A lecture given in Berlin, 22 December
1908. Translated by D. S. Osmond from shorthand notes
unrevised by the lecturer and published by permission of
the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung from the volume
entitled, Das Weihnachtsmysterium. Novalis, der Seher und
Christuskünder. This volume contains three lectures
given in Berlin and one in Cologne, during the years
1908, 1909 and 1912. Introductory prefaces by Marie
Steiner. (See also Nos. 108, 117 and 143 in the
Bibliographical Survey, 1961, of the Complete Edition of
Rudolf Steiner's works.)
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The Christmas Mystery
Novalis, the Seer
Individuals appear in the world from time
to time who are able to see in direct vision what has been
realised through Feeling by thousands upon thousands of souls
and hearts in the course of the centuries. But in the modern
age only those who are familiar with the findings of
spiritual ‘clear-seeing’ know that the effects of
the event of Mystery of Golgotha on evolution are always
perceptible to the true seer.
The entire spiritual sphere
of the Earth was changed through what took place at Golgotha.
And ever since then, if the eye of the soul has been opened
through contemplation of this Event, the seer beholds the
presence of the everlasting power of the Christ in the
spiritual sphere of the Earth. Other men are impressed by the
power of the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha
and the great truths connected with that Event; they realise,
too, that since then the human heart has been able to
experience something that could never previously have been
experienced or felt on the Earth. But to a seer this is
perceptible reality.
The young German poet
Novalis became a seer — we might almost say
‘miraculously’ — by the grace of
divine-spiritual Powers. Through a deeply shattering event
which made him aware, as if by a stroke of magic, of the
connection between life and death, his eyes of spirit were
opened and as well as a great vista of past ages of the Earth
and Cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before him. He
was able to say of himself that he was one who with the eyes
of spirit has actually seen what is revealed when ‘the
stone is lifted’ and the Being who has furnished
earthly existence with the proof that life in the spirit will
forever overcome death, becomes visible.
In the case of Novalis we
cannot really speak of a self-contained life in the ordinary sense,
for his was like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The
Initiation conferred upon him as it were through Grace,
brought to life within him his achievements and experiences
in earlier incarnations; there was a kind of consolidation of
intuitions and insights that had been his in a previous life.
And because he looked back through the ages with his own
awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to affirm that nothing
in his life was comparable in importance with the experience
of having discovered Christ as a living reality. Such an
experience is like a repetition of the happening at Damascus,
when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of
Christ Jesus and rejected their proclamation, received in
higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is
present, and that the Event of Golgotha is unique in the
whole process of the evolution of humanity. Those whose eyes
of spirit are open can themselves behold this Event, for in
truth Christ was not only present in the Body that was once
His dwelling-place. He has remained with the Earth; through
Him the Sun-Power has united with the Earth.
Novalis speaks of the
revelation that came to him as ‘unique’ and he maintains
that only those who with their whole soul are willing to
relate themselves with this Event are men in the true sense.
He rightly says that the ancient Indian, with his sublime
spirituality, would have allied himself with Christ had he
but known Him. Not out of any dim inkling or blind faith, but
out of actual knowledge, Novalis says that the Christ whom he
has seen with eyes of spirit is a Power pervading all beings.
This Power can be recognised by the eye in which it is
working. The eye that beholds the Christ has itself been
formed by the Christ-Power. The Christ-Power within the eye
beholds the Christ outside the eye.
These are truly wonderful
words! Novalis is also aware of the stupendous truth that since the
Event of Golgotha the Being we call Christ has been the
planetary Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit by whom the Earth's
body will gradually be transformed. A wonderful vista of the
future opens out before Novalis. He sees the Earth
transfigured; he sees the present Earth in which the residue
of ancient times is still contained, transformed into the
Body of Christ; he sees the waters of the Earth permeated
with Christ's Blood, and he sees the solid rocks as Christ's
Flesh. He sees the body of the Earth gradually becoming the
Body of Christ; he sees the Earth and Christ miraculously
made one; he sees the Earth in future time as a great
organism enshrining man, an organism whose soul is
Christ.
