The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence

GA 150 — 23 December 1913, Berlin

IX. The Power of Childhood and the Power of Eternity

A Christmas Gift

It could easily seem as if the simple, loving joy that has expressed itself in hundreds and hundreds of hearts over long periods of time, when such a play about the divine child and his destiny on earth passed by these hearts , it might easily seem as if this simple, loving joy were affected by our spiritual-scientific worldview, by the seemingly so complicated, so much-evoked insights of Christ Jesus, to which we must strive within our worldview. Every heart and every mind will certainly be joyfully seized when it can become aware of such a play again, as it has been throughout the centuries during this Christmas season in the hearts of people, both in the cities and in the most lonely deserts, of those people who have gone through a certain spiritual life and of those people who remained in the simplicity of rural life, how all these hearts felt drawn to the divine child, in whom they perceived the forces that once entered into the becoming of humanity and saved this becoming from the spiritual death to which it was otherwise believed to be subject by virtue of the eternal laws of the world. Every heart, every mind must be seized when it sees again how this divine child has been worshiped.

And yet, it is only apparent if one wanted to believe that through our increasingly complicated knowledge of the miracle of Bethlehem, this direct warmth, this elementary feeling, could somehow be affected. It is, I say, only seemingly looked at the circumstances if one can think so. For we live in a very different world today, and will increasingly live in a very different world from the centuries that passed such plays in their seasons, not in the way we do, but in the way of direct life. Our complicated time, which has looked so deeply into scientific thinking and imagining, needs a different impulse of the soul in order to be able to look up again to the divine child who has brought the greatest impulse into the becoming of humanity. Only seemingly more complicated is our view, which speaks of the two Jesus children, of the Solomon-like and the Nathan-like Jesus child. For we see in the Nathanian Jesus child, as it were, the child of the whole of humanity, that being of humanity which remained behind when the other humanity began its earthly path, remained behind in spiritual worlds, before the tempter, the Luciferic principle, approached humanity. We see that it remained, as it were, at the stage of human childhood and was retained as the spiritual childhood impulse of humanity in the spiritual realm until 'the time was fulfilled', when it was born as an exceptional human being in the Nathanian Jesus child and appeared as a human that did not pass through the incarnations on earth before, but that appeared for the first time in an earthly embodiment and that, immediately after birth, addressed his mother in a language that only she understood, a language that sounded like it came from the heights of heaven. And more and more people will be convinced that, in order to understand the different way in which humanity is understood in our time, we need to look up to the divine child, whom we revere in the boy Jesus, the son of Nathan, who remained behind on the childhood stage of humanity in the spiritual realm, who was born with those human qualities, with those original characteristics that all human beings would have had if they had not entered into earthly existence through the luciferic temptation. It was with all these qualities, which were the very property of humanity before the luciferic temptation, that the Nathanic Jesus-child entered into humanity.

We need to know this today, we need to know that we have the childhood of all humanity in this boy Jesus, so that we can feel from the depths of our soul the same feelings that simple people of the past felt – but only felt, which we can know if we want to continue along the spiritual path – when they encountered the glorification of the divine child in such games. What speaks most to our soul in such a play, as it has come to us, is precisely the child's deepest innocence, humanity's own divine child innocence in the face of what the tempter in the guise of Lucifer or the later Ahriman, who is to be seen as the medieval “devil”), has made of humanity. The contrast between Herod, who was seduced by the devil and then killed by him, and the child of humanity who preserves the principle of human innocence and leads to eternal life, is deeply moving.

Such ideas, as they live in such plays, they truly did not come from superficial feelings. They arose from the intuitive recognition of the deepest secrets of the world, which were known, even if only intuitively, from the Middle Ages, from the cities to the deserts of the mountains and the countryside. Only the way in which human souls turned to those secrets was different from the way in which we must fathom them again.

And it is easy for the soul's gaze to turn from such a play to representations in which, one might say, with all the means of the highest art, as they arose in the 13th and 14th centuries from the abundance of Christian feeling, the whole mystery of the coming of humanity to earth and the relationship of the human soul to that which lives as the eternal divine in the human being was depicted. So today, when we want to celebrate the holy Christmas in our own way, I would like to turn my gaze away from these games to a magnificent representation, in which we are able to admire the very origins that lead from the highest feeling and, one might say, from “scientific-artistic knowledge” for the Middle Ages, to such simple games. I would like to direct our view to one such supreme artistic representation, which contains, as it were, the very origins of what is then found in such simple games.

