The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Essence of Christianity

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When the subject of theosophy or spiritual science comes up today, many of our contemporaries still seem to believe that this worldview has its roots or origins in some Eastern concepts or spiritual experiences that are foreign to our Western culture. And this prejudice is held above all by those who believe they must see in Theosophy or spiritual science something that is at odds with Christianity—even with a more deeply understood Christianity, insofar as it permeates our entire Western spiritual culture. When such an opinion is held, it is based specifically on the fact that within the theosophical worldview, what might be called the doctrine of repeated earthly lives—or, as it is also known, the doctrine of reincarnation—is presented as a fundamental fact. And one holds the view that such an idea—that human beings must undergo repeated earthly lives—can only have been derived from Buddhism or some other Eastern worldview. Now, if one makes such an assumption, then the entire position of spiritual science or theosophy regarding the spiritual life of our time is misunderstood; for what does this concept of repeated earthly lives mean for modern people—or, perhaps better said, what significance can it have under today’s circumstances?

[ 2 ] There is a word today—one that, admittedly, is mostly used in connection with scientific facts, yet has a fascinating effect on the educated people of our time—on those who believe they are at the pinnacle of our intellectual life—and that word is “development.” However, today this word is usually applied only in a way that refers to the development of external forms—that is, the forms of lower life forms all the way up to human beings. Little thought is given today to the application of this idea of development to human life as a whole, including the soul and spiritual life of human beings; for if one were to engage in elaborating the idea of development for the entirety of human life, one would gradually have to realize that what we call the development of the species or genus in the animal kingdom must manifest itself in human beings as the development of the individual, of the individual personality.

[ 3 ] But this means nothing other than this: Just as we observe in the animal kingdom how individual species diverge in their development, so too must we approach the individual human being with the same interest that we direct toward the genus in the animal kingdom; thus, in the case of humans, we must speak of the development of individuality. Let us take this to heart: When it comes to human beings, if we possess sound judgment, we must show the same interest in individuality—in the individual human being—as we do in the species or genus when studying animals. The same interest we have in the lion species—[be it] the lion grandfather, the lion father, the lion son, and so on—is the same interest we have in every individual human being. Therefore, we must apply the same principle that we regard as a law of development in animal genera to the individual human being.

[ 4 ] So you see that in the field of spiritual science we speak of the development of the individual human personality. And we must conclude by saying: What comes into being in a human being at birth, what gradually and mysteriously takes shape from the still undefined facial features, expressions, and gestures of early childhood—that is the soul-spiritual aspect of the human being, which presents itself to us in each individual as something unique, something individual. We cannot attribute this solely to the inherited characteristics of immediate ancestors; rather, we must conceive of this relationship between human life and its causes differently than the relationship between an animal and its ancestors. In the case of animals, we understand everything that lives within a particular individual—its form, its physiognomy—when we understand the species. With human beings, however, it is different.

[ 5 ] What lives within human beings can be found in each person in a unique and specific way. What has developed in human beings as generic characteristics, we attribute to physical heredity; but what we perceive as their specific essence must be traced back to what the human being has experienced in previous lives, in earlier stages of existence, as the cause of their present life. And what we perceive within the current framework of their personality, in turn, forms the cause, the foundation for their actions in a future life. Thus we have a living chain of development that extends from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. And we regard everything that appears to us as characteristic of a human being in such a way that we recognize the necessity of attributing it to earlier soul-spiritual states.

[ 6 ] Thus, Theosophy, or spiritual science, is in a position to introduce a law into the higher realm of human life, just as it was incorporated into the realm of natural life in the development of humanity a relatively short time ago. Indeed, humanity today has a short memory. Otherwise, it would not be necessary to point out that as late as the seventeenth century, not only laypeople but also scholars of the natural sciences assumed that lower animals could develop from decaying river mud without any seeds of life having been introduced into it. And it was first the great Italian naturalist Francesco Redi who brought about a tremendous upheaval in scientific thought by positing the principle that life can only come from life.

[ 7 ] Just as this statement applies, within certain limits, to the natural world, so too does the following statement apply, within certain limits, to human life: What is spiritual and psychological can only have its origin in what is spiritual and psychological. – And it is merely an inaccurate observation to attempt to trace what emerges day by day, week by week, year by year from the indeterminate depths of a growing person’s consciousness—as something spiritual-psychic—back to the merely physical lineage of ancestors – it is just as inaccurate an observation as it is to attribute what lives in animals—even in earthworms—to the mere laws governing the substances that make up river mud, simply because one has failed to take the living germ into account. It is an imprecise observation to speak today merely of the inheritance of psychological and moral abilities, because one fails to take into account the psychological-spiritual core, which integrates precisely whatever it can assimilate from the inherited characteristics—just as the living germ of a living being assimilates the substance in which that germ is embedded.

