday you may have read a striking but at the same time tragic article which included the text of a letter from North West Germany. The writer of the letter, with whom the author of the article seems to some extent to agree, emphasises that the universal tendency of the day is to prepare for the destruction of the old without putting anything new in its place, that on all sides — right and left — people are succumbing almost eagerly to illusions. The author of the article himself says: What will come now is the spread of Bolshevism over Europe; that is to be expected, for it is the line of natural development. And then, once people have experienced what Bolshevism really is, something good can emerge. But he adds two or three lines which deserve attention, although the cursory reader will overlook them as he overlooks so many things. The author of the article adds: “It is not these illusions to which people readily succumb to-day that must be heeded, but something else ... We must not listen to what individual dreamers say but detect the general tendencies.”
These well-intentioned people are the really difficult ones to deal with. They realise that civilisation is going downhill and are always warning, warning most pessimistically against listening to those who make an attempt to better this miserable state of things. But as a matter of fact they are only representatives of large masses of people who are immediately satisfied whenever some acute crisis is followed by a measure of peace. They are blind to the fact that there is nothing really important about this interval of peace and that the path must inevitably lead downhill until a sufficiently large number of human beings realise that unless a wave of spiritual revival passes over this unhappy Europe, there can be no improvement. It is impossible to make any progress by perpetuating old conditions and least of all is it possible by means of compromises — which are always dangerous because the new that is trying to come to expression is itself compromised.
Even in their feelings men could promote the right attitude by thinking of the forcefulness with which a personality like Paul at the great turning-point of history introduced something entirely new into earth-evolution, something that has glimmered on but at the present time is covered by a layer of ashes. This turning-point divided the old from the new age, although the transition is not noticed because it came about so gradually. When men looked out at nature in olden times, they perceived the divine and spiritual in everything. And this perception of the divine and spiritual passed over into the views that were held concerning the social order, the configuration of life that ought to prevail among the masses, from whom individuals came forth as rulers, as priestly leaders. We will not at the moment consider how this configuration of the social life was regulated by the Mysteries, but it was respected and was administered in accordance with something bestowed upon man without action on his part, as a gift proceeding from the unity of nature and spirit.
A man who through the circumstances and conditions obtaining at some place or another, became the leader, was recognised and acknowledged as such, because the people said: Divinity itself speaks through him. Just as the divine and spiritual was seen in stones, in mountains, in water, in trees, so too was it seen in an individual man. In those past times it was a matter of course to regard the ruler as a God, that is to say, as one in whom the Godhead was manifest. If people of the present day were a little humbler and did not drag in their own opinion about ancient usages, those usages would be far better understood. To-day, of course, there is no such concept as: a man is a God. But in ancient times there was reality behind it. Just as men saw not merely a flowing stream but the divine and spiritual astir in it, so did they perceive the sway of the divine in the social life, as immediate reality. As time went on, however, this vision of the direct presence of the divine and spiritual grew dimmer and dimmer.
Possessing this ancient vision, how did man conceive of his own being? He knew that his being was rooted in the world of the divine and spiritual; he knew that the divine and spiritual is present wherever sense-objects, wherever human beings themselves are, on the physical earth. He knew that he was born out of the divine and spiritual. Out of God I am born, out of God we are all born — this was a self-evident truth to man in those days, for he beheld its reality. It was the outcome of sensory vision.
Such a conviction was no longer within man's immediate reach at the time when knowledge of the divine and spiritual was to be brought to humanity in a new form by the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times a man could say: Everything I see in the world reveals to me that objects and beings come from the gods, that their existence is not enclosed within the limits of earthly life. Man was conscious of the eternal nature of his own being, because he knew that he originated from the gods. This apprehension of spiritual existence before birth lay at the very root of the old Pagan creeds. The characteristics attributed to Paganism by scholars to-day are no more than conjectures.
The essence of Paganism before it fell into decadence, was that men knew: before our birth we were beings of spirit-and-soul; therefore our existence is not limited to earthly life. We have the assurance of eternal life, for we come from God and God will take us to Himself again. That, after all, was the knowledge emanating from the ancient, primeval wisdom. And it can be said that this knowledge came to the various peoples in the form appropriate to each of them, for it was bound up with innate vision of the divine and spiritual in the things of the world of sense. In ancient times, this vision of the divine and spiritual was dependent on the blood, and the particular form in which the primeval wisdom came to a man depended on his blood-relationships, his racial stock and his people.
The Jewish people alone were an exception in the sense that although their particular form of the primeval wisdom was bound up with their blood, they regarded themselves as the “chosen people,” as the people who, while possessing their own racial creed, maintained that this contained the true knowledge of the God of all mankind. Whereas the heathen people round about worshipped their racial Divinities, the Jewish people believed their God to be the God of all the earth.
This was a transitional stage. When Paul appeared with his interpretation of Christianity there was a fundamental break, with the principle whereby human knowledge was determined by the blood, the principle that had prevailed — and necessarily so — in earlier times. For Paul was the first to declare that neither blood nor identity of race, nor any factor by which human knowledge had been determined in pre-Christian times, could remain, but that man himself must establish his relation to knowledge through inner initiative: that there must be a community of those whom he designated as Christians, a community to which man allies himself in spirit and soul, into which he is not placed by his blood, but of which he himself elects to be a member.
Paul was well aware of the need to establish this spiritual community on earth, because the time was approaching when, in respect of external knowledge, man was destined to succumb to materialism. This being so, it was necessary that man's consciousness of his nature of spirit-and-soul should spring from a source other than that of the mere vision of the physical human being living on earth. In olden times it was a matter simply of looking with the eyes, for the spirit-and-soul in a man was immediately manifest. This was so no longer. Knowledge of the spirit-and-soul was to be sought in a different way. In other words, man had perforce to grasp the problem of death, to learn to realise that what can be seen of the human being here on earth through the senses may perish and disintegrate, but that there is within him an entelechy not immediately perceptible in this physical frame, a being who belongs to the spiritual world. The bond between men in this community of Christians was not to be dependent on the blood; for of this dependence it could always be contended, and rightly so, that if men are to recognise their immortality by what is determined by the blood, immortality is not assured, for the blood is the vitalizer and sustainer of that which ends with death — although in ancient times the spirit-and-soul shone through it. The spirit-and-soul must be revealed in its essence and purity if the possibility of understanding the problem of death in a non-materialistic way is not to be lost. The power to speak to men of a being of spirit-and-soul not bound to physical matter was able to work in Paul only because he had himself experienced this super-sensible reality at Damascus.
Knowledge of the super-sensible, of the spirit-and-soul was dependent in olden times on the blood; the blood itself brought the revelation of the spirit-and-soul to men in the material world. This was so no longer, and it was therefore necessary for men to turn to something not dependent on the blood. But there was a great danger here — the danger that in the age now dawning, man would still be prone to look to the innate qualities of his own being for spirit-and-soul knowledge. Formerly, this was possible because the blood itself was the bearer of super-sensible knowledge. For men of good will the Event of Golgotha had done away with this dependence, but the general trend of evolution was such that for a time men continued the once well-founded habit in regard to the blood. Without being bearers of the now sanctified blood, they still wanted to understand the divine and spiritual through attributes innate in their human blood.
The danger resulting from this consisted in the following, and it is important that this danger should be elucidated. — Man receives his blood through descent, through birth, and when he is 25, 30, 35 years old, he bears this inherited blood within him. In that he is brought into existence by the world-order, he receives his blood. If the blood is itself the guarantee of the existence of the spirit-and-soul, then man can look to the blood. But although little by little the blood had lost the power to be the bearer of the divine and spiritual, men still went on desiring to find in themselves the way to the divine and spiritual through the simple fact of being human. This was less and less possible, for if the blood does not carry into material existence the conviction of the super-sensible, the organism itself can promote no relationship with super-sensible reality. Men came to the point of enquiring into the super-sensible by looking to themselves alone, relying upon what comes with them at birth. But Christianity summons men not to rely upon what is brought into earthly existence at birth; it summons them to undergo a transformation, to allow the soul to develop, to be reborn in Christ, to acquire through effort and training, through earth-life itself, what is not acquired through the mere fact of birth. This could not be grasped all at once and it therefore came about that echoes of the old blood-wisdom persisted right on into the 15th century — and even then a remained the custom to relate the divine and spiritual to descent, to heredity, until in the 19th century even this glimpse of the divine and spiritual was lost and man had eyes for the material alone. Because he was only willing to cognise the divine and spiritual through an organism still untransformed, he lost sight of it altogether, and in the 19th century there befell the great catastrophe; men had forsaken God, had become unchristian, because a situation which had been concealed for a time under the mantle of tradition now came to the surface.
Until the rise of Protestantism a Christian tradition was still alive. What the Apostles, the disciples of the Apostles and the Church Fathers imparted through teachers who preserved a living tradition, was linked with the revelation of Golgotha. But the sustaining power of this tradition steadily diminished. Nor were men able of themselves to reach any true understanding of the Event of Golgotha. Then came the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and connection was lost even with tradition, in the end it was to documents alone that a measure of importance was still attached. Protestantism set store by documents, by scripts; tradition had been abandoned. But even a genuine understanding of documents came to an end in the 19th century and the fact is that the body of belief professed by the vast majority of those calling themselves Christians to-day is no longer Christianity. Thus in the 19th century the dire need arose to discover the Event of Golgotha anew, and with this need came the last flare-up of the anti-Christian impulse, which was of course there under the surface but had for a time been cloaked by tradition and by scripture. This element made its way to the surface during the 19th century and reached full force in the 20th, when for the majority of people neither scripture nor tradition have importance any longer. At the same time they have not yet themselves kindled the light which can lead again to an understanding of the Event of Golgotha.
To this cause alone are to be attributed the utterly unchristian impulses which laid hold of mankind in the 19th century and have persisted into the 20th. Two of the most unchristian impulses of all are those which took effect in the 19th century. The first impulse which came to the fore and gained an ever stronger hold of men's minds and emotions, was that of nationalism. Here we see the shadow of the old blood-principle. The Christian impulse towards universal humanity was completely overshadowed by the principle of nationalism, because the new way to bring this element of universal humanity to its own had not been found. The anti-Christian impulse makes its appearance first and foremost in the form of nationalism. The old Luciferic principle of the blood comes to life once again in nation-consciousness. We see a revolt against Christianity in the nationalism of the 19th century, which reached its apex in Woodrow Wilson's phrase about the self-determination of nations, whereas the one and only reality befitting the present age would be to overcome nationalism, to eliminate it, and for men to be stirred by the impulse of the human universal.
The second phenomenon is that men seek to draw their knowledge of the world, not from awakened powers of soul, but from the material image of these powers only. Vision of the soul has faded, and in his physical being, man is only an image of the divine and spiritual. This image can bring forth intellectualism, but not knowledge of the spirit. A secret of which I have often spoken to you is that man can only recognise and know the spiritual by lifting himself to the spirit; the brain is merely the instrument for intellectual apprehension. Intellectualism and materialistic thinking are one and the same, for all the thinking that goes on in science, in theology, in the sphere of modern Christian consciousness — all of it is merely the product of the human brain, it is materialistic. This manifests itself, on the one side, in formalism of belief; on the other, in Bolshevism. Bolshevism owes its destructive power to the fact that it is a product of the brain pure and simple, of the material brain. I have often described how the material brain really represents a process of decay: materialistic thinking unfolds only through processes of destruction, death-processes, which are taking place in the brain. If this kind of thinking is applied, as it is in Leninism and Trotskyism, to the social order, a destructive process is set in motion inevitably, for such ideas about the social order issue from what is itself the foundation of destruction, namely, the Ahrimanic impulse. — That is the other side of the picture.
These two impulses, Nationalism, the Luciferic form of anti-Christianity, and that which culminated in the tenets of Lenin and Trotsky, the Ahrimanic form of anti-Christianity, have insinuated themselves into what ought to have been the Christian impulse of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nationalism and Leninism are the spades with which the grave of Christianity is being dug to-day. And wherever these principles, even in a mild form, become a cult, there the grave of Christianity is being prepared. Those who have insight can discern here a mood that is in the real sense the mood of Easter Saturday. Christianity lies in the grave and men place a stone over the grave. In truth, two stones have been laid over the grave of Christianity — the stones of Nationalism and of external forms of Bolshevism. It now behoves humanity to inaugurate the epoch of Easter Sunday, when the stone or the stones are rolled away. Christianity will not rise from the grave until men overcome nationalistic passions and false forms of socialism; until they learn how to find, out of themselves, the forces that can lead to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
When with the mood-of-soul prevailing at the present time, men profess belief in Christ, the Angel can only give the same answer as was given in the days of the Mystery itself: “He Whom ye seek is not here.” At that time He was no longer there, because men had first to find the way through tradition and then through documents and scripts before reaching knowledge of their own concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. The need for such understanding is urgent to-day, for neither scripture nor tradition tell us those things that need to be known; direct knowledge alone can reveal these things. The age must be brought about when the Angel can answer: “He Whom ye seek is here indeed!” But that will not be until the anti-Christian impulses of our time are cast aside. The community which Paul wished to found, a community filled with the consciousness that immortality is assured to man beyond death — this is what must become reality. “In Christo morimur” — In Christ we pass through death. — Not until it is realised that spiritual knowledge alone can lead to an understanding of what Paul wished to establish, will any improvement in the social life of men be possible; there can only be decline.
What must be understood with regard to Christianity to-day is that man must train himself for the attainment of spiritual knowledge, whereas in ancient times it was given him together with the blood.
