LECTURE
VI
By
taking our start from what was said yesterday, we shall be able to
come nearer to the fundamental questions of Christianity and to
penetrate into its essential nature. We shall see that only by this
means can we see into the heart of what the Christ-Impulse has become
for the evolution of humanity and what it will become in the future.
People are always
insisting that the answers to the highest questions must not be
complicated; the truth must be brought directly to each person in the
simplest way. In support of this they argue, for example, that the
Apostle John in his last years expressed the quintessence of
Christianity in words of truth: ‘Children, love one another.’
No one, however, should conclude that a person who simply pronounces
the words, ‘Children, love one another’, knows the
essence of Christianity and of all truth for men. Before the Apostle
John was entitled to pronounce these words, he had fulfilled various
preconditions. We know it was at the end of a long life, in his
ninety-fifth year, that he came to this utterance; only by then, in
that particular incarnation, had he earned the right to use such
words, Indeed, he stands there as a witness that this saying, if it
came from any chance individual, would not have the power it had from
him. For he had achieved something else, also. Although the critics
dispute it, he was the author of the John Gospel, the Apocalypse, and
the Epistles of John. Throughout his life he had not always said,
‘Children, love one another!’ He had written a work which
belongs to the most difficult productions of man, the Apocalypse, and
the John Gospel, which penetrates most intimately and deeply into the
human soul. He had gained the right to pronounce such a saying only
through a long life and through what he had accomplished. If anyone
lives a life such as his, and does what he did, and then says, as he
did, ‘Children, love one another!’ there are no grounds
for objecting to it. We must, however, be quite clear that al-though
some things can be compressed into a few words, so that these few
words signify very much, the same few words may also say nothing.
Many a person who pronounces a word of wisdom which in its proper
setting would perhaps signify something very deep, believes that by
merely uttering it he has said a very great deal.
The writer of the
Apocalypse and of the John Gospel, in his greatest age, could speak
the words ‘Children, love one another!’ out of the
essence of Christianity, but the same words from the mouth of another
person may be a mere phrase. We must gather matters for the
understanding of Christianity from far a field, so that we may apply
them to the simplest truths of daily life.
Yesterday we had to approach the question, so fateful for modern thought:
What are we to make of the physical body in relation to the four-fold
being of man?
We shall see how the
points brought out yesterday in looking at the differing views of the
Greeks, the ancient Hebrews and the Buddhists will lead us further
towards understanding the nature of Christianity. But if we are to
learn more concerning the fate of the physical body, we must first
take up a question which is central to the whole Christian cosmic
conception; a question which lies at the very core of Christianity:
How it is with the Resurrection of Christ? Must we not assume that
for the understanding of Christianity it is essential to reach an
understanding of the Resurrection?
To see how important this is, we need only recall a passage in the
first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians,
(I Corinthians XV:14–20):
If Christ has not
been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in
vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it
is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised,
then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your
faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who
have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life we who
are in Christ have only hope, we are of all men most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of
those who have fallen asleep. (Quotations from the New Testament are
in the Revised Standard Version, 1946.)
We must remember that Christianity, in so far as it has
extended over the world, began with Paul. And if we are disposed to
take these important words seriously, we cannot simply pass them over
by saying that we must leave the question of the Resurrection
unexplained. For what is it that Paul says? That the whole of
Christianity has no justification, and the whole Christian Faith no
meaning, if the Resurrection is not true! That is what is said by
Paul, with whom Christianity as a fact of history had its
starting-point. And it means that anyone who is willing to give up
the Resurrection must give up Christianity as Paul understood it.
And now let us pass
over almost two thousand years and ask people of the present day how,
according to the requirements of modern culture, they stand with
regard to the question of the Resurrection. I shall not now take note
of those who simply deny Jesus entirely; it is naturally quite easy
for them to be clear regarding the question of the Resurrection. If
Jesus never lived, one need not trouble about the Resurrection.
