The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. Christ and the Twentieth Century

[ 1 ] Anyone who takes a brief look at intellectual life today will not be able to deny that the question that is to be the subject of today’s reflection has captured the widest possible circles—and, one might say, precisely from a scientific standpoint. On the other hand, however, a worldview seems to be gaining ground more and more in the present day, within which the question associated with the name of Christ actually has no real place. The lecture I had the privilege of delivering from this very spot a few weeks ago on “The Origin of Man,” and the one that followed—as a sort of continuation—at another location on “The Origin of the Animal Kingdom,” will surely have shown that every age, including our own, places such fundamental questions as the origin of humankind and similar ones—and we may thereby assume this also includes the question concerning the being designated by the name of Christ—in the light of the habits of thought, the entire modes of feeling and perception that otherwise prevail in an age. We have seen that even in the question of the origin of humankind, the theoretical views and worldviews that have emerged for our contemporaries from these habits of thought fundamentally contradict the true, genuine findings of scientific research, whereas it has become clear to us, precisely in the question of the origin of humankind, that the answers provided by the spiritual sciences—which trace the origin of humankind not to external, physical-sensory forms but to spiritual forms—correspond exactly to the actual findings of the natural sciences and are in complete harmony with them. But perhaps in no other question—and this may well stem from the fact that the question is one of the greatest questions of worldview—is the disharmony so evident between what has developed as a worldview, what prevails as habits of thought in the widest circles of people today, and what science has in fact necessarily had to establish, as it is in the question of Christ. Admittedly, ever since the Christ Movement entered world history, the human imagination’s conception of the Christ Being has always taken the form that was appropriate to the age or, one might even say, to the people engaged with it.

[ 2 ] There we find that in the first centuries after Christianity entered world history, within a certain school of thought and spiritual movement known as Gnosticism, ideas began to take shape—ideas that were grandiose and overwhelming in comparison to the being known as Christ. We find that these Gnostic ideas were able to hold their own, in a general sense, for only a relatively short time against the conceptions of Christ that spread, so to speak, as the popular ones and subsequently became the substance of the ecclesiastical movement. It is instructive to touch briefly upon the grandiose ideas about Christ that developed as Gnostic ideas in the early Christian centuries, not because the concepts that spiritual science has to say about the Christ in any way coincide with Gnostic ideas; only those who, due to their spiritual immaturity, are completely incapable of truly distinguishing the things that present themselves in spiritual life would claim this. Contemporary spiritual science, whose ideas we wish to discuss this evening—albeit briefly—surpasses in many respects everything that the ancient Gnosticism of the early Christian centuries produced. But this perhaps makes it all the more interesting to touch upon these Gnostic ideas in a few words. There are, of course, many perspectives within Gnosticism, various nuances within this spiritual tradition, but at least one—the most important one—should be mentioned, the one that most closely resonates with what spiritual science has to say today.

[ 3 ] One could say: The ancient Gnosticism of the first Christian centuries initially held the deepest and most meaningful conception of the Christ-essence in contrast to everything that was emerging in Christianity at that time, for to it, this Christ-essence is an Eternal One that is linked not only to the entire development of humanity but also to the entire development of the world surrounding human beings—the cosmos as a whole. — In addressing the question of the origin of humankind, we had to go back to that form of the human being that still hovers entirely in spiritual heights, which, so to speak, has not yet settled into or become incorporated into the outer material garment. We have seen how, in the course of Earth’s evolution, humanity—starting from a purely spiritual form—has gradually descended to that condensed being we call modern humanity, and how, solely due to materialistic habits of thought, the theory of evolution—by tracing humanity backward—arrives at outwardly animal forms, whereas spiritual science arrives at forms that increasingly resemble the spiritual-soul aspects and ultimately reveal humanity’s spiritual origin in its entirety. In that region where human beings soared before assuming material existence—where they felt themselves to be amidst purely spiritual beings and spiritual realities—ancient Gnosticism was already seeking the Christ-being. If we are to understand it correctly, we must say that Gnosticism held the view: As human beings continued to develop and proceeded to enclose their spiritual-soul nature within a physical body in order to enter the material sequence of development, the Christ-Essence remained present in purely spiritual worlds—as, one might say, an old companion of humanity—who, however, did not descend into the material world, — so that, in order to perceive this ancient Gnosis, humanity underwent a process of development within the material world and has since made progress within it. The Christ-Essence, however, remains in the realm of the purely spiritual, while humanity underwent its developments in the material realm; thus, even for the period that humanity has already lived through as history, the Christ-Essence is not to be sought within the realm to which humanity belongs as a physical-sensory being, but rather in the purely spiritual. In that era which we designate as the starting point of Christianity, Gnosticism viewed a particularly significant moment in the development of Earth’s humanity—namely, the moment when, from the spiritual worlds—having held back its own development while humanity had already descended into the material world—the Christ-Essence entered the physical-sensory world to act as an impulse within it. Thus, Gnosticism viewed humanity—when it was still in the early epochs of human evolution—as a spiritual being connected to the world in which Christ was active, and then, at the beginning of our era, saw Christ descend into the world in which humanity had long since undergone its material evolution.

