The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Humanity must once again be able to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha with all the forces that live within the human soul—not merely as is possible within the context of today’s civilization, but in such a way that the entire human being can be united with the Mystery of Golgotha. But this will only be possible for humanity when it can once again approach the Mystery of Golgotha from the standpoint of spiritual knowledge. No intellectual understanding is in reality capable of bringing Christianity into full effect in the world, for every intellectual understanding engages only human thinking. And when we have a form of knowledge that speaks only to the thinking mind, we must seek our impulses of will—and these are the most important impulses within true Christianity—from our instincts; we cannot perceive them from the world in which they truly exist, namely the spiritual world. In the present age, there will be no other option but to turn our gaze once again to the great question of humanity: To what extent is the Mystery of Golgotha the meaning of the entire development of the Earth?

[ 2 ] One would most like to express what this is meant to convey through an image—perhaps a somewhat paradoxical one. If some being from another planet were to come down to Earth, that being would probably find everything on Earth quite incomprehensible, since it could not be a human being in the earthly sense; but it is my deepest conviction, drawn from an understanding of Earth’s evolution, that such a being—even if it came from Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, *The Last Supper*. For such a being would find in this painting something that tells it: A deeper meaning is connected to Earth and its evolution. — And from this perspective, which encompasses the Mystery of Golgotha, a being from a completely different world would be able to understand Earth and all its other phenomena.

[ 3 ] We people of the present day have no idea how deeply we have become entangled in intellectualistic abstraction. As a result, we can no longer connect with the souls of people who lived for a time before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those human souls were quite different from the human souls of today. People tend to imagine the history of humanity as far too similar to the events taking place today. But human souls have undergone a significant evolution, and in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, they were such that all people—even those who had only a primitive education in their souls—perceived within themselves something that was a spiritual essence, what one might call a memory of the time the human soul experiences before it descends into an earthly body. Just as we today, in our ordinary lives, remember what we have experienced since, say, our third, fourth, or fifth year, so the ancient human soul had a memory of its prenatal life in the spiritual-soul world. In a certain sense, human beings were self-aware in a soul-related sense; they knew: “I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to Earth.” And they also knew—especially in earlier times—certain details of their spiritual-soul life prior to their descent to Earth. They experienced themselves through visions of the world. They looked up at the stars, and they did not see the stars merely in their abstract configuration, as we see them today; they saw them in dreamlike visions. They saw the entire world permeated by dreamlike visions, and they could say to themselves: “This is the last glimmer of that spiritual world from which I have descended, and by descending as a soul from this spiritual world, I have entered a human body.” — And never did this person of earlier times connect so intensely with his human body that he did not have an experience of the soul.

[ 4 ] What did this person from a bygone era experience? He experienced being able to say to himself: “Before I descended to Earth, I was in a world where the sun is not merely a celestial body that radiates light, but rather the gathering place of higher spiritual hierarchies.” I did not live in a physical space, but in a spiritual one—in a world where the sun does not merely spread light, but radiates wisdom. I lived in a world in which the stars are beings that assert their will. I ascended from this world. — And for this person of earlier times, two experiences were linked to this feeling: the experience of nature and the experience of sin.

[ 5 ] Modern man no longer has this experience of sin, because for him sin exists only in the world of abstract existence; for him, sin is merely a projection—something that, as a moral concept, he cannot reconcile with the necessities of nature. For the ancient man, these two currents did not exist in worldly existence: natural necessity on the one hand, moral necessity on the other. For him, all moral necessity was also a natural necessity; all natural necessity was also a moral necessity.

[ 6 ] Thus, human beings could say to themselves: I had to descend from the divine-spiritual world. But by entering a human body, I am, in a sense, sick in relation to that world from which I descended. — And the concepts of illness and sin became intertwined for the ancient human being. Human beings felt so here on this earth that they had to find within themselves the means to overcome illness. That is why the awareness grew ever stronger among these older souls: We need, as education, something that is healing. Education is medicine; education is therapy. And figures such as the therapists appeared, shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha, as healers. In Greece, too, all spiritual life was thought of in connection with the healing of human beings, because people sensed that human beings were healthier at the beginning of Earth’s evolution and gradually developed in such a way that they became increasingly distant from the divine-spiritual being. That was the concept of illness—one that, though now forgotten, pervaded the very world into which the Mystery of Golgotha then historically entered. For in those earlier times, human beings perceived everything spiritual by looking back to the past; they said to themselves: “I must look back to a time before my birth if I want to see the spiritual—back into the past, for that is where the Spirit is. I was born of this Spirit, and I must find this Spirit again. But I have strayed from this Spirit.”

