The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I spoke to you about that error that has crept into our modern spiritual life and which even today is properly recognized by only a few people. You have probably sensed from these discussions that, precisely by pointing out this error, we are at a very important juncture in spiritual scientific considerations. It will be absolutely necessary for the flourishing development of humanity’s spiritual life that this point be clearly understood. I have pointed out to you cultural works—such as Milton’s Paradise Lost or Klopstock’s Messiah—that have truly sprung from the general popular thinking of the past centuries. But I have also pointed out to you how, precisely in these cultural works—which are outstanding in terms of their artistic and general spiritual qualities—it is evident what dangers the human soul faces if one fails to recognize how impossible it is for a person to arrive at a true concept of God—and thus also a concept of Christ—that is necessary for them, if they merely imagine that the structure of the world, including the spiritual, is to be understood in terms of a duality. Precisely by distinguishing, as it were, only this duality—good on the one hand, evil on the other—people fell into the error of classifying as evil everything that we have had to designate over time as the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. But people failed to recognize that they had conflated two world elements into one. As a result, they effectively shifted the Luciferic elements over to the side of the Good; in other words, they believed they were worshiping the Divine, recognizing the Divine, and speaking of the Divine by name, yet they were mixing the Luciferic element into this Divine. Consequently, it has become so difficult for our time to arrive at a pure concept of the Divine and a pure concept of the Christ impulse in the development of humanity and the world. Through the culture of the centuries, and because of the recognition of this duality, we have become accustomed to speaking, on the one hand, of the soul, and on the other, of the physical or corporeal. And we have lost the connection between those concepts conveyed to us by the soul-spiritual realm and those conveyed to us by the physical realm. Today, when we speak of thinking, willing, the mind, and feeling—and our school psychology does this most of all—we are speaking of little more than the sounds of words. We do not arrive at any real, inner, meaningful concepts of this spiritual element. And on the other hand, we speak of a de-spiritualized material world, of a soulless material world, and we tap, as it were, on this outer, hard, stony, soulless material world and cannot build a bridge from it to the spiritual realm.

[ 2 ] The spiritual—which is everywhere—and the physical—which is at the same time spiritual—have broken apart into two elements. Mere theories cannot build such a bridge between the physical and the spiritual. And since we cannot do so, our entire scientific thinking, above all, has taken on this character of a dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual or psychological. One might say: On the one hand, the various creeds have fallen into the trap of pointing to a spiritual realm without being able to explain how this spiritual realm directly intervenes in the physical-bodily realm, how it is creatively active within it; on the other hand, however, a soulless form of knowledge today, a soulless view of nature regards the physical in such a way that it cannot, anywhere, see through the physical processes to the spiritual-psychic forces at work within them. Anyone who, from this perspective, surveys the scientific worldview as it developed throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century will have to admit: Everything that presents itself to us here appears to be a consequence of what has just been characterized. But above all, we must first establish the truth—which can already be deduced from the manifold premises we have discussed at length here—before we can fully grasp the delusion that today obscures the truth. Today people speak of the human being as a unified entity, regardless of whether they are referring to the soul or the body. They speak of the soul as a unified entity; they speak of the body as a unified entity. And yet, as you will have seen from our considerations, what prevails above all in the human being is the great contrast—which I have already hinted at—between everything that constitutes the head formation and everything else—we will not break this down further now; you know it can be broken down further, but we will summarize it as a single category for now—that which the human being carries within themselves apart from their head formation. (The right side of the drawing, see § 30, was sketched.) One asks about the development of the human being. One must ask in a completely different way about the development of the human being with regard to the formation of the head, and about the development of the human being with regard to the rest of the physical form.

[ 3 ] If we consider the formation of the human head—let us initially view it in purely physical terms—insofar as this formation contains the organism for sensory perception, thinking, or imagination, then we must indeed look far back into the cosmic evolution of the human being. Then we must tell ourselves: What finds its expression today in the structure of the human head has gradually developed and been transformed. It developed through the ancient Saturn stage, through the ancient Sun stage, through the ancient Moon stage, and was then further developed during the Earth era. But this is not the case with what constitutes the other physical aspects of the human being. It would be entirely wrong to seek a single, unified history of development for the whole human being. We can say (as will be further illustrated): The structure of the head points back to the preceding planetary stages of our Earth’s formation: the Lunar stage, the Solar stage, and the Saturn stage. That which has most recently found its direct culmination in the human head goes back to a long process of development. But if we add everything else that belongs to the human being, we must not go back as far as the Saturn stage; rather, we must say: What the human being carries within themselves besides their head—insofar as it pertains to the formation of the chest—we can trace back at most to the planetary Moon epoch (drawing: vertical dividing line); the limbs, however, did not develop in humans until the Earth formation period.

