The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] There is a significant contrast between the idea of Christmas and the idea of Easter, and whoever is able to contrast these two ideas—which have often been discussed in our context— is able to connect them in an appropriate way, and can then bring their interaction—the interaction of the Christmas idea and the Easter idea—to life within themselves, will be guided toward an inner experience that, in a certain sense, comprehensively describes the mysteries of humanity.

[ 2 ] The idea of Christmas does, after all, point us toward birth. We know how, through birth, the eternal aspect of the human being enters the world from which the human being’s sensually perceptible, visible, physical being is drawn. And when we approach the idea of Christmas with this perspective, it appears to us as the idea that connects us to the supersensible. Then, in addition to everything else it brings to us, it appears in such a way that it points, as it were, to one pole of our existence, where we, as sensory-physical beings, are connected to the spiritual-supersensible. Therefore, taken in its entirety, the birth of the human being can never be fully comprehended by a science that derives its premises solely from the observation of sensory-physical existence.

[ 3 ] At the other pole of human experience lies the idea underlying the Easter festival, an idea that, in the course of Western development, has increasingly become the very concept that paved the way for the materialistic worldview of the West. The idea of Easter can be grasped—initially in a more abstract way—if one is clear about how the eternal, the immortal aspect of the human being—which, therefore, cannot be born—how the spiritual and supersensible descends from spiritual worlds and clothes itself in the human physical body. From the very beginning of this physical existence—as I have explained to you here from a wide variety of perspectives—this activity of the spirit within the physical body is, in fact, a process of leading the physical body toward death, and the idea of birth is accompanied at the same time by the idea of death.

[ 4 ] I have pointed out that the human head can only be understood by recognizing that, fundamentally, there is a continuous process of dying taking place in the head, which is counteracted only by the life forces of the rest of the human organism. And at the moment when the forces of death—which are always present in the human head and determine the human nature of thought—at the moment when these forces of death gain the upper hand over the human, transitory being, at that very moment, true death occurs.

[ 5 ] In truth, the idea of death is, I would say, merely the other side of the idea of birth, and therefore the idea of death cannot find expression in the idea of Easter. In the time when Christianity was still taking its initial form based on an Eastern worldview, we see how Pauline Christianity directs people’s attention first and foremost not to the death of Jesus Christ, but to the Resurrection—as this form of Christianity emphasizes with such powerful words as those spoken by Paul: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.”

[ 6 ] The Resurrection, the triumph over death, the overcoming of death—this is what, above all else, constituted the essence of Easter in the earliest form of Christianity, which was still shaped by the wisdom of the East. Or we can also see, on the other hand, images in which Christ Jesus is depicted as the Good Shepherd, who, so to speak, watches over the eternal affairs of human beings who are asleep in their temporal existence. We see everywhere that, fundamentally, early Christianity is directed toward the words of the Gospel: “The one you are seeking is no longer here.” You must seek him—we might add—in the spiritual worlds; you must not seek him in the physical-sensory world. If you seek him in the physical-sensory world, all that can be said to you is: “The one you seek as physical and sensory is no longer here in the physical-sensory world.”

[ 7 ] The great, all-encompassing wisdom that, in the early centuries of Christianity, had still set out to penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha with all that it entails initially became submerged in Western materialism. This materialism had not yet fully taken hold in those early centuries. It was slowly taking shape. One might say that the first, still very faint materialistic impulses of the early centuries—which were barely noticeable—only much later transformed into what became increasingly materialistic and permeated Western civilization more and more. The Eastern concept of religion had, after all, become intertwined with the emerging concept of the state in the West. In the 4th century, Christianity became the state religion; that is to say, something entered Christianity that could no longer be considered religion.

[ 8 ] Julian the Apostate, who was not a Christian but was a religious man, could above all not accept what Christianity had become under Constantinianism. And so we see, at first very faintly but nonetheless already somewhat noticeable in the blending of Christianity with the declining Roman Empire, how the materialism of the West casts its first rays. Under this influence, the image of Christ Jesus emerged—an image that did not exist at the beginning and is by no means rooted in the origins of Christianity: the image of Christ Jesus as the Crucified One, the Suffering One, the Man of Sorrows, the one who wastes away in pain under the weight of the unspeakable suffering inflicted upon him.