Leaving such persons aside, we will turn to those who about the
middle or in the last third of the nineteenth century had accepted
the current ideas of our time — the time in which we are still
living. We will ask them what they think, in conformity with the
whole culture of our day, concerning the question of the
Resurrection.
We will take a man
who has gained great influence over the way of thinking of those who
consider themselves best informed — David Friedrich Strauss. In
his work on Reimarus, a thinker of the eighteenth century, we read:
‘The Resurrection of Jesus is really a shibboleth, concerning
which not only the various conceptions of Christianity, but the
various world-philosophies and stages of spiritual evolution, are at
variance.’ And in a Swiss journal almost of the same date we
read: ‘As soon as I can convince myself of the reality of the
Resurrection of Christ, this absolute miracle, I tear down the modern
conception of the world. This breach in what I believe to be the
inviolable order of Nature would make an irreparable rent in my
system, in my whole thought-world.’
Let us ask how many
persons of our present time who, according to the modern standpoint,
must and do subscribe to these words, would say, ‘If I were
obliged to recognise the Resurrection as historical fact, I would
tear down my whole system of thought, philosophical or otherwise.’
Let us ask how should the Resurrection, as historical fact, fit in
with a modern man's outlook on the world.
Let us recall
something indicated in my first public lecture on this subject, that
the Gospels are to be taken first and foremost as Initiation
writings. The leading events depicted in the Gospels are
fundamentally Initiation events — events which had formerly
taken place within the secret places of the temples of the Mysteries,
when this or that person, who had been deemed worthy, was initiated
by the hierophants. Such a person, after he had been prepared for a
long time, went through a kind of death and a kind of resurrection.
He had also to go through certain situations in life which re-appear
for us in the Gospels — in the story of the Temptation, the
story set on the Mount of Olives, and other similar ones. That is why
the accounts of ancient Initiates, which do not aim to be biographies
in the usual sense, show such resemblance to the Gospel stories of
Christ Jesus. And when we read the history of the greatest initiates,
of Apollonius of Tyana, or indeed even of Buddha or Zarathustra, or
the life of Osiris or of Orpheus, it often seems that important
characteristics of their lives are the same as those narrated of
Christ Jesus in the Gospels. But although we must grant that we have
to seek in the Initiation ceremonies of the old Mysteries for the
prototypes of important events narrated in the Gospels, on the other
hand we see quite clearly that the great teachings of the life of
Christ Jesus are saturated throughout with individual details which
are not intended as a mere repetition of Initiation ceremonies, but
make it very plain that what is described is actual fact. Must we not
say that we receive a remarkably factual impression when the
following is pictured for us in the Gospel of John XX:1–10:
Now on the first day
of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still
dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So
she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom
Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of
the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Peter
then came out with the other disciple, and they went towards the
tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached
the tomb first; and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths
lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following
him, and he went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and
the napkins, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen
cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple,
who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed;
for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from
the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.
But Mary stood
weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into
the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of
Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to
her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them,
‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where
they have laid him.’ Saying this, she turned and saw Jesus
standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her,
‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?’ Supposing
him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have
carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him
away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned and
said to him in Hebrew,
‘Rab-boni!’
(which means Teacher). Jesus said to her,
‘Do not hold
me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren
and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my
God and your God.’
Here is a situation
described in such detail that if we wish to picture it in imagination
there is hardly anything lacking — when, for example, it is
said that the one disciple runs faster than the other, or that the
napkin which had covered the head was laid aside in another place,
and so on. In every detail something is described which would have no
meaning if it did not refer to a fact. Attention was drawn on a
former occasion to one detail, that Mary did not recognise Christ
Jesus, and we asked how was it possible that after three days anyone
could fail to recognise in the same form a person previously known.
Hence we had to note that Christ appeared to Mary in a changed form,
or these words would have no meaning.