[ 7 ] And so the people of the past perceived the Spirit from which they had become estranged as the Spirit of the Father. And in the Mysteries, the highest initiate was the one who had developed within himself—in his heart, in his soul—those powers through which he could outwardly represent the Father as a human being. And when the students of the Mysteries crossed the threshold of the Mysteries, entered those institutions that were at once centers of art, knowledge, and consecration, and when they then stood before the highest initiate, they beheld in the highest initiate the representative of the Father God. The Fathers were higher initiates than the “Sun Heroes.” The Father Principle prevailed before the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 8 ] And humanity felt how it had drifted further and further away from the Father—of whom one can say: *Ex deo nascimur*—and how it needed to be healed. Humanity looked to the One who brings knowledge as the Healer, the Savior. Christ is no longer alive to us as the Savior; but only when we come to perceive him once more as the Physician of the Worlds, as the great Savior, will we be able to restore him to his rightful place in the world.

[ 9 ] That was the fundamental feeling the ancient souls had regarding the Mystery of Golgotha and its connection to the supersensible world of the Father. And what was felt in Greece—what lived in that remarkable saying: “Better to be a beggar here on earth than a king in the realm of shadows”—means that humanity had come to feel deeply how far it had strayed, in its very being, from the supersensible world. At the same time, a deep longing for this supersensible world lived within human beings.

[ 10 ] But if humanity had continued to develop in this way, with an awareness only of God the Father, it could never have attained the full self-awareness of the “I” or inner freedom. For in order to attain this inner freedom, that which was regarded as a disease in comparison to previous states had to take root in human beings. In a certain sense, all of humanity felt the “Lazarus disease.” But it was precisely the disease that does not lead to death, but rather to liberation and to a new recognition of the eternal within the human being.

[ 11 ] One could say: People had increasingly forgotten that spiritual and soul-related past before birth; their gaze was directed more and more toward the physical environment. When an older soul gazed into this physical environment through the body, it saw everywhere in the stars the images of the spiritual realm it had left behind when it came to Earth through birth. In the light of the sun, it saw the radiant wisdom in which it had lived as if in its own life-atmosphere; in the sun itself, it saw the chorus of the higher hierarchies from which it had been sent down to Earth. But humanity had forgotten this.

[ 12 ] And this could be felt as the 8th, the 7th, and the following centuries drew near the Mystery of Golgotha. If external history says nothing about this, that is simply a shortcoming of external history. To those who know how to view history spiritually, it appears that a powerful consciousness of God the Father was present at the starting point of human development, and that this consciousness was gradually numbed, so that human beings would see only a de-spiritualized nature around them.

[ 13 ] Much went unsaid back then; much lay in the subconscious depths of the human soul. But what had the greatest impact in the subconscious realms of the human soul was a question that people could not put into words—they could only feel it with their hearts—the question: Nature surrounds us—where is the Spirit of whom we are children? Where do we see the Spirit of whom we are children? — This question lived unconsciously within the finest souls of the 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st centuries, without ever being articulated.

[ 14 ] It was a time of questioning, a time when humanity felt its distance from God the Father, knowing deep in its souls, as it were: It must be so—Ex deo nascimur!—but do we still know this, and can we even know it?

[ 15 ] If we look even deeper into the souls of the people who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching, the following becomes apparent to us. There were the simpler, more primitive souls who could only sense deep within their subconscious how they were now separated from their connection to the Father. For they were the descendants of those primordial human beings who were by no means as animal-like as we imagine them to be today from a scientific perspective, but who, within their animal-like form, bore a soul through which they knew, in the ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance: “We have descended from the divine-spiritual world and taken on a human body. The Father God has guided us into the earthly world. We were born of Him.”

[ 16 ] But the oldest souls of humanity had known: In the spiritual worlds from which they had descended, they had left behind something that we now call—or that was later called—the “Christ.” That is why the early Christian writers said that the oldest souls were Christians; these souls truly knew how to worship the Christ. But in the spiritual worlds where they had been before descending to Earth, Christ was the focal point of their contemplation; Christ was the central Being toward whom they turned their spiritual gaze. And people on Earth remembered this communion with Christ in their pre-earthly life.