[ 9 ] This marked a rupture in the entire worldview of the Christian world; for this image, which has persisted through the centuries—Christ hanging on the cross, steeped in suffering—is the Christ who can no longer be understood in his spiritual essence, but only in his physical, corporeal essence. And the more the marks of suffering were imprinted on the human body—the more art, in its great perfection across various eras, succeeded in imprinting these marks of suffering on the Savior hanging on the cross—the more the seeds of a materialistic Christian sensibility were sown. The crucifix is the expression of the transition to Christian materialism. This is not contradicted by the fact that, in a grand and powerful way, precisely what art has embodied as the Savior’s suffering is recognized in its full depth and significance. Nevertheless, it remains true that with this image of the Savior dying in agony on the cross, a farewell has been bid to a truly spiritual conception of Christianity.

[ 10 ] This conception of the Man of Sorrows was then intertwined with that of Christ, the Judge of the World—whom we actually see in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, in such magnificent form, as nothing more than another expression of Yahweh or Jehovah, namely the Yahweh or Jehovah who has been transformed into a legal figure. The same spirit that, through the image of the tomb from which the Savior rises—from which the Savior emerges in triumph—has caused the triumphant spirit, the victor over death, to vanish from this image; that same spirit declared at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 869 that the spirit is something one must not believe in, decreed that man is to be conceived as consisting only of body and soul, and that the spirit consists only of certain attributes possessed by the soul.

[ 11 ] Just as we see the spiritual aspect of the Crucifix as having been swept away—just as we sense, in the physical realm, which is the only aspect that appears outwardly, the soul steeped in pain, without the Spirit as the victor, without the Spirit as the bearer and, at the same time, as the one who cares for humanity—so, too, we see the Spirit struck from human nature by a council decree.

[ 12 ] And the Good Friday celebration and the Resurrection celebration—Easter—were combined. In a certain sense, in times when people were not yet so dry, sober, and devoid of imagination, the Good Friday celebration had become a festival in which the idea of Easter had been transformed in a thoroughly selfish way. Wallowing in pain, immersing one’s own soul voluptuously in pain, experiencing the bliss of suffering—this was, throughout the ages, the idea of Good Friday, which was, in a sense, meant only to serve as a backdrop for the idea of Easter, which people were becoming less and less capable of grasping in its true form. For the very same humanity that had elevated to a tenet of faith the principle that man consists only of body and soul—that very same humanity demanded, for its own emotional needs, a Savior who was merely dying; it demanded the counter-image of its own physical pain, so that it might have a backdrop against which—albeit only in a superficial transition — to feel what was originally meant to be felt instinctively: the awareness that the living spirit must always triumph over everything that can happen in the physical body. It was only through the image of death by torture that one could perceive, by contrast, the true essence of the Easter message.

[ 13 ] One cannot help but feel deeply how, in this way, the true spiritual vision and spiritual sensibility have gradually given way in Western culture, and one will certainly look upon all the artistic attempts to depict the Suffering Man on the cross with admiration, but also with a sense of a certain tragedy. It is not enough to rise to what our time requires with a few haphazard thoughts and scattered impressions. One must fully comprehend everything that has long been on a downward slope with regard to the spiritual aspect of Western culture.

[ 14 ] Today we need to ensure that even what is among the greatest achievements in any field is at the same time perceived as something above which humanity must rise today. But within our entire Western culture, we need the idea of Easter. In other words, we need, once again, to be lifted up to the spirit. What once emerged in a magnificent way as the sacred mystery of birth—the Christmas mystery—gradually became immersed within the evolving Western culture in those sentimentalities that were, after all, merely the antithesis of materialistic development; in those sentimentalities that reveled and reveled in all manner of songs about the little Jesus. It was a voluptuous indulgence in the sentiment of the little child. Instead of sensing the great, mighty mystery of the entry of a supernatural spirit in the Christmas mystery, the sober, philistine songs about “Little Jesus” gradually became the dominant and defining tone.