In Pisa, the western Italian city, is the famous cathedral where, as we have mentioned several times, Galileo observed the swinging church lamp, and through his genius discovered the laws without which modern physics would be unthinkable. Adjacent to this church, we find the famous Camposanto, enclosed by high walls, on which medieval art has embodied what was thought about the divine secrets and the connection of man with these divine secrets, with the eternal spiritual principle thought in the human being. Some of these medieval secrets are picturesquely depicted on the walls of the Camposanto of Pisa. This churchyard was covered with soil that the crusaders brought from the tomb of Jesus Christ. And anyone who visits this churchyard today and picks up a handful of earth can get the feeling that there is something under this earth that the crusaders once brought from Palestine to spread out on this churchyard, which was to be considered particularly sacred.

Among the paintings on the walls of the Camposanto is one called “The Triumph of Death”. However, it has only been called that since 1705. Before that, everyone who saw it and knew it and spoke of it called it “Purgatory”. And there certainly were also a “heaven” and a “hell” on the walls of the Camposanto. But this Purgatory contains most profoundly the way in which the medieval soul viewed the mystery of the human soul and its connection with the eternal in the human being. Today, much of this image has already been corrupted. But through the corrupted, one can still see what the painter, unknown to history today, wanted to conjure up on the wall of the great mysteries of becoming human.

First we see a procession of kings and queens emerging from a mountain cave and developing mightily, full of self-confidence and arrogance and imbued with the feeling: We know what one is on earth if one belongs to such a class! The procession emerges from a mountain cave and, as it comes out of the cave, it encounters three coffins guarded by a hermit. Suddenly, the hunting party finds itself standing before these three coffins. The contents of the coffins are characteristically different: one contains a skeleton, the second a corpse that has already begun to decompose, with worms gnawing at it, and the third a recently deceased person who has only just begun to decompose. The procession stops before these three coffins. A hermit is sitting in front of these coffins, as if to indicate with his gesture: Stop! Look at what you really are as human beings at this memento mori. Further up, above the mountain, on a second ascending hill, we see three hermits sitting, some of them bringing food, but some of them also deeply absorbed in their books, pondering the secrets of becoming human. The whole thing is arranged in such a way that the one mountain at the top forms the ceiling, as it were. Where the hunting procession encounters the coffins, the three hermits are seated at the top, representing peace and having the ability to enter the depths of the human soul to find the connection between that human soul and the realms of the eternal. And if we look further, we see all kinds of dismembered people immediately joining the hunt, which is standing in front of the memento mori. Further on, we see people listening to the sounds of a harp; behind the harp stands a figure with a finger to its mouth. Above them, we see a host of angelic beings on one side, and devilish ones in hideous images – the painter has used all his imagination to depict the devils – on the other. So that on the far right of the picture we see the angels leaning down to the people listening to the harp. Between them and the mountain, from whose crater fire is coming, we see the devils developing.

But all this is actually there for the one who looks at it, to draw attention to something that one might not want to notice on superficial examination, but which gradually leads to an insight into the deepest human secrets. What is it that is supposed to be depicted here? It is characteristic of the medieval science when we see how the hunting party stops in front of the three corpses: first a skeleton, then the second, a corpse already eaten away by worms, and then the third, a bloated body, one that has only recently died – a motif that we often find in the Middle Ages. We understand it only when we ask: Why do people come out of the mountains? What are those who are there in the hunt? — and when we know: These are not the living, these are the deceased who are in Kamaloka! The image says: Such bodies do you have on you - the skeleton as the physical body, the corpse eaten by worms as the etheric body, and that which belongs to the recently deceased as the astral body. Remember, you who are living, what you should see of the secrets of existence after death! Thus we see the mystery of the three human covers expressed in a medieval way.

One would like to say: strange and wonderful. The hermit, who is sitting a little elevated directly in front of the three coffins, indicates to us through his whole gesture that man needs to penetrate into the mysteries of existence in order to recognize how he is connected to the eternal sources for his temporary existence. The picture is completed by the mountain itself arching over the whole, and the hermits sitting at the top, in silent contemplation and a peaceful life in nature, showing us, as it were, how one can connect with the inner workings of human nature by turning inward.