[ 4 ] This immediately raises the question: How did Gnosticism conceive of this descent of a purely spiritual being into human evolution?

[ 5 ] Gnosticism held that a particularly highly developed individual of humanity—identified by historical research as Jesus of Nazareth—had attained such a level of maturity that, at a certain point in time, the conditions were present within him for his soul to directly receive from the spiritual world what human beings had previously been unable to receive directly from that world. Gnosticism thus speaks of this point in time when the soul of a chosen human being felt ready to take into itself a being not previously connected with human evolution, namely the Christ. In the Bible, Gnosticism sought a depiction of this irruption of the Christ entity into human evolution in that event—we may call it today a symbolic event or whatever we wish—which took place as the baptism by John in the Jordan. Through this baptism by John, something very special is said to have happened to Jesus of Nazareth. One arrives at what lies at the heart of Gnostic thought when one considers, for example, the following:

[ 6 ] There are indeed—and this cannot be denied if we truly observe the lives of some people, not through today’s habitual ways of thinking, but through what can lead us deep into their souls—such moments for many people, such epoch-making events, where these people feel as if they have reached a turning point in their lives and can say to themselves: Compared to what I have experienced and gone through so far, this now seems to me like the prospect of a new life. — It may have come about through a particularly profound and painful event or through other trials of life. It cannot be denied that for many people there is something like a turning point, something that can be called a renewal, an awakening of very special forces in the life of the soul. If one conceives of such an event as the primordial beginnings of what Gnosticism imagined to have taken place with Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism by John in the Jordan, one gets a sense of the irruption of something entirely new—not, however, something that typically enters the human soul through life’s trials, but rather something that, in all human development up to that point, had not been connected to a human life. And what dawns in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth—what appears as something entirely new and lives as an inner being within Jesus of Nazareth, leading a life that has cast all culture originating from it into a new light—Gnosticism called the Christ that which such a life brings into the inner being of Jesus of Nazareth. With this, Gnosticism was also clear that with this Christ—who cannot simply be sought in an individual external human being, but rather in what still existed within an external human being as a special inner being—something had burst into humanity as a new impulse, an impulse for something that had never existed before, precisely because what Jesus of Nazareth carried within himself during the three years following his baptism by John had not previously been connected to human evolution.

[ 7 ] We have thus presented the ancient Gnostic conception of Christ in a way that we can understand it, because it is already present, so to speak, in its basic elements when a particular transformation takes place within an individual human soul. What will be particularly difficult for modern people to grasp, however, is that connected to this event—which has just been described—is something that has historical significance for the entire development of humanity, a historical significance of a fundamental nature; that is, it represents what we might call the focal point of the entire development of humanity. Regarding this Gnostic conception—even if we compare it to various ideas that have been presented in these lectures on spiritual science—it may be said that it actually—regardless of one’s views on reality—embodies a magnificent, powerful conception, on the one hand, of the Christ-being, and on the other hand, of the human being, for it places the human being within a process of development into which an impulse from the spiritual world intervenes directly in the course of historical becoming. It is therefore not at all surprising that this Gnostic conception could not, in any way, have become popular. For anyone who takes even a brief look at the conditions of human development from the first Christian centuries onward—the states of the human soul, the various circumstances of social life—will readily admit that such a conception was sustained by a lofty spirit that most certainly does not become popular. To realize this, one need only take a look at today’s spiritual life. When such a concept—as has just been characterized as Gnostic—is discussed, most people will say: That is an abstraction, a bold daydream. But we humans need something truly real, something that is close to us, something that can intervene directly in our real lives. — People today still regard what has just been characterized as the Gnostic conception as an abstraction, for people today are actually still far from sensing the far greater richness, the true concreteness of what lies in the spiritual concepts to which we rise, as opposed to what most people once called the tangible, the concrete, and the truly real. If this were not the case, people would not strive in art for what the eyes can see and the hands can grasp, and would not reject as something abstract that which one must rise to in the spirit through inner gifts of the soul.