[ 15 ] It is characteristic of the development of Christianity—which has proceeded purely along the paths of reason—that it has already led certain of its representatives to the point of saying, that the Son does not belong in the Gospel at all, but rather that the Father belongs in the Gospel—that this development nevertheless retains the idea of the Resurrection, in that the idea of the Resurrection is still intertwined with the idea of death, even for this form of Christianity. But it is characteristic how, increasingly in the manner I have just described, the idea of Good Friday has come to the fore in modern developments, and how the idea of the Resurrection—the true idea of Easter—has gradually receded further and further into the background.

[ 16 ] A time that must point out that human beings must once again experience the resurrection of their being from the Spirit—such a time must emphasize the idea of Easter in a special way. We need the idea of Easter; we need a complete understanding of the idea of Easter. To achieve this, however, it is necessary for us to realize that the Man of Sorrows is just as much an expression of Western civilization’s descent into materialism as, on the other hand, the world judge who passes judgment merely on legal grounds. For we need Christ as a supersensible being, as a being of an extraterrestrial nature who has nevertheless been drawn into earthly evolution. We must bring ourselves to embrace this solar concept beyond all human imagination.

[ 17 ] Just as we must realize that the idea of the Christmas Nativity has become something that, I would say, has drawn the greatest mystery into the trivial realm of sentimentality; in the same way, we must recognize how necessary it is, when considering the idea of Easter, to emphasize that something is entering human development that cannot be understood on the basis of earthly premises, but which can be understood on the basis of spiritual knowledge, through spiritual insight.

[ 18 ] Spiritual insight must find its first great anchor in the idea of the Resurrection; it must also recognize in human beings that the spiritual-eternal is untouched by what is bodily-physical; it must see in Paul’s words: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain”—a confirmation—which in more recent times must be attained in a different, more conscious way—a confirmation of what, in essence, constitutes the very essence of Christ.

[ 19 ] In this way, we must once again recall the spirit of Easter today. In this way, the time when we can recall the spirit of Easter must once again become an inner celebration for us—a celebration in which we commemorate for ourselves the victory of the spirit over the physical. Since we must not be ahistorical, we must keep before our eyes the pain-stricken Jesus on the cross, the Man of Sorrows; but above the cross must appear the Triumphant One, who remains untouched by both birth and death, and who alone can turn our gaze upward toward the eternal realms of spiritual life. Only through this will we once again draw closer to the true essence of Christ.

[ 20 ] Western humanity has drawn Christ down to its level: drawn him down as a small child, drawn him down as the one who is perceived primarily in suffering and pain. I have often emphasized that for as long as the words “death is evil” resounded from the Buddha’s mouth before the Mystery of Golgotha, after the Mystery of Golgotha the Crucified One appears, and just as one looks upon death, and it is perceived not as an evil, but as something that in truth has no existence.

[ 21 ] But this feeling, which still emerges from an Eastern wisdom deeper than Buddhism, is overshadowed by the other feeling that clings to the sight of the one writhing in pain. We must not rely solely on our thoughts—for they are usually superficial—but we must ascend with the full breadth of our feelings to what has been the destiny of human conceptions of the Mystery of Golgotha over the course of the centuries. We must realize that we must return to a pure, genuine understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. We must consider how, even in ancient Hebrew times, Yahweh was not conceived of as a judge of the world in the legal sense. The greatest dramatic portrayal of the religious sentiment of ancient Hebrew times—the Book of Job, which depicts the long-suffering Job—essentially excludes the notion of outward righteousness. Job is the long-suffering man, the man who regards what befalls him from the outside world as fate. Only gradually does the legal concept of retribution find its way into the cosmic order. Yet in a certain sense, what we see in Michelangelo’s painting on the altar of the Sistine Chapel is a revival of the Yahweh principle.

[ 22 ] But we need the Christ whom we can seek within ourselves, because when we seek him, he appears at once. We need the Christ who enters into our will, who warms and enkindles our will, so that this will may become powerful enough to carry out the deeds required of us for the development of humanity. We need the Christ whom we do not view as the suffering one, but who hovers above the cross and looks down upon what ends in nothingness on the cross. We need a strong awareness of the eternity of the Spirit.