[ 8 ] Such truths always meet a similar fate in the course of human development. Back then, Francesco Redi was barely able to escape the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, everyone—from Haeckel’s followers to his most radical opponents—will accept this statement as self-evident, though only within the limits of external nature, insofar as it concerns the physical body. Back then, however, the statement “Life can only come from life” was considered a grave heresy. Today, of course, heretics are no longer burned at the stake. But if one stands on the firm ground of today’s scientific facts—while in reality one stands only on the ground of one’s preconceived opinions and the prejudices of the times— one regards the law of repeated earthly lives—which, for the higher realms of spiritual existence, is the same as Redis’s statement that the living can come only from the living—as heresy, as fantasy, as sheer madness. But the time is not far off when people will say of this law: It is actually incomprehensible that anyone could ever have thought otherwise.

[ 9 ] So where does this law of repeated earthly lives come from? Do we need to [go back to] some Eastern worldview for this; must this law be borrowed from Buddhism?—No, to incorporate the law of repeated earthly lives into modern European culture, all that is needed is an unbiased spiritual-research perspective that surveys the facts. And what this perspective perceives has nothing to do with any tradition whatsoever. Like any other scientific law, this one, too, will be embraced by modern spiritual culture, because, based on the idea of evolution, it is driven by its own necessity toward this law.

[ 10 ] But anyone who would claim that this could introduce anything into our Western intellectual development that would run counter to Christianity fails to recognize how this entire Western intellectual life is permeated by the living fabric and essence of Christian sentiment, of Christian feeling. Indeed, this goes so far—if one is only able to observe with the soul—that the very manner of thinking and the forms of imagination, even of those who today present themselves as the most bitter opponents of Christianity, have been made possible entirely only through the education of Western humanity, which it has received through Christianity. Anyone who is able and willing to observe impartially will find that even the most radical opponents combat Christianity with ideas borrowed from Christianity itself.

[ 11 ] But there is a radical difference between the Christian essence and what we might call the pre-Christian essence—a difference that is not immediately apparent simply because everything in human development proceeds slowly and gradually, and the earlier always spills over into the later. There is something in the pre-Christian worldview that is radically different from Christianity, something that can be found and observed among Eastern worldviews—even in their most modern forms, such as Buddhism. We can discern this fundamental difference between the essence of Christianity and the form that Eastern feeling and thinking have taken in Buddhism if we consider even a small part of it.

[ 12 ] To this end, we need only present to our soul a dialogue found in Buddhist literature, one that is deeply rooted in Buddhist feeling and thought. By examining such descriptions, one can discern the very essence of any worldview much more precisely than by considering its highest tenets and dogmas. For, in the end, one can argue at length over whether this or that is to be understood as Nirvana or as Christian bliss. But how what lives in the Buddhist and Christian modes of thought works its way into people’s feelings, and how these feelings thereby relate to the entire world—the physical and the spiritual world—that is what determines the value, significance, and essence of a worldview and its effect on human souls.

[ 13 ] Buddhist literature preserves for us that remarkable conversation between the legendary King Milinda and the sage Nagasena. In this conversation, it is said: King Milinda came by chariot to the sage Nagasena and wished to be instructed regarding the nature of the human soul. Then the sage asked the king: “Tell me, did you come by chariot or on foot?” “By chariot,” replied the king. “Now tell me, when you have the chariot in front of you, what do you see before you? You see the drawbar, the body of the chariot, and the wheels in front of you. Is the drawbar the chariot?” Is the body of the cart the cart? Are the wheels the cart? No! Is that all you have in front of you? Well, there’s also the seat! And what else do you have in front of you? Nothing! The cart is therefore only a name or a form, for the realities that are there in front of you are, after all, the body, the drawbar, the wheels, and the seat. What else is there is merely a name and a form. — Just as only a name or a form holds [the individual parts] together—wheels, drawbar, wagon body, and seat—so, too, the individual faculties, feelings, thoughts, and sensations of the human soul are not held together by anything that can be described as a specific reality, but only by a name or a form. Thus, one can say—in the true Buddhist sense: A central essence within a human being that holds the individual faculties of the soul together cannot be found, just as nothing other than a name and a form can be found in the cart apart from the drawbar, the body, the seat, and the wheels.

[ 14 ] And through yet another parable, the sage explained the nature of the soul to [the king], saying: Consider the mango fruit—it comes from the mango tree. You know: The mango tree exists only because there was previously another mango fruit from which it sprang. The mango plant thus originates from the mango fruit, which, however, has rotted in the ground. What can you say about the mango fruit? It comes from the rotted seed. Now trace the path from the old fruit to the new mango plant. What does the new plant have in common with the old one other than just the name or the form? — Likewise, said the sage Nagasena to King Milinda, so it is with the existence of the soul. [It, too, was already there only in name!] – It was indeed an empirical law of Buddhism that human beings undergo repeated earthly lives. But this law did not lead the actual, central Buddhist perception to seek or see anything other than name and form in what passes from one life to the next—just as with the mango fruit, where nothing passes from one to the other except name and form. Thus, according to the Buddhist view, we can see in what we call our destiny in one life—our abilities, talents, and so on—the effects of past lives. But no central soul-essence passes from the previous life to the new one; rather, causes simply play out as effects, and what we share in one life with a previous life—apart from what we perceive as our destiny in the new life—is nothing but name and form. One must truly grasp what Buddhism is actually teaching.