[ 8 ] Of course, it is not possible to even briefly touch upon how the concept of the Christ-being has developed in popular culture. But it must be said that, alongside the immediate image people formed of Jesus of Nazareth—who was born in a miraculous way, who approached people in numerous ways with his endearing manner, and who, as the story of his childhood unfolded, then appeared to people as the loving Savior of all humanity— —it must be said that, alongside all the sentiments and feelings that people harbored for this Savior of humanity in all his endearing ways, an echo of the concept of Christ—of a being embodied and incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—has always lived on throughout the centuries. And alongside what was, so to speak, the external history recounted about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, there was also the gaze directed upward toward a great secret, toward an immense mystery—the mystery that, precisely at the time when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth, had expressed something superhuman in this personality. And this superhuman aspect was specifically named the Christ. At the same time, however—one might say—the more people approached modern times, the more and more incapable they felt of grasping the bold idea of this Christ, such as the Gnostic Christ, so that already in the Middle Ages we see how science, so to speak, dared only to offer explanations regarding the external world—that which unfolds before the senses and what lies beyond the senses as a kind of world governed by natural laws. In contrast, science did not feel called upon to delve into those factors, those impulses, which have intervened in human evolution as the highest spiritual impulses. Thus, the question of the origin of humankind—and also the question of that phase of human development into which the Christ impulse intervenes—became, for the medieval worldview, a matter of faith; and from then on, faith stood alongside what was to be science and knowledge, which was to be limited solely to the lower aspects of the world order. It would now be interesting to illustrate how, from the sixteenth century onward, this kind of “double standard” within humanity became increasingly pronounced—a standard through which one sought to limit the nature of knowledge to the lower orders of things, and to assign everything relating to spiritual origins and matters of spiritual development to the realm of faith. But that cannot be our task today. Rather, we must point out how, in the nineteenth century, the entire course of development led, so to speak, to the nineteenth century completely losing any real idea of Christ, at least in wider circles. In more restricted circles, what might be called a deep insight into the Christ impulse has indeed been preserved as a further development of ancient Gnostic ideas. But in broader circles, including scientific-theological circles, the nineteenth century saw a renunciation of the actual concept of Christ, and an attempt was made to limit oneself to the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—presenting him, to be sure, as a unique, exceptional personality who, as it were, grasped most deeply the conditions of human development and the divine inner nature of the human being and embodied them in a fundamental way—but nevertheless as a “human being,” albeit one who transcended everything else. Thus, in the nineteenth century, an old Christology was replaced by what might be called a mere —a form of “Life of Jesus” research that was increasingly skeptical of anything in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth that was said to have embodied a divine content, and was willing to believe only that Jesus of Nazareth represented an exceptional individual human personality. This kind of view reached its peak in what people encounter today in works such as Adolf Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity and similar endeavors in the study of the life of Jesus, which manifest themselves today in the most diverse shades. One need only point out what has been achieved in the very recent past through the most serious and in-depth study of the life of Jesus. And since what is to be said here pertains to recent events, it suffices to note briefly that the methods employed in the nineteenth century to historically prove, so to speak, what is said to have taken place at the beginning of the Christian era have led to absolutely no real results. It would go far too far to elaborate on this idea in one way or another. But anyone who delves more deeply into the achievements of recent times will know that an attempt has been made to place the personality of Jesus of Nazareth at the starting point of our Christian spiritual life using the usual methods of external, materialistic research; yet this attempt to prove the existence of that personality by external historical means—as one would otherwise prove something else— has led to the admission that this personality of Jesus of Nazareth cannot be substantiated by external, materialistic means. — Not that the opposite—that he did not live—can be justified, but it cannot be justified if one were to attempt to prove the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the same way that one otherwise uses historical methods to prove the existence of an Aristotle, Socrates, or Alexander the Great. But not only that; research in this field has in recent times been pushed in an entirely different direction and line of inquiry. You need only pick up books such as those by William Benjamin Smith published by Diederichs in Leipzig, and you will see that, through a careful examination of the biblical and other documents relating to Christianity, our era has once again come to the conclusion that these documents cannot actually speak of what people believed they had to speak of for so long in the nineteenth century. People sought to reconstruct the life of Jesus of Nazareth through a philological examination of the biblical and other documents, but the documents ultimately revealed something entirely different to people. It became apparent, while attempts were being made with the utmost scientific rigor and the most sophisticated methods to reconstruct a “Life of Jesus,” that these biblical texts—the Christian documents—do not, in fact, speak of a “human being” named Jesus of Nazareth when one stands on truly Christian ground. Thus we see that secular scholarship was forced to conclude: The documents do not speak at all of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth, but rather of a God. — We are faced in our time with the strange anomaly that materialist scholarship asserts: “You have drawn the wrong conclusion if you believe that the Christian sources provide evidence of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth; rather, you must come to realize that the Gospels and the other documents speak of a God, and that all the things that are recounted have meaning and significance only when one speaks of a God as the starting point of Christianity.”