[ 23 ] We do not gain a deep awareness of the eternity of the Spirit when we lose ourselves in the image of the crucifix alone. And when we see how the image of the crucifix has gradually been transformed more and more into that of the suffering and pain-stricken figure, we will see what power this particular direction of human sentiment has gained. It is humanity’s turning away from what is truly spiritual and its turning toward what is merely earthly and physical. This is, of course, sometimes expressed in a grandiose manner; but to those who, like Goethe, for example, have already sensed something of the necessity for our civilization to be permeated by the spirit once more—to such people it has always appeared as something they cannot truly go along with. Goethe expressed it often enough: that the crucified Savior does not, in essence, express what he feels about Christianity—the elevation of humanity to the spiritual.

[ 24 ] There is a need for both the Good Friday mood and the Easter mood to change, for the Good Friday mood to take on a form that, in itself, involves looking upon Jesus as he is dying and thus, in essence, perceiving that this is merely the other side of being born. Whoever does not see in birth, at the same time, the dying, does not see fully. Whoever is able to perceive what arises in the mood of death on Good Friday in such a way that only one side of the human is revealed there—the opposite pole of what is revealed in the child’s entry into the world at birth—will prepare themselves in the right way for the true Easter mood, for that mood which can consist only in the human being’s knowledge that: And whatever my human shell may be that is born—the true human being is unborn, just as he is immortal.

[ 25 ] The true human being must connect with that which has come into the world as the Christ—who cannot die, who looks beyond himself when he gazes upon the Suffering One on the cross. We must come to realize what has actually happened as a result of the spiritual concept having gradually been lost to Western civilization since the end of the first century. And it will be the universal idea of Easter when a sufficiently large number of people realize that the spirit must rise again within modern civilization.

[ 26 ] Outwardly, one must express this in such a way that human beings will not only want to investigate what is imposed upon them, will not only seek the laws of nature or the laws of history that are similar to the laws of nature, but that human beings will yearn for the knowledge of their own will, for knowledge of his own freedom; that human beings will yearn to perceive the true nature of the will, which carries them beyond the gates of death, but which must be contemplated spiritually so that it may be seen in its true form.

[ 27 ] How is a person to find the strength to embrace the idea of Pentecost—the outpouring of the Spirit—after the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople declared the idea of Pentecost to be nothing more than a mere phrase? How can a person find the strength to embrace this Pentecost concept if they are unable to penetrate the Easter concept—the true Easter concept—the concept of the resurrection of the Spirit! Humanity must not be numbed by the image of the dying, pain-stricken Savior. Humanity must learn that pain is intrinsically linked to our connection with material existence.

[ 28 ] This was a fundamental principle of ancient wisdom, which arose from the instinctive depths of human cognition. We must regain this insight through conscious understanding. Yet it was a fundamental principle that the origin of pain lies in the connection with matter, that suffering stems from humanity’s connection with matter. It would, however, be absurd to believe that Christ—because he, as a divine-spiritual being, passed through death—did not suffer pain. To explain the pain of the Mystery of Golgotha as mere illusory pain would be an unrealistic conception. It must be conceived as real in the most profound sense, but it must not be conceived as its opposite. We must once again gain insight into what lies before us when we view the Mystery of Golgotha against the backdrop of the entire development of humanity.

[ 29 ] When the oldest students awaiting initiation were to be shown the image of the freest human being, when these students awaiting initiation had gone through the most varied preliminary stages, when they had completed all the exercises through which they could attain certain insights, and these had been dramatically presented to them in the image, then they were finally led before the image of the human being suffering completely in his physical body, clad in a red purple robe with a crown of thorns upon his head—before the image of Chrestos. And in beholding this Chrestos, the power that makes a human being truly human was to well up from the soul. And the drops of blood that met the gaze of the beholder—the one to be initiated—at all the significant points on that ancient Chrestos were meant to be there to dispel powerlessness and human weakness and to raise the triumphant spirit from within the human being.

