The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Whenever I have spoken at one of the annual celebrations in recent years—whether a Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost celebration— I have had to point out that, especially on such occasions, we currently have no right to celebrate in the traditional way—to, so to speak, forget all the pain and suffering of our time and, on such days, to remember only the greatest event that has taken place in the development of the Earth. Especially on the foundation of that spiritual worldview on which we stand, we have an obligation to allow everything—all the signs of decline that are gripping humanity in today’s cultural world—to flow in right up to the Christmas tree. Today we have a veritable obligation to take the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts and souls in such a way that we do not overlook the terrible decline that has gripped so-called civilized humanity.

[ 2 ] For on this very day, it is up to us to raise the question: Has not the very idea of Christmas already been subject to the forces of general decline? When we speak of Christmas today, do we still feel what a person is meant to feel when they lift their thoughts and feelings up to this Christian celebration? Does humanity in general sense the true meaning of the entire mystery of Golgotha playing out within human evolution? Today we light our Christmas trees; we speak in familiar phrases and words about what is connected with the Christmas festival, yet all too often we avoid opening our eyes fully and fully awakening our consciousness to the necessity of saying to ourselves: There is a decline; where are you, Christ-force, that you may truly help us so that we can bring about a new dawn? For it should have become clear to you from the reflections on spiritual worldview that have been made in our circles over the decades that only with the help of the Christ-force will it be possible to once again imbue our decaying culture with the impulse that can lead it to a new ascent.

[ 3 ] These days, one often finds oneself thinking of people who, around the middle of the 19th century or toward the last third of that century, spoke differently—out of a certain materialistic mindset—than many people do today, yet who spoke more honestly than the majority of people do today. Today I would like to remind you of a rather materialistically minded figure, the Swabian David Friedrich Strauss. As you know, David Friedrich Strauss’s The Old and the New Faith is, in a sense, a kind of Bible of materialism. Among the questions David Friedrich Strauss poses in this book is this one: Can we still be Christians? — David Friedrich Strauss provides an answer. This answer has the peculiarity of being born entirely out of a purely materialistic mindset, yet at the same time it has the peculiarity of being honest. David Friedrich Strauss conceives the idea of a world structure built solely on materialistic physical laws, and he places human beings within this world order in such a way that the human essence, too, contains nothing other than physical laws. And based on this conviction of his, he answers the question: “Can we still be Christians?”—with an honest “No.” For those who share this kind of scientific worldview—as represented by David Friedrich Strauss out of a sense of the times—cannot be Christians. Thus, David Friedrich Strauss’s “no” conveys a fateful yet thoroughly honest attitude, and one sometimes has the feeling today: If only the so-called official representatives of one religious denomination or another could be as honest as David Friedrich Strauss! If only they could realize that, while they use the name of Christ, they are in fact working against Christianity!

[ 4 ] We must not, today, succumb to the temptation to turn a blind eye to the most essential and important phenomena of the present. It may not seem very Christmassy to some, but to me it seems quite Christmassy when I mention a certain experience I had through a kind of spiritual inquiry into something immediate and real in the present.

[ 5 ] You know, those people who—for the most part, especially in Central Europe—are to blame—insofar as people can be called to blame for these things—for the terrible circumstances into which we have sailed; these people—what are they doing now that disaster has befallen Europe? They’re writing books! And so we have books by a wide variety of people. We have a book by Tirpitz, we have a book by Ludendorff, and I could name many others; I’ll limit myself to these two. You see, one can conduct the following experiment with the help of spiritual science; one can—but entirely in the spirit of spiritual science—ask oneself the question: What kind of thought patterns are expressed in the books by Tirpitz, Ludendorff, and their ilk? I have tried to examine this question conscientiously from all angles, asking myself: What are the thought patterns of these men, upon whom so much of Central Europe’s fate depends? If one does not proceed abstractly but delves into the concrete aspects of such matters, then one must make comparisons; and so a comparison presented itself to me when I asked: When, roughly speaking, were such thought forms—as they are now embodied by Tirpitz and Ludendorff—developed in Europe according to the normal course of development? And upon careful examination of the facts, it becomes clear that people thought in this way around the time of the Roman Caesar. Fundamentally, there is no difference between Julius Caesar’s way of thinking and living—let us say, in his Gallic War—and the way Tirpitz and Ludendorff shape their thoughts. But this means that these people are immersed in a life of thought that is completely untouched by Christianity, for Julius Caesar lived before the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. And everything these people may occasionally utter when they mention the name of Jesus Christ is nothing but a hollow lie, for their inner life has developed in such a way that they have nothing to do with concrete Christianity.