[ 9 ] Well, isn’t that something most peculiar? Our era believes that if one wants to speak of Jesus of Nazareth, one must speak of a god! Yet it is this very same era and this very same school of thought that cannot perceive any reality whatsoever in a god—that is, in a pure spiritual being. What, then, does Christ become for contemporary scholarship? He becomes a pure fiction of humanity, something that has entered history only as an idea, only as an emotional impulse created by people in a social fantasy! According to the latest historical research, Christ becomes not a reality, but a conceived God. Indeed, to put it bluntly, one could say: Here, historical research arrives at something it cannot really use, for what is contemporary research to do with a God in whom it cannot really believe? — It has only the evidence that the biblical documents speak of a God, but can do nothing with it except place Him among the works of fiction.

[ 10 ] Let us now contrast this state of affairs with the one that spiritual science must present in its place.

[ 11 ] Here I would like to refer to my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact. The central theme of this book has actually been little understood. I have therefore attempted, in the preface to the second edition, to once again draw attention to what really matters. What matters is that human history, world history, is something that is not exhausted by all that external history can usually describe to us, or by what external documents can provide, because spiritual impulses and spiritual factors—which we must indeed describe as spiritual entities—intervene everywhere in human development. If, on the other hand, we contrast this with the entire approach to a historical worldview, as it was introduced, for example, by Leopold von Ranke and others, we must say: The highest level to which the science of history still aspires is to speak of historical ideas, as if external, abstract ideas were intervening, so to speak, in the course of human development as it unfolds across peoples and states. That is the very limit of what is believed. But ideas are not something—not even as historians understand them—that develops strength or exerts power. The entire course of human development would be spiritless, if you were to investigate it historically, were it not for the ideas that penetrate human souls, were the expression of essential impulses that invisibly and supersensibly permeate the entire course of historical becoming—so that behind what external history recounts lies that which can only be reached through the methods of spiritual science, of supersensible research, as has already been presented in a lecture and will be presented further. And there I could show how the Christian impulse historically enters into the development of humanity by proving itself to be a continuation of what took place in the ancient mysteries for the spiritual development of humanity. What the mysteries actually are is, in essence, still little understood today. What was accomplished in the ancient pre-Christian times within the mysteries as the spiritual foundations of all human development can be understood only by those who, through modern spiritual science, gain insight into that development of the soul which transforms this soul into what has already been discussed here on several occasions—an instrument for perceiving what lies as the spiritual world behind the sensory world. We know that today, in a certain way—limited purely to his inner life and entirely withdrawn into the intimacies of his soul experience—a person can rise above himself to a certain higher form of his soul being, so that this soul being lives in a spiritual world just as the human being, embodied in the physical body, lives in a physical world.

