The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. How Do I Find Christ?

[ 1 ] Following up on the reflections we shared here last week regarding participation in the spiritual world—which the human soul must strive toward in the future— I would like to speak in a little more detail today about various aspects related to that particular way of experiencing the Christ Mystery, which is to be prepared through such spiritual ideals as I discussed recently.

[ 2 ] When we view human beings today from the perspective of the humanities—this is, to begin with, a statement that will, however, be further illuminated as our discussion progresses today— that is, when we view human beings from a spiritual scientific perspective—as we are able to do with the tools of modern spiritual science—in terms of their soul life, we can say that within this soul life, insofar as it is connected on the one hand to physical life and on the other to mental life, a threefold process takes place: a threefold inclination toward the supersensible world. This threefold inclination toward the supersensible world must actually be denied if one wishes to know nothing at all about the supersensible world. Human beings have an inclination to recognize what is generally called the divine. They have a second inclination—we are, of course, always speaking of human beings in the present cycle of development—to recognize Christ. And they have a third inclination to recognize that which is usually called the Spirit or the Holy Spirit.

[ 3 ] With regard to all three of these inclinations, you know that there are people who deny them. It has been amply demonstrated, particularly during the 19th century—when things were taken to extremes, at least within European culture—that people have denied the divine in the world altogether.

[ 4 ] Now, from a spiritual scientific perspective—since within spiritual science there can be no doubt about the Divine, which, if we may say so, dwells in the supersensible—one might ask: What leads human beings to deny the Divine in the first place, that which is called the Father God in the Trinity? — Here spiritual science shows us that in every such case where a person denies the Father God—that is, denies the existence of the Divine in the world altogether, including that Divine which is recognized, for example, in the Israelite religion—a real, genuine physical defect, a physical illness, or a physical deficiency occurs in the human body. For the spiritual scientist, being an atheist means being sick in some respect. Of course, it is an illness that doctors cannot cure; they themselves very often suffer from this illness, an illness that is not even recognized as such by modern medicine. But it is an illness that spiritual science finds in a person when that person denies what he must now feel—not through his soul, but through his physical constitution. If he denies what a healthy sense of his body tells him—that something divine pervades the world—then, according to spiritual scientific concepts, he is ill, physically ill.

[ 5 ] There are then a great many people who deny Christ. Spiritual science must regard the denial of Christ as something that is essentially a matter of destiny and concerns the life of the human soul. Spiritual science must call the denial of Christ a misfortune; the denial of God a disease, the denial of Christ a misfortune. Being able to find Christ is, in a sense, a matter of destiny; it is, in a sense, something that must play a role in a person’s karma. It is a misfortune to have no connection to Christ. To deny the Spirit or the Holy Spirit signifies a dullness of one’s own spirit. A human being consists of body, soul, and spirit. A person can have a defect in relation to all three. Atheism represents a real, physical defect of illness in relation to the divine. Failing to find in life that connection to the world which allows us to recognize Christ is a misfortune. Being unable to find the spirit within oneself is a dullness, in a certain sense a form of idiocy—albeit a more subtle one that, in turn, goes unrecognized.

[ 6 ] Now the question arises: How does a person find Christ? — And it is precisely this finding of Christ that we want to discuss today—that finding of Christ which can take place within one’s own human soul over the course of a lifetime. One often hears this question from souls who are truly earnest seekers: How do I find Christ? — However, if one wishes to find a meaningful answer to this question, one can only do so by considering it within a certain historical context. Let us place a historical context before our souls, one that will ultimately lead us, in today’s reflections, to an answer to this question: How do I find Christ? —

[ 7 ] We know that, from a spiritual-scientific perspective, our current historical period began in the 15th century. If one wishes to give a rough figure, one could cite the year 1413. But if one does not wish to get bogged down in such specific dates, one can simply say: In the 15th century, the inner life of humanity became what it is today. — If this is not acknowledged in modern history, the reason is simply that modern history considers only external facts and, by its very nature as a “fable convenue,” has no inkling whatsoever that, as soon as one goes back beyond the 15th century, people thought differently, felt differently, acted differently based on their impulses, and were radically different in their inner lives from the inner lives of people today. The period that came to an end in 1413 began in 747 B.C., that is, in the 8th century B.C., so that what we call, in spiritual science, the Greco-Latin cultural period spans from 747 B.C. to 1413. As we know, the Mystery of Golgotha took place during this period—specifically, in roughly the first third of it. Now, this Mystery of Golgotha, as you know, was for many people over the centuries the linchpin of their entire feeling life and their entire thinking. This Mystery of Golgotha was grasped by the soul, particularly on an emotional level, in the times that preceded the modern era—the 15th, 16th centuries, and so on. Then began the era in which people started reading the Gospels among the broader masses. But then also began the controversy over whether the Gospels are truly historical documents. And this controversy, as you know, has been taken to extremes right up to the present day. Today we do not wish to deal with the individual phases of this controversy—which, after all, plays such a major role particularly in the circles of Protestant theology—but we simply wish to bring to the forefront of our consciousness what can be said today regarding the true purpose of this controversy surrounding the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] In this materialistic age, people have become accustomed to wanting everything to be “proven” in a materialistic way. In history, something is called “proven” if it is supported by documents. Where records are found, it is assumed that the historical event described in those records actually took place. Such evidential value could probably not be attributed to the Gospels. You know from my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact what the Gospels are. They are anything but historical documents; they are books of inspiration, books of initiation. They were once regarded as historical documents; now, through genuine research, it has been realized that they are not historical documents. It has also been discovered that all the other documents contained in the Bible are not historical records. And a renowned theologian—a theologian who is wrongly regarded as such—Adolf Harnack, concluded as a result of recent biblical research that everything one can know historically about the person of Jesus Christ could be written down on a single sheet of paper. The only thing that is correct about this—if I may put it in such paradoxical terms—is that even that is not true; that what one would write on that quarter-sheet is not historically tenable either! The only truth in this is that there are no truly reliable historical documents regarding the Mystery of Golgotha. If, as a historian today, one asks: “Can the Mystery of Golgotha be historically proven?”—then, from the standpoint of contemporary historical research, one must say: It cannot be proven by external evidence.

