CHRIST AND THE
HUMAN SOUL
LECTURE 4.
Mankind is
ever in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly
understood. The assimilation of truths is not only of significance for
our knowledge; Truths in themselves contain life-force; and by
permeating ourselves with truth, we permeate our soul being with a
Cosmic element, just as we must permeate our physical being with air
taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed
in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real
inner meaning is often only understood much later.
The New
Testament has been written; the New Testament is there as a revelation
for humanity — but the whole of the earth's evolution will have
to run its course before this New Testament will be fully understood.
In the future, man will require much knowledge of the external world,
and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense
everything will make for an understanding of the New Testament. The
understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written
in a simple form so that it can be absorbed, although it can only later
and gradually be understood. The assimilation of the truths that are to
be found in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we
cannot as yet understand the truths in their inner depths. Later on,
the truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force; it
is imbibed, in a more or less childlike form. And if these very
questions which we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in
the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need
knowledge of greater depth, with insight into the spiritual world and
its mysteries.
To continue
the last lecture, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they
will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of
guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation
of Christ to the human soul.
In the
course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a
point of view which may be clothed in the form of a question,
‘Why did Christ die in a human body?’ In reality this
question expresses the riddle of the Mystery of Golgotha: ‘Why
did Christ die, why did the Godhead die, in a human body?’
God died
because for the sake of the evolution of the universe it was necessary
for Him to be able to enter humanity; it was necessary that a God of
the upper worlds should be able to become the leader of the
earth-evolution. Christ had to become akin to death. Akin to death! One
could wish that this expression might be deeply understood by the soul
of man. As a rule a man only meets with death when he himself sees
another die, or in different phenomena akin to death, which are to be
found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass
through the portal of death when the present incarnation is over. But
this is really only the external aspect of death. Death is present in
quite a different form in the world in which we live. Let us start from
an ordinary everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe
it out again: but thereby the air undergoes a change. When this air is
exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air, it cannot be inhaled again, for
exhaled air is harmful. I only indicate this in order that you may
understand the meaning of the occult saying: ‘When the air enters
into man, it dies.’ That which is living in the air dies when it
enters into man. Death enters the air with every breath taken by man.
That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which
penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should have nothing from
the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of
light as our lungs do in the case of the air; the light that enters
into our eye dies in our eye; and as a result of the death of the light
in our eye it comes about that we can see. That which is living in the
light dies when it penetrates our eye. The ray of light is killed in
the eye. We slay it in order that our eye may be able to perceive. We
are filled with that which must die within us in order that we may have
our earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the
ray of light which penetrates us, we kill it in many ways.
When we
call Spiritual Science to our aid, we differentiate earth substance,
and the substance of water, air and heat; we then enter into the world
of light-ether; we speak also of the warmth-ether. As far up as the
light-ether, we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly
in order that we may have our earth-consciousness. But there is
something that is not killed by our earth-existence. We know that above
the light-ether there is the so-called ‘chemical-ether,’
and then there comes the ‘life-ether.’ Those are the two
kinds of ether which we cannot kill. But, because of this, these two
kinds of ether have no special participation in us. If we were able to
kill the chemical-ether, the waves of the harmony of the spheres would
sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should destroy these
waves with our physical life. And if we could also kill the life-ether,
we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic
life that streams to the earth. In earthly sound a substitute is given
to us, but it must not be compared with what we should hear if the
chemical-ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For
physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound;
it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.
When the
Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place
man in a sphere, where, from the light-ether downwards death lives in
his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said —
and the words are there in the Bible — ‘Man has taken unto
himself the faculty of differentiation between Good and Evil, but Life
he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he is not to eat.’ In
Occultism an addition may be made to this; to the sentence ‘Of
the Tree of Life man shall not eat’ might be added the words
‘and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.’ Of the Tree
of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear!
These spheres were closed to man. Only through a certain process in the
old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life,
pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be
initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ
in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of
the Spheres.
In drawing
attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from
which the Christ came to us at the time of the baptism by John in
Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those spheres which had
been closed to man, which man had to forget at the beginning of the
Earth-evolution, as a result of the Luciferic temptation — from
the region of the Music of the Spheres — from the region of
Cosmic Life. At the baptism by John in Jordan, Christ entered into a
human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual
essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the
cosmic Life — elements that still belonged to the human soul
during its earth-evolution, but from which the soul of man had to be
separated as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also
man is related to Spirit. As a being of soul he really belongs to the
region of the Music of the Spheres, and to the region of the Word
— of the living cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from these
regions. They were to be restored to him again in order that he might
again be gradually permeated by that from which he had been cast out.