[ 6 ] We know from a wide range of observations that when something develops in its own time, it is, in essence, good for humanity. It is a different matter when it remains stagnant and emerges later; if this is the case—that is, if the Caesar-like principle still plays a role in the 20th century—then the Caesar-like principle has been transformed into the Luciferic. For what was actually meant to have taken effect in another era becomes, when it remains stagnant, Luciferic; that is, after all, the very essence of the Luciferic.

[ 7 ] And now we ask again: How is it possible that those individuals whom fate has destined to assume leadership positions—how is it possible that these individuals have remained so far behind in their spiritual development? If we are to answer this question, we must turn our gaze to those who purport to permeate spiritual life with the Christ impulse, but who in fact work in an antichristian sense. We must turn our gaze to many official representatives of religious denominations who purport to speak from the Gospels, but who oppose everything that truly seeks to proclaim the living Christ in our time. Today, the most anti-Christian people are often found among pastors and preachers of the so-called Christian denominations. Anyone who examines works such as Adolf Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity—a book considered by many to be authoritative—will find the answer to such a question. Adolf Harnack wrote The Essence of Christianity. If one were to strike out the name “Christ” in this book and replace it with the name of a general, unknown God who governs and permeates nature just as He does human life—if one were to strike out the name “Christ” and substitute the Old Testament name “Yahweh” in its place—then the book would become truer than it is, for only then would it make sense. The fact is that Adolf Harnack knows nothing of the true nature of Christ, that he has absolutely no idea of the true nature of Christ, that he worships a general, undefined god and then attaches the name of Christ to that general, undefined god. And who is this Adolf Harnack? This Adolf Harnack was the leading theologian for all those circles that paved the way for the spiritual movement from which Tirpitz, Ludendorff, and others also emerged! Because no true revelation of Christ has come from the representatives of the confessions, there is no such sense of the true revelation of Christ in the events of the present day, nor in the people connected with these events. For thousands and millions of people today, it makes no sense at all when they speak of the Christmas festival; for they do not know the essence of Christ Jesus in the sense that is necessary for our time. We must look at such things if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the causes behind the decline of the events of our time and of human life within these events.

[ 8 ] From this place, I have often spoken to you about that important event that took place in the last third of the 19th century—the event through which a special relationship was formed between the Archangelic Power, which we refer to as the Archangelic Power of Michael, and the destiny of humanity. I have drawn your attention to the fact that, since November 1879, Michael has, so to speak, had to serve as the regent for all those who wish to channel the right forces to humanity for its prosperous progress.

[ 9 ] In our time, when one alludes to something like this, one is pointing to two things: first, an objective fact; and second, how this objective fact relates to everything that people wish to take into their will and consciousness. The objective fact is simply that in November 1879, beyond the sphere of the sensory world—in the supersensible realm—something took place that can be expressed as follows: Michael has gained the power, when people come to meet him with all that lives in their souls, to permeate them so deeply with his power that they can transform the old materialistic power of the intellect—which had grown so strong in humanity up to that point—into spiritual power of the intellect, into a spiritual faculty of understanding. That is the objective fact; it has taken place. We can say that Michael has entered into a different relationship with humanity than the one he had previously, since November 1879. But it is necessary to serve Michael. What I mean by this will become clearest when I explain the following to you.