[ 9 ] But there is a very good reason for this. The Mystery of Golgotha—I would say, in accordance with the decrees of divine wisdom—is not meant to be proven in an external, materialistic way, for the simple reason that the Mystery of Golgotha, as the most important event that has ever taken place on Earth, is meant to be comprehensible only in a supersensible way. Anyone who seeks external, materialistic proof will not find it; rather, through their own critical inquiry, they will ultimately discover that no such proof exists. Humanity is to be placed before the decision, precisely in the face of the Mystery of Golgotha, to admit to itself: “I must take refuge in the supersensible, or I cannot find anything like the Mystery of Golgotha at all.” — The Mystery of Golgotha is meant, so to speak, to compel the human soul to find the path to the supersensible beyond all sensory evidence. There is, therefore, a good reason why the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be proven either scientifically or historically in any other way. This will be precisely the significance of modern spiritual science: that when all external science—all science based solely on the sensory—must admit that it no longer has access to the Mystery of Golgotha, and when even theology, insofar as it is critical, behaves in an unchristian manner, it will be spiritual science that must lead people to the Mystery of Golgotha—but along a supersensible path, which we have, after all, described on several occasions.

[ 10 ] Now we may ask ourselves: What was the state of humanity when the Mystery of Golgotha entered the fourth post-Atlantean, Greek-Latin cultural epoch? — Well, you know what this epoch signifies. Humanity develops over time in such a way that it, so to speak, also passes through the various aspects of human nature. You know that in the Egyptian-Chaldean era, which preceded the year 747 B.C., human beings were led, through their development, into what is called the feeling soul; in the Greco-Latin period, into the intellectual or emotional soul; and since the year 1413, in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, into the so-called conscious soul. Thus we can say: The essence of Greek-Latin culture from 747 BC to 1413 consists in humanity being educated—if we may use this expression of Lessing’s—to the free use of the intellectual or emotional soul.

[ 11 ] Let’s ask ourselves: When was the midpoint of this period? — The midpoint—for, after all, we can assume: If this period lasted from 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha until 1413, then it had a midpoint at which, so to speak, the intellectual or emotional soul had developed in an ascending manner up to that point and then began to develop in a descending manner. This point in time—you can easily calculate this—is the year 333 after the birth of Christ Jesus. Thus, 333 is a very important period in human development, the midpoint of the Greco-Latin cultural era. The birth of Christ Jesus occurred 333 years before this midpoint; that is, the event that led to the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] We can only truly appreciate the entire human condition if we ask ourselves: What would have happened if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? — We can truly appreciate the value of the Mystery of Golgotha for humanity when we ask what would have happened if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. Of course, without the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity would have reached the middle of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in the year 333 solely through its own elemental forces. It would have developed from within itself all the faculties belonging to the intellectual or emotional soul. It would then have possessed these faculties in the centuries that followed.

[ 13 ] This was fundamentally changed by the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Something entirely different happened than would otherwise have happened, and it was something profoundly different. When we look at the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to characterize this special event—which gives meaning to the entire earth—we can regard as the most important point of view precisely that there is only a supersensible approach to the Mystery of Golgotha, that one can reach it only by a supersensible path.

[ 14 ] Why is that, actually? It is because, even though humanity was approaching the highest flowering of the intellectual or emotional soul in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, around the year 333, humanity was, in its physical life between birth and death, still far from being able to comprehend the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha with ordinary human powers. What matters is that, [although] we can develop and live to a very old age, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha with the powers we develop within ourselves between birth and death as a result of our physical development.

[ 15 ] That is why even the contemporaries—those who loved Christ Jesus— the disciples, the apostles—could understand, to the extent that they were meant to, the nature of Christ Jesus whom they surrounded, was that they were, in a certain sense, endowed with atavistic clairvoyance, as I have often said, and through their atavistic clairvoyance had a sense of the One who walked among them. But they did not possess this through their own human powers. And then the Gospel writers also recorded the Gospels by drawing upon ancient mystery texts. They wrote these powerful Gospels out of the ancient atavistic clairvoyant power, not out of the powers that had developed up to that point in a natural way, from natural human powers.

[ 16 ] But the human soul continues to develop even after it has passed through the gate of death. This human soul, which continues to develop even after passing through the gate of death, grows in its powers of understanding even after death; it learns to understand more and more.