In the light of these thoughts, the gravity of the present time comes vividly before us — above all the need to work for the spiritualising of our civilisation. Must the bridge leading to the spiritual world — into which man will in any case enter when he passes through the gate of death and in which he will sojourn between death and a new birth — must this bridge be utterly demolished? True it is that this bridge is broken by nationalism and by false socialism; for these tendencies are at the root of all the urgent and fundamental crises of our time. Those who cannot realise this, who want to continue with a consciousness that is merely the outcome of material processes in the human being — such people are lending all their forces to the furtherance of decadence. The time has come when these issues must be decided, and they can be decided only by the free will of man. Free will itself, however, is possible only on the foundation of actual spirit-knowledge.
At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, remarkable tolerance towards all faiths was practised in Rome. Little by little, having long refrained, people even brought themselves to exercise a certain tolerance towards Judaism. There was great tolerance in Rome in the days when the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was finding its way into the evolution of humanity. Towards the Christians alone did intolerance become more and more vehement, Them developed in Rome an intolerance towards the Christians as great as the intolerance now prevailing in one nationality towards the other nationalities. The attitude of the different nationalities to-day towards each other has its prototype in the intolerance of the Romans towards a genuine knowledge of the spirit, for this meets with opposition on all sides. There are alliances to-day — all unperceived — between Jesuitism and the extremist elements here and there. For in the repudiation of spiritual knowledge the ultra-radical Communists and the Jesuits are completely at one. That too is reminiscent of the intolerance of the Roman State towards Christianity, and then, as now, the fundamental impulse is the same: in the unconscious part of their being, men hate the spirit, yes, actually hate the spirit. This unconscious hatred of the spirit confronts us from the side of nationalism as well as from that of false socialism. For think what this hatred of the spirit means to-day, what nationalism means to-day! In ancient times nationalism had its good purpose, because knowledge of the spirit was connected with the blood; to be swayed by nationalistic passions as people are swayed to-day is completely senseless, because blood-relationship is no longer a factor of any real significance. The factor of blood-relationship as expressed in nationalism is a pure fiction, an illusion.
For this reason, people who cling to such ideas have no real right to celebrate an Easter festival. To celebrate an Easter festival is for them a piece of untruthfulness. The truth would consist in the Angel again being able to say — or rather to say for the first time: “He Whom ye seek is here indeed!” But of this we may be sure: His presence will be vouchsafed only where the principle of the human universal takes effect! It is to-day as it was among the Romans, who showed the greatest intolerance of all to the Christians. What were all the others doing — all of them with the exception of the Christians? The others were still venerating the Roman Emperor as a God, were also making sacrifice to him. The Christians could do no such thing; the only King whom the Christians could acknowledge was the Representative of universal humanity — Christ Jesus.
This is one of the points from which a direct line has continued right into the present time. One has only to think of it as follows. — Does the formula “In the Name of His Majesty the King” which appears on every ministerial decree, really mean anything to individuals in England, for example? If the truth as demanded by the spirit were to prevail, such a formula would simply not be there. And how, I ask you, are the interests of a true Frenchman to-day furthered by Clemenceau's nationalism, with its inner untruthfulness? It would be Christian to-day to acknowledge such things, but such acknowledgment would at once be the target of intolerance.
These are the domains where untruthfulness is rampant, deep down in the souls of men. And this untruthfulness makes the other stones of nationalism and of false socialism into one stone which is rolled upon the grave and covers it. The grave will remain covered until men again acquire a true knowledge of the spirit and through this knowledge an understanding of universal Christianity. Until then there can be no true Easter festival; until then the black of mourning cannot with integrity be replaced by the red of Easter, for until then this replacement is a human lie. Men must seek for the spirit — that and that alone can give meaning to present existence.
It devolves upon those who understand the evolution of mankind to bring to fulfilment the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” If the future is to contain hope, what must be striven for cannot be ‘of this world.’ But that, of course, runs counter to man's love of ease. It is more convenient to set up old customs as ideals and then to bask in the glow of self-congratulation; this is far pleasanter than to say: The great responsibility for the future must be shouldered, and this can be done only when striving for spiritual knowledge becomes a driving force in mankind.
Therefore Easter to-day remains a festival of warning instead of being a festival of joy. And in truth those who would fain speak honestly to mankind will not use the Easter words, “Christ is risen” ... but rather: “Christ shall and must arise!”
In the Basler Nachrichten yesterday you may have read a striking but at the same time tragic article which included the text of a letter from North West Germany. The writer of the letter, with whom the author of the article seems to some extent to agree, emphasises that the universal tendency of the day is to prepare for the destruction of the old without putting anything new in its place, that on all sides — right and left — people are succumbing almost eagerly to illusions. The author of the article himself says: What will come now is the spread of Bolshevism over Europe; that is to be expected, for it is the line of natural development. And then, once people have experienced what Bolshevism really is, something good can emerge. But he adds two or three lines which deserve attention, although the cursory reader will overlook them as he overlooks so many things. The author of the article adds: “It is not these illusions to which people readily succumb to-day that must be heeded, but something else ... We must not listen to what individual dreamers say but detect the general tendencies.”
These well-intentioned people are the really difficult ones to deal with. They realise that civilisation is going downhill and are always warning, warning most pessimistically against listening to those who make an attempt to better this miserable state of things. But as a matter of fact they are only representatives of large masses of people who are immediately satisfied whenever some acute crisis is followed by a measure of peace. They are blind to the fact that there is nothing really important about this interval of peace and that the path must inevitably lead downhill until a sufficiently large number of human beings realise that unless a wave of spiritual revival passes over this unhappy Europe, there can be no improvement. It is impossible to make any progress by perpetuating old conditions and least of all is it possible by means of compromises — which are always dangerous because the new that is trying to come to expression is itself compromised.
Even in their feelings men could promote the right attitude by thinking of the forcefulness with which a personality like Paul at the great turning-point of history introduced something entirely new into earth-evolution, something that has glimmered on but at the present time is covered by a layer of ashes. This turning-point divided the old from the new age, although the transition is not noticed because it came about so gradually. When men looked out at nature in olden times, they perceived the divine and spiritual in everything. And this perception of the divine and spiritual passed over into the views that were held concerning the social order, the configuration of life that ought to prevail among the masses, from whom individuals came forth as rulers, as priestly leaders. We will not at the moment consider how this configuration of the social life was regulated by the Mysteries, but it was respected and was administered in accordance with something bestowed upon man without action on his part, as a gift proceeding from the unity of nature and spirit.
A man who through the circumstances and conditions obtaining at some place or another, became the leader, was recognised and acknowledged as such, because the people said: Divinity itself speaks through him. Just as the divine and spiritual was seen in stones, in mountains, in water, in trees, so too was it seen in an individual man. In those past times it was a matter of course to regard the ruler as a God, that is to say, as one in whom the Godhead was manifest. If people of the present day were a little humbler and did not drag in their own opinion about ancient usages, those usages would be far better understood. To-day, of course, there is no such concept as: a man is a God. But in ancient times there was reality behind it. Just as men saw not merely a flowing stream but the divine and spiritual astir in it, so did they perceive the sway of the divine in the social life, as immediate reality. As time went on, however, this vision of the direct presence of the divine and spiritual grew dimmer and dimmer.
Possessing this ancient vision, how did man conceive of his own being? He knew that his being was rooted in the world of the divine and spiritual; he knew that the divine and spiritual is present wherever sense-objects, wherever human beings themselves are, on the physical earth. He knew that he was born out of the divine and spiritual. Out of God I am born, out of God we are all born — this was a self-evident truth to man in those days, for he beheld its reality. It was the outcome of sensory vision.
Such a conviction was no longer within man's immediate reach at the time when knowledge of the divine and spiritual was to be brought to humanity in a new form by the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times a man could say: Everything I see in the world reveals to me that objects and beings come from the gods, that their existence is not enclosed within the limits of earthly life. Man was conscious of the eternal nature of his own being, because he knew that he originated from the gods. This apprehension of spiritual existence before birth lay at the very root of the old Pagan creeds. The characteristics attributed to Paganism by scholars to-day are no more than conjectures.
The essence of Paganism before it fell into decadence, was that men knew: before our birth we were beings of spirit-and-soul; therefore our existence is not limited to earthly life. We have the assurance of eternal life, for we come from God and God will take us to Himself again. That, after all, was the knowledge emanating from the ancient, primeval wisdom. And it can be said that this knowledge came to the various peoples in the form appropriate to each of them, for it was bound up with innate vision of the divine and spiritual in the things of the world of sense. In ancient times, this vision of the divine and spiritual was dependent on the blood, and the particular form in which the primeval wisdom came to a man depended on his blood-relationships, his racial stock and his people.
The Jewish people alone were an exception in the sense that although their particular form of the primeval wisdom was bound up with their blood, they regarded themselves as the “chosen people,” as the people who, while possessing their own racial creed, maintained that this contained the true knowledge of the God of all mankind. Whereas the heathen people round about worshipped their racial Divinities, the Jewish people believed their God to be the God of all the earth.
This was a transitional stage. When Paul appeared with his interpretation of Christianity there was a fundamental break, with the principle whereby human knowledge was determined by the blood, the principle that had prevailed — and necessarily so — in earlier times. For Paul was the first to declare that neither blood nor identity of race, nor any factor by which human knowledge had been determined in pre-Christian times, could remain, but that man himself must establish his relation to knowledge through inner initiative: that there must be a community of those whom he designated as Christians, a community to which man allies himself in spirit and soul, into which he is not placed by his blood, but of which he himself elects to be a member.
Paul was well aware of the need to establish this spiritual community on earth, because the time was approaching when, in respect of external knowledge, man was destined to succumb to materialism. This being so, it was necessary that man's consciousness of his nature of spirit-and-soul should spring from a source other than that of the mere vision of the physical human being living on earth. In olden times it was a matter simply of looking with the eyes, for the spirit-and-soul in a man was immediately manifest. This was so no longer. Knowledge of the spirit-and-soul was to be sought in a different way. In other words, man had perforce to grasp the problem of death, to learn to realise that what can be seen of the human being here on earth through the senses may perish and disintegrate, but that there is within him an entelechy not immediately perceptible in this physical frame, a being who belongs to the spiritual world. The bond between men in this community of Christians was not to be dependent on the blood; for of this dependence it could always be contended, and rightly so, that if men are to recognise their immortality by what is determined by the blood, immortality is not assured, for the blood is the vitalizer and sustainer of that which ends with death — although in ancient times the spirit-and-soul shone through it. The spirit-and-soul must be revealed in its essence and purity if the possibility of understanding the problem of death in a non-materialistic way is not to be lost. The power to speak to men of a being of spirit-and-soul not bound to physical matter was able to work in Paul only because he had himself experienced this super-sensible reality at Damascus.
Knowledge of the super-sensible, of the spirit-and-soul was dependent in olden times on the blood; the blood itself brought the revelation of the spirit-and-soul to men in the material world. This was so no longer, and it was therefore necessary for men to turn to something not dependent on the blood. But there was a great danger here — the danger that in the age now dawning, man would still be prone to look to the innate qualities of his own being for spirit-and-soul knowledge. Formerly, this was possible because the blood itself was the bearer of super-sensible knowledge. For men of good will the Event of Golgotha had done away with this dependence, but the general trend of evolution was such that for a time men continued the once well-founded habit in regard to the blood. Without being bearers of the now sanctified blood, they still wanted to understand the divine and spiritual through attributes innate in their human blood.
The danger resulting from this consisted in the following, and it is important that this danger should be elucidated. — Man receives his blood through descent, through birth, and when he is 25, 30, 35 years old, he bears this inherited blood within him. In that he is brought into existence by the world-order, he receives his blood. If the blood is itself the guarantee of the existence of the spirit-and-soul, then man can look to the blood. But although little by little the blood had lost the power to be the bearer of the divine and spiritual, men still went on desiring to find in themselves the way to the divine and spiritual through the simple fact of being human. This was less and less possible, for if the blood does not carry into material existence the conviction of the super-sensible, the organism itself can promote no relationship with super-sensible reality. Men came to the point of enquiring into the super-sensible by looking to themselves alone, relying upon what comes with them at birth. But Christianity summons men not to rely upon what is brought into earthly existence at birth; it summons them to undergo a transformation, to allow the soul to develop, to be reborn in Christ, to acquire through effort and training, through earth-life itself, what is not acquired through the mere fact of birth. This could not be grasped all at once and it therefore came about that echoes of the old blood-wisdom persisted right on into the 15th century — and even then a remained the custom to relate the divine and spiritual to descent, to heredity, until in the 19th century even this glimpse of the divine and spiritual was lost and man had eyes for the material alone. Because he was only willing to cognise the divine and spiritual through an organism still untransformed, he lost sight of it altogether, and in the 19th century there befell the great catastrophe; men had forsaken God, had become unchristian, because a situation which had been concealed for a time under the mantle of tradition now came to the surface.
Until the rise of Protestantism a Christian tradition was still alive. What the Apostles, the disciples of the Apostles and the Church Fathers imparted through teachers who preserved a living tradition, was linked with the revelation of Golgotha. But the sustaining power of this tradition steadily diminished. Nor were men able of themselves to reach any true understanding of the Event of Golgotha. Then came the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and connection was lost even with tradition, in the end it was to documents alone that a measure of importance was still attached. Protestantism set store by documents, by scripts; tradition had been abandoned. But even a genuine understanding of documents came to an end in the 19th century and the fact is that the body of belief professed by the vast majority of those calling themselves Christians to-day is no longer Christianity. Thus in the 19th century the dire need arose to discover the Event of Golgotha anew, and with this need came the last flare-up of the anti-Christian impulse, which was of course there under the surface but had for a time been cloaked by tradition and by scripture. This element made its way to the surface during the 19th century and reached full force in the 20th, when for the majority of people neither scripture nor tradition have importance any longer. At the same time they have not yet themselves kindled the light which can lead again to an understanding of the Event of Golgotha.
