The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Feast of the Epiphany I

[ 1 ] If one considers, from the perspective of contemporary thinking, that we are currently taking a course here during the Christmas holidays, this might seem strange, precisely because people generally believe that work should come to a halt during the major holidays of the year and that, especially at Christmas, people should devote themselves solely to religious observances. Nevertheless, a deeper insight into contemporary circumstances must not fail to recognize that, especially during these festive seasons, what is appropriate today differs from what has been the norm for a long time. We are living in difficult times, and it must seem reckless today to simply want to continue with old habits without taking into account the severe times of hardship we have entered, unaffected by what is unfolding in both the visible and invisible worlds right now. We see how, during these festive seasons, people exchange gifts, how they decorate their Christmas trees in the traditional way, and how, in other respects, they follow tradition by doing what has been customary for centuries. Today, however, one must note how this custom is verging on sacrilege.

[ 2 ] Anyone who has experienced the past few years with a deep sense of empathy feels as if they have had to live through centuries, and it is only with a certain wistfulness that they can look upon that part of humanity which today habitually thinks in a way that, with some justification, could still have been considered reasonable until the beginning or middle of the second decade of our century. To the unbiased mind, everything emerging from current events must today appear burdened with questions—questions that concern the primordial elements of all human life. Those among my esteemed audience who have heard me speak on one topic or another on occasion will know how little I am inclined to go along with the custom of speaking of living in a time of transition. Every era can claim this for itself, for the transition from the past to the future is always naturally present. It all depends on what this transition consists of. And today, one cannot fail to recognize that human beings are only aware of their true nature when they take part in the momentous events unfolding in the world.

[ 3 ] It has often been criticized that many people have increasingly come to view Christianity as merely saying, “Lord, Lord!”—or as uttering the name of Christ as often as possible. Today, however, we need something fundamentally different: a Christian transformation of our entire lives—one for which it is not enough merely to call upon the name of Christ, but which requires us to unite ourselves intimately with the Spirit of Christ. Today we see how major questions of existence are being raised across nearly the entire globe. We are already perceiving that that region—the European region—which for a long time was the very center of human civilization, will no longer be able to serve as that center in the future. We observe how the world’s questions are spreading across ever-larger territories, and above all, we can already perceive today, through symptomatic signs, how the great conflict between the West and the East is looming in all areas of life.

[ 4 ] The West has kindled a new spiritual life based on mechanistic-naturalistic foundations. Only those who believe that this spiritual life is still in its infancy can truly understand it. But we must look beyond this nascent spiritual life of the West toward the East, with which we are becoming increasingly connected—geographically, historically, and culturally—and with which the West must engage.

[ 5 ] In the East, there exists an ancient spiritual life that dates back thousands of years. And when one looks back from what is today decadent in the East to that from which it originated—as the primordial wisdom of humanity—one feels an immense respect, an immeasurable awe. A word resounds from the East when we consider the more spiritual aspects of life—a word that, especially when we adopt the Western perspective, cannot help but strike a strange chord in our hearts. It is the word that, in the language of the East, is meant to express the peculiar nature of the physical world that we perceive all around us with our senses. This physical-sensory world has come to be called by the East—beginning with India—whether it expresses this more or less clearly or not—a Maya, a great illusion.

[ 6 ] Thus, before the East—even if, as I have said, all of this exists today only in a decadent form—the external world, which the eyes see and the ears hear, stands before human beings as a great illusion, as a Maya. Anyone who becomes acquainted with the distinctive characteristics of the Eastern view of life must realize that this conception of Maya was not originally part of the primordial wisdom of the East. It is precisely with the help of anthroposophical spiritual science that we can look into the millennia-long development of Eastern civilization. Then we look back beyond the third millennium B.C. and, as we go further and further back into the mists of antiquity, we find this concept of Maya—of the great illusion of external sensory-physical reality—less and less prevalent. If we wish to specify an approximate time, we can say that it was not until the turn of the third to the fourth pre-Christian millennium that this view emerged as a conviction in the East: that the physical-sensory world surrounding human beings is not reality, but a great illusion, a Maya.

[ 7 ] What is the cause of this tremendous shift in the Eastern view of life? This cause is deeply rooted in the spiritual evolution of humanity. When we look at the primordial wisdom of the East—as it was later expressed poetically in the Vedas, philosophically in Vedanta, and subsequently developed into the teachings of yoga—and when we consider, for example, the grandeur with which these Eastern teachings are embodied in the Bhagavad Gita, then we find that the essence of this Eastern wisdom was once that human beings perceived not only the outer sensory world, but also—within that outer sensory world, in everything they saw with their eyes, heard with their ears, and touched with their hands—a divine-spiritual reality.

