LECTURE
VII
Yesterday
we saw that in a certain respect the question of Christianity is the
question of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. In particular, we spoke
of Paul, the proclaimer of Christianity, who from his knowledge of
the essential nature of the Christ-Impulse recognised immediately
that after and since the Event of Golgotha, Christ lives. We saw that
for Paul, after his experience on the road to Damascus, a powerful,
magnificent picture of human evolution opened up.
From this point we
went on to build up a picture of what Christ Jesus was directly after
the Baptism in Jordan by John. Our next task will be to inquire into
the course of events from the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha. But
if we are to rise to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, we
must clear away certain hindrances. From all that has been said
concerning the Gospels in the course of years, and also from what has
been said already in these few lectures, you will have been able to
gather that certain theosophical ideas, which in some quarters are
esteemed sufficient, are really not sufficient to answer the question
with which we are here concerned.
Before everything
else we must take quite seriously what has been said about the three
streams of human thought: the stream which has its source in ancient
Greece; the stream which comes down from ancient Hebraism, and lastly
the stream which found expression in Gautama Buddha half a millennium
before our era. We have seen that this Buddha stream, especially as
it developed among his followers, is least of all adapted to an
understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. To the modern man, whose
consciousness is filled with the intellectual culture of the present
day, the stream of thought which finds expression in Buddhism
certainly offers something very pleasant. Hardly any other form of
thought suits so well the concepts of the present day, in so far as
they prefer to remain silent in face of the greatest question that
humanity has to grasp — the question of the Resurrection. For
with this question the whole evolutionary history of mankind is
connected. Now in Buddhist teaching the real being of the Ego, which
in the true sense we can call the fourth member of human nature, has
been lost. Certainly in these matters one can employ all kinds of
interpretations, one can twist them in all sorts of ways, and plenty
of people will find fault with what has been said here about Buddhist
teaching, but that is not the point. For such things as I have quoted
from the heart of Buddhism — for example, the conversation
between King Milinda and the Buddhist sage Nagasena — testify
clearly that the Ego-nature cannot be spoken of in Buddhism as we
must speak of it. For a genuine follower of Buddhism it would indeed
be heretical to speak of the Ego-nature as we must represent it. On
this very account we must ourselves be clear regarding the
Ego-nature.
The human Ego, which
in the case of every human being, even of the highest Adept, passes
from incarnation to incarnation, is a term which (as we saw
yesterday) can be applied to Jesus of Nazareth only from his birth to
the Baptism in Jordan. After the baptism, we still have before us the
physical body, the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of
Nazareth; but these external human sheaths are now in-dwelt not by a
human Ego but by a Cosmic Being, the Christ-Being. Through years of
endeavour we have tried by means of words to bring the Christ-Being
nearer to our understanding. As soon as one comprehends the whole
nature of Christ Jesus, it is obvious that for Him one must rule out
any kind of physical or bodily reincarnation. The expression employed
in my mystery drama,
The Soul's Probation,
about Christ having
been present once only in a body of flesh, must be taken seriously
and quite literally. Accordingly we must first concern ourselves with
the being, the nature, of the ordinary human Ego. The
Christ-Jesus-Being was completely independent of the human Ego from
the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha.
In earlier lectures
it was shown that the evolution of the earth was preceded by a Saturn
existence, a Sun existence and a Moon existence, and these three
planetary embodiments were followed by the fourth, our
Earth-embodiment. You know from those lectures that only during the
Earth-existence, the fourth of the planetary conditions which were
necessary to bring into existence our Earth with all its creatures,
could the human Ego enter into connection with human nature. Just as
in the Ancient Saturn period we speak of the beginning of the
physical body, so in the period of the ancient Sun we speak of the
first development of the etheric body, in the Moon period of the
first development of the astral body, and only in the Earth period of
the unfolding of the Ego. In this way the whole matter is brought
cosmic-ally and historically into view. But how is it when we look at
the history of peoples?
Through our former
studies we know that although the seed-kernel of the Ego was laid
down in human beings during the Lemurian time, the possibility of
attaining to Ego-consciousness arose only towards the end of the
Atlantean period, and that even then this Ego-consciousness was very
dim and vague. Indeed, after the Atlantean time, through the various
periods of civilisation which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, the
Ego-consciousness was still dull, dream-like, dim. But if you turn
your attention to the development of the Hebrew people, it will be
clear to you that here the Ego-consciousness found expression in a
very unusual way. A kind of Folk-Ego lived in each single member of
the ancient Hebrew people; in fact, every member of this people
traced his Ego back to his ancestor in the flesh, to Abraham. The Ego
of the ancient Hebrew people was still such that we can designate it
as a Group-Ego, a Folk-Group-Ego. Consciousness had not yet
penetrated as far as the separate individuality in each man. Why was
this so?