To this cause alone are to be attributed the utterly unchristian impulses which laid hold of mankind in the 19th century and have persisted into the 20th. Two of the most unchristian impulses of all are those which took effect in the 19th century. The first impulse which came to the fore and gained an ever stronger hold of men's minds and emotions, was that of nationalism. Here we see the shadow of the old blood-principle. The Christian impulse towards universal humanity was completely overshadowed by the principle of nationalism, because the new way to bring this element of universal humanity to its own had not been found. The anti-Christian impulse makes its appearance first and foremost in the form of nationalism. The old Luciferic principle of the blood comes to life once again in nation-consciousness. We see a revolt against Christianity in the nationalism of the 19th century, which reached its apex in Woodrow Wilson's phrase about the self-determination of nations, whereas the one and only reality befitting the present age would be to overcome nationalism, to eliminate it, and for men to be stirred by the impulse of the human universal.
The second phenomenon is that men seek to draw their knowledge of the world, not from awakened powers of soul, but from the material image of these powers only. Vision of the soul has faded, and in his physical being, man is only an image of the divine and spiritual. This image can bring forth intellectualism, but not knowledge of the spirit. A secret of which I have often spoken to you is that man can only recognise and know the spiritual by lifting himself to the spirit; the brain is merely the instrument for intellectual apprehension. Intellectualism and materialistic thinking are one and the same, for all the thinking that goes on in science, in theology, in the sphere of modern Christian consciousness — all of it is merely the product of the human brain, it is materialistic. This manifests itself, on the one side, in formalism of belief; on the other, in Bolshevism. Bolshevism owes its destructive power to the fact that it is a product of the brain pure and simple, of the material brain. I have often described how the material brain really represents a process of decay: materialistic thinking unfolds only through processes of destruction, death-processes, which are taking place in the brain. If this kind of thinking is applied, as it is in Leninism and Trotskyism, to the social order, a destructive process is set in motion inevitably, for such ideas about the social order issue from what is itself the foundation of destruction, namely, the Ahrimanic impulse. — That is the other side of the picture.
These two impulses, Nationalism, the Luciferic form of anti-Christianity, and that which culminated in the tenets of Lenin and Trotsky, the Ahrimanic form of anti-Christianity, have insinuated themselves into what ought to have been the Christian impulse of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nationalism and Leninism are the spades with which the grave of Christianity is being dug to-day. And wherever these principles, even in a mild form, become a cult, there the grave of Christianity is being prepared. Those who have insight can discern here a mood that is in the real sense the mood of Easter Saturday. Christianity lies in the grave and men place a stone over the grave. In truth, two stones have been laid over the grave of Christianity — the stones of Nationalism and of external forms of Bolshevism. It now behoves humanity to inaugurate the epoch of Easter Sunday, when the stone or the stones are rolled away. Christianity will not rise from the grave until men overcome nationalistic passions and false forms of socialism; until they learn how to find, out of themselves, the forces that can lead to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.
When with the mood-of-soul prevailing at the present time, men profess belief in Christ, the Angel can only give the same answer as was given in the days of the Mystery itself: “He Whom ye seek is not here.” At that time He was no longer there, because men had first to find the way through tradition and then through documents and scripts before reaching knowledge of their own concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. The need for such understanding is urgent to-day, for neither scripture nor tradition tell us those things that need to be known; direct knowledge alone can reveal these things. The age must be brought about when the Angel can answer: “He Whom ye seek is here indeed!” But that will not be until the anti-Christian impulses of our time are cast aside. The community which Paul wished to found, a community filled with the consciousness that immortality is assured to man beyond death — this is what must become reality. “In Christo morimur” — In Christ we pass through death. — Not until it is realised that spiritual knowledge alone can lead to an understanding of what Paul wished to establish, will any improvement in the social life of men be possible; there can only be decline.
What must be understood with regard to Christianity to-day is that man must train himself for the attainment of spiritual knowledge, whereas in ancient times it was given him together with the blood.
In the light of these thoughts, the gravity of the present time comes vividly before us — above all the need to work for the spiritualising of our civilisation. Must the bridge leading to the spiritual world — into which man will in any case enter when he passes through the gate of death and in which he will sojourn between death and a new birth — must this bridge be utterly demolished? True it is that this bridge is broken by nationalism and by false socialism; for these tendencies are at the root of all the urgent and fundamental crises of our time. Those who cannot realise this, who want to continue with a consciousness that is merely the outcome of material processes in the human being — such people are lending all their forces to the furtherance of decadence. The time has come when these issues must be decided, and they can be decided only by the free will of man. Free will itself, however, is possible only on the foundation of actual spirit-knowledge.
At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, remarkable tolerance towards all faiths was practised in Rome. Little by little, having long refrained, people even brought themselves to exercise a certain tolerance towards Judaism. There was great tolerance in Rome in the days when the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was finding its way into the evolution of humanity. Towards the Christians alone did intolerance become more and more vehement, Them developed in Rome an intolerance towards the Christians as great as the intolerance now prevailing in one nationality towards the other nationalities. The attitude of the different nationalities to-day towards each other has its prototype in the intolerance of the Romans towards a genuine knowledge of the spirit, for this meets with opposition on all sides. There are alliances to-day — all unperceived — between Jesuitism and the extremist elements here and there. For in the repudiation of spiritual knowledge the ultra-radical Communists and the Jesuits are completely at one. That too is reminiscent of the intolerance of the Roman State towards Christianity, and then, as now, the fundamental impulse is the same: in the unconscious part of their being, men hate the spirit, yes, actually hate the spirit. This unconscious hatred of the spirit confronts us from the side of nationalism as well as from that of false socialism. For think what this hatred of the spirit means to-day, what nationalism means to-day! In ancient times nationalism had its good purpose, because knowledge of the spirit was connected with the blood; to be swayed by nationalistic passions as people are swayed to-day is completely senseless, because blood-relationship is no longer a factor of any real significance. The factor of blood-relationship as expressed in nationalism is a pure fiction, an illusion.
For this reason, people who cling to such ideas have no real right to celebrate an Easter festival. To celebrate an Easter festival is for them a piece of untruthfulness. The truth would consist in the Angel again being able to say — or rather to say for the first time: “He Whom ye seek is here indeed!” But of this we may be sure: His presence will be vouchsafed only where the principle of the human universal takes effect! It is to-day as it was among the Romans, who showed the greatest intolerance of all to the Christians. What were all the others doing — all of them with the exception of the Christians? The others were still venerating the Roman Emperor as a God, were also making sacrifice to him. The Christians could do no such thing; the only King whom the Christians could acknowledge was the Representative of universal humanity — Christ Jesus.
This is one of the points from which a direct line has continued right into the present time. One has only to think of it as follows. — Does the formula “In the Name of His Majesty the King” which appears on every ministerial decree, really mean anything to individuals in England, for example? If the truth as demanded by the spirit were to prevail, such a formula would simply not be there. And how, I ask you, are the interests of a true Frenchman to-day furthered by Clemenceau's nationalism, with its inner untruthfulness? It would be Christian to-day to acknowledge such things, but such acknowledgment would at once be the target of intolerance.
These are the domains where untruthfulness is rampant, deep down in the souls of men. And this untruthfulness makes the other stones of nationalism and of false socialism into one stone which is rolled upon the grave and covers it. The grave will remain covered until men again acquire a true knowledge of the spirit and through this knowledge an understanding of universal Christianity. Until then there can be no true Easter festival; until then the black of mourning cannot with integrity be replaced by the red of Easter, for until then this replacement is a human lie. Men must seek for the spirit — that and that alone can give meaning to present existence.
It devolves upon those who understand the evolution of mankind to bring to fulfilment the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” If the future is to contain hope, what must be striven for cannot be ‘of this world.’ But that, of course, runs counter to man's love of ease. It is more convenient to set up old customs as ideals and then to bask in the glow of self-congratulation; this is far pleasanter than to say: The great responsibility for the future must be shouldered, and this can be done only when striving for spiritual knowledge becomes a driving force in mankind.
Therefore Easter to-day remains a festival of warning instead of being a festival of joy. And in truth those who would fain speak honestly to mankind will not use the Easter words, “Christ is risen” ... but rather: “Christ shall and must arise!”
The Death of a God and Its Fruits in Humanity
by Rudolf Steiner
Düsseldorf, May 5th, 1912
Düsseldorf, May 5th, 1912
I SHALL Speak to-day of certain matters in a way that could not be used in public lectures but is possible when I am speaking to those who have been studying spiritual science for some considerable time.
The importance of the subject of which we shall speak first, will be evident to all serious students of spiritual science. Reference has frequently been made to this subject but one cannot speak too often of spiritual-scientific concepts, for they must become actual forces, actual impulses in men of the present and immediate future. I shall lay emphasis to-day upon one aspect of what spiritual science must signify in the world, namely, the need to impart soul to our “world-body,” as we may call it.
A comparatively short time ago in the evolution of humanity it would not have been possible to speak, as we can speak to-day, of a “world-body.” Looking back only a little into the historical development of mankind, we shall find that in the comparatively recent past, the idea of a world-body peopled by a humanity forming one whole had not yet come into the consciousness of men. We find self-contained civilisations, enclosed within strict boundaries. Guided by the several Folk-Spirits, the Old Indian civilisation, the Old Persian civilisation, and so on, embraced peoples living a self-contained existence, separated from one another by mountains, seas or rivers.
Needless to say, such civilisations still exist. We speak, and rightly so, of Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, German culture, but as well as this, when we look over the earth to-day we perceive a certain unity extending over the globe — something by which peoples separated by vast distances are formed as it were into a single whole. We need think only of industry, of railways, of telegraphs, of recent inventions. (see Note 1) Railways are built, telegraph systems installed, cheques made out and cashed, all over the globe, and the same will hold good for discoveries and inventions yet to be made.
Now let us ask: What is the peculiarity of this element that extends over the globe and is the same in Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, London, and everywhere else? It is all a means of providing humanity with food and clothing, as well as with ever-increasing luxury goods. During the last few centuries a material civilisation has spread over the earth, without distinction between nation and nation, race and race. Greek culture flourished in a tiny region of the earth and little was known of it outside that region. But nowadays, news flashes around the whole globe in a few hours — and nobody would doubt the justification of calling this material culture an earthly culture! Moreover it will become increasingly material and our earth-body more and more deeply entangled in it.
But those who realise the need for spiritual science will understand with greater clarity that no body can subsist without a soul. Just as material culture encompasses the whole body of the earth, so must knowledge of the spirit be the soul that extends over the whole earth, without distinction of nation, colour, race or people. And just as identical methods are employed wherever railways and telegraph systems are constructed, so will mutual understanding over the whole earth be necessary in regard to questions concerning the human soul. The longings and questionings that will arise increasingly in the souls of men, demand answers. Hence the need for a movement dedicated to the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. Something comparable with cultural relations between individual peoples will then take effect on a wide scale, weaving threads between soul and soul over the whole earth. And what will weave from soul to soul may be called a deep and intimate understanding in regard to something that is sacred to individual souls everywhere, namely, how they are related to the spiritual world.
In a future not far distant, intimate understanding will take the place of what led in past times to bitterest conflict and disharmony as long as humanity was divided into regional civilisations which knew nothing of each other. But what will operate on a universal scale over the globe as a spiritual movement embracing all earthly humanity, must operate also between soul and soul. What a distance still separates the Buddhists and the Christians, how little do they understand and how insistently do they turn away from each other on the circumscribed ground of their particular creeds! But the time will come when their own religion will lead more and more Buddhists to Anthroposophy, and Christianity itself will lead more and more Christians to Anthroposophy. And then complete understanding will reign between them.
That humanity is coming a little nearer to this intimate understanding can be discerned to-day in the fact that the science of comparative religion is also finding its place in the domain of scholarship. The value of this science of comparative religion should not be underrated, for it has splendid achievements to its credit. But what is really brought to light when the different teachings of the religions are set forth? Although it is not acknowledged, the basis of this science of comparative religion amounts to no more than the most elementary beliefs, long since outgrown by those who have grasped the essence of the religions. The science of comparative religion confines itself to these elementary beliefs.
But what is the aim of spiritual science in regard to the various religions? It seeks for something that lies beyond the reach of the scientific investigators, namely for the essential truths contained in the religions.
From what does spiritual science take its start? From the fact that mankind has originated from a common Godhead and that a primeval wisdom belonging to mankind as one whole and springing from one Divine source has only for a time been partitioned, as it were, in a number of rays among the different peoples and groups of human beings on the earth. The aim and ideal of spiritual science is to rediscover this primeval truth, this primeval wisdom, uncoloured by this or that particular creed, and to give it again to humanity. Spiritual science is able to penetrate to the essence of the various religions because its attention is focussed, not upon external rites and ceremonies, but upon the kernel of primeval wisdom contained in each one of them. Spiritual science regards the religions as so many channels for the rays of what once streamed without differentiation over the whole of mankind.
When a professed Christian, knowing nothing beyond the external tenets of belief that have been instilled into the hearts of men through the centuries, says to a Buddhist: ‘If you would reach the truth you must believe what I believe’ ... and the Buddhist rejoins by declaring what he holds sacred, then no understanding is possible between them. But spiritual science approaches these questions in an entirely different way.
Those who can penetrate to the essence of Buddhism as well as to that of Christianity through the methods leading to the development of the new clairvoyance, come to know of sublime Beings who have risen from the realm of man and are called Bodhisattvas. Herein lies the central nerve of Buddhism. And the Christian, too, hears of a Bodhisattva who arises from mankind and works within humanity. He hears that one of these Bodhisattvas — born 600 years before our era as Siddartha, the son of King Suddhodana — attained the rank of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. A Christian who is an anthroposophist also knows that a Being who has risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha need not appear again on earth in a body of flesh.