In this sense, and out
of his deep insight into occult truths, Novalis speaks of Christ as
the Son of Man. Just as in a certain sense men are the
‘Sons of the Gods’, that is to say of the ancient
Gods who through untold millions of years have moulded and
shaped our planet, who have built the bodies in which we live
and the ground upon which we move, so, by overcoming earthly
things, man's task is to build, through his own powers, an
Earth that will be the body of the new God, the God of the
future. And whereas the men of old looked back to the
primeval Gods, yearning to be united with them in death,
Novalis recognises the God who in time to come will have as
his body all that is best in us and that we can offer to Him.
In Christ he sees the Being to whom humanity offers itself in
order that this Being may have a body. He recognises Christ
as the ‘Son of Man’ in this higher, cosmological
sense. He speaks of Christ as the ‘God of the
future’.
All these experiences
and perceptions are so pregnant with meaning that they are well
able to kindle the true mood of Christmas in our souls. And
so we will let one who lived a brief life at the end of the
eighteenth century, dying at the age of 29, describe the
experiences associated with the greatest event in his life
— the sublime vision of the Christ Being.
(Marie von Sivers (Marie
Steiner) here recited a poem from the Spiritual Songs of Novalis.)
The Christmas Tree has
not been the symbol of the Christmas Festival for any length of time.
We shall find no poem on the Christmas Tree among, let us
say, the works of a poet such as Schiller, although had such
a custom existed in his day he would certainly have
recognised its poetic possibilities and would not have found
it difficult to write a poem on the subject. But in
Schiller's time the Christmas Tree in its now familiar form
was unknown. It is a young and quite recent institution. In
earlier times men celebrated this festival in a different
way. However far we look back into past ages, as long as one
can speak of human beings in their present form or having the
rudiments of that form, we shall everywhere find an
institution that is akin to our Christmas Festival; we shall
find it in constantly new forms among the widespread masses
of the peoples and as an enactment in the highest
Mysteries.
The very fact that the
festival itself is so ancient and our present symbol of it so recent,
is indicative of an element of eternity, of an eternal
reality from which new forms ever and again spring forth.
This Christ-Festival and all the feelings and experiences it
symbolises, are as ancient as humanity on Earth. But man will
always be able to find new symbols, symbols that are in
keeping with the times, as outward forms of expression for
this festival. Just as Nature herself is rejuvenated every
year and her eternal forces bud forth in forms that are
forever new, so it is with the symbols of Christmas piety; in
their constant rejuvenation they betoken the eternal reality
of this festival. And so in the solemnity of this Christmas
hour we will bring a picture before our souls of what men on
Earth have experienced at the time when we now celebrate
Christmas.
As pupils of Spiritual
Science we can send our thoughts back to ages in the far, far past, to
begin with to the times when our souls were incarnated in
Atlantean bodies, bodies very unlike those of today. In that
epoch there were great Teachers who were also the Leaders of
humanity. Men looked out upon a different world, where there
was no bright sunlight to reveal to them in clear outlines
the forms of objects in the kingdoms of Nature. Everything
around them was as though swathed in mist — not only
because much of Atlantis was actually covered with mist and
fog through which the sunlight could not penetrate to the
same extent as later on, but also because man's faculty of
perception had not yet developed to the stage where external
objects appeared in clear outline. When men woke in the
morning they saw everything around them in divine Nature
swathed in mist and surrounded by auric colours, and when
they went to sleep at night they passed into a spiritual
world without falling into the oblivion and unconsciousness
of sleep today.