[ 12 ] A spiritual-scientific examination of history now shows that this possibility of ascending into the spiritual world through purely inner, intimate soul development only emerged in the course of human evolution over time, and that it was by no means already present in ancient times. While today the soul, by remaining within itself, can rise completely freely through its own efforts to a state of spiritual vision, the soul in pre-Christian times was essentially unable to do so; rather, it was dependent on certain rituals performed upon it in the mystery sanctuaries. If we wish to briefly outline—as described in more detail in my Christianity as a Mystical Fact—what was done to the soul by the leaders of the mystery temples (which, in the ancient sense, were what we would today regard as spiritual schools) in those temples, it can be summarized as follows. Through external procedures, the soul was freed from its physicality. It was given the opportunity to remain, for a certain period of time, in a state similar to sleep and yet entirely different from it. When we consider the state of sleep today in light of the findings of spiritual science, we must imagine that the human being’s outer physical body remains in bed, while the actual spiritual-soul core of the human being remains outside of what remains in bed. But the forces—the actual inner essence of this spiritual-soul core—are of such low intensity during sleep that unconsciousness sets in and darkness surrounds the human being’s spiritual-soul core. The procedures performed on the human soul in the ancient mysteries consisted in inducing a kind of sleep state for the soul through the influence of other, advanced personalities who had themselves already undergone this mystery initiation, but in such a way that this soul’s inner powers were simultaneously sharpened and strengthened, so that it left its body in a sleeping, even death-like state, yet was able to gaze into the spiritual world through a soul-life for a certain period of time—thus consciously leading a life of sleep and, within this life of sleep, gaining a conviction of what it is as a citizen of the spiritual world. When such a soul had been brought back to the ordinary human condition after some time, a memory arose within it of what it had experienced in perception outside its body, and such a soul could then step before the community as a prophetic spirit and bear witness that there is a spiritual world and an eternal existence for humanity. Such a soul had thereby participated in life in the spiritual realm, and in the Mysteries the precepts were given to which such a soul had to submit over the course of a long life, so that the final act might then be performed by the leaders of the ancient Mystery sites. Let us therefore ask the question: Where do the ancient teachings—which have been handed down to us in the course of human development by the peoples of the world—regarding their divine origin and the eternity of the human soul come from? — From the perspective of spiritual science, we must answer: They originate from those who were initiated in this way, or “initiates,” as they are also called. — These ancient teachings, however, reveal themselves to us in a peculiar way. Myths, legends, and all manner of pictorial representations and narratives contain what the initiate experienced in these mystery sites, as if in a living dream. Indeed, one can only understand the mythologies if one regards the figures that appear to us in them as pictorial representations of what the initiates of the mysteries beheld during their initiation. Therefore, if one wishes to develop a relationship with the ancient religious teachings, one must go back to the Mysteries; one must see in the Mysteries what was indeed hidden from the outer, profane world—what could be attained only by those who had prepared themselves for initiation through rigorous trials and also through silence, which was required by circumstances that cannot be discussed today.

[ 13 ] When we trace human spiritual development back to pre-Christian times, it leads us into the darkness of the mysteries. In those ancient times, the human soul was not yet mature enough to ascend into the spiritual world on its own, relying solely on its own inner powers, without the unfree intervention of the temple priests. But that something did occur while the outward events of history were unfolding—this is what I sought to demonstrate in my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact. It was intended to show that the entire purpose of human development is that, through everything humanity had absorbed and experienced during its repeated incarnations—including what its initiates had taught about the spiritual world—humanity had reached such a state of maturity by the turning point in history at which Christianity began that the time could now dawn in which human beings, without external influence, without the practices that had been customary in the mysteries of ancient times, could, solely within their innermost being as souls, ascend into a spiritual world. This is—as we now wish to view the event that took place in Palestine—the great progress that gradually, perhaps over the course of centuries, but certainly around the turn of the era marking the beginning of Christianity, in which the human soul became, so to speak, ripe for “self-initiation”—simply under the guidance of those who knew what the human soul must go through, but without the intervention of external temple leaders or mystery leaders. But what had otherwise taken place within the mystery temples—hundreds and hundreds of times—and of which we have been informed through the legends, myths, and mythologies of the peoples, stepped onto the grand stage of world history with the founding of Christianity. And if one wishes to understand the Gospels, one can simply proceed by asking: What did a candidate for initiation have to undergo—for example, among the ancient Persian or Egyptian peoples—in order to elevate his soul to a direct insight into the spiritual world? — The instructions regarding what he had to undergo—from a certain process called “baptism” and another called “temptation,” right up to the point where the soul was led out to perceive the spiritual world—were described and constituted, so to speak, the ritual of initiation. If one takes such rituals and compares them with the main content of the individual Gospels—as I was able to demonstrate in my aforementioned book—one sees how the Gospels present us with revived descriptions of the ancient initiation ceremonies, applied solely to the great historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. One then sees how, whereas in the past the candidates for initiation were led up into the spiritual world within the seclusion of the mystery temples, through what actually took place in history itself, Jesus of Nazareth was led to the point where he was not merely guided so far that he could report on a spiritual world from memory, but where he was able to unite with a being that had truly never before united with a human being: the Christ Being. Thus there is a great correspondence between the accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth up to the point where Christ took possession of his soul—and continued to do so throughout the next three years—and the descriptions of the ancient initiation rites. In the account of what Jesus of Nazareth went through there—as seen most clearly in the Gospel of John—we encounter the initiation that was directly bestowed by the great spiritual-divine realities underlying history itself. Countless candidates had been initiated before, but only to the extent that they could bear witness: There is a spiritual world, and the human soul belongs to such a spiritual world. — But when the initiation took place in him within the context of world history, the inner being of Jesus of Nazareth was able to unite with the most significant being they could recall. This was an initiation toward which all ancient initiations pointed and to which they were ordered.