True, such teachings are also communicated to us by the scientific investigators of religions, but they can make nothing of a Being such as a Bodhisattva or a Buddha; the nature of such a Being is beyond their comprehension; neither can they realise how such a Being continues to guide humanity from the spiritual worlds without living in a body of flesh.
But as anthroposophical Christians, our attitude to the Bodhisattva can be as full of reverence as that of a Buddhist, In spiritual science we say exactly the same about Buddha as a Buddhist says. The Christian who is an anthroposophist says to the Buddhist: I understand and believe what you understand and believe. No one who has come to spiritual science from the ground of Christianity would ever dream, as a Christian, of saying that the Buddha returns in the flesh. He knows that this would wound the deepest, most intimate feelings of the Buddhist and that such a statement would be utterly at variance with the true character of those Beings who have risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha. Christianity itself has brought him knowledge and understanding of these Beings.
And what will be the attitude of the Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist? He will understand the particular basis of Christianity. He will realise that as in the case of the other religions, Christianity has a Founder — Jesus of Nazareth — but that another Being united with him. A great deal could be said about all that has been associated with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth through the centuries. But the Christian's view of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth differs from the Buddhist's view of the Founder of his religion. In the East it would be said: “One who is a great Founder of religion has achieved the complete harmonisation of all passions and desires, of all human, personal attributes. Is such complete harmonisation manifest in Jesus of Nazareth? We read that he was seized with anger, that he overthrew the tables of the money-changers, drove them out of the temple, that he uttered words of impassioned wrath. This is evidence to us that he does not possess the qualities to be expected of a Founder of religion.” Such is the attitude of the East.
We ourselves, of course, could point to many other aspects of this question, but that is not what concerns us at the moment. The really significant fact is that Christianity differs from all other religions inasmuch as they all point to a Founder who was a great Teacher. But to believe that the same is true of Christianity would denote a fundamental misunderstanding. The essence of Christianity is not that it looks back to Jesus of Nazareth as a great Teacher. Christianity originates in aDeed, takes its start from a super-personal Deed — from the Mystery of Golgotha.
How could this be? It was because for three years there dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth a Being, Whom — if we are to give Him a name — we call Christ. But a name cannot encompass the Divine Spirit we recognise in Christ. No human name, no human word, can define a Divinity. In Christ we have to do with a Divine Impulse spreading through the world: the Christ Impulse which at the Baptism in the Jordan entered in Him, into Jesus of Nazareth. The very essence of Christianity lies in the Christ Impulse which came to the earth through a physical personality, the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth into whose sheaths it entered. The Christ took these sheaths upon Himself because the course of world-evolution is, first, a descent, and then again an ascent. At the deepest point of descent the Mystery of Golgotha takes place, because from it alone could spring the power to lead humanity upwards.
After the Atlantean catastrophe came the ancient Indian epoch of civilisation. The spirituality of that epoch will not again be reached until the end of the seventh epoch. The ancient Indian epoch was followed by that of ancient Persia, that again by the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. When we survey evolution, even in its external aspect, the decline of spirituality is evident. Then we come to Greco-Latin civilisation with its firm footing in the earthly realm. The works of art created by the Greeks are the most wonderful expression of the marriage of spirit with form. And in Roman culture, in Roman civic life, man becomes master on the physical plane. But the spirituality in Greek culture is characterised by the saying: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ Dread of the world lying behind the physical plane, dread of the world into which man will pass after death is expressed in this saying. Spirituality has here descended to the deepest point.
From then onwards, mankind needed an impulse for the return to the spiritual worlds, and this impulse was given in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch through an Event at a level far transcending the physical plane.
The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in a remote comer of the earth, for the sake of no particular race or denomination. It took place in seclusion, in concealment. Neither outer civilisation nor the Romans who governed the little territory of Palestine, knew anything of the Event. The Romans were no followers of Christ — the Jews still less!
Who were present when the Mystery of Golgotha took place? Whom had he gathered around him who in his thirtieth year had received the Christ into himself? Had pupils gathered around this Being as they had gathered around Confucius, Laotse or Buddha? If we look closely we see that this is not so. For were those who until the Event of Golgotha had been His disciples, already His apostles? No! They had scattered, they had gone away when the One Whom they had followed hitherto entered upon the path of His Passion. Only when having passed through death, He gave them the certain knowledge of the power that had conquered death — only then did they become true Apostles and carried His impulse to the peoples of the earth. Before then they had not even understood Him. Even Paul, the one who after the Mystery of Golgotha achieved most of all for the spread of Christianity, understood Him only when He had appeared to him in the spirit!
So we see that, unlike the other religions, Christianity was not, in essence, founded by a great Teacher whose pupils then promulgate his teachings. The essential, basic truth of Christianity is that a Divine Impulse came down to the earth, passed through death and became the source of the impulse which leads humanity upwards. When the individual personal element had passed through death, had departed from the earth — then and only then did the power which came upon the earth through Christ, begin to work. It is not a merely personal teaching that works on, but the actual Event that Christ was within Jesus and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and that from the Mystery of Golgotha a power streamed forth over the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.
That is the difference between what Christianity sees as the starting-point of its development and what the other religions see as theirs. When, therefore, we turn our attention to the beginning of Christianity, it is a matter of realising what actually came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. Paul says, in effect: The descending line of evolution was caused through Adam, even before the Fall, before he was man, before he was a personality in the real sense. The impulse for the ascent was given by Christ.
To feel this as a reality, we must go deeply into the occult truths available to mankind. To grasp this stupendous fact, man's understanding must be quickened by the deepest, most intimate occult truths. It will then be comprehensible to him that, to begin with, even in Christendom itself, the loftiest thoughts and deepest truths could not immediately be understood. To grasp the full meaning of this Divine Death and the Impulse proceeding from it, to realise that such an Event cannot be repeated, that it occurred at the deepest point of the evolutionary process and radiates the power which enables mankind henceforward to tread the path of ascent — to conceive this was possible only to a few. And so in the centuries that followed, men clung to Jesus of Nazareth — for understanding of the Christ was as yet beyond their reach. Moreover it was through Jesus that the Christ Impulse also made its way into works of art. Men yearned for Jesus, not for Christ.
We ourselves are still living at the dawn of true Christianity; Christianity is only beginning to come into its own. And when men plead to-day: ‘Do not take from us the individual, personal Jesus who comforts and uplifts our hearts, on whom we lean; do not give us, instead of him, a super-personal event’ ... they must realise that this is nothing but an expression of egoism. Not until they transcend this personal egoism and realise that they have no right to call themselves Christians until they recognise as the source of their Christianity the Event that was fulfilled in majestic isolation on Golgotha, will they be able to draw near to Christ. But this realisation belongs to future time.
There may be some who say: Surely the Crucifixion should have been avoided! But this is simply a human opinion — no more than that. These people do not know the difference between an utter impossibility and what is merely a mistaken idea. For what came into the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha could proceed only from the impulse of a god Who had endured all the sufferings and agonies of mankind, all the sorrows, the mockery and scorn, the contempt and the shame that were the lot of Christ. And these sufferings were infinitely harder for a god than for an ordinary human being.
That the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place cannot be authenticated in the same way as other historical events. There is no authentic, documentary evidence even of the Crucifixion. But there is good reason why no proof exists, for this is an Event which lies outside the sphere of the general evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha — and this is its very essence — is an Event transcending that which has merely to do with the evolution of humanity.
The Mystery of Golgotha was concerned with the descending path which men have taken and with what must lead them upwards again — with the Luciferic influence upon mankind! Lucifer, together with everything belonging to him, is verily not a human being. Lucifer and his hosts are superhuman beings. Nor did Lucifer desire that through his deeds men should be set upon a downward path; his purpose was to rebel against the upper gods. He wanted to vanquish his opponents, not to set men upon a downward path. The progressive gods, the upper gods, and Lucifer with his hosts of the lower gods of hindrance, waged war against each other, and from the very beginning of earthly evolution, man was dragged into this warfare among gods. It was an issue that the gods in the higher worlds had to settle among themselves, but as a result of the conflict, men were drawn more deeply into the material world than was originally intended. And now the gods had to create the balance; humanity had to be lifted upwards again, the deed of Lucifer made of no avail. And this could not be achieved through a man but only through a Divine Deed, the deed of a god. This deed of a god must be understood in all its truth and reality.
If we ponder deeply about earthly existence, we find as its greatest riddle: birth and death.The fact that beings can die is the fundamental problem confronting humanity. Death is something that occurs only on the earth. In the higher worlds there is transformation, metamorphosis — no death. Death is the consequence of what came into human beings through Lucifer, and if something had not taken place from the side of the gods, the whole of mankind would have been more and more entangled in the forces which lead to death. And so a sacrifice had to be made from the side of the gods: it was necessary that One from among them should descend and suffer the death that can be undergone only by the children of earth. This was a deed which created the balance for the deed of Lucifer. And from this death of a god streams the power which also radiates into the souls of men and can raise them again out of the darkness in which Lucifer's deed has ensnared them. A god had to die on the physical plane.
This is not a direct concern of men ... they were here spectators of an affair of the gods. No wonder that physical means are incapable of portraying an Event which is an affair of the higher worlds, for it falls outside the sphere of the physical world.
But the fruits of this deed of a god which had perforce to be wrought on the earth, became the heritage of humanity, and the Christian Initiation gives men the power to understand it. And just as mankind could come forth only once from the bosom of the Godhead, so could the overcoming of what was then instilled into the human soul be achieved only once.
If the Christian who has become an anthroposophist were to speak of the nature of Christ to a Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist, the Buddhist would say: ‘I should therefore misunderstand you were I to believe that the Being Whom you call Christ is subject to reincarnation. He is not subject to reincarnation — any more than you would say that the Buddha can return to earthly existence!’
Yet there is one fundamental difference. The Buddhist points to the great Teacher who was the originator of his religion; but the true Christian points to a deed of the spiritual worlds, enacted in seclusion on the earth, he points to something entirely non-personal, having nothing to do with any specific creed or denomination. No single human being, to begin with, recognised this deed; it had nothing to do with any particular locality on the earth. In majestic seclusion the Divine Power poured from this deed into the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.
The task of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to seek for the truths contained in the different religions, and to seek for the kernel of truth in them all is the augury of peace. When an adherent of some creed truly understands his religion in the light of spiritual science, he will never force its particular ray of truth upon adherents of another religion. As little as the anthroposophical Christian will speak of the return of the Buddha — for then he would not have understood him — as little will the anthroposophical Buddhist speak of the return of Christ — for that too would be a misunderstanding. Provided personal bias is laid aside, the truth concerning Buddha and the truth concerning Christ never makes for discord and sectarianism, but for harmony and peace. This is a natural consequence of truth, for truth is the augury of peace in the world. At the highest level of truth, all nations and all religions on the earth can belong to Buddha the great Teacher; and at the same highest level of truth, all nations and all religions can belong to Christ, the Divine Power. Mutual understanding augurs peace in the world. This peace is the soul of the new world. And to this soul, which must reign all over the globe as the science of the Spirit belonging to all men in all earthly civilisations, Anthroposophy should lead the way.
From the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, such knowledge was cultivated in the Rosicrucian Schools. It was known there that together with such knowledge, peace draws into the souls of men. And in these Rosicrucian Schools it was known, too, that many a one who on earth cannot experience this peace, will experience it after death as the fulfilment of his most treasured ideals — when he looks down to the earth and beholds peace reigning among the peoples and nations to the extent to which men open their hearts to receive such knowledge.
As I have spoken here to-day, so did the Rosicrucians speak in their small, enclosed circles. To-day these things can be communicated to larger gatherings of men. Those to whom it has been entrusted to carry into effect through spiritual science what streams into humanity from the Mystery of Golgotha, know that every year at Eastertide, Jesus, who bore the Christ within him, seeks out the places where the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled. Whether actually in incarnation or not, every year he visits these places, and there his pupils who have made themselves ready, can be united with him.
A poet — Anastasius Grün — felt the reality of this. He describes five such meetings of the Master with his pupils. The first, after the destruction of Jerusalem; the second, after the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders; the third — Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, lingering on Golgotha; the fourth — a praying monk, yearning and pleading for deliverance from his conqueror. For while sects of different kinds scattered over the earth are at strife among themselves, he through whom the greatest of all tidings of peace was brought to the earth, looks again at the places that were the scene of his earthly deeds.
These four pictures are given of past visits of Jesus to the scene of his work on Golgotha. Then, in the poem printed under the title of “Five Easters,” Anastasius Grün pictures another return to Golgotha, in the far future. In this far future of which he gives us a glimpse, the power of peace will then have prevailed on the earth, a peace based, not on denominational Christianity, but on Christianity as it is understood in Rosicrucianism. He sees children who, while they are at play, dig up an object of iron and do not know what it is. They alone who still possess some remote information of the strife waged among men in what is for them the distant past — they alone know that this object is a sword. In that age of peace the purpose of a sword is no longer known — it has been replaced by the ploughshare. Then a farmer digging in the earth finds an object made of stone ... Again it is not recognised. “For a time this was banished from the earth,” say those who still have some knowledge, “for men no longer understood it! Once upon a time they used it as a symbol of strife.” It is a cross of stone,— but now, when the impulse given by Christ Jesus for all future time gathers men together, now it has become something different!
How does this poet, writing in the year 1835, describe this symbol of the mission of the Christ Impulse, when rightly understood? He describes it as follows:
Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing,
Eternal in their breast it stands upright;
There blooms its seed abroad on every pathway,
A Cross it was — this stranger to their sight.
