The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] It will now be our task to understand the spiritual horizon within which modern humanity exists by exploring its origins. We have seen, after all, how human beings have, so to speak, become more and more like their present form as they evolved through the Lemurian and Atlantean eras; and today we wish to continue our examination from this last era, the Atlantean, into our own time, to the extent that it is necessary for our understanding of this topic.

[ 2 ] We know that before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, human consciousness was quite different. During the day, while a person was in their physical body—if we may put it that way—they did not see objects with the sharp contours we see today, but rather everything was more or less blurred. On the other hand, when human beings left their physical bodies at night, a dreamless sleep did not envelop them; rather, they were able to perceive spiritual beings from a spiritual world. We will not dwell further on the fact that those spiritual beings, who also sought incarnation in Atlantean bodies, entered into a certain partnership with human beings; we wish only to focus on the fact that, in those days, based on direct experience, human beings were convinced that other realms were arranged in ascending order above the human realm to which they themselves belonged: the realm of the angels, the archangels; and human beings came to know these higher beings—if we may use the expression—face to face in a spiritual sense, just as people now come to know one another in the physical world. Then came the time when awareness of objects became increasingly clear during the day, from waking until falling asleep, while, in contrast, a growing dullness and darkness spread during the night. But this was the very moment when the first seed of the “I” or “I am” was planted within human beings. As human beings learned to perceive the objects around them, they simultaneously acquired the form and shape of their self-consciousness, which they were now to develop more and more.

[ 3 ] Now we must imagine everything in the world in stages; we must conceive that just as there are all manner of levels of beings in the animal and human kingdoms, so too there are the most diverse levels in the hierarchy of beings beyond humanity. There are beings in the realm of the angels who are very close to human beings; but there are also those who are on a higher, more exalted level—we would encounter every conceivable degree if we were to turn our gaze toward these higher worlds. Above all, we must be clear that these higher beings, back when human beings still ascended into the higher worlds during the night through a dim, clairvoyant consciousness, in a certain sense—to put it quite simply—also possessed something of this human gift; that through their interaction with human beings, they experienced an enrichment of their own inner being. For these beings were still intimately connected with human beings at that time; they inspired him; they influenced his imaginative consciousness, which, of course, was only a dim one. So we must picture human beings in those ancient times in such a way that, when they stepped out of their physical and etheric bodies, it was as if such a higher being—and, in a broader sense, a host of higher beings—were to receive them. Essentially, this is still the case today, only human beings are unaware of it, whereas back then they knew it—albeit only through a dim form of clairvoyance. We have already mentioned in other lectures that even today, sleep is by no means something unnecessary for human beings; it has a tremendous purpose. Throughout the day, human beings continuously wear down their physical and etheric bodies. The life we lead from morning to evening is a process of wearing down these two bodies, and what you feel as fatigue in the evening is nothing other than the expression of the fact that, within your physical and etheric bodies—via the astral body—perceptions of the external world have taken place; that feelings, impulses, suffering, and pain—that all manner of things have played out within you. And what unfolds in this way wears down our physical and etheric bodies throughout the day, and we are tired in the evening because we have been working all day to destroy our physical and etheric bodies. Now, when you lie in bed at night with your physical body and your etheric body, the astral body—together with the “I”—is not idle; rather, it sends its power into the physical and etheric bodies throughout the night; it works to restore the powers that have been depleted and exhausted. But it could not do this if, upon withdrawing from the physical and etheric bodies, it were not received into another realm. Above the human realm, in fact, there extends a spiritual realm—the realm of angels, archangels, and other beings. It is like an ocean of spiritual beings that surrounds us, from which we are separated during the day because we are enclosed within the skin of our body, within our perceptions. At night, however, we plunge into this ocean of spirits, and the astral body draws from it the forces that it then pours into the physical and etheric bodies to restore them. People today know nothing of this. But back then, when human beings still possessed a dim, clairvoyant consciousness, they could see how the “I” and the astral body stepped out and were received by the divine-spiritual world.