Therefore it is that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, the
words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning,
when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged
to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos,
with God. And through the baptism by John in Jordan the Logos entered
into human evolution — He became Man.
Here we
have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands
there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole
shows itself to us only from the external side. If it did not show
itself merely from the external side, man would know how he absorbs the
corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.
What was it
that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St.
Paul's saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ might be made
possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature
of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain through
human nature in earth-existence, from the light-ether that dies in the
human eye downwards. The nature of man is filled with death; but what
lives in the highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human
nature might not be filled with their death. But in order that Christ
might dwell in us He had to become akin to death, akin to all that is
spread out in the world, beginning from the light down into the depths
of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into that which we bear
within us as the corpse of the light, of the heat, of the air, etc. It
was only because He was able to become akin to death that He could
become akin to man. And we must feel within our soul that the God had
to die so that He might be able to enfill us, who had acquired death as
a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say:
‘Christ in us.’
Many other
things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze
upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the sun conjures forth
the plants from out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is
necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half of the truth.
He who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual
elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and
rises again out of them as a living spiritual element; the light comes
down into the plants in order to be transformed in them and to be born
again as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the
chemical-ether that enters, and this chemical-ether is not perceptible
to man: if man could be aware of it, it would sound spiritually. The
animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform
light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the
chemical-ether into water-spirits. But man transforms what dwells in
the cosmic ether-in the life-ether — that which enables him to
live at all and which he has been prevented from killing within himself
— that he transforms into earth-spirits.
In a course
of lectures in Carlsruhe ‘From Jesus to Christ,’ I once
spoke of the human ‘phantom.’ This is not the time for
drawing the connecting threads between what is to be said here and what
was said then about the human ‘phantom,’ but such
connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for
yourselves. To-day let me present the thing from another side.
There is
perpetually brought forth in man something that is also spiritual
— the life in him. It is forever passing out into the world. Man
projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he enriches the
earthly spiritual element of the earth. In the earthly spiritual
element of the earth, however, there are contained, all the qualities,
moral or otherwise that man has acquired and that he bears within
himself. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man
sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world and
how this aura continues to live as earth-spirit in the spirituality of
the earth. As a comet draws its tail through the cosmos, so does man
draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he
projects. This spiritual aura is held together phantom-like, during a
man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral
and intellectual wealth of soul. Life is very complicated, and this
also is a phenomenon of life.
When, in
our occult studies, we go back to the times before the Mystery of
Golgotha, we find that men of those periods simply radiated this
phantomlike entity which contained their moral qualities, into the
external world, into the external spiritual aura of the earth. But
humanity developed in the course of the earth's existence, and just at
the epoch when the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass a certain stage had
been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. We may say
that in earlier times the phantomlike entity, rayed out by man, was
much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had
become denser, had more form; and as a fundamental characteristic of
this phantom-like entity, man had mingled the connection with death,
which he was developing in himself, by killing the ray of light that
enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These earthly
spiritual entities which radiate from man himself are like a stillborn
child, because man imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come
upon Earth, human beings would, during the sojourn of their souls in
earthly bodies, continuously have exuded entities with the impress of
death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been
bound up the moral qualities of men, of which we spoke yesterday
— objective guilt and objective sin, — they would have been
within it.
Let us
suppose that Christ had not come. What would have happened in the
evolution of the earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha
would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created
dense forms to which they would have imparted death. And these dense
forms would have had to pass over to ‘Jupiter’ with the
earth. Man would have imparted death to the earth. A dead earth would
have given birth to a dead Jupiter.
It could
not have been otherwise, because, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not
come about, man would have lacked the possibility of permeating what
rayed out from him, with the Music of the Spheres, and the Cosmic Life.
Christ brought these with the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a
fulfillment of the words: ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’ when
we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which
rays out from us, and which would otherwise be dead, is made living.