Here, therefore, a
distinction must be kept in mind. First, we have to understand the
Resurrection as a translation into historic fact of the awakening
that took place in the holy Mysteries of all times, only with the
difference that he who in the Mysteries raised up the individual
pupil was the hierophant; while the Gospels indicate that He who
raised up Christ is the Being whom we designate as the Father —
that the Father Himself raised up the Christ. Here we are shown that
what had formerly been carried out on a small scale in the depths of
the Mysteries was now and once for all enacted for humanity by Divine
Spirits, and that the Being who is designated as the Father acted as
hierophant in the raising to life of Christ Jesus. Thus we have here,
enhanced to the highest degree, something which formerly had taken
place on a small scale in the Mysteries.
That is the first
point. The other is that, interwoven with matters which carry us back
to the Mysteries, there are descriptions so detailed that even to-day
we can reconstruct from the Gospels the situations even to their
minute particulars, as we have just seen in the passage read to you.
But this passage includes one detail that calls for particular
attention. There must be a meaning in the words, ‘For they did
not as yet know the Scripture, that He must rise from the dead. Then
the disciples went back to their homes.’ Let us ask: Of what
had the disciples been able so far to convince them-selves? It is
described as clearly as anything can be that the linen wrappings are
there, but the body is not there, is no longer in the grave. The
disciples had not been able to convince themselves of anything else,
and they understood nothing else when they now went home. Otherwise
the words have no meaning. The more deeply you enter into the text,
the more you must say that the disciples who were standing by the
grave were convinced that the linen wrappings were there, but that
the body was no longer in the grave. They went home with the thought:
‘Where has the body gone? Who has taken it out of the grave?’
And now, from the
conviction that the body is not there, the Gospels lead us slowly to
the events through which the disciples were finally convinced of the
Resurrection. How were they convinced? Through the fact that, as the
Gospels relate, Christ appeared to them by degrees, so that they
could say, ‘He is there!’, and this went so far that
Thomas, called the Doubter, could lay his finger in the prints of the
wounds. In short, we can see from the Gospels that the disciples
became convinced of the Resurrection through Christ having come to
them after it as the Risen One. The proof for the disciples was that
He was there. And if these disciples, who had gradually come to the
conviction that Christ was alive, although He had died, had been
asked what they actually believed, they would have said: ‘We
have proofs that Christ lives.’ But they certainly would not
have spoken as Paul spoke later, after he had gone through his
experience on the road to Damascus.
Anyone who allows
the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles to work upon him will notice the
deep underlying difference between the fundamental tone of the
Gospels as regards the understanding of the Resurrection, and the
Pauline conception of it. Paul, indeed, draws a parallel between his
conviction of the Resurrection and that of the Gospels, for in saying
‘Christ is risen’, he indicates that Christ, after He had
been crucified, appeared as a living Being to Cephas, to the Twelve,
then to five hundred brethren at one time; and last of all to
himself, Paul, as to one born out of due time, Christ had appeared
from out of the fiery glory of the Spiritual. Christ had appeared to
the disciples also; Paul refers to that, and the events lived through
with the Risen One were the same for Paul as they had been for the
disciples. But what Paul immediately joins to these, as the outcome
for him of the event of Damascus, is his wonderful and easily
comprehensible theory of the Being of Christ.