[ 17 ] Now, the peculiar thing is that Christ’s contemporaries—who, through their love for Christ, had prepared themselves for a life in Christ after death—did not truly comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha in its fullness through their own human powers until the 3rd century after the Mystery of Golgotha. In other words, those who lived with Christ as both his disciples and apostles—who then died and continued to live in the spiritual world—saw their powers grow as they lived in the spiritual world, just as they grow here. Now, at the time of death, we are not yet at the point where we possess the same understanding that we have two centuries after death. It was not until the 2nd century, toward the end of the 3rd century, that his contemporaries had reached the point where, in the spiritual realm that a person experiences between death and a new birth, they came to understand on their own what they had experienced here on Earth two to three centuries earlier. And then, from the spiritual world, they inspired those people who were down here on Earth.

[ 18 ] Read, from this perspective, what the so-called Church Fathers wrote in the 2nd and 3rd centuries—when inspiration in the true sense began—and you will come to understand what the Church Fathers wrote about Christ Jesus. What was inspired by the deceased contemporaries of Christ Jesus began to be written down in the 3rd century. These people of the 3rd century used a peculiar language when speaking about Christ Jesus—a language that is, in part, quite incomprehensible to people today—we will speak about these people of today shortly.

[ 19 ] I want to cite one person—I could cite another as well—but I want to cite one who is so deeply despised by today’s materialistic culture, the one of whom this materialistic culture says he uttered a terrible statement: Credo quia absurdum est — I believe what is absurd, and not what is reasonable. — I want to cite Tertullian.

[ 20 ] When one cites Tertullian—who lived around the time when inspiration from above began to flow through the deceased contemporaries of Christ Jesus, and who, as far as he was humanly able, was under this inspiration—when one truly reads this Tertullian, one gets a peculiar impression. Of course, he wrote as he had to, given his human nature. One can certainly have inspirations, but they always manifest themselves in a way that one is capable of receiving them. Thus, Tertullian did not convey the inspirations in their pure form; he conveyed them as he was able to express them in his human mind—first, because he dwelt in a mortal body, and second, because he was, in a certain sense, passionate and fanatical. He wrote as it came out, but it came out in a most peculiar way when viewed from a true and correct perspective.

[ 21 ] From this perspective, Tertullian appears not as a Roman with particularly high literary education, but as a writer of magnificent linguistic power. One might even say: Tertullian is the one who first did justice to the Latin language in the context of Christianity. He was the first to find a way to infuse this most prosaic, most unpoetic language—this purely rhetorical language, the Latin language—with such temperament and such holy passion that a truly immediate spiritual life truly breathes within Tertullian’s works, particularly in De carne Christi, for example, or in the work in which he attempts to refute all the charges leveled against Christians. They are written with a sacred fervor and magnificent eloquence. — And this Tertullian, as a Roman—and De carne Christi demonstrates this—was free of prejudice toward his own Roman identity. He found magnificent words in defending the Christians against Roman persecution. He vehemently condemned the mistreatment inflicted on the Christians to force them to deny their affiliation with Christ Jesus, saying: “Does not your conduct as judges toward the Christians prove sufficiently that you are unjust?” You must change your entire judicial procedure—as you normally conduct it—and not apply it when you judge Christians. Otherwise, through your mistreatment, you are forcing a witness not to deny the truth; you are forcing him to confess what is true, what he truly believes. With Christians, you do the opposite: you torture them so that they will deny what they believe. As judges, you behave toward Christians in a manner opposite to how you normally behave as judges. In other cases, you seek to uncover the truth through mistreatment; with Christians, you seek to elicit a lie. — And in a similar vein, in words that truly hit the nail on the head, Tertullian spoke about many things.

[ 22 ] It can be said that, in addition to being a courageous, powerful man who fully understood and exposed the hollowness of Roman religious worship, he was also a person who, wherever he wrote, demonstrated his connection to the supernatural world. He spoke of the supernatural world in such a way that one can see: This man knows what it means to speak of the supernatural world. He speaks of demons just as he speaks of his acquaintances as human beings. — And he speaks of demons, for example, in such a way that he says: Ask the demons whether Christ—the one whom Christians claim is a true God—is truly a true God! Just once, place a true Christian face to face with a possessed person through whom a demon speaks, and you will see: If you really get him to speak, he will confess to you that he himself is a demon, for he speaks the truth. — Tertullian knew that demons do not lie when questioned. — But the demons will also tell you—if the Christian asks them correctly, from a place of true conviction—that Christ is the true God. They simply hate him because they are fighting against him. You will learn from the demon that He is the true God. — Thus, Tertullian relies not only on the testimony of humans, but also on the testimony of demons. He speaks of the demons as witnesses who do not merely speak, but who also confess that Christ is the true God. Tertullian says all this of his own accord.

