THE CHRIST IMPULSE AS LIVING REALITY
Munich, 18th November 1911
Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science is based on occult
science, as we have often emphasised, which brings us knowledge of the
forces underlying the various epochs, and also enables us to
understand what is at work in the cultural periods of our own epoch.
So we must speak of these inner forces of our own time, whenever and
wherever we meet, in order to understand the tasks of Spiritual
Science in relation to what is at work beneath the surface of life,
and so that occult research can help us direct our lives in harmony
with the great goals of mankind.
In order to speak about contemporary occult trends it would be a good
thing to start from the point where deep, occult research can lead us
to what is also taking place in the super-sensible world in our time.
By way of introduction we must also take into account what we have
right in front of us at present, though we can only give a general
sketch of it and not go into any details. Many things can only be
spoken of without embarrassment in Anthroposophical gatherings, for
ours is a time of dogmatism and abstraction. The strange thing is that
this basic characteristic is not recognised in exoteric life, and
people believe generally that their thoughts and actions are free from
dogma, when in fact they are extremely dogmatic. They think they are
basing themselves on reality, although they are really lost in the
wildest abstractions. Therefore it is worthwhile bringing
Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science, with its realities,
to the attention of wider circles, to open up the possibility for an
understanding of our epoch, though it will probably be a long time
before the outside world wants to develop a deeper understanding for
these things. We do not see how tied up in dogmas and abstractions our
civilisation is, until we stop looking at it from the abstract point
of view and begin seeing it in a really living way. One then finds a
trend of thought whose chief characteristic consists in the laying
down of ready-made dogmas that enlightened people are required to
accept, whilst imagining they are being genuinely discriminating.
Something of the sort is evident in the so-called monistic movement,
though it is not justified in calling itself monistic. It gets its
chief dogmas from modern natural science, in fact that particular
branch of it which, strictly speaking, likes drawing its knowledge by
means of purely external methods. If this natural science were to keep
to its own field of activity, it could do important work; instead of
this it leads to the formation of a new religion. Men take the facts
of materialistic natural science and turn them into abstract dogmas.
And anyone who is of the opinion that he is right because he is
convinced of these dogmas himself, believes that the others have
lagged a long way behind. They completely ignore the whole life of
human individuality, and strive only to cram their heads with what the
external world outlook considers as dogmas, and to regard the conclusions
drawn from abstractions as the most important thing. This leads to the
formation of sects whose adherents cling to expert opinions, principles
and dogmas which they then advocate as the thing.
All that comprises the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual
movement represents the opposite of this. This movement does not set
out to follow a number of doctrines but to place the worth of the
human individuality in the foreground.
Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science leads to the kind of
social life that is based on a mutual interchange founded on the sort
of confidence that each personality has in the other. Human beings
should and will come together who have trust in one another. And in
joint tasks one ought to say: You are the right person, not because
you adhere to this or the other principle, but because you can achieve
this or that and do not disturb the other people in the course of your
work. Nothing could be worse than this, that the bad modern habit of
forming sects should take hold of Anthroposophical life. It is not
only when you are in full agreement with your neighbour that you
should listen to him, but, if you are not, you should still reserve
freedom and mobility for yourself and for him, and, with this
recognition of individualities, work educationally in the
Anthroposophical movement. Our time has very little understanding for
this sort of thing. It aims at generalities. What is right for one can
make the other man appear a fool. In the Anthroposophical movement we
must make a clean sweep of that. If this attitude were not prevalent
in the outside world of materialism, men would hasten of their own
accord to understand human individualities in our own way, and then a
scientific spirituality would soon appear that would be bound to lead
to a world conception of a spiritual kind. But men are rigid with
dogmas and therefore cannot reach it.