[ 10 ] You know, before the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled on Earth, the Old Testament Jews looked up to their Yahweh or Jehovah. Those among the Jewish priesthood who looked to Yahweh with full awareness knew that they could not approach Yahweh directly through their human understanding. Even the name was considered unpronounceable, and when the name was to be spoken, only a sign was made—one similar to certain sequences of signs that we explore through our eurythmy. But this priesthood was also clearly aware that human beings could approach Yahweh through Michael. This priesthood called Michael the face of Yahweh or Jehovah. Just as we come to know a person when we look into their face—just as we infer the gentleness of their soul from the gentleness of their face, and their character from the way they look at us— so too did the Old Testament priesthood wish to infer, from what crept into the soul in the form of atavistic visions in dreams—from the face of Yahweh, from Michael—the nature of Yahweh, whom humanity was, after all, unable to reach. This priesthood held the correct view of Michael and Yahweh or Jehovah; it held the correct view of Michael because it was aware that when the people of that time turned to Michael, they would find through Michael the very power—the power of Yahweh or Jehovah—that it was fitting for the people of that time to seek.

[ 11 ] Other spiritual rulers of humanity have since taken Michael’s place; but since November 1879, Michael has reappeared, and he can be activated in the life of the human soul if one seeks the paths to him. And these paths today are the paths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. One might just as well speak of the “paths of Michael” as one might speak of “the paths of spiritual scientific knowledge.” But precisely since that time, when Michael entered into a relationship with human souls in this way—to once again become their immediate source of inspiration for three centuries—the demonic counterforce has also taken hold with the greatest intensity, having prepared itself beforehand. Thus a call went out through the world, which during our so-called war years—but in reality, years of horror—has become a great global delusion that now pervades the hearts and souls of human beings.

[ 12 ] What would have become of the Old Testament Jewish people if, instead of drawing near to Yahweh through Michael, they had sought to approach Yahweh directly? They would have become an intolerant, ethnocentric people, a people capable of thinking only of themselves. For Yahweh is the God who is connected to all of nature, and in the external, historical process of human becoming, He shapes His essence through the intergenerational continuity of humanity, as expressed in the life of the people. It was only because the ancient Hebrew people sought to draw near to Yahweh through Michael at that time that they were spared from becoming so nationalistically self-centered that not even the Christ Jesus could have emerged from the midst of that people. For by imbuing itself with the Michael force—as that force existed at that time—the Jewish people did not become imbued with forces that would have given rise to such strong national egoism as would have been the case had they turned directly to Yahweh or Jehovah.

[ 13 ] Today, Michael is once again the Ruler of the World, but humanity is compelled to relate to him in a new way. For now Michael is not to be the face of Yahweh, but the face of Christ Jesus. Now we are to draw closer to the Christ impulse through Michael. But in many cases, humanity has not yet brought itself to do this; humanity has atavistically preserved the old emotional qualities through which people used to approach Michael just as they did back when he was still the mediator to Yahweh. And so today, humanity still has a false relationship with Michael, and this false relationship with Michael is revealed in a characteristic manifestation.

[ 14 ] During the war years, we heard the same global lie time and again: freedom for the individual, even for the smallest nations. This attitude—which is a lie, because in this Michael era it is not groups of people but Merian individualities that matter—is nothing other than the effort to imbue every single people not with the new Michael force, but with the old force of pre-Christian times, with the Michael force of the Old Testament. As paradoxical as it sounds, there is a tendency today among the peoples of so-called civilized humanity to transform, in a Luciferic manner, that which was justified in the Old Testament Jewish people and to make it the innermost driving force of every single nation. With an Old Testament mindset, people today seek to build Polish empires, American empires, French empires, and so on. They strive to follow Michael in the same way it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when one was to find through him Yahweh, a national god. Today, through him, we are to find Christ Jesus, the divine guide of all humanity. But then we must seek feelings and ideas that have nothing to do with any human differences on earth; yet we cannot seek them on the surface—we must seek them where the human-spiritual and soul-life pulsates; that is, we must seek them through the path of spiritual science. And this is how things stand: one must resolve to seek the true Christ through spiritual science—that is, through the Michaelic path—for He can only be sought and found on the foundation of a spiritual quest for truth. Otherwise, one would be better off extinguishing all the Christmas lights, cutting down all the Christmas trees, and at least honestly admitting that one does not want any remembrance of what Christ Jesus brought into human evolution.

[ 15 ] And so, through the memoirs of people living today, a pre-Christian—that is, in our time, anti-Christian—mindset resounds; and when people considered representative, such as Wilson in the present day, make their views known, such fourteen points as he has set forth resonate with a purely Old Testament mindset, which becomes a Luciferic mindset in our time. Where does this come from? What is actually going on here?