[ 4 ] The fact is that things which appear in a certain way in our physical world look quite different up there. One might say that even the gods benefit from that participation in humanity. We must develop a concept here that is not entirely easy to grasp, but which is necessary if we are to understand humanity’s relationship to the world. We have said that the Earth is the planet of love; and love is only truly developed on Earth. To put it crudely, it is cultivated; and through their participation in human beings, the gods come to know love just as they bestow it in another sense. This is difficult to imagine. It is entirely possible for one being to formally bestow a gift upon another being and to come to know that gift only through the other being. Imagine an immensely wealthy person who has never known anything but wealth, without that deep spiritual satisfaction that doing good can bring. And now this person does a good deed; they give something to a poor person. In the soul of this poor person, the gifts evoke gratitude, and this feeling of gratitude is also a gift: it would not exist if the wealthy person had not given. The wealthy person, however, did not feel the gratitude; rather, they brought it forth. They are the giver of the feeling of gratitude, but the wealthy person can only come to know this feeling of gratitude through reflection, when it radiates back from those in whom they have kindled it. This is roughly how it is with the gift of love, which is poured out upon humanity by the gods. The gods are capable of kindling love within human beings, so that people are able to learn to experience love; yet the gods themselves only come to know love as a reality through human beings. They descend from the heights into the ocean of humanity and feel the warmth of love. Yes, we know that the gods lack something when people do not live in love—that, so to speak, the gods find their sustenance in the love of human beings. The more love there is among people on earth, the more sustenance the gods have in heaven—the less love there is, the greater the gods’ hunger. The sacrifice of humans is, in essence, nothing other than the love generated within them that flows upward to the gods.

[ 5 ] Now we can imagine that this mutual communication between humans and the gods in ancient times—when humans themselves still had an awareness of the divine—was something quite different from what it was later on. Indeed, there were certain entities among the divine-spiritual beings who, because human beings could no longer, so to speak, look up with their dull clairvoyant consciousness, were also no longer able to look down—they could no longer reach the sphere of humanity. During the Atlantean era, human beings lived alongside a number of divine-spiritual beings, and the more they became unable to look up to the gods, the less a certain category of divine beings could experience what they had otherwise been able to experience through human beings, Among the Atlantean gods, there were certainly some who, as Atlantis sank, suffered increasing deprivation—who, so to speak, suffered more and more from hunger because they could no longer find their way to humankind.

[ 6 ] From this perspective, we must imagine how things developed further. We know that near what is now Ireland there was a kingdom, a region where the most advanced beings of the Atlantean era lived—those human beings who were most ready to undergo progressive development. These people then migrated from the west to the east, populating Europe, and there certain individuals remained at a specific stage of development, while others moved on. The most advanced migrated to the region of present-day Central Asia, while others went to Africa. There, however, were already populations from the ancient times of Atlantis and Lemuria; the others intermingled with these in manifold ways, and this gave rise to those hybrid forms that the Greeks depicted in various art forms as the satyr, Mercury, and Zeus types. Such was the migration from west to east, and we must imagine that with it, the state of human consciousness also changed more and more. The people who had migrated still possessed, to a greater or lesser extent, remnants of the old clairvoyant consciousness, but this gradually diminished. There were those who had already lost every trace of clairvoyant consciousness at the onset of the Atlantean catastrophe, but there were also those who had retained a remnant of it, even among those who had migrated to Asia, Europe, and Africa. Everywhere there were those who, in certain states—for example, between sleeping and waking—could gain a clear insight into the spiritual worlds. For instance, the spiritual being known as Wotan was a “personality” well known to the ancient Atlanteans; one might say that all Atlanteans were connected to him to a greater or lesser extent, much as people today are connected to a monarch. But this conscious connection was gradually lost. Now, among the European population—among the pre-Germanic peoples—there were numerous individuals who, in an intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep, could enter into a relationship or connection with this Wotan, who truly existed in the spiritual world but, due to his evolution, was bound and could no longer make himself popular in the old way. Such people existed in Asia as well. This continued into late times, into an era to which even history cannot take us back, where a primal, natural clairvoyance had been preserved, and where people could speak of the gods based on their own experiences.