[ 4 ] We can only truly understand human beings if we make a comparative statement such as the following. But please, take this as a comparison. You can very easily imagine, hypothetically, that through certain organic conditions in the cosmos, through certain adaptive processes combined with internal growth processes, human beings might develop new limbs. You would then not trace the entire human form back to its earlier stages of development, but you would say: Human beings, insofar as they have developed, must be traced back; but at a certain point in time, this or that limb first developed. The fact that we are tempted not to think this way with regard to the head and the rest of the human body stems solely from the fact that, purely in terms of external size, the rest of the human body is larger than the head. The truth, however, is that the formation of the head goes back the farthest, and that the formation of the rest of the body represents later developments. If one speaks at all of a connection between human beings and the animal world in terms of evolution, then one can only say: What is present in the human head can be traced back to an earlier animal form. The human head is a transformed animal form—a very strongly transformed animal form.

[ 5 ] Outwardly, though under entirely different physical conditions, human beings had an animal form long before any animals existed. Animals later evolved into human beings. But that which had an animal form in human beings has today become the human head. And that which is attached to the head—the rest of the organism—was only attached to the head simultaneously with the evolution of animals; it therefore has nothing to do with actual animal descent. So we must actually say: The part of the human being that at first glance appears to be the noblest—the head—points us back to animality; in this respect, human beings themselves once had a kind of animal form. But what we otherwise carry within us was acquired alongside the evolution of the animals as, so to speak, an organic appendage to the head in the course of cosmic evolution.

[ 6 ] Now, in a certain sense, the head has become our organ of thought. Our organ of thought has thus become precisely that part which has an animal origin, if we may put it that way. It does, however, have a peculiar animal origin. If you take a human head today, you may not immediately see, from an anatomical perspective, what points back to an animal form. But upon closer inspection, if you know how to interpret the shape of the head’s organs correctly, you will recognize that they are transformed animal organs.

[ 7 ] Now, when we consider this, we must also mention that the transformation of the human head from its animal state came about because a backward-directed development had already taken hold within that head. That which was full of living life in earlier stages of development is already in the process of dying off in the human head; it is undergoing a retrograde development in the human head. I once said: If we as human beings were nothing but a head, we could never actually live; we would, in essence, have to be dying constantly, for the organic connection of the human head—through the head’s own forces—is not a process of life, but a process of dying. What is in the head is constantly being revitalized by the rest of the organism. The fact that the head also participates in the general life of the organism is due to the rest of the organism’s life. If the head could rely solely on the forces for which it is organized—the powers of sensory perception and the powers of imagination—then the head would be constantly dying off. The head has a constant tendency to die; it must be continually revitalized. And when we think, when we perceive through our senses, there is no ascending life process taking place in our head—in our nervous system as a whole and its connection to the sense organs—that corresponds to growth or the like; for then we would only be able to sleep, to be plunged into a deep sleep, and we would never be able to think clearly. It is only because death constantly passes through our head, because there is a constant process of regression, because the organic processes are constantly being reversed, that thinking and sensory perception take place in our head.

[ 8 ] Anyone who attempts to explain thinking or sensory perception in a materialistic way based on brain processes simply has no idea what processes are actually taking place; they believe that processes are occurring there that can be compared to organic growth or the like. That is not the case. What occurs in parallel with sensory perception and imagination are processes of decay, processes of erosion, and processes of destruction. The organic, the material, must first be eroded, must first be destroyed; only then does the thought process rise above the organic process of destruction.

[ 9 ] Today, humanity perceives these things in such a way that it attempts to understand their nature from an external perspective. People think and perceive with their senses, but they know nothing of what is happening in parallel within their own organism; this remains entirely in their unconscious. Only through the processes I have described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? can one gradually ascend to a kind of knowledge that does not dwell merely in what is almost exclusively referred to by the term “the soul”—that is, in sensory perception and thinking. In a development of this kind that the soul undergoes, it can, on the one hand, devote itself to thinking and sensory perception while simultaneously perceiving what is happening in the brain. Here one does not perceive what one might otherwise experience as a growth process; rather, one perceives a process of breakdown that must constantly be balanced out by the rest of the organism.