[ 15 ] And now—to remain objective—we could translate what appears to us in this story as a genuine Buddhist sentiment by transposing the whole thing into a Christian context. How would the two stories read in a Christian sense? They do not exist, but let us try to translate them once and thereby make the difference quite clear.

[ 16 ] A Christian sage might say something like this: Take a look at the wagon—when you look at it, you see the drawbar, the body, the wheels, and whatever else you can see on the outside. The wagon seems to you to be nothing but a name and a form, but try to see if you can ride on a name or a form; you certainly can’t be driven through the world on that.—Even though only a name and a form are visible, there is still something beyond the wagon body, the drawbar, the wheels, and so on that constitutes a reality when a wagon stands before us and not merely its parts. As I said, there is no such Christian legend, but a person with a Christian sensibility sensed this when he coined the phrase about the parts that the scientific thinker often has at his disposal, yet for which he lacks the context, when he said: “/p”

Then he has the pieces in his hand,
But, unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

[ 17 ] Goethe, who coined the term, knew that this spiritual bond was a reality.

[ 18 ] And now the second parable: Imagine the mango hanging up there on the tree, and the one down below that has rotted. They share more than just a name and form. Although name and form exist in the same way in both the old and the new fruit, what makes this mango, as a reality, the same as the other one that has rotted on the ground lies in forces and elements that are supernatural and that pass from the first mango into the second.

[ 19 ] Thus, in what a human being experiences spiritually from one life to the next, we see a central “I” at work—a central soul being. And when we encounter a person in a later life, what they experience as fate—their abilities, talents, and so on—is not solely the result of causes from previous lives; rather, there is a central, unifying being that passes from the previous incarnation into the new one.

[ 20 ] Thus we see how the idea of repeated earthly lives—reincarnation—must be enlivened by the fundamental Christian principle. Anyone who takes Christianity seriously has no fear that the foundations of Christianity might be shaken when new truths come into human view. Christianity is so strong—in that it can inspire feelings such as those just described—that it, like all other truths, can tolerate the truth of repeated earthly lives; indeed, it can even willingly accept it when human thinking has progressed to the point where this law can be instilled in it. But then the fundamental impulse of Christianity will assert itself: the reality of the soul-spiritual, which runs through the various earthly lives as a central core.

[ 21 ] We have thus presented a contrast that can help us understand the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity. In doing so, we must consider both worldviews in terms of their fundamental sensibilities [and not their dogmas], for one could argue not just for days, but for months or even years, about dogmatic concepts and ideas. Whether, for example, Nirvana is the same as Christian bliss—one could argue endlessly about this and lose oneself in logical and dialectical sophistry. But the point is never to engage in discussions about the highest concepts; rather, it is about how religious or other worldview impulses fit into people’s souls, hearts, hopes for life, and certainties about life. In another, [even clearer] way, the same truth presents itself to us when we allow the fundamental impulse that animated the great Buddha to take effect upon us. I deliberately say “the great Buddha,” for this Buddha appears as a great, noble figure to those who are able to penetrate what the Buddha—like the final twilight of all pre-Christian thought—has brought forth as a worldview.

[ 22 ] It seems entirely correct to us that the greatest influence on the Great Buddha was what the legend expresses in the following words: We are told—and the legend tells us this more truthfully than any external history—that the Buddha, thanks to his parents’ care, had initially lived his life in such a way that he had come to know only the joys, but not the sufferings, of life. But one day he was led out of his parents’ palace, and there he saw life in its [full] reality. There he saw a sick person. Only then did he come to understand that life does not reveal itself solely through robust health; only then did he come to understand that the very same force that brings robust health into being also brings illness into being. Through this, he learned the significance of suffering in life. And through further examples he encountered in life, he learned the significance of suffering. He saw an old man and said to himself: Old age is suffering—just as he had first said to himself: Illness is suffering. —And finally, when he was shown a corpse, he said to himself in the face of life’s end: Death is suffering.

[ 23 ] And as this insight develops further, we see how the Buddha recognized suffering in the very act of coming into being. He said: Birth is suffering, sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering. Separation from what one loves is suffering; union with what one does not love is suffering; the inability to attain what one desires is suffering. – And from this, the great Buddha derived the essence of his doctrine of salvation.

[ 24 ] Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation in that it teaches: It is the urge for existence, the thirst for existence, that draws that which is better than this world into the world. Only through salvation from this world can a person enter into real, higher states of existence. But one can achieve this only by combating the thirst for existence that draws one into earthly incarnation. Let us not view these matters merely theoretically, but intuitively; let us see the great Buddha with that vast, expansive heart full of love that he possessed, and let us envision him as he stands before a corpse—which represents to him the end of life—and says to himself: Death is suffering. — For the Great Buddha, in the twilight of the ancient pre-Christian worldview, a corpse becomes the symbol of suffering, the symbol that this thirst for earthly life must be fought. He teaches the human mind to turn away from this earthly life; he teaches it to ascend to that which then beckons to it as Nirvana.

