The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Power of Children and the Power of Eternity

[ 1 ] A Christmas Gift

[ 2 ] It might easily seem as though that simple, sweet joy, which has found expression in hundreds upon hundreds of hearts throughout the ages whenever the story of the divine Child and his destiny on earth touched those hearts, it might easily seem as though this simple, loving joy were diminished by our spiritual-scientific worldview, by the seemingly so complicated, so far-reaching insights into Christ Jesus, toward which we must strive within our worldview. Every heart, every soul is surely filled with joy when it can once again become aware of how, from the cities out into the loneliest wildernesses, throughout the centuries during this Christmas season, the hearts of people—both those who have lived a certain spiritual life and those who have remained in the simplicity of country life— how all these hearts felt drawn to the divine Child, in whom they perceived the forces that once entered into the becoming of humanity and saved this becoming from the spiritual death to which it was otherwise believed to be doomed by the eternal laws of the world. Every heart, every soul must be moved when it sees once more how this divine Child was worshipped.

[ 3 ] And yet, it is only an illusion to think that our increasingly complex understanding of the miracle of Bethlehem could somehow diminish this immediate warmth, this primal feeling. It is, I say, only an illusion when viewed from the outside, if one can think that way. For we are facing a different world today, and will face an ever-changing world unlike those centuries that did not witness such events as we do—not through memory, but through direct experience during this Christmas season. Our complicated age, which has turned so many glances toward scientific thinking and imagination, needs a different impulse of the soul in order to be able to look up again to the divine Child who carried the greatest impulse into the becoming of humanity. Our view, which speaks of the two Jesus children—the Solomonic and the Nathanic Jesus children—is only seemingly more complicated. For we see in the Nathanic Jesus-child, so to speak, the child of all humanity, that human being who, when the rest of humanity began its earthly journey, remained behind—remained behind in the spiritual worlds—before the Tempter, the Luciferic principle, approached humanity. We see that it has, as it were, been preserved at the stage of human childhood and retained in the spirit realm as a spiritual childhood impulse for humanity until “the time was fulfilled,” who was born as an exceptional human being in the Nathanic Jesus-child and appeared as a human ego that had not previously passed through earthly incarnations, but appeared for the first time in an earthly embodiment and who, immediately after birth, addressed his mother in a language comprehensible only to her, a language that sounded as if it came down from the heights of heaven. And more and more people will come to realize that, in the face of our time’s distorted understanding of humanity, we must look up to the divine Child whom we revere in the Nathanic Jesus-child, who has remained at the childhood stage of humanity in the spirit realm, who was born with those human qualities, with those primordial characteristics, which all human beings would have possessed had they not entered into earthly existence through the Luciferic temptation. With all these characteristics, which were primordial to humanity before the Luciferic temptation, the Nathanic Jesus-child entered into humanity.

[ 4 ] We must know this today; we must know that we have the childhood of all humanity in this child Jesus, so that we may feel from the depths of our soul the very same thing that simple people felt in the past—but merely felt, as we can know if we wish to continue along the spiritual path—when they were confronted with the glorification of the divine child in such plays. What speaks most deeply to our soul in such a play as we have encountered is precisely the child’s deepest innocence—the divine childlike innocence inherent in humanity—in contrast to what the tempter, in the form of Lucifer or the later Ahriman (who must indeed be regarded as the medieval “Devil”), has made of humanity. Deeply moving is this contrast between Herod from our play—seduced by the devil and brought down by the devil—and the child of humanity who upholds the principle of human innocence, the sacred principle of humanity, and leads to eternal life.

[ 5 ] Such ideas, as they come to life in a game like this, certainly did not arise from superficial feelings. They arose from an intuitive grasp of the deepest mysteries of the world, which throughout the Middle Ages—from the cities out into the desolate regions of the mountains and countryside—were recognized, if only intuitively. Yet human souls turned toward those mysteries in a different way than we must now seek to fathom them.

[ 6 ] And the soul’s gaze is easily drawn from such a play to depictions in which, one might say, using all the means of the highest art—as they arose in the 13th and 14th centuries from the abundance of Christian feeling—the entire mystery of humanity’s becoming on earth and the relationship of the human soul to that which lives as the eternal divine within the human being were portrayed. So today, on this day when we wish to celebrate the holy Christmas Eve in our own way, I would like to turn our gaze from these games to a magnificent representation in which we can, so to speak, admire the fundamental principles that lead from the highest sensibility and from what one might call the “scientific-artistic insight” of the Middle Ages to such simple games. I would like to direct our gaze toward such a supreme artistic representation, which, as it were, contains the primordial foundations of what then lies in such simple games.