Each part of the
four-membered human being we now regard as normal developed gradually
in the course of the earth's evolution. It was only towards the
end of the Atlantean Period that part of the etheric body, which
until then had been external to the physical body, was gradually
drawn into the body. This led towards the condition now recognised by
clairvoyant consciousness as normal, namely that the physical body
and the etheric body approximately coincide, and only then was it
possible for man to develop his Ego-consciousness Let us slowly and
gradually form an impression of the very peculiar way in which this
Ego-consciousness meets us in man.
I described
yesterday how people speak of the Resurrection when they approach it
with all the intellectual preconceptions of the present day. If, they
say, ‘I had to assent to the real Pauline teaching about the
Resurrection, I would have to tear up my whole conception of the
world.’ That is what they say, these up-to-date people who have
at their command all the resources of modern intellectualism. To
people who speak thus, what must now be said will seem very strange.
But is it not
possible that such a person might reflect: ‘Yes, if I am to
accept the Resurrection, I shall have to tear up all my intellectual
concepts. But is that a reason for setting this question aside?
Because we cannot understand the Resurrection and have to regard it
as a miracle, must we assume that the only way out of this difficulty
is to pass it by? Is there no other way?’
The other way is far
from easy for a modern man, for he would have to admit to himself:
‘Perhaps it is not the fault of the Resurrection that I am
unable to understand it. Perhaps the reason is that my intellect is
unfitted to understand it.’
So little is this
matter taken seriously in our day that we may say: Modern man is
prevented by his pride — and just because he does not suspect
that pride could come into it — from admitting that his
intellect may be incompetent to fathom this question. For which is
more reasonable: to say that I am setting aside something that
shatters my intellectual outlook, or to admit that it may be beyond
my under-standing? Pride, however, forbids this admission.
Of course, an
anthroposophist must have trained himself to rise above this kind of
pride. It should not be far from the heart of a true anthroposophist
to say: ‘Perhaps my intellect is not competent to form an
opinion about the Resurrection.’ But then he has to face
another difficulty: he now has to answer the question why the human
mind is not adapted to comprehend the greatest fact in human
evolution. To answer this question we must go somewhat more closely
into the real nature of human understanding. Here I should like to
remind you of my Munich lectures, Wonders of the World, of which I
will now give a resume as far as we need one.
The elements that go to make up our soul life, our thoughts, feelings and
perceptions, are not to be found in our present-day physical body;
they penetrate only as far as the etheric body. In order to be clear
about this, let us imagine our human nature, in so far as it consists
of Ego, astral body and etheric body, enclosed in an ellipse:
| Diagram 7 Click image for large view | |
We will take this diagram to represent schematically what we call our
inward life and can experience in our souls; the diagram shows it coming
to expression only in the streams and forces of the etheric body. If we
experience a thought or perception, it has three lines of action in
our soul-nature, as indicated in the following diagram.
| Diagram 8 Click image for large view | |
Within our soul-nature there is nothing that is not present in this way.
Now if a man's ordinary earthly consciousness were restricted to
soul-experiences within the confines of the diagram, the experiences
would occur, but he would not be conscious of them; they would remain
unconscious. Our soul-experiences become conscious only through a
process which an analogy will help us to understand. Imagine you are
going in a certain direction, looking straight ahead. Your name is
Smith. While you are going straight ahead you do not see Smith, yet
you are he, you experience him, you are the person ‘Smith’.
Imagine that someone puts a mirror in front of you. Now ‘Smith’
stands before you. What you had previously experienced you now see;
it meets you in the mirror. So it is with the soul-life of man. A
person has an experience, but he does not become conscious of it
without a mirror. The mirror is the physical body. The perceptions,
the thoughts, are thrown back by the sheath of the physical body.
Thereby we become conscious of them. Hence in the diagram we can
represent the physical body as the enclosing sheath. For us, as
earthly men, the physical body is in truth a reflecting apparatus.
If in this way you
go more and more deeply into the nature of the human soul and of
human consciousness, it will be impossible for you to consider as in
any way dangerous or significant all those things which are brought
forward again and again by materialism in opposition to the spiritual
conception of the world. If through any damage to the reflecting
apparatus, the soul-experience is no longer perceived by the
consciousness, it is absolute nonsense to conclude that the
soul-experience itself is bound up with the mirror. If someone breaks
a mirror in which you see yourself, he does not break you. You merely
disappear from your own field of vision. So it is when the reflecting
apparatus for the soul-life, the brain, is disturbed. Perception
ceases, but the soul-life itself, in so far as it goes on in the
etheric body and the astral body, is not in the least disturbed.