[ 17 ] Then there were other regions—and Plato, for example, speaks of them in a very special way—where students were initiated into the mysteries, in which the perception of the supersensible worlds was awakened, and in which the powers were released from the human being that enable one to look into the spiritual worlds. These disciples of the initiates did not, in fact, merely come to know “Christ”—with whom all human beings had lived before they descended to Earth, and who was now merely a half-forgotten image in human souls here on Earth—from a vague memory; rather, they came to know Christ once again in his full form. But they came to know him as a being who, in a sense, had lost his purpose in the supersensible worlds.

[ 18 ] In the mysteries of the 2nd and 1st centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, people looked in a very special way toward that Being of the supersensible worlds who was later called the Christ Being. People looked upon it in such a way that they said: “We see this Being in the supermundane worlds, but its activity has steadily diminished.” — For it was the Being who had implanted in the souls the memory of pre-birth times, which then came to life during earthly existence. In the supersensible worlds, this being was the great teacher of what the soul still retained in memory after it had descended to Earth. To the initiates, the being that was later called the Christ Being appeared as one who had lost its activity, because human beings gradually no longer possessed these memories or were no longer able to receive them.

[ 19 ] And so these initiates continued to live, as the awareness within them grew ever stronger: This being, whom primordial humanity remembered during its earthly existence—this being, whom we now see becoming less and less active in the spiritual worlds—will seek out a new sphere of life. It will descend to Earth to reawaken the supersensible spirituality within human beings.

[ 20 ] And people began to speak of that being—who would later be called the Christ—as the one who would come down to Earth in the future and take on a human body, just as he did in Jesus of Nazareth. And this speaking of the Christ as one who was to come—that was one of the main themes of discourse in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. We see in the pictorial grandeur of those three Magi or three Kings from the East representatives of such initiates who had learned in their places of initiation: Christ will come when the times are fulfilled and the signs in the heavens announce him. Then we must seek him at his hidden place. — And throughout the Gospels, what is revealed in the evolution of humanity resounds as a deeper secret, as a deeper mystery, when viewed once more with the spiritual eye.

[ 21 ] Thus, primitive humans looked up at the supersensible world as if lost. In their subconscious, they said to themselves: We have forgotten the Christ. — And they looked at the nature around them. The question I hinted at earlier arose in their hearts: How can we rediscover the supersensible world? — And the initiates in the Mysteries knew: This being, whom they later called Christ, will come, take on human form, and what the souls had previously experienced in their pre-earthly existence, they will experience in the contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 22 ] Thus, the answer to the question—“How do we return to the supernatural?”—is given not in an intellectualistic way, but through the most powerful event that has ever taken place on Earth. — And the people who at that time had developed a sense of what was happening learned from those who knew that within the human being Jesus lived a true God who had descended—the God whom humanity had forgotten because the forces of the body had developed toward freedom. He appeared in a new form, so that people could behold him, see him, and continue to speak of him in history as an earthly being. The God whom people had known only in the spirit world had descended, had walked in Palestine, and had sanctified the earth by taking up residence in a human body. Therefore, the great question for those who were educated people in the sense of that time was: What path did the Christ take to come to Jesus?

[ 23 ] In the early days of Christianity, the question of the Christ was a purely spiritual one. People did not seek the Jesus; they sought the Christ, as he had descended. People looked up toward the supersensory worlds; they saw the descent of the Christ to Earth; they asked themselves: How did the superterrestrial being become an earthly one? — And that is why the simple people who surrounded Christ Jesus as disciples had the opportunity to speak with him as a spirit even after his death. And the most important things he was able to say after death have been preserved only in a few fragments. But spiritual science, spiritual knowledge, can explore what the Christ spoke to those who were closest to him after his death, since he appeared to them in his spiritual form.

[ 24 ] There he spoke to them as the great Healer, as the “Therapist” who was a comforter, who knew the secret that human beings had once had a memory of him, because they had been with him in the spiritual realms during their pre-earthly existence. And now he could say to them: I have previously given you the ability to remember your supersensible, pre-earthly existence. I now give you—if you receive me into your souls, if you receive me into your hearts—the strength to pass through the gate of death with the awareness of immortality. And you will no longer recognize only the Father—Ex deo nascimur—but you will feel the Son as the One with whom you can die and yet remain alive—In Christo morimur.