[ 16 ] If we look back in the course of human history to a time before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find, in the ancient days of Eastern cultural development, a human personality on Earth within the culture that gave rise to today’s Chinese culture, a human personality who was the outer human embodiment of Lucifer, who at that time truly walked the earth as a human embodiment, and who was the bearer of the human light that we find in the realm of ancient pre-Christian wisdom, with the exception of Judaism. Even in Greek civilization, what flowed through the art, worldview, and statesmanship of that era was that which had originated from the Lucifer incarnation millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 17 ] We must simply be clear about the fact that everything we today call human intellect is still, as long as we have not spiritualized it, a gift from that Lucifer. We must simply not develop a philistine, bourgeois sectarian mindset: “Luciferic” is something terrible that must be cast off. If one tries to cast it off, one falls prey to it all the more; for it has simply become necessary, through millennia of human development, to inherit the legacy of the incarnated Lucifer. Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. But a time will come when, just as in the East Lucifer once incarnated in an earthly personality to prepare the way for Christianity among the pagans, so too in the West the earthly incarnation of the real Ahriman will appear. We are moving toward that time. Objectively, Ahriman will walk the earth. Just as truly as Lucifer walked the earth and Christ walked the earth objectively in a human being, Ahriman will walk the earth with immense power as an earthly force of intellect. We humans do not have the task of preventing the incarnation of Ahriman, but we do have the task of preparing humanity so that Ahriman is assessed in the right way. For Ahriman will have tasks; he will have to do one thing and another, but people will have to assess and make use of what comes into the world through Ahriman in the right way. They will only be able to do this if they can already today attune themselves in the right way to what Ahriman is already sending to Earth from the worlds beyond—so that he may one day act on Earth without being noticed. That must not be allowed to happen. Ahriman must not be allowed to operate on Earth unnoticed; we must fully recognize him in his true nature, and we must be able to oppose him with full consciousness.

[ 18 ] Now, during the days I will be lecturing here in Stuttgart, I will show you various aspects of what should be taken into account in the development of humanity up to the incarnation of Ahriman, so that when it comes, it may be properly assessed. Today I want to draw your attention to just one thing: In this regard, some contemporary interpretations of the Gospels are just as bad as the worst materialistic worldview. If today the representatives of the so-called religious societies simply take the Gospels at face value and reject every new revelation, then such devotion to the Gospels—such a way of practicing Christianity—is the best way to prepare oneself, in the Ahrimanic sense, for the earthly manifestation of Ahriman. Ahriman works most intensely through a large number of representatives of today’s so-called denominations, who disregard the truth: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” by declaring heretical everything that arises from the direct perception of the present Christ, and by clinging to the Gospels in a convenient manner—literally, but only in their own way. Humanity should be protected by wisdom from adhering to the Gospels in this way, since the four Gospels appear to contradict one another purely on the surface, as perceived by the physical intellect. And anyone today who does not advance toward a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels is spreading a false interpretation of the Gospels, for they are deceiving people about the outward contradictions that exist in the four Gospels. And deceiving people about their most important matters is precisely what best promotes the ways of Ahriman.

[ 19 ] People today have a great need to place Christ right in the middle between Ahriman and Lucifer. The power of Christ must permeate us. But as human beings, we must always seek a balance between that which, in a sense, seeks to lift us up in an enthusiastic, mystical way, and that which seeks to pull us down to earth in a materialistic, intellectual, philistine, and heavy-handed manner. At every moment we must seek a balance between that which lifts us upward in a Luciferic way and that which draws us downward in an Ahrimanic way; but it is in the very act of seeking this balance that Christ is found. And only when we strive to seek this balance can we find Christ.

[ 20 ] By a strange twist of fate, something very peculiar occurred in the recent development of humanity during the period when materialism took hold. I will refer only to two works: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Klopstock’s Messiah. In these works, the spiritual worlds are depicted as if a paradise had been lost and humanity had been cast out of it. Both Milton’s Paradise Lost and Klopstock’s Messiah operate on the basis of a duality in the world—the contrast between good and evil, the divine and the diabolical. You see, however, this is the great error of modern times: that world culture is conceived in terms of a duality, whereas it must be conceived in terms of a trinity. On the one hand are the upward-striving Luciferic forces, which approach human beings through the mystical, the dreamy, the imaginative—and, in their degeneration, also through the fantastical—and which live in human blood; the other are the Ahrimanic forces, which live in all that is dry and heavy—in the skeletal system, physiologically speaking; the Christian stands in the middle between the two; that is the third. The first is Luciferic, the second is Ahrimanic, and in the middle between the two is the Christian.