If you look into the principles that are upheld in monistic
gatherings, you would soon see that none of these principles and
dogmas are based on the outlook and results of present day science but
on those of fifteen to twenty years ago. Thus, for instance, a
personality distinguished in modern scientific circles said at a
recent scientific meeting in Koenigsberg: Facts of physics are all
tending in a certain direction. People always used to speak of the
ether as being in matter and outside, and it was taken for granted
without taking the other known material sciences into account. But,
after all, this has gradually met with justified doubt, and therefore
we must now ask what the physicists should assume to be there in place
of the ether. The answer was: Purely mathematical constructions,
Hertz' and Maxwell' equations, conceptual formulae. According to
these, light does not spread through space by means of ether
vibrations, but, assuming them not to be there, it overcomes the
non-material space as a vacuum in the sense of the equations referred
to, so that according to this the transmission of light appears to be
bound to concepts and ideas. It could quite easily happen that anyone
who pointed to such hypotheses of the most up-to-date science in a
monistic meeting could be mistaken for a mad theosophist, making the
absurd proposition that thoughts are the bearers of light. Yet
Max Planck
( 37 )
of Berlin, a respected authority on natural science,
declared this to be his scientific opinion. If, therefore the monists
wanted to make progress in science, they would also have to accept
this opinion of the experts. As this is not the case, a monistic
religion will only be possible if its supporters believe they have a
scientific basis, but do not know that their assumptions have long
been superseded. People who think in a monistic way are only held
together by the results of so-called intellectual research and its
world conception, or the biased dogmas arising out of this. Whereas
the Anthroposophically orientated theosophist complies with facts that
cannot deprive anyone of his freedom or lead to the formation of
sects, and each individuality can remain free.
An important aspect of the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual
movement is that it gives an impulse for self-education in a way that
hardly has its equal at the present time. We must understand what we
ourselves are as a movement, and realise that this movement is based
on foundations that can only be found within this movement and nowhere
outside.
Facts of real life can show us this. There are many people who think
we ought to take what Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science
has to offer and give it out in philosophical terms, in the style of
official science, to make Spiritual Science more acceptable to the
representatives and followers of officialdom. But that cannot be done,
because it is impossible to make compromises between the occult stream
of Spiritual Science and any other movement that arises out of the
characteristic outlook of our times, like the monistic one, for
instance that is, one that has a completely different basis. To
bring about compromises between the two, even if only in form, is
impossible. It is much more a matter of aiming at bringing a new
impulse into the culture of the times. The others cannot even
understand or explain their own basic facts, nor judge them one single
step ahead, because they lack the courage to draw the conclusions
arising from these facts. On closer examination we find incomplete
thought processes in every sect, including scientific circles, and
Spiritual Science must see these for what they are, for we know that a
half truth or a quarter truth is worse than a total fallacy because it
deceives the outside world which is not competent to judge. The
Anthroposophist must enter the very nerve of the spiritual movement in
order to understand the materialistic movement that sets the pace in
the outside world, because it sometimes works with facts that are
tending in the direction of spiritual truth, but are not fully
developed.
If the medical branch of natural science means to go seriously into
bodily research, it cannot ignore the sphere, the concepts and the
results of occult investigation. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund
Freud
( 38 )
in Vienna, which enjoys a large and still
growing circulation, gives us an instructive example of the
difficulties arising in this sphere. It began by investigating the
life of the soul in both the physically and the mentally ill, in an
attempt to discover certain psychic causes there, in the
long-forgotten early years, for example, because there was a definite
feeling that what is still there in the unconscious has its lasting
effect on later life too. An ingenious doctor of this school, Dr.
