The Rudolf Steiner Archive

94. From Moses to Christ

[ 1 ] “From Moses to Christ” was the subject of a lecture given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the well-known leader of the new Theosophical Movement, on Saturday evening at the local branch of the Theosophical Society. Those among the—incidentally, quite numerous—audience members who were not yet initiated into this “unscientific science,” which distinguishes itself from the other branches of the occult by the name “theosophy,” were certainly offered quite stimulating and surprising perspectives and, above all, a glimpse into the realm of the ancient humanity’s mode of consciousness—which, as theosophy teaches, has now receded into our subconscious. According to Steiner, this is the spiritual science par excellence, standing in contrast to the facts and events of the physical world (our natural sciences) as well as to what our intellect—bound to the instrument of the brain—is capable of doing (our human sciences). Only beyond this intellect lies what can be called the living spirit. In this spirit, for example, the conception of history is not an assumption of dead “guiding ideas and concepts” that can be abstracted from the facts of historical development, but rather a living spirit that acts meaningfully, just as human beings themselves do. Having provided such an introduction to Moses, the speaker established the fundamental principle: spiritual science (theosophy) is based on the premise that the constitution of the human soul has changed significantly over the course of millennia, and that there is a development of human consciousness. For us today, there is only the dream between waking and sleeping. In earlier times, these ambiguous dream images unambiguously referred to a supersensible world. At the expense of this clairvoyant consciousness of antiquity, our present-day object-oriented consciousness has developed—a consciousness that will once again be supplanted by a clairvoyant consciousness. It was this consciousness—not our present-day concrete consciousness—that created the ancient, primarily mythological records, and they can be interpreted only through such a consciousness, not through today’s philological and historical scholarship. Specifically, the ancient narrators—such as those of the Bible—relate the external facts and weave the inner processes of the soul into these historical narratives in the form of external events. This is one prerequisite of the theosophical view of history. The other is that the various nations, according to their characteristics, have their own special task: to make their own particular contribution to the overall human culture. Their leaders, however, are the expressions of these missions. – Moses, together with his people, replaced the old culture with its old consciousness—the clairvoyant, instinctive one. We still live today within the new consciousness he brought with him—the concrete consciousness bound to the instrument of the intellect.—This is a summary of the lecture’s main points. Neither the venue nor the subject matter permits a more detailed discussion here, although many of the ideas contained therein would be worth repeating due to their beauty and grandeur.