The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Jesus or Christ

[ 1 ] I naturally feel like a guest here in Norway, and I would like above all to express my heartfelt thanks to the speaker, who has just addressed such heartfelt words to me, and to all of you who are willing to take an interest in the remarks I will be able to offer on the problem I have mentioned during this brief time. I would like to preface this by saying, however, that within the theological movement I actually feel like a guest in two respects, for I have always had to emphasize within the anthroposophical movement that anthroposophy is by no means intended to be the founding of a new religion or, even less, the formation of a sect, but rather that it actually seeks to grow out of the scientific movement in general in the present day. It seeks to find the appropriate research methods for the supersensible realities of human life and the life of the world. And only to the extent that the theological realm belongs to the general field of research is it, so to speak, compelled—when asked—to contribute to theological research what it believes it can bring to this field using the methods of supersensible research. That is why, when a large number of younger theologians in Germany recently approached me, I said: I wish to serve only with what I am able to offer from an anthroposophical perspective. But whatever may be necessary today within a theological-religious movement must be carried out by those individuals who are actively engaged in theological or religious life. From this sphere of life, a particular objection raised against anthroposophy is that, with its research methods, it seeks to ascend into the supersensible worlds in terms of knowledge, and that it aims to develop certain powers of cognition that are otherwise latent in human beings in order to penetrate the supersensible worlds through research. It is said, particularly from a theological perspective, that this is actually contrary to religious sentiment and religious piety, and that it must above all be rejected by Christian theology. And recently, this view has been expressed in particular by stating that religion must work with the irrational, with the mystery that must not be unveiled by rationalism. It must work with that which does not seek to be understood, but which is to be revered as an incomprehensible mystery with deep, trusting reverence. The phrase has even been used: “Christianity needs the paradox in order to truly lead and shape a genuinely Christian religious life with sufficient depth and out of immediate human trust.”

[ 2 ] If anthroposophy were aimed at rationalizing the irrational—particularly with regard to the question of Christ Jesus—and reducing what is contained in the Mystery of Golgotha to a sober, intellectual framework, then the objections raised in this vein would likely be valid. And these objections are further supplemented by another. Since anthroposophy is neither gnosis, nor mysticism, nor ahistorical Orientalism, it is thoroughly oriented toward the historical unfolding of human development. Gnosis is ahistorical, mysticism is ahistorical, and all Eastern worldviews are, in a certain sense, ahistorical. Anthroposophy is, through and through, a Western worldview with regard to this

[ 3 ] methodological standpoint, and it regards historical development as a reality, as is customary in Western scholarship. And it therefore feels compelled to situate the personality of Jesus within the historical life of humanity. It knows what the historical Jesus holds in store for humanity, and—for reasons I would like to discuss today—it is compelled to ascend from the human Jesus observable in earthly life to the super-earthly, extra-earthly, cosmic Christ-being that was incarnated in the human Jesus, and truly to speak of Christ Jesus, in a certain sense, as a dual being.

[ 4 ] It is said there that what anthroposophy has to say about the cosmic—and even telluric—Christ is actually irrelevant to the religious sensibilities of today’s humanity, because when it comes to historical development, today’s humanity wishes to limit its perspective to the earthly realm, and the cosmic Christ is simply no longer needed alongside the historical Jesus.

[ 5 ] Well, the first thing I will need to demonstrate is how anthroposophy itself must approach the facts of the world, and how, based on its research methods, it arrives at a very special perspective on the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 6 ] Anthroposophy seeks, first and foremost, to grasp in a very specific, illusion-free, and clearly defined way what has emerged among Western humanity—particularly since the mid-15th century—as “objective cognition,” as I would like to call it. Through this objective cognition, nature has already been explained, systematized, and understood in terms of its laws in a magnificent way—and the ideal of the natural sciences, of course, justifiably goes much further—and it is a concomitant phenomenon, a subjective parallel phenomenon of sound natural science, that human beings become rationalistic—I might also say abstract—in their approach to knowledge. The world of thought is increasingly taking on the character of mere images. If we go back even further than the 15th century, we find everywhere that the world of thought did not have that pictorial character, that abstract character—which merely designates reality without seeking to contain it itself—that it has assumed since the middle of the 15th century, particularly since the time of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and so on. Today, ideas mean to us, at most, the image of a reality. If we go back to before the 15th century, people still had the feeling that a true spiritual reality entered into them when they immersed themselves in the world of ideas. People did not merely have the abstract world of ideas; they had a world of ideas filled with spirit, a world of ideas permeated by spiritual reality.