[ 7 ] But now we must once again bear in mind the fact that human beings were being drawn down more and more onto the physical plane, into the material world; as a result, the gods were increasingly unable to maintain connections with human beings. Gradually, some of them were able to commune only with select beings. There were certain divine figures who could no longer descend to ordinary human beings, who could only make contact with those personalities who, in a certain sense, met them halfway—who had developed themselves upward toward them. Now, in a remarkable way, a blend of spiritual disposition, remnants of clairvoyance, and the principle of initiation intermingled in such a way that the expression of this blend was preserved in the Germanic consciousness. During the Atlantean epoch, people knew: Just as I ascend into the realm of the gods in sleep—when I have left the physical and etheric bodies—so too do I ascend into the realm of the gods after death; they are familiar to me, and there I can meet them again. — And it came to be perceived as a kind of punishment when, after death, a person was temporarily deprived of the possibility of looking up to the gods and being admitted into their community—when he had to undergo a certain period of trial after “death” because he had become too entangled in material life. As for those people, however, who were able to regard material life as no more important than any other non-material aspect of existence—it was believed that they were not held back by the material world, but that they could enter the realm of the spirit immediately after death, a realm that was, after all, well known to them. According to the beliefs of the peoples who spread across Europe, a person was considered—above all else—not to be attached to material life if they fought bravely on the battlefield, met their end as a warrior, and valued the honors of war higher than material things. And it was believed that such a person would see a deity immediately after death. But those who could not die as warriors on the battlefield—those who had not learned to value spiritual goods more highly than material life—were said to die a “straw death”; they were not considered ready to be immediately admitted into the realm of the spirit, but had to first enter a realm where they would have to undergo certain trials. And the encounter with the Valkyrie is the expression of this mindset in connection with the memory of ancient clairvoyance. It was rightly imagined that the one who met death on the battlefield was received by the Valkyrie; and it is entirely in keeping with this mode of thought that what had developed in this way in Europe took shape in those ancient times as the symbolism of initiation. Other peoples had developed different conceptions; within the European region, however, personal bravery and prowess were regarded as the most valuable qualities.

[ 8 ] It has always been rightly understood that initiation means a person can experience during their lifetime what they would normally only experience after death: direct communion with the spiritual world. Just as the warrior first encountered the Valkyrie on the battlefield, so it was clear that the one seeking initiation had to experience this encounter already in physical life. And within a part of Europe, Siegfried—who has been preserved in the figure of Siegfried—was regarded as the last of the heroes of initiation. Hence the legend tells that he unites with the Valkyrie during his lifetime, just as the warrior does on the battlefield. Thus we see how, on a small scale for the individual human being, everything harmonizes that applies on a larger scale to the principle of initiation.

[ 9 ] Now let us try to put ourselves in the mindset of this population that migrated from west to east, toward Europe. In a certain sense, they had indeed reached the level where they could embark on further development. They were not stagnant; rather, they possessed the seed for full further development. But it was precisely this group that retained a relatively strong gift of clairvoyance. Among almost all the peoples who had migrated from the Atlantic continent, it was the European population that was endowed with the strongest clairvoyant disposition; the African population was less strongly endowed. In Asia, the most advanced population—which had migrated there early on—had come into contact with an even older one, and they had found these peoples in possession of an even older clairvoyant consciousness, so that there was also a great deal of clairvoyance there at that time. But then there was a certain small colony consisting precisely of the most advanced people of the Atlantean era, located near the Gobi Desert. What kind of people were they? What does “most advanced” even mean? It meant: having the least ability to perceive the spiritual world. For their progress consisted precisely in having emerged from the spiritual and moved into the physical world. These were people who had to feel: “We once had a connection with the spiritual world, but now we no longer have it.” It was melancholy over the loss of the spiritual world that lived in the hearts of these people—a longing for that world, which was the more valuable one and from which they had been forced out.

