The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] If one wishes to consider the significance of the penetration of spiritual science into the world for the present day, one must not overlook the fact that this penetration—as we can already gather from the various considerations we have made—will bring about a substantial deepening of the human understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And one can say that anyone who unites not only with ordinary, rational thought but with their whole soul, with their whole being, with the insights of spiritual scientific research—such a person, if they are in any way connected to modern culture, will inevitably have to ask themselves again and again: How does a human being, transformed in a certain sense by spiritual scientific knowledge, relate to the Mystery of Golgotha? — We have cast our gaze upon this most important event in human history from a wide variety of perspectives. Today we will attempt to look at this event in such a way that we will strive to trace the current emanating from this Mystery right up to the present day. In a certain sense, the fruitfulness of spiritual scientific knowledge can be demonstrated by the fact that it succeeds—or at least can succeed—in spiritually comprehending world events and the history of humanity up to the present in a similar way, whereas human observation otherwise usually shies away from spiritualizing recent history.

[ 2 ] When one contemplates the Mystery of Golgotha, one is struck above all by the fact that this Mystery of Golgotha cannot be grasped or understood if one seeks to approach it solely from a material perspective on world events. One can only arrive at a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha by attempting to grasp a spiritual event in a spiritual way. Of course, you might say: The Mystery of Golgotha is, after all, a physical event in the physical world, just like other historical events. — Yet I hinted to you just the other day: Modern science, if it is honest, cannot say that. It cannot recognize the Gospels as historical documents in the same sense as other historical documents, nor can it accept the few historical notes that exist outside the Gospels regarding the Mystery of Golgotha—which are highly questionable—as historical documents in the same sense as, for example, the historical accounts of Socrates or Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Emperor Augustus and the like. This is precisely—as we have often emphasized—what constitutes the special relationship of spiritual science to the Mystery of Golgotha: that spiritual science will present the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality at the very moment when all other human methods and all other human paths fail to approach the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality. For the Mystery of Golgotha, as a spiritual event, must be understood spiritually. Only through a spiritual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha can one also approach the outer reality of this Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 3 ] What is the most important aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha? Despite all the so-called “liberal” theology of Protestantism, the answer remains the same: The most important aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha is the idea of the Resurrection. And yet the Pauline saying remains true: “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain.” This means: Essential to Christianity—to true, genuine Christianity—is the ability to recognize that Christ Jesus passed through death and thereby conquered that death by reconnecting, after a certain time, with the development of the Earth while still alive. But this, of course, belongs solely to the spiritual worlds in terms of its inner laws.

[ 4 ] Now I have also pointed out something else to you which, if honestly considered from a purely rational standpoint, could literally break one’s heart, because it represents one of those contradictions that must always exist in life and that logic always seeks to eliminate: Christ has been killed. The most innocent being who ever walked the earth was killed because of human guilt! — One can look at this human guilt and view it as one views human guilt—such great human guilt. That is one side of the matter. But then one must look at the other side of the matter and say to oneself: And if Christ had not been executed, if Christ had not passed through death, there could be no Christianity in the true sense. That is to say, humanity’s greatest guilt was necessary for the greatest blessing to enter into the development of the Earth, for the development of the Earth to find its meaning. One could speak of this in almost paradoxical terms: If humanity had not incurred that guilt—that greatest of sins—back then, the purpose of the Earth would not have been fulfilled. — And this points precisely to one of those great, radical contradictions that life presents and that logic always seeks to eliminate. For what is the aim of logic? Logic aims, whenever it finds a contradiction, to eliminate it. But logic still does not know today what it is doing: by removing the contradiction, logic itself kills life as human beings perceive it. And that is why human beings cannot arrive at a living understanding if they seek to shape that understanding solely through abstract logic. That is why human beings can only arrive at an understanding of the living when they seek to rise above logic to imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 5 ] Outwardly, the Mystery of Golgotha presents itself as follows: at a certain point in time, in a little-known province of the Roman Empire, the man Jesus is born; he lives for thirty years in the manner we have often discussed; then he is spiritualized by the Christ, lives as Christ Jesus for three more years, and in the third year passes through death and is resurrected. At first, this event goes unnoticed throughout the vast Roman Empire. Over the centuries, however, this event has had such an effect that it has not merely transformed the culture of the civilized world, but has completely renewed it. That is the outward aspect. One penetrates to the inner aspect when one tries to understand how this mystery of Golgotha arose out of Judaism and in the very midst of the pagan world. Judaism’s conception of religion has something that is radically different from every pagan conception of religion. One might even say: Judaism and paganism appear to be the two poles of any conception of religion whatsoever.

