Christ and the Twentieth Century
Berlin, 25 January 1912
Someone who looks around in the present
cultural life cannot deny that the object of the today's
consideration has seized many people, just from the scientific
point of view. However, on the other side more and more
a worldview seems to gain ground in the present within which
the question that is connected with the name of Christ has no
place. The previous talks on
‘the origin of the human being’,
and on
‘the origin of the animal realm’
have probably shown that
every age moves such basic questions as on the origin of the
human being and similar matters into the light of the habitual
ways of thinking and feeling which prevail in an age in other
ways as well. We have realised that already in the question of
the origin of the human being, actually, the theoretical views
which have arisen to our contemporaries from these habitual
ways of thinking contradict the real results of scientific
research whereas just the question of the origin of the human
being has shown that the spiritual-scientific answers
completely consort just with the real results of natural
sciences. However, maybe with no question the disharmony
appears as big between that what has developed as a worldview
what prevails as habitual ways of thinking with many people and
that what science had necessarily to decide as with the
question of Christ. Indeed, since the appearance of the
Christian movement in world history, the human imaginative
power towards the being of Christ has always taken that form
which was commensurate to the age or, one can even say, to the
human beings.
During the first post-Christian centuries,
we find that in a certain school of thought which one calls
gnosis magnificent ideas of the Christ Being develop. These
gnostic ideas can maintain only for a short time against the
ideas that spread out as the popular ones and became then the
contents of the ecclesiastical movements. It is instructive to
go into the gnostic ideas about Christ with few words only,
even if the spiritual-scientific concepts of Christ do not
correspond in any way to the gnostic ideas. Since those only
assert this who are incapable because of their lacking
spiritual-scientific maturity to distinguish the matters really
which present themselves in the spiritual life. The present
spiritual science whose ideas we want to discuss briefly this
evening exceeds everything in many respects that the old gnosis
produced. Nevertheless, even more interesting it is maybe to
point with a few words to these gnostic ideas. However, there
are many points of view and shadings of the gnosis, but to the
most important one I would like to point which reminds mostly
of that what spiritual science has to say in the present.
One can say that the old gnosis has the
deepest, most important concept of the Christ Being first
compared with all that what originated in Christianity at that
time. Since it regards this Christ Being as an everlasting
being that is connected not only with the whole development of
humanity but also with the whole development of the universe
generally. —
We had to go back with the question of the
origin of the human being to that spiritual figure which did
not yet embody itself, so to speak, in the outer material form.
We have realised that the human being gradually descended to
that compressed being that we know as the present human being.
We have also realised that only by the materialist habitual
ways of thinking the theory of evolution, which pursues the
human being backward, gets to outer animal forms, while
spiritual science gets to forms that more and more resemble the
spiritual-mental forms and, finally, completely show the
spiritual origin of the human being. In that region in which
the human being lived before he assumed material existence
where he felt in the midst of wholly spiritual beings and
spiritual facts the old gnosis already searched the Christ
Being.
If we want to understand the gnosis
correctly, we have to say that it took the following view.
While the human being kept on developing and began enclosing
his spiritual-mental being with a physical cover to enter into
the material development, an old companion of the human being
remained in wholly spiritual worlds who did not descend to the
material world, the Christ Being. Whereas the human being
advanced within the material world, the Christ Being
remained in the wholly spiritual region. Gnosis considered that
time of the emergence of Christianity as a particularly
important time of human evolution in which the Christ Being
entered the physical-sensory world, after it had restrained its
own development to work as an impulse in humanity. Thus gnosis
considered the human being when he was still in old
developmental epochs as a spiritual being connected with the
world in which Christ was effective and beheld Christ
descending to the world in the beginning of our calendar where
the human being has experienced his material development long
since.
The question must arise from it at once:
how did gnosis imagine this descent of a wholly spiritual being
to the human development?
Gnosis imagined that an especially
developed human being who is called Jesus of Nazareth by
historical research had such maturity that in him at a certain
time conditions existed that his soul could directly take up
from the spiritual world what the human beings could not
directly take up from the spiritual world. Gnosis speaks of
this time in which the soul of a choice human being could feel
ripe to take up a being, the Christ, not connected with the
human evolution up to then. Gnosis regarded the Baptism in the
Jordan as the representation of this irruption of the Christ
Being in the human development. At this baptism something
particular happened with Jesus of Nazareth. You approach the
gnostic idea if you think the following.