[ 10 ] This is the tragic consequence of a true understanding of our brain’s main activity. The clairvoyant cannot take pleasure, for example, in the flourishing of the brain’s organic processes when he thinks or perceives through the senses; rather, he must come to terms with a process of destruction. But they must also come to terms with the fact that the materialist assumes that processes take place in the human head which are precisely excluded when a person thinks or perceives through the senses. Materialism must assume precisely the opposite of what is actually true.

[ 11 ] So, in the case of the human head, we are dealing with a development that, while emerging from the animal realm, is now already characterized by a regressive development—a process of decay. Our other human organism, however, is undergoing an ascending development. We must not assume that this other human organism has no part in the soul-spiritual realm and its experience within the human being. Not only is blood continually sent up from the rest of the organism to the head, but those soul-spiritual thought-forms from which the world is woven—and from which our organism is also woven—are also continually rising into the blood. Human beings today, in their normal state, do not yet perceive these soul-spiritual thought-forms, but we have entered an age in which human beings must begin to perceive the thought-forms that arise from their own being. As you know, we do not sleep only from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up; with a part of our being, we sleep throughout the entire day. We are actually only awake in terms of our thinking, imagining, and sensory perception. We dream in terms of our emotional life; we are completely asleep in terms of our life of the will. For of what we will, we are aware only of the thoughts and ideas, not of the process of the will itself. What the will actually does takes place for our consciousness just as unconsciously as the life of sleep from falling asleep to waking up. But when we ask: By what paths alone can knowledge of the truly divine reach human beings? — then we cannot point to the path through the head, to the path through sensory perception and through thinking; rather, we can only point to the path that runs through the rest of our organism. And the great, mighty mystery lies in the fact that human beings developed their head over a long evolutionary sequence, that what constitutes the rest of their organism was added later, that the head has already begun a process of regression, but that what human beings can perceive as their divine nature must speak to them through the rest of their organism, not through the head. For it is important to be clear about this: At first, only the Luciferic beings spoke to human beings through the head. And we can say: The rest of the organism was created for human beings in addition to their head so that their gods could speak to them. The Bible does not begin with: “And God sent a ray of light to the human being, and he became a living soul”—but rather: “God breathed the breath of life into the human being, and he became a living soul.”—Here it is correctly recognized that the divine impulse came to the human being through an activity not centered in the head.

[ 12 ] From this, however, it will also be clear to you that, at first, this divine impulse could only reach human beings through a kind of unconscious clairvoyance, or at least through an understanding of what was conveyed through unconscious clairvoyance. If you look at the Old Testament in our Bible, you will find—as we know from other considerations—that it is the result of unconscious clairvoyance. Those who contributed to the creation of the Old Testament were also aware of this. I cannot describe the origins of the Old Testament to you here today, but I would like to point out to you how often we have reflected on such matters—for you will find throughout the teachings of the ancient Hebrew people a consistent awareness that their God spoke to them not through direct sensory perceptions, not through ordinary thinking, not through anything for which the mind serves as the mediator, but that their God spoke to them through dreams—by which they meant not ordinary dreams, but dreams imbued with reality—and that God spoke to them through such clairvoyant moments as to Moses from the burning bush and the like. And when the initiates of that ancient time were asked how they imagined the divine calls to them came, they said: The Lord, whose name is unpronounceable, speaks to us, but he speaks to us through his face. — And they called the face of their God “Michael,” that spiritual power which we count among the hierarchy of the Archangels. They perceived their God as remaining unknown even to the clairvoyant, hidden behind all appearances. But when the clairvoyant, through the inner state of his soul, rose up to his God, Michael spoke to him. But this Michael spoke only when people were able to enter a state different from the ordinary state of consciousness—when they were able to enter a state of a certain clairvoyance through which that which otherwise only creates and lives within the human being—either from falling asleep until waking up, or through the will that remains subconscious—which is actually also asleep, even when we are awake during the day.