[ 10 ] Conditions were different among the European population; there were many who, under certain circumstances, could still glimpse into the spiritual worlds. And in those days, when the mysteries were still practiced in Europe, it was as follows: When the initiates—who, through their occult development, could ascend in full consciousness—spoke of the existence of spiritual worlds, when they told of this or that being or of this or that role that a human being must play after death, and when they proclaimed this through myths and sagas, legends, and powerful imagery, they found people who understood them, for some of them had even seen it for themselves. The unique living and residential conditions of ancient Europe made it entirely possible for even the uninitiated—if not the high gods, then at least the spiritual worlds—to experience these realms, and through this they came to believe in them. To them, these worlds were truly more than half familiar; they therefore also felt their humanity in a very different sense than other peoples of the Earth.

[ 11 ] Let us put ourselves in the mindset of these ancient Europeans. They all said to themselves: I can see that I am connected to the gods; I reach up into the realm of the gods. — And as a result, a strong sense of individuality developed precisely on European soil—an awareness of the inherent divine value of the human personality and, above all, a strong sense of freedom. We must imagine this state of mind, for it was this sense of individuality that was also brought by those European masses who later migrated south and populated the Greek and Italian peninsulas. In particular, we see the stragglers of this sense of freedom in the ancient Etruscans. Even in their distinctive art, we see this strong sense of freedom flowing from the Etruscans, who had preserved this feeling on a spiritual foundation. Before the actual Roman Empire had established itself on the Italian Peninsula, the Etruscan population was already there, and their constitution possessed a high degree of freedom; on the one hand, it was certainly structured somewhat hierarchically, but on the other hand, it was also liberal in the highest sense. Each city took great care to preserve its freedom, and the ancient Etruscans would have regarded any form of state union in the later sense as something intolerable. And everything that flowed down toward the southern peninsula in terms of freedom and a sense of individuality stemmed from the causes we have just described. As for those other peoples, however, who had migrated far away to Asia, they comprised a small group from whom the divine-spiritual worlds had withdrawn the most. But they had gained one thing in return; they had rescued one thing from this world that had descended into the deepest twilight: the “I,” the “I am” — this: that they felt there was, in the “I am,” an eternal center of their being that originated in the spiritual world itself; that all the forms they had seen earlier constituted, so to speak, a sacred memory; and that their strength rested upon this firm center that had remained with them. They did not yet perceive it in its full form—that would require a later time—but a certain disposition began to take shape precisely among those who had advanced the farthest, who had descended the deepest, a disposition that might be described something like this: What we must cultivate above all else is an awareness of our divinity in what we find in the deepest recesses of our soul. Even if this soul has forgotten what it once beheld in divine forms, we can still find the path back to the divine by looking into its innermost being, into the sense of self. — In short, the concept of the formless God emerged—one who does not appear in external forms, whom one must seek in one’s innermost being; a concept that is ancient in this tradition and which, as humanity has evolved, has taken on the form of the commandment: “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything.”

