II THE BLOOD-RELATIONSHIP AND THE CHRIST-RELATIONSHIP
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!
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