The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. The Christ Impulse and Its Great Proclaimers

Notes from the lecture

[ 1 ] The last two lectures introduced us to the nature of the individual human being. Today we will gain a brief insight into certain epochs in the development of humanity as a whole and its spiritual life. Looking back from the vantage point of our present epoch of development, we can go back to the distant past and draw conclusions about the future from it. If we use our clairvoyant eye to assist us in this, the examination will become even easier, and our prophetic gaze into the times to come will be even more certain.

[ 2 ] Human abilities have constantly changed over the millennia, and earlier generations possessed very different gifts than our own. What was once clairvoyant consciousness is not the same as what can be attained today through Rosicrucian training. It was a more subdued form of clairvoyant consciousness, yet one inherent in all human beings. We ourselves, who are gathered here, were incarnated in those people, yet our abilities were different and will continue to change in future incarnations. In our epoch, those abilities were to be developed that enable the precise observation of the physical external world, such as the external intellect, which makes use of the brain and the physical sense organs. In the past, the soul was not limited to the latter as it is today; it possessed clairvoyant faculties that have gradually become dulled. The soul’s capacity for perception has been completely transferred from the inner world to the outer world, but it will be transformed and elevated once again in the future. Sensory-physical vision will be complemented by spiritual clairvoyance, which will become a normal gift of all human beings. We have descended into matter, and our vision has been darkened; yet the time is near when light will once again surround us, and we will look up through matter toward the spirit. For this to happen, it was necessary for ever-new influences to come from the spiritual worlds. Humanity received gift upon gift in order to develop its being in every respect and to mature, so as to receive the highest of these gifts from Christ when he descended to Earth and incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 3 ] Christ is such a mighty Being that He remains incomprehensible even to the highest clairvoyant consciousness. No matter how high the initiate may rise, he comprehends only a small part of Him. We, who live 2,000 years after Him, are only at the beginning of understanding Christ. A deeper understanding of His nature is reserved for the humanity of the future, when more intimate impulses of the will will be awakened within it. Our entire previous evolution was merely a preparation for receiving the Christ principle, and less exalted precursors had the task of guiding this maturing of human souls. Likewise, successors will instill ever higher ideas and feelings into human souls, making them increasingly capable of allowing the divine power to work within them. Those exalted guides and teachers who sacrifice their spiritual power in the service of humanity and open up our souls are called Bodhisattvas in the East. They are beings filled with wisdom, and their mission is to radiate wisdom. Among them, special mention should be made of the one who lived 500 to 600 years before Jesus: Gautama Buddha, the great Buddha.

[ 4 ] To form a true picture of him, we must think of his earlier incarnations, in which he was active on Earth as a Bodhisattva—just as many others have intervened in the life of humanity over the course of millennia, forming something like a choir whose members each have their own specific mission, depending on the state of humanity’s maturity.

[ 5 ] It was only during his incarnation as Siddhartha, the son of an Indian king, that he rose to the level of a Buddha. His mission was to lay the groundwork for the teachings of compassion and love. One might object that Christ did this—no. Christ did not merely teach them; he instilled love and compassion themselves into the hearts of humanity.

[ 6 ] The difference between Buddha’s teaching and Christ’s power is like that between an art connoisseur standing before a painting by Raphael and Raphael himself. This is precisely where the great error of many lies: they see in Buddha the highest of all spirits in human form. They do not realize that the one who incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth 600 years after him was the incarnation of the Logos himself. Buddha’s task was to prepare the ground for compassion and love. He prepared souls for what Christ was to bring. Viewed in the grand scheme of things, his preparatory work is the most significant that has ever been accomplished. To better understand his personality, we must clarify the difference between a Bodhisattva and a Buddha. If we use our clairvoyant eye, we see that a Bodhisattva is a human being who is constantly connected to the spiritual world and does not live entirely in the physical world. His being is, as it were, too great to fit within a human body; only a part of it reaches down into the earthly shell, while the greater part remains in the higher worlds. Consequently, the Bodhisattva is always in a state of inspiration.

[ 7 ] Gautama Buddha was born as such a being. It was not until his twenty-ninth year that his earthly personality became strong enough to incorporate the higher part within himself. According to legend, during his wanderings he sat down beneath a fig tree and attained enlightenment, which made him the Buddha. He ascended to a higher rank, in accordance with the hierarchy that prevails in the spiritual world. At the same time, another being ascended and took the place he had vacated. His successor in the rank of Bodhisattva now fulfills his office until he, too, attains Buddhahood. Another 3,000 years will pass before he incarnates among humankind as the Maitreya Buddha. His mission will be discussed later.