[ 23 ] When one becomes acquainted with Tertullian as a writer, one really has every reason to ask: What, in fact, was the deeper inner conviction of Tertullian, who was moved by the inspiration I have just described to you? This deeper inner conviction of Tertullian is indeed instructive. For Tertullian already sensed something that would not become apparent to humanity until quite some time after his own era. Tertullian essentially affirmed three principles regarding human nature. First: Human nature is such that in the present time—that is, Tertullian’s time, the end of the 2nd century A.D.—it can, as it is now, bring upon itself the disgrace of denying the greatest event on earth. If a person follows only himself, he will not attain the greatest event on earth. Second, his soul is too weak to comprehend this greatest event on earth. Third, it is entirely impossible for a human being—if he follows only what his mortal body allows him to do—to establish a relationship with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 24 ] These three points constitute, more or less, Tertullian’s creed. Based on these three points, Tertullian spoke the following words: “The Son of God was crucified; this is no disgrace, because it is shameful. He also died; this is precisely why it is credible, because it is foolish.” “Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est”—it is credible precisely because it is foolish. This sentence is found in Tertullian. The other sentence that the world attributes to him—“Credo, quia absurdum est”—is found nowhere, neither in Tertullian nor in any other Church Father. But this sentence, which I have just spoken to you, was written back then. Most people know nothing else about Tertullian except this sentence, which is not true. Third: “And the one who was buried has risen,” says Tertullian, “because it is impossible. We must believe it because it is impossible.”

[ 25 ] This threefold statement by Tertullian naturally strikes modern, highly intelligent people as something terrible. Just imagine a genuine, thoroughly materialistically educated person of today who hears someone say: Christ was crucified; we must believe it because it is shameful. Christ died; we must believe it because it is foolish. Christ truly rose from the dead; we must believe it because it is impossible. — Just imagine what kind of attitude a true monist of today might develop toward such statements!

[ 26 ] But what did Tertullian mean? It was precisely through his inspiration for his own time that Tertullian became such a keen judge of human nature; he recognized the path human nature was taking at that time. People were moving toward the fourth post-Atlantean, Greek-Latin cultural period, which would follow in the centuries to come. Exactly as many years as had preceded the Mystery of Golgotha at the midpoint of this period—333 years—exactly that many years after this period, certain spiritual powers intended to steer the Earth’s development along entirely different paths than those it ultimately took because the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred. 333 years after the year 333 is 666; this is the year of which the author of the Book of Revelation speaks with great intensity. Read the relevant passages where the author of the Book of Revelation speaks of what relates to 666! According to the intentions of certain spiritual powers, something was to happen to humanity at that time, and it would have happened had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place. The downward path that would have been destined for humanity from 333 onward—as the pinnacle of the culture of the intellectual or emotional soul—would have been used to steer humanity into a completely different course than the one intended by those divine beings who have been connected with it from the beginning, from the Saturnic Age onward. This was to be achieved by giving humanity—as early as 666—something that was not supposed to come to humanity until later: the consciousness soul with its contents, through a kind of revelation. Had this been carried out, the intentions of certain beings—who are opposed to human development but seek to seize control of it—would indeed have been fulfilled; then humanity would have been so surprised in the year 666 and endowed with the consciousness soul as it will be only much later in our time.

[ 27 ] This is the basis for what the entities hostile to the benevolent gods always do: they seek to bring forward to an earlier time—when humanity is not yet ready for it—what these benevolent spiritual beings intend to do for humanity at a later time. What was supposed to happen only in the middle of our era—that is, 1,080 years after the year 1413, or in the year 2493—when humanity is finally ready to consciously grasp its own personality— be instilled in humanity as early as 666 by Ahrimanic-Luciferic forces.

[ 28 ] What did these beings hope to achieve by doing this? They wanted to give human beings the soul of consciousness, but in doing so would have implanted in them a nature that would have made it impossible for them to find their further path toward the spiritual self, the spirit of life, and the spiritual human being. This would have cut off humanity’s path to the future and would have bound humanity to entirely different paths of development.

[ 29 ] History did not unfold as it was intended in this particular form—in this phenomenal, magnificent, yet diabolical form—but traces of it have nonetheless come to pass in history. They were able to manifest through events of which one can only say: People carry them out on Earth, but in reality they are always doing so as agents of what certain spiritual beings carry out through human beings. — And so Emperor Justinian, too, was an agent of certain spiritual beings when he—who was, after all, an enemy of everything that had been handed down from the lofty wisdom of Greek civilization—closed the philosophical schools in Athens in 529, so that the last remnants of Greek scholarship, along with the lofty Aristotelian-Platonic knowledge, were banished and fled to Persia. The Syrian sages had already fled to Nisibis earlier, when Zeno Isauricus had driven such Greek sages from Edessa in the 5th century. And so, as the year 666 drew near, the Persian Academy of Gondishapur truly became a gathering place for the most exquisite scholarship that had come over from ancient Greece—scholarship that had paid no heed to the Mystery of Golgotha. And within the Academy of Gondishapur, those who were inspired by Luciferic-Ahrimanic forces taught.

[ 30 ] Had that which was to have befallen humanity in the year 666—which, had it come to pass, would have led as early as the year 666 to the severing of later development and to the elevation of humanity to the level of the consciousness soul—had that achieved its full success, as intended by the Academy of Gondishapur, then, in the 7th century, highly learned individuals—whose extraordinary genius stemmed from their profound scholarship—would have emerged here and there, who were to travel through Western Asia, North Africa, Southern Europe, and Europe as a whole, and who were to spread everywhere that culture of 666 intended by the Academy of Gondishapur. Above all, this culture was intended to place the human being entirely on the foundation of his or her personality, to bring the soul of consciousness fully to the fore.