There are for many people such moments,
such epoch-making events where they feel like in a turning
point of their life and say to themselves, now compared with
that what I have experienced up to now this appears to me like
the image of a new life. — It was maybe
released by an especially deep painful event or by other trials
of life. One cannot deny that there is something like a turning
point, like an arousal of particular forces in the soul life
for many persons. If you imagine such an event as the
elementary beginning of that what gnosis imagined what has gone
forward with Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in the Jordan,
one gets an image of the irruption of something quite new, but
not of something as it descends, otherwise, upon the human soul
by trials of life, but from something that was not connected
with a human life during the entire human evolution.
Gnosis calls that Christ what there rises
in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth what appears as something new
and lives in Jesus of Nazareth and has caused that all culture
that has taken its starting point from it has moved in a new
light. However, with it gnosis also realised that with this
Christ who cannot be searched just like that in a single outer
human being, but in that what still existed there in an outer
human being as a special inside being something descended upon
humanity as a new impulse of something that was never there
before. Since just that, which Jesus of Nazareth bore in
himself for three years from the Baptism in the Jordan on, was
not connected with the human evolution before.
With it, we have given the old gnostic idea
of Christ in such a way that we can understand it because it is
already given to us, so to speak, in its elements if a special
reversal happens in a single human soul. What now the modern
human being hardly understands is that something is connected
with this event that has historical significance of basic kind,
that with it the main focus of the whole human development was
given. From this gnostic image, even if we compare it to
various matters of spiritual science that I could show in these
talks one may say that it has, actually, a great idea of the
Christ Being on one side, but also of the nature of the human
being. For it puts the human being in a development in which an
impulse from the spiritual world intervenes directly in the
course of the historical becoming.
Hence, it is no miracle that this gnostic
image could not become popular. Since someone who brings the
conditions of human development, the states of the human soul,
the different conditions of social life of the first Christian
century to his mind admits just like that that such an image
was carried by a high-minded attitude which does certainly not
become popular. One has only to look at the modern cultural
life. If talk is of such an image, most people say, this is an
abstraction, a daring daydreaming. However, we need something
real, something that can intervene directly in our real
life. — Since people are still far away today to feel the
really concrete of that what lies in the spiritual ideas to
which we rise, compared to that what most people call real. If
this were not the case, people would also not strive in art for
that which eyes see which hands can seize, and reject as
something abstract to which one must ascend in spirit with
inner soul gifts.
It is not possible of course to go into the
further development of the idea of the Christ Being in the
popular world even with a few lines. But I am allowed to say
that beside the immediate idea which one formed of “Jesus
of Nazareth” who is born in miraculous way who faced the
human beings with his charming kind — already while the
history of his childhood was told — who faced the human
beings then as the human Saviour loving whole humanity.
— I have
to say that beside all the sensations and feelings that the
human being exerted for this human Saviour. Nevertheless,
always also an echo of the image of the Christ Being lived, of
a being that was embodied in the human being Jesus of
Nazareth.
Beside that what one, so to speak, told as
outer history of the life of Jesus, one still looked up at a
great secret, at a mystery which just at that time, when Jesus
of Nazareth walked on earth, expressed something superhuman in
this human being. One called this superhuman Christ. Besides,
the human beings yet felt, the more they approached the modern
time, to be more and more incapable to grasp the daring thought
of this gnostic Christ,. That is why we already realise in the
Middle Ages that science only dares to give information about
the outer sensory world and about that which is behind the
senses still as the realm of physical principles. Against it,
science did not feel called to penetrate into those impulses
that intervened in the human development as the highest
spiritual impulses. Thus the question of the origin and
development of the human being, in which the Christ impulse
intervenes, became an object of faith for the medieval view,
and the faith figured from now on beside the scientific
knowledge that should confine itself to the lower objects of
the world order. It would be now interesting to show how from
the sixteenth century on this kind of “double-entry
bookkeeping” got out of control in humanity by which one
wanted to limit the kind of knowledge to the lower orders of
the things, and wanted to assign everything to faith that
referred to the spiritual origins and the matters of spiritual
development.
However, this cannot be our task today.