[ 8 ] For these early humans, trees were not as mundane as we see them today. In every tree, every shrub, every cloud, and every spring, there was something that revealed itself as the spiritual, soulful, and cosmic essence of the world. Everywhere one looked, one saw the physical world permeated by the spiritual. The spring did not merely trickle with inarticulate sounds; rather, from the sounds of the spring one could hear spiritual and soulful content. The forest did not rustle in an inarticulate way; from the rustling of the forest, one could hear the language of the eternal Word of the world, a spiritual-soul entity. Modern people can only imagine to a very limited extent the immense vitality with which human beings experienced the world in those ancient times.

[ 9 ] But the vitality of spirit with which humankind lived in its environment began to wane around the 3rd millennium B.C. And if we immerse ourselves in the course of history, we become aware of how humanity—now understood as a whole, as Eastern humanity—perceived the phenomena of the world with a certain wistful feeling, as if the gods were withdrawing, as if they were disappearing beneath the surface of things. And surely many a particularly deep human soul will have expressed this feeling, as if in prayer, by saying: The ancient gods have vanished behind the surface of external sensory phenomena. The world has been emptied of the gods, and because it appears as a world devoid of gods, it is Maya; it is a great illusion.

[ 10 ] It was not from the very beginning that people spoke of the world as this great illusion; rather, because the world had become devoid of gods, it came to be perceived as a great illusion, as Maya. If one wishes to trace this view back to its very source, one must go even beyond the Atlantean catastrophe, all the way back to Atlantean humanity. For immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe, this suggestion began to emerge quietly in general civilization: to regard the world of outer, sensory-physical phenomena as something unreal. But much of the perception of the gods in the physical-sensory world still remained until the end of the 4th millennium B.C. There was so much of it that, up to that point, people did not yet need any real consolation in the face of what they perceived as the unreality of the world. From the end of the 4th millennium onward, people needed consolation. And this consolation was sought by the initiates, by the teachers and priests of the mysteries, for humanity, and it was sought through the language of the stars. Here on Earth, it was said, there is no reality. But when one studies the stars, one discovers through the language of the stars how reality pours down upon the Earth from regions of the heavens far removed from our world. The stars speak a language which, when we hear it, sounds as though the Maya of the world takes on a real meaning.

[ 11 ] Such was the profound impact that the astrological wisdom of the Chaldeans and the ancient Egyptians had on humanity that this wisdom was perceived as the very thing that gave Maya its reality. Here on this Earth, it was said, one can find only the unreal. One must look up to the eternal Word of the worlds, which speaks to the receptive soul through the movements and positions of the stars; then reality reveals itself within Maya. If one wished to recognize something important, something significant for life, one sought to explore this through the stars and their language. And so the human state of mind remained until the times in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

[ 12 ] The sages of the Mysteries proclaimed to humanity from the stars that which truly is, for on Earth people did not believe they could find this reality. Anyone who understands the Greek spirit in its truth will nevertheless perceive—even though a certain superficial view always maintains that the Greek spirit flows like a kind of childlike joy over reality—that something tragic hangs over the Greek spirit, something that yearns for a kind of redemption within human life. And this is nothing other than the echo of that Eastern sentiment of which I have just spoken.

[ 13 ] And we, the people of today, have brought about a situation in which, for our present civilization, thought—the idea that thought unfolds in every direction—has, in a sense, developed into an inner supreme good. But we have not succeeded in recognizing this idea as a reality. When we devote ourselves to the life of thought, we feel as if we were in a state of unreality. And a great many people speak of life in thought as an ideology. By using the word “ideology” in relation to the inner life of the soul, a great many people intend to imply the same thing that the East felt toward external, physical-sensory reality when it called it “maya.” Just as we speak of “ideology,” we could also speak of “Maya,” but in that case we would have to mean our inner spiritual life.

[ 14 ] What was the most intense reality for the East during a certain period—the spiritual and psychological realm—has become “Maya” for us, and what was “Maya” for the East—the external, physical, and sensory world—has become our naturalistic reality. And so we live by calling ideology or Maya that which permeates us inwardly until it reaches the stage of mature thought. The East once saw gods in the outer, sensory nature. These gods have vanished from its sight. It did not possess thought in the way we do today. This is what is unique to the West: that thought—the purest, most luminous expression of soul life—has been attained. But the divine has not yet dawned upon us in thought. We are waiting for the divine to dawn within thought. That which has vanished from external sensibility for the East—through which this external sensibility has become Maya—is not yet present in our world of ideas, in our inner world of thought. In the course of historical development, the external sensory world has gradually become devoid of gods for the East. Our thought is still devoid of gods. We can only understand this if we perceive it as a kind of prophecy: that the Maya of our thinking will one day be filled with inner reality.