[ 30 ] The concept of pain should signify the resurrection of the spiritual being. In the deepest sense, the image before humanity should be what can be expressed in simple terms as follows: You may owe many things in life to your pleasure; but if you have gained knowledge, if you have gained insight into spiritual connections, then you owe that to your suffering, to your pain. You owe it to the fact that you did not perish in your suffering and pain, but had the strength to rise above them. — That is why, in the ancient mysteries, the image of the suffering Chrestos was replaced by the image of the triumphant Christ, who looks down upon the suffering Chrestos as upon that which has been overcome.

[ 31 ] We must thus rediscover the possibility of having the triumphant spiritual Christ before the soul, within the soul, and especially within the will. This is what must lie before us in the present, and in particular in what we intend to do in this present moment to bring about a wholesome human future. But we will never be able to grasp this Easter idea—this true Easter idea—unless we realize that we must look beyond the merely earthly to the cosmic, if we are to speak of Christ at all.

[ 32 ] Modern thinking has turned the cosmos into a corpse. Today we gaze upon the stars and the movement of the stars, and we calculate it all. That is to say, we calculate something about the corpse of the world—and we do not see how life dwells within the stars, nor how the intentions of the cosmic Spirit govern the movement of the stars. Christ descended into humanity to connect human souls with this cosmic Spirit. And only the one who points out that what appears physically and sensually in the sun is the outer expression of the Spirit of our world—the resurrected Spirit of our world—is a true herald of the Gospel of Christ Himself.

[ 33 ] Something like the unity between that which is the reflection of the World Spirit in the Moon and that which is the World Spirit itself in the Sun must come to life. It must come to life again, just as the Easter festival has been determined by the relationship between the Sun and the Moon in spring. We must be able to connect with that which the cosmos itself has determined for Earth’s development through the Easter festival. We must know that it was the most protective and vigilant spirits of the cosmos who, through this cosmic clock—whose hands are the Sun and the Moon for earthly existence—made clear the great, significant hour in the development of the world and humanity into which the Resurrection is to be placed. We must learn from the spiritual realm to perceive the movement of these two hands—the Sun and the Moon—just as we learn to understand the movement of a clock’s hands in our physical affairs. We must link the physical, earthly realm to the superphysical, super-earthly realm.

[ 34 ] The idea of Easter can only be interpreted from a supernatural perspective. For what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha—insofar as it is the Mystery of the Resurrection—is something distinct from the rest of human affairs. The rest of human affairs unfold on Earth in a completely different way than what happened with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Earth has absorbed the cosmic forces, and from what it has itself become, these forces spring forth as human forces of will into the human metabolism. But when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, a new confluence of will entered into earthly events. Something occurred on Earth that is a cosmic event, for which the Earth is merely the stage. Humanity was once again connected to the cosmos.

[ 35 ] This is what must be understood, and it is only through this understanding that the meaning of Easter is revealed in its full scope. Therefore, it is not only the image of the crucifix that must arise before our souls. And even if art had produced the most beautiful, the greatest, the most significant, and the most sublime image of the Crucifix—the thought must arise: “The one you seek is not here.” Above the cross, the one who is now here must appear to you—the one who speaks to you from the Spirit, for the Spirit, awakening the Spirit.

[ 36 ] This is what must enter into the development of humanity as the Easter idea; this is what the human heart and mind must aspire to. In our time, we are not merely required to admire the old. We are not merely required to immerse ourselves and lose ourselves in what has been created. We must become creators of the new. And even if it is the cross itself, with all the beauty that artists have drawn from it, we must not leave it at that. We must hear the words of the spiritual beings who, when we seek in death and suffering, call out to us: “The one you seek is no longer here!” — And so we must seek the one who is here.

[ 37 ] At Easter, we must learn to turn toward the Spirit that can be given to us only through the image of the Resurrection. Then we will be able to move in the right way from the mood of Good Friday’s suffering to the spiritual mood of Easter Sunday. Then, too, we will be able to find within this spirit of Easter Day what our will must take in so that we may become active agents against the forces of decline within the forces of humanity’s ascent. And we need such forces that can work toward this end. And the moment we understand the Resurrection-Easter idea in the right way, this Easter idea—warm and illuminating us—will kindle within us the forces we need for the future development of humanity.