Rather I have to point to the fact that in the nineteenth
century the whole course of development has led to lose any
real idea of Christ, at least in wide sections of the
population. In some sections, this deep insight into the Christ
impulse has survived like a further development of old gnostic
ideas. However, other sections, also scientific-theological
ones, renounced the real Christ concept, and tried to confine
themselves to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, this was
put as a unique, choice person who grasped the developmental
terms of humanity, the divine inside nature of the human being
and bore them in basic way in himself, but as a “human
being,” indeed, who excelled all others. Thus in the
nineteenth century a mere quest for the historical Jesus
replaced the old Christology which could believe less and less
that in Jesus of Nazareth divine contents had lived, and wanted
only to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a choice single
human individuality. This kind of views attained its climax in
such a writing like
The Being of Christianity
(1910) by Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) and similar attempts
in this field of
research that appear in the most manifold nuances today. One
needs only to point to that which one attained recently from a
serious deepening just of this academic Jesus research. I want
only to point with few words to the fact that those methods
which were applied in the nineteenth century to prove, so to
speak, historically what should have taken place at the
beginning of the Christian calendar have led to no real result.
I would go too far if I carried out this thought in the one or
other way.
However, someone who goes deeper into that
which modern time has done knows that one tried to put the person of Jesus of Nazareth with the
usual means of outer materialistic research at the starting
point of our Christian cultural life. However, this attempt to
prove the existence of that person with outer historical means
led to the fact that one had to admit: one cannot prove this
person of Jesus of Nazareth with the outer materialistic
means. — Not because the opposite can be proved that he did not
live, but one cannot prove the life of Jesus in such a way as
one proves the existence of Aristotle or Socrates or Alexander
the Great, otherwise, with historical means. Not only this, but
in another direction the research in this field has been urged
in the last time. You need only to take such books like those
by William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) and you will realise that
our time has got on by precise study of biblical and other
documents which refer to Christianity that these documents
cannot talk, actually, about that what one believed so long in
the nineteenth century to have to talk. One wanted to
reconstruct the life of Jesus from a philological investigation
of biblical and other documents, but the documents showed, in
the end, something else. It became obvious, when one attempted
to construct a “life of Jesus” with all scientific
conscientiousness that these biblical documents, the Christian
documents where one stands on really Christian ground do not
speak at all of a “human being” Jesus of
Nazareth.
Thus, the outer research had to say that
the documents do not talk about a human being Jesus of Nazareth
but about a god. —
One realises the strange anomaly in our
time that the materialistic research states, you have wrongly
concluded if you believe that the Christian documents refer to
the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Rather you have to convince
yourselves that the Gospels and the other documents talk about
a god, and that all things that are told there bear a meaning
and have sense only if one speaks about a god at the starting
point of Christianity.
Now, is this not extremely weird? Our time
discovers, if one wants to speak about Jesus of Nazareth, that
one has to speak about a god. However, it is the same time and
the same attitude of research that cannot at all consider a
god, something wholly spiritual generally as real. What does
Christ become, hence, for the present research? He becomes pure
poetry, something that only intervened in history as an idea,
as an impulse caused by social imagination.
According to modern historical research,
Christ is not real but a fictional god. Yes, one may express it
drily: here historical research gets to something that it
cannot use, because what should the present research make use
of a god in whom it cannot believe? — It has the evidence
only that the biblical documents speak about a god, but it can
do nothing but putting him among poetries.
Let us now compare this with that which
spiritual science has to say in this case.
There I would like to refer to my book
Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
The main concern of this book was little understood,
actually. Hence, I tried to draw the attention in the preface
of the second edition once again to the fact that world history
does not consist only of that what outer documents can give
because in the human development spiritual impulses, spiritual
factors intervene everywhere that we have almost to call
spiritual beings. However, if we consider the whole way of the
historical worldview as Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), for
example, and others applied it, one has to say that the highest
what history still soars is that it speaks of historical ideas,
as if, so to speak, outer abstract ideas intervene in the
course of human evolution. This is the extreme that one can
believe. However, ideas are not anything that develops power.
The entire developmental course of humanity would be brainless
if you did historic research unless the ideas, which squeeze in
the human souls, were the expression of being-like impulses
invisibly, supersensibly penetrating the whole historical
development, so that behind the outer history still this is
what one can attain only with the means of
spiritual-scientific, supersensible research. There I could
show that the Christian impulse positions itself in the human
development historically in such a way that it proves to
continue that which has happened for the spiritual human
development in the ancient mysteries. Today one understands a
little only, what the mysteries really are.