[ 8 ] What significance does it hold for humanity that the Bodhisattva became a Buddha? It enabled humanity to acquire new abilities. It is widely believed that these same abilities have always been present to a greater or lesser degree. However, this is by no means the case. New abilities have continually been added in the course of evolution, and every time humanity became ready to be endowed with a new gift, that new ability first had to be incarnated in a great individual. It manifested itself in him first, and he then planted the seeds in the souls that were ready to receive them. Therefore, all feeling and thinking prior to the appearance of the Gautama Buddha was different. The reception of the teachings was also different from what it was for later generations. Half-unconsciously, as if by suggestion, they received what the Bodhisattvas received as inspiration and allowed to flow as a force into their disciples. It was only through Gautama Buddha that human beings received the impulse toward compassion and love for one’s neighbor and were thus prepared to receive the Christ impulse. However, it is not enough merely to feel this capacity; it must become the guiding life force and be put into practice.

[ 9 ] From where, we might ask, do all these Bodhisattvas derive their power and their teachings? — High above in the spiritual realms into which they reach, in the midst of their exalted choir, there sits one who is the Teacher of all and at the same time the inexhaustible source of all light, all power, and all wisdom that flows upon them: Christ. From him they drew their strength and descended among humanity as his forerunners. Then he himself came down to Earth and incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth. And after him, they will return to carry out his plan.

[ 10 ] At the end of his exalted journey, a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha and no longer needs to take on a physical body. The stage of Buddhahood completes the cycle of his incarnations, and he enters a new, higher stage of evolution. His lowest level of being is then no longer a physical body, but an etheric body, and from then on he is perceptible only to the clairvoyant eye. Only the seer can observe how Gautama Buddha continued to work for the salvation of humanity after his death and helped develop all the forces on Earth so that Christ himself could incarnate in the flesh, in an earthly vessel that became his personality: in Jesus of Nazareth. Much had to happen for this to take place, and a series of great events was connected with it, as we can see from the Gospel of Luke. It states there that the shepherds in the fields received the grace to see what an earthly eye cannot otherwise perceive. They became clairvoyant and saw angels hovering above the place where the infant Jesus was born. What were these heavenly spirits? It was the gift that Buddha bestowed by offering himself as a sacrifice. They saw him, in his powers, woven into the aura that surrounded that place. Yet he alone did not contribute to this greatest of events; each of the preceding Bodhisattvas had his part to play. Buddha’s part—the greatest—became visible as an angelic aura.

[ 11 ] This interpretation may seem to many to be inconsistent with what they know about Buddha and Buddhism. They do not consider that their knowledge comes from ancient scriptures and that Buddha has not remained the same person he was at the time of his death. They forget that he, too, has progressed in evolution. The Buddha of that time prepared the way for Christianity; the present Buddha is within Christianity.

[ 12 ] If we now look back at his predecessors, we see from their teachings that the Christ-being was already known to humankind in the most distant past. The great leaders of all peoples and all ages have spoken of him. For example, in ancient India we find in the Vedas—albeit only a small part—of the vast teachings of the holy Rishis. They called Vishva-Karman the incomprehensible being whom they sensed beyond their sphere. Later, in ancient Persia, Zarathustra proclaimed what his spiritual eye beheld. It was, as discussed in the first lecture, what one attained through initiation: the vision of the sun at midnight. — Looking through physical matter, he saw the spirit of the sun.

[ 13 ] To better understand this, let us recall once more that the physical body of a celestial body, just like that of a human being, is only a part of the entire being in question, and that both possess more subtle principles that are visible to the clairvoyant as an aura. Just as human beings have a small aura formed from the astral and etheric bodies, so in the macrocosm we distinguish the great aura, “Ahura Mazdao,” as Zarathustra called it. This name later became Ormuzd, synonymous with “Spirit of Light.” Christ was still far from us at that time, so Zarathustra said to his disciples: “As long as your gaze remains fixed on the earth, you will not see Him; but if you rise with clairvoyant power into the high realms of heaven toward the sun, you will find the great Sun Spirit.”