[ 14 ] Thus the Mystery of Golgotha confronts us, emerging from what had hitherto been shrouded in the darkness of the mysteries, onto the grand stage of world history. As long as one does not believe that, at a specific point on Earth and at a specific moment in time, something like the fusion—the initiation—of Jesus of Nazareth with the Christ took place, and that this event radiated its mighty rays of power and formed an impulse for all of humanity’s subsequent development, one cannot comprehend what the Christ impulse actually means for human evolution. Only when one is able to acknowledge the reality of such a spiritual event—as it has now been described—through all the other prerequisites of spiritual science can one understand what has been introduced into human development through the Christ impulse. Then, however, one will not disparage the Gospels simply because they contain four different initiation rites, in which only what actually took place around the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is veiled. But once one understands this, one will also grasp that what took place through this event in Palestine has a profound, causal significance for all subsequent human development. Whereas up to that point, what we might call the innermost core of being was something that, though present for human beings, had not truly entered human consciousness—and this was precisely what was to be subject to the event described as the Mystery of Golgotha—the time was now to begin when human beings could know: In this “I,” that which human beings share with the entire cosmos is revealed within them.

[ 15 ] If we were to describe how a person who speaks in the spiritual-scientific sense must view the great turning point that the Christ impulse has brought about in world history, we would have to say: In terms of their essence, human beings consist of their physical body, their life body, and their soul sheath; and at their very core they carry that which passes from incarnation to incarnation, from earthly life to earthly life—the true “I.” But this true “I” is also that of which human beings became aware last of all, so that in pre-Christian times people had no inkling that, just as their physical body is connected to the entire physical world and their soul-being to the world of souls, so too is their deepest inner core born out of the most comprehensive spiritual world. To seek God and the divine primordial being not in the shell of the soul, but in the true self—that was what Christianity, the Christ impulse in human development just described, brought about. In the past, one could say: My soul is rooted in the divine; the divine is the truly pictorial, the creative. — But now we have learned to say: If you wish to recognize where the deepest Divine, which permeates the entire world, can reveal itself to you, look into your own “I,” for it is through your “I” that God speaks to you. He speaks to you, as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, when you truly understand how divine forces entered humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, when you familiarize yourself with how this single initiation took place as a great historical event, whereas in earlier times the initiate was led into the depths of the mystery temples to experience the spiritual world. But God speaks to you in a special way when you elevate yourself by making your soul an instrument of perception in the spiritual world. — One might say: The entry of divine consciousness, which speaks through the “I,” is the essence of the Christ impulse. And the fact that this Christ impulse was able to enter humanity was brought about precisely by the historicization of the ancient principle of initiation, as has been described. The one—the Mystery of Golgotha—is the cause. What will emerge more and more in human souls in the course of Earth’s evolution, even into their most distant future, is that a clear recognition of the divine-spiritual realm—to which the human being belongs and through which he becomes independent of all earthly becoming—speaks through the “I.”

[ 16 ] Anyone who, from this perspective, can understand certain of the most profound words of the Gospels will gain insight into the great education of the human race by the spiritual world. They will see how the ancient Hebrew development prepared the way for what was to speak to human beings through the “I” core—just as that which spoke to Judaism did so as a national spirit. This was not the case with other peoples; rather, they were only aware that the spiritual-divine speaks—so to speak—to the soul’s outer shell when a person is initiated. But it had become clear to Judaism that human development is an ongoing process of education, and that within the “I” that encompasses the entire people lie the powers to which the human being belongs with his deepest being. Therefore, the Jew felt: As an individual member of the entire ancient Hebrew people, when I look up the line of development back to Abraham and recognize what reigns there as the Spirit—what passes on through the generations—I may say: He lives in me, lives in all my forebears as the Divine that has shaped the individual physical being of humankind. — Thus, the individual member of the ancient Hebrew people saw himself as connected to the patriarch and felt at one with Father Abraham. Christianity, however, sharply emphasizes: Any such feeling of the Divine—even when it speaks of itself as “Ejeh asher ejeh” — “I am who I am”—is not yet what reveals the human being in his fullest form; only when one senses something that exists in the spiritual realm beyond all generations has one grasped what works within human beings as the divine. Therefore, the correct translation of the sentence must be: Before Abraham was, the I Am was! — That is to say, in his “I,” man experiences an Eternal that is more primordial than the Divine that has manifested itself through the generations, beginning with Abraham.