What, from the event
of Damascus onwards, was the Being of Christ for Paul? The Being of
Christ was for him the ‘Second Adam’; and he immediately
differentiates between the first Adam and the second Adam, the
Christ. He calls the first Adam the progenitor of men on Earth
because he sees in him the first man, from whom all other men are
descended. For Paul, it is Adam who has bequeathed to human beings
the body which they carry about with them as a physical body. All men
have inherited their physical body from Adam. This is the body which
meets us in external Maya, and is mortal; it is the body inherited
from Adam, the corruptible body, the physical body of man that decays
in death. With this body men are ‘clothed’. The second
Adam, Christ, is regarded by Paul as possessing, in contrast to the
first, the incorruptible, the immortal body. Paul then affirms that
through Christian evolution men are gradually made ready to put on
the second Adam in place of the first Adam; the incorruptible body of
the second Adam, Christ, in place of the corruptible body of the
first Adam. What Paul seems to require of all who call themselves
true Christians is some-thing that violates all the old conceptions
of the world. As the first corruptible body is descended from Adam,
so must the incorruptible body originate from the second Adam, from
Christ. Every Christian could say: ‘Because I am descended from
Adam, I have a corruptible body as Adam had; but in that I set myself
in the right relationship to Christ, I receive from Him, the second
Adam, an incorruptible body.’ For Paul, this view shines out
directly from the experience of Damascus. We can perhaps express what
Paul wishes to say by means of a simple diagram:
| Diagram 6 Click image for large view | |
Here we have (x, x ...) a number of people at a given time. Paul would
trace them all back to the first Adam, from whom they are all descended
and by whom they are given the corruptible body. According to Paul's
conception, however, something else is possible. Just as human beings
can say, ‘We are related because we are all descended from the
one progenitor, Adam,’ so they can say, ‘As without any
action of ours, through the relationships of human generation lines
can be traced back to Adam, so it is possible for us to cause
something else to arise within us; something that could make us
different beings. Just as the natural lines lead back to Adam, so it
must be possible to represent lines which lead, not to the
corruptible body of the fleshly Adam, but to the body that is
incorruptible. Through our relationship to Christ, we can —
according to the Pauline view — bear this incorruptible body
within us, just as through Adam we bear the Corruptible body.’
| Diagram 5 Click image for large view | |
There is nothing more uncomfortable for the modern consciousness than
this idea. For looking at the matter quite soberly, what does it demand
from us? It demands something which, for modern thought, is really
monstrous. Modern thought has long disputed whether all human beings
are descended from one primeval human being, but it may be allowed
that all are descended from a single human being who was the first on
earth as regards physical consciousness. Paul, however, demands the
following. He says: ‘If you desire to be a Christian in the
true sense, you must conceive that within you something can arise
which can live in you, and from which you can draw spiritual lines to
a second Adam, to Christ, to that very Christ who on the third day
rose from the grave, just as all men can trace lines back to the
physical body of the first Adam.’ So Paul demands that all who
call themselves Christians should cause something within them to
arise; something leading to that entity which on the third day rose
out of the grave in which the body of Christ Jesus had been laid.
Anyone who does not grant this cannot come into any relationship with
Paul; he cannot say he understands Paul. If man, as regards his
corruptible body, is descended from the first Adam, then, by
receiving the Being of Christ into his own being, he has the
possibility of having a second ancestor. This ancestor, however, is
He who, on the third day after His body had been laid in the earth,
rose out of the grave.
Let us clearly
understand that Paul makes this demand, however displeasing it may be
to modern thinkers. From this Pauline statement we will indeed
approach the modern thinker; but one ought not to have any other
opinion concerning that which meets us so clearly in the Pauline
writings; one ought not to twist the meaning of something so clearly
expressed by Paul. Certainly it is pleasant to interpret something
allegorically and to say it was meant in such and such a way; but all
these interpretations make no sense. If we wish to connect a meaning
with the Pauline statement we are bound to say — even if modern
consciousness regards it as superstition — that, according to
Paul, Christ rose from the dead after three days.
Let us go further.
An assertion such as this, made by Paul after he had reached the
summit of his initiation through the event of Damascus — the
assertion concerning the second Adam and His rising from the grave —
could be made only by someone whose whole mode of thought and outlook
had been derived from Greek thought; by one whose roots were in
Greece, even if he were also a Hebrew; by one who in a certain
respect had brought all his Hebraism as an offering to the Greek
mind. For, if we come closer to all this, what is it that Paul really
declares? Looking with inner vision on that which the Greeks loved
and valued, the external form of the human body, concerning which
they had the tragic feeling that it comes to an end when the
individual passes through the gate of death, Paul says: ‘With
the Resurrection of Christ, the body has been raised in triumph from
the grave.’ If we are to build a bridge between these two
world-outlooks, we can best do it in the following way.