When men went to sleep
in the days of Atlantis, they beheld the divine-spiritual Beings who
were their companions; they beheld those divine Beings who
were once experienced as realities and who in later times
were preserved as memories in different regions of the Earth,
bearing different names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, in Middle
Europe; the names of Zeus, Pallas Athene, Ares, and so forth,
were given to those divine figures who had once been visible
to man's eyes of soul in old Atlantis. But in Atlantean times
the divine worlds were no longer the highest, creative worlds
whence man had come forth in the age of Lemuria. Our souls
were once born from the womb of divine Beings of whose
sublimity and majesty there can be only a dim inkling today.
These same divine Beings sent forth the cosmic orbs and all
the forces surrounding us. Man was within the womb of divine
Beings whose outward expressions we behold in the celestial
bodies; they were the Beings who flash through the air in
lightning and thunder, whose expressions are the plants and
animals and whose sense-organs are the crystals. All the
warmth that streams to us, all the forces in play around us
— all this constitutes the body of divine-spiritual
Beings from whom man has come forth.
The more deeply man
descended to the Earth, the more closely he united with material
substances, the more he membered into himself the substances
of the Earth, the less capable he became of beholding the
great Gods.
In primeval times man
had as yet no faculty for cognising the material world; he could neither
see with eyes nor hear with ears; pictures that were not
pictures of minerals, animals or plants but of
divine-spiritual Beings above him, surged through his soul.
In later ages he lived more and more on the physical plane,
learning through the outer sense-organs to know the physical
world. In the days of Atlantis, sight on the physical plane
alternated with a form of clairvoyance that had remained as a
relic of the ancient state of sublime spirituality in which
man once had lived. But the Gods he was still able to behold
on the astral plane when by night he enjoyed the bliss of
living as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings,
were lower in rank than the highest Gods.
As the physical plane
grew clearer, man's vision on the spiritual planes grew dim. But
in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates who as well as
imparting the deeper teachings concerning the Gods of old
whence men had come forth, proclaimed a truth which they
presented in somewhat the following way.
‘Look at the seed
of a plant; see how this seed develops into a plant. It grows,
sends forth leaves, sepals, blossom and fruit. One who
observes the plant in this way can say to himself: I look
back to the seed; the seed is the creator of the leaves and
the blossom I see before me, and this blossom holds within it
the seed of a new plant; the blossom forms itself into a new
seed. And one can also look into the future.’ —
Thus did the great Atlantean Initiates speak to their pupils
and through their pupils to the whole people. They said:
‘You can look back to the seeds of the Gods whence men
have come forth. The spiritual and physical realities you see
around you are all leaves that have sprung from the seeds of
the primeval Gods. See in them the forces of those divine
seeds even as the forces of the seed from which the plant has
come forth can be seen in its leaves. But we are able to
point to something more: in future times there will spread
around man something that will be akin to the blossom of a
plant, something that has, it is true, issued from the
ancient Gods but — as the blossom ripens a seed —
contains a seed in which the new God
unfolds!’
The world is born of
Gods — such was the ancient teaching. That the world will give
birth to a God, to the great God of the future — such was the
prophecy made by the Initiates of Atlantis to their pupils
and through them to the people. For like all Initiates, those
of Atlantis saw into the future, foresaw the great events of
the future. Their vision reached beyond the time of the great
Atlantean flood, beyond that stupendous happening whereby the
face of the Earth was changed. They foresaw the civilisations
that would arise in the future, in the land of the holy
Rishis, in the land of Zarathustra; they foresaw the ancient
Egyptian culture founded by Hermes, the conditions heralded
and inaugurated by Moses, the happiness prevailing in Greece,
the might and strength of Rome. All this the Atlantean
Initiates saw in advance, and their vision extended to our
own time and even beyond it. And to their intimate pupils
they imparted hope, saying to them: ‘True, you must
leave the spirit-lands where now you dwell, you must be
ensnared in matter, you must clothe yourselves in sheaths
woven from physical substances. There will come a time when
you must labour on the physical plane, when it will seem as
though the ancient Gods have vanished from your ken. But your
eyes will be able to turn to where the new star can appear to
you, to where the new seed comes to life, where there will
spring forth the new God of the future, the God who has
waited through the ages in order to appear in humanity at the
right and proper time!’