[ 31 ] It had become impossible for this to happen. The world had already taken on a different form than the one it would have had to be in for this to have been possible. Consequently, the entire impetus that was to have been imparted to Western culture from the Academy of Gondishapur was blunted. And instead of a wisdom emerging against which everything we know today in the external world would be a mere trifle—instead of a wisdom emerging through spiritual inspiration that would have transcended all that will gradually be discovered through experimentation and the natural sciences up to the year 2493, and which would have emerged through brilliant, magnificent scholarship—only the remnants of it remained in what Arab scholars brought to Spain. But even that had already been dulled. It did not emerge in the way that was intended; it had been dulled. And in its place, Islam—Muhammad and his teachings—remained, and it was Islam alone that took the place of what should have emerged from the Academy of Gundishapur. The world had been diverted from this ruinous course by the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 32 ] And she had been dissuaded by the fact that not only had the Mystery of Golgotha already taken place, but that this very Mystery of Golgotha had occurred as an event that cannot be comprehended by ordinary human faculties until death; as a result of which, within Western humanity, precisely what I described earlier came about: inspiration from the dead took place, as we observe in Tertullian and many others. As a result, people’s attention was directed toward the Mystery of Golgotha and thus toward something entirely different from what should have emanated from the Academy of Gondishapur. Consequently, what spread was that which prevented the high but diabolical wisdom intended by the Academy of Gondishapur; yet the spread of that wisdom for the salvation of humanity was prevented. Much of what had been inspired by the dead emerged in a fragmented form, but humanity was nevertheless spared from having to endure what it would have had to absorb into its souls had the Academy of Gondishapur succeeded in its endeavor.

[ 33 ] But events such as the one intended by the Academy of Gondishapur take place, so to speak, behind the scenes of the outer world’s development. They take place in the supersensible realm. Human beings are connected to them, but these events unfold entirely in the supersensible realm. And we cannot judge such events—neither what was intended by the Academy of Gondishapur nor the event at Golgotha—solely on the basis of what happens on the physical plane. If we wish to characterize such events, we must seek them in depths far, far more significant than is commonly thought.

[ 34 ] Something of what should have happened back then has indeed been left behind for humanity—something that has merely been dulled by the fact that the fantastic, wretched Islam emerged from something magnificent. Something has indeed happened to humanity. What happened was that back then, humanity—upon which the impulse from Gondishapur had acted, this Neo-Persian impulse that brought back the Zarathustra impulse at the wrong time—that all of humanity, if I may put it that way, if I may express myself in trivial terms, suffered an inner crack that extended right down into the physical body. At that time, humanity received an impulse that penetrates right down into the physical body—an impulse with which we are now always born—an impulse that is actually identical to what I characterized earlier. That illness has been instilled in humanity; when it runs its course, it leads to the denial of the Father God.

[ 35 ] So please understand me correctly: Humanity—insofar as it is civilized humanity—has a thorn in its side today. And Saint Paul speaks at great length about this thorn. This humanity has a thorn in its side. St. Paul speaks of it prophetically. As a particularly advanced individual, he already had it in his time; the others did not actually acquire it until the 7th century. But this thorn will spread more and more; it will become increasingly significant. If you meet someone today who has completely surrendered to this thorn, to this illness—for it is a thorn in the physical body; it is a real illness—then that person becomes an atheist, a denier of God, a denier of the divine. Every person who belongs to modern civilization actually has a predisposition toward this atheism; the only question is whether they give in to this predisposition. Human beings carry within themselves that illness which incites them to deny the divine, whereas it would actually follow from their very nature to acknowledge it. This nature has, so to speak, become somewhat mineralized over time, set back in its development, so that we all carry the illness of denying God within us.

[ 36 ] This disease of atheism brings about various effects in human beings. For this disease of atheism creates a stronger bond of attraction between the human soul and the body than existed before, and than is actually inherent in human nature itself. The soul is, as it were, more firmly bound to the body. And while the soul, by its very nature, is not destined to share in the fate of the body, it would thereby have been set on a course whereby it would participate more and more in the fate of the body—including the fates of birth, heredity, and death.

[ 37 ] For even back then—and this is what certain secret societies, albeit in a more amateurish form, still seek in our own time—the sages of Gondishapur sought nothing less than to make human beings very great and very wise on this earth, but by instilling this wisdom, to make his soul partake of death, so that once he had passed through the gate of death, he would have no inclination to participate in spiritual life or in subsequent incarnations. They wanted to cut him off from further development altogether. They wanted to win him over to a completely different world, to preserve him from earthly life in order to divert him from the very purpose for which human beings are here on Earth—what they are first meant to learn through slow, gradual development, and through which they will attain the spiritual self, the spirit of life, and the spiritual human being.

[ 38 ] The human soul would thus become acquainted with the earth to a greater extent than was intended. Death, which is intended only for the body, would, in a sense, have become the fate of the soul as well. This was counteracted by the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus, humanity became akin to death, but was preserved from this kinship with death through the Mystery of Golgotha. While, on the one hand, a certain current in the development of the world has brought about a stronger connection between the soul and the human body than was intended for humankind, Christ—in order to restore the balance—has bound the soul more closely to the Spirit than was, in turn, intended. Thus, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the human soul has been brought closer to the spirit than was predestined for it.

[ 39 ] This enables us to truly see how the Mystery of Golgotha is connected to the innermost forces of human nature throughout the millennia. One must be able to compare the interrelationship between body and soul—which was determined for humanity by Ahriman and Lucifer—with the interrelationship between soul and spirit if one wishes to approach the Mystery of Golgotha with historical accuracy.