[ 7 ] As for rationalism and the natural sciences, the recent centuries have indeed achieved magnificent things. And we see more and more how the other historical sciences, too, are being influenced by the mindset and way of thinking that is asserting itself in these fields. And anyone who has followed the transformation of research methods in theology over the past few centuries can see that research attitudes have been driven decisively in the direction of the natural sciences, for history has, in recent times, indeed taken on the character of scientific thinking. And so Christology has gradually become a historical “study of the life of Jesus.” This is entirely understandable given the overall course of intellectual development in modern times. One must understand that this was inevitable. But one must also understand that this direction, if pursued further, is at the same time capable of robbing Christianity of Christ and of moving ever closer to what even a historian neutral toward religion—such as Ranke, who classified the personality of Jesus within the historical process as virtually the noblest being who ever walked the earth—can offer. Theology has drawn ever closer to historical research, and we already find today a large number of theologians whose scholarly mindset and research methods differ little from those of a historian of Ranke’s stature.

[ 8 ] In contrast, anthroposophy asserts that certain powers of cognition—which remain latent in human beings in ordinary life and in ordinary science, of which one is not aware, but which are present in every human being— can be brought to the surface through an awareness that these insights then lead beyond the mere sensory world and enable a person to grasp a supersensory world through their cognition just as a person endowed with the senses can grasp the sensory world. Through an approach that is no longer objective, that no longer has anything in common with ordinary rationalism, but rather draws closer to genuine experience, one approaches the supersensible world itself.

[ 9 ] Now, it is a very common misconception to believe that anthroposophy seeks to transfer the characteristic features of knowledge—as found in the natural sciences and in rationalism—to the supersensible realm, that it is itself a rational system, that it thus eliminates the irrational, the paradoxical, and the mysterious, and demands logical assent to what it regards as the Mystery of Golgotha—rather than a voluntary assent based on trust and reverence, as must remain the case in religion. But now the entire worldview—and indeed human beings themselves—changes completely when one ascends, so to speak, from the history of scientific and historical knowledge to this history of supersensible knowledge, if I may use that expression. If we wish to identify the most important characteristic—I can, of course, only hint at all these things—of the ordinary, objective scientific method recognized today, it is this: for those who truly and honestly draw the ultimate consequences of this natural science and this rationalism, it divides the world into two realms. One does not always become aware of these two realms because one harbors a certain inner, unconscious fear of drawing the ultimate consequences. But anyone who, like me, has met people who have suffered deeply from this—I would say—division of human nature, who have also, with their hearts and their religious sensibilities, gone all the way to the ultimate consequences of modern thought, and who has seen what soul-wrenching pain, what spiritual disorientation can be linked—precisely in relation to the deepest religious sensibility—to this dualism of modern rationalistic natural science in its stance toward humanity, will surely be inclined to reflect a little on how, precisely on religious ground, insights have emerged from this dualism. For natural science exerts far too great a power over the human mind. One feels too strongly responsible for its views to resist the temptation to model other scientific methods—if they are to be reliable—precisely on the natural-scientific, historical-realistic method.

[ 10 ] But where, then, does this method ultimately lead? It leads to the emergence of a deep chasm—one that is truly unbridgeable for external, objective cognition—between what we must acknowledge as a scientific necessity and what we grasp in our moral and ethical life, that which alone guarantees our true human dignity. And moral and ethical life, when lived correctly, appears to us as a direct outflow of the divine, thus leading us directly to religious piety, to religiosity itself. But the deep chasm between this ethical-religious life and what scientific knowledge of nature reveals to us about the physical human being may indeed be veiled from human perception by a mist—because we harbor a certain inner, unconscious fear—yet for those who approach human nature with complete honesty, it cannot be bridged by natural science alone. For on the one hand, there stands the well-founded scientific hypothesis regarding the origin of the Earth—the Kant-Laplace theory; today it has been modified. I will, of course, not discuss it in detail. But even though it has been modified today, it stands as something that, in the context of the world’s end, is indifferent to human development—the development from which the ethical-divine ideals spring, ideals to which one devotes oneself as a certainty that lives only in images. And if, on the other hand, we view the end of the Earth from a scientific standpoint, we are presented with a valid scientific hypothesis: the theory of entropy, which speaks of heat death at the end of the Earth. Thus, out of scientific necessity, we have placed humanity between the Kant-Laplacean cosmic nebula and heat death. There he lives right in the midst of it all, devoting himself to his ethical-religious ideals, only to find them ultimately unmasked as an illusion; for at the end of the Earth’s evolution stands, nevertheless, the heat death—the great corpse that buries not only what is physically and etherically present in the Earth’s evolution, but also everything contained within the ethical ideals.