When the Atlantean
Initiates wanted to explain to their pupils and to all the people
why man was destined to descend into the vale of Earth, they said
to them that all souls would at some future time see and
experience the One who was to come, who was still hidden from
their sight, dwelling in a realm invisible to physical eyes
as well as to the eyes of spirit which while man was still
resting in the womb of the Gods, had gazed upon Him.
Then came the Atlantean
flood. In a comparatively short time the face of the Earth was changed,
and after the migrations of the peoples from West to East,
the great post-Atlantean civilisations arose, beginning with
that of ancient India.
The great Teachers in
that epoch, the seven holy Rishis, taught their pupils, and indeed all
the Indian people, of the reality of a spiritual world, for
their life was now lived on the physical plane and they
needed so to be taught. Their eyes could now see only the
outer form of the physical world as the expression of the
Spiritual, but the Spiritual itself they could not see. Yet
there lived in the soul of every Indian something that can be
called a dim remembrance of what the soul had once
experienced among Gods in the age of old Atlantis. This
remembrance aroused a yearning of such intensity for what had
been lost, that the soul could establish no close
relationship with the physical plane, could only regard it as
maya, illusion, unreality. Nor could souls have endured such
conditions on the physical plane had not the Rishis, filled
with the fire of spiritual inspiration, been able to teach
them of the glories of the ancient world that had departed
from them. The teachings given by the Rishis concerning the
Cosmos are still very little understood today; they were
teachings based on a primeval wisdom, because the Rishis were
initiated into what man had experienced when he was still
within the womb of the Gods.
For man was present
when the Gods separated the Sun from the Earth and ordained the paths
of the celestial orbs — but during his later earthly
pilgrimage he had forgotten it!
This wisdom was taught
by the Rishis. And something else too was taught to those who were
the most advanced and able to feel its significance. To them
it was said: ‘From the world in which man is now
placed, the world he now sees as maya, there will spring the
Being who cannot yet be visible in this world because the
human soul has not reached the stage where it can unfold the
power to know this Being. But He who is still beyond your
world will appear!’ Vicva karman was the name
of the Being proclaimed by the ancient Teachers of India as
the great Spirit of the future. To the Indian people it was
said: ‘You cannot see Him yet, any more than you can
see in the blossom the seed of the new plant. But as truly as
the blossom contains the seed, as truly does maya unfold the
germinating power that will make life in the physical world a
worthy existence. The Being known in later times as the
Christ was proclaimed in advance by the Teachers of ancient
India; they, in true humility, were his prophets. Their
spiritual gaze could turn in two directions — back to
that primeval wisdom according to which the world was
fashioned, and forward into the future. And to men engaged in
the daily tasks of life they proclaimed the coming of One
whose power would penetrate into the depths of human hearts
and stir human hands to activity.
There was no age when
He was not proclaimed, whenever one can speak of human culture and
human understanding. If in later times men have forgotten the
proclamations, this is not the fault of the great Teachers of
an earlier humanity.
Then came the ancient
Persian civilisation of which Zarathustra was the Leader. To his
intimate pupils, and again to all the people, Zarathustra
proclaimed that in everything by which man is surrounded, in
the forces streaming from the Sun and from the other
celestial bodies to the Earth, in all that fills the airy
expanse, lives a Being now revealed to man in veiled form
only. — And to his Initiates, Zarathustra was able to
speak of the great Sun-Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of the God of
Good. What he said to his pupils may be rendered in somewhat
the following way. — ‘Look at the plant. It grows
from the seed, develops leaves and blossom. But the plant is
pervaded by a mysterious force which arises in the heart of
the blossom as the new seed. What surrounds the seed will
fall away; but the innermost force that can be perceived in
the heart of the blossom enables you to feel that a new plant
will arise from the old. If you ponder on the power and the
force of the Sun's light, Feeling that in it you are
beholding merely the physical expression of a spiritual
reality and letting yourselves be inspired by the spiritual
power of the Sun, then you will begin to understand the
prophetic announcement of the Divine Fruit that is to be born
from the Earth!’