[ 6 ] Let us therefore first turn our attention to paganism. All paganism—whether or not what I am about to say is more or less concealed within it—is based on the premise of somehow extracting the divine-spiritual from nature for human perception. Pagan religion is, in essence, also a view of nature. More or less unconsciously, it is always based on the fact that the pagan observes nature and feels that human beings, too, arise from the becoming and interweaving of natural phenomena; that, as a human being, he feels connected in his entire existence, in his entire becoming, to what is present in nature and what comes into being within it. And then, as a sort of culmination of what he can grasp as a view of nature, the pagan attempts to grasp with his soul that which is divine-spiritual and lives within this nature. In ancient times, we see this in the fact that human beings were able to grasp the divine-spiritual—out of their own physical nature—through visions and atavistic clairvoyance. In highly cultured Greek civilization, we see how human beings attempt to grasp the divine-spiritual through pure thought. But everywhere we see how human beings, by being pagans, try to forge a direct path upward from the contemplation of nature to the crowning achievement of the edifice of nature: the perception of the divine-spiritual within nature. |

[ 7 ] Such a view—and this becomes apparent when one delves thoroughly into the essence of all paganism (though I can only sketch these things out today)—cannot fully grasp the moral impulses of the human race. For no matter how much one tries to recognize the divine-spiritual impulse from nature itself, this divine-spiritual impulse remains devoid of moral content. In the highly cultivated pagan religion of the Greeks, we see that the gods do not, in fact, contain very many moral impulses.

[ 8 ] Radically and polar opposites—of course, everything expresses itself outwardly in a more or less veiled way, as the essential takes on this or that form, but in essence it is indeed possible to say: The matter is expressed in Judaism as radically and polar opposites. — Judaism could be called, to put it simply, the true discovery of the moral impulse in the process of becoming human. This is the defining characteristic of the ancient Jewish religion: that the impulse of Yahweh essentially interweaves and permeates humanity in such a way that its weaving and essence bring morality into the development of humanity as well. This, however, gave rise to a difficulty specifically for the Jewish conception of religion, one that the pagan conception of religion did not face. This difficulty lay in the fact that Judaism was unable to develop an understanding relationship with nature. The God Yahweh permeates and weaves through human life. But when a person looks upon the God Yahweh who brings humans into being—who also punishes sins and rewards good deeds throughout the course of life—and then turns their gaze away from the God Yahweh to the natural phenomena, into which human beings on this earth are also woven, there is undoubtedly an impossibility of reconciling these natural phenomena with the workings of the God Yahweh. The entire tragedy of this inability to reconcile natural phenomena with the impulse of the God of Yahweh is expressed in the great, overwhelming tragedy of the Book of Job, where we are particularly reminded of how, in the course of nature, the righteous can suffer, can fall into misery, and how, in contradiction to what nature brings, he must believe in the righteousness of his impulse from Yahweh. But the entire underlying tone—this deeply tragic underlying tone of the Book of Job, which, I would say, sounds utterly alien to nature as it enters the human soul—it reveals to us the difficulty that exists between a pure understanding of what the Yahweh presence actually is and an unbiased view of what primarily presents itself to human sight and human life as the course of natural events in which human beings are entangled. And yet, for those who truly understand the Old Testament, what is this God of Yahweh, this impulse of Yahweh, other than the innermost essence that weaves itself within the human soul itself? To what end is the ancient Hebrew conception driven by the fact that it stands in such polar opposition to the view of nature that is so strongly emphasized in paganism?