[ 13 ] And so, in the ancient Hebrew esoteric teachings, the Yahweh Revelation was called the Revelation of the Night, and the Yahweh Revelation—as perceived through the Michael Revelation—was regarded as the Revelation of the Night. On the one hand, people looked into the world to see what it could offer them through sensory perception and human rational thought, and said to themselves: In this way, insights and knowledge come to human beings—knowledge that initially does not contain the divine. But when a person evolves from this state of consciousness to another, then the face of God, Michael, speaks to them, and reveals to him the true mysteries connected with the human being, reveals to him that which builds a bridge between humanity and those powers that cannot be perceived in the outer sensory world, that cannot be conceived by the intellect bound to the brain.

[ 14 ] So one must say: In pre-Christian times, people lived in such a way that they could look, on the one hand, to sensory knowledge—which served as a guide for their earthly activities—and, on the other hand, to that knowledge which human beings would only come to possess—they did not possess it — for ordinary consciousness, if that consciousness were to remain awake while it sleeps between falling asleep and waking up. It was known that when a person is awake, they are surrounded by spiritual beings. And these spiritual beings are not their creative beings—as was thought in the Old Testament during the time from which the Old Testament originates—these beings are the Luciferic beings. The beings who were perceived as the creative-divine ones in relation to humanity were those who acted upon the human being from the moment of falling asleep until waking, or upon those parts of the human being that also sleep during the waking hours of the day. The Ruler of the Night—as the god Yahweh was called in the time from which the Old Testament originates—and the servant of the Ruler of the Night—who was said to be the face of Yahweh—was Michael. And people thought of Michael whenever they referred to all the prophetic inspirations through which they understood more than what could be gained through knowledge of the sensory world.

[ 15 ] And what consciousness lies behind all of this? Behind all of this lies the consciousness that has grown out of that sphere of being in which the powers surrounding Yahweh dwell, while the formation of the human head is surrounded by Luciferic essence. It was a mystery carried through all the ancient temples—and one that brought one truly close to the truth—that, because the human head protrudes from the human organism, human beings have turned toward the Luciferic beings through their heads. It was known, so to speak, that just as the head protrudes from the human organism, so too does Lucifer protrude from the human organism. The power that has guided the human head from the animal realm to its present form is a Luciferic power. And the power that human beings are meant to perceive as divine must flow upward from the state of sleep of the rest of the organism into the human head. Such was the knowledge available to human beings in pre-Christian times.

[ 16 ] Then the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth. And we know, of course, that the Mystery of Golgotha signifies a union of a super-earthly being with human earthly evolution through the body of Jesus of Nazareth—a union such that, through the death on Golgotha, this being, whom we call the Christ Being, became united with the human earthly being. What did this accomplish in the Earth’s evolution? Indeed, it was only through this that the Earth’s evolution truly acquired its purpose. Otherwise, the Earth would have no purpose if human beings on this Earth were to develop, standing there with their senses and their intellect—which is bound to the head and has a Luciferic origin—perceiving the outer earthly world and the world of light streaming onto the Earth from the sun and the stars, yet having to remain in a state of sleep in order to perceive the Divine. The Earth would never thereby find its purpose, for the waking human belongs to the Earth. The sleeping human is initially unaware of his connection to earthly existence. Through the fact that the Christ Being dwelt in a human body that had passed through death, something like a jolt has taken place within the Earth’s evolution. Everything in this earthly evolution has taken on a new meaning. The possibility has initially emerged that human beings will gradually become capable of recognizing their creative, divine powers even during the day, during ordinary wakefulness—that is, in the ordinary state of consciousness. Today, only error prevails regarding this, simply because the time that has elapsed since the Mystery of Golgotha has not yet been sufficient to lead human beings to look, even while awake during the day, into that world into which the prophets of the Old Testament were able to look in the times they perceived as permeated by revelations from their Ruler of the Night, Yahweh, and his face, Michael. A transitional period was necessary. But with the passing of the 19th century—all Eastern wisdom points to the importance of this passing of the 19th century, though from a completely different perspective—the time has come when people must recognize that something has been fulfilled that was not fulfilled before, when people must recognize: Now the capacity lies latent within them; now the capacity for awakening has ripened within them to see, through the revelation of the day, that which was previously conveyed only in the night revelation through Michael.