Someone can only understand what was done
for the spiritual bases of any national development in the
pre-Christian mysteries who gets an insight of the soul
development by modern spiritual science which transforms this
soul into that which I have repeatedly mentioned already here,
into an instrument of the perception of the spiritual world
which is behind the sensory one. We know that the human being
can today ascend beyond himself to a higher development of his
soul confining himself to his inside in a way, completely
secluded to the intimacies of his soul experience, so that his
soul lives in a spiritual world as the human being lives in a
physical world.
The spiritual-scientific consideration of
history shows now that this possibility to ascend wholly
internally by an intimate soul development to the spiritual
world has originated only in the course of human development
that it did not at all exist in ancient times. Whereas today
the soul rises freely by own measures to spiritual beholding,
the soul could not do this in pre-Christian times, but there it
depended on certain measures that were carried out in the
mysteries with it. If we briefly outline what in the mystery
temples — we have to understand them as spiritual educational
institutions —
the leaders of the mystery temples carried
out with the soul, one can summarise it the following way. The
soul was freed by outer measures from its physical body. It was
enabled to remain during a certain time in a state which was
similar and, still, quite different from the sleeping
state.
If we consider the sleeping state
spiritual-scientifically, we have to imagine that the outer
body of the human being lies in the bed, while the real
spiritual-mental essence remains beyond that what remains in
the bed. However, the forces, the real inner being of this
spiritual-mental core is in the sleeping state of such low
intensity that unconsciousness happens and darkness prevails
around the spiritual-mental core.
The measures that were carried out in the
ancient mysteries with the human soul are those that a kind of
sleeping state was caused by advanced human beings who had
already experienced this mystery initiation in their souls.
Besides, the inner soul forces were so strengthened at the same
time that it left behind its body in a sleeping state like
death, but it was able to behold into the spiritual world for a
certain time. Thus, it spent a sleeping life consciously and
could convince itself that it is as a citizen of the spiritual
world. If then such a soul was led back again to the usual
state after some time, it remembered what it had perceived and
experienced beyond its body. Then such a human being could
present himself like a prophet to the people and could bear
witness that a spiritual world and humanity exist forever. Such
a soul had thereby take partd in the spiritual life, and in the
mysteries the instructions were given according to which such a
soul had to dedicate itself in a long life, so that then by the
leaders of the ancient mystery sites the last act was added. If
we put up the question, where from originate the old wisdoms of
the divine origin and the eternity of the human soul that the
peoples of the whole world deliver to us? — Spiritual science
answers: they are due to the initiates. However, these old
wisdoms face us in a peculiar way. In myths, legends and
pictorial stories the experiences of the initiands are shown
which they had like in a living dream in these mystery
sites.
One understands mythology only if one
understands its figures as pictorial representations of that
what the initiates of the mysteries beheld during their
initiations. One has to go back if one wants to gain a relation
to the old religious teachings to the mysteries and regard them
as that what was hidden to the outer profane world what only
those could attain who had prepared themselves by strict trials
and by silence for initiation
Thus, the human spiritual development takes
place if we trace back it to pre-Christian times, to the
darkness of the mysteries. The human soul was not yet ripe in
those times to ascend to the spiritual world without the
necessary co-operation of the temple priests. I wanted to show
in my book
Christianity as Mystical Fact
that something
happened, while the outer actions of the history took place. I
wanted to show there that it is the sense of development that
humanity had got to know by everything that it had found out
during the repeated incarnations also from their initiates
about the spiritual world, to become so ripe around that turn
of the era that from then on the human being could rise to the
spiritual world without outer influence, only in his innermost
inside. This is, howsoever we want to think about the event in
Palestine, the big progress which gradually took place maybe in
the course of centuries, but around the turn of the era that
the human soul became ripe for “self-initiation,”
simply under the guidance of those who knew what the human soul
had to experience, but without any help of mystery leaders.
However, that appeared in human history by
the foundation of Christianity, which took place,
otherwise, inside the mystery temple, about which we know in
the legends and myths. One can simply proceed if one wants to
understand the Gospels in such a way that one asks, what had an
initiand of the ancient Persian or the Egyptian peoples to
experience to behold the spiritual world directly? — The
instructions what he had to experience were described as a
process, called “baptism,” and another, called
“temptation,” up to that point where the soul
perceived the spiritual world; this was, so to speak, the
ritual of initiation. If one takes such rituals and compares
them to the central issue in the single Gospels, one realises
that the reappeared descriptions of the old initiatory
ceremonies face us in the Gospels, only applied to the great
historical individual of Jesus of Nazareth. Then one realises, that — while once the
initiands were led to the spiritual world in the seclusion of
the mystery temples —
Jesus of Nazareth was led to the point by
that what took place in history where he was led so far that he
could not only remember the spiritual world, but where he could
combine with a being that had not yet combined before with a
human being, with the Christ Being.