[ 7 ] In Pisa, the city in western Italy, stands the famous cathedral where, as we have often mentioned, Galileo observed that swinging church lamp, through which his genius led him to discover the laws without which modern physics would be inconceivable today. Adjacent to this church we find the famous cemetery, the Camposanto, enclosed by high walls on which medieval art has embodied what was conceived regarding the divine mysteries and humanity’s connection to these divine mysteries, to the eternal spiritual principle conceived within the human being. Some of these medieval mysteries are depicted in paintings on the walls of the Camposanto in Pisa. This cemetery was covered with soil that the Crusaders brought back from the tomb of Jesus Christ. And anyone who visits this cemetery today and picks up a handful of soil may get the feeling that beneath this soil lies something of what the Crusaders once brought back from Palestine to spread over this cemetery, which was to be regarded as particularly holy.

[ 8 ] Among the paintings on the walls of the Camposanto is a painting titled “The Triumph of Death.” However, it has only been called that since 1705. Before that, everyone who saw it, knew it, and spoke of it referred to it as “Purgatory.” And certainly there were also a “Heaven” and a “Hell” on the walls of the Camposanto. This Purgatory, however, most profoundly expresses the way in which the medieval soul approached the mystery of the human soul and its connection to the primordial eternal in the human being. Today, much of this image has already been corrupted. But one can still see through the corruption to what the painter—now unknown to history—sought to conjure onto the wall from the great mysteries of becoming human.

[ 9 ] First we see a procession of kings and queens emerging from a mountain cave and advancing with great pomp, full of self-confidence and arrogance, and filled with the feeling: We know what it means to be on earth when one belongs to such a class! — The procession emerges from the hollow of a mountain, and as it steps out of the cave, it encounters three coffins guarded by a hermit. Suddenly, then, this hunting party stands before these three coffins. What is found in these coffins is distinctly different: In one, a skeleton; in the second, a corpse that has already begun to decay so much that worms are gnawing at it; and in the third, a recently deceased person who has just begun to decay. The procession halts before these three coffins. A hermit sits before them, as it were, gesturing: Halt! Behold what you truly are as human beings in this memento mori. — Further up, above the mountain, on a second rising hill, we see three hermits sitting: some gathering food, but others also deeply bent over their books, pondering the mysteries of becoming human, the whole scene arranged so that the one mountain forms a sort of ceiling above. There, where the hunting party encounters the coffins, sit the three hermits, who represent peace and are capable of entering the innermost depths of the human soul to discover its connection with the realms of the eternal. And if we look further, we see all manner of frail, jumbled-together people immediately following the hunting party, which stands before the memento mori. Further on, we see people listening to the sounds of a harp; behind the harp stands a figure holding a finger to their mouth. Above it all, we see angelic beings spreading out on one side, and devilish beings in hideous forms—the painter has used his full imagination to depict the devils—on the other. So that on the far right of the picture, the angels can be seen bending down toward the people listening to the harp’s strains. Between them and the mountain, from whose crater fire is emerging, we see the devils taking shape.

[ 10 ] But all of this is actually there, for the observer, to draw the eye toward something that one might not wish to notice at first glance, yet which gradually leads to an insight into the deepest mysteries of humanity. What is actually being depicted? Oh, it is characteristic of the perspective of that medieval science when we see how the hunting party stops before the three corpses: first a skeleton, then the second, a corpse already devoured by worms, then the third, a bloated body, one that has only recently died—a motif we often find in the Middle Ages. We only understand it when we ask: Why are the people coming out of the mountain? Who are those in the hunting party? — and when we know: These are not the living; these are the dead who are in Kamaloka! — Such bodies do you possess—the image seems to say—: the skeleton as the physical body, the corpse eaten by worms as the etheric body, and that which belongs to the recently deceased as the astral body. Remember, you who are living, what you are to behold of the mysteries of existence after death! Thus, expressed in a medieval manner, we see the mystery of the three human sheaths.