[ 17 ] But this had to be preceded by a great error—a “night of enlightenment,” so to speak. I have often said that I do not at all agree with those who always claim that our time is a transitional era. I know full well that every age is a transitional era. But I do not wish to dwell on such formally abstract definitions, for what matters is specifying in what the transition of a particular age consists. The transition in our time consists in the fact that people must recognize: what was formerly only night-time knowledge must now come through day-time knowledge. In other words: Michael was the Revealer through the night and is to become, in our time, the Revealer during the day. Michael is to be transformed from a spirit of the night into a spirit of the day. For him, the Mystery of Golgotha signifies the transformation from a spirit of the night into a spirit of the day.

[ 18 ] But for this insight—which was to gain ground among people more quickly than we believe today—to emerge, it had to be preceded by an even greater error, the greatest conceivable error that was actually possible in human development, even though it is still regarded in many circles today as a particularly important and essential truth. The origin of the human head has been completely veiled from modern humanity; the Luciferic spirituality connected with the human head has been completely veiled. As I said, human beings were also regarded as a unity in the physical sense. People asked about human ancestry, and the answer given was that human beings are descended from the animal kingdom, whereas in truth only that which is Luciferic in human beings is descended from the animal kingdom. But that through which his divine creators once spoke to him from his state of sleep—that arose only after the animals had come into being—as the beginning of the human head. Everything about the human being has been lumped together, and people speak of the human being’s descent from the animal kingdom. This is something like a “punishment of knowledge” that has entered humanity, though I use the word “punishment” in a somewhat reinterpreted sense.

[ 19 ] Where, then, does this tendency actually come from—the idea that humans invented the notion that they are descended from animals, when the true process is the one we initially described regarding the origin of the head and the rest of the organism? What inspired humans to create the myth that the whole human being is descended from the animal realm?

[ 20 ] You see, in the interval that has elapsed between the Mystery of Golgotha and our own day—an interval that, in a certain sense, served as a preparation for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha—during this time, when the old pagan wisdom, through which one initially sought to grasp Christianity, had receded, and in which the new spiritual insight was not yet fully mature—during this time, the Ahrimanic element gradually crept into human evolution. And because people failed to recognize the Luciferic element in the human head, they were also unable to recognize the Ahrimanic element—with which the Divine is in conflict—in the rest of the human organism. And so arose the purely Ahrimanic notion that human beings are descended from the “animal kingdom.”

[ 21 ] The idea that human beings are descended from the animal kingdom is an Ahrimanic inspiration. This science is purely Ahrimanic in character. The delusion that human beings are descended from the animal kingdom stems from the obscuring of that wisdom which points out how the human head is a Luciferic formation. Because people could no longer perceive the one aspect correctly—namely, the origin of the human head—they also failed to perceive the other aspect correctly. And so the notion that the human being as a whole is related to the animal kingdom crept into human perception. And so what has, in essence, permeated an entire worldview in the recent development of civilization also crept into the conception of the human being: the human head was elevated to the noblest part, while the other was set in opposition to it, just as one sets good and evil in the world, heaven and hell—a duality instead of a trinity. In truth, one should have known that what human beings initially attain in the world through their head is indeed owed to the wisdom of the world—but to Luciferic wisdom—and that this Luciferic wisdom must first be gradually permeated by other elements.

[ 22 ] The spiritual power that—after human evolution had passed through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon phases and the Earth phase had begun—incorporated the Luciferic being into the structure of the human head is the Michael power. “And he cast his opposing spirits down to Earth”—that is to say: Through this casting down of the Luciferic spirits opposed to Michael, human beings were first imbued with their reason, with that which springs from the human head.

[ 23 ] Thus it was Michael who sent his adversaries to humankind, so that humankind might first acquire reason by assimilating this adversarial, this Luciferic element. Then the Mystery of Golgotha entered the course of human development. The Christ Being passed through the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ Being united with the development of humanity.

[ 24 ] The period of preparation has come to an end. Michael himself has participated in the results of the Mystery of Golgotha in the supersensible worlds. Since the last third of the 19th century, Michael has held a very special position within human evolution. The first thing that must come about through a correct understanding of this relationship between human beings and Michael is that we gain insight into such mysteries as those we are attempting to present today, for example, with regard to the human head and the rest of the human organism.