[ 14 ] Similarly, the ancient Hebrew esoteric teaching speaks of the great Spirit that hovers through the cosmos and which the seer must seek in the higher spheres. However, the prophecy follows that he will descend and unite with the Earth’s aura. One of those who perceived him in our earthly sphere was Paul. As Saul, he knew full well that the Messiah would come and that the Earth would be united with the Spirit of the Sun, yet he still believed this to be a distant prospect. On the road to Damascus, he suddenly gained clairvoyance and realized that the great event had already taken place and that Jesus of Nazareth was the Long-Awaited One. This experience transformed him into Paul, and from then on, as an enthusiastic apostle, he proclaimed what had happened.

[ 15 ] The Christ Impulse should not be understood merely as the enlightenment of individual human beings. The clairvoyant may say that through it, the entire Earth has become something new. When Christ’s blood flowed on Golgotha, an intimate union took place between our Earth and the highest Being, who descended from unreachable heavenly realms for the salvation of humanity. Many have already recognized him as the one for whose coming the Bodhisattvas prepared here below over the course of many millennia; yet there are few in whom Christianity has become a true way of life. The Christ impulse is still in its infancy, and humanity will need a long time—and must be spurred on by many leaders—before it comes to full expression in all aspects of social life.

[ 16 ] However, we can observe a tremendous advance in the view of life during the brief period separating Buddha from Christ. One fact illustrates this as clearly as possible. When the young prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, once stepped out of his palace—where he had never seen anything but pleasure and splendor, youth and beauty—he beheld a cripple, the sight of whom horrified him, and he said to himself: Life brings illness, and illness is suffering. — On another occasion, he encountered an old man, and with a heavy heart he concluded: Life brings old age, and old age is suffering.—Soon afterward, he saw the most horrifying sight of all—a decaying corpse—and, filled with horror, he repeated to himself: Life brings death, and death is suffering.—Wherever he looked, he found physical infirmity, mental anguish, and separation from everything that is dear and precious in life. “All life is suffering,” he told himself, and on this principle he built his doctrine of renunciation of life. He taught that, in order to escape suffering, a person should strive to rise as quickly as possible out of the cycle of reincarnation, so as to escape forever the painful alternation of life and death.

[ 17 ] If we now move forward a few centuries, we see countless people—not Buddhas, but simple souls—who nevertheless sensed within themselves the power of Christ, gazing upon a corpse, yet not with horror. They are not filled with the sole thought that “death is suffering”—for in the death of Christ they have experienced the exemplary death, which signifies that death is the victory of the spirit over all that is physical. Death is the victory of the eternal over all that is temporal.

[ 18 ] Never before has there been an impulse such as this one, which came from the Mystery of Golgotha, and never will a greater one be bestowed upon humankind on Earth. This is what those innocent souls felt when they looked up at the cross, the most powerful of all symbols. There they sensed that there is something higher and stronger than the decaying body, which is subject to illness, old age, and death.

[ 19 ] Let us now consider the other tenets of the Buddha’s teachings from the perspective of Christian Spiritual Science: Illness and old age cannot discourage us or drive us to flee, since we have recognized their cause. Yesterday we saw how the newly acquired abilities of our astral body make the inflexible physical body increasingly unfit for us, and how the growing disharmony between soul and body gradually destroys the latter until it is finally shed. Old age does not frighten us, for we know that when life here has reached its peak and the body begins to wither, what we have newly attained contracts within it into a young seed that will one day blossom into a richer life on Earth. This spiritual development, as taught by Christianity, holds infinite comfort and makes our separation from those we love less painful, for we know that this separation is caused only by physical barriers and that in spirit we can find our way to our loved ones.

[ 20 ] If we think and feel this way, our entire life here on earth takes on a new, spiritually enriched character and becomes increasingly valuable to us. Our spiritual eye sees through physical infirmities and helps us bear them with equanimity. We know that our field of work is here on earth, and it is here that the seed for new life must be sown. What we can discern today from the spiritual teachings will become a certainty for us in future stages of development. The Christ-force, which is only just beginning to take shape, will soon bring about an elevation in our perception. We are at the end of the transitional epoch, which marks the lowest point of immersion and spiritual blindness in matter, and in the not-too-distant future, an emerging clairvoyance will join our physical sensory perception. This ascent will be recognizable by two phenomena. In individual people—and their number will steadily grow—the ability will awaken to see the etheric forms that surround the physical body. Around the human body, they will see the fine veil of the Life-Body shimmering.