[ 25 ] Of course, this was not expressed in the exact words I am now using, but in essence, this was what Christ taught those who were close to him after his physical death. After all, human beings did not know death when they were primordial humans, for from the time they attained consciousness, they possessed an inner awareness of their soul; they knew of that which cannot die. They could see the people around them die—death was, to them, an illusion within the realities surrounding them. People did not experience death. It was only as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near that people felt the reality of death, for their soul had gradually become so connected to the physical body that doubt could now arise as to how the soul could continue to live when the body decays. This would not have been a question at all in earlier times, because people recognized the soul.

[ 26 ] Now the Christ came as the one who said: “I will live with you on earth so that you may have the strength to rekindle your souls, to impel them from within, so that you may carry them through death as a living soul.” — That was what Paul had not immediately understood, what Paul only understood once access to the supersensible worlds had been opened to him, once he had received the impressions of Christ Jesus here on this earth. That is why Pauline Christianity is held in ever lower esteem today, because it claims that one must view Christ as coming from supermundane worlds and uniting his supermundane power with the earthly human being.

[ 27 ] Thus, in the evolution of human consciousness, the words “From God”—namely, from the Father God—“we are born” were joined by the words of life, comfort, and strength: “In Christ we die”—that is to say, we live in him.

[ 28 ] What has come to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha will best come to life in our souls when I now describe the evolution of humanity in the present—and how we must hope it will unfold in the future—from the perspective of the modern initiate. I have attempted to present to you the perspective of the ancient initiate, the perspective of the initiate at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; now I would like to attempt to describe the perspective of the modern initiate—one who today approaches life not merely with an external understanding of nature, but in whom those deeper powers of insight have awakened that we can awaken from within the soul using the methods described in spiritual literature.

[ 29 ] When this initiate acquires the insights that today represent the triumph of the age—the splendor in which many people, upon acquiring them, also feel at ease with a certain higher consciousness—he finds himself in a tragic situation with these insights. For the newer, the modern initiate, when he connects those insights—which are particularly esteemed and valued in the world today—with his soul, feels them as a kind of dying. And the more the modern initiate, before whose soul the world of the supersensible sphere has arisen, immerses himself in what the whole world today calls science, the more he feels his soul dying. For the modern initiate, the sciences are the grave of the soul; the soul already feels connected to death while still alive, as the initiate acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern science. And he often feels this dying deeply and intensely. And then he likely seeks the reason why he dies whenever he gains knowledge in the modern sense, why he experiences something like the scent of a corpse, precisely when he soars to the highest modern insights—which he truly appreciates, but which are for him a premonition of death.

[ 30 ] Then, based on his insights into the supersensible world, he tells himself something that I would like to convey to you through an image. We live spiritually and soulfully before we descend to Earth. Of what we experience there in full reality—spiritually and soulfully—in our pre-earthly existence, we have only thoughts, concepts, and ideas in our souls here on Earth. These are in our souls. But how are they in our souls?

[ 31 ] Let us look at the human being as he stands in life between birth and death, fully alive, his body permeated with flesh and blood. We call him alive. He passes through the gate of death. What remains of the physical human being is the corpse, which is then returned to the earth and the elements. We look at the physically dead human being. We have the corpse before us, the remnant of the living human being, once permeated by living blood. The human being is physically dead. We look back—but with the gaze of initiation—into our own soul. We look at the thoughts we now have in the life between birth and death, at the thoughts we hold as today’s modern wisdom and science, and we see: They are the corpse of what we were before we descended to Earth. Just as the corpse of a human being relates to the fully living human being, so too—as we come to recognize—do our thoughts, which we today revere as the highest treasures brought to us by the insights of external nature, relate as the corpses of that within us to what we were before we descended to Earth. This is what the initiate can experience. In thought, he does not experience his true life; in thought, he experiences the corpse of his soul. This is a fact; it is not something spoken out of sentimentality, but rather something that stands before the soul today with full force as a result of active insight. This is not what the sentimental, mystical dreamer of today tells himself; who seeks to feel something arising from some dark, mystical depths of his own being. But the one who today steps through the gate of initiation discovers within his soul these thoughts which, precisely because they are lifeless, alone can make living freedom possible. These thoughts, which are the very foundation of human freedom, do not compel the human being—precisely because they are dead, because they are not alive. Human beings can become free beings today precisely because they are dealing not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. These dead thoughts can be grasped by human beings and used to achieve freedom. Yet they are also experienced, with all the tragedy of the world, as the corpse of the soul. Before the soul descended into the earthly world, everything that is now a corpse was fully alive and active. In the spiritual-super-sensory worlds, among the human souls—some of whom had already passed through death and were now living in the spiritual world, and others who had not yet descended to Earth—the beings of the higher hierarchies that stand above humanity moved; within this sphere, too, moved those elemental beings that underlie nature. There, everything in the soul was alive. Here, in the soul, lies the legacy from the spiritual worlds; thought is dead.