Because we bear death within us the living Christ had to permeate us,
in order that He might give life to the spiritual earth-essence that we
leave behind us. Christ, the Living Logos, permeates and gives life to
the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and which we
do not carry further in Karma, and because He gives it life, a living
earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. That is the result of the
Mystery of Golgotha.
The soul
can, if it reflects, receive Christ in the following way. The soul can
realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the
divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He
took death into himself. Into him there passed the germ by which he
would have brought to birth a dead earth as a dead Jupiter. That
remained behind, which, before the temptation, the human soul had been
destined to receive for its earth-existence: with Christ, this entered
again into man's earth-existence.
When man
takes Christ into himself so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is
able to say to himself: ‘That which the gods had allotted to me,
before the Luciferic temptation, but which, owing to the temptation by
Lucifer, had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with
Christ. The soul may become perfect again through taking Christ into
itself. Then only am I fully soul; then only am I again what, according
to divine decree, I was intended to be from the very beginning of the
earth.’ ‘Am I really a soul without Christ?’ man asks
himself: and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes
the soul that the guiding divine Beings intended him to be. That is the
wonderful feeling of ‘home’ which souls can have with
Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul did Christ
descend, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be
lost upon the earth as a result of the temptation of Lucifer. Christ
leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it
by the Gods. That is the bliss and the blessing of the human soul in
the experience of Christ. It was this that gave such bliss to certain
Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written many things
which in themselves seem to be tinged with too strong a sense element,
but it was nevertheless fundamentally spiritual. Such Christian mystics
as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the
human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal
beginning of the earth; and when Christ entered into their souls,
filling them with life, and soul, and spirit, Christ was to them as the
bridegroom who united himself with the soul, and whom she had once lost
in her original home, whom she had forsaken in order, through Lucifer,
to follow the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good
and evil.
When the
soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living
Being, Who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of
the earth, and may flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly
vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death to
life.
As up to
the most remote future we must live out our earthly existence in human
bodies, we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres, nor have
direct experience of the cosmic life. But we can experience that which
flows out from Christ, and in this way, have, by proxy, as it were,
that which otherwise comes to us from the Music of the Spheres and the
cosmic life. Pythagoras of old spoke of the Music of the Spheres.
Why?
Pythagoras
was an initiate of the ancient Mysteries. He had gone through the
experience wherein the soul passed out of the body. When the soul was
out of the body he was able to be withdrawn into the spiritual worlds;
there he saw Christ Who was later to come to the earth. Since the
Mystery of Golgotha, man cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as
did Pythagoras; but even if his soul does not live outside the body he
can speak in another way of the Music of the Spheres. As an initiate he
might even to-day speak like Pythagoras; but the ordinary inhabitant of
earth can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the cosmic life only
when he experiences in his soul: ‘Not I, but the Christ in
me,’ for That is What has lived in the Sphere-Music, and in the
cosmic life. But we too must pass through the experience in ourselves;
we must receive the Christ into our souls. Let us suppose that a man
were to fight against this that he did not wish to receive Christ into
his soul. At the end of the earth when the earth spirits, that have
arisen in the course Of the life of mankind, have formed themselves
into a nebulous spirit-form that has emanated from the earth, such a
man would bear with him all those phantom-like entities which had come
forth from him in earlier incarnations. There would be a dead earth,
and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the
earth-period a man might have carried out and completely absolved his
Karma; he might have shouldered the whole of it in order to work out
the adjustment of all the imperfections committed by him; he might have
become perfect in his soul being, in his Ego, but sin and guilt would
remain objectively in what was left behind. That is a truth, for we do
not live only for ourselves; we do not live in order that we may become
egoistically more perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the
world, the remains of our earth-incarnations will stand there like a
mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ. When we
connect what was said in the last lecture with what is being said
to-day (and it is really the same, only taken from two sides) we
understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of the
earth-humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if
we have inwardly realized this, ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’
then He takes over what comes forth from us, and these
‘remains’ of ours stand there vivified by Christ,
irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Our incarnations stand
there, that is to say, the remains of these incarnations, and taken as
a whole, what do they yield?
Because
Christ unites them all — Christ Who belongs to all mankind in the
present and in the future — all the remains of the single
incarnations coalesce. Let us take one incarnation: certain relics or
remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations have other
remains, and so on, up to the end of the earth period. If these relics
are permeated with Christ, they coalesce — compress what is
rarified and you will get density — spirit also becomes dense,
our collective earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body.