[ 25 ] And now let’s move forward 600 years, and then another 600 years, and take another look at humanity’s view of life. 600 years before our era, we have the teachings of the great Buddha in India. Then, 600 years after the beginning of our era, we are no longer dealing with the Buddha, but with simple, naive minds. Like the Buddha, they fix their gaze on a corpse—the corpse of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, which represents the mystery of Golgotha to them. What does this corpse mean to these simple people 600 years after the founding of Christianity? What was once the symbol of a religion of salvation for the Buddha is, for these simple souls—who had received the Christian impulse 1,200 years after the Buddha— is not the symbol of a religion of salvation that turns away from all earthly things, but rather the symbol of a religion of resurrection; for as they behold this corpse, the certainty sinks into human hearts and souls that all suffering and all death are the passageway to the victory of the spirit over all that is physical, to liberation from death.

[ 26 ] There was no greater, no more decisive impulse than the very Christ impulse that entered the development of humanity between the two epochs: between that epoch when even the great Buddha could look upon a corpse and find in it only the thought of liberation from the body, and that epoch when one could again look upon a corpse, but now saw in that corpse a symbol that the highest and best, the most valuable thing living within the human being, will always triumph over the physical, will always rise again, will rise above the physical. This is how one must characterize the impulse, for only in this way does one approach the impulse of Christianity intuitively, as it should be, rather than through theoretical ideas. And if we now wish to grasp this impulse of Christianity in the proper sense, we can do so through something else as well.

[ 27 ] Essentially, pre-Christian religions are unfamiliar with something that only entered humanity’s worldview in all its splendor through Christianity. Here, too, we can once again turn our attention to Buddhism. When we examine and understand it, we find that it has crystallized the concept of the Bodhisattva as one of the highest ideals of human existence. What is a Bodhisattva? Well, if one wishes to grasp this concept of the Bodhisattva—whom Buddhism regards as one of the highest guides in humanity’s spiritual life—one must certainly look back somewhat at the history of the development of human mental and soul life. One must be clear about the fact that, just as we live today in terms of our soul’s condition, this state that we carry within us is also subject to development. The way we perceive the things around us today and how we combine sensory impressions with our intellect—that is our present state of soul—and this type of soul has developed gradually over time. And anyone who looks back on the cultural development of humanity—not yet through the means of spiritual science, but simply by thinking—will become aware of how, in earlier times, the state of the human soul was quite different.

[ 28 ] Well, I would first like to describe how spiritual science is to understand this earlier state. We look back to [primordial] ancient times, to the times of prehistoric human development—to times for which there are no historical records. Back then, people did not view the world as they do today, for example in science; in those times, a kind of clairvoyant state of mind still existed. People today are annoyed when we speak of clairvoyant states of mind, and perhaps rightly so, for the term is indeed often misused today, and it is frequently understood to mean something highly superstitious. But what is really meant by it is something entirely different from the state of mind we experience today from waking until falling asleep, and from the state of unconsciousness during sleep. In addition to these two states of consciousness, there was in ancient times a third—an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. All that remains of this third state for humanity today is what we must describe as a kind of atavism: namely, the dream state. Only the pictorial and symbolic aspects were common to the clairvoyance of the past and to today’s dream consciousness; but while today’s dream images usually appear fragmented and chaotic, [in earlier times] the content of what was perceived clairvoyantly could be related to spiritual realities lying beyond our sensory world, so that we can say: In an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, the spiritual world was, for people of ancient times, direct perception, direct experience. People looked into spiritual reality. And therein lies the meaning of human development: that humanity has descended from that state to our present-day consciousness, where, by relinquishing the old clairvoyance, we have gained the ability to grasp the world through our intellectual concepts and our ideas.

[ 29 ] However, this development continues, and in the future, today’s consciousness will once again unite with the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. Just as individual people today are undergoing a process of soul development through which they develop clairvoyant consciousness in addition to their outer, object-oriented consciousness, so will all of humanity eventually attain an intellect that functions simultaneously as clairvoyant consciousness. One can therefore say that the people who lived in ancient, very ancient cultures could still look back on a time in human development when their forefathers possessed knowledge derived from the direct observation of the divine-spiritual world. And in those most ancient times, the leaders with regard to such knowledge were those people whom Buddhism calls the first Bodhisattvas. Then people’s clairvoyant powers gradually diminished. And those peoples who felt the decline of these abilities particularly keenly—as was the case with the inhabitants of ancient India—incorporated this looking back at the origin of humanity from the spiritual realm into their feelings, and they said: “In the way we now view the world with our ordinary everyday consciousness, we are, in essence, not living in a way that corresponds to our innermost core of being.”