[ 11 ] Truly not out of religious rationalism, but precisely out of the insight that presents itself to me in a fundamental, epistemological way, I must reckon with the fog with which people delude themselves about what approaches them and can become the most excruciating spiritual experiences to which a human being can be subjected, I must also reckon with the fact that people have sought the refuge—which did not yet exist in any of the ancient religions nor even in the early days of Christian development—of distinguishing between knowledge and faith. For knowledge, through the power it must exert upon the human mind, gradually becomes a Moloch that must little by little devour faith, unless that faith can hold fast to a higher, truly supersensory knowledge, which in turn is capable of penetrating even something like the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] And this is where anthroposophy must draw attention to how what constitutes rigid, scientific necessity becomes, for its supersensible knowledge, a mere phenomenon—how the world we see with our eyes and hear with our ears simply dissolves into phenomenalism. Today I can only speak about these things in general terms, but anthroposophy seeks to provide proof that what we see is not at all a material world, but rather a world of phenomena. And in supersensible knowledge, the sensory world loses, so to speak, some of its rigid density; but on the other hand, the ethical-religious world also loses some of its abstractness, its detachment from sensory necessity. The two worlds draw closer together. The ethical-religious world becomes more real, while the sensory-physical world becomes more phenomenal. And it is not through speculation, not through an abstract philosophical method, but through genuine experience that a world is built up that lies beyond our ordinary sensory world. And this world that is sought no longer has that opposition between the ideal and the real. The two have drawn closer together. The laws of nature, I would say, take on a moral character in this world, while moral laws condense into a natural process. And to mention just one example: Although this anthroposophy also posits something like “heat death” at the end of the Earth, what human beings carry within themselves as moral and religious ideals becomes, in this view, something like a real seed that, as with a plant, carries the life of this year over into the next. Here, anthroposophy comes into sharp conflict with modern science. I dare to say this, however, because I believe it will cause less offense among theologians than among rigid natural scientists: that anthroposophical spiritual knowledge recognizes how the so-called law of the conservation of energy and matter in this world—which is described as the supersensible world— no longer applies, and that this law of the conservation of matter and energy has only relative validity in the world that appears as the natural world and is grasped by rationalism.

[ 13 ] Anthroposophy teaches us, precisely through the human organism, to recognize that it is not only matter that exists and undergoes transformation; it teaches us to recognize more than just the metamorphoses of matter. Outside the human organism, in the rest of nature, the law of conservation of energy and matter applies; but within the human being itself, anthroposophy teaches us that matter completely disappears and that new matter arises out of pure space. And anthroposophical spiritual science may—if I may use a trivial comparison—point out that the ordinary conception of substance and energy in the human organism is like someone saying, for example, that they have counted how many banknotes are carried into a bank and how many are carried out again, and that if one considers sufficiently long periods of time, the numbers are the same. This is also the approach taken in the study of the law of conservation of matter and energy: one sees that just as much energy enters the matter as leaves it. But just as one must not assume that the banknotes themselves are transformed within the bank—rather, independent work must be performed there (the banknotes can even be reissued, and entirely new ones can emerge)—so it is also in the human organism: the destruction and creation of matter and energy take place.

[ 14 ] This is not something that is frivolously imagined, but rather something that has been recognized through rigorous anthroposophical research. Now, while it is true that what is known to the outside world as the law of conservation of matter and energy applies—albeit to the middle stage of development—when we approach the end of the Earth’s existence and may, with some justification, assume a heat death, then we do not see a vast graveyard, but rather we see that everything humanity has developed in terms of moral and ethical ideals and divine-spiritual convictions can truly unite within the human being with the newly emerging material reality, and that consequently we are dealing with a real seed of further development. It is through what is emerging within the human being itself that the death of the outer material is overcome.

[ 15 ] In anthroposophical spiritual science, we find something that clearly demonstrates how ethical and moral forces are also directly at work within the material world. In human beings, this remains, at first, subconscious to ordinary consciousness. But, to reiterate, for the consciousness attained through anthroposophical research, one does indeed come to recognize that ethical, moral, and religious forces are condensed into reality, while what exists in the outer material world dissolves into mere phenomenality. Through this, the two worlds are brought closer together. They are also brought closer together when one observes the way in which the human being now behaves within this higher knowledge. We are accustomed to speaking and judging logically when we apply ordinary rationalism to the external natural world and thus rely on those logical categories that are entirely justified for the external sensory world. Anthroposophical spiritual science also departs from this approach, simply out of objective necessity. It must depart because it experiences something different and observes something different through its methods of knowledge. And two concepts in particular emerge—though many others do as well, of course, but these two are of special importance to us today—which are otherwise known only indirectly, as objects, but which are not applied in the same way that logical concepts are applied. In knowledge, even that which is otherwise formal and ideal becomes an expression, a revelation, and is brought closer to reality.

[ 16 ] The two concepts that arise here are those of “healthy” and “sick.” You will all agree with me that it is actually impossible to speak of the logical categories of “healthy” and “sick” in the ordinary sensory world—of that which is not only true but is also recognized as such because it is healthy. In organic nature, we recognize the healthy as a principle of growth and development; we recognize the sick as a deformation, as an inhibition of normal development. But when we apply logical categories, we do not speak of healthy and sick. When we ascend from ordinary, concrete knowledge to the kind of knowledge employed by anthroposophical spiritual science, we must begin to speak of “healthy” and “sick.” For observation compels us to find such things—no longer mere ideas and concepts, but experiences, since “healthy” and “sick” are experiences—in the supersensible world into which we are entering. What we designate in the sensory world with the mere abstraction “true,” we must experience in the supersensible world as that which is healthy. And what we designate in the sensory world as “untrue” or “incorrect,” we must experience in the supersensible world as that which is diseased.