[ 11 ] Strange—one might even say wondrous. The hermit, sitting slightly elevated directly in front of the three coffins, suggests to us through his entire demeanor that man has a real need to penetrate the mysteries of existence in order to recognize how he is linked to the eternal sources during his transient existence. The image then continues in such a way that the mountain itself arches over the whole scene, and at the top sit the hermits, in quiet contemplation and a peaceful life in nature, showing us, as it were, how one can connect with the innermost core of human nature by turning inward.

[ 12 ] That is what the painter intended to depict, and not a “Triumph of Death,” as the painting was later called when its meaning was no longer understood. From the painting itself, we can see how right those were who spoke of Purgatory—that is, of what we call the Kamaloka. What the painter intended was to show that, just as we are in life, we do not always belong to those who recognize the meaning of life after death and relate in the right way to the primordial in human nature, as the painter shows us in those who are no longer in this life but in the life after death; for in the case of those on the hunting expedition, we are dealing with people who are in the Kamaloka, who have already died. They see what becomes of the body after death.

[ 13 ] And when we look at the sick, at those who are frail, we see, on the one hand, what is physical, and on the other hand, we see how the devils and the angels carry off human souls. And we see the profound reality that reveals itself before us: every devil holds a soul in its claws, which it carries away, and every angel carries a soul beneath its wings, but these souls are different. And that is what I would like to point out at this Christmas hour. The souls taken by the devils—who are rightly depicted as misshapen but with a true understanding—are souls that have the form of people who have grown old. And those taken by the angels to the bliss of heaven are souls depicted by the painter as children. In this we sense the view that runs through the entire Middle Ages: that something in the human being must remain childlike throughout the whole of earthly existence, that human beings can preserve something—even if they become as old and outwardly senile as they may—of childlikeness, of innocence of feeling, throughout their entire lives; that, on the other hand, there are people who grow old not only physically but also spiritually by embracing the spiritual-earthly. For one grows old only on earth. Those who grow old can do so only through guilt, through that which distracts from the primal-eternal-heavenly. Therefore, their souls look like those of people who have grown old, whereas the souls of those who remain connected to what preserves the link with the primal-eternal in the spiritual world retain their childlike form.

[ 14 ] This is what speaks so immensely, so powerfully to the viewer from this image of the Camposanto in Pisa: that there is something in human nature which we must address as such, as expressing the eternal in human beings during the first three years of childhood—something I attempted to portray in the little book *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity* —namely, that human beings are indeed different in the first years of childhood than they are later on. This sense of being united with the divine-spiritual heights that arises in childhood was felt in the Middle Ages. This was even expressed in such magnificent works of art as this painting in the Camposanto in Pisa, which is perhaps the most interesting painting of the early Middle Ages in this regard, a work so magnificent that it was—though this is impossible, since it was painted in the period after Giotto—attributed to Giotto and many other great contemporaries. This painting expresses most magnificently how medieval people viewed the child. We encounter this sentiment everywhere. We find it so wonderfully in these simple Christmas nativity plays; we find it in the fact that the legend of the Christ Child has taken root in all hearts with indescribable warmth, and how this very legend of the Child made people aware of how they are connected to the Christ impulse. People needed the certainty that the principle saving the eternity of the human soul had entered into the child. Just as the person who has preserved their eternal self is depicted in the painter’s image as a human being in the form of a child, being carried by angels into the realms of the blessed, so too must one imagine that in the form of the innocent child entered the world that which we know then, in his thirtieth year, united with the Christian divine impulse, with the Christian divine being.

[ 15 ] Thus, I would say, is the connection between the heights of spiritual life in the Middle Ages—as they are presented to us in such a depiction in the Camposanto in Pisa—and the simple games, which, admittedly, as one was performed here, did not emerge until later, but which all contain the impulses that expressed what we, in turn, seek in the tone and character of our own time. Nor was it merely “simple”—as people today are so fond of trying to convince others—how the souls of people in earlier centuries related to the infant Jesus. Just as we must now take to heart the teaching of the Nathanic Child Jesus, who in his twelfth year took the I of Zarathustra into himself and in his thirtieth year the Christ-being—as we must understand this in order to realize what had to happen in the becoming of the human being so that humanity might save the eternal in its being— so medieval humanity did not need all that science which is presented in concepts and ‘theories,’ but rather what was offered in such magnificent visions of the nature of the human soul, as expressed in the image just described. Different times call for different ways of presenting the eternal mysteries, and different times have had their different ways of presenting the eternal mysteries. Time and again, it is the manifestation of the fact that human beings may have great hope for their souls. In the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the hope that there would come into being, in the human being, that which spiritually corresponds to what the sun is in our planetary system in a physical sense. What we can know today was felt deeply in all ages.