[ 40 ] The Catholic Church, which was very strongly influenced by remnants of the impulse of the Academy of Gondishapur, dogmatically decreed in 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople that one need not believe in the Spirit—not because it sought to enlighten everyone about the mystery of Golgotha, but because it sought to cast darkness over the mystery of Golgotha. The Spirit was abolished by the Catholic Church in 869. The dogma established there states that one must not believe in the Spirit, but only in body and soul, and that the soul possesses something spirit-like within itself. But the fact that human beings truly consist of body, soul, and Spirit was abolished by the Catholic Church. This abolition took place in the Catholic Church directly under the influence of the impulse from Gondishapur. History simply looks different than it is often portrayed by one side or the other for the convenience of those whom they wish to guide.

[ 41 ] Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the human being was thus made more spiritually attuned. As a result, there are two forces within the human being: the force that makes him spiritually akin to death, and the force that, in turn, frees him from death and leads him inwardly toward the Spirit.

[ 42 ] What kind of force is this? I have told you: It is a kind of illness—that which is atheistic in human beings. This predisposition is a kind of illness that all of us within civilized humanity carry within us by virtue of our mere physical bodies. Yet to deny God is an illness, says spiritual science, but we have this illness within us. And if we understand ourselves correctly, we do not truly cease to deny God until we find Him again through Christ. Just as our physical body contains a pathogenic force that tends toward the denial of God, so too—by having the Christ-force within us, as I have often described, as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha—we possess a healing, salutary force within us. Now, Christ is, in the truest sense of the word, the Savior for all of us—the physician against that illness that can turn a person into a denier of God. Christ is a physician against it. He is a physician for that hidden illness that I have just described to you.

[ 43 ] Our time is, in many respects, a renewal of those times that took place—in part through the Mystery of Golgotha, in part through the events of 333, and in part through the events of 666. This has very specific effects. You can only understand the Mystery of Golgotha correctly if you are clear about this: It cannot be understood with the powers that are given to human beings solely by virtue of their living physically in a physical body until death. Even the contemporaries of the Apostles were not able to understand the Mystery of Golgotha through their own human powers until the third century—that is, long after their deaths. But all these things are part of the process of development; through all these things, many things unfold. And the following has taken place.

[ 44 ] We find ourselves today in a situation quite different from that of Christ’s contemporaries or of those who lived in the centuries that followed, up through the 7th century. We are, after all, already living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and are well into it; we are living in the 20th century. As a result, when we are born as souls and enter the sensory world from the supersensory world, we now, in turn, experience something in the spiritual world centuries beforehand. Just as those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha came to a full understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha centuries later, so do we experience a kind of reflection before we are born—centuries before we are born. But this applies only to people today. All people today, by being born into the physical world, carry within them something that is like a reflection of the Mystery of Golgotha, like a mirror image of what was experienced in the spiritual world centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 45 ] Of course, those who cannot see with their spiritual eyes cannot perceive this impulse directly, but everyone can experience its effect within themselves. And when they experience it, they will find the answer to the question: How do I find Christ?

[ 46 ] The following experience is necessary for this. One finds Christ when one has the following experiences. First, the experience of saying to oneself: I want to strive for self-knowledge to the extent that is possible for me, given my entirely individual human personality. — No one who honestly strives for this self-knowledge will be able to say anything else to themselves today as a human being other than: “I cannot grasp what I am actually striving for. My capacity to comprehend falls short of what I am striving for; I feel my powerlessness in the face of my striving.” — This experience is a very important one. Everyone who honestly consults with themselves in the pursuit of self-knowledge should have this experience: a certain sense of powerlessness. This sense of powerlessness is healthy, for it is nothing other than the awareness of illness—and one is all the more ill when one has an illness and does not feel it. By feeling this powerlessness to rise to the divine at any point in one’s life, one senses within oneself that illness of which I have spoken, which is implanted within us. And by sensing this illness, one senses that the soul, through our body—as the body is today—would actually be condemned to die along with it. Then, when one senses this powerlessness with sufficient intensity, a turning point occurs. Then comes the other experience, which tells us: But we can—if we do not surrender to what we are capable of achieving through the powers of our body alone—we can, if we surrender to what the Spirit gives us, overcome this inner death of the soul. We can have the opportunity to rediscover our soul and reconnect with the Spirit. We can experience the futility of existence on the one hand and the glorification of existence arising from within ourselves on the other, when we move beyond the feeling of powerlessness. We can feel the illness in our powerlessness; we can [but also] feel the Savior, the healing power, when we have [experienced] that powerlessness and have become akin to death in our soul. By sensing the Savior, we feel that we carry something within our soul that can rise from death at any moment in our own inner experience. — When we seek these two experiences, we find Christ within our own soul.

[ 47 ] This is an experience that humanity is moving toward. Angelus Silesius expressed this when he spoke these meaningful words:

The cross of Golgotha cannot redeem you from evil,
unless it is also raised up within you.