That is what the painter wanted to depict, and not a “triumph of death”, as the painting was later called when its meaning was no longer understood. From the painting itself, we can see how right those were who spoke of the Purgatory, that is, of what we call Kamaloka. What the painter intended was to show that we, as we are in life, do not always belong to those who recognize the meaning of life after death and relate to the eternal in human nature in the right way , as the painter shows us in those who are no longer in life but in the life after death; for we are dealing with those who are in the hunting procession with people who are in Kamaloka, who have already died. They see what happens to the body after death.

And when we look at the sick, at the ailing people, we see on the one hand what is physical, and on the other hand we see how the devils and the angels depart with the human souls. And we see the depths that are revealed before us: Every devil has a soul in his claws, which he leads away, and every angel carries a soul under his wings, but these souls are different. And that is what I would like to point out at this Christmas hour. The souls that are taken by the devils, who are rightly deformed but formed with the right understanding, are souls that have the form of older people. And those who are taken by the angels to the bliss of heaven are souls that the painter shaped as children. In this we sense the view that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages: that something in man must remain childlike throughout his earthly existence, that people can retain something, however old and outwardly aged they become , of childlikeness, of innocence of feeling throughout their whole life; that, on the other hand, there are people who grow old not only physically but also in soul, because they have accepted the soul-earthly. For only on earth do we grow old. Those who grow old can only do so through guilt, through that which distracts from the eternal heavenly. Therefore, their souls look like people who have grown old, whereas the souls of those who remain connected to that which maintains the connection with the eternal in the spiritual world retain the childlike form.

That is what speaks so powerfully to the observer in this image from the Camposanto in Pisa: that there is something in human nature that we can recognize as expressing the eternal in man in the first three years of childhood, which I tried to show in the little book 'The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity'. This sense of being at home with the divine spiritual heights that occurs in childhood was felt in the Middle Ages. This was expressed even in such magnificent works of art as in this picture of the Camposanto in Pisa, which is perhaps the most interesting picture of the early Middle Ages in this respect, and which was so magnificent that it was attributed to Giotto and many other great contemporaries, which is impossible because it was painted after Giotto. The way in which the medieval human being related to the child is most magnificently expressed in this picture. We encounter this feeling everywhere. We find it so wonderfully expressed in these simple Christmas carols, we find it in the fact that the legend of the Christ Child has found its way into all hearts with inexpressible warmth, and how this legend of the child has made people aware of their connection to the Christ impulse. People needed the certainty that the principle of the child had come to save the eternity of the human soul. Just as the human being who has preserved his or her own eternity is brought by the angels into the realm of the blessed as a human being in the form of a child, as depicted by the painter, so too must one imagine that in the form of the innocent child, that which we know to have united itself with the Christian divine impulse, with the Christian divine essence, in his thirtieth year.

Thus, I would say, the connection between the heights of medieval spiritual life, as they present themselves to us in such a picture in the Camposanto at Pisa, and the simple games, which, admittedly, only originated later in the way one was presented here, but which all contain the impulses that express what we are again seeking in the tone and manner of our time. So it was not just — as people today would like to persuade people — how the souls of people in earlier centuries related to the child Jesus. Just as we must now assimilate the teaching of the Nathanic Jesus Child, who in His twelfth year of life took up the I of Zarathustra and in His thirtieth year the Christ-being, as we must understand it in order to realize what had to happen in the process of becoming human, In order to save the eternal in his being, medieval man did not need all the science that is given in concepts and 'theories, but rather what was given in such grandiose views of the nature of the human soul, as expressed in the image just characterized. Different times demand different ways of presenting eternal mysteries, and different times have had their different ways of presenting eternal mysteries. Time and again, it is the manifestation of the fact that man may have great hope for his soul. In the time before the mystery of Golgotha, it was the hope that there would come what corresponds spiritually in man to what the sun is physically in our planetary system. What we can know today, was felt deeply at all times.