The Greek hero said
from his Greek feeling: ‘Better a beggar in the upper world
than a king in the land of shades.’ He said this because he was
convinced that the external form of the physical body, so highly
cherished by the Greeks, was lost for ever in passing through the
gate of death. On this same soil, out of which this tragic mood of
intoxication with beauty had grown, Paul appeared, he who first
proclaimed the Gospel to the Greeks. We do not deviate from his words
if we translate them as follows: ‘That which you value above
all, the human bodily form, will no longer be destroyed. Christ is
risen as the first of those who are raised from the dead! The Form of
the physical body is not lost, but is given back to humanity through
the Resurrection of Christ!’ That which the Greeks valued most
highly was given back to them with the Resurrection by Paul the Jew,
who had been steeped in Greek culture. Only a Greek would so think
and speak, but only someone who had become a Greek with all the
preconceptions derived from his Jewish ancestry. Only a Jew who had
become a Greek could speak in this way; no one else.
But how can we
approach these things from the stand-point of Spiritual Science? For
we have reached the point of knowing that Paul demands something
which thoroughly upsets the calculations of the modern thinker. Let
us endeavour from the standpoint of Spiritual Science to get nearer
to what Paul demands. Let us collect what we know from Spiritual
Science, so as to bring an idea to meet Paul's statement.
When we review the
very simplest spiritual-scientific truths, we know that man consists
of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. If now you ask
someone who has studied Spiritual Science a little, but not very
thoroughly, whether he knows the physical body of man, he will be
sure to answer: ‘I know it quite well, for I see it when a
person stands before me. The other members are super-sensible,
invisible, and one cannot see them, but the physical human body I
know very well.’ Is it really the physical body of man that
appears before our eyes when we meet a man with our ordinary vision?
I ask you, who without clairvoyant vision has ever seen a physical
human body? What is it that people have before them if they see only
with physical eyes and physical understanding? A human body, but one
consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. And
when a man stands before us, it is as an organised assembly of
physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego. It would make as
little sense to say that a physical body stood before us as it would
if, when giving someone a glass of water, we were to say, ‘There
is hydrogen in that glass.’ Water consists of hydrogen and
oxygen, as man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies, and
Ego. Their assemblage is visible, just as water is, but the hydrogen
and oxygen are not. Anyone who said he saw hydrogen in the water
would be obviously mistaken. So is anyone who thinks he sees the
physical body when he sees a man in the external world. What he
normally sees is not a physical human body, but a four-membered
being. He sees the physical body only in so far as it is permeated by
the other members of the human being. And it is then changed in the
same way that hydrogen is changed when it is permeated with oxygen in
water. For hydrogen is a gas, and oxygen also; from the two gases
united we get a liquid. Why should it be incomprehensible that the
man who meets us in the physical world is quite unlike his single
members, the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego, just as
water is quite unlike hydrogen? And so he is! Hence we cannot rely
upon the Maya which appears to us as the physical body. We must think
of the physical body in a quite different way if we want to draw
nearer to its nature.
The observation of
the physical human body, in itself, belongs to the most difficult
clairvoyant problems, the hardest of all! Suppose we allow the
external world to per-form on man the experiment which is similar to
the disintegration of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In death this
experiment is performed by the great world. We then see how man lays
aside his physical body. But does he really lay aside his physical
body? The question seems absurd, for what could be clearer than the
apparent fact that at death man lays aside his physical body? But
what is it that he lays aside? It is something no longer imbued with
the physical body's most important possession during life: its
Form. Directly after death the Form begins to withdraw from the dead
body. We are left with decaying substances, no longer characterised
by the Form. The body laid aside is composed of substances and
elements which we can trace also in Nature; in the natural order of
things they would not produce a human Form. Yet this Form belongs
quite essentially to the physical human body. To ordinary
clairvoyance it seems evident that at death a person simply discards
these material substances, which are then handed over to decay or
burning, and that nothing of the physical body is left. The
clairvoyant then observes how after death the Ego, astral body, and
etheric body remain connected during the person's review of his
past life. Then he sees how the etheric body separates itself, how an
extract of it remains, while the main portion dissolves in one way or
another into the general cosmic ether. It does indeed seem that the
person has laid aside his physical body, with its substances and
forces, and then, after a few days, the etheric body. When the
clairvoyant follows the person further through the Kamaloka period,
he sees how an extract of the astral body goes with him during the
life between death and a new birth, while the rest of the astral body
is given over to the cosmic astrality.