That belongs to us, we need it, because we evolve onwards to Jupiter,
and it is the starting point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end
of the earth period we shall stand there with our soul, we shall stand
there before our earth-relics, which have been gathered together by
Christ, and we shall have to unite ourselves with them in order to pass
over with them to Jupiter.
We shall
rise again in the body, in the earth-body, that has condensed out of
the separate incarnations. From a heart profoundly moved I say:
‘In the body we shall rise again!’
In these
days, young people of sixteen, and even less, are beginning to press
their own confession of faith, and to talk of having happily grown
beyond such nonsense as ‘The Resurrection of the Body.’ But
those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the Mysteries of the
Universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been
said to men, because — as I explained at the beginning of this
lecture — it had first of all to be said, in order that men might
grasp it as life-truth and then understand it later. The resurrection
of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will arise
face to face with the earth-relics that have been collected, brought
together by Christ, face to face with the spiritual body that is
permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand.
For supposing that (because of our not having received into ourselves
the living Christ), we could not approach this earth-body with its sin
and guilt and unite with it. If we rejected the Christ, the relics of
our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the
earth-period; they would have remained, but they would not have been
gathered together by the Christ who spiritualizes the whole of
humanity. We should stand as a soul at the end of the earth period, and
we should be bound to the earth, to that in the earth which remains
dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would, in spirit, be free in an
egoistic sense, but we could not approach our bodily relics. Such souls
are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to cross the true earth-goal,
he tries to prevent souls from reaching their earth-goal, to hold them
back in the spiritual world. And Lucifer will send over what has
remained of scattered earth-relics, to the Jupiter evolution as a dead
content of Jupiter, which will not separate as Moon from Jupiter, but
will be in Jupiter, and will be continually emitting these
earth-relics. And these earth-relics will have to be called into life
on Jupiter by the souls above, of their own kind.
And now you
will remember what I told you some years ago — that the human
race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained
their earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into
those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom
and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic
souls, Luciferic — merely spiritual. They will have their body
below, and this body will be a direct expression of their whole inner
being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races,
the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on
Jupiter.
A Venus
existence will follow that of Jupiter; and again there will be an
adjustment as a result of the further evolution of the Christ event,
but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to wish to be
perfect only in his own Ego, and not to make the whole earth his own
affair. Through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle man will have to
experience that, for all that he has not permeated with Christ, during
his earthly existence, will then pass before his spiritual sight.
Let us
reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ which sent His
disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to
forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness
of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can only be blotted out and
transformed into living life if Christ can be united with our
earth-relics, if during our earth-existence He is within us in the
sense of the Pauline saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in
me.’
And
wherever any religious confession, in its outer ceremonial associates
itself with this saying of Christ in order to bring home to souls the
meaning and significance of Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in
it. When in any form of religious confession, one of His servants
speaks of the forgiveness of sins, by Christ's command, as it were, it
means that he who with his words about the forgiveness of sins, forms a
connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, says to the
soul in need of comfort: ‘I have seen that thou hast developed a
living relationship to Christ. Thou dost unite with objective sin and
guilt, and with what as objective sin and guilt is to enter into thine
Earth-relics, all that Christ is to thee. Because I have recognized
that thou hast permeated thyself with the Christ — therefore I
dare to say to thee: “Thy sins are forgiven
thee.”‘
Such words
always mean that he, who in any religious confession whatsoever, speaks
of the forgiveness of sins, is convinced that the person in question
has formed a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in
his heart and in his soul. Because of this he is permitted to give
comfort when the other comes to him conscious of his guilt.
‘Christ will forgive thee, and I dare to say unto thee that in
His Name thy sins are forgiven thee.’ Christ is the only forgiver
of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being Who gives
life to human earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created
when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words:
‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’ — to those who show that
in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is a fresh
strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes
‘I have taken such a view of my guilt and of my sins, that it
might be said to me that Christ takes them upon Himself, works through
them with His Being.’ If the expression ‘forgiveness of
sins’ is to be an expression of a truth it must contain as an
undertone that the sinner is reminded of his bond with Christ even if
he does not form it anew. There must be so inward a bond between the
soul and Christ that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough.
And because Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the
human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its
relation to Christ by reminding itself at the moment of the forgiveness
of sins, of the existence of the cosmic Christ in the earth's being.