The Cross of Stone now stands within a garden,
A strange and sacred relic from of old;
Flowers of all patterns lift their growth above it,
While roses, climbing high, the Cross enfold.
So stood the Cross, weighty with solemn meaning,
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen
Long since 'tis hidden by its sheath of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen. (see Note 2)
Note 1: Since this lecture was given wireless broadcasting has been perfected.
Note 2: The whole poem consists of 108 verses, in five parts.
The importance of the subject of which we shall speak first, will be evident to all serious students of spiritual science. Reference has frequently been made to this subject but one cannot speak too often of spiritual-scientific concepts, for they must become actual forces, actual impulses in men of the present and immediate future. I shall lay emphasis to-day upon one aspect of what spiritual science must signify in the world, namely, the need to impart soul to our “world-body,” as we may call it.
A comparatively short time ago in the evolution of humanity it would not have been possible to speak, as we can speak to-day, of a “world-body.” Looking back only a little into the historical development of mankind, we shall find that in the comparatively recent past, the idea of a world-body peopled by a humanity forming one whole had not yet come into the consciousness of men. We find self-contained civilisations, enclosed within strict boundaries. Guided by the several Folk-Spirits, the Old Indian civilisation, the Old Persian civilisation, and so on, embraced peoples living a self-contained existence, separated from one another by mountains, seas or rivers.
Needless to say, such civilisations still exist. We speak, and rightly so, of Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, German culture, but as well as this, when we look over the earth to-day we perceive a certain unity extending over the globe — something by which peoples separated by vast distances are formed as it were into a single whole. We need think only of industry, of railways, of telegraphs, of recent inventions. (see Note 1) Railways are built, telegraph systems installed, cheques made out and cashed, all over the globe, and the same will hold good for discoveries and inventions yet to be made.
Now let us ask: What is the peculiarity of this element that extends over the globe and is the same in Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, London, and everywhere else? It is all a means of providing humanity with food and clothing, as well as with ever-increasing luxury goods. During the last few centuries a material civilisation has spread over the earth, without distinction between nation and nation, race and race. Greek culture flourished in a tiny region of the earth and little was known of it outside that region. But nowadays, news flashes around the whole globe in a few hours — and nobody would doubt the justification of calling this material culture an earthly culture! Moreover it will become increasingly material and our earth-body more and more deeply entangled in it.
But those who realise the need for spiritual science will understand with greater clarity that no body can subsist without a soul. Just as material culture encompasses the whole body of the earth, so must knowledge of the spirit be the soul that extends over the whole earth, without distinction of nation, colour, race or people. And just as identical methods are employed wherever railways and telegraph systems are constructed, so will mutual understanding over the whole earth be necessary in regard to questions concerning the human soul. The longings and questionings that will arise increasingly in the souls of men, demand answers. Hence the need for a movement dedicated to the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. Something comparable with cultural relations between individual peoples will then take effect on a wide scale, weaving threads between soul and soul over the whole earth. And what will weave from soul to soul may be called a deep and intimate understanding in regard to something that is sacred to individual souls everywhere, namely, how they are related to the spiritual world.
In a future not far distant, intimate understanding will take the place of what led in past times to bitterest conflict and disharmony as long as humanity was divided into regional civilisations which knew nothing of each other. But what will operate on a universal scale over the globe as a spiritual movement embracing all earthly humanity, must operate also between soul and soul. What a distance still separates the Buddhists and the Christians, how little do they understand and how insistently do they turn away from each other on the circumscribed ground of their particular creeds! But the time will come when their own religion will lead more and more Buddhists to Anthroposophy, and Christianity itself will lead more and more Christians to Anthroposophy. And then complete understanding will reign between them.
That humanity is coming a little nearer to this intimate understanding can be discerned to-day in the fact that the science of comparative religion is also finding its place in the domain of scholarship. The value of this science of comparative religion should not be underrated, for it has splendid achievements to its credit. But what is really brought to light when the different teachings of the religions are set forth? Although it is not acknowledged, the basis of this science of comparative religion amounts to no more than the most elementary beliefs, long since outgrown by those who have grasped the essence of the religions. The science of comparative religion confines itself to these elementary beliefs.
But what is the aim of spiritual science in regard to the various religions? It seeks for something that lies beyond the reach of the scientific investigators, namely for the essential truths contained in the religions.
From what does spiritual science take its start? From the fact that mankind has originated from a common Godhead and that a primeval wisdom belonging to mankind as one whole and springing from one Divine source has only for a time been partitioned, as it were, in a number of rays among the different peoples and groups of human beings on the earth. The aim and ideal of spiritual science is to rediscover this primeval truth, this primeval wisdom, uncoloured by this or that particular creed, and to give it again to humanity. Spiritual science is able to penetrate to the essence of the various religions because its attention is focussed, not upon external rites and ceremonies, but upon the kernel of primeval wisdom contained in each one of them. Spiritual science regards the religions as so many channels for the rays of what once streamed without differentiation over the whole of mankind.
When a professed Christian, knowing nothing beyond the external tenets of belief that have been instilled into the hearts of men through the centuries, says to a Buddhist: ‘If you would reach the truth you must believe what I believe’ ... and the Buddhist rejoins by declaring what he holds sacred, then no understanding is possible between them. But spiritual science approaches these questions in an entirely different way.
Those who can penetrate to the essence of Buddhism as well as to that of Christianity through the methods leading to the development of the new clairvoyance, come to know of sublime Beings who have risen from the realm of man and are called Bodhisattvas. Herein lies the central nerve of Buddhism. And the Christian, too, hears of a Bodhisattva who arises from mankind and works within humanity. He hears that one of these Bodhisattvas — born 600 years before our era as Siddartha, the son of King Suddhodana — attained the rank of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. A Christian who is an anthroposophist also knows that a Being who has risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha need not appear again on earth in a body of flesh.
True, such teachings are also communicated to us by the scientific investigators of religions, but they can make nothing of a Being such as a Bodhisattva or a Buddha; the nature of such a Being is beyond their comprehension; neither can they realise how such a Being continues to guide humanity from the spiritual worlds without living in a body of flesh.
But as anthroposophical Christians, our attitude to the Bodhisattva can be as full of reverence as that of a Buddhist, In spiritual science we say exactly the same about Buddha as a Buddhist says. The Christian who is an anthroposophist says to the Buddhist: I understand and believe what you understand and believe. No one who has come to spiritual science from the ground of Christianity would ever dream, as a Christian, of saying that the Buddha returns in the flesh. He knows that this would wound the deepest, most intimate feelings of the Buddhist and that such a statement would be utterly at variance with the true character of those Beings who have risen from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha. Christianity itself has brought him knowledge and understanding of these Beings.
And what will be the attitude of the Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist? He will understand the particular basis of Christianity. He will realise that as in the case of the other religions, Christianity has a Founder — Jesus of Nazareth — but that another Being united with him. A great deal could be said about all that has been associated with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth through the centuries. But the Christian's view of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth differs from the Buddhist's view of the Founder of his religion. In the East it would be said: “One who is a great Founder of religion has achieved the complete harmonisation of all passions and desires, of all human, personal attributes. Is such complete harmonisation manifest in Jesus of Nazareth? We read that he was seized with anger, that he overthrew the tables of the money-changers, drove them out of the temple, that he uttered words of impassioned wrath. This is evidence to us that he does not possess the qualities to be expected of a Founder of religion.” Such is the attitude of the East.
We ourselves, of course, could point to many other aspects of this question, but that is not what concerns us at the moment. The really significant fact is that Christianity differs from all other religions inasmuch as they all point to a Founder who was a great Teacher. But to believe that the same is true of Christianity would denote a fundamental misunderstanding. The essence of Christianity is not that it looks back to Jesus of Nazareth as a great Teacher. Christianity originates in aDeed, takes its start from a super-personal Deed — from the Mystery of Golgotha.
How could this be? It was because for three years there dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth a Being, Whom — if we are to give Him a name — we call Christ. But a name cannot encompass the Divine Spirit we recognise in Christ. No human name, no human word, can define a Divinity. In Christ we have to do with a Divine Impulse spreading through the world: the Christ Impulse which at the Baptism in the Jordan entered in Him, into Jesus of Nazareth. The very essence of Christianity lies in the Christ Impulse which came to the earth through a physical personality, the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth into whose sheaths it entered. The Christ took these sheaths upon Himself because the course of world-evolution is, first, a descent, and then again an ascent. At the deepest point of descent the Mystery of Golgotha takes place, because from it alone could spring the power to lead humanity upwards.
After the Atlantean catastrophe came the ancient Indian epoch of civilisation. The spirituality of that epoch will not again be reached until the end of the seventh epoch. The ancient Indian epoch was followed by that of ancient Persia, that again by the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. When we survey evolution, even in its external aspect, the decline of spirituality is evident. Then we come to Greco-Latin civilisation with its firm footing in the earthly realm. The works of art created by the Greeks are the most wonderful expression of the marriage of spirit with form. And in Roman culture, in Roman civic life, man becomes master on the physical plane. But the spirituality in Greek culture is characterised by the saying: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ Dread of the world lying behind the physical plane, dread of the world into which man will pass after death is expressed in this saying. Spirituality has here descended to the deepest point.
From then onwards, mankind needed an impulse for the return to the spiritual worlds, and this impulse was given in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch through an Event at a level far transcending the physical plane.
The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in a remote comer of the earth, for the sake of no particular race or denomination. It took place in seclusion, in concealment. Neither outer civilisation nor the Romans who governed the little territory of Palestine, knew anything of the Event. The Romans were no followers of Christ — the Jews still less!
Who were present when the Mystery of Golgotha took place? Whom had he gathered around him who in his thirtieth year had received the Christ into himself? Had pupils gathered around this Being as they had gathered around Confucius, Laotse or Buddha? If we look closely we see that this is not so. For were those who until the Event of Golgotha had been His disciples, already His apostles? No! They had scattered, they had gone away when the One Whom they had followed hitherto entered upon the path of His Passion. Only when having passed through death, He gave them the certain knowledge of the power that had conquered death — only then did they become true Apostles and carried His impulse to the peoples of the earth. Before then they had not even understood Him. Even Paul, the one who after the Mystery of Golgotha achieved most of all for the spread of Christianity, understood Him only when He had appeared to him in the spirit!
So we see that, unlike the other religions, Christianity was not, in essence, founded by a great Teacher whose pupils then promulgate his teachings. The essential, basic truth of Christianity is that a Divine Impulse came down to the earth, passed through death and became the source of the impulse which leads humanity upwards. When the individual personal element had passed through death, had departed from the earth — then and only then did the power which came upon the earth through Christ, begin to work. It is not a merely personal teaching that works on, but the actual Event that Christ was within Jesus and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and that from the Mystery of Golgotha a power streamed forth over the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.
That is the difference between what Christianity sees as the starting-point of its development and what the other religions see as theirs. When, therefore, we turn our attention to the beginning of Christianity, it is a matter of realising what actually came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. Paul says, in effect: The descending line of evolution was caused through Adam, even before the Fall, before he was man, before he was a personality in the real sense. The impulse for the ascent was given by Christ.
To feel this as a reality, we must go deeply into the occult truths available to mankind. To grasp this stupendous fact, man's understanding must be quickened by the deepest, most intimate occult truths. It will then be comprehensible to him that, to begin with, even in Christendom itself, the loftiest thoughts and deepest truths could not immediately be understood. To grasp the full meaning of this Divine Death and the Impulse proceeding from it, to realise that such an Event cannot be repeated, that it occurred at the deepest point of the evolutionary process and radiates the power which enables mankind henceforward to tread the path of ascent — to conceive this was possible only to a few. And so in the centuries that followed, men clung to Jesus of Nazareth — for understanding of the Christ was as yet beyond their reach. Moreover it was through Jesus that the Christ Impulse also made its way into works of art. Men yearned for Jesus, not for Christ.
We ourselves are still living at the dawn of true Christianity; Christianity is only beginning to come into its own. And when men plead to-day: ‘Do not take from us the individual, personal Jesus who comforts and uplifts our hearts, on whom we lean; do not give us, instead of him, a super-personal event’ ... they must realise that this is nothing but an expression of egoism. Not until they transcend this personal egoism and realise that they have no right to call themselves Christians until they recognise as the source of their Christianity the Event that was fulfilled in majestic isolation on Golgotha, will they be able to draw near to Christ. But this realisation belongs to future time.
There may be some who say: Surely the Crucifixion should have been avoided! But this is simply a human opinion — no more than that. These people do not know the difference between an utter impossibility and what is merely a mistaken idea. For what came into the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha could proceed only from the impulse of a god Who had endured all the sufferings and agonies of mankind, all the sorrows, the mockery and scorn, the contempt and the shame that were the lot of Christ. And these sufferings were infinitely harder for a god than for an ordinary human being.
That the Mystery of Golgotha actually took place cannot be authenticated in the same way as other historical events. There is no authentic, documentary evidence even of the Crucifixion. But there is good reason why no proof exists, for this is an Event which lies outside the sphere of the general evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha — and this is its very essence — is an Event transcending that which has merely to do with the evolution of humanity.
The Mystery of Golgotha was concerned with the descending path which men have taken and with what must lead them upwards again — with the Luciferic influence upon mankind! Lucifer, together with everything belonging to him, is verily not a human being. Lucifer and his hosts are superhuman beings. Nor did Lucifer desire that through his deeds men should be set upon a downward path; his purpose was to rebel against the upper gods. He wanted to vanquish his opponents, not to set men upon a downward path. The progressive gods, the upper gods, and Lucifer with his hosts of the lower gods of hindrance, waged war against each other, and from the very beginning of earthly evolution, man was dragged into this warfare among gods. It was an issue that the gods in the higher worlds had to settle among themselves, but as a result of the conflict, men were drawn more deeply into the material world than was originally intended. And now the gods had to create the balance; humanity had to be lifted upwards again, the deed of Lucifer made of no avail. And this could not be achieved through a man but only through a Divine Deed, the deed of a god. This deed of a god must be understood in all its truth and reality.