[ 16 ] In spring we see life, plants sprouting and budding from the earth, and we watch them grow as summer approaches. We look up at the sun and know: From the sun come the forces that fertilize the earth, so that it can draw forth from within itself the living life of the sprouting and budding plants and other beings. And alongside what unfolds so regularly in sacred order from year to year, we see, within the regularity of the sun’s course—which at its exact hour fills every place with the blessing it must receive—that which, so to speak, belongs to the earth’s atmosphere itself: the storms that sweep across the fields, the rain that pours from the clouds, the fog that spreads over the earth—we see that which has no rule or order. We perhaps see rule and order in what emanates from the sun for earthly life. In spring and summer, when we observe nature with feeling, we have the sense that the sun, rushing victoriously over the earth, has some power over what the earth, so to speak, brings forth on its surface in terms of wind and weather. But as we approach autumn and winter draws near, and the sun’s power loses its strength and intervenes less in earthly existence, then the capriciousness of the earth’s own effects becomes perceptible to us in a different way. And whoever contemplates this alternation of spring and summer on the one hand and autumn and winter on the other with a little insight can say to themselves: In spring, the sun, with its sacred order, triumphs over the capricious weather effects that the earth’s egoism brings forth from the earth’s nature. In winter, however, is the time when the earth manifests what is present in the egoistic atmosphere, where that which is within it triumphs over what works blessedly into the earth from the cosmos.

[ 17 ] The person who observes their inner life—their thinking, feeling, and willing—sees how emotional impulses, affections, and the forces of the will rise up within them in a seemingly random manner, from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep. They can sense how this capriciousness within their own inner being can only be compared to what exists in the Earth’s atmosphere. And indeed, just as the Earth’s atmosphere does, so too does that which governs our thinking, feeling, and willing. Our soul possesses within itself the same forces—albeit only in an embryonic form—as those that operate outside in the air and weather and in the elemental forces. They govern within us as the forces of thinking, feeling, and willing. Outwardly, they are elemental forces, demonic powers that live in air, water, and fire, and in what we see in lightning and thunder, in the capricious effects of our atmosphere around us. When we think, feel, and will, we are, in essence, akin only to what the Earth develops from its own egoism in winter. And this has been felt throughout the ages. When winter approached, making the Earth’s self-interest more potent through the elemental forces that no longer followed the Sun as they do the ruling Sun in spring and summer, then one felt that all this is related to the human being’s own inner self. O wintertime—so the human being felt, even if they did not express it clearly— you are related to my own inner being! — But when the depth of the winter night came, when the time of the winter solstice came, then people felt in the way the sun was now developing its powers anew, so that they might grow and grow ever more and gather strength toward spring and summer; then people felt: The sun’s power always triumphs over the Earth’s selfishness. And then people felt courage and hope within themselves and could say to themselves: Just as in the physical world the cosmic sun always triumphs over the terrestrial forces of the earth, just as the victorious sun always breaks through the dark winter night if we only feel it, so there must also be something within the human being that reigns in the depths of the soul as a spiritual sun, which will come and triumph—just as the annual sun triumphs at the winter solstice—which will come as the spiritual sun at the greater winter solstice! First one hoped for it, then one knew it: that the time of the great winter solstice had dawned, when one came to understand the time of the Mystery of Golgotha as the rising of the spiritual sun within the human being.