[ 9 ] This necessarily drives the ancient Hebrew conception toward the view of a being that, apart from the Yahweh impulse, had a share in human nature as it once existed in the context of earthly existence: The serpent of Paradise, Lucifer, Satan—a being who opposes God, the God of Yahweh—must have a part in how humanity came to be within earthly existence. The believer in the Old Testament must regard the God of Yahweh as the innermost impulse to whom he directs his worship and submission; yet he is unable to attribute to this impulse of Yahweh the sole responsibility for the coming into being of humankind. He must attribute a substantial part of humankind’s origin to what came to be called the Devil in the Middle Ages. And yet it is nothing but dilettantism—even if one believes it to be terribly erudite—to present this contrast between the God Yahweh and the Devil, the ancient serpent, as if it were the same contrast as, for example, that between Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Persian religion. The Persian religion is, in its very essence, of a pagan nature, and Ormuzd and Ahriman stand in such opposition to one another that one can ascend to their essence in the worldview by rising from the view of nature. The entire process of the cosmic struggle, which Persian religion conceives as the struggle between Ormuzd and Ahriman, is likewise a process of the kind that other pagan religions have incorporated into their religious conceptions. But what is conceived as a contrast in the Old Testament between the impulse of Yahweh and the impulse of Satan, as it appears in the Book of Job, is a moral contrast, and the entire depiction of this contrast is thoroughly permeated with moral overtones in the Book of Job. There is indeed a reference there to a spiritual realm in which good and evil exist, a realm that is distinct from the natural realm. And one can say: At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching in the course of human development, humanity had reached a point where it could no longer cope with these two main currents—the pagan path toward the divine and the Jewish path toward the divine. Both, however, had reached their highest level of development. For we must not forget—and we must remind ourselves of this again and again—that such a refined spirituality, such a height of human imaginative life as had developed in Greek paganism, is truly unique in human evolution. It has not been attained again since then, nor did it exist before. And conversely: such an unwavering adherence to the moral impulse of Yahweh—unshaken by natural events—as depicted in the Book of Job, is also unique; it cannot be found anywhere else. The Book of Job is indeed one of the marvels of human development, precisely in this regard.

[ 10 ] In a sense, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, humanity had reached a dead end. It could go no further. It had understood—or had attempted to understand—on the one hand, nature in the old sense, and on the other, the moral world in the old sense. It could go no further. Both, in their outward form, had reached the highest peak in human perception, but it was impossible to proceed any further. The fact is that the development of the world proceeds through opposites. It does not simply advance in a straightforward, linear manner, as modern evolutionary theory comfortably assumes. This modern theory of evolution imagines it this way: first the simple, then the next stage rising in a straight line, and so on. But evolution is not like that; rather, it is based on a different principle, in which certain evolutionary impulses reach a highest point, but at the same time as these impulses reach their highest point, other impulses develop that reach a lowest point. There are always two currents at work: one reaches its highest external expression, and precisely as one reaches its highest external expression, the other reaches its highest internal expression. And at the very same time that, on the one hand, humanity had reached a certain height with regard to pagan abandonment and, on the other hand, had reached a certain height with regard to the Jewish conception, what was developing within the human race on Earth could not be achieved except through such an event, which—even though it unfolded outwardly, as it were, as a world symbol—itself took place historically.

[ 11 ] Thus, it could only be the death of the spirit that gives meaning to the earth. Supreme life—as this life developed throughout antiquity and reached its zenith—simultaneously implied, on an inner, spiritual level, the necessity of death. Only from death could new life then emerge. This death on Golgotha is therefore the necessary and greatest contrast to the exuberant life that the worldview had attained in Greek and Jewish culture at that time.

[ 12 ] Certainly, one can present the matter from a wide variety of perspectives. We have already done so. But one can also say, for example, the following. One can say: All the ancient worldviews—which were, after all, more or less based on atavistic clairvoyance and had only advanced to pure thought in Greek civilization—all these ancient worldviews were designed to finally find the human being here on Earth. And this is precisely what happened—particularly in Greek civilization, and in a different way in Judaism—at the very time of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we go back to even earlier times, we find that human beings are, in a sense, closer to the divine through what they think of themselves. They had not yet arrived at a conception of themselves. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings had arrived at a conception of themselves. When something like this happens, one of those events occurs in which a process, as it were, turns into its opposite through its own power.