When these intimate
pupils had reached a very advanced stage, they were permitted, at
certain times, to listen to teachings even more secret. And
in consecrated hours Zarathustra spoke to them of One who
would come when men were ready to receive Him into their
midst with understanding. Mighty pictures of the One who
would come were presented by Zarathustra to his pupils. To
one pupil he could reveal the picture itself, to a second a
kind of reflection only; to the others it was only possible
to give a general picture of what would come to pass in the
future. — Thus He who was called Christ was also
proclaimed in the civilisation of Zarathustra in ancient
Persia.
So also it was in
Egyptian civilisation. Hermes too had his Egyptian Initiates and
through them had proclaimed the Christ in a certain way to
all the people of ancient Egypt. In the legend of Osiris may
be seen a reflection of the proclamation of Christ.
What was it that the
legend of Osiris conveyed to men? The legend is that in olden times
the people were blessed in that Osiris ruled in the Land of Egypt
in true union with Isis, his spouse. His evil brother, Set,
or Typhon, resolved to destroy Osiris. To this end he built a
chest in which Osiris was imprisoned, and cast it into the
sea. Isis eventually found the chest but could not bring
Osiris to life again on the Earth. He had been transported
into higher realms and since then could be seen by men only
after they had passed through the gate of death. To every
Egyptian it was said: After death you can be united with
Osiris as truly as your hand is united with you here on
Earth. After death you can be part of Osiris and call him
your own higher Self, but only provided you have merited this
on the physical plane. After death you can be united with the
God known to you as the Most High.
To one who was an
Initiate, something more could be revealed. When he had undergone
all the ordeals and testings, when he had received all the
teachings that must precede vision of the higher worlds, then
even during physical life between birth and death the picture
of Osiris was revealed to him — the picture that came
before other men only after death. The Being with whom the
pupil of the Egyptian Initiates must feel himself united came
before him when he was outside his body, when his ether-body,
astral body and ego had been raised out of the physical body;
and then, one who even in his lifetime had gazed upon Osiris
could proclaim to the others:- Osiris lives! But never could
it have been proclaimed in ancient Egypt: Osiris dwells among
us! This was expressed in the legend by saying: Osiris is a
king who has never been seen on the Earth! The
‘chest’ is nothing else than the physical body.
The moment Osiris is laid in the physical body, the inimical
forces of the physical world, forces that are not yet ready
to receive the God, assert themselves with such strength that
they bring the God to destruction. The physical world is not
ready yet to receive the God with whom man must be united.
‘But’ — so spake those who could bear
personal witness that Osiris lives — ‘although we
say to you that the God lives in very truth, it is only the
Initiate who can behold him, when he (the Initiate) is away
from the physical world. The God with whom man must become
one in his inmost being, lives, but he lives in the spiritual
world. He alone who leaves the physical world can be united
with the God!’
At the same time
men were beginning more and more to love the physical world; for
it was their task and mission to work in the physical world, to
establish one culture after another in the physical world. To
the same extent to which the eyes looked out with clearer
vision, and intelligence was better able to fathom the
happenings of the physical world, to the same extent to which
man's knowledge increased, enabling him to make discoveries
and inventions useful for the purposes of physical life
— to that same extent it became constantly more
difficult for him during life between birth and death to gaze
into the spiritual world. He could hear from the Initiates
that the God with whom he must be united, lives in very
truth; but from the physical world he could bring little that
would make definite communion with Osiris possible for him in
yonder world. Greater and greater darkness spread over life
in the world surmised by man to be the home of the God with
whom he must become one.