[ 17 ] “Look to that which is not limited to the physical human being as such, but which lives on as a divine-spiritual reality through the generations, through the blood of all the generations that have developed from Abraham onward. But look upon this divine-spiritual aspect in such a way that you recognize it in the individual human being—not in what binds brother and sister together, but in what lives within the individual, what the individual discovers when he recognizes himself in his innermost, central soul being as ‘I am.’” — Thus, we must understand a saying of Christ Jesus such as the one that goes something like this: “If anyone comes to me and does not forsake his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” — We must not interpret this as a rebellion against the legitimacy of kinship and parental love, but rather as Christ Jesus bringing into the world the principle of the Divine-Spiritual, which every single human being, by virtue of being human, can find in the innermost core of their being. Therefore, the very heart of Christianity will increasingly touch people in such a way that what reigns as the innermost mystery of Christianity is one that transcends all the differences that exist among human beings and leads to the universal human, to that which every person can discover within themselves. The ancient gods were gods of the people, gods of the races, bound to this or that tribal characteristic; we can also attribute something of this nature to Hinduism and Buddhism. The God, on the other hand, who appeared to humanity in Christ, is one who leads people, beyond all other differences, to that which a human being is solely by virtue of being “human.” This necessitates that anyone who wishes to grasp the true essence of Christianity must regard the spiritually guiding forces and impulses of world history as realities, that a break be made with all that has hitherto been considered “history,” and that what has hitherto been regarded by humanity as history is merely the outer garment of historical becoming, whereas in the depths of historical becoming there are beings at work who, though supersensible, are as real as an individual animal or human being is in the sensory world. And the most preeminent among the supersensible entities that govern the historical development of humanity is the Christ, who, as Gnosticism also held, worked for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 18 ] Thus, spiritual science does indeed rise to a conception that can make sense of what external science has produced. For while the latter is today compelled to acknowledge that we are dealing not with a “human being” but with a divine being active within a human being—a concept with which it cannot make sense of—spiritual science, in turn, leads us to such entities that are realities for it, so that spiritual science knows precisely how to make sense of even the latest research in this very field. It will prove to be a marvel for the spiritual development of the twentieth century that it will recognize that the nineteenth century was on the wrong path in seeking to reduce the life of Christ Jesus to a mere life of Jesus of Nazareth, but that the science which says: Everything provides us with proof that in Christ Jesus we are dealing with a “God.” — Spiritual science will merely add that one can make sense of this word. This is, of course, a view that contradicts what has emerged in recent times as a materialistic-monistic worldview. But we were able to show, both in the lecture on the “Origin of Man” and in the other on the “Origin of the Animal Kingdom,” how spiritual science is in complete harmony with what external science has brought to light as actual research findings. And now we can say that spiritual science can connect directly with the conclusions reached by conscientious external research. Where, however, it is still met with a question mark, this conscientious external research does not lead to the conclusions to which spiritual science can lead.

[ 19 ] During the twentieth century, however, something else will have to be added to our ways of thinking. People now take the view that human life and cognition, as they exist in the physical world, stand in opposition to the external world as immediate truth, and that error can arise, at most, when people form inaccurate images of the world or do something that is described as evil—something that does not correspond to the external course of the world. Today, the worldview is still entirely focused on seeking causes everywhere in what presents itself directly. Through this way of thinking, questions of worldview have been driven to a point from which—and this must be clear to all who can look more deeply into the spiritual life of humanity—a reversal becomes necessary. In both the natural sciences and the historical sciences, external scholarship has arrived at a state of outright disbelief in all that is spiritual and a mere reduction of reality to external sensory phenomena—a refusal to acknowledge the spiritual that is said to lie behind sensory appearances. In a certain sense, one might say that our age has reached a point where it must inevitably turn into its opposite. Extreme materialism, extreme materialistic monism, must lead the soul, through its own inner resistance, to come to terms with that concept of worldview which, until now, has actually played very little a role in worldviews. To all seeking after the origins of things, a concept must be added that has not yet found acceptance. In my writings The Philosophy of Freedom as well as in Truth and Science, it has been shown that human beings must assume that the state in which they find themselves in relation to the world is not the true one, that they must first undergo a development of their inner life in order to be able to recognize the truth about worldly phenomena and to establish a true and also moral relationship to them. The concept of redemption must be added to this merely causal understanding.