[ 15 ] Thus, the history of human development is divided into two significant parts. One evolves from a state of being filled with the gods to a state of being devoid of the gods. The other—at the beginning of which we now stand—evolves from a state of being devoid of the gods to the hoped-for state of being filled with the gods. And in the midst of these two currents of development stands the cross on Golgotha. How does this cross on Golgotha appear in the consciousness of humanity? We look back, about six centuries beyond the Mystery of Golgotha: we see the Buddha, who is gradually being revered by a large community. We see this Buddha leaving his homeland, going out into the world, and, among the myriad things he sees, beholding a corpse. The sight of this corpse affects his soul in such a way that he turns away from the maya of the outer world. The corpse has a repulsive effect on the Buddha. And because he is compelled to see death, to see the corpse, he feels compelled to look up from the world toward something else—toward a divine-spiritual reality that cannot be found in the world. The sight of the dead man is the starting point for the Buddha to leave the world and take refuge in a transcendent realm of reality.

[ 16 ] And now let us turn to the moment that lies about six hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Many people gaze upon the great symbol: the crucifix, the cross on which the body hangs. People gaze upon the dead man. But they gaze upon him not to flee, not to leave him and go to another reality, but rather to see in this dead man the one to whom they are to take refuge. Over the course of twelve centuries, humanity has changed so much that people have come to love death on the cross—the very death from which the Buddha fled. Nothing can more deeply suggest to the soul the great transformation that has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha, which lies midway between these two points in time. And as we turn our thoughts in this way to the Mystery of Golgotha, we must remember what was actually venerated there in the spirit of early Christianity.

[ 17 ] Paul, an initiate into the mysteries of his time, could not believe in the living Jesus; he fought against the living Jesus. When, on his way to Damascus, he became aware that the Christ lives, that the Christ reveals himself out of the darkness of the world, Paul no longer believed in the living Jesus, but in the risen Christ; and the living Jesus became precious to him because he was the bearer of the risen Christ. Out of death, through this special insight into the context of the world, certainty regarding the divine-spiritual life welled up within Paul.

[ 18 ] What had come to pass for humanity was that, whereas people had formerly found comfort by looking up from the earth to the stars, from whence the eternal Word had spoken, they now looked upon the historical event of Golgotha; they looked upon a human form that contained the mystery of existence. And this mystery of existence—the Apostle John sought to express it with the words: “In the beginning was the Word!”

[ 19 ] Yes, in the very beginning, the Word spoke through the movement and alignment of the stars. It resounded down from the cosmos, this Word. But this Word was not found on Earth; this Word penetrated from the vastness of the heavens, from the Father’s homeland, into and upon the Earth. But the writer of the Gospel of John dared to speak the Word: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That is to say, that which lives out there in the stars dwelt in the body that hung on the cross. In a human being, that which had previously been sought in the vastness of the cosmos was to be seen. That which had previously flowed down to Earth only in the radiance of light was to descend to humanity. The view of life was guided from a cosmology spanning the worlds to a vision of the human being as the center, who was permeated by what shone down from the stars, who was permeated by the living Word of the worlds.

[ 20 ] That one can also look toward the origin of the earthly realm by looking into the inner being of Jesus and establishing an intimate relationship between one’s own inner being and this inner being of Jesus, just as one formerly established a relationship between human beings living on Earth and the eternal Word of the Worlds that speaks from the stars, that is the meaning to be revealed to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this Mystery of Golgotha is indeed the most significant turning point in the development of the Earth. And this is indicated to us by the New Testament.

[ 21 ] It is of wondrous depth, and it is immeasurably moving how—in the spirit of the Gospels—one Gospel recounts one account, another Gospel recounts another—people are taught about the appearance of Christ Jesus. On the one hand, there are the three wise men, the magi from the East, the bearers of ancient stellar wisdom, the interpreters of the World Word from the cosmic script of the stars. They are endowed with the highest wisdom accessible to humanity at that time. And the Gospel suggests how this highest wisdom could say nothing else at that time other than: Christ Jesus is appearing; the stars tell us so. The eternal Word of the World, which came in the stars and lives in the constellations, tells us that Christ Jesus will appear.

[ 22 ] In the schools, in the schools of wisdom, it was proclaimed: Jupiter has completed its orbital cycle 354 times since the origin of present-day humanity on Earth. A Jupiter year—a great Jupiter year—has been completed since the time from which, for example, the ancient Hebrews date the existence of humanity on Earth. According to the worldview of that time, an ordinary year had 354 days. 354 Jupiter days have passed, and these 354 Jupiter days are something that speaks from the wisdom of the worlds, just as the sentence—the great sentence—and the individual words within it refer to the orbits of Mercury; and seven times seven is forty-nine times a Mercury day, which has elapsed in the same time that a Jupiter day has elapsed.