But have we not come
to a point when we must consider closely the nature of the physical
body? You will agree that without consciousness we could not be
conscious of the Ego. In order to make Ego-consciousness our own
during life on earth, our physical body, with its brain organisation,
has to be a reflecting apparatus. We learn to become conscious of
ourselves through our own mirrored reflection. If we had no mirror
apparatus, we could not be conscious of our own selves. What is this
mirror?
We are shown by
occult investigations, which reach back through reading the Akashic
record as far as the origin of our earth existence, that in the
beginning of Earth-existence this reflecting apparatus, the external
physical body, came under Luciferic influence and was changed.
Yesterday we saw what this physical body has become for earthly man.
It has become something that falls to pieces when he passes through
the gate of death. We have said that the body which falls to pieces
is not the body which Divine Spirits had pre-pared through four
planetary evolutions so that it should become the physical body on
earth. What the Divine Spirits prepared, which yesterday we called
the Phantom, belongs to the physical body as a form-body which
permeates, and at the same time holds together, the material parts
that are woven into our physical body. If no Luciferic influence had
intervened, then, at the beginning of his Earth-existence, man would
have received this Phantom in full strength together with his
physical body. But into the human organisation, in so far as it
consists of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, the
Luciferic influence penetrated, and the con-sequence was the
disorganisation of the Phantom of the physical body. As we shall see,
this is symbolically expressed in the Bible as the Fall, together
with the fact, related in the Old Testament, that death followed the
Fall. Death was indeed the result of the disorganisation of the
Phantom of the physical body. The outcome is that, when man goes
through the gate of death, he has to see the dissolution of his
physical body. This crumbling physical body, lacking the strength of
the Phantom, is indeed borne by man from birth to death. The
crumbling away goes on all the time, and the decomposition, the death
of the physical body, is only the final stage of a continuous
process. For if the disintegration of the body — preceded by
the disorganisation of the Phantom — is not countered by
processes of reconstruction, death finally ensues.
If no Luciferic
influence had come in, the destructive and reconstructive forces in
the physical body would have remained in balance. But then everything
in earthly human nature would have been different; there would, for
example, have been no mind incapable of comprehending the
Resurrection. For what kind of understanding is it that cannot grasp
the Resurrection? It is the kind that is bound up with the decadence
of the physical body, and is what it is because the individual has
incurred, through the Luciferic influence, the progressive
destruction of the Phantom of the physical body. In consequence the
human understanding, the human intellect, has become so thin, so
threadbare, that it cannot take in the great processes of cosmic
evolution. It looks on them as miracles, or says it cannot comprehend
them. If the Luciferic influence had not come, and the upbuilding
forces in the human body had held the destructive forces in balance,
then the human understanding, equipped with all that was intended for
it, would have seen into the upbuilding forces, rather as one follows
a laboratory experiment. But our understanding is now such that it
remains on the surface of things and has no insight into the cosmic
depths.
Anyone, therefore,
who wishes to characterise these conditions correctly must say: In
the beginning of our Earth-existence, the physical body was prevented
by the Luciferic influence from becoming what it should have become
according to the will of the Powers who worked through Saturn, Sun
and Moon. Instead, it took into itself a destructive process. Since
the beginning of the Earth-existence man has lived in a physical body
which is subject to destruction; a body which cannot adequately
counter the destructive forces with upbuilding forces.
So there is truth in
something which appears to the modern man as such folly: that a
hidden connection exists between what has come to pass through the
working of Lucifer, and death. And now let us look at this working.
What was the effect of this destruction of the real physical body? If
we had the complete physical body, as was intended at the beginning
of the earth-existence, our soul-powers would reflect them-selves in
quite another way: we should then know in truth what we are. As
things are, we do not know what we are because the physical body is
not given us in its completeness. We do certainly speak of the nature
and being of the human Ego — but how far does man know the Ego?
So problematic is the Ego that Buddhism can even deny that it goes
from one incarnation to another. So problematic is it that Greece
could fall into the tragic mood which found expression in those words
of the Greek hero: ‘Better a beggar in the upper world than a
king in the realm of shades.’ So it was that when a Greek saw
the treasured physical body — the body shaped by the Phantom —
given over to destruction, he felt a sadness in face of the
darkening, the fading away, of the Ego, for he felt that it could
exist only together with the Ego-consciousness. And when he saw the
Form of the physical body falling into decadence, he shuddered at the
thought that the Ego would grow dark and dim; this Ego which is
reflected by the Form of the physical body. And when we follow human
evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha,
we find that the process we have just indicated shows itself in an
ever-increasing degree.