[ 48 ] It can be established within a person by feeling the two poles: powerlessness through the physical, and resurrection through the spiritual. The inner experience consisting of these two parts is the one that truly points toward the Mystery of Golgotha. This is an event that cannot be dismissed by claiming that one lacks supernaturally developed abilities. Such abilities are not necessary for this. One need only truly practice self-reflection and cultivate the will for this self-reflection—the will to combat that pride which is so commonplace today, which prevents people from realizing that when they rely on their own powers, they become arrogant toward their own powers. If one cannot feel, in the face of one’s own arrogance, that one becomes powerless through one’s own strength, then one can feel neither death nor resurrection; then one can never truly grasp the thought of Angelus Silesius:

The cross of Golgotha cannot redeem you from evil,
unless it is also raised up within you.

[ 49 ] But then, when we can experience powerlessness and restoration from that powerlessness, we are blessed with the good fortune of having a truly real relationship with Christ Jesus. For this experience is a repetition of what we experienced centuries earlier in the spiritual world. Thus, we must seek it in its reflection here in the soul on the physical plane. Search within yourselves, and you will find powerlessness. Search, and once you have found powerlessness, you will find deliverance from it—the resurrection of the soul to the Spirit.

[ 50 ] But do not let yourself be led astray in this search by some of what is preached today as mysticism or even from certain positive confessions of faith. When Harnack, for example, speaks of Christ, what he says is not true, for the simple reason that what he says about Christ—read it through—is something that can be said about God in general. One could just as well say that about the God of the Jews, or the God of the Muslims, or any God at all. And many who today wish to be so-called “awakened ones,” who say, “I experience God within me”—but they experience only the Father God, and even then only in a weakened form, because they do not actually realize that they are sick and are merely parroting tradition. Johannes Müller, for example, does something like this. But none of these people have Christ, for the Christ experience does not consist of an experience of God in the human soul, but of two things: the experience of death in the soul through the body, and the resurrection of the soul through the Spirit. And the one who tells humanity that he does not merely feel God within himself—as even the purely rhetorical theosophists claim—but who can speak of these two events, of powerlessness and of resurrection from powerlessness, is speaking of the true Christ experience. But such a person finds himself on a supersensible path toward the Mystery of Golgotha; he himself discovers the forces that stimulate certain supersensible powers and lead him to the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 51 ] Today, one truly need not despair of finding Christ in one’s own immediate experience, for one has found him when one has found oneself again—but from a place of powerlessness. The entire sense of insignificance that overwhelms us when we reflect on our own powers without arrogance must precede the Christ impulse. Clever mystics believe that if they can only say, “I have found within my ‘I’ the higher ‘I,’ the ‘I’ of God”—that is Christianity. That is not Christianity. Christianity must be based precisely on the statement:

The cross of Golgotha cannot redeem you from evil,
unless it is also raised up within you.

[ 52 ] One can already sense, in the details of life, how true what I am saying is, and one can then rise from these details of life to the great experience of powerlessness and resurrection from that powerlessness. My dear friends, it would be wonderful, especially in our time, if people were to discover, for example, the following. There is certainly a tendency toward truth rooted in the depths of the human soul, and consequently also a tendency to speak the truth. But precisely when we are in the midst of this intention to speak the truth and then reflect on this very act of speaking the truth, we can take a first step on the path toward sensing the powerlessness of the human body in the face of divine truth. For at the very moment when you truly engage in self-reflection on the act of speaking the truth, you come upon something very remarkable. The poet sensed this when he said: “When the soul speaks, ah! the soul no longer speaks.” — On the path by which what we truly experience inwardly in the soul as truth finds its way into language, it already begins to lose its edge. It does not yet die out completely in language, but it is already losing its edge. And anyone who knows language knows that nothing other than proper names—which always designate only one thing—are true designations for that thing. As soon as we have generalizing names—be they nouns, adverbs, or adjectives—we no longer speak the full truth. The truth then lies in the fact that we are aware that, fundamentally, with every sentence we must deviate from the truth.

[ 53 ] In the humanities, one attempts to rise above this admission—that with every assertion you speak untruth—by proceeding in a certain way, which I have often described to you. I have often told you: What matters in spiritual science is not so much what is said—for that would just as easily fall prey to this judgment of powerlessness—but rather how it is said. — Try to follow—you can do this in my writings as well—how every subject is characterized from the most diverse perspectives, how an effort is always made to characterize a thing from one side and from the other. Only then can one approach things. For anyone who believes that the words themselves are anything other than a form of eurythmy is very much mistaken. Words are merely a form of eurythmy performed by the larynx and aided by the breath. They are simply gestures—except that these gestures are not made with the hands and feet, but with the larynx. We must become aware that we are merely pointing toward something, and that we can only gain a proper relationship to the truth when we see in words hints of what we wish to express, and when we live together as human beings in such a way that we are conscious that these hints live within the words. This is one of the things that eurythmy aims to point out; it transforms the whole human being into the larynx—that is, it expresses through the whole human being what is otherwise expressed only by the larynx—so that people may once again sense that even when they speak spoken language, they are merely making gestures. I say “Father,” I say “Mother”: If I were to generalize, I can only truly express myself if the other person has, together with me, become attuned to these things within the social context, if they understand the gesture. We rise from the powerlessness we may already feel in the face of language—we celebrate the resurrection from it—only when we understand that, by opening our mouths, we must already be Christian. That which has come into being from the Word, from the Logos, in the course of evolution, can be understood only when the Logos is once again united with Christ, when we become aware that: Our body, by becoming the instrument of speech, forces the truth down, so that it partially dies on our lips, and we revive it again in Christ when we become aware that we must spiritualize it—that is, think with the Spirit, not accept language as such, but think with the Spirit. — This is what we must learn, my dear friends.