[ 17 ] And this now offers anthroposophy—not by forcing the connection, but through the entirely honest and sincere progress of research itself—the opportunity to link current research directly to the New and Old Testaments. This truly bridges the gap between research and the Old and New Testaments. A new path to understanding the Mystery of Golgotha is created. For something is presented here that is indeed quite paradoxical. As I said, I can only give a more or less general account today, but what I am outlining for you in broad strokes is merely the result of years of research—research that did not proceed from religious prejudices, if I may be permitted to note that. I myself came from a strictly scientific background; I grew up as free-thinking as possible in my youth and carried no religious sentiments with me from that time. Through research—and through what is the ultimate consequence of scientific research—I have been led to what I believe I may say, from an anthroposophical perspective, regarding the origin of religious problems. So there really are no subjective prejudices at play here whatsoever. But through anthroposophical research—especially when one conducts research entirely in the style and spirit of the natural sciences—one truly comes to know nature more precisely. Even if, of course, one does not always admit this and seeks, in a sense, to taint the natural sciences with all sorts of mysticism, which is unjustified: one truly learns to perceive nature more precisely, not only in terms of its phenomena and laws, but also by being able to form certain concepts about its quality—about what it actually is. And then one says to oneself: What is happening out there in nature continues within the human being as well. What has taken place outside the skin is also present within the human skin. We find natural processes externally. We find natural processes internally. But—and here comes the paradox that reveals itself to anthroposophical research—all ascending natural processes tending toward fertility have only limited validity within the human being; within the human being, they become processes of decay and destruction. And this great, powerful statement arises from truly diverse observations of nature and from diverse anthroposophical contemplations of the human being: Nature is permitted to be nature outside the human skin; within the human skin, that which is nature becomes that which opposes nature.

[ 18 ] Once we have risen to the level of supersensory research methods, we see how those forces that are constructive in external nature become destructive within the human being, and how these destructive forces in human nature become the bearers of evil. This is the distinction that anthroposophy must make in contrast to mere idealism: it asserts that nature is permitted to remain nature; the inner being of the human being, however, is not permitted—even physically—to remain nature. For even in its natural state, that which acts within the human being as a continuation of nature becomes pathological and thus evil. Nature outside of us is neutral toward good and evil; within us, however, it is physically destructive, pathogenic, and evil. And, as the anthroposophical view again shows, we maintain our resistance against that which reigns within us as evil only by maintaining a relationship with external nature in the life between birth and death such that we allow it to reach only as far as the reflection of external nature, so that we do not grasp in our consciousness what reigns organically in the depths of our human being as the source of evil. We fill our consciousness by receiving sensory perceptions from the outside. We receive external sensory impressions, but we allow them to penetrate only to a certain point. They must not go any further. For then these impressions of external nature—as supersensible knowledge reveals—would have a poisonous effect. We reflect them back. This creates a boundary between what in human beings are the organs of consciousness that take in external nature, and that which is where nature itself continues, where it still develops its constructive forces within the human being. Conscious processes do not penetrate below this boundary, but are instead reflected back and form our memory. And what lives in our memory is reflected external nature, which does not penetrate deeper into us. Just as a ray of light is reflected back from a mirror, so too is the image of nature—not nature itself—reflected back. For if a human being were to bring into consciousness what lies beyond his inner mirror, what lies down there where nature turns evil within him, he would, through the sway of nature within him, become an evil being.

[ 19 ] But we cannot attain full self-consciousness—a self-consciousness that is self-contained—as becomes quite clear to us when we limit ourselves to reflective ideas, to memories, to the mere reflection of external nature. What we summarize as self-consciousness—what comes to life within us as the “I”—can only arise from our physicality; it has its origin in human nature. Therefore, rationalism is, in and of itself, just as neutral toward good and evil as the laws of nature. But if that which constitutes human self-consciousness were to extend to the other part of human soul life, we would, in the present stage of human existence, inevitably have—with the awakening of the “I”—an irresistible inclination toward evil, toward that which exists within us as destructive natural forces. And now a significant insight arises that leads into the realm of religion. The person—as the view of the ordinary physical world from a supersensible perspective clearly shows—who clearly surrenders to all that is the workings of nature, to the forces that permeate natural phenomena, comes to say to himself: Atheism is not merely a logical error; atheism is truly an illness. Not a disease that can usually be diagnosed, but anthroposophical spiritual science can speak of it because, from its supersensible standpoint, it applies the mere concepts of “right or wrong” the concepts of “healthy and sick,” from its supersensible standpoint, that there is something pathological present in the human body’s fluid compositions—which are no longer accessible to external physiology and biology—when a person says from the depths of their soul: “There is no God.” — For healthy human nature—although it can become evil, though the evil remains in the subconscious—says: “There is a God.”