[ 30 ] People in earlier times could look back into the spiritual world to which we actually belong; today, however, only those who are undergoing a special spiritual development can do so. The members of the ancient Indian people saw, beyond the physical world, humanity’s ancient spiritual homeland—one that could once be perceived but can no longer be seen today. They felt this so deeply that they said: Everything that present-day consciousness perceives is Maya, the great illusion, the great deception; behind it lies what the ancient forefathers beheld, what our own souls themselves beheld in former bodies. And what our fathers have handed down to us in the teachings from time immemorial contains the truth about humanity’s spiritual homeland. – And so the ancient Indian strove to emerge from Maya, the great deception, and ascend to the spiritual homeland, to the Spirit with which a person felt connected when he said to himself in his soul: “The spiritual that lives within me is one with the spiritual that permeates and weaves through the world as Brahman.”

[ 31 ] That was the prevailing spirit in ancient India, but an echo of that ancient primordial wisdom has always remained with humanity, and that is what matters. If one considers only the external accounts, one comes to the conclusion that what people in pre-Christian times regarded as religions can be traced back to what they possessed as primordial wisdom, which originated in [ancient] clairvoyance. And one also sees that, from those times onward, from age to age, new great leaders of humanity must continually emerge—leaders who possess within themselves, in their souls, the essence of the ancient wisdom and truth, which they master. Thus, the ancient wisdom lives on in the leaders and teachers of humanity, the Bodhisattvas. And in the spirit of Buddhism, one would have to regard Buddha himself, Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus, and others as such Bodhisattvas. They were initiated into the primordial wisdom, which they held within themselves as truth, and this meant that their souls were connected to the spiritual worlds. Thus, Buddhism looks up to the great leaders who, from epoch to epoch, passed on the ancient wisdom, for the word “Bodhisattva” roughly means “wisdom” or “truth.”

[ 32 ] The status of a Bodhisattva is attained when a person gradually evolves to the point where their soul can absorb the wisdom that characterizes humanity’s spiritual homeland. When, through incarnation after incarnation, a person has progressed to the point of becoming a Bodhisattva, the next stage—the higher rank, so to speak, that he can attain—is the stage of a Buddha; one progresses from Bodhisattva to Buddha. But the Buddha is no longer called upon to descend back to earth; rather, having become a Buddha, he has reached the point where the thirst for life in the physical body is quenched, where liberation occurs, where he is no longer bound to the physical world, and where he no longer continues to live within it. Thus, the so-called final manifestation of the pre-Christian worldview recognizes in the Bodhisattva the human being who stands at the threshold of what still remains connected to earthly existence. The moment a person ascends one step higher, he no longer needs to remain bound to the earth. However, this worldview does not yet know the concept of Christ in the true sense. What, then, does the concept of Christ consist of?

[ 33 ] The concept of Christ transcends both the concept of the Bodhisattva and that of the Buddha. We can only arrive at the concept of Christ if we first turn our spiritual gaze toward an inner experience of the human soul—an experience hinted at in the Christian Gospels and which we might call the inner resurrection or rebirth. Usually, this inner rebirth is conceived of as something entirely abstract. But we need only keep certain aspects of the human soul life in mind, and we will be able to see how this “inner rebirth” refers to something quite concrete. We need only consider in detail what constitutes the fundamental element of the human soul life. Here, the human being first presents himself to us in his outer life with his sensations, feelings, emotions, and impulses of the will; there we see how, from this soul that lives in instincts, passions, and other impulses, the human being forms his conceptions of the external world, and how he can rise ever higher to more purified and truer concepts, further and further still. Who would not admit that the human being feels within himself the instinct and urge toward ever-greater perfection? One need only imagine the demands of all the noble idealists of humanity, and one must conclude: These demands set forth lofty ideals, and people also live them out in methodical acts of noble human compassion and so on. Therefore, one must say: Human beings can, in a sense, rise above themselves.

[ 34 ] There is a fact of human spiritual life here that—when viewed from a human perspective—cannot always be called merely abstract. People acknowledge this when they say: Within us lives something like a second self, a higher self, toward which one can grow, rising above the lower, everyday self. In an abstract sense, one sometimes admits that Goethe’s words are correct:

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

[ 35 ] But when we think of this higher self, we usually imagine something bloodless and colorless—something that, for most people, does not immediately possess the same reality as those manifestations of human essence that are connected to the human being as he or she directly confronts us in life. There he stands before us with all his emotions, impulses, with everything he does as a natural being, with his blood, with the whole force that pulses through his physical body, with everything that nature has placed within him as a personality. If we wish to summarize all of this, we can say: Just as the human being confronts us as a natural being, so is he endowed with the forces that permeate the entire world. Just as he confronts us there as a personality, so has he come into being through the forces of the world.