Thus, the stories of the development of
Jesus of Nazareth up to the point where Christ took possession
of his soul for three years comply well with the descriptions of the ancient initiatory
processes. In the representation of the experiences of Jesus of
Nazareth the initiation faces us — you can realise that
best in the John's Gospel — which was given
directly by the big spiritual-divine facts underlying history.
Countless neophytes were initiated before, but only so far,
that they could bear witness that there is a spiritual world,
and that the human soul belongs to such a spiritual
world. — However, the inner being of Jesus of Nazareth could
combine with the most significant being that they could
remember when his initiation took place in world history. Any
ancient initiation was prone to this initiation.
Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha appears to us
from the darkness of the mysteries on the big plan of world
history. As long as one does not believe that at a point of the
earth at a certain time such a thing happens like the
initiation of Jesus of Nazareth with Christ, and that such a
thing sends rays of immense power and forms an impulse for the
whole following evolution of humanity, one does not understand
the actual significance of the Christ impulse. Not before one
is able to admit the reality of such a spiritual event by all
other preconditions of spiritual science, one can understand
what came by the Christ impulse into the human
development.
But then one will also not degrade the
Gospels while one discovers four different initiatory rituals
in them in which is only hidden as secrets what has happened
around the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Then one
will also understand that that what happens by this event in
Palestine has a deep, causal significance for the whole
following human development. While up to then the innermost
essence was something that, indeed, existed for the human
being, but had not completely entered the human
consciousness —
this should be caused just by this event
which is described as the Mystery of Golgotha. Now the time
should begin when the human beings could know: in this ego that
reveals itself in the human being, which he has in common with
the whole universe.
If we wanted to show how one has to
consider the big reversal spiritual-scientifically which
happened by the Christ impulse in world history, we have to
say, the human being consists of his physical body, of his
etheric body, of his soul cover, and in the core he carries
what goes from incarnation to incarnation, the real ego.
However, this real ego is at the same time that which the human
beings realised latest, so that they did not have a notion in
the pre-Christian times that just as their physical bodies are
connected with the whole physical world, and as their soul
beings are connected with the soul world, their innermost
essences are born out of the most extensive spiritual world.
Christianity, the just described Christ impulse brought to the
human development to search God and the original divine being
not in the soul cover but in the real ego. Once one could say,
my soul is rooted in the divine; the divine is the actually
formative. —
But now one learnt to say, if you want to
recognise where the deepest divine that lives through the
universe can reveal itself, look into your own ego, because God
speaks to you through your ego. He speaks to you for the usual
consciousness if you properly understand how by the Mystery of
Golgotha divine forces have entered into humanity if you have
recognised that an initiation took place as a great historical
event, while once the initiate experienced the spiritual world
in the depths of the mystery temples. However, God speaks to
you in particular if you rise while you make your soul an
instrument of perception in the spiritual world.
One may say that the entry of the divine
consciousness that speaks through the ego is the being of the
Christ impulse. That this Christ impulse could enter into
humanity was caused by the fact that the ancient initiatory
principle became historical, as I have shown. The Mystery of
Golgotha is the cause. The human souls will recognise in the
course of the earth evolution clearer and clearer that the
divine-spiritual to which the human being belongs and by which
he becomes independent of all earthly conditions speaks through
the ego.
Someone who can understand certain deep
words of the Gospels from this viewpoint penetrates into the
big education of the human race by the spiritual world. He will
realise that the ancient Hebrew development prepared what
should speak through the ego to the human being, like that what
spoke through Judaism, but as a folk spirit. It was not in such
a way with the other peoples, but with these, only the
consciousness existed that the spiritual-divine speaks to the
soul cover if the human being is initiated. However, it had
become clear to Judaism that the human development is an
ongoing educational process, and that in the ego that encloses
the whole people the forces are to which the human being
belongs with his deepest being.