[ 20 ] But in this awareness—that there is one God, which is the direct expression of true human health—lies the only profession of faith in God that I would like to call the “profession of faith in the Father.” We can gain nothing else from deepening our understanding of nature, from experiencing nature within ourselves, than the awareness of the Father.

[ 21 ] Therefore, for those who remain within the confines of modern natural science, the inevitable outcome is that they arrive at Father-consciousness and, in effect, lose sight of the Son—Christ-consciousness—from among the ranks of divine beings, more or less, even if they do not admit it. And the fundamental character of Harnack’s *The Essence of Christianity* is, after all, that it asserts that it is not the Son who belongs in the Gospels, but solely the Father, and that the Son is merely the one who sent the teaching of the Father into the world through the Gospels.

[ 22 ] This view nevertheless gradually leads away from true, authentic Christianity. For if one wishes to remain true to Christianity, one must be able to add the experience of the Son to the distinct experience of the Father that one attains in this way, provided one truly possesses a sound human nature. This experience of the Son, however, is none other than that which arises not from the experience of nature, but from the experience of something within the human being that exists above nature within him—an experience that belongs to that which has nothing to do with nature, in contrast to which nature fades away to mere phenomenality. And then there arises the possibility of adding the experience of the Son to the experience of the Father.

[ 23 ] Just as the experience of the Father is simply an experience of perfect, harmonious health, so the experience of the Son is the reality that is inwardly lived through when a person realizes that, in ascending to full self-consciousness, he must develop this self-consciousness in earthly life—and that this self-consciousness itself is entirely natural. And if he does not want to surrender it to evil, this “I” must awaken within earthly life itself to a permeation with divine-spiritual content. It must become truth: Not I, but Christ in me.

[ 24 ] It must become truth because the “I”—which, as it is initially experienced, can still remain within the experience of the Father—must be thoroughly transformed, metamorphosed. A person need not become pathologically affected by what external nature merely reflects—where it does not enter his consciousness directly, but only through the images it casts back, through reflections. But a person would become ill in relation to their true human nature if they could not, out of their own freedom, find that cosmic power which is not merely the source of what exists as healthy nature—but which becomes a diseased entity within the person—if they could not rise to that which now recognizes the necessary illness brought about by the emergence of the “I.” The rest of the soul life might, under certain circumstances, remain healthy, but the rigidity of the “I” would inevitably make this soul life diseased if human beings could not, in life—in the inner, senseless experience—encounter that essence which can be found here on earth but is not of an earthly nature, which can only be found through the free act of the soul, and whose discovery is therefore entirely different from the discovery of the Father.

[ 25 ] In Western Europe, very little emphasis is placed on the difference between these two experiences—the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son. If one were to travel eastward today and study, for example, the philosophy of the Russian philosopher Soloviev, one would find that he, in particular, actually speaks like a person from the early Christian centuries—except that he clothes what he says from this perspective in modern philosophical formulas. He speaks in such a way that one can clearly see: He has a special experience of the Father and a special experience of the Son. Instinctively, he possesses what modern spiritual research must once again acknowledge: that one is born out of the Father; that it is a form of illness not to acknowledge the Father; but that for the human being endowed with an “I,” there must be a healing process and a supernatural healer—and that is Christ. Not experiencing the father means being inwardly ill; not experiencing Christ means seeing misfortune enter one’s life. The question of the father is a question of knowledge. The question of the son is a question of destiny, a question of happiness and misfortune. And only those eras that have regarded Christ as a physician—as a universal physician—have been able to gain a sufficient understanding of the way in which Christ enters our lives. For supersensory-anthroposophical research, this is not a mere phrase; it is not something that has merely allegorical or symbolic meaning: Christ the Physician, Christ the Savior or Healer—the one who frees the “I” from the danger from which the Father cannot free it, because even what is healthy can become ill. And through “I”-consciousness, health would have to be lost. What the Father cannot do, he has entrusted to the Son. In a distinct experience alongside the Father, Christ enters fully into human consciousness.

[ 26 ] And anthroposophical research in the spiritual sciences can justify this experience entirely through scientific methods. But here, something would first emerge that I would like to call: the eternally present Christ. We find him—if only we seek him deeply enough within our soul—as a being we cannot draw forth from our own soul. We find him just as we objectively encounter an external natural phenomenon outside of ourselves. We encounter him after our birth in the course of our human development. We must draw him forth from our moral perception. There he is: the eternally present Christ.

