IV
WHITSUN
A Symbol of the Immortality of the Ego
[An extract from the first lecture of Course XLIII,
Cosmic Being and Egohood,
given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, 6th June to 18th July, 1916.
(Printed by special permission).]
TO TURN our minds to thoughts connected with the Whitsun festival
seems to me less appropriate during these grave days
[Berlin, 1916.]
than would have been the case in earlier years. For mankind is passing
through fateful ordeals and at such times it is not really fitting to call
up feelings of inner warmth and exhilaration. If our feelings are right and
true we can never for a single moment forget the suffering that is now so
universal, and in a certain sense it is actually selfish to wish to
forget it in order to give ourselves up to thoughts that warm and
uplift the soul. It will therefore be more fitting to-day to speak of
certain matters bearing on the needs of the age, for our recent
studies have shown very clearly that many of the reasons for the
sufferings of the present time lie in the prevailing attitude to the
spiritual, and that it is vitally urgent to work for the development
of the human soul in order that mankind may go forward to better days.
Nevertheless I want at least to start with thoughts which will bring
home to us the meaning of a festival such as Whitsun.
There are three festivals of main importance in the course of the
year: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun. Everyone who has not become
indifferent, as is the case with the majority of our contemporaries,
to the significance of such festivals in the evolution of the world
and of humanity will at once perceive the contrasts between these
three festivals, for the difference in the kind of experiences
associated with each is expressed in their outer symbolism. Christmas
is a festival connected above all with the joys of childhood, a
festival in which a part is usually, if not always, played by the
Christmas Tree brought into the house from snow-clad nature outside.
Our thought also turns to the Christmas Plays so often performed among
us and which for centuries have brought uplift to the simplest human
hearts at this season by reminding them of the great and unique event
in earth-evolution when Jesus of Nazareth, or, to be quite exact,
Jesus who came from Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. The
festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a festival connected
with a world of feeling engendered by the Gospel of St. Luke, by those
parts of the Gospel which make the most general appeal to simple
hearts and are the easiest to understand. It is therefore a festival
of universal humanity, intelligible, to a certain extent at least,
even to the child and to men who have preserved a childlike quality of
heart and mind. Yet it brings to such childlike hearts something great
and mighty which then becomes part of their consciousness.
The Easter festival, although it is celebrated during the season when
nature is waking to life, leads our minds to the portal of death. By
contrast with the tenderness and universal appeal of the Christmas
festival, the festival of Easter contains something infinitely
sublime. If human souls are able to celebrate the Easter festival
truly, they cannot fail to be aware of its transcendent majesty. It
brings the sublime conception of the Divine Being who descended into a
human body and passed through death. The whole riddle of death and the
preservation in death itself of the eternal life of the soul
this is the great vista presented by the Easter festival.
These times of festival can be experienced in their depths only when
we recall many things made real to us by Spiritual Science. Think only
of how closely connected with all the festivals celebrated in the
world in commemoration of the births of saviours are the thoughts
arising from the Christmas festival. We are reminded, for example, of
the Mithras festival celebrating the birth of Mithras in a cave. All
these things are evidence of an intimate connection with nature. That
Christmas is a festival linked with nature is symbolised in the
Christmas Tree, and the birth, too, leads our minds to the workings
and powers of nature. But because the birth of which Spiritual Science
has so many things to say is that of Jesus of Nazareth, it is a birth
fraught with infinite significance. And remembering that the Spirit of
the earth wakens in winter, is most active during the season when
outer nature appears to lie sleeping in a mantle of ice and snow, we
can feel that the Christmas festival leads us into elemental nature
herself, and that the lighting of the Christmas candles is a symbol of
how the Spirit is awakening in the wintry darkness of nature.
If we would relate the Christmas festival to the life and being of
man, we can do so by remembering that man is also connected with
nature when he has separated from her spiritually, as he does in
sleep, when in his ego and astral body he has gone into the spiritual
world. His etheric body remains bound, supersensibly, to the physical
body, and represents the part of man's being which belongs to
elemental nature, to that elemental nature which wakens to life within
the earth when the earth is shrouded in the ice of winter. It is far
more than an analogy, indeed it is a profound truth to say that in
addition to everything else, the Christmas festival is a token that
man has in his being an etheric, elemental principle, an etheric body
through which he is linked with elemental nature.