[ 18 ] And now let us look back to those ancient times in the Earth’s evolution, when it was the Earth’s spring and summer, before the Mystery of Golgotha had come. Back then, human beings still carried within them the legacy of ancient times—the old clairvoyance—which enabled them to see into the spiritual world, when the awareness of the connection with the divine-spiritual world was still present. But we live in the Earth’s winter—this cannot be denied—in a time when it has truly come to pass that we are not only increasingly surrounded on the outside by the mechanical forces at work in machines, in industry, and in the commercial conditions of earthly life, but we also live in such a way that we no longer have as in the time of Earth’s spring and Earth’s summer, have the spiritual-divine world around us. But what humanity perceived as a symbol—the victory of the sun at the winter solstice as the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul—that is what today’s humanity may perceive in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha and its preparation through that birth which we celebrate anew each year at Christmas. Just as a person, when approaching winter, need never despair of the power of the sun, but may hope that the joys taken from them by autumn will reappear after the depths of the winter night, so may a person look to what has taken place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to themselves: Even if, like the winter storms in the winter night, the selfishness of the human winter night may rage unchecked within one’s own inner being, hope can never fade that, in the face of what manifests as capricious weather in our own soul, there must prevail what has been connected with all human life on earth since the Mystery of Golgotha: the Christ impulse, which entered into the development of earthly humanity through the body of the Nathanic Jesus child, and which was able to enter because the child of humanity was born in the Nathanic Jesus, the child with those qualities that belonged to the human soul before it had passed through earthly incarnations, in which had not yet been implanted what comes from entering into earthly incarnations, the child that still possessed the qualities of the spiritual heights in which it may abide eternally.

[ 19 ] I wanted to present these ideas to you so that we might see from them how, in light of the childlike powers of the human being—which are at the same time his powers of eternity—people can perceive a supreme reality, one that has always been perceived and should continue to be perceived at the sight of the divine Child at Christmas. And even if our understanding must change, even if in place of what the medieval conception saw in the image I alluded to, we must gain other conceptions—the conception of the two Jesus children, the passing over of the essence of one into the other, the taking possession of the body of the Nathanic Jesus child by the Christ essence—yet it remains true that we can look upon with our most sacred feelings and our strongest hopes the insight that tells us: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, something has been living within our human becoming that has drawn into our earthly aura, to which we need only appeal in our festive joy as a hope for the indestructibility of our human being.

[ 20 ] Remembering this is just as necessary for us as it was for the people who took joy in these simple games. Indeed, we may say even more: we take no less joy in these simple games. We feel connected to those people who took joy in these games, because we, in our own way, know how to appreciate what was given to humanity when the Child of Humanity entered into earthly existence—just as they were given the strongest hope, the strongest impulse that a human being needs in order to sustain themselves through the earthly winter, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, to sustain themselves through the vision that, just as in the physical cosmos the sun triumphs over earthly egoism, so in the depths of the human soul the impulse will live ever more fully—the impulse that flowed forth through the Mystery of Golgotha as the spiritual solar impulse of human earthly evolution. Once upon a time, the event occurred as a historical one through which this impulse entered earthly life, but it must be awakened again and again in memory, as can happen through such festivals. For it is true, on the one hand, that the Christ Being once entered the Earth’s aura through the Mystery of Golgotha; and it is true, on the other hand, what Angelus Silesias expressed in these beautiful words: “/p”

Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem
But not in you—you remain lost forever!

[ 21 ] What was born in Bethlehem must be born deep within our own souls, and ever more deeply, so that we may see fulfilled in our own souls what the medieval sensibility sought to see fulfilled, as it beheld the souls imbued with the Christ impulse in those childlike figures carried aloft by the angels into the realms of the blessed, and not fall into the clutches of Ahriman, to whom only those souls remain who have become so bound to earthly life that they appear old, whereas the destiny of the soul is not to grow old on earth, but to remain young. And it is only the destiny of the body on earth to grow old. It is the higher destiny of the human being to preserve spiritual youth within this aging body in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, so as to feel within oneself ever more and more the hope that, however the winter storms may rage in the soul and however the trials may live in the soul, the living confidence can never die, that from the depths of the soul may rise what has flowed into the Earth’s aura through the Mystery of Golgotha, and what we wish to revive in our souls through such festivals by remembering it.

[ 22 ] So I have attempted to summarize what we can currently perceive as the Christmas spirit through a reflection that seeks to encapsulate in these few words what we feel toward the Christmas festival from our anthroposophical worldview, and what people in earlier times experienced in the message of the divine child during a play such as the one we have presented. This is what the words are meant to express:

In the depths of the human soul
The Sun of the Spirit lives, certain of victory;
The true powers of the mind,
They are able to sense it
In the inner life of winter,
And the heart’s impulse of hope:
It beholds the victory of the Sun-Spirit
In the blessed light of Christmas,
As the symbol of the highest life
In the deep night of winter.