Then came the age
of Greece when with all their delight in the physical world, men
achieved that marriage between spirit and matter which bore such
glorious fruit on the physical plane. In the wonderful
masterpieces of ancient Greece we have a picture of how, in
the epoch when the Event of Golgotha was to take place, men
were related to the spiritual world. It is difficult to
conceive but it is true nevertheless, that the supreme
achievement of architecture — the Greek temple —
corresponds with the lowest point in man's relationship with
the spiritual world.
Let us picture a Greek
temple towering before us. In its forms, in its perfection and
wholeness, it is the very purest, noblest expression of the
Spiritual — so that it could once be said, and said
with truth: the God himself dwells in the Greek temple. The
God was present in the temple, for the lines woven by the
material were everywhere in harmony with the spiritual order
of the Cosmos and with the lines pervading the physical plane
as the directions of space. There is no more beautiful, no
nobler example of the interpenetration of the spirit of man
and physical matter than a Greek temple. It is the
unparalleled example of union between the higher worlds and
physical matter.
Through their works
of art and the principles expressed in their creation, the Greeks
were able to make the ancient Gods come down among them. And even
if the Greeks did not actually behold Zeus or Pallas Athene
when they had so descended, nevertheless the Gods were there,
drawn and enchanted into these works of art — the Gods
who had once been visible to men and among whom they had
lived in the times of Atlantis. Men were able to provide a
glorious dwelling-place for the ancient Gods.
And now let us see
what the Greek temple represents in another respect. Suppose clairvoyant
consciousness has before it a Greek temple. What will now be
said holds good even of the sparse remains still surviving of
the Greek temple architecture.— Think of what happens
when clairvoyant consciousness has before it a relic such as
one of the temples at Paestum. The harmony of the lines
presented by the columns and roof coverings can literally
fill one with rapture. Such perfection is there that one can
picture and feel the very presence of divinity in the
physical structure itself. The same feeling can arise when
Greek architecture is seen through the eyes of the physical
body.
And now think of
clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. There
it is as if a black screen were drawn across what is to be seen
in the physical world; what is to be seen there is as though
obliterated. Nothing of all these splendours of the physical
plane can be carried over into the spiritual world. Supreme
beauty — when such indeed it is — achieved on the
physical plane, is obliterated in the spiritual world. And
then we realise that it is no myth when, on meeting an
Initiate, one who was a leading figure in Greece uttered the
words: Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a
king in the realm of the Shades! (Homer: Odyssey,
Song XI, verse 488-491) — In Greece, where man could
find such bliss in the physical world, souls entered a
shadowy existence when they passed into the world of the
dead. Splendour in the physical world — equivalent
barrenness in the spiritual world.
Let us now make two
other comparisons with the experience aroused by a Greek temple.
— Think of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, or
Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper — works
created after the Event of Golgotha and influenced by its
mysteries. The sight of these pictures can fill the soul with
rapture, and this is also true of clairvoyant
consciousness.
When the eyes of
clairvoyant consciousness rest upon these pictures on the physical
plane and this consciousness then rises into the spiritual world, a
man realises, although the physical is no longer seen: What I
take into the spiritual world from the experience aroused by
these pictures is not simply an echo of the physical; here
there is not only the rapture I experienced at the sight of
them, but now for the first time I realise all their glory;
in the physical world I merely laid the seed of what I now
experience in infinitely greater majesty and splendour!
— When a man contemplates such pictures in which the
mysteries connected with Golgotha are contained, he is laying
the seed — but only the seed — for a greater
knowledge in the spiritual world. What has made this
possible? It has been made possible because the spiritual
Power proclaimed so long in advance, actually appeared on the
Earth. Mankind had succeeded in unfolding a blossom in which
the seed of the God of the future could ripen. Through the
Event of Golgotha something was communicated to Earth
existence that man can not only take with him into the
spiritual world but that in the spiritual worlds appears in
higher glory and sublimity.