Those who join Anthroposophy in the real spirit, and not merely in an
external sense, can most assuredly become their own father-confessors.
Through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately
and feel themselves so closely connected with Him — that they can
be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And, when they have
solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in
spirit direct their confession to Him, and in their silent meditation
ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But so long as men have not yet
permeated themselves with Spiritual Science in this deep spiritual
sense, intelligent reference must be made to that which, as an external
sign, is known in the various religions of the world as the
‘Forgiveness of Sins.’ Men will become spiritually freer
and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with
Christ will become more and more a thing of direct experience.
And there
must be tolerance I A man who thinks that, through the deep
understanding which his innermost soul has of Christ — the Spirit
of Golgotha — he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ,
must look with understanding upon those who need the positive
declarations of a confession of faith, and who need a minister of
Christ to give them comfort with the words ‘Thy sins are forgiven
thee.’ On the other side there should be tolerance on the part of
those who see that there are men who can manage for themselves. This
may be all an ideal in the Earth existence, but the anthroposophist, at
all events, may look out to such an ideal.
I have
spoken to you of spiritual secrets which reveal themselves, and which
make it possible for men — even those, who have imbibed much
spiritual teaching — to look still more deeply into the nature of
our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and
of those things which we must understand before we can have a right
understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is
not only an ‘I’ being, but belong to the whole
earth-existence, and is called to help forward the attainment of the
divine aim of the earth. Christ did not come into the world and pass
through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to
each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be
so understood in a sense that the expression of Paul. ‘Not I, but
Christ in me’ should only encourage a higher egoism. Christ died
for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the earth. Christ became
the central Spirit of the earth Who has to save, for the sake of the
earth, the spiritual-earthly elements that flow from man.
Those who
read theological works to-day can bear out what I now say. Certain
theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries peremptorily
disposed of the popular belief of the Middle Ages, that Christ came
upon earth in order to snatch the earth from the devil, to snatch the
earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an
‘enlightened’ materialism which will not recognize itself
as such, on the contrary it imagines itself to be very enlightened; it
says: ‘In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared
in the world because He had to snatch the earth away from the
devil.’ But the true explanation leads us back to this simple,
popular belief of the people. For everything on the earth which is not
set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us —
all that is more than what is contained in our Ego, will be ennobled;
it will be made fruitful for the whole of humanity when it is permeated
with Christ.
And now at
the end of what we have been considering during the last few days, I do
not want to omit to say these words to each single one of the souls who
have gathered together here: Hope and confidence in the future of the
work in which we are engaged, can dwell in our hearts, because we have
endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with
the will of Christ. And in this hope and confidence it may be said that
our teaching is itself what Christ wishes to say to us, in fulfillment
of His words: ‘I am with you always even to the end of the
earth-ages.’ We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from
Him; and that which He has breathed into us, according to His promise,
we want to take into ourselves as Spiritual Science. Not because we
feel our Spiritual Science to be filled with an element of Christian
dogmatism, do we consider it truly Christian, but because having Christ
within us, it is really a revelation of the Christ. I am therefore also
convinced that what takes root as true Spiritual Science in those souls
which want to receive our Christ-filled Spiritual Science will be
fruitful for the whole of humanity.
Clairvoyant
investigation shows that much of what is good in a spiritual sense in
our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our
‘Christian’ Spiritual Science into themselves, and who,
after having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the
fruits of this Christian Spiritual Science. The Christian Spiritual
Science, which they have taken into themselves, and which they are now
sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us.
For they do not keep it merely for the sake of perfecting their own
Karma. They can let it stream into those who want to receive it.
Comfort and hope arise for our Spiritual Science when we know that our
so-called ‘dead’ are working with us.
In the
second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But
to-day, when we have come to the close of this course, I should like to
add a personal word.
Whilst I
have been speaking to this Norrköping Branch of our Society I
could not help being conscious of the spirit of one who was so closely
connected with us here. It is really true to say that the spirit of
Frau Danielsen like a ‘good angel’ looks on all that this
Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a ‘Christian
spirit’ in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will
never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as
guardian-spirit over this Branch! Willingly will it do so if the souls
that work in this Branch receive it. With these words, which I speak
from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we
shall continue to work together on the spiritual path which we have
entered.
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