[ 27 ] But once one has found this ever-present Christ, once one has validated him through anthroposophical research, then one approaches historical research differently than one did before. For this is the peculiar thing: When one ascends to the higher consciousness, one must first descend again to ordinary consciousness. One cannot investigate the sensory world from within higher consciousness. That would lead only to empty talk. Anyone who were to develop only higher consciousness—that is, who were to know only what anthroposophy is—should certainly not speak about natural science, for anyone who wishes to speak about natural science must also know nature scientifically, in the same way that natural science investigates it. Only then can one penetrate what natural science provides through supersensible research. A layperson, a dilettante in natural science, is not permitted to speak about natural science, no matter how well-versed they may be in the knowledge of the supersensible worlds. The supersensible worlds have, in essence, exactly the same significance for the sensory worlds as oxygen does when it is outside the lungs. Nature is like the lungs. Spiritual science must first be infused into natural science if natural science is to be enriched.

[ 28 ] However, another area now emerges, again not based on religious prejudice. One can arrive at this conclusion initially without any historical analysis, entirely without resorting to the Gospels. It is what I would like to call the epoch of human development, which for us coincides externally with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 29 ] If someone who does not advance to supersensible concepts and ideas is able to approach the Mystery of Golgotha, then they will be tempted to proceed more and more merely from an external, naturalistic-historical perspective and to reduce Christ Jesus to the mere personality of Jesus. Those who ascend to anthroposophical spiritual research find everywhere the necessity first to penetrate through understanding what presents itself to them in the realm of nature and in the realm of ordinary history. Only in the face of the historical Mystery of Golgotha do they not find this. To this, the higher concepts are directly applicable without prejudice. One can grasp what took place in the sensory world, just as it took place, directly through supersensible research. And then one arrives at the following. Then one sees that the development of the “I,” of which I have spoken to you, was in fact not always present within human evolution. Then one finds it justified, for example, that the further back we go in the development of language, the more the “I” designation is increasingly contained within verbs, and that the “I” designation as a separate term only appears later. But that is merely an external aspect. Anyone who researches historical psychology by permeating it with supersensible insights will find that the “I” experience was in fact not present until around the 8th or 7th century B.C., that it then slowly emerges, and that historical development in human history is in fact tending toward what must be described as the dawning of the “I.”

[ 30 ] I believe that it was precisely within Greek life that people fully sensed the dawning of this “I”—not only because they were aware that this “I” originated in nature and was therefore subject to nature, thus destroying humanity if it developed on its own. That is why people in Greece truly felt that it was better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. That was a thoroughly sincere feeling. But they also felt it in another way. Anyone who truly studies the great Greek dramatists—not with the superficiality with which this is so often done today—knows that they also wanted to be physicians, that they wanted to structure their dramas in such a way that human beings could be healed through catharsis. The Greeks sensed something of the healing power of art.

[ 31 ] And when we turn our attention to the Roman world in this era of historical development, we sense how the inner life of the human soul becomes rigidified into abstract concepts in religious life, political life, and public life in general. We find in humanity the great danger of falling ill with the development of the “I.” And we sense what it actually meant—I am not playing with words to draw an analogy, even if it may appear that way; it is, after all, the result of anthroposophical research—that in the East the “Therapists” emerged, a certain order that set itself the task of truly restoring health to a humanity that was falling ill.

[ 32 ] What we see unfolding in the course of historical development, however, is that humanity did not wither away or become ill, as one might have expected if one were to look impartially only at the continuation of what existed as an impulse within humanity prior to the 7th, 8th, and so on, centuries B.C. It does not wither away, it does not become sick; rather, it absorbs an element that has a healing effect from within. A historical healing process is taking place.

[ 33 ] Anyone who does not sense that the Old Testament—and indeed the other ancient religions as well—clearly point to the fact that the process of human development is a process of becoming ill through sin; anyone who does not see this process of becoming ill through sin—such a person also fails to sense the radiance of something that comes from outside the Earth, from beyond the telluric realm, and which gives the Earth a new impetus, just as the soil receives a new impetus through the seeds of fruit. One comes to understand how, from that point onward, a fertilizing seed from super-earthly worlds is poured in as a healing seed, for earthly humanity was truly falling ill. And one learns to see how that which is cosmic—that which is not merely terrestrial—intervenes in the Earth’s evolution. And equipped with this insight—the insight of a being who intervenes in historical development as the great invisible healer—one traces the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. There it emerges, and even without being influenced by the Gospels, one finds it if one seeks it with the right star—not with prejudices, but with something that is the shining of an inner light.

[ 34 ] There are truly two paths: First, by bringing together all of science—including that which recognizes not merely abstract truth and falsehood, but also what is healthy and diseased in the course of historical development—and approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, just as the three wise men or magi of the East approached it using the ancient science of astronomy. But one also approaches it from the simple human heart, from human feeling.