At the moment
when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha,
Christ appeared among those who were living between death and
a new birth. He could proclaim to them what none of the
earlier Initiates, when they passed into the spiritual world,
could have proclaimed. When the earlier Initiates — let
us say of the Eleusinian Mysteries — passed from this
physical world into the world of those living between death
and a new birth, what would the Eleusinian Initiates have
been able to say to those souls? They could have told them of
happenings on the physical plane, but this would have caused
them nothing but longing and grief. For their life had taken
root entirely on the physical plane and in yonder world,
where nothing physical could be found and darkness prevailed,
souls could not share the Feeling which made a man of
importance on the physical plane exclaim: Better it is to be
a beggar on the physical plane than a king in the realm of
the Shades! The Initiates who could bring such treasures to
those living on the physical plane could have brought nothing
to the souls then living in yonder world. Then came the Event
of Golgotha. Christ appeared among the dead — and for
the first time there could be proclaimed in the spiritual
world an event of the physical world which forms the
beginning of a bridge leading over from the physical into the
spiritual world. When Christ appeared in the nether world it
was as though light flashed through the spiritual worlds. For
in the physical world itself incontrovertible proof had been
furnished that the spiritual can forever conquer death! And
thus it came to pass that man can also carry over with him
into the spiritual world, experiences that come to him in the
physical world.
This holds good of
St. John's Gospel in an even higher degree and also of the other
Gospels which tell of the Event of Golgotha. A man who studies
the Gospel of St. John on the physical plane, experiences
intellectual joy from the reading of this great record; but
when he passes into the spiritual world he knows that what he
was able to experience in the physical world was but a
foretaste of what he can now perceive and behold. The
fact of supreme importance is that man can now take his
treasures with him from the physical plane into the spiritual
world.
Since the Event of
Golgotha the spiritual world has been illumined with an ever brighter,
ever clearer light. Everything existing in the physical world
has issued from the spiritual world. When he passed from the
physical into the spiritual world, pre-Christian man could
say: Here is the wellspring and origin of everything the
physical world contains. What has come forth from the
spiritual world are but the effects. But since the Event of
Golgotha, man can say when he passes from the physical into
the spiritual world: In the physical world too there is
causality and what is experienced on the physical plane works
over into the spiritual world.
And so it will
continue — in ever-increasing measure. Everything proceeding
from the work of the old Gods will die away and what will blossom
forth will grow on into the future, as the workings of the
God of the future. This is what will pass over into the
spiritual world. It is just as when a man, looking at the
seed of a new plant, says to himself: True, it has come forth
from an old plant, from an earlier seed, but now the old has
fallen away, has vanished, and now the new seed is there, the
seed that will unfold into the new plant, the new blossom.
— We too live in a world where leaves and blossom have
issued from the seeds born of the ancient Gods. But more and
more the new fruit, the Christ-fruit, is unfolding and
everything else will fall away. What is wrought out here in
the physical world will be of value for the future in so far
as it is carried over into the spiritual world. Before the
eyes of Spirit a world arises in the future, a world which
has its roots in the physical as our world once had its roots
in the spiritual. Just as men are the sons of the Gods, so,
out of what men in the physical world experience by rising to
an understanding of the Event of Golgotha, the body will be
formed for those new Gods of the future, of whom Christ is
the Leader. So do the old worlds live on into the new; the
old dies utterly away, and the new springs into bud out of
the old. But this could come about only because humanity was
able to unfold a blossom for that spiritual Being Who was to
become the God of the future.
This blossom that
could unfold within it the seed of the God of the future could only
be a threefold human sheath consisting of physical body, ether
body and astral body, a sheath cleansed and purified by all
that could be attained by man on Earth. And this sheath of
Jesus of Nazareth who sacrificed himself in order that the
Christ-Seed might be received, this blossom of manhood,
represents the very purest essence that the spiritual
endeavours of evolving mankind have been able to produce. Not
until the earth was ready to bring forth her fairest blossom
could the seed for the new God appear. And the birth of this
blossom is commemorated in our Christmas Festival. In our
Christmas Festival we celebrate the birth of the blossom
which was to receive the Christ-Seed.