[ 23 ] These ancient sages sought such connections in the language of the stars. And what was inspired into their souls through deciphering this language of the stars, they interpreted in such a way that they could put it into words: Christ Jesus is coming, for the time is fulfilled. The Age of Jupiter, the Age of Mercury, is fulfilled. The great cosmic timekeeper, which resides in the stars, declares that the time is fulfilled. This is what the Gospels proclaim on the one hand. On the other hand, they proclaim what the poor shepherds in the field received as a revelation from the depths of the human heart—a revelation springing from a dream that welled up from their simple hearts, without any wisdom, merely listening to the devout, simple voice of the human soul. And it is the same message: Christ is appearing.

[ 24 ] Supreme wisdom and the utmost human simplicity resonate together in the words: “The Christ appears.” — Supreme human wisdom is in decline at that time; supreme human wisdom is fading away. What is beginning to glow is that which comes from within the human being itself. And from within the human being, the thought has emerged ever since. We cannot yet elevate it to reality; it is still an illusion to us. But today we are faced with the necessity of understanding more and more how this thought can become reality. In pre-Christian times, people looked up to the stars to sense reality. We must look to Christ to find reality for our inner selves. “Not I, but Christ in me”—that is the word that will give the thought inner weight, that will give the thought inner reality.

[ 25 ] Nineteenth-century theology has increasingly reduced Christ Jesus to a mere human figure whom even external history can acknowledge: Jesus, the simple, though exalted, man from Nazareth. But the Christ has been lost. He will only appear in his true form through the revival of a worldview that reaches toward the supersensible—a conception of life that looks from the sensible toward the supersensible. To the same extent that humanity has lost the spiritual within the sensible, it must gain inner reality within thought, which has advanced to a level that is certainly luminous but abstract.

[ 26 ] They will attain this inner reality by perceiving, within the events unfolding on our Earth in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, something that can only be revealed to the human soul through supersensible concepts. To the same extent that people resolve to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha through supersensible knowledge, to that same extent will Christ be reborn within the development of human civilization. From the acceptance of supersensible knowledge, humanity may hope for a truly enduring Bethlehem. A word spoken in intuition, such as that uttered by Angelus Silesius, must take on a deep meaning:

[ 27 ] Even if Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem
and not within you, you would still remain lost forever.

[ 28 ] But Christ must be born not only in empty rhetoric, but in all knowledge, in all understanding. We must come to view what we can gain through mere observation of the world in the same way that Paul viewed what the external world was to him before he experienced the event at Damascus, before he saw the earthly world filled with the power of the living Christ. We must bring this power of the living Christ into all our understanding. We must warm the cold, abstract knowledge that has led us into the distress of the present. We must permeate this knowledge with the living power of Christ.

[ 29 ] This is something that stands out as a significant task of our time. We must feel that we first have to reach Christ. We must come to an internalization of the Christ idea. We must be clear that the distress of our times is too great to merely cling to external Christmas customs. We must rise to the conviction that such clinging is a lie in the face of the other views of our time. We must realize that the great conflict between East and West must also take place in the spiritual realm, that the Maya of the East and the Maya of the West—the Maya of the outer sensory world and the Maya of thought—must come to a harmonious understanding.

[ 30 ] We must not believe that we have the Christ within our present time. We must see ourselves as the poor shepherds who were aware of their need. We must seek Christ in the innermost depths of the human being, just as the shepherds sought Christ in the stable at Bethlehem. We must make sacrifices to this Christ, who transforms the maya of our thoughts into realities. We must have the humility to first rise to an understanding of the birth of Christ. We must know that we first need an understanding of the Christmas message before we can truly honor Christmas in the proper way. We must permeate every sphere of life with the living power of Christ. We must work, and we will best celebrate the festivals when we labor in the midst of the needs of our time to bring about, in a spiritual sense, what historically gazes upon us from the place of the skull at Golgotha as a symbol—albeit a symbol of reality.

[ 31 ] And so we must understand that, for us today, the most important Christmas message is this: to bring about a universal Christmas through a true understanding of Christianity. This inner voice, this inner longing, can guide us through the Christmas season in light of the current hardships of our time. For the festival at the end of the year—Christmas—can only come alive today if we feel the longing to view this Christmas as a call to look deeply into what humanity needs in its development. So that something of the festive spirit we feel during this season may radiate to us—namely, that through the power of an inner grasp of reality regarding what is still “maya” to us, we may come to a resurrection of that divine-spiritual reality which had faded in earlier times and which therefore led to the perception of “maya.”

[ 32 ] Humanity has entered into Maya, into outer Maya. From within inner Maya, humanity must evolve toward true spiritual and soul reality. If we understand this, then the individual Christmas spirit during the festive season will be filled with a sense of the world that we need today if we are to feel true human worth and true human dignity. Then, from our feeling toward this individual festival, that which prompts us to confess will well up within us: We must celebrate in times of need in such a way that we gradually see the new Christmas lights of a new spiritual life. We must learn to celebrate not just a single Christmas season; we must learn to celebrate the World’s Christmas.