[ 35 ] When one has encountered the ever-present Christ—whom one finds equipped with that organ in which the ever-present Christ says, in the manner of Paul: “It is not I, but Christ in me who heals me and restores me from death to life”—then one finds in the history of humanity the man Jesus, in whom Christ truly lived. Thus the supermundane Christ-being—the Healer, the great Therapist—converges with the simple man from Nazareth, who indeed needed to be nothing other than simple, who could speak in his outward words to the poorest of the poor, who could also speak in his words to the sinners—that is to say, to the sick—but who spoke to them words that were not merely imbued with what had been at work in humanity up to that point—for then they would have remained as sick as the words had gradually become in Roman times, because they were permeated by mere abstractness—but who spoke to them words of eternal life, words that need not speak to the intellect, but can speak to the heart, to that which is irrational.

[ 36 ] We thus come to know the personality of Jesus of Nazareth; we come to recognize all the wonderful aspects described to us in the Gospel of Luke. But we are also led to all that the Gospel of John describes, based on inner experience, about the Healer, the Therapist—who is also the living Logos, the healing Logos. One learns to connect the Synoptic Gospels with the Gospel of John at the very moment when one no longer approaches historical research with rationalistic concepts of formal correctness or incorrectness, but rather approaches historical development with the higher concepts of health and illness. Then the “man Jesus” loses nothing. For since he is the one who was first chosen by the extraterrestrial to take within himself that which is the Christ-healing impulse, he has no need of all the wisdom of antiquity, which, after all, has developed only into the process of illness, so that humanity could no longer recognize the Divine through wisdom, but would henceforth have been able to recognize the external-natural realm through wisdom only in a pathological way. One learns to recognize the one who, entirely through fertilization from above, became the being who walked upon the soil of Palestine. One learns to look upon the personality of Jesus as the outer shell for the extraterrestrial Christ Being. One learns to recognize that the Earth would have lost its meaning, that it would have perished in sickness, had the great healing through the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place.

[ 37 ] Nothing of the irrational or the paradoxical is taken away from Christianity; rather, human beings are simply led back in the right way to that which reason cannot grasp, but only the living knowledge that anthroposophical research seeks to bring within human reach. On the contrary, one sees that research into the life of Jesus has gradually become rationalistic, that the “simple man from Nazareth” has already become, for many, the sole reason why they cannot find Christ again. Yet one cannot find Christ through mere logic, even if it is historical logic. One can find the Christ only if one is able to trace the historical process using the higher concepts of health and illness in this context. Then one truly comes to see that the illness that would gradually have come over humanity through the awakening of the “I” would have led to the death of the spirit. For through the expansion of the “I”—which arises precisely from the body—humanity would have become more and more a part of nature. Nature would have poured itself out over the human soul. Humanity would gradually have succumbed to what is then its earthly death and, ultimately, the heat death of the Earth. If one understands the impact of the Mystery of Golgotha as an event that gives the Earth a new meaning, then one finds precisely in the historical development through the human being Jesus, through his death on the cross, and through the Resurrection, that which has recently been given to the Earth from the heavens. One comes to recognize what it means when the words resound: “This is my beloved Son; today he is born to me.” — One comes to realize that a truly new era is dawning for the Earth. One comes to realize how human beings must gradually, step by step, educate themselves to understand what has actually been brought into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. And one asks oneself: How does this Mystery of Golgotha continue to work?

[ 38 ] Well, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was unfolding on Earth, there was still something left of what had once existed on Earth in ancient times: a certain instinctive insight. This was present in human beings even before the development of the “I” had taken hold. The people of old did not have a clearly defined “I,” but they did possess an instinctive insight. This had come to them through an instinctive, divine inspiration. In ancient times, this was the healing force; it was the primal therapeutic revelation. This primal revelation gradually faded away more and more. Human beings spread their ego over their entire being. It was precisely through this that human beings became increasingly ill. But the last remnants of the old clairvoyant, instinctive perception of the spiritual worlds were still present. Such remnants of ancient visions were present among the Apostles, among the Gnostics, and among some others, even if they were not perfect enough. Thus it came to pass that, through the last vestiges of genuine ancient clairvoyance, Christ was still recognized; people still knew that in Jesus an extraterrestrial being had appeared who had not previously been on Earth.

[ 39 ] Paul experienced this most intensely. As Saul, he had been initiated, in a certain sense, into all the mysteries into which one could be initiated from the fading light of ancient wisdom. It was from this fading light of ancient wisdom that he fought against Christ Jesus. At the moment when a vision arose from within him, at the moment when Christ dawned upon him as the Eternally Present One, he also turned toward the cross on Golgotha. The inner experience of Christ brought him to the outer experience of Christ. And so he was able to call himself an apostle alongside the others—indeed, the last of the apostles. Just as the apostles and disciples, through their heritage from ancient clairvoyant times, were still able to rise to the experience of Christ and understand the Resurrection, so too could Paul understand them. But with the expansion of the “I,” such understanding has steadily declined. I would like to say: Theosophy has increasingly become theology. Through logic, the human being steps out of natural existence but enters into the development of the “I,” which ultimately leads to the pathological condition of which we have spoken.