If we ponder deeply about earthly existence, we find as its greatest riddle: birth and death.The fact that beings can die is the fundamental problem confronting humanity. Death is something that occurs only on the earth. In the higher worlds there is transformation, metamorphosis — no death. Death is the consequence of what came into human beings through Lucifer, and if something had not taken place from the side of the gods, the whole of mankind would have been more and more entangled in the forces which lead to death. And so a sacrifice had to be made from the side of the gods: it was necessary that One from among them should descend and suffer the death that can be undergone only by the children of earth. This was a deed which created the balance for the deed of Lucifer. And from this death of a god streams the power which also radiates into the souls of men and can raise them again out of the darkness in which Lucifer's deed has ensnared them. A god had to die on the physical plane.
This is not a direct concern of men ... they were here spectators of an affair of the gods. No wonder that physical means are incapable of portraying an Event which is an affair of the higher worlds, for it falls outside the sphere of the physical world.
But the fruits of this deed of a god which had perforce to be wrought on the earth, became the heritage of humanity, and the Christian Initiation gives men the power to understand it. And just as mankind could come forth only once from the bosom of the Godhead, so could the overcoming of what was then instilled into the human soul be achieved only once.
If the Christian who has become an anthroposophist were to speak of the nature of Christ to a Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist, the Buddhist would say: ‘I should therefore misunderstand you were I to believe that the Being Whom you call Christ is subject to reincarnation. He is not subject to reincarnation — any more than you would say that the Buddha can return to earthly existence!’
Yet there is one fundamental difference. The Buddhist points to the great Teacher who was the originator of his religion; but the true Christian points to a deed of the spiritual worlds, enacted in seclusion on the earth, he points to something entirely non-personal, having nothing to do with any specific creed or denomination. No single human being, to begin with, recognised this deed; it had nothing to do with any particular locality on the earth. In majestic seclusion the Divine Power poured from this deed into the whole subsequent evolution of mankind.
The task of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to seek for the truths contained in the different religions, and to seek for the kernel of truth in them all is the augury of peace. When an adherent of some creed truly understands his religion in the light of spiritual science, he will never force its particular ray of truth upon adherents of another religion. As little as the anthroposophical Christian will speak of the return of the Buddha — for then he would not have understood him — as little will the anthroposophical Buddhist speak of the return of Christ — for that too would be a misunderstanding. Provided personal bias is laid aside, the truth concerning Buddha and the truth concerning Christ never makes for discord and sectarianism, but for harmony and peace. This is a natural consequence of truth, for truth is the augury of peace in the world. At the highest level of truth, all nations and all religions on the earth can belong to Buddha the great Teacher; and at the same highest level of truth, all nations and all religions can belong to Christ, the Divine Power. Mutual understanding augurs peace in the world. This peace is the soul of the new world. And to this soul, which must reign all over the globe as the science of the Spirit belonging to all men in all earthly civilisations, Anthroposophy should lead the way.
From the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, such knowledge was cultivated in the Rosicrucian Schools. It was known there that together with such knowledge, peace draws into the souls of men. And in these Rosicrucian Schools it was known, too, that many a one who on earth cannot experience this peace, will experience it after death as the fulfilment of his most treasured ideals — when he looks down to the earth and beholds peace reigning among the peoples and nations to the extent to which men open their hearts to receive such knowledge.
As I have spoken here to-day, so did the Rosicrucians speak in their small, enclosed circles. To-day these things can be communicated to larger gatherings of men. Those to whom it has been entrusted to carry into effect through spiritual science what streams into humanity from the Mystery of Golgotha, know that every year at Eastertide, Jesus, who bore the Christ within him, seeks out the places where the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled. Whether actually in incarnation or not, every year he visits these places, and there his pupils who have made themselves ready, can be united with him.
A poet — Anastasius Grün — felt the reality of this. He describes five such meetings of the Master with his pupils. The first, after the destruction of Jerusalem; the second, after the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders; the third — Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, lingering on Golgotha; the fourth — a praying monk, yearning and pleading for deliverance from his conqueror. For while sects of different kinds scattered over the earth are at strife among themselves, he through whom the greatest of all tidings of peace was brought to the earth, looks again at the places that were the scene of his earthly deeds.
These four pictures are given of past visits of Jesus to the scene of his work on Golgotha. Then, in the poem printed under the title of “Five Easters,” Anastasius Grün pictures another return to Golgotha, in the far future. In this far future of which he gives us a glimpse, the power of peace will then have prevailed on the earth, a peace based, not on denominational Christianity, but on Christianity as it is understood in Rosicrucianism. He sees children who, while they are at play, dig up an object of iron and do not know what it is. They alone who still possess some remote information of the strife waged among men in what is for them the distant past — they alone know that this object is a sword. In that age of peace the purpose of a sword is no longer known — it has been replaced by the ploughshare. Then a farmer digging in the earth finds an object made of stone ... Again it is not recognised. “For a time this was banished from the earth,” say those who still have some knowledge, “for men no longer understood it! Once upon a time they used it as a symbol of strife.” It is a cross of stone,— but now, when the impulse given by Christ Jesus for all future time gathers men together, now it has become something different!
How does this poet, writing in the year 1835, describe this symbol of the mission of the Christ Impulse, when rightly understood? He describes it as follows:
Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing,
Eternal in their breast it stands upright;
There blooms its seed abroad on every pathway,
A Cross it was — this stranger to their sight.
The Cross of Stone now stands within a garden,
A strange and sacred relic from of old;
Flowers of all patterns lift their growth above it,
While roses, climbing high, the Cross enfold.
So stood the Cross, weighty with solemn meaning,
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen
Long since 'tis hidden by its sheath of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen. (see Note 2)
Note 1: Since this lecture was given wireless broadcasting has been perfected.
Note 2: The whole poem consists of 108 verses, in five parts.
Spirit Triumphant
by Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, March 27th, 1921
Dornach, March 27th, 1921
THERE is a significant contrast between the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Understanding of the contrast and also of the living relationship between them will lead to an experience which, in a certain way, embraces the whole riddle of human existence.
The Christmas thought points to birth. Through birth, the eternal being of man comes into the world whence his material, bodily constitution is derived. The Christmas thought, therefore, links us with the super-sensible. Together with all its other associations, it points to the one pole of our existence, where as physical-material beings we are connected with the spiritual and super-sensible. Obviously, therefore, the birth of a human being in its full significance can never be explained by a science based entirely upon observation of material existence.
The thought underlying the Easter festival lies at the other pole of human experience. In the course of the development of Western civilisation this Easter thought assumed a form which has influenced the growth of the materialistic conceptions prevailing in the West. The Easter thought can be grasped — in a more abstract way, to begin with — when it is realised that the immortal, eternal being of man, the spiritual and super-sensible essence of being that cannot in the real sense be born, descends from spiritual worlds and is clothed in the human physical body. From the very beginning of physical existence the working of the spirit within the physical body actually leads this physical body towards death. The thought of death is therefore implicit in that of birth.
On other occasions I have said that the head-organisation of man can be understood only in the light of the knowledge that in the head a continual process of dying is taking place, but is counteracted by the life-forces in the rest of the organism. The moment the forces of death that are all the time present in the head and enable man to think, get the upper hand of his transient, mortal nature — at that moment actual death occurs.
In truth, therefore, the thought of death is merely the other side of that of birth and cannot be an essential part of the Easter thought. Hence at the time when Pauline Christianity was beginning to emerge from conceptions still based upon Eastern wisdom, it was not to the Death but to the Resurrection of Christ Jesus that men's minds were directed by words of power such as those of Paul: “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain.”
The Resurrection, the triumphant victory over death, the overcoming of death — this was the essence of the Easter thought in the form of early Christianity that was still an echo of Eastern wisdom. On the other hand, there are pictures in which Christ Jesus is portrayed as the Good Shepherd, watching over the eternal interests of man as he sleeps through his mortal existence. In early Christianity, man is everywhere directed to the words of the Gospel: “He Whom ye seek is not here.” Expanding this, we might say: Seek Him in spiritual worlds, not in the physical-material world. For if you seek Him in the physical-material world, you can but be told: He Whom you seek is no longer here.
The all-embracing wisdom by means of which in the first centuries of Christendom men were still endeavouring to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and all that pertained to it, was gradually submerged by the materialism of the West. In those early centuries, materialism had not reached anything like its full power, but was only slowly being prepared. It was not until much later that these first, still feeble and hardly noticeable tendencies were transformed into the materialism which took stronger and stronger hold of Western civilisation. The original Eastern concept of religion came to be bound up with the concept of the State that was developing in the West. In the fourth century A.D., Christianity became a State religion — in other words, there crept into Christianity something that is not religion at all.
Julian the Apostate, who was no Christian, but for all that a deeply religious man, could not accept what Christianity had become under Constantine. And so we see how in the fusion of Christianity with the declining culture of Rome, the influence of Western materialism begins to take effect — very slightly to begin with, but nevertheless perceptibly. And under this influence there appeared a picture of Christ Jesus which at the beginning simply was not there, was not part of Christianity in its original form: the picture of Christ Jesus as the crucified One, the Man of Sorrows, brought to His death by the indescribable suffering that was His lot.
This made a breach in the whole outlook of the Christian world. For the picture which from then onwards persisted through the centuries — the picture of Christ agonising on the Cross — is of the Christ Who could no longer be comprehended in His spiritual nature but in His bodily nature only. And the greater the emphasis that was laid on the signs of suffering in the human body, the more perfect the skill with which art succeeded at different periods in portraying the sufferings, the more firmly were the seeds of materialism planted in Christian feeling. The crucifix is the expression of the transition to Christian materialism. This in no way gainsays the profundity and significance with which art portrayed the sufferings of the Redeemer. Nevertheless it is a fact that with the concentration on this picture of the Redeemer suffering and dying on the Cross, leave was taken of a truly spiritual conception of Christianity.
Then there crept into this conception of the Man of Sorrows, that of Christ as Judge of the world, who must be regarded as merely another expression of Jahve or Jehovah — the figure portrayed so magnificently in the Sistine Chapel at Rome as the Dispenser of Judgment. The attitude of mind which caused the triumphant Spirit, the Victor over death, to vanish from the picture of the grave from which the Redeemer rises — this same attitude of mind, in the year 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, declared belief in the Spirit to be heretical, decreed that man is to be conceived as consisting only of body and soul, the soul merely having certain spiritual qualities. Just as we see the spiritual reality expelled by the crucifix, just as the portrayals of the physical give expression to the pain-racked soul without the Spirit triumphant by Whom mankind is guarded and sustained, so do we see the Spirit struck away from the being of man by the decree of an Ecumenical Council.
The Good Friday festival and the Easter festival of Resurrection were largely combined. Even in days when men were not yet so arid, so empty of understanding, Good Friday became a festival in which the Easter thought was transformed in an altogether egotistic direction. Wallowing in pain, steeping the soul voluptuously in pain, feeling ecstasy in pain — this, for centuries, was associated with the Good Friday thought which, in truth, should merely have formed the background for the Easter thought. But men became less and less capable of grasping the Easter thought in its true form. The same humanity into whose creed had been accepted the principle that man consists of body and soul only — this same humanity demanded, for the sake of emotional life, the picture of the dying Redeemer as the counter-image of its own physical suffering, in order that this might serve — outwardly at least — as a background for the direct consciousness that the living Spirit must always be victorious over everything that can befall the physical body. Men needed, first, the picture of the martyr's death, in order to experience, by way of contrast, the true Easter thought.
We must always feel profoundly how, in this way, vision and experience of the Spirit gradually faded from Western culture, and we shall certainly look with wonder, but at the same time with a feeling of the tragedy of it all, at the attempts made by art to portray the Man of Sorrows on the Cross. Casual thoughts and feelings about what is needed in our time are not enough, my dear friends. The decline that has taken place in Western culture in respect of the understanding of the spiritual, must be perceived with all clarity. What has to be recognised to-day is that even the greatest achievements in a certain domain are something that humanity must now surmount. The whole of our Western culture needs the Easter thought, needs, in other words, to be lifted to the Spirit. The holy Mystery of Birth, the Christmas Mystery once revealed in such glory, gradually deteriorated in the course of Western civilisation into those sentimentalities which revelled in hymns and songs about the Jesus Babe and were in truth merely the corresponding pole of the increasing materialism. Men wallowed in sentimentalities over the little Child. Banal hymns about the Jesus Babe gradually became the vogue, obscuring men's feeling of the stupendous Christmas Mystery of the coming of a super-earthly Spirit. It is characteristic of a Christianity developing more and more in the direction of intellectualism that certain of its representatives to-day even go as far as to say that the Gospels are concerned primarily with the Father, not with the Son. True, the Resurrection thought has remained, but it is associated always with the thought of Death. A characteristic symptom is that with the development of modern civilisation, the Good Friday thought has come increasingly to the fore, while the Resurrection thought, the true Easter thought, has fallen more and more into the background. In an age when it is incumbent upon man to experience the resurrection of his own being in the Spirit, particular emphasis must be laid upon the Easter thought. We must learn to understand the Easter thought in all its depths. But this entails the realisation that the picture of the Man of Sorrows on the one side and that of the Judge of the world on the other, are both symptomatic of the march of Western civilisation into materialism. Christ as a super-sensible, super-earthly Being Who entered nevertheless into the stream of earthly evolution — that is the Sun-thought to the attainment of which all the forces of human thinking must be applied.