[ 13 ] If you look at a pendulum swinging back and forth, you will observe the following—I have used this illustration many times: As this pendulum swings this way (it is drawn), it falls back to this point due to gravity, and as it has fallen here due to gravity, at that very moment—because the string is directly opposite the direction of gravity—gravity cannot act. But the pendulum does not come to a standstill. Why? Because, as they say in physics—though it is not spiritually correct, one can still use the term—the pendulum has absorbed so much inertia during its fall that it swings to the other side due to this very inertia. However, this inertia is exhausted—reduced to zero—at the moment when the pendulum has swung as far to the left as it did to the right. The movement to the left is caused by the pendulum’s own inertia, but it exhausts itself. This is, in fact, a general law governing processes in the world: something happens, and in the course of that event, the impulse behind it is destroyed. Thus, at the very moment when pagan and Jewish cultures had reached a pinnacle, the force that had brought them this far was exhausted, having reached a point of zero. And a new impulse was needed, one that entered the world to guide development further. And this impulse was the Christ, for whom the vessel of Jesus had been prepared in the way we know it.

[ 14 ] One might say, then: If a person had been able to fully comprehend, at the time our calendar designates as the year zero, what was actually taking place within humanity, he would have had to say: At this point in time, humanity faces the tragic fate that the forces given to it at the end of Earth’s evolution—forces that, by the time we have reached, have indeed brought humanity to its highest development in terms of its inner spiritual constitution—have at the same time been exhausted. Humanity is struck by the death of its culture, which unfolded in accordance with those impulses that the ancients received as a legacy of humanity at the starting point of Earth’s evolution. — Then someone who had perceived the fate of humanity in this way could look up to the mountain of Golgotha and see the outward historical symbol—the dying body of Jesus, the dying representative of humanity—and could draw hope from the Resurrection that a new impulse would not abandon humanity on Earth, but would lead it forward; but an impulse that could not arise from what the Earth had been able to give humanity up to that point. That is to say, humanity had to look up to something the Earth could not provide, by gazing upon Golgotha and sensing there the possibility of humanity’s further development from Golgotha onward. To look up to something that entered into the Earth’s evolution as a new turning point—that is what the person who had, or should have, inwardly grasped the course of human evolution at that time would have had to do. That is what had taken place, and that was the significance of what had occurred. Whether people interpreted this event more or less in one way or another is a matter of external history. What is essential for Christianity is that this happened and that it unfolded as an objective fact. Christianity is not a doctrine; Christianity is the perception of this objective event unfolding in the course of Earth’s development.

[ 15 ] And now we see how this view of Christianity is spreading in a remarkable way. I recently discussed the same fact from a different perspective. Today we will simply consider how the concept of the Christ impulse—which entered into the Earth’s evolution—is spreading across the lands of Judaism, Greek paganism, and Roman paganism. If one looks at historical development with an open mind, one cannot help but say to oneself: Yes, Christianity certainly did not take root in Judaism in any truly profound way; nor, even though the Gospels were written from within Greek culture, did it take root in Greek culture; and certainly not in the Roman culture of the Roman Empire. You need only take Catholicism—which is, after all, what remains of that Christianity that developed out of the Roman Empire—and consider, within this Roman Catholicism, the Mass, which is indeed, in its own way, a grand and mighty sacrifice, and you will see what peculiar significance underlies precisely the spread of the Christian worldview through the ancient Roman Empire.

[ 16 ] What, after all, is the Mass? The Mass, as well as other ceremonies of the Catholic Church, derive their grandeur and incomparable magnificence from the ancient pagan mysteries. And as soon as you look at the ritual of Catholicism and understand it correctly, you will see in this ritual a reenactment of the path of initiation in the ancient pagan mysteries. The main parts of the Mass—the Proclamation, the Sacrifice, the Consecration, and Communion—represent the path of the initiate from the ancient pagan mysteries. The Christ impulse had to be clothed in the form of the ancient pagan mystery in order to spread throughout the regions of the Roman Empire. And you can read in my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact how what was experienced in the vision of Christ Jesus presented itself to those who were familiar with the results of initiation into the ancient pagan mysteries. There it is described how, on Golgotha, that which had otherwise always manifested itself in the mysterious depths of mystery initiation—as an individual human experience on another plane—was brought forth onto the stage of world history. And so we see that, as Christianity spread across the civilized lands of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—which we call the Greco-Latin period—the mystery of Christianity became embedded in pagan ritual. There, what we hold as the idea of the Christ impulse lives on in the ritual; there it lives on in the Mass. Essentially, it still lives on today in this way within the Mass in Catholicism. For a true Catholic is one who perceives Christ Jesus in all his mystery when the Host—the bread transformed into the Body of Christ—is raised at the altar. In this ritual act, the true Catholic—who perceives the pagan form of Christianity—feels what he is meant to feel. There is no direct relationship to Christ Jesus here; rather, there is a relationship that seeks to reach people through the form of the pagan ritual.