[ 32 ] But when we, as modern initiates, allow Christ—as he lived out his life in the Mystery of Golgotha—to permeate us, we understand, in the deepest, most inner sense, the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me,” then Christ also leads us through this death; then we penetrate nature with our thoughts, but Christ walks with us spiritually, and He immerses our thoughts in the tomb of nature. For otherwise, when we have dead thoughts, nature becomes a tomb. But if we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of the stars, the world of the clouds, the mountains, and the rivers with these dead thoughts—if we approach them with these dead thoughts, yet accompanied by Christ according to the words: “Not I, but Christ in me,” then in modern initiation, when we immerse ourselves in the quartz crystal, we experience that the thought arising from nature, from the quartz crystal, now rises as a living one. As if from the mineral tomb, the thought rises as a living one. The mineral world allows the spirit to rise within us. And when Christ leads us through the plant world out of all those places where otherwise only dead thoughts would live, living thoughts come into being.

[ 33 ] We would feel sick if we went out into nature and gazed out into the world of the stars with only the gaze of a calculating astronomer, and if these dead thoughts were to sink into that world; we would feel sick, and that sickness would lead to death. But if we allow Christ to accompany us, if we carry our lifeless thoughts—accompanied by Christ—into the world of the stars, into the world of the sun, the moon, the clouds, the mountains, the rivers, the minerals, the plants, and the animals, if we carry them into the entire physical human world, everything comes alive as we contemplate nature, and from all beings—as if rising from a grave—arises the living Spirit, the one who heals us, the one who awakens us from death: the Holy Spirit. And, accompanied by Christ, we feel revived by what we have experienced as death. We feel the living, healing Spirit speaking to us from all beings in this world.

[ 34 ] We must regain this through spiritual insight, through a new insight gained through initiation. Then we will grasp the Mystery of Golgotha as the meaning of all earthly existence; we will know how we must be guided in this age, when human freedom must develop through dead thoughts, and how we must be guided to an understanding of nature through Christ. We will know how Christ not only laid down his own destiny on Earth through his death within the Mystery of Golgotha, but how he bestowed upon Earth the great freedom of Pentecost by promising Earth’s humanity the living Spirit, which, through his help, can arise from all that is on Earth. Our knowledge remains dead—indeed, remains sin itself—unless we are raised up through Christ in such a way that from all of nature, from all cosmic existence, the Spirit—the living Spirit—speaks to us once more.

[ 35 ] It is not merely a sophisticated formula—the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit— it is something deeply connected to the entire evolution of the cosmos, and it becomes a living—not a dead—realization for us when we bring Christ Himself to life within us as the Risen One, who is the Bearer of the Holy Spirit.

[ 36 ] Then we understand that it would be like an illness if we could not see the Divine from which we were born. A person must be secretly ill if he is an atheist. He is healthy only when his physical nature is such that he can feel from within, “I am born of God!” as the essence of his own being. And it is a stroke of fate if a person does not find Christ in his earthly life—Christ who can guide him, who can lead him through death at the end of his earthly life, who can lead him through death to knowledge. For if we feel the “In Christo morimur,” then we also feel that which seeks to approach us through Christ’s guidance, through Christ’s leading; then we feel how the Spirit rises from everything, rising even in this earthly life. We feel alive again in this earthly life, gaze through the gate of death through which Christ leads us, look toward that life that lies beyond death, and now know why Christ sent the Spirit, the Holy Spirit: so that we may unite ourselves with this Holy Spirit even here in this life, if we surrender ourselves to Christ’s guidance. We can then say with certainty: We die in Christ as we pass through the gate of death.

[ 37 ] What we have experienced here in nature through our knowledge is already a foreshadowing of the future. For what would otherwise be dead science is brought to life by the living Spirit. If we have understood this correctly—that we are born of the Father, and that we die in Christ—then we may also say, when the death of knowledge is replaced by true death, which takes our body from us—looking through the gate of death—that we will be raised again in the Holy Spirit—Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.