[ 36 ] How colorless, how abstract, by contrast, is what people often regard as the content of higher impulses. And how concrete it seems when a person flies into a rage, driven by the blood in their veins. When, on the other hand, one constructs an ideal of the higher self, it usually remains quite abstract—so colorless and bloodless that it seems utterly consumptive to us. One could describe, for example, what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” as such a consumptive ideal. A bloodless idealism! Now, to counter what so often confronts us as bloodless abstractions, we need only hold before us a single word drawn from the development of Christian impulses—a word that is effective: the words of Paul:

Not I, but Christ in me.

[ 37 ] We have thus mentioned what, in the deepest sense, is capable of defining the very essence of Christianity.

[ 38 ] We see the human being before us as a natural personality; we see how, with his emotions and passions, he stands as a convergence of all the forces that permeate and interweave the entire world. He stands there, formed into a small world, like a microcosm within the great world, the macrocosm. And now we see how this human being is imbued with the striving for perfection, how he wants to experience something within himself, as expressed in Goethe’s famous saying:

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

[ 39 ] What initially appears to us as a natural personality—composed, like a microcosm, of the forces of the world—now strives beyond itself toward concepts and ideas that may at first appear as abstract ideals representing the better self of humanity. But then we can imagine that these abstract ideals—these higher forms of wisdom, these highest ideals, which a person can possess only by rising above his natural existence—now permeate this higher self as well, and become just as much an expression of what the world experiences and is interwoven with spiritually—as the spiritual, as the moral of the world—just as the physical-sensual aspect of the personality is an expression of the entire macrocosm.

[ 40 ] When, as it were, a cosmic being strikes like a flash into the highest ideals of humanity, a cosmic being—conceived in the spiritual-super-sensible realm as truly real as the external cosmic forces are conceived to be real, forces which, acting from the macrocosm, have fashioned the human natural personality as a microcosm—then we have the human being who liberates himself—the human being who in this way rises above himself, who now lives in his higher self, which otherwise [merely] remains an abstraction, existing in empty, lifeless concepts that do not exert an immediate, powerful influence. Now the higher impulse that has taken root in this person is at work; a spiritual element [lives] within him that is becoming [becomes] his higher personality. Now he possesses not only abstract ideals, the highest moral ideas, within himself; now he carries within himself a second, spiritual personality. Now that to which he can rise as the highest is just as permeated by spiritual personality as the natural human being was formerly permeated by abstract ideals.

[ 41 ] When we sense that this can take place within a person, then we understand Paul’s words: “Not I, but Christ in me.” This Christ in me can permeate and penetrate everything that is otherwise—and remains—an abstraction of a higher self. Thus, through Christ, we ascend to a higher personality. While the Bodhisattvas are those teaching guides of humanity who lead people toward impersonal higher wisdom—toward abstract concepts and ideas—the Christ impulse leads people not merely toward an impersonal wisdom, but toward a higher personality within themselves. This concept, however, only entered the world with the establishment of Christianity. Everything that happens in the world has its causes. And when a person today, through a development such as that outlined in the treatise “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?”, rises to spiritual vision—to spiritual clairvoyance—then he has this higher personality directly before him as a reality, like a new human being within the human being—the Christ within ourselves.

[ 42 ] But now there comes a moment for the true clairvoyant when a word—one that Goethe used to describe external, physical facts of nature and then also applied to the highest essence within the human being—is spiritually fulfilled, namely the word:

If the eye were not like the sun,
How could we see the light?

[ 43 ] Goethe means, with regard to the external world: Here is my eye, which sees the sun; if it did not possess the power to see the light, we would not be able to perceive the light. – But he also says:

The eye is formed by light for the sake of light.

[ 44 ] We could not have eyes if light did not permeate and interweave the world: the eye is formed by light. – Schopenhauer’s truth, “The world is my idea”—that is, that the world of light and color is the idea of the eye—is only a half-truth. The whole truth is found only when we add: My perception is created through the world, so that when we use the eye formed by the sun, we look into the world in which the sun exists. – And likewise, we can say: Just as there is no eye without the sun, so there is no divine knowledge or sensation within us without God as an objective God in the external world.

[ 45 ] In this way, Christ within us can also be objectively experienced as a personality. And this event—in which we experience our higher self in such a way that we can say, “Not we, but Christ within us”—becomes a concrete experience for us. Then our inner soul life is transformed; we have become a different person, a reborn person, and through this experience a new, spiritual eye has been opened to us. And then we also come to see that this “Christ within us” necessarily requires the Christ outside of us—that the objectively historical Christ must accompany the spiritual Christ experienced subjectively within us. To deny Him—the Christ who underwent the Mystery of Golgotha—logically amounts to the same thing as denying the sun, which, as Goethe said, has formed the eye out of an otherwise indifferent organism.