[ 17 ] Christianity, however, first emerges in a completely different, deeply human way when it spreads from the civilized countries of the South—which had been steeped in paganism or Judaism—to the Nordic barbarians. These Nordic barbarians are therefore initially so opposed to Christianity that they embrace it in a much more primitive form. And for a long time, these Nordic barbarians were Arians; that is to say, they did not engage with the complex concepts simply embodied in pagan ritual, but rather imagined Jesus Christ more or less as a kind of ideal human being—as a heightened, deified, idealized human being, as the first brother of humanity, yet still as the brother of humanity. They are not particularly interested in how Christ relates to some unknown god; what interests them immensely, however, is how human nature relates to the nature of Christ—what direct relationship the human heart and mind can have with the ideal human being, Jesus Christ. And this is connected to their views on the external, human, social structure. Christ becomes a special king, a special leader of the people. Just as people have imagined following a leader in whom they have trust, so they wish to follow Christ Jesus as the particularly illustrious leader. This gives rise to what one might call the search for a personal relationship with Christ Jesus, in contrast to the complex relationship—expressible only in the realized, imaginative image of the ritual—that was developed in the South.

[ 18 ] How does this come about? Indeed, these barbaric peoples, among whom Christianity is making inroads in the North, are the seed of what will later emerge in human evolution as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. At a time when the people of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch had already reached a relatively high level of development, they had not yet even truly become human. They still absorb into their primitive human nature that which can enter a highly developed humanity only in the form of the realized imaginations of ritual. What, in the southern regions, was absorbed only in a paganized form during the transformation of human nature into high spirituality is taken up in an intimate, personal way by the hearts and minds of the barbarians.

[ 19 ] And so we see that the seed of the Christ impulse takes root in quite different ways in the hearts of the southerners and in the hearts of the Nordic barbarians. These Nordic barbarian hearts are far less mature than the hearts of the peoples of the South, and the Christ impulse sinks into their immaturity. The remarkable fact is that throughout the South—through Christianized Judaism, Christianized Hellenism, and Christianized Roman culture—Christianity takes root in such a way that, before the Christ impulse approaches humanity, the concept of Christ is established, shaped in the manner that was possible based on the ancient spiritual experiences. For these ancient people had a significant inner life, an inner life that was, in a certain sense, magnificently developed. The Nordic barbarians, on the other hand, had a primitive, simple inner life that was accustomed only to the immediate surroundings, to the most immediate personal relationships between human beings. And into these immediate relationships the Christ impulse poured. These people had no conception whatsoever of scientific knowledge as it had developed among the Greeks, nor of a political view of state structure as it had developed among the Romans. Such things did not exist among the northern barbarians. Their imaginative life in the soul was, one might say, free. They could not think much. They could hunt, they could wage war, they could practice a little agriculture, they could do other things as well—you need only read about the ancient Nordic barbarians—but they did not develop any kind of advanced science. No preconceived notion stood in the way of the Christ impulse; it could come to the people directly as the Christ impulse. Therefore, one can say: The Christ came to the southern peoples in such a way that he had to pause before the life of the imagination they presented to him. These southern peoples erected a gate: “You must first pass through this,” they said to the Christ. This gate was still the one built from the old, traditional conceptions. The Nordic barbarians had no such gate; the entrance was wide open, and the Christ impulse entered there of its own accord. There is only a gradual difference between the people—or peoples—who lived out their lives as Nordic barbarians, to whom the Christ came, and Jesus himself, to whom the Christ came as an individual human being. In Palestine, the Christ came to the individual human being, Jesus. Then the impulse spread throughout the southern lands. There, the gateway of the life of the imagination was present everywhere; he could not enter there in the same way that he could enter into the human being Jesus. Just as the Christ impulse came to the northern barbarians, it could not, of course, enter every individual human being everywhere—they were not “Jesuses”—but it could enter the souls of the peoples; they received him as the Christ in a certain sense. And a similar process took place between the souls of the peoples and the Christ as between Jesus and the Christ.