[ 20 ] This will be the great task of the twentieth century: to ensure that the concept of salvation and rebirth gains equal standing among other scientific concepts. The way human beings, as beings capable of cognition, relate to the world does not correspond to the truth. One attains all true concepts only when, having been liberated from one’s present point of view, one has developed toward a higher level—when one is freed from the obstacles that prevent one from seeing the true form of the world. This is the liberation of knowledge. Moral redemption occurs when a person recognizes that their current relationship to the world is not the truth, but that they must first walk a path that transcends the obstacles piling up between them and that to which they truly belong. The concept of the soul’s rebirth on a higher plane will emerge from what we have encountered as marvelous findings in the natural sciences, as well as from the marvelous findings of historical research. Once humanity has depicted the world as if through a photograph and conjured up before itself the great scientific and historical development of humankind, it will recognize that this is not merely a representation of the world, but a powerful educational tool. Humanity will no longer merely believe that science depicts a world for it; rather, the laws of nature will become a force that educates it. And when natural science is no longer merely there to depict the world, but to educate human beings—so that the human soul may be liberated from a more immediate standpoint and work its way up to a standpoint where it is reborn on a higher level—when human beings thus realize that they are being liberated from the constraints in which they are trapped, then he will have developed within himself the prerequisites for the concept of the Christ impulse in the world. For then they will realize that they may look forward to that point in time—which we have come to know from the perspective of spiritual science—when humanity once existed in a purely spiritual world and descended into the world of material existence; that they must pass through this material world in order to continue their journey; but that at a certain point, their return had to be initiated, so that he might free himself once more from what he has taken on here. The Christ impulse has freed humanity from sinking into the purely material. Objectively, in the evolution of the world, Christ is that which represents within us the experience we have when we say: The relationship to the world that arises when the soul is reborn and redeemed from what it received as its original nature—what can thus appear as its experience—is, viewed from outside in the great world process of humanity, that which entered the world as the Christ.

[ 21 ] If the twentieth century is ever able to take this great inner experience of the human being truly seriously, it will also be able to comprehend the Christ event and will no longer take offense at what unfolds within the human being as the rebirth of the soul on a higher level. And then spiritual science will show that the same applies to historical development as applies to external natural events. In the external worldview, people have also succumbed to the error of Schopenhauer’s statement: “The world is my representation.” — That is to say, the world of colors, sounds, and so on that surrounds me depends on my eye and my other sense organs. But it is not correct, when one seeks to grasp the world in its entirety, to say: “The world of colors exists only because of the constitution of my eye.” — For my eye would not exist if light had not first conjured it into being. While it is true, on the one hand, that the sensations of light are determined by the constitution of the eye, it is no less true, on the other hand, that the eye exists only through light, through the sun. Both truths must be united into a comprehensive truth. Thus, what Goethe once said is true: “The eye owes its existence to light. From indifferent, animal-like auxiliary organs, light brings forth an organ that becomes its equal, and so the eye is formed by light for light, so that the inner light may meet the outer light.” — Just as the eye is formed by light, and just as the perception of light occurs through the eye, so too does the inner experience of Christ—the inner rebirth of the soul—come about through humanity’s experience of Christ, through the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritual science shows that, before the Christ impulse entered humanity, this inner experience could only be undergone through an external impetus in the mysteries, and not intimately, as it is now through a kind of self-initiation within the human being. Thus, the inner mystical experience of Christ is just as it is for the world of colors and light through the eye: through the inner self, the human being experiences Christ. But the fact that the soul can be elevated intimately beyond itself stems from the fact that the spiritual sun, the Mystery of Golgotha, has entered world history. — Without the objective Mystery of Golgotha and without the objective Christ, there can be no subjective inner experience of a mystical nature, such as the human being will experience in the twentieth century and will take completely seriously from a scientific standpoint.

[ 22 ] Thus we can say: The twentieth century will provide humanity with the prerequisites for a true understanding of the Christ impulse by showing how profoundly true the Christ impulse is as a spiritual sun and how it awakens within the human soul the inner experience that Goethe alluded to with the words:

From the force that binds all beings,
The person who overcomes themselves is set free.

[ 23 ] And one can say, by drawing upon this self-overcoming, upon the Mystery of Golgotha, upon the Christ event, that it is actually only through this self-overcoming that human beings truly find themselves, that they must regard the form they have inherited from their earthly origins as something from which they must be redeemed, and that all moral action and all knowledge can only come about through redemption. Through the concept of inner redemption, human beings will learn to recognize the concept of redemption in historical development and, in such a penetrating way, to understand the Christ event in the twentieth century in the light that is fully expressed by Goethe’s slightly expanded statement:

From the bondage that binds all beings,
Man frees himself by overcoming himself,
And in this overcoming
He finds himself in truth for the first time,
Just as all of humanity can find itself in Christ
In truth.