[ 46 ] The fact that we can experience the Christ within us is formed within us as an inner experience, emerging from our soul organism, just as our physical eye is formed by the light of the sun. Thus, what constitutes our inner, spiritual eye is formed within us from the true, real Christ; and whoever truly experiences this—not merely as a feeling, but through clairvoyant consciousness—experiences it as their most immediate knowledge: what could be characterized as the clairvoyant gaze ascending from the spiritual personality of the Christ within us to the real, objective, historical Christ. We need no Gospel, no historical document; we need only the true, genuine gaze of the clairvoyant, and we know that, in the course of human development, the embodiment of that Being from whom the impulse for the “Christ within us” originated has lived. This is the objective, not merely the subjective, mystical experience of the Christ.

[ 47 ] But we know something else as well. We know that as the doctrine of repeated earthly lives gradually takes root in the process of human development—and thus in all of earthly life—under the compulsion of logical thinking, then, through clairvoyance, we have the Christ before us as the historical Christ, who awakens the inner vision within us so that we can look toward future incarnations. And now we do not say, as Buddhism does: “The fewer earthly incarnations, the better for the human being, for the sooner he will be redeemed from existence”—but rather we say: As long as the Earth has its mission to fulfill, we, by being incarnated on Earth, absorb the Christ impulse more and more, and the Christ impulse within us becomes ever stronger and more comprehensive; in every new incarnation we carry it higher and higher within us. And so we look toward a future in which the words “Not I, but Christ in me” can be fulfilled more and more in us. Therefore, we look upon future incarnations—our future earthly lives—as lives increasingly permeated by Christ, and we understand why, in the pre-Christian worldview, even in Buddhism, only a single idea of salvation could arise—for the Christ impulse had not yet arrived, the impulse that brings ever-renewed fruitfulness to every earthly life. On the contrary, the point had even been reached where it had become hopeless to further perfect earthly lives. With the Christ impulse, earthly incarnations—the earthly lives of human beings—gain their meaning, a meaning that Buddhism could no longer reveal.

[ 48 ] And when we look at the history of Christianity’s development, the question arises: How did Christianity—not Christ, but Christianity—come into the world? — Anyone who wishes to view history objectively will have to admit: The person who contributed most to the development of Christianity is Paul. — Let us therefore take a closer look at him. Was he convinced by what actually took place in the physical world, or by what was described to him about it? As a contemporary of the events that took place in the physical world, he was able to hear everything—they came to meet him—but what he was able to take into his soul from these Christian ideas was insufficient to make these external events appear to him in such a light that he could have turned his soul toward Christianity. But then that event occurred which scientific theology has so far been unable to interpret. What kind of event was that? Viewed from the outside, what Paul could not have believed through any perception or observation in the physical world became, for him, a matter of immediate certainty through what he beheld supersensually, in the spirit. No information from the physical world could be decisive for him—but a supersensible experience, a superphysical event, was. And this convinced him, not merely of the existence of some Christ, but that Christ had lived through the very event which, when applied to human life, means: In every human being, the spiritual core of being will overcome the death of the outer shell of the lower human, for “if Christ had not been raised, our faith would be in vain, and our preaching would be in vain.” Paul appealed to the risen Christ because it had become clear to him that, in the Mystery of Golgotha, that spiritual sun had appeared which alone makes the inner Christ in human beings possible. For Paul, the starting point of Christian development was a supernatural event that gave him the impulse to work for Christianity.

[ 49 ] Christianity, then, in relation to its first great teacher, arose from a supernatural impulse, and it was only later that the Gospels were able to provide what people needed to clearly envision the Christ event in their souls. This event can always be renewed, even today; if a person observes the laws of inner human development, he creates the possibility for himself to relive the Damascus experience within himself. Then they are able to experience the objective Christ as truth in a spiritual way; then they begin to be able to believe the Gospels without being compelled to have historical proof, for what they perceive in the spirit—what clairvoyant consciousness gives them—they then find confirmed by the Gospel writings.

[ 50 ] Thus, the very essence of Christianity is to be found within the human soul. And the strongest impetus for the spread of Christianity is to be found in a supernatural experience of insight. Through this experience, every human being perceives, so to speak, directly the necessity that Christ Himself appeared as the most important impetus in the historical development of humanity. And then one truly understands that in the person of Jesus, Christ lived as a being unlike any other. While the Bodhisattvas thus proceed from incarnation to incarnation like other human beings until they have fulfilled their task and become Buddhas, we have record of only a single earthly life for this being who lived as the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. And [just as, with successive generations, the same blood is passed from father to son], so too does a spiritual impulse go out from the one Christ who lived through the event of Golgotha—a fact that becomes evident to the higher consciousness—to all those who find their way to this Christ.

[ 51 ] This idea—that Christ is connected by a spiritual bond to those who find their way to him, just as a descendant is connected to an ancestor by the bond of blood—not only forms the basis of Christian mysticism but also of a Christianity that can be described as a “mystical fact.” There is not merely a Christian mysticism—an inner mystical experience in the Christian sense—but what took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era is a fact that can only be grasped through mysticism. Just as the flow of blood through successive generations can be understood through the natural sciences, so too can what happened through Christ be understood only through spiritual insight, through the wisdom of mysticism. Through spiritual insight, one can understand that “spiritual blood” flows from Christ Jesus into the souls of those who find their way to him.