[ 12 ] In ancient times, people had experienced God Himself as an image. Now that image had withdrawn into obscurity, and people sought to muster all their strength to bring God out of the “I”—where He is formless—into imagination and thought, to grasp and feel an idea, a power of God. But this was not immediately possible; in the early days of the post-Atlantean cultures, the memory of what had been lost was still too strong, too great; the soul felt: the gate has closed, and the longing to ascend once more into this spiritual world was too overwhelming. Thus, the first cultural epoch took shape—one that felt, above all, this sentiment, this longing for the lost, hidden spiritual world; one that looked up to the initiates in divine reverence and implored: “Let us share in this lost world.” — And under the influence of these initiates, the ancient Indian culture was founded through a colonial movement—the pre-Vedic, wondrous culture that inspired awe, which found its ultimate expression in the Vedas; the culture in which the longing for the spiritual world was so great that people strove to reestablish, by artificial means, a connection with the ancient gods and spirits. The longing to flee from this world into which one had entered arose as a powerful feeling during this first post-Atlantean cultural epoch. And we see this feeling at the very depths of the souls who were still permitted to receive the instruction of the initiates, the holy Rishis. We see how this feeling develops within them: The world we see around us, the world we have now attained, the world of the physical plane, is merely an illusion; it is worthless; it is Maya; but what is valuable is the world that lies beyond this deceptive physical plane. — And so the feeling of the worthlessness of the physical plane develops, along with the necessity to flee it and attain the spiritual; what develops is what we know as the foundation of this ancient culture, which is connected to the fact that a person must lose their strong sense of personality when they find themselves, so to speak, completely cut off from the Divine and live in longing for that Divine. They strive to be wholly absorbed in the Divine, with the annihilation of their personality; he prefers the annihilation of the personality’s intrinsic value to life within that personality. We must understand this ancient culture primarily as a mood; then we will comprehend that flight from the material: how, when seeking the divine, human beings had to be free from the bonds of the sensual, how they had to be free from all illusion, all māyā.

[ 13 ] This was the first post-Atlantean cultural epoch. The mission of post-Atlantean culture, however, is for human beings to increasingly make the world into which they are placed their own, to increasingly conquer it. Thus we see that in Persian, pre-Zoroastrian culture, the first phase of this conquest of the outer physical world takes place. The ancient Persians—and here we mean the prehistoric Persians, who were founded by a colony of the last Atlanteans who had migrated there—already possessed a different consciousness; they already perceived the physical plane as something real. The physical plane no longer appeared to the ancient Persians as something foreign; they said to themselves: Within this physical plane there are also possibilities for planting and nurturing the spirit. — They were already paying attention to the physical world; they were not yet studying it, but they were paying attention to it. The ancient Persian still perceives something hostile in it, but in such a way that he can overcome the enemy. He makes himself a friend, a companion of the god Ormuzd, in order to redeem matter. He works into the physical realm; little by little, he begins to sense that this world is not merely Maya, not merely an insubstantial illusion, but a reality to be taken seriously.

[ 14 ] And then we see another wave moving on to the Near East and Africa, where it establishes the Chaldean and Egyptian cultures. There, humanity has already advanced a step further in the conquest of the physical plane. By then, people have reached a point where they no longer perceive the external, the sensory, as merely hostile or even as insubstantial. People are already turning their gaze upward toward the stars and saying to themselves: “These stars are not Maya; they are not merely an illusion!”—And they immerse themselves in the movements of the stars, studying how one star approaches another and the changes the constellations undergo. And he says to himself: This is an outward expression of the ruling gods, a script written by the gods. The external, the sensory, is not merely an illusion; it is a revelation of the gods. — Another step has been taken: the sensory-material is regarded as an expression of the divine; one begins to seek wisdom in the sensory. And in the Egyptian world, one turns one’s gaze down from the heavens to the earth; one studies geometry to master the earth; one unites what the spirit can attain with the sensory material—a significant step forward in development. Thus it continues step by step.

[ 15 ] And now, within the third cultural epoch, a small, isolated group is once again forming, one that, in a certain sense, incorporates everything that has been gained from both ancient traditions and new achievements; a small group whose initiates had preserved the ancient wisdom and their former communion with the gods; whose initiates knew how to convey what could be known as experience from the spiritual world, and who at the same time had absorbed Chaldean wisdom—the writing of God in the cosmos—and Egyptian wisdom, which is realized in the symbolic union of the spiritual with the physical. And it is this group of people who, in this sense, are to be called the chosen people. It is the people who were tasked with preparing the greatest period of world history, the Old Testament people, who in their Old Testament—with regard to all ancient events as well as to what lives on—indeed possessed the greatest and most significant document. And it is not merely a scholarly aberration, but a farce, when any creation story is regarded as even remotely equal in value to the Old Testament account. For the Old Testament contains, in powerful imagery, the descent of humankind from divine heights and, at the same time, links humanity’s historical experiences to these cosmic events. The Old Testament narrative contains all of this precisely, and above all, that which fully corresponds to the context of the universe.