Breuer,
( 39 )
tried to put the patients into a condition of
hypnosis, and then let them make a kind of confession, so that he
could probe into the depths of their souls. You all know that it is a
great relief to talk about what is oppressing you. People were often
cured by these hypnotic confessions, or they were well on the way to
it. Even without hypnosis Freud often achieved the same results by
means of well chosen questions. Apart from this he discovered that
happenings of a largely unconscious kind are revealed in dream life,
and out of this a kind of dream interpretation arose in the school of
psychoanalysis. If someone were now to say that here is a good
opportunity to strike a compromise between Spiritual Science and the
results of these efforts, such an opinion can only be called a
fallacy, because despite the quarter truth contained in it he would
soon become aware that the direction in question leads to the wildest
errors and that it would be preferable to keep to purely materialistic
interpretations. Spiritual Science, when properly understood, has to
reject such things. The point is that the ideas about the soul's dream
life and the resulting theory are steeped in coarse, sense-bound
thinking, and it is therefore not possible on this basis to turn it
into a spiritual truth. For in order to do that one needs the
spiritual foundations that Spiritual Science has to offer, otherwise
one gropes around in obscure hypotheses and theories and explains them
in a materialistic way. And that is the way things have turned out in
the Freudian school. They certainly got as far as the symbolism of
dreams, but wove into them the thoughts of the materialistic age,
whilst Schubert's
( 40 )
and Volkelt's
( 41 )
correct conception could be started on in Leipzig but not developed. They
thought of the dream as a symbol of sexual life, because our time is
incapable of realising that this area is the lowest revelation of
innumerable worlds that rise far above our world in spiritual
significance. By so doing they are turning it into something that
gives an irresponsible flavour to a whole field of investigation, and,
in consequence, brings about the most serious errors. Therefore the
only thing that Spiritual Science can say about the Freudian school is
that it has to reject its research on the grounds that it is
dilettante. If it would first of all make itself thoroughly acquainted
with spiritual investigation, these truths would produce quite
different results. People would then begin to see that our age is an
intellectual age, an age of dogma, that drives people into a wild
chaos of instincts and passions and is satisfied with what is merely
intellectual and abstract.
In the example of the Freudian school therefore, we see an area of
soul life being shown in a wrong light and dragged down by the worst
kind of materialism by trying to relate all the phenomena to sex, a
procedure of which one could say that it arose out of the personal
inclination of the scientists themselves, only they are not conscious
of it, and it is dilettante into the bargain.
We must feel how necessary it is that spiritual investigation rejects
half and quarter truths and only adopts those it can defend with its
own principles, for we realise that Spiritual Science can work out of
its own strength. It is important to stress that my first books did
not grow out of theosophy, yet people outside find it strange that I
nevertheless became a theosophist later on. That is a short-sighted,
narrow-minded view, however. The books have this about them that
despite their strictly scientific attitude they do not have dealings
with what is regarded as official science, or assume the style that
believes itself capable of making general definitions.
Spiritual Science should draw abundant life from the foundations of
occultism, make no compromises and show a courage that is lacking in
the domains outside. Whoever refuses to make any compromises of this
kind, acquires a reputation of being inadequate in the eyes of those
people who always want one to give way, but do not do so themselves.
As opposed to this, Spiritual Science stands in the world as a
spiritual movement firmly established on its own basis, and its
members must always be conscious of this fact, and see it to be a
vital element of this spiritual movement. It sometimes happens that
people with special interests come into Spiritual Science, but where
Spiritual Science and spiritual investigations are concerned it is not
a case of special interests. Each individual can follow these up for
himself, and he should not expect Spiritual Science to follow after
him. Spiritual Science must penetrate into our whole cultural
situation and have the courage to carry out its task in life with
consistency in an age that is justifiably called intellectual.
But do not let us imagine that this intellectuality ought to merge, as
such, with spiritual life, for we have to take our start from facts
that are reached by clairvoyant means. We find, then, that the life of
the soul has three basic elements. There is, firstly, the life of
concepts, intellectuality, which to begin with only comes to
expression in perception. When we consider intellectuality by itself,
we notice that it is bound in the widest sense to the material world
from which man draws his mental images. These images themselves, of
course, are super-sensible. From the very connection between the life
of mental imagery and the life of perception we see that the former is
connected with the physical plane. If we involve ourselves in
difficult thoughts and think to such an extent that we get tired, then
we sleep well, provided that only the life of thought and not the life
of feeling was engaged in the activity. Therefore we can grasp the
statement that the life of thought is a super-sensible process, and is
connected with the next element, the astral world. It is from the
astral plane that those forces come that awaken and maintain the life
of thought in the human soul.
The second element consists of the waves of feeling that pass through
our soul, such as pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sorrow,
love, dislike, and so on. The flow of thought and feeling is
intimately connected with our ego, and these rob us of our sleep
because their emotional unrest prevents us entering the astral plane.
We can understand therefore that this brings us into connection with
lower Devachan, which does not accept our emotions if they are impure
but rejects them from that part of the astral world that is lower
Devachan.