In earlier times,
for example, no one would have preached the annihilation of the
physical body in so radical a fashion as did Gautama Buddha. For such
teaching to be given, it was necessary that the decadence of the
physical body, its complete annulment as regards its Form, should
have become more and more nearly complete, so that the human mind no
longer had any idea that the entity which becomes conscious through
the physical body — that is, through the Form — can pass
over from one incarnation to another. The truth is that man, in the
course of the Earth-evolution, lost the Form of the physical body, so
that he no longer has what the Divine Beings had intended for him
from the beginning of the Earth. This is something he must regain;
but it had first to be imparted to him once more. And we cannot
comprehend Christianity unless we understand that at the time when
the Events of Palestine took place, the human race on earth had
reached a stage where the decadence of the physical body was at its
peak, and where, because of this, the whole evolution of humanity was
threatened with the danger that the Ego-consciousness — the
specific achievement of the earth-evolution — would be lost. If
this process had continued unchanged, the destructive element would
have penetrated ever more deeply into the human bodily organism, and
men born after the time when the events of Palestine were due would
have had to live with an ever-duller feeling of the Ego. Everything
that depends on perfect reflection from the physical body would have
become increasingly worn out.
Then came the
Mystery of Golgotha; it came as we have characterised it, and through
it something happened which is so hard to grasp for an intellect
bound up with the physical body only, a body in which the destructive
forces preponderate. It came to pass that one man, who was the bearer
of the Christ, had gone through such a death that after three days
the specifically mortal part of the physical body had to disappear,
and out of the grave there rose the body which is the force-bearer of
the physical, material parts. The body that was really intended for
man by the Rulers of Saturn, Sun, and Moon — the pure Phantom
of the physical body with all the attributes of the physical body —
this it was that rose out of the grave. So was given the possibility
of that spiritual genealogy of which we have spoken.
Let us think of the
body of Christ that rose out of the grave. Just as from the body of
Adam the bodies of earth-men are descended, in so far as these men
have the body that crumbles away, even so are the spiritual bodies,
the Phantoms for all men, descended from that which rose out of the
grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ
through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise
decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave of
Golgotha. It is possible for man to receive into his organism those
forces which then rose from the grave, just as through his physical
organism at the beginning of the earth evolution, as a consequence of
the Luciferic forces, he received the organism of Adam.
It is this that Paul
wishes to say. Just as man, through his place in the stream of
physical evolution, inherits the physical body in which the
destruction of the Phantom, the force-bearer, is gradually taking
place, so from the pure Phantom that rose out of the grave he can
inherit what he has lost. He can inherit it, he can clothe himself
with it, as he clothed himself with the first Adam; he can become one
with it. Thereby he can go through a development by means of which he
can climb upwards again, even as before the Mystery of Golgotha he
had descended in evolution. In other words, that which had been taken
from him through the Luciferic influence can be given back to him
through its presence as the Risen Body of Christ. That is what Paul
wishes to say.
Now, just as it is
very easy, from the standpoint of modern anatomy or physiology, to
refute what has been said in this lecture — apparently to
refute it — so is it very easy to raise another objection. Some
such question as this might be asked: If indeed Paul really believed
that a spiritual body had risen, what has this spiritual body which
had risen out of the grave to do with what every man now bears in
himself? This is not hard to understand: we need only consider the
analogy offered by the coming into existence of a human individual.
As physical human being he begins from a single cell; a physical body
consists entirely of cells which are all children of the original
cell; all cells which compose a human body are traceable to the
original cell. Now imagine that, through what we may call a mystical
Christological process, man acquires a body quite other than the one
he has gradually acquired in his downward evolution. Then think of
each of these new bodies as having an intimate connection with the
pure Phantom that rose from the grave, somewhat as the human cells of
the physical body are connected with the original cell. That is, we
must think of the Phantom as multiplying itself, as does the cell
which gives rise to the physical body. So, in the evolution which
follows the Event of Golgotha, every man can inwardly acquire
something which is spiritually descended from the Phantom which rose
from the grave, just as — to echo Paul — the ordinary
body which falls into dissolution is descended from Adam.