Christmas is a festival
wherein men can gaze into the past and also into the future. For from
the past has issued the blossom out of which unfolds the seed
for the future. The threefold sheath of Christ was a product
of the old Earth — woven and born out of the highest
that it was in men's power to achieve. And no outer
presentation of a mystery can make a more powerful impression
upon us than the presentation of the mystery of how the
fairest flower of humankind could spring from the purest
calyx.
That mankind once issued
from the womb of the Godhead, that man was once a spiritual being and
descended into material existence — how can this be
more beautifully presented than by indicating how the
Spiritual gradually densifies, how man himself has densified
out of the formless haze of the Spiritual? As a prophetic
foreshadowing, the ancient Egyptian depicted the lion-headed
Goddess, still wholly spiritual, belonging to the age when
man was still hardly material, still resting as an
etheric-spiritual being in the womb of the Godhead. Then,
anticipating the later ‘Sistine Madonna’, we have
the Egyptian portrayal of another female form: Isis with the
child Horus. There we see how what is born from the clouds,
that is to say from the Spirit, has densified into the calyx,
into that which represents the human being developing an into
the future. This conception, already foreshadowed by men of
ancient time, we see in the Christian Madonna with the Child
Jesus.
With supreme purity and
delicacy, Raphael has breathed this mystery into form in his portrayal
of the Madonna. A human being crystallises out of angels'
heads and in turn brings forth Jesus of Nazareth, the blossom
into which the Christ-Seed is to be received. The whole story
of the evolution of humanity is contained in a most wonderful
way in this picture of the Madonna. No wonder that as he
stood before the Madonna, there arose in the one to whose
words we have listened today, the glorious remembrance from
the incarnation of which his last incarnation was again a
remembrance, and who brought to life within himself all the
sublime insight which this pictured mystery of mankind could
awaken; no wonder that these feelings streamed to the being
from whom Christ was born, to the figure who brought forth
the calyx from which sprang the blossom that could allow the
seed of the new God to ripen!
And so we see how
in the supremely gifted Novalis, feelings free of all denominational
bias quicken to life at the portrayal of this holy Mystery
which was enacted at the first Christmas and is repeated at
every Christmastide. It is the Mystery of the ancient
Initiates, represented by the Magi, bringing their offerings
to the new Mystery. The Wise Men, who are bearers of the
wisdom of times past, make their offerings to that which is
to go forward into the future, that which, in a human being,
will one day harbour the power by which all worlds connected
with the Earth are pervaded.
Novalis experienced
the Christ Mystery, the Mary Mystery, in relation to the Cosmic Mystery,
the light of which shone before his eyes of soul as it had
shone at the first Christmas, when Beings who had not
descended to the physical plane proclaimed the union between
a cosmic and an earthly Power, which can become a reality in
human hearts and in the Cosmos itself when the human heart
unites with Christ. The Egyptian proclamation: ‘The God
with whom you must be united dwells in the world that can be
reached only after death’, holds good no longer. For
now the God with whom man must be united lives among us here,
between birth and death; and men can find Him when they unite
their hearts and souls with Him in this world. Thus in the
first Holy Night of Christendom the strain resounded:
Offenbarung durch die Höhen dem
Gotte,
Ruhe und Stille durch die Erdenräume,
Seligkeit in den Menschen.
Revelation in the Heights to God,
Quiet and peace through all the Earth,
Blessed joy in Men.
[ 1 ]
Poems by Novalis
(‘Marienlieder’) were recited by Marie von Sivers
(Marie Steiner) at the end of this lecture.
Notes:
1. This
should be regarded as an approximate translation of the
rather unusual rendering of the Christmas message.
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