Morality and will impulses are the third element. The man who can look
back on good deeds in his day's review can experience a moment of
bliss before falling asleep. He is in the pleasant situation in which
he can say: If only it were possible to prolong it, to enjoy the
enlivening power of it, and that it could take hold of our whole soul
life as a fructifying force! This enables us to understand what occult
investigation tell us: That will impulses refer us to higher Devachan,
where they are accepted only if they issue from a pure will and are
suitable for this spiritual world. Thus our life of mental images and
concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral
world, our life of feeling with lower Devachan and our life of will
with higher Devachan.
In addition to these we have our life of sense perception on the
physical plane. These four elements develop at a different rate in
human incarnations during the various cultural epochs.
When we consider the occult background, we see how the life of
perception comes to the fore in the Greco-Roman era, how the Greek and
the Roman was completely attuned to the physical world that he
esteemed so highly. Our time, the fifth cultural epoch, is that of
thinking, of intellectuality. This is why the abstract sciences are
flourishing. The coming sixth age will retain intellectual life, in
the same way as we in the fifth have retained the life of perception,
and will in addition express itself in the feeling life of the soul.
The environment will affect people so that it causes them pleasure and
displeasure, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, to a degree that as
yet can only be felt by the occultist who is capable of overcoming
mere intellect, and understanding certain connections of life with
real feeling, without lengthy logical reasoning. The occultist feels
displeasure over illogical things, joy and peace of soul over logical
things. If he defends something that he immediately sees to be right,
he has to prove it nowadays with a lengthy argument, in order to be
understood. The occultist feels pain especially vividly when he reads
the newspaper, because it is just in the daily papers that one
frequently finds illogicality incarnate. You have to read them,
nevertheless choosing as carefully as you can in order
to keep in touch with the outside world. You should not choose in the
way the professor of the Chinese language did, who told his colleague
one day, in a great state of agitation: I have just this moment
discovered it was the year 1870–71 that Germany has
been at war with France for half a year, because I only read the
Chinese newspapers.
In the last post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh era, the sense for
morality will develop, that is, the sense for the will impulses.
Remarkable progress will come about through this. Occult
investigations, even those of the present-day, show us that someone
can be very clever and intellectual without being moral. Nowadays
intellectuality and morality exist alongside each other. Little by
little, however, the curious fact will emerge that a person's
cleverness will be killed off by his immorality, so that in the far
future an immoral person will actually be stupid or will have to
become so. A moral era is coming in which the morality of our whole
soul life and the intellectuality of those later times will become
one.
Although man has within his soul all the four elements mentioned,
sense perception predominated over all others in the Greco-Roman era,
and intellectuality is added to this to a greater degree in the
present; in the one before the last, the sixth period, emotion will
predominate, and in the seventh, the last cultural epoch, it will be
morality, and in a way we can only dream of today. We cannot even
imagine what it will be like as Socrates could, who considered that
virtue could be both taught and learnt. All this, however, will become
reality by the seventh epoch, for the tendencies that are already
clearly perceptible in occultism foretell this.
Intellectuality, then, is the chief spiritual characteristic of our
age, but there is a difference between the way it comes to expression
in the materialistic thinking of the world and in Spiritual Science.
Man is connected through his intellect with the astral plane, but he
will only be conscious of this and he will only make the right
use of it when he has developed clairvoyance. This will begin
in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the
twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when
men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also
lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to
intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the
etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the
next three thousand years. In bygone times, however, when man was
mainly connected with the physical plane, Christ could only appear in
physical incarnation. In the present age of the intellect He can
appear only in etheric form. Spiritual Science wishes to prepare
mankind for this in such a way that it acquires a proper understanding
and makes proper use of the clairvoyant faculties that are slowly
appearing and will be used for vision later on, in the course of
natural development. And this will ensure that in the second half of
our intellectual age the Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in His
etheric form.
The age of feeling will develop the soul further in a different
respect, enabling it to enter the lower Devachanic world in a
conscious way. Christ will appear as a form of light to a number of
human beings in the lower Devachanic world, revealing Himself through
sound, and from His astral body of light He will fill their receptive
souls with the Word that was active in astral form in the beginning,
as is expressed by John in the opening words of his Gospel.