[ 21 ] What has happened in recent times? Something has happened that humanity should examine with true spiritual and intellectual fervor, for until it understands this, it will not find the true path to Christmas. Today we read Milton and Klopstock, their descriptions of the supersensible world; how do we read them? We read them in such a way that Luciferic qualities are projected everywhere onto that which one wishes to call divine. People like Klopstock and Milton seek to depict the struggle between a Luciferic force—which appears to them as the divine—and the Ahrimanic. And a large part of what modern humanity describes as its divine is merely Luciferic. But people do not recognize it in the right way, any more than they do the Ahrimanic. This still comes into play in Goethe’s Faust, where we find Mephistopheles set in opposition to the “Lord”; but even Goethe was not yet able to separate the Ahrimanic from the Luciferic. Thus, his Mephistopheles has become a jumble of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. I have already pointed this out in my little book Goethe’s Spirit. Today, one is a Goetheanist in the true sense not if, as some academics and other people of the present day do, one simply parrots what comes verbatim from Goethe, but if one forges a path toward Goethe in such a way that one can also understand what had to change in him, especially when following his worldview beyond the year 1832; if we speak today not of a Goethe of the year 1832, but of a Goethe of the year 1919—and soon to be 1920. But we must find the way to calmly admit to ourselves that there is much that is Luciferic in what the materialistic centuries have called their “divine,” that much of what people today use to spread religion consists only of words carried into humanity on the wings of the Luciferic. Only when people once again recognize the dualism between the Luciferic—which seeks to lift them up— and the Ahrimanic, which seeks to lead them downward, to the true Christian, only then will people once again stand, in the true sense, before the Christmas event—that event meant to remind us how that which actually gives the Earth meaning, a true meaning, has been drawn into the development of humanity.

[ 22 ] These days, one sometimes can’t help but think of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci once painted his great masterpiece in Milan—the one you know, The Last Supper, with Christ surrounded by his apostles. He worked on this painting for a long time—two decades. He wanted to include so much in it. He couldn’t finish it because he kept trying to paint the figure of Judas just right. Now, under the municipal administration of Milan, the abbot of the monastery for which the painting was being created was his immediate superior; and when a new abbot arrived—one who was not as lenient as the old one, but rather stern—he pressed Leonardo hard and demanded that the painting finally be completed. Leonardo then said that he could now finish it, for since the new abbot had arrived, he had a model for Judas. He then quickly painted the face of Judas that we see in the painting. Just as the face of Judas appeared to Leonardo at the dawn of the modern era precisely against the backdrop of a positive confession of faith, so too do we have ample reason today to take deeply to heart and engrave upon our souls the fact that the one whose birth we commemorate on this holy Christmas feast is betrayed most of all by many of those who claim to be preparing the festivities for him out of their own faith. We know that this Christmas celebration, too, is part of what Christian development has embraced. It was not until the 3rd and 4th centuries that people began to celebrate the birth of Christ during these December days. The event at Golgotha had already taken place centuries earlier, yet the perspective that turned toward that event at Golgotha embraced something new—something as profoundly new as the institution of the Christmas festival at that time. And much, much later, it was still possible to introduce new elements into Christianity. Even then, a struggle had to be waged against many of those who called themselves true Christians at the time. But today there are many at work who do not wish to proceed as their own creed did when it adopted the institution of Christmas in the 3rd and 4th centuries—those who rigidly cling only to what they say is written, rejecting any living revelation. It is terrible in our time to see those who are slumbering, those who often, with their immoral attitudes, defile that which seeks to enter into spiritual life; but most terrible of all are those who, from within the creeds themselves, betray the very spirit of Christian development.

[ 23 ] This is the solemn mood that the lights of the Christmas tree seek to evoke in us today. I wanted to touch on these things today. Next time, I will speak to you from a different perspective.