[ 40 ] This development must, in turn, return—if it is not to lose sight of the understanding of Christ—to the possibility of recognizing Christ as a supersensory, superterrestrial being, so that it may correctly assess the personality of Jesus. We therefore also understand everything that took place after the time of the Apostles and the Apostolic Fathers. We understand that struggle—that living struggle through the centuries, amid the fading old understanding and the gradual emergence of ego-consciousness—to be able to look upon the historical Christ.

[ 41 ] Anthroposophy does not seek to found a new religion or to be sectarian, but when it simply follows its own path and rises to supersensible knowledge, it encounters, among the facts of the earth—and indeed as that which gives the earth its very meaning—the Mystery of Golgotha. And through intuition, it teaches us to recognize once again that which must inevitably be lost to mere reason. It can, in turn, add—through a path of knowledge that is not, however, a rationalistic one—the inner divine essence of Christ to the outer historical personality of Jesus. And one comes to the point where the concept of Christ Jesus once again becomes one of full substance—but one that humanity must win for itself through freedom.

[ 42 ] One might say that this can occur in the manner of the humble shepherds, who first intuitively sense the eternal Christ within themselves and then seek Him outwardly in the infant Jesus. But one cannot, as many believe, come to Christ Jesus solely through this path of the poor shepherds, for then science would arise as a Moloch that would devour this naive faith. One can also, by truly cultivating science, find once again the star that leads the way to Bethlehem. Just as the simplest human mind can find Christ in its innermost experience—if only it rises not merely to reason but to the feeling of inner frailty—so too can the experience of Christ, the encounter with Christ, take shape in a completely naive way out of this awareness of frailty, which is essentially the real feeling of a sense of sin. But science cannot lead away from this experience; for if this science, as it must in all other fields, rises to supersensible perception, then the highest science, just like the simplest human mind, finds Christ in Jesus.

[ 43 ] And this is what anthroposophy seeks to accomplish in a modest way. It does not seek to take away the mystery that the simple human soul seeks with reverent trust, for although the path that anthroposophy follows ascends into higher realms of knowledge, it does not lead to rationalism. It must, as I have indicated, steer clear of the pitfalls of the irrational and the paradoxical. It must even add the life-affirming concepts of “healthy” and “sick” to the abstract notions of “right” and “wrong.” It must supplement mere physical therapy with the great therapy of history.

[ 44 ] Then this anthroposophical research, when it rises to the level of understanding to which it aspires, will lead to the very thing that, at first, can be grasped as the true mystery in quiet, trusting reverence—precisely as that which must remain unknown. For why do we speak of this unknown? Well, when one knows a person not merely from descriptions, when one does not merely believe in his existence, but when one is led before his very face, one comes to behold him. But this beholding does not therefore become rationalistic. The irrationality of the person before whom we are led does not cease. This person remains a mystery to us, for he possesses within himself an intensely infinite quality. We could never exhaust him through reason alone. Nor does anthroposophical knowledge exhaust Christ, even though it strives toward him with all its longing and seeks, with all its means of knowledge, to behold this Christ—not merely to believe in him. He never ceases to stand as a being who, even when beheld, is not absorbed by reason. And just as nothing need be taken away from the earthly veneration we bestow upon every individual human being—who remains a mystery even when we are led before his face—so too does the mystery of Golgotha remain a mystery; it is not dragged down by anthroposophy into dryness, sobriety, and the logical rigidity of the rational. The irrational, the paradoxical aspect of Christianity is not to be extinguished by the Christ Jesus of anthroposophy; rather, the irrational and the paradoxical are to be beheld. And toward what is beheld, one can feel just as childlike, just as deep—perhaps even greater, more childlike—reverence as toward that which one is merely supposed to believe in. That is why anthroposophy is not the death of faith, but rather the life-giver of faith. And this is particularly evident in the unravelling that anthroposophy seeks to bring to the mystery of Golgotha—the connection between Christ and the personality of Jesus.

[ 45 ] All of this, of course, is the subject of extensive research that has been ongoing for years, yet is still only in its infancy today. And I must ask for your forgiveness for having presented only a few guiding principles in this lecture, which has already become far too long. But may these guidelines at least suggest that anthroposophy does not seek to reduce the Mystery of Golgotha to the rationalism of ordinary knowledge or to turn it into a profane, unveiled secret, but rather that it seeks to lead us to it with all reverence, with all religious devotion, indeed, with a deepened religious devotion—one that is deepened precisely because we feel the true awe only when we stand in direct contemplation before the cross of Golgotha.

[ 46 ] Thus, anthroposophy does not seek to contribute to any kind of destruction, but rather to a revitalization, to a re-spiritualization of Christianity, which indeed seems to be suffering grievously from rationalism—a rationalism that is entirely justified in the context of the external natural sciences.