[ 16 ] We have seen how the human germ of the “I Am” prepared itself, step by step, during the Earth’s evolution. We have seen that this germ could never have developed if the Sun had not separated from the Earth; that the Moon, too, had to separate from the Earth; and that only then could this germ gradually continue to develop as the horizon toward the divine-spiritual world had closed off. Let us clarify how this seed formed. What does the human being gradually learn in the course of earthly evolution? We look back to ancient times when he was not yet able to perceive the physical world, when he lived solely in the spiritual world; then came the time when physical things appeared only vaguely to him, yet he could still perceive the spiritual realms. Who, then, prepared these human beings in such a way that, in later times, when they were able to see the full sun, they were also ripe for it? It was that God who, so to speak, nurtured humanity to full maturity—the one we have called Jehovah, who separated himself from the Elohim in order to prepare, from the moon, for the highest moment of earthly existence. While human beings were not yet able to perceive the outer world, the God Jehovah instilled self-awareness within them. It was He who slipped into the ancient initiations that took place amid a dim consciousness; who appeared to people in dreams; who slowly prepared them for the maturity of the self, which they could attain only through the descent of the Christ. Christ did not come all at once; he did not descend all at once—that was merely his final, personal appearance—but he had already been at work in those ancient times through the prophets. After all, Christ himself points out in the Gospel of John that those who did not believe in Moses and the prophets would not believe in him either; for he says that Moses and the prophets spoke of him—not yet of the one who stood on earth, but of the one who had been foretold. In this sense, Christ has a certain history within the development of the Earth. If we go back to the ancient mysteries, we can find this history of Christ and his descent everywhere.

[ 17 ] Let us study the European mysteries. There is a certain tragic element present throughout. If you immerse yourself in these ancient mysteries, you will see that everywhere the teachers tell their students: You can rise to the highest divine; you can be initiated in the highest sense; but there is something you cannot yet fully comprehend, something you must wait for, something we can only point toward: that is the coming Christ. — Throughout the Nordic mysteries, Christ was spoken of as One who is to come; they knew of him everywhere, just not as one who had already been on Earth. The initiates knew him over in Asia, in Egypt—everywhere they knew that Christ was on his way, that he would one day be there. And everywhere they knew that the ancient mysteries could not lead up to the highest level. This has been preserved symbolically. We must not force these things; they are not to be taken in sharp contours, but rather quite subtly—partly as truth and partly only in a comparative sense. Something of that tragic aspect has remained in relation to the ancient gods and the waiting for the Christ, for the radiance of the gods will fade before the radiance of the Christ. We find it even in the latest legends of the Germanic gods. The legend attributes something remarkable to Siegfried: He was invulnerable; he possessed the strength of the initiate in the sense of the European mysteries. But one spot had remained vulnerable; it was there that he, too, was wounded, and that is what brought about his “death.” Which spot was that? The very spot where, later, the cross would lie for the One who was expected. The spot where Siegfried was still vulnerable was covered by the cross during the journey to Golgotha. This is the last remnant of that tragic thread that ran through the ancient European mysteries. But often, even in those mysteries from which the Old Testament emerged—and into which Moses was initiated, and which Moses then transplanted among his people as far as he deemed possible—often, even there, reference was made to this peculiar course of human development. And it is more than a mere image; it is something that lends the image a profound reality, which we can sketch out something like this:

[ 18 ] Let us suppose we have the human being before us in his fourfold constitution, and that his ego, his astral, etheric, and physical bodies are bathed in the light of the sun. Because Christ came to Earth, the human being has become capable of absorbing the physical and spiritual forces of the sun. Before, it was different. During sleep, when the astral body and the “I” were outside the physical and etheric bodies, the light that fell upon the human being during the night was, so to speak, not the direct sunlight but the sunlight reflected by the moon; the human being absorbed this reflected light, not the direct sunlight. As an external symbolic reality, this is exactly as it was with Christ, who lived as a spiritual ray of the sun, and with Jehovah, who reflected the reflected light of Christ back until humanity had matured enough to receive the direct light of the Sun-Christ. As if from a mirror, Jehovah sent Christ down to humanity. So how did people speak of the Christ before his appearance? They spoke of him by speaking of Jehovah, and that is why Jehovah says to Moses: “Tell your people: I am the I-Am.” - This is the very same name that would later be attributed to Christ. He does not yet wish to turn His own face toward humanity; rather, He prepares the Christ, giving humanity the image of Christ before Christ Himself descends to them. And because human beings are to grasp this Christ in their innermost being through their “I Am”—because they are to grasp in him the entire descent into this physical world—that is why this group of people, who were to prepare the way for Christ most authentically, held most firmly to the idea of the formless God. They had to forge for themselves a new conception of God, not merely recall the old form. And so this people, in its Jehovah religion, does indeed become the people preparing the way for Christ. But now one must be clear that everything in the world that is to be strived for with particular intensity must, so to speak, also arise from strong impulses. Therefore, the powers of the formless God also had to be, so to speak, exaggerated within the Old Testament: a completely abstract, formless God, compressed into the center of a mere “I”-being, stands at the heart of Old Testament religion—an “I”-God, a formless God.

[ 19 ] Where, then, could this God first have taken on a form such that He could be understood by the people who were now living on the physical plane and were to come to know Him? Through a wise providential arrangement, something remarkable came into being in southern Europe. Migrations from Asia and Africa took place; they mingled with those who had come down from the north. Those who came from the East, bringing with them the strong conviction of the worthlessness of Maya and of the necessity that this material realm of humanity must be transformed into the realm of the spirit, mingled with those who had attained a strong sense of individuality. And the strongest spiritual forces—which had lagged behind the most on the journey from West to East—met in Asia Minor, on the Greek and Italian peninsulas; there the fourth stage took shape, and once again the conquest of the physical world took a step forward. To grasp and intuit God in the depths—that was the mission of the third cultural epoch, the Chaldean-Egyptian culture; from it had to emerge the ethnic group capable of seeking God in an abstract way, as a spiritual being, with the least possible sensory content. But in southern Europe, a different group took shape. As people with a strong Nordic sense of individuality migrated southward, the union of the human soul with matter took form—a union we admire in the Greek temple, in Greek works of art, and in Greek tragedy, where human beings begin to depict his own destiny, where he enshrines his own spirit within matter, incorporating it into external realities. One might say: a marriage between the spiritual and the physical is concluded, in which both have an equal share. In Greek art, in everything the Greeks create, the spiritual and the physical share an equal part. And in a certain sense, this is true of the Romans as well; they know: The spirit lives within me; within me, the spiritual can become personality.

[ 20 ] Only at this stage of human development can that which has been foretold take on its actual, external form on the physical plane. It was only then—once humanity had conquered the physical plane—that the Christ could descend onto it. A Christ would not have been possible in the ancient culture, when only the maya of the physical world was perceived, when only a longing for the past lived within people. Humanity turned more and more toward the physical plane during that time when this union took place—a union we see in Greek art and which found its expression in the strong Roman civic consciousness. And that was also the time when the Christ principle could appear in the flesh.

[ 21 ] Therefore, we must regard all those who were active before as having been well acquainted with Christ; we must regard them as prophets who could only point the way; who saw in Christ’s coming the fulfillment of what they themselves had been striving for.

[ 22 ] In the next few lectures, we will see how Christianity and other elements come together to shape our post-Christian era and our present day. Today, we should focus on the point in time when humanity, through its conquest of the physical plane, had become ready to understand the God-man, Christ.