[ 54 ] I don’t know if time will permit me tomorrow to draw public attention to such a matter. I would like to do so, but I want to say it here first. If I were to repeat it again tomorrow, I hope you won’t take offense. I want to say here first what I have said publicly on various occasions. You see, one can make a remarkable discovery. I’d like to illustrate this with a specific example. I have carefully studied the truly fascinating essays written by Woodrow Wilson—lectures on American history, American literature, and American life. One could say that Woodrow Wilson provides a magnificent, powerful portrayal of American development as it unfolds from the American East to the West. He describes it entirely as an American would, and these lectures, reproduced in essay form, are very captivating. “ They are titled “Just Literature”; by reading these essays, one comes to know the American spirit—for Woodrow Wilson is the quintessential American. Now I have compared—and the comparison can be made quite objectively—certain passages in Woodrow Wilson’s essays with statements by, for example, Herman Grimm, a man who is through and through a typical 19th-century German, a quintessential 19th-century Central European—a man whose writing style appeals to me just as much as Woodrow Wilson’s is thoroughly unappealing to me. But that is just a personal aside. I love Herman Grimm’s writing style, and I find Woodrow Wilson’s writing style utterly repulsive, but one can remain entirely objective here: The quintessential American, Woodrow Wilson, simply writes brilliantly, magnificently—particularly on the development of the American people. — And now something else came to mind as I compared essays by Woodrow Wilson and Herman Grimm, in which both wrote about the method of history. One can take sentences from Woodrow Wilson; they correspond almost word for word with sentences written by Herman Grimm, and one can translate sentences from Herman Grimm into Woodrow Wilson’s essays—they match perfectly. — Any borrowing is out of the question! There is absolutely no question of my implying plagiarism; that is entirely out of the question. Here is the point where one can truly learn, without falling into bourgeois or philistine thinking: When two people say the same thing, it is not the same thing. — For now the problem arises: What is so remarkable about the fact that Woodrow Wilson portrays his Americans in a way that is actually far more compelling and evocative than Herman Grimm ever did in his Method of History, yet in doing so speaks in his portrayal [just as] in the sentences of Herman Grimm? Where does this come from? It really does become a problem.

[ 55 ] Now, if one allows oneself to delve into it, one finds the following. If one follows Herman Grimm’s style—everything he has written—one sees that every sentence has been personally and individually fought for; from sentence to sentence, everything has been personally and individually fought for. Everything unfolds in the light of nineteenth-century culture, but springs directly from the innermost depths of his consciousness. Woodrow Wilson describes it brilliantly, yet he himself is possessed by something in his subconscious. A demonic obsession is present. In his subconscious there is something that inspires him to write down what he is now putting down on paper. The demon—which, of course, manifests itself in a particular way in a 20th-century American—speaks through his soul. Hence the grandeur, the power.

[ 56 ] Today, when lazy people so often say, whenever they read something somewhere: “I’ve read that here and there too”—focusing only on the content—today is the time when humanity must learn that it is no longer so much the content that matters, but rather who is saying it; that one must know the person from what he says, because words are merely gestures, and one must know who is making that gesture. This is what humanity must come to understand. Herein lies a tremendously great mystery of the most ordinary life, my dear friends. There is indeed a difference between whether each sentence is fought for within the personal “I,” or whether it is, for example, instilled in some way from below, from above, or from the side. Instillation, for example, has an even more suggestive effect, because in contrast to what is fought for, one must in turn fight for every sentence oneself. And the time is approaching when one will no longer have to look merely at the literal content of what one has before one’s soul, but when one will have to look above all at those who say this or that—not at the outer physical personality, but at the entire human-spiritual context.

[ 57 ] When people today ask, “How do I find Christ?”—one must give this answer: for Christ cannot be attained through mere speculation or a comfortable form of mysticism, but can only be attained if one has the courage to place oneself directly within life. And in such a case, you must also feel the powerlessness you experience in relation to language—the powerlessness into which the body has placed you by becoming the bearer of language—and subsequently, the resurrection of the spirit in the word. That is it. Not only: “The letter kills, the Spirit gives life”—a saying that is, of course, often misunderstood—but even the sound itself kills, and the Spirit must first bring life back by concretely connecting, in individual experience, to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha. In this first step one finds Christ: seeking—not merely looking at the content of beautiful words here and there—as people are accustomed to doing today—but seeking the human contexts, seeking how the words emerge from the place from which they were spoken. This is becoming more and more important. If only some among us would consider this, we would not so often experience people coming and saying: “He spoke in a thoroughly anthroposophical or theosophical way; just look it up!” — What matters is not the words themselves, but the spirit from which they spring. With anthroposophy, we do not wish to spread words, but a new spirit—the spirit, indeed, that must be the spirit of Christianity from the 20th century onward.

[ 58 ] That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to follow up on. I am happy that I was able to build on what I presented here eight days ago, and that I was once again able to speak to you about these matters that touch us all, and I hope that we will be able to continue these branch-specific reflections here in Zurich again very soon. In this sense, let us always remember—even when we are physically separated from one another—that as anthroposophists we are united in spirit, and in this sense let us always remain faithfully united in the spirit of humanity that is meant to reign and work among us.