[ 20 ] This is the inner secret of Christianity’s journey through the southern lands to the northern barbarians. But these northern barbarians were really not very far away. And even though Christ was able to enter their midst directly, the dwellings he found there did not look very refined. The ideas there were primitive, the most primitive of all. I would like to say: It was only under the canopy of world evolution that what was already highly developed in the South—albeit at a previous stage—began to unfold. What was highly developed in the South during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the Greco-Latin one, was still entirely embryonic in the North and had to wait until later. So one can say: We have the fourth post-Atlantean cultural stage and we have the fifth post-Atlantean cultural stage. We know that the fourth post-Atlantean cultural stage, beginning in 747 B.C.E., extends until the year 1413, and then it continues; we are now living in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural stage. If one takes any point in the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch—say, a point in the 5th century before the Event of Golgotha—development had advanced in the Greco-Latin countries, while it lagged far behind among the Nordic barbarians. They had to wait for later unfolding; that same point did not arrive there until much later. This means that in the North, although at a higher stage, people reached the same point that the South had reached earlier only much later. It is important to take such a perspective into account. For it is only by taking such a perspective that one can understand how the inner development, the inner unfolding of human life, takes shape across the Earth.

[ 21 ] Just consider how exalted this Greco-Latin culture was at the time when, within that very culture, the great man—one cannot simply call him a philosopher—Plato emerged, Plato with his turning of the human mind toward the Ideas. These are not the abstract ideas that people today ramble on about; these are spiritual beings themselves, to whom Plato looks up when he speaks of Ideas. Anyone who truly knows Plato understands the heights to which this ancient Greco-Latin culture had risen during the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. At the time when the great Plato stood out from Greek civilization, the Nordic barbarian culture still had much to go through before it, in turn, could produce from its own flesh and blood—albeit now for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—the very same thing that had been produced by Greek civilization when Plato was there.

[ 22 ] And when, exactly, had the Nordic barbaric nature, from its own flesh and blood, worked its way up to such a height that Plato had already reached in an earlier epoch? That was in Goethe’s time. What Platonism is to Greek civilization, Goetheanism is to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. How many years, then, elapse in a cultural epoch? You know that if you take the 1,413 years following the Mystery of Golgotha and the 747 years preceding it, that makes one cultural epoch; that is 2,160, a little over 2,000 years. That is also roughly the time that elapsed between Plato and Goethe; a cultural epoch, merely shifted forward, lies between the two.

[ 23 ] And as we look to Plato, one thing stands out in his work that shines magnificently above the rest of ancient culture. What we encounter in Plato is encapsulated in the words where his philosophy rises to a religious consecration, where he says: “God is the Good”—where he gains an inkling that the idealistic view of nature must be united with the moral order of the world: the divine is the Good. And with this, the anticipation of Christianity dawns upon the Greek world.

[ 24 ] This, however, would point to an expectation in the Nordic world—an expectation of a renewal of Christianity—as embodied in Goethe. Who could view Goethe inwardly in any other way than to see in him an expectation of a renewal of the understanding of the mystery of Golgotha! The boy Goethe, at the age of seven, still stands before nature like a pagan, reenacting his Hellenism. He takes a music stand, places all manner of stones and rock formations on it as representatives of natural processes, and lights a small incense candle directly in the sunlight he has focused through a magnifying glass, in order to offer a sacrifice to the great God of Nature. Purely pagan worship of nature; there is nothing of Christ Jesus in it. In it lives the God who can be beheld in nature. And Goethe is intimately honest right down to his innermost being. He does not outwardly profess faith in any deity, in anything divine, with which he cannot connect honestly from within. He cannot accept the concept of God that a priest tells him; he cannot outwardly learn what does not spring from his innermost soul. Thus, as late as 1780, his prose hymn to nature welled up from within him—that wonderful prose hymn to nature that begins: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by her. Unwarned and uninvited, she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along with her until we are weary and sink into her arms... Everything is nature.” We belong to her; she carries us along with her. Even the most unnatural is nature. The greatest philistinism has something of her genius. She has placed me within it; she will not hate her work. Everything is her merit, everything her fault.