Of course it is an
insult to the human intellect, which thinks so arrogantly of itself
at the present time, when one says that a process similar to the
multiplication of the cell, which if need be can be seen, takes place
in the invisible. This outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, however,
is an occult fact. To someone who contemplates evolution with occult
sight it is apparent that the spiritual cell, the body which overcame
death, the body of Christ Jesus, has risen from the grave and in the
course of time imparts itself to anyone who enters into the
corresponding relationship with the Christ. To anyone resolved to
deny super-sensible happenings altogether, this statement will
naturally seem absurd. But to anyone who grants the super-sensible,
the event with which we are here concerned must be presented in the
way described. The Phantom which rose from the grave communicates
itself to those who make themselves fitted for it. This, then, is a
fact that everyone who grants the super-sensible can understand.
If we can inscribe
upon our souls what is in very truth the Pauline teaching, we come to
regard the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality that took place and had
to take place in the evolution of the earth; for it signifies
literally the rescue of the human Ego. We have seen that if the
process of evolution had continued along the path it had followed up
to the time of the Events of Palestine, the Ego-consciousness could
not have been developed; it would not only have failed to advance,
but would have gone down ever further into darkness. But the path
turned upwards, and will continue to ascend in proportion as men find
their relation to the Christ-Being.
Now we can
understand Buddhism very well. About five hundred years before the
Events of Palestine, a truth was proclaimed: ‘Everything that
envelops a man as his physical body and makes him a being incarnated
in the flesh — all this must be looked upon as worthless; it is
fundamentally a left-over from the past and must be cast off.’
Certainly up to that time conditions were such that humanity would
have had to set its course towards this philosophy of life, if
nothing else had intervened. But there came the Event of Golgotha, an
Event which completely restored the lost principles of human
evolution. In so far as man takes into himself the incorruptible body
we spoke of yesterday, and have brought before our souls in closer
detail today, if he clothes himself with this incorruptible body, he
will become more and more clearly aware of his Ego-consciousness, and
of that part of his nature which journeys on from one incarnation to
another.
That which came into
the world with Christianity must therefore not be regarded merely as
a new teaching — this must be specially emphasised — and
not as a new theory, but as something real, something factual. Hence
when people insist that everything Christ taught had been known
previously, this signifies nothing for a real understanding of
Christianity. The important thing is not what Christ taught, but what
he gave: his Body. For the Body that rose from the grave of Golgotha
had never before entered into human evolution. Never before had there
been present on earth, through the death of a man, that which came to
be present as the Risen Body of Christ Jesus. Previously, after men
had passed through the gate of death, and had gone through the period
between death and a new birth, they had brought to earth with them
the defective Phantom, given over to deterioration. No one had ever
caused a perfect Phantom to arise.
Here we can refer to
the Initiates and Adepts. They always had to receive initiation
outside their physical bodies, by overcoming their physical bodies,
but this over-coming never went as far as a resuscitation of the
physical Phantom. No pre-Christian initiations went farther than the
outermost limits of the physical body; they did not touch the forces
of the physical body, except in so far as the inner organism impinges
in a general way on the outer. No one, having gone through death, had
ever overcome death as a human Phantom. Similar things had certainly
occurred, but never this — that a man had gone through a
complete human death and that the complete Phantom had then gained
victory over death. Just as it is true that only this Phantom can
give rise to a complete humanity in the course of human evolution, so
is it true that this Phantom took its beginning from the grave of
Golgotha.
That is the
important fact in Christian evolution. Hence the commentators are not
at fault when they say again and again that the teaching of Christ
Jesus has been transformed into a teaching about Christ Jesus. It had
to be so. For the important thing is not what Christ Jesus taught,
but what He gave to humanity. His Resurrection is the coming to birth
of a new member of human nature — an incorruptible body. But
for this to happen, this rescue of the human Phantom through death,
two things were necessary. It was necessary, first, that the Being of
Christ Jesus should be such as we have described it —
constituted of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, and —
instead of a human ego — the Christ-Being. Secondly, it was
necessary that the Christ-Being should have resolved to descend into
a human body, to incarnate in a human body of flesh. For if we are to
contemplate the Christ-Being in the right light, we must seek Him in
the time before the beginning of man on earth. The Christ-Being was
of course existent at that time. He did not enter into the course of
human evolution; He dwelt in the spiritual world. Humanity continued
along its ever-decreasing path. At a point in time when the crisis of
human evolution had been reached, the Christ-Being incorporated
Himself in the body of a man. That is the greatest sacrifice that
could have been brought to the earth-evolution by the Christ-Being.
And the second thing we must learn to understand is wherein this
sacrifice consisted. Yesterday we dealt with one part of the question
concerning the nature of Christ, confining our study to the time
after the Baptism by John in Jordan. We must now go on to ask: What
is the significance of the fact that at the Baptism the Christ-Being
descended into a body of flesh, and how did death come about in the
Mystery of Golgotha?
This question will occupy us in the coming days.
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