Hence, the Jew felt: while I look up as a
member of the whole ancient Hebrew people to Abraham and
recognise what prevails there as spirit what advances through
the generations, I am allowed to say, He lives in me, lives in
all my ancestors as the divine which has developed the physical
of the human being. — Thus, the member of the ancient Hebrew
people considered himself one with the ancestors. Christianity
now strongly stresses: such a feeling of the divine, even if it
speaks of itself as „ejeh asher ejeh“ — “I
am the I-am ,” is not yet that what shows the human being
in his complete figure, but only if one feels something that is
in the spiritual beyond all generations. Then one has grasped
what works as something divine on the human being. Therefore,
one has to say translating the sentence correctly: before
Abraham was, this I-am was. — That means, the
human being experiences something everlasting in his ego that
is more original than that divine which lived from Abraham
through the generations.
“Look at that what does not only
consist of the real physical human being, but what flows as
something divine-spiritual through the generations, through the
blood of all generations which developed from Abraham. However,
look at this divine-spiritual in such a way that you recognise
it in the single human being, not in that what holds brother
and sister together but what the single human being discovers
if he recognises himself as the I-am in his innermost soul
being. — We have to understand such a quotation of Christ Jesus
that reads, if anyone comes to me and does not leave his
father, mother, woman, children, brothers, sisters, or his own
life, then he cannot be my disciple. — We have to
understand it not as if he rejects the beneficiary of
relationship and child's love, but in such a way, that Christ
Jesus brings the principle of the divine-spiritual to the world
that every single human being can find in his innermost
essence. Hence, the core of Christianity will affect the human
beings more and more in such a way that the innermost secret of
Christianity leads beyond all differences that prevail among
the human beings to the general-human. The old gods were
national gods, engaged to the characteristics of the people
concerned; that also applies to the Indian Buddhism. But that
God who faced the human beings in Christ leads the human being
beyond all other differences away to that what the human being
is only because he is a “human being.” That is why
it is necessary that someone who wants to grasp the real being
of Christianity has to regard the spiritually leading forces
and impulses of world history as realities. One has to break
with all that what was “history” up to now, and
that that history is only the outer dress of the historical
becoming, while in the depths of the historical becoming real
supersensible beings prevail. The most superior among the
supersensible beings who rule the historical becoming of
humanity is the Christ who worked, as well as gnosis assumes
it, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth for three
years.
However, thus spiritual science rises to a
mental picture that is able to make use of the results of the
outer science. Since the latter has to admit today that we do
not deal with a “human being” but with a god
prevailing in a human being for which it has no use. Against
it, spiritual science leads us to such beings that are
realities for it, so that spiritual science knows how to make
the right use of the results of modern research. This will turn
out as the miraculous for the spiritual development of the
twentieth century that it will recognise that the nineteenth
century was on the wrong tracks. Since it wanted to reduce the
life of Christ Jesus to a mere life of Jesus of Nazareth that,
however, science starts turning to the right life that says
there, everything bears witness that one deals with a
“god” in Christ Jesus.
Spiritual science will only add that one
can make use of this word. However, this is a view that
contradicts the materialistic-monistic worldview. However, we
could show with the talk on the origin of the human being as
well as with the other about the origin of the animal realm
that spiritual science completely agrees with the actual
research results of science. But where this stands as before a
question mark, this outer conscientious research is not led to
that to which spiritual science can lead.
However, during the twentieth
century something else has to be added to the habitual ways of
thinking. The human being stands on the point of view now that
the human life and the cognition of the outer world face us as
immediate truth, and that at most an error may originate
because the human being forms incorrect mental pictures of the
world or does something that one calls evil that does not
comply with the outer course of the world. Today the worldview
is still out to search the causes everywhere in that what
presents itself immediately. The worldview questions are pushed
by this way of thinking to a point from which a return proves
necessary.
The outer science has advanced so far that
it does not believe in anything spiritual and only summarises
the sensory reality in the scientific and historical fields. In
a certain respect our age has come to a point which must change
directly into its opposite. Extreme materialism must lead the
soul to the fact that it brings itself by its own inner
resisting to accepting that concept which has played a little
role in the worldviews up to now. To the search for the origins
of the things, a concept has to be added which has not yet
found acceptance. In my writings
Philosophy of Freedom
and
Truth and Science,
I have shown that the
human being has to assume that the condition in which he is
compared with the world is not the true one that he has to go
through a development of his inner life first to be able to
recognise the truth of the world phenomena and to put himself
in a true and also moral relation to them. The concept of
redemption has to be added to the only causal cognition. The
big task of the twentieth century will be that the concept of
redemption, of rebirth will get acceptance beside the other
scientific concepts. It does not correspond to truth in what
way the human being faces the world. One gets all true concepts
first if one, released from the present point of view, develops
to a higher one if one is released from the obstacles that
cause that one does not recognise the true figure of the
world.