[ 25 ] The essential point must be that people come to realize: Because they have failed to recognize the true origin of the human head, they could only fall into delusion regarding the origin of the whole human being. Because they did not want to imagine that the Luciferic formation had first taken hold in the human head, people fell into the delusion that whatever is connected with the human head could be traced back to the same origin as the rest of the human being. Humanity must see through these mysteries. Humanity must come to the point where it can boldly and courageously face the realization that, from within itself, by grasping new divine mysteries, it has the potential to improve upon all that can be given to it through mere intellectual understanding of the head, through mere human, earthly wisdom or cleverness. And first of all, it must be possible to correct the great error that must have preceded the reversal—the error that lies in the materialistic interpretation of the theory of evolution regarding the origin of the entire human being from the animal kingdom.

[ 26 ] Only this will be the way to once again arrive at the possibility of not seeing in this human being, as he stands before us, on the one hand merely a spiritual-soul aspect that simply dwells in a body, nor, on the other hand, a soulless physical being, but to perceive the concrete-spiritual that is at work—albeit in a Luciferic manner—on the human head, and the concrete-divine-spiritual that is at work on the whole human being, which, however, encounters an adversary in the Ahrimanic nature found in the organism outside the head.

[ 27 ] In terms of imagination, we can point to how the Luciferic element was incorporated into the human being through the Michael impulse; through that which Michael has become, the Ahrimanic element must now in turn be taken away from the human being. In our external science today, our consciousness perceives the human being as if what we recognize through anatomy, physiology, and so on—or what we observe in the human being before us through external sensory observation—were the truth. We must become capable of viewing the human being in such a way that we see, in every fiber of his being, the spiritual—the concrete-spiritual essence—along with the physical. We must be aware that the blood flowing through a living human being is not the same as what we let drip out; rather, this blood flowing through a living human being is imbued with spirit in a special way. But we must come to know the spirit that pulses through the blood. We must come to know the spirit that pulsates through the nervous system even when the nervous system is in a phase of decay, and so on. We must be able to perceive the spiritual element in every single manifestation of life.

[ 28 ] Michael is the spirit of strength. By entering into human development, he must enable us not to have, on the one hand, abstract spirituality, and on the other, materiality—which we tap into, which we cut through, and of which we have no idea that it is, in essence, merely an outer form of manifestation of the spiritual as well— Michael must permeate us as the powerful force that can see through the material world by simultaneously perceiving the spiritual within it, so that the Spirit is seen everywhere in the material world. Reference was made to an ancient stage of human consciousness, when it was said: In those ancient times, the Word lived in a spiritual sense, but the Word became flesh and dwelt among us—as the Evangelist puts it. The Word united with the flesh, and the Michael Revelation preceded this. All of these are processes in human consciousness to which reference is being made here. The reverse process must begin—this reverse process, which consists in adding another word to the evangelist’s words. Within our consciousness, the power must arise to see how human beings take in that which, through the Christ impulse, has united with the Earth from the spiritual worlds and must connect with humanity, so that humanity does not perish along with the Earth. We must see how human beings take in the spiritual not only into their heads but into their whole being, how they become completely permeated by the spiritual. Only the Christ impulse can help with this. But the interpretation of the Christ impulse through the Michael impulse must also help. Then it will be possible to add to the words of the evangelist: “And the time must come when the flesh once again becomes the Word and learns to dwell in the realm of the Word.”

[ 29 ] It is not an invention of some later editor that the Gospels conclude by stating that much has been omitted. This also points to that which can only be revealed to humanity little by little. Anyone who regards the Gospels as if they must remain exactly as they are and must not be touched does not understand them well. They must be interpreted according to the words of Christ Jesus; I have always told you: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” — But this means: I have not only revealed Myself to you in the days when the Gospels were written; I will speak to you forever through My Day Spirit Michael whenever you seek the path to Me. Through the ongoing revelation of Christ, you will be able to add to the Gospels what cannot be known in the Gospel of the first millennium, but can be known in the Gospel of the second millennium—and to which new insights can always be added in the millennia to come. — For just as true as what is written in the Gospel—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”—it is equally true that we must add to the revelation: and human flesh must once again be spiritualized so that it may become capable of dwelling in the Kingdom of the Word, to behold the divine mysteries. — The Incarnation of the Word is the first Michael Revelation; the spiritualization of the flesh must be the second Michael Revelation.