[ 52 ] Christianity can only be understood if one regards it as a mystical fact. That is why I have titled my book *Christianity as a Mystical Fact*, for in spiritual science, where one speaks and writes with full responsibility, every word is chosen and formulated in accordance with the facts. And when we keep in mind this idea of the essence of Christianity—which is revealed in Christ himself and which is the reason why a spiritual being—our higher self— an inner Christ, can rise within us all—then this idea will become increasingly rooted in earthly existence—especially in the future incarnations that human beings will undergo on Earth. Thus, even though the Christ was incarnated in a body only once, he can still say—looking upon those into whom his spiritual blood can now flow:

I am with you always, even to the end of the earth's cycles.

[ 53 ] To recognize and observe how the impulse of Christ—and thus Christ himself—flows within the evolution of the Earth—this, in turn, must be transformed into feelings, and one will sense how contradictions such as the following allow us to glimpse into the depths of the development of worldview.

[ 54 ] We have a passage attributed to the Buddha that can be compared to the saying just mentioned: “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth.” The Buddha said to his disciples: When I look back on past earthly lives, I know that my soul has passed through many earthly lives and has undergone these or those experiences. It has acquired abilities and has now built up my body—this outer, physical body. This has become my destiny because the soul has built it in this way and guided it to such places where it could experience all of this. Thus, in my present physical body, I behold the results of the spiritual powers I have gathered.—And he called the body a temple built from divine powers, through the indirect path of human individuality. [And the Buddha went on to say:] The temple of my body is the result of the past lives I have lived. But I know for certain that ever since I became the Buddha, this temple has stood, and this is the last time my inner forces have built such a temple. I can clearly feel the beams already breaking and the pillars cracking; this is the last body my soul inhabits—the last body, for I have become the Buddha.

[ 55 ] Liberation from the body—that is what the Buddha teaches. Let us reflect on this and consider, in contrast, another passage—namely, the one in which Jesus Christ also spoke to his disciples about the temple of his body. But what did he say? Did he, like the Buddha, say that this is the final existence, that everything that led to this body will dissolve? No, Christ said—foreseeing that what he had become in this body would provide the impulse to continue working through all earthly existence—“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up again in three days.” – That is the great contrast: on the one hand, the breaking down of the temple and the joy of breaking it down in order to take leave of the earth—and on the other [the perspective] of viewing the structure of the temple as the starting point for all subsequent human salvation. And this is what the expression stands for: “Break down this temple; the impulse is already there to continue working.”

[ 56 ] Thus, we must not view the impulses that emanate from Christ Jesus—and which form the very essence of Christianity—in abstract terms, but rather we must transform these concepts so that they become sensations and feelings. Then, precisely through an understanding of repeated earthly lives, we will perceive the full significance of this Christ impulse. There we will look toward the human earthly lives of the future and see in Christ the starting point for an ever higher and higher fulfillment of humanity’s destiny in the future.

[ 57 ] And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stood at the very beginning of humanity, but which gradually faded away until people were left with only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when humanity was struck by the greatest impulse—the Christ impulse—which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, presenting the soul with the possibility of ascending ever higher and higher, to ever higher and higher life, until human beings have reached a point in their earthly existence where they can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Thus, nothing fills us as profoundly, deeply, and powerfully as what we can perceive as a defining characteristic of humanity’s true mission within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he finds himself surrounded by the physical-sensory world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, and he knows that through them he reaches upward into a spiritual world. And he knows that spiritual forces and beings reach into his existence from this spiritual world. But human beings cannot simply ascend into the spiritual worlds through abstract concepts and ideals alone; for just as they exist as personalities here in the physical world, so too must they develop themselves as personalities in the spiritual world. Therefore, only an exemplary personality can lead them there—and that is the personality of Christ!

[ 58 ] Thus, human beings look up to Christ as the bringer of the spiritual world and say: By lifting my own self up to you, by increasingly fulfilling Paul’s saying, “Christ in me,” I draw down from the spiritual worlds the most intimate and powerful impulses, clothe them in my human being, and transmit them into our physical world, into our sensory world. I am the mediator between the spiritual world and the sensory world. I bring the spiritual into the physical world. I imbue and structure the physical with that which comes from the spiritual world. Christ is my helper and my model in this—the true Christ, who is as necessary for the inner human being as the outer sun is for the physical eye, and who, as a historical being, walked upon the outer physical plane at the beginning of our era.

[ 59 ] As human beings in the world, we then feel: We can hint at our mission on Earth by saying that one should fully imbue with Christian meaning those words in which I would like to summarize what today’s meditation was intended to reveal regarding humanity’s relationship to the physical world on the one hand and to the spiritual world on the other:

It presses upon human consciousness
From the mysterious depths of the world
The rich abundance of matter.
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of meaning
The clarifying light of the spirit.
They are found within the human being
As a reality full of wisdom.