If you think, now, of all that has been said in the course of many
years about the gradual darkening and decline of man's forces, you
will realise how closely all the forces in the human astral body are
connected with the death-bringing processes. The fact that we have to
develop the astral body during our life, and that in the astral body
we have to receive the spiritual, means that, in doing so, we bring
the seeds of death into our being. It is quite incorrect to believe
that death is connected with life in an external sense only, for the
connection is most inward and fundamental. Our life is as it is only
because we are able to die in the way we do. But this is bound up with
the whole development of man's astral body. Again it is more than an
analogy when we say: The Easter festival is a symbol for everything
that has to do with the astral nature of man, with that principle of
his being which, whenever he sleeps, leaves the physical body together
with him and enters the spiritual world whence descended that
Divine-Spiritual Being Who in Jesus of Nazareth actually passed
through death. If one were speaking in an age more alive to the
spiritual than is our own, what I have just said would be recognised
as reality, whereas in our days it is taken merely as symbolism. It
would then be realised that the purpose of instituting the Christmas
and Easter festivals was to provide man with tokens of remembrance
that he is connected with spiritual nature, with that nature that
brings death to the physical, and to provide him with tokens reminding
him that in his etheric body and astral body he is himself a bearer of
the spiritual. In our days these things have been forgotten.
They will come to light again when humanity has the will to acquire
understanding of spiritual truths such as these.
But now, besides the etheric body and the astral body, we bear within
us as that which is supremely spiritual, our Ego. We know something of
the complex nature of the Ego. We know especially that it is the Ego
which passes from incarnation to incarnation, that the inner forces of
the Ego build themselves up and shape themselves to that form which we
carry forward into our being in each new incarnation. In the Ego we
rise again from death to prepare for a new incarnation. It is by
virtue of the Ego that we are individuals. If we can say that
the etheric body represents in a certain sense that which is akin to
birth and is connected with the elemental forces of nature, that the
astral body symbolises the death-bringing principle that is connected
with the higher spirituality, so we can say that the Ego represents
our continual rising again in the spirit, our resurrection into the
spiritual realm which is neither nature nor the world of stars, but
pervades them all. And just as the Christmas festival can be connected
with the etheric body and the Easter festival with the astral body, so
the Whitsun festival can be connected with the Ego. This is the
festival which, representing the immortality of the Ego, is a token of
the fact that we, as men, do not share only in the universal life of
nature, do not merely undergo death, but that we are individual
immortal beings, rising ever and again from death.
And how beautifully this comes to expression when the Christmas
thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought are carried
further! The Christmas festival is directly connected with earthly
happenings, with the winter solstice, the time when the earth is
shrouded in deepest darkness. In celebrating the Christmas festival we
follow as it were the law by which earth-existence itself is governed;
when the nights are longest and the days shortest, when the earth is
frost-bound, we withdraw into ourselves and seek for the spiritual
that is now alive within the earth. The Christmas festival is
linked with the Spirit of the earth; it reminds us ever and again that
we belong to the earth, that the Spirit had perforce to come down from
cosmic heights and take earthly form in order to be a child of earth
among the children of earth.
The Easter festival has a different setting. You know well that Easter
is determined by the relation of the sun to the moon on the first
Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the first full moon after
the 21st March. The Easter festival, therefore, is fixed according to
the relative position of the sun to the moon. In a wonderful way,
then, the Christmas festival is linked with the earth, and the Easter
festival with the cosmos. At Christmas we are reminded of what is most
holy in the earth, at Easter of what is most holy in the heavens. But
the thought underlying the Christian festival of Whitsun is associated
in a most beautiful way with what is even above the stars the
universal, spiritual, cosmic fire which individualises and in the
fiery tongues descends upon the Apostles. It is the fire that is
neither heavenly alone nor earthly alone; it is the all-pervading fire
which individualises and passes into each single human being. In very
truth the Whitsun festival is linked with the whole universe. Just as
the Christmas festival is connected with the earth and the Easter
festival with the stars, so is the Whitsun festival directly connected
with man, with individual man, inasmuch as he receives the spark of
spiritual life out of the whole universe. What is bestowed upon
mankind in general through the descent to the earth of the Being who
was both God and Man, is made ready for every individual human being
in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. These fiery tongues represent what
lives alike in man, in the stars, in the world.
And so for those who are seeking for the spiritual, this festival of
Whitsun has a meaning and content of special profundity, calling ever
and again for perpetual renewal of the spiritual quest.
In our days it is necessary that these thoughts of the festival should
be taken in a deeper sense than at other times. For how we shall
emerge from the grievous events of this age will depend very largely
upon how deeply men are able to experience these thoughts. That souls
will have themselves to work their way out of the present catastrophic
conditions is already beginning to be realised here and there. And
those who have come to Spiritual Science should feel with even greater
intensity the need of the age for new strength to be infused into the
spiritual life, the need to surmount materialism. This victory over
materialism will only be possible if men have the will to kindle the
spiritual world into living activity within them, to celebrate the
Whitsun festival inwardly and with true earnestness.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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