[ 21 ] In addition to this enrichment of perception, some individuals will see something like a dream image appear as they commit an act. At first, these images will be largely ignored and, above all, not understood. They will initially be shadowy and will only gradually become clearer—especially in those who are materialistically minded. For the more strongly materialism holds a person captive, the more difficult it becomes for them to become aware of the spiritual and to perceive the supraphysical. The clairvoyants of the future will, of course, be mocked as fools and perhaps confined as the mentally ill. However, this will not be able to prevent what is destined to happen. Supernatural vision will become ever clearer and more frequent, and people will come to understand what is revealed to their gaze. The etheric forms will teach them that life is everywhere, and in the visions that emerge they will soon recognize images of karmic compensation. They will see what they have created through an action and understand how they must compensate for it, if it was evil.

[ 22 ] But other abilities will also be linked to those just mentioned: A small number of people will relive through their own experience what transformed Saul into Paul near Damascus. Just as he did, they will suddenly see that Christ united Himself with the earth through His death on the cross at Golgotha. This powerful inner experience, which some will have in the not-too-distant future, is what has been promised as the “reappearance of Christ.” For Christ appeared in the flesh only once and could be seen with physical senses, at a time when humanity was not clairvoyant. Yet He has remained with humanity, just as He Himself promised: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Christ has not remained in a physical body, nor will He appear again in the flesh. Anyone who believes in the evolution of human capabilities will understand this.

[ 23 ] Through the power of Christ, people are to rise again, beyond the limits of the physical world, and their perception is not to remain bound solely to the beings embodied in matter. The spiritual realm, with its essence, is to be opened up to them once more, and they are to behold Him who redeemed them from darkness and sin.

[ 24 ] This will be repeated to people over and over again. Many will accept it in the form presented by today’s Spiritual Science. Others, however, will cling to the erroneous belief that Christ will return in the flesh, and will be deceived by false messiahs and led astray. Those who do not want to accept the spiritual, who do not want to see it, will seek Him here in the material world among human beings, and hostile forces will send out their representatives and use their obstinacy and blindness for their own purposes. Over the centuries, there has often been talk of such messiahs, and external history points to many of them in the flesh. It is they who will be the test for those who call themselves Theosophists. For many speak as Theosophists and gladly profess to be such, yet they carry Theosophy on their tongues and not in their hearts. However, whoever trusts his physical eye no more than the spiritual eye that is opening up will experience the event at Damascus.

[ 25 ] At first there will be only a few, and then more and more; and as the number of those who see grows, their influence on all of humanity will increase and transform it. New moral capacities will also develop alongside spiritual perception over the course of the next two millennia. For what humans create now, they need intellectual ability and intelligence, and the inventor’s moral character is irrelevant. That will change later. Now, for example, the chemist’s work is limited to combining substances. However, a time will come when he will be able to infuse life into the structures he has created. But to reach that point, humankind must first develop within itself the finest and noblest impulses; only then will it be able to channel the power contained within them into its work. Today, humankind is still too undeveloped and immoral, and it would cause the greatest calamity if such powers were at its disposal. Therefore, he will not succeed until he is able to pour not only his intellect but also morality, compassion, and love into everything he does. Irreverent experimentation driven by selfish motives must become impossible; love must become the driving force behind all creation, and the laboratory bench must become an altar.

[ 26 ] A new age begins with the emergence of the Christ force, and John the Baptist points this out with the words: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” He had witnessed the descent of the Sun God, Ahura Mazdao, and recognized Jesus of Nazareth as his bearer. We must prepare ourselves for this new era and rise above materialism. We must become aware that our horizon will expand and that new faculties for a more perfect perception will be added to our present physical ones. Let us not doubt this truth, nor regard it as fantasy or dangerous teachings that could harm the Christ impulse. Understanding and feeling for this will become ever clearer and deeper, and the number of those in whom the Christ seed will begin to grow will continue to increase. However, for it to reach full blossoming throughout all of humanity, a great individuality must yet incarnate among us.

[ 27 ] The Bodhisattva who took Gautama’s place when he became the Buddha will descend in the form of the Maitreya Buddha to lead humanity to a full recognition of the Christ. He will be the greatest of the heralds of the Christ impulse and will make the Damascus experience possible for many. Much time will still pass, and in ever-new forms, Spiritual Science will make the Christ-Being understandable to humanity from ever-higher perspectives, until the last of the Bodhisattvas has completed his mission on Earth and humanity has grasped the Christ in his full significance and has unreservedly immersed its entire life in his impulse.

[ 28 ] Such a vast perspective shows us how humanity must look up to the supersensible history in order to understand the meaning of earthly history. It all boils down to helping humanity comprehend the fulfillment of the words: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age!”