This is redemption of knowledge. Moral
redemption is if the human being recognises that his relation
to the world is not true, but that he has to go a way first
which overcomes the obstacles which tower up between him and
that to which he belongs,
actually.
The concept of the re-embodiment of the
soul on a higher level will develop from the wonderful
scientific and historical research results. The human being
will recognise when he has depicted the world photographically
and has conjured up the big scientific and historical
development of humanity before himself that he has not
something in it that only depicts the world to him, but that it
is a powerful means of education. The human being will no
longer only believe that natural sciences depict a world, but
the lawfulness will be something that will educate him. If
natural sciences are not only there to depict the world, but to
educate the human beings, so that the human soul works to a
point of view where it is reborn on a higher level if the human
being recognises that he is released from the inhibitions in
which he is, then he has formed the preconditions of the
concept of the Christ impulse in the world.
Since then he realises that he is allowed
to look at that time where the human being was once in a
completely spiritual world and has descended to the world of
material existence that he has to go through this material
world to advance but that his return had to be initiated at a
certain point, so that he can get free from that again what he
has taken up here. The Christ impulse has freed humanity from
sinking down into the wholly material. Objectively Christ is
that in the world evolution which shows that experience which
we have if we say, the relation to the world which arises if
the soul is reborn and is released from that what it has got as
its. It is that, seen from without in the big world process of
humanity, which entered as Christ into the world.
If the twentieth century can take the great
experience inside the human being seriously, it will also be
able to understand the Christ event and does no longer take
offence at what happens as the rebirth of the soul on a higher
level in the human being. Then spiritual science will show that
the same applies to the historical becoming that applies to the
outer natural events. There one has dedicated himself in the
outer worldview also to the mistake of Schopenhauer's
proposition: the world is my mental picture.
That means that it depends on my eye and on
my other senses that round me a world of colours, of tones and
the like exists. However, it is not right if one wants to grasp
the world in its entirety that one says, the world of colours
is only there by the constitution of my eye.
— Since my
eye would not be there unless the light had brought out my eye
first. As it is true on one side that the sensations of the
light are determined by the constitution of the eye, it is as
true on the other side that the eye is there only by the light,
by the sun. Both truths must combine to a whole truth. It is
right what already Goethe said: “The eye has to owe its
existence to the light. From indifferent animal auxiliary
organs the light produces an organ for itself which becomes
equal to it, and the eye forms in the light for the light, so
that the inner light faces the outer one.”
— As the
eye is formed by the light as the perception of light happens
by the eye, the inner Christ experience, the inner rebirth of
the soul comes about by the Christ experience of humanity, by
the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritual science shows that, before
the Christ impulse entered into humanity, this inner experience
could take place only by outer impulses in the mysteries and
not intimately, as it now happens by a kind of self-initiation
in the human being himself.
It is also with the inner mystic experience
of Christ as it is for the world of light and colours with the
eye: the human being experiences Christ with his inside. He can
develop the soul intimately beyond himself because the
spiritual sun, the Mystery of Golgotha, entered into world
history. — Without the objective Mystery of Golgotha and without
the objective Christ there is no subjective inner experience of
mystic kind as the human being will experience it in the
twentieth century and as he will completely take it
seriously.
Therefore, we can say that the twentieth
century delivers the preconditions of a real understanding of
the Christ impulse showing how true the Christ impulse is as
the spiritual sun and evokes the inner experience in the soul
which Goethe indicated with the words:
The man who masters himself
Is delivered from the force
That binds all creatures.
One can say, while one goes back to this
self-conquest, to the Mystery of Golgotha, that the human being
only finds himself in this self-conquest that he has to regard
the figure which he has from his earthly origin as something
from which he has to be released, and that all moral work, all
knowledge can only take place by redemption. With the concept
of inner redemption, the human being will recognise the concept
of redemption in the historical development and see the Christ
event in the light of the somewhat enlarged sentence of Goethe
in the twentieth century:
The man who masters himself
Is delivered from the force
That binds all creatures,
And only finds himself
In this overcoming in truth,
As well as the whole humanity
Can find itself in Christ in truth.
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