So we see that
physical, etheric and astral bodies are laid aside, and that the
physical body seems to drain away completely into materials and
forces which, through decay or burning or some other form of
dissolution, are returned to the elements. But the more clairvoyance
is developed in our time, the clearer will it be that the physical
forces and sub-stances laid aside are not the whole physical body,
for its complete configuration could never derive from them alone. To
these substances and forces there belongs something else, best called
the ‘Phantom’ of the man. This Phantom is the Form-shape
which as a spiritual texture works up the physical substances and
forces so that they fill out the Form which we encounter as the man
on the physical plane. The sculptor can bring no statue into
existence if he merely takes marble or something else, and strikes
away wildly so that single pieces spring off just as the substance
permits. As the sculptor must have the ‘thought’ which he
impresses on the substance, so is a ‘thought’ related to
the human body: not in the same way as the thought of the artist, for
the material of the human body is not marble or plaster, but as a
real thought, the Phantom, in the external world. Just as the thought
of the plastic artist is stamped upon his material, so the Phantom of
the physical body is stamped upon the substances of the earth which
we see given over after death to the grave or the fire. The Phantom
belongs to the physical body as its enduring part, a more important
part than the external substances. The external substances are merely
loaded into the network of the human Form, as one might load apples
into a cart. You can see how important the Phantom is. The substances
which fall asunder after death are essentially those we meet
externally in nature. They are merely caught up by the human Form.
If you think more
deeply, can you believe that all the work of the great Divine Spirits
though the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods has merely created something
which is handed over at death to the elements of the Earth? No —
that which was developed during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods is
not the physical body that is laid aside at death. It is the Phantom,
the Form, of the physical body. We must be quite clear that to
understand the physical body is not an easy thing. Above all, this
understanding must not be sought for in the world of illusion, the
world of Maya. We know that the foundation, the germ, of this Phantom
of the physical body was laid down by the Thrones during the Saturn
period; during the Sun period the Spirits of Wisdom worked further
upon it, the Spirits of Movement during the Moon period, and the
Spirits of Form during the Earth period. And it is only in this
period that the physical body received the Phantom. We call these
Spirits the Spirits of Form, because they really live in the Phantom
of the physical body. So in order to understand the physical body, we
must go back to the Phantom.
If we look back to
the beginning of our Earth-existence, we can say that the hosts from
the ranks of the higher Hierarchies who had prepared the physical
human body in its own proper Form during the Saturn, Sun and Moon
periods, up to the Earth period, had from the outset placed this
Phantom within the Earth evolution. In fact the Phantom, which cannot
be seen with the physical eye, was what was first there of the
physical body of man. It is a transparent body of force. What the
physical eye sees are the physical substances which a person eats and
takes into himself, and they fill out the invisible Phantom. If the
physical eye looks upon a physical body, what it sees is the mineral
part that fills the physical body, not the physical body itself. But
how has this mineral part found its way into the Phantom of man's
physical body? To answer this question, let us picture once more the
genesis, the first ‘becoming’, of man on Earth.
From Saturn, Sun and
Moon there came over that network of forces which in its true form
meets us as the invisible Phantom of the physical body. For a higher
clairvoyance it appears as Phantom only when we look away from all
the external substance that fills it out. This is the Phantom which
stands at the starting-point of man's Earth existence, when he
was invisible as a physical body. Let us suppose that to this Phantom
of the physical body the etheric body is added; will the Phantom then
become visible? Certainly not; for the etheric body is invisible for
ordinary sight. Thus the physical body as Phantom, plus etheric body,
is still invisible to external physical sense. And the astral body
even more so; hence the combination of physical body as Phantom with
the etheric and astral bodies is still invisible. And when the Ego is
added it would certainly become perceptible inwardly, but not
externally visible. Thus, as man came over out of the Saturn, Sun,
and Moon periods, he was still visible only to a clairvoyant. How did
he become visible? But for the occurrence described in the Bible
symbolically, and factually in occult science, as the entry of the
Lucifer influence, he would not have become visible. What happened
through that influence?