In the age of morality a number of human beings will perceive the
Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true Ego that
surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such
splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral
impulses. Such is the connection between the impulses of the different
cultural epochs and the soul of man. From higher and ever higher
worlds will come the forces that flow into man and become active
within him.
Perception in the physical world is wonderful indeed; even more
wonderful is the intellect when it attains predominance and forms a
connection with the astral world, and even greater still are the
feelings and morality that are connected with the Devachanic world.
Thinking this through logically you will realise the logic in this
course of development, because life confirms it on all sides. The
Anthroposophist faces these stages of development consciously, not
only in broad sweeps and universal truths but also in the individual
details of human development. In the abuses of the outer world the
striving towards dogma of the intellectual element is very prominent,
but in spiritual knowledge the intellect has to become spiritualised
so that it can understand the more advanced results of occult
investigation. This is more clearly illuminated in the fact that in
the Greco-Roman era, through the Mystery of Golgotha, we are presented
in physical form with that which then developed further so that with
its impact on the human soul it could lead humanity upwards. It is
necessary above all that man learns to understand what this Christ
Impulse signifies for our world. It has to be stressed that this
Christ Impulse is a living reality that is streaming into mankind, and
that Christ did not give the world a doctrine or a theory but the
impulse for new life. Let us take a serious look at this.
Since the Saturn stage, throughout the Sun and Moon stage, man has
developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. The ego could only
appear on earth in a body that was sufficiently prepared for it and
then develop further under the nurturing influence of the Christ
Impulse because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is to us
microcosmically. The four principles of the macrocosm are connected in
manifold ways with our four lower principles including the most
important of these, the ego. In our present cultural period the higher
human principles can already be glimpsed in our development.
Life-spirit, spirit-self and spirit-man will be developed in us out of
the higher spirit worlds through the macrocosmic principles. Not
through the fourth macrocosmic principle, however, but through the
help of beings that have no macrocosmic significance of their own but
only microcosmic significance, really working as teachers among
mankind, as they have themselves advanced by one or more principles
beyond man himself. On the other hand Christ is a macrocosmic being at
the fourth stage of His macrocosmic development, as man is
microcosmically at the fourth stage.
So you should keep macrocosmic and microcosmic principles apart, but
be clear about the fact that the four first macrocosmic principles
include of course all the higher microcosmic principles. Thus the
microcosmic beings work as teachers and seek to carry mankind forward
through their teaching, whereas Christ, working as a macrocosmic
reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity, for He
united Himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as very life.
The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the so-called
Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in
His full reality of being; again in the Christian era they point to
Him as a power Who is now united with the earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas
work both before and after Christ's physical life on earth. He, who
was born as the son of a king in India 550 years before Christ, lived
and taught for twenty-nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended
to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the
earth in a body of flesh, but from then onwards he worked from the
spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva became Buddha he was succeeded
in that very moment by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead
mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things
had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the earth, for
about the year 105 BC. there was living in Palestine a man still to
this day defamed in rabbinical literature, Jeshu ben Pandira, and he
was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an
essentially different Being, in that when He reached the age of thirty
He became the bearer of Christ at the baptism by John in the Jordan.
It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene
( 42 )
teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew,
and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned
by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of
contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult
research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature,
although the information is either misleading or deliberately
falsified. He bore within him the individuality of the new Bodhisattva
and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew
passed over to later pupils, and the content of the Gospel known by
that name had already been in existence since the time of the first
Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the
ancient mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus the essential
content of these mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What
were previously only pictures from the mysteries, seeds as it were of
subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had
already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the
ceremonies of the ancient mysteries, before it became, once and once
only, an actual event on the physical plane.
The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the
earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in
order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which
cannot as yet be completed. Although its consummation can already be
foreseen by clairvoyance, no larynx exists that is capable of
producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this
Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental
occultism, therefore, it can be said: Five thousand years after
Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next three
thousand years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become
Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch
connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in
the future, he becomes Buddha, his spoken words will contain the magic
power of goodness. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental
tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come,
will be a bringer of goodness by way of the word. He will then be able
to teach men the real nature of the Christ Impulse, and in this age
the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so
can the Christ Mystery be truly understood.
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