Just as we must realise that the Christmas thought of birth has become something that has dragged the greatest of Mysteries into the realm of trivial sentimentality, so too we must realise how necessary it is to emphasise through the Easter thought that there entered into human evolution at that time something that is forever inexplicable by earthly theories, but is comprehensible to spiritual knowledge, to spiritual insight.
Spiritual understanding finds in the Resurrection thought the first great source of strength, knowing that the spiritual and eternal — even within man — remains unaffected by the physical and bodily. In the words of St. Paul, “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain,” it recognises a confirmation — which in the modern age must be reached in a different, more conscious way — of the real nature of the Being of Christ.
This is what the Easter thought must call up in us to-day. Easter must become an inner festival, a festival in which we celebrate in ourselves the victory of the Spirit over the body. As history cannot be disregarded, we shall not ignore the figure of the pain-stricken Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, on the Cross; but above the Cross we must behold the Victor Who remains unaffected by birth as well as by death, and Who alone can lead our vision up to the eternal pastures of life in the Spirit. Only so shall we draw near again to the true Being of Christ. Western humanity has drawn Christ down to its own level, drawn Him down as the helpless Child, and as one associated pre-eminently with suffering and death.
I have often pointed out that the words, “Death is evil,” fell from the Buddha's lips as long before the Mystery of Golgotha as, after the Mystery of Golgotha, there appeared the crucifix, the figure of the crucified One. And I have also shown how then, in the sixth century, men looked upon death and felt it to be no evil but something that had no real existence. But this feeling, which was an echo from an Eastern wisdom even more profound than Buddhisn, was gradually obscured by the other, which clung to the picture of the pain-racked Sufferer.
We must grasp with the whole range of our feelings — not with thoughts alone, for their range is too limited — what the fate of man's conception of the Mystery of Golgotha has been in the course of the centuries. A true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha is what we must again acquire. And be it remembered that even in the days of Hebraic antiquity, Jahve was not conceived as the Judge of the world in any juristic sense. In the Book of Job, the greatest dramatic presentation of religious experience in Hebraic antiquity, Job is presented as the suffering man, but the idea of the execution of justice from without is essentially absent. Job is the suffering man, the man who regards what outer circumstances inflict upon him, as his destiny. Only gradually does the juristic concept of retribution, punishment, become part of the world-order. Michelangelo's picture over the altar of the Sistine Chapel represents in one aspect, a kind of revival of the Jahve principle. But we need the Christ for Whom we can seek in our inmost being, because when we truly seek Him, He at once appears. We need the Christ Who draws into our will, warming, kindling, strengthening it for deeds demanded of us for the sake of human evolution. We need, not the suffering Christ, but the Christ Who hovers above the Cross, looking down upon that which — no longer a living reality — comes to an end on the Cross. We need the strong consciousness of the eternity of the Spirit, and this consciousness will not be attained if we give ourselves up to the picture of the crucifix alone. And when we see how the crucifix has gradually come to be a picture of the Man of suffering and pain, we shall realise what power this direction of human feeling has acquired. Men's gaze has been diverted from the spiritual to the earthly and physical. This aspect, it is true, has often been magnificently portrayed, but to those, as for example Goethe, who feel the need for our civilisation again to reach the Spirit, it is something, which, in a way, rouses their antipathy. Goethe has made it abundantly clear that the figure of the crucified Redeemer does not express what he feels to be the essence of Christianity, namely, the lifting of man to the Spirit.
The Good Friday mood, as well as the Easter mood, needs to be transformed. The Good Friday mood must be one that realises when contemplating the dying Jesus: This is only the other side of birth. Not to recognise that dying is also implicit in the fact of being born, is to lose sight of the full reality. A man who is able to feel that the mood of death associated with Good Friday merely presents the other pole of the entrance of the child into the world at birth, is making the right preparation for the mood of Easter — which can, in truth consist only in the knowledge: “Into whatever human sheath I have been born, my real being is both unborn and deathless.” — In his own eternal being man must unite with the Christ Who came into the world and cannot die, Who when He beholds the Man of Sorrows on the Cross, is looking down, not upon the eternal Self, but upon Himself incarnate in another.
We must be aware of what has actually happened in consequence of the fact that since the end of the first Christian century, Western civilisation has gradually lost the conception of the Spirit. When a sufficiently large number of men realise that the Spirit must come to life again in modern civilisation, the World-Easter thought will become a reality. This will express itself outwardly in the fact that man will not be satisfied with investigating the laws of nature only, or the laws of history which are akin to those of nature, but will yearn for understanding of his own will, for knowledge of his own inner freedom, and of the real nature of the will which bears him through and beyond the gate of death, but which in its true nature must be seen spiritually.
How is man to acquire the power to grasp the Pentecost thought, the outpouring of the Spirit, since this thought has been dogmatically declared by the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople to be an empty phrase? How is man to acquire the power to grasp this Pentecost thought if he is incapable of apprehending the true Easter thought — the Resurrection of the Spirit? The picture of the dying, pain-racked Redeemer must not confound him; he must learn that pain is inseparable from material existence.
The knowledge of this was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom which still sprang from instinctive depths of man's cognitional life. We must acquire this knowledge again, but now through acts of conscious cognition. It was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom that pain and suffering originate from man's union with matter. It would be foolishness to believe that because Christ passed through death as a Divine-Spiritual Being, He did not suffer pain; to declare that the pain associated with the Mystery of Golgotha was a mere semblance of pain would be to voice an unreality. In the deepest sense, this pain must be conceived as reality — and not as its mere counter-image. We must gain something from what stands before us when, in surveying the whole sweep of the evolution of humanity, we contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha.
When the picture of the man who had attained freedom at the highest level was presented to the candidates for ancient Initiation after they had completed the preparatory stages, had undergone all the exercises by which they could acquire certain knowledge presented to them in dramatic imagery, they were led at last before the figure of the Chrestos — the man suffering within the physical body, in the purple robe and wearing the crown of thorns. The sight of this Chrestos was meant to kindle in the soul the power that makes man truly man. And the drops of blood which the aspirant for Initiation beheld at vital points on the Chrestos figure were intended to be a stimulus for overcoming human weaknesses and for raising the Spirit triumphant from the inmost being. The sight of pain was meant to betoken the resurrection of the spiritual nature. The purpose of the figure before the candidate was to convey to him the deepest import of what may be expressed in these simple words: For your happiness you may thank many things in life — but if you have gained knowledge and insight into the spiritual connections of existence, for that you have to thank your Buffering, your pain. You owe your knowledge to the fact that you did not allow yourself to be mastered by suffering and pain but were strong enough to rise above them. And so in the ancient Mysteries, the figure of the suffering Chrestos was in turn replaced by the figure of the Christ triumphant Who looks down upon the suffering Chrestos as upon that which has been overcome. And now again it must be possible for the soul to have the Christ triumphant before and within it, especially in the will. That must be the ideal before us in this present time, above all in regard to what we wish to do for the future well-being of mankind.
But the true Easter thought will never be within our reach if we cannot realise that whenever we speak of Christ we must look beyond the earthly into the cosmic. Modern thinking has made the cosmos into a corpse. To-day we gaze at the stars and calculate their movements — in other words we make calculations about the corpse of the universe, never perceiving that in the stars there is life, and that the will of the cosmic Spirit prevails in their courses. Christ descended to humanity in order to unite the souls of men with this cosmic Spirit. And he alone proclaims the Gospel of Christ truly, who affirms that what the sun reveals to the physical senses is the outer expression of the Spirit of our universe, of its resurrecting Spirit.
There must be a living realisation of the connection of this Spirit of the universe with the sun, and of how the time of the Easter festival has been determined by the relationship prevailing between the sun and the moon in spring. A link must be made with that cosmic reality in accordance with which the Easter festival was established in earth-evolution. We must come to realise that it was the ever-watchful Guardian-Spirits of the cosmos who, through the great cosmic timepiece in which the sun and the moon are the hands in respect of earthly existence, have pointed explicitly to the time in the evolution of the world and of humanity at which the Festival of the Resurrection is to be celebrated. With spiritual insight we must learn to perceive the course of the sun and moon as the two hands of the cosmic time piece, just as for the affairs of physical existence we learn to understand the movements of the hands on a clock. The physical and earthly must be linked to the super-physical and the super-earthly.
The Easter thought can be interpreted only in the light of super-earthly realities, for the Mystery of Golgotha, in its aspect as the Resurrection Mystery, must be distinguished from ordinary human happenings. Human affairs take their course on the earth in an altogether different way. The earth received the cosmic forces and, in the course of its evolution, the human powers of will penetrate the metabolic processes of man's being. But since the Mystery of Golgotha took place, a new influx of will streamed into earthly happenings. There took place on earth a cosmic event, for which the earth is merely the stage. Thereby man was again united with the cosmos.
That is what must be understood, for only so can the Easter thought be grasped in all its magnitude. Therefore it is not the picture of the crucifix alone that must stand before us, however grandly and sublimely portrayed by art. “He Whom ye seek is not here” — is the thought that must arise. Above the Cross there must appear to you the One Who is here now, Who by the spirit calls you to a spirit-awakening.
This is the true Easter thought that must find its way into the evolution of mankind; it is to this that the human heart and mind must be lifted. Our age demands of us that we shall not only deepen our understanding of what has been created, but that we shall become creators of the new. And even if it be the Cross itself, in all the beauty with which artists have endowed it, we may not rest content with that picture; we must hear the words of the Angels who, when we seek in death and suffering, exclaim to us: “He Whom ye seek is no longer here.”
We have to seek the One Who is here, by turning at Eastertime to the Spirit of Whom the only true picture is that of the Resurrection. Then we shall be able, in the right way, to pass from the Good Friday mood of suffering to the spiritual mood of Easter Day. In this Easter mood we shall also be able to find the strength with which our will must be imbued if the forces of decline are to be countered by those which lead humanity upwards. We need the forces that can bring about this ascent. And the moment we truly understand the Easter thought of Resurrection, this Easter thought — bringing warmth and illumination — will kindle within us the forces needed for the future evolution of mankind.
The Christmas thought points to birth. Through birth, the eternal being of man comes into the world whence his material, bodily constitution is derived. The Christmas thought, therefore, links us with the super-sensible. Together with all its other associations, it points to the one pole of our existence, where as physical-material beings we are connected with the spiritual and super-sensible. Obviously, therefore, the birth of a human being in its full significance can never be explained by a science based entirely upon observation of material existence.
The thought underlying the Easter festival lies at the other pole of human experience. In the course of the development of Western civilisation this Easter thought assumed a form which has influenced the growth of the materialistic conceptions prevailing in the West. The Easter thought can be grasped — in a more abstract way, to begin with — when it is realised that the immortal, eternal being of man, the spiritual and super-sensible essence of being that cannot in the real sense be born, descends from spiritual worlds and is clothed in the human physical body. From the very beginning of physical existence the working of the spirit within the physical body actually leads this physical body towards death. The thought of death is therefore implicit in that of birth.
On other occasions I have said that the head-organisation of man can be understood only in the light of the knowledge that in the head a continual process of dying is taking place, but is counteracted by the life-forces in the rest of the organism. The moment the forces of death that are all the time present in the head and enable man to think, get the upper hand of his transient, mortal nature — at that moment actual death occurs.
In truth, therefore, the thought of death is merely the other side of that of birth and cannot be an essential part of the Easter thought. Hence at the time when Pauline Christianity was beginning to emerge from conceptions still based upon Eastern wisdom, it was not to the Death but to the Resurrection of Christ Jesus that men's minds were directed by words of power such as those of Paul: “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain.”
The Resurrection, the triumphant victory over death, the overcoming of death — this was the essence of the Easter thought in the form of early Christianity that was still an echo of Eastern wisdom. On the other hand, there are pictures in which Christ Jesus is portrayed as the Good Shepherd, watching over the eternal interests of man as he sleeps through his mortal existence. In early Christianity, man is everywhere directed to the words of the Gospel: “He Whom ye seek is not here.” Expanding this, we might say: Seek Him in spiritual worlds, not in the physical-material world. For if you seek Him in the physical-material world, you can but be told: He Whom you seek is no longer here.
The all-embracing wisdom by means of which in the first centuries of Christendom men were still endeavouring to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and all that pertained to it, was gradually submerged by the materialism of the West. In those early centuries, materialism had not reached anything like its full power, but was only slowly being prepared. It was not until much later that these first, still feeble and hardly noticeable tendencies were transformed into the materialism which took stronger and stronger hold of Western civilisation. The original Eastern concept of religion came to be bound up with the concept of the State that was developing in the West. In the fourth century A.D., Christianity became a State religion — in other words, there crept into Christianity something that is not religion at all.
Julian the Apostate, who was no Christian, but for all that a deeply religious man, could not accept what Christianity had become under Constantine. And so we see how in the fusion of Christianity with the declining culture of Rome, the influence of Western materialism begins to take effect — very slightly to begin with, but nevertheless perceptibly. And under this influence there appeared a picture of Christ Jesus which at the beginning simply was not there, was not part of Christianity in its original form: the picture of Christ Jesus as the crucified One, the Man of Sorrows, brought to His death by the indescribable suffering that was His lot.
This made a breach in the whole outlook of the Christian world. For the picture which from then onwards persisted through the centuries — the picture of Christ agonising on the Cross — is of the Christ Who could no longer be comprehended in His spiritual nature but in His bodily nature only. And the greater the emphasis that was laid on the signs of suffering in the human body, the more perfect the skill with which art succeeded at different periods in portraying the sufferings, the more firmly were the seeds of materialism planted in Christian feeling. The crucifix is the expression of the transition to Christian materialism. This in no way gainsays the profundity and significance with which art portrayed the sufferings of the Redeemer. Nevertheless it is a fact that with the concentration on this picture of the Redeemer suffering and dying on the Cross, leave was taken of a truly spiritual conception of Christianity.