[ 25 ] This perspective springs intimately from the very depths of his being, because Goethe seeks it with such sincerity—as he must, as a representative of his stage of humanity, in which there is nothing Christian. Throughout the entire prose hymn “Nature,” you will find a wonderful inclination toward God, almost like that of a seven-year-old boy who sets up his pagan altar from natural materials, but with nothing Christian about it. For Goethe stands as an honest representative within the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which for him is the epoch of expectation. But the fact that he cannot remain with the pagan is expressed in Goethe, on the one hand, by the fact that he also arrives at his magnificent view of nature through scientific means, which finds expression in his morphology and his theory of colors; on the other hand, however, it is also expressed by the fact that he must go beyond this view of nature, beyond this paganism. And from this perspective, consider the innermost impulse of Faust; from this perspective, consider in particular what Goethe has enshrined in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” that rebirth of the human being expressed in this “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”—and then try not to remain superficial, but to penetrate to what lived in Goethe’s mind—then the thought will occur to you: Here, within a human soul, lives a new Christ impulse, a new impulse for the transformation of humanity, as it came about through the Mystery of Golgotha—a striving toward a new understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha. For the entire “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” is imbued with a spirit of anticipation.

[ 26 ] Just as Plato occupies a certain place in Greek culture, so does Goethe within the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The question: “Where does Goethe stand?” leads us to say: Just as Plato, with his definition of the divine as the good, pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha for the understanding of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, so Goethe, with the sayings that resound from the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” pointed toward a renewed understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that must yet come. That is the answer to the question: Where does Goethe stand?

[ 27 ] How can one conceive of human history in a spiritualized way, right up to the present day? The external, historical view, which merely lists people and events one after another, actually says nothing that could truly touch people inwardly. But if one looks at the inner essence of these events, one sees how, at the very same point in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch where Plato stood for the fourth, Goethe now stands; then the spiritual wave that has swept through the Western world right up to the present day is revealed. In the present day, history is generally viewed in a rather unspiritual way by contemporary humanity. Goetheanism is at the same time a mood of anticipation for a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 28 ] There is no other way to gain an understanding of what happened at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century than by attempting, in this way, to penetrate to the heart of human history. One can evoke certain uplifting ideas in people’s hearts today by attempting to revive certain feelings that were stirred in ancient paganism—for example, when people looked up to the image of the great Isis of Egyptian culture. But certainly, even in Plato’s time, the ideas about the Egyptian Isis—as the impulse that reigns throughout all of nature—resonated with people. When we hear about Isis today, if we do not strive with all our might to revive what people felt in that era, it remains merely words. To be honest, it remains merely words. If one does not let oneself be intoxicated by the sounds of the words, it remains merely words; it does not touch the heart. What can modern man do if he wishes to awaken within himself the same ideas that were awakened in the human heart in antiquity when Isis was spoken of? Modern man can allow Goethe’s prose hymn on nature to take effect upon him. There, modern humanity is addressed in the same way that ancient humanity was addressed when Isis was spoken of. There, “what resounded from the mysterious depths of the universe when Isis was spoken of to the people of antiquity” also resounds directly. |

[ 29 ] And let us consider how we do wrong—wrong to the development of the world and wrong to our own hearts—when we refuse to listen in this way, when we prefer to adopt, purely on the surface because it carries an ancient aura, the manner in which the ancients spoke of Isis. When the ancients spoke of Isis, an ancient, sacred mystery resounded from all of it. And the language of our time may speak of that same mystery—truly and genuinely as deeply as it came from the lips of the Egyptian priests when they sang of Isis. We must not fail to recognize when depth reigns in the new spiritual life. Then we will once again truly feel like human beings, provided we do not become prosaic in our sensibilities, provided the sacred resounds within us in the way it seeks to resound from the newer impulse of historical development. And then, when we prepare ourselves—I would say, in a pagan sense—for something like the prose hymn, then we will immerse ourselves in all those expansions of the soul that may come over us, in all the deepening of the soul that becomes tangible within us, in all the exaltations of the soul that we come to feel, we will immerse ourselves in something akin to certain scenes from Faust or the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” where we find, expressed in the most modern of all human beings, the expectant mood of a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 30 ] This is something I wanted to suggest to you regarding a “rediscovery” of Goethe and Goetheanism—not merely in the way this is often done, but rather a rediscovery that finds the spirit of Goethe in the entire course of human development, leading to an understanding of the immediate present, to draw strength from those impulses we need if we truly wish to position ourselves within the present and the near future—into which, as I have often emphasized, we must step not in a state of slumber but with full awareness, if we do not wish to fall short of the course of human development. More on this tomorrow.