Read what is said in
Occult Science. Out of that path of evolution in which his physical,
etheric and astral bodies were still invisible, man was thrown down
into denser matter, and was compelled under the influence of Lucifer
to take this denser matter into himself. If the Lucifer force had not
been introduced into our astral body and Ego, this dense materiality
would not have become as visible as it has become. Hence we have to
represent man as an invisible being, made visible in matter only
through forces which entered into him under the influence of Lucifer.
Through this influence external substances and forces are drawn into
the domain of the Phantom and permeate it. As when we pour a coloured
fluid into a transparent glass, so that the glass looks coloured, so
we can imagine that the Lucifer influence poured forces into the
human Phantom, with the result that man was adapted for taking in on
Earth the requisite substances and forces which make his Form
visible. Otherwise his physical body would have remained always
invisible.
The alchemists
always insisted that the human body really consists of the same
substance that constitutes the perfectly transparent, crystal-clear
‘Philosopher's Stone’. The physical body is itself
entirely transparent, and it is the Lucifer forces in man which have
brought him to a non-transparent state and placed him before us so
that he is opaque and tangible. Hence you will understand that man
has become a being who takes up external substances and forces of the
Earth, which are given off again at death, only because Lucifer
tempted him, and certain forces were poured into his astral body. It
follows that because the Ego entered into connection with the
physical, etheric and astral bodies under the influence of Lucifer,
man became what he is on earth and otherwise would not have been —
the bearer of a visible, earthly organism.
Now let us suppose
that at a certain point of time in life the Ego were to go out from a
human organism, so that there stood before us physical, etheric and
astral bodies, but not the Ego. This is what happened in the case of
Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year of His life. The human Ego
then left this cohesion of physical, etheric and astral bodies. And
into this cohesion the Christ-Being entered at the Baptism in Jordan.
We now have the physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man, and the
Christ-Being. The Christ-Being had now taken up His abode in a human
organism, as otherwise the Ego would have done. What now
differentiates this Christ Jesus from all other men on Earth? It is
this: that all other men bear within them an Ego that once was
overcome by Lucifer's temptation, but Jesus no longer bears an
Ego within Him; instead, He bears the Christ-Being. So that from this
time, beginning with the Baptism in Jordan, Jesus bears within
Himself the residual effects that had come from Lucifer, but with no
human Ego to allow any further Luciferic influences to enter his
body. A physical body, an etheric body, and astral body — in
which the residue of the earlier Luciferic influences was present,
but into which no more Luciferic influence could enter — and
the Christ-Being: thus was Christ Jesus constituted.
Let us set before us
exactly what the Christ is from the Baptism in Jordan until the
Mystery of Golgotha: a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral
body which makes this physical body together with the etheric body
visible because it still contains the residue of the Luciferic
influence. Because the Christ-Being had the astral body that Jesus of
Nazareth had had from birth to his thirtieth year, the physical body
was visible as the bearer of the Christ. Thus from the time of the
Baptism in Jordan we have before us a physical body which as such
would not be visible on the physical plane; an etheric body which as
such would not have been perceptible; the astral body which makes the
other two bodies visible and so makes the body of Jesus of Nazareth
into a visible body; and, within this organism, the Christ-Being.
We will inscribe
firmly in our souls this four-fold nature of Christ Jesus, saying to
ourselves: Every person who stands before us on the physical plane
consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego; and
this Ego is such that it always works into the astral body up to the
hour of death. The Christ-Jesus-Being, however, stands before us as
One who had physical body, etheric body and astral body, but no human
Ego, so that during the three years up to his death he was not
subject to the influences that normally work upon human beings. The
only influence came from the Christ-Being.
From this starting-point we will continue to-morrow.
|