Then there crept into this conception of the Man of Sorrows, that of Christ as Judge of the world, who must be regarded as merely another expression of Jahve or Jehovah — the figure portrayed so magnificently in the Sistine Chapel at Rome as the Dispenser of Judgment. The attitude of mind which caused the triumphant Spirit, the Victor over death, to vanish from the picture of the grave from which the Redeemer rises — this same attitude of mind, in the year 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, declared belief in the Spirit to be heretical, decreed that man is to be conceived as consisting only of body and soul, the soul merely having certain spiritual qualities. Just as we see the spiritual reality expelled by the crucifix, just as the portrayals of the physical give expression to the pain-racked soul without the Spirit triumphant by Whom mankind is guarded and sustained, so do we see the Spirit struck away from the being of man by the decree of an Ecumenical Council.
The Good Friday festival and the Easter festival of Resurrection were largely combined. Even in days when men were not yet so arid, so empty of understanding, Good Friday became a festival in which the Easter thought was transformed in an altogether egotistic direction. Wallowing in pain, steeping the soul voluptuously in pain, feeling ecstasy in pain — this, for centuries, was associated with the Good Friday thought which, in truth, should merely have formed the background for the Easter thought. But men became less and less capable of grasping the Easter thought in its true form. The same humanity into whose creed had been accepted the principle that man consists of body and soul only — this same humanity demanded, for the sake of emotional life, the picture of the dying Redeemer as the counter-image of its own physical suffering, in order that this might serve — outwardly at least — as a background for the direct consciousness that the living Spirit must always be victorious over everything that can befall the physical body. Men needed, first, the picture of the martyr's death, in order to experience, by way of contrast, the true Easter thought.
We must always feel profoundly how, in this way, vision and experience of the Spirit gradually faded from Western culture, and we shall certainly look with wonder, but at the same time with a feeling of the tragedy of it all, at the attempts made by art to portray the Man of Sorrows on the Cross. Casual thoughts and feelings about what is needed in our time are not enough, my dear friends. The decline that has taken place in Western culture in respect of the understanding of the spiritual, must be perceived with all clarity. What has to be recognised to-day is that even the greatest achievements in a certain domain are something that humanity must now surmount. The whole of our Western culture needs the Easter thought, needs, in other words, to be lifted to the Spirit. The holy Mystery of Birth, the Christmas Mystery once revealed in such glory, gradually deteriorated in the course of Western civilisation into those sentimentalities which revelled in hymns and songs about the Jesus Babe and were in truth merely the corresponding pole of the increasing materialism. Men wallowed in sentimentalities over the little Child. Banal hymns about the Jesus Babe gradually became the vogue, obscuring men's feeling of the stupendous Christmas Mystery of the coming of a super-earthly Spirit. It is characteristic of a Christianity developing more and more in the direction of intellectualism that certain of its representatives to-day even go as far as to say that the Gospels are concerned primarily with the Father, not with the Son. True, the Resurrection thought has remained, but it is associated always with the thought of Death. A characteristic symptom is that with the development of modern civilisation, the Good Friday thought has come increasingly to the fore, while the Resurrection thought, the true Easter thought, has fallen more and more into the background. In an age when it is incumbent upon man to experience the resurrection of his own being in the Spirit, particular emphasis must be laid upon the Easter thought. We must learn to understand the Easter thought in all its depths. But this entails the realisation that the picture of the Man of Sorrows on the one side and that of the Judge of the world on the other, are both symptomatic of the march of Western civilisation into materialism. Christ as a super-sensible, super-earthly Being Who entered nevertheless into the stream of earthly evolution — that is the Sun-thought to the attainment of which all the forces of human thinking must be applied.
Just as we must realise that the Christmas thought of birth has become something that has dragged the greatest of Mysteries into the realm of trivial sentimentality, so too we must realise how necessary it is to emphasise through the Easter thought that there entered into human evolution at that time something that is forever inexplicable by earthly theories, but is comprehensible to spiritual knowledge, to spiritual insight.
Spiritual understanding finds in the Resurrection thought the first great source of strength, knowing that the spiritual and eternal — even within man — remains unaffected by the physical and bodily. In the words of St. Paul, “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain,” it recognises a confirmation — which in the modern age must be reached in a different, more conscious way — of the real nature of the Being of Christ.
This is what the Easter thought must call up in us to-day. Easter must become an inner festival, a festival in which we celebrate in ourselves the victory of the Spirit over the body. As history cannot be disregarded, we shall not ignore the figure of the pain-stricken Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, on the Cross; but above the Cross we must behold the Victor Who remains unaffected by birth as well as by death, and Who alone can lead our vision up to the eternal pastures of life in the Spirit. Only so shall we draw near again to the true Being of Christ. Western humanity has drawn Christ down to its own level, drawn Him down as the helpless Child, and as one associated pre-eminently with suffering and death.
I have often pointed out that the words, “Death is evil,” fell from the Buddha's lips as long before the Mystery of Golgotha as, after the Mystery of Golgotha, there appeared the crucifix, the figure of the crucified One. And I have also shown how then, in the sixth century, men looked upon death and felt it to be no evil but something that had no real existence. But this feeling, which was an echo from an Eastern wisdom even more profound than Buddhisn, was gradually obscured by the other, which clung to the picture of the pain-racked Sufferer.
We must grasp with the whole range of our feelings — not with thoughts alone, for their range is too limited — what the fate of man's conception of the Mystery of Golgotha has been in the course of the centuries. A true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha is what we must again acquire. And be it remembered that even in the days of Hebraic antiquity, Jahve was not conceived as the Judge of the world in any juristic sense. In the Book of Job, the greatest dramatic presentation of religious experience in Hebraic antiquity, Job is presented as the suffering man, but the idea of the execution of justice from without is essentially absent. Job is the suffering man, the man who regards what outer circumstances inflict upon him, as his destiny. Only gradually does the juristic concept of retribution, punishment, become part of the world-order. Michelangelo's picture over the altar of the Sistine Chapel represents in one aspect, a kind of revival of the Jahve principle. But we need the Christ for Whom we can seek in our inmost being, because when we truly seek Him, He at once appears. We need the Christ Who draws into our will, warming, kindling, strengthening it for deeds demanded of us for the sake of human evolution. We need, not the suffering Christ, but the Christ Who hovers above the Cross, looking down upon that which — no longer a living reality — comes to an end on the Cross. We need the strong consciousness of the eternity of the Spirit, and this consciousness will not be attained if we give ourselves up to the picture of the crucifix alone. And when we see how the crucifix has gradually come to be a picture of the Man of suffering and pain, we shall realise what power this direction of human feeling has acquired. Men's gaze has been diverted from the spiritual to the earthly and physical. This aspect, it is true, has often been magnificently portrayed, but to those, as for example Goethe, who feel the need for our civilisation again to reach the Spirit, it is something, which, in a way, rouses their antipathy. Goethe has made it abundantly clear that the figure of the crucified Redeemer does not express what he feels to be the essence of Christianity, namely, the lifting of man to the Spirit.
The Good Friday mood, as well as the Easter mood, needs to be transformed. The Good Friday mood must be one that realises when contemplating the dying Jesus: This is only the other side of birth. Not to recognise that dying is also implicit in the fact of being born, is to lose sight of the full reality. A man who is able to feel that the mood of death associated with Good Friday merely presents the other pole of the entrance of the child into the world at birth, is making the right preparation for the mood of Easter — which can, in truth consist only in the knowledge: “Into whatever human sheath I have been born, my real being is both unborn and deathless.” — In his own eternal being man must unite with the Christ Who came into the world and cannot die, Who when He beholds the Man of Sorrows on the Cross, is looking down, not upon the eternal Self, but upon Himself incarnate in another.
We must be aware of what has actually happened in consequence of the fact that since the end of the first Christian century, Western civilisation has gradually lost the conception of the Spirit. When a sufficiently large number of men realise that the Spirit must come to life again in modern civilisation, the World-Easter thought will become a reality. This will express itself outwardly in the fact that man will not be satisfied with investigating the laws of nature only, or the laws of history which are akin to those of nature, but will yearn for understanding of his own will, for knowledge of his own inner freedom, and of the real nature of the will which bears him through and beyond the gate of death, but which in its true nature must be seen spiritually.
How is man to acquire the power to grasp the Pentecost thought, the outpouring of the Spirit, since this thought has been dogmatically declared by the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople to be an empty phrase? How is man to acquire the power to grasp this Pentecost thought if he is incapable of apprehending the true Easter thought — the Resurrection of the Spirit? The picture of the dying, pain-racked Redeemer must not confound him; he must learn that pain is inseparable from material existence.
The knowledge of this was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom which still sprang from instinctive depths of man's cognitional life. We must acquire this knowledge again, but now through acts of conscious cognition. It was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom that pain and suffering originate from man's union with matter. It would be foolishness to believe that because Christ passed through death as a Divine-Spiritual Being, He did not suffer pain; to declare that the pain associated with the Mystery of Golgotha was a mere semblance of pain would be to voice an unreality. In the deepest sense, this pain must be conceived as reality — and not as its mere counter-image. We must gain something from what stands before us when, in surveying the whole sweep of the evolution of humanity, we contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha.
When the picture of the man who had attained freedom at the highest level was presented to the candidates for ancient Initiation after they had completed the preparatory stages, had undergone all the exercises by which they could acquire certain knowledge presented to them in dramatic imagery, they were led at last before the figure of the Chrestos — the man suffering within the physical body, in the purple robe and wearing the crown of thorns. The sight of this Chrestos was meant to kindle in the soul the power that makes man truly man. And the drops of blood which the aspirant for Initiation beheld at vital points on the Chrestos figure were intended to be a stimulus for overcoming human weaknesses and for raising the Spirit triumphant from the inmost being. The sight of pain was meant to betoken the resurrection of the spiritual nature. The purpose of the figure before the candidate was to convey to him the deepest import of what may be expressed in these simple words: For your happiness you may thank many things in life — but if you have gained knowledge and insight into the spiritual connections of existence, for that you have to thank your Buffering, your pain. You owe your knowledge to the fact that you did not allow yourself to be mastered by suffering and pain but were strong enough to rise above them. And so in the ancient Mysteries, the figure of the suffering Chrestos was in turn replaced by the figure of the Christ triumphant Who looks down upon the suffering Chrestos as upon that which has been overcome. And now again it must be possible for the soul to have the Christ triumphant before and within it, especially in the will. That must be the ideal before us in this present time, above all in regard to what we wish to do for the future well-being of mankind.
But the true Easter thought will never be within our reach if we cannot realise that whenever we speak of Christ we must look beyond the earthly into the cosmic. Modern thinking has made the cosmos into a corpse. To-day we gaze at the stars and calculate their movements — in other words we make calculations about the corpse of the universe, never perceiving that in the stars there is life, and that the will of the cosmic Spirit prevails in their courses. Christ descended to humanity in order to unite the souls of men with this cosmic Spirit. And he alone proclaims the Gospel of Christ truly, who affirms that what the sun reveals to the physical senses is the outer expression of the Spirit of our universe, of its resurrecting Spirit.
There must be a living realisation of the connection of this Spirit of the universe with the sun, and of how the time of the Easter festival has been determined by the relationship prevailing between the sun and the moon in spring. A link must be made with that cosmic reality in accordance with which the Easter festival was established in earth-evolution. We must come to realise that it was the ever-watchful Guardian-Spirits of the cosmos who, through the great cosmic timepiece in which the sun and the moon are the hands in respect of earthly existence, have pointed explicitly to the time in the evolution of the world and of humanity at which the Festival of the Resurrection is to be celebrated. With spiritual insight we must learn to perceive the course of the sun and moon as the two hands of the cosmic time piece, just as for the affairs of physical existence we learn to understand the movements of the hands on a clock. The physical and earthly must be linked to the super-physical and the super-earthly.
The Easter thought can be interpreted only in the light of super-earthly realities, for the Mystery of Golgotha, in its aspect as the Resurrection Mystery, must be distinguished from ordinary human happenings. Human affairs take their course on the earth in an altogether different way. The earth received the cosmic forces and, in the course of its evolution, the human powers of will penetrate the metabolic processes of man's being. But since the Mystery of Golgotha took place, a new influx of will streamed into earthly happenings. There took place on earth a cosmic event, for which the earth is merely the stage. Thereby man was again united with the cosmos.
That is what must be understood, for only so can the Easter thought be grasped in all its magnitude. Therefore it is not the picture of the crucifix alone that must stand before us, however grandly and sublimely portrayed by art. “He Whom ye seek is not here” — is the thought that must arise. Above the Cross there must appear to you the One Who is here now, Who by the spirit calls you to a spirit-awakening.
This is the true Easter thought that must find its way into the evolution of mankind; it is to this that the human heart and mind must be lifted. Our age demands of us that we shall not only deepen our understanding of what has been created, but that we shall become creators of the new. And even if it be the Cross itself, in all the beauty with which artists have endowed it, we may not rest content with that picture; we must hear the words of the Angels who, when we seek in death and suffering, exclaim to us: “He Whom ye seek is no longer here.”
We have to seek the One Who is here, by turning at Eastertime to the Spirit of Whom the only true picture is that of the Resurrection. Then we shall be able, in the right way, to pass from the Good Friday mood of suffering to the spiritual mood of Easter Day. In this Easter mood we shall also be able to find the strength with which our will must be imbued if the forces of decline are to be countered by those which lead humanity upwards. We need the forces that can bring about this ascent. And the moment we truly understand the Easter thought of Resurrection, this Easter thought — bringing warmth and illumination — will kindle within us the forces needed for the future evolution of mankind.