In spring we see life, the plants sprouting from the earth and sprout and see them grow towards summer. We look up at the sun and know: they emanate from the sun, the forces that fertilize the earth, so that it can bring forth the living life of the sprouting and sprouting plants and the other beings. And in addition to what takes place so regularly from year to year in a sacred order, we see the regularity of the sun's path, which at its exact hour fills every place with the power of blessing, with which it must be filled, that which that belongs to the earth's atmosphere itself, such as the storms that sweep across the fields, the rain that pours down from the clouds, and the fog that spreads over the earth. We may see order and rule in what emanates from the sun for life on earth. In spring and summer, if we observe nature carefully, we have the feeling that the sun, triumphantly hurrying over the earth, is able to do something about the wind and weather that the earth, so to speak, allows to arise on its surface. But when we approach autumn and winter, and the power of the sun loses its strength and intervenes less in earthly existence, then we feel the changeable nature of our own earthly activities in a different way. And anyone who contemplates this alternation between spring and summer on the one hand and autumn and winter on the other with a little reflection can say: in spring, the sun with its holy order triumphs over the fickle effects that the egoism of the earth brings forth from the nature of the earth. But winter is the time when the earth forms that which is in the egoistic atmosphere, where that which is in it conquers that which blesses the earth from the cosmos.

The person who observes his inner being in thinking, feeling and willing sees how the impulses of feeling, the affects, the forces of will arise in him in a disorderly fashion from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep. He can feel how this changeable nature in his own inner being can only be compared to that which is in the earth's atmosphere. And indeed, just as the earth's atmosphere changes, so does what dominates our thinking, feeling and willing. Our soul has the same forces within it, albeit only in embryonic form, as those that work outside in air and weather and in the elemental forces. They dominate our thinking, feeling and willing as forces within us. Outside, they are elemental forces, demonic powers that live in air, water and fire and in what we have around us in lightning and thunder, in the changeable effects of our atmosphere. When we think, feel and will, we are fundamentally only related to what the earth develops out of its own selfishness in winter. And this has been felt at all times. When winter approached, when the earth's egoism became more effective with the elemental forces, which now did not follow the sun as they followed the ruling sun in spring and summer, then it was felt that all this was related to man's own inner being. O winter time, man felt, even if he did not express it clearly, you are related to my own inner being! But when the depth of the winter night came, when the time of the winter solstice came, then man felt by the way the sun now developed its new strength so that it could grow and grow more and more and gain strength towards spring and summer, man felt: the sun's power always conquers the selfishness of the earth. And then man felt courage and hope within himself and could say to himself: Just as in the physical world the cosmic sun always triumphs over the terrestrial forces of the earth, however the sun rises on a dark winter's night, if only we can feel it, so there must also be something in the depths of the soul that reigns as a spiritual sun, which will come and triumph — as the annual sun triumphs in the winter solstice — which will come as a spiritual sun in the great winter solstice! First it was hoped, then it was known, that the time of the great winter solstice had come, when one learned to understand the time of the Mystery of Golgotha as the rising of the spiritual sun within man.

And now we look back to those ancient times in the evolution of the earth, when there was an earthly spring and an earthly summer, before the Mystery of Golgotha had come. Then man still carried within him the legacy of the old times, the old clairvoyance, which made it possible for him to see into the spiritual world, where the consciousness of the connection with the divine-spiritual world still existed. But we live in the winter of the earth, that cannot be denied, in the time when it has really come about that we are not only surrounded more and more by mechanical forces outside, which are at work in machines, in industry, in the industry, in the commercial conditions of the earth's economy, but we also live in such a way that we no longer have the spiritual-divine world around us, as we did in the time of the earth's spring and summer. But what the human being felt as a symbol, the victory of the sun at the winter solstice as the victory of the spiritual sun in the depths of the human soul, that is what today's humanity can feel in the face of the Mystery of Golgotha and its preparation through that birth, which we celebrate every year renewed at Christmas. Just as a person who lives through the winter need never despair of the power of the sun, but may hope that the joys taken from him by the fall will reappear after the depths of the winter night, so too may a person look at what has taken place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and say to himself: Even if, like the winter storms on winter's winter night, so too may selfishness, the winter night of the human soul, rule without order in our own inner being. Yet we can never lose hope, for whatever may appear in our own soul that is contrary to the weather, must be counteracted by that which, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is connected with all human life on earth: the Christ impulse, which entered the evolution of humanity through the body of the Nathanian Jesus child , which could enter through the fact that in the Nathanic Jesus was born the child of humanity, the child with those qualities that belonged to the human soul when it had not yet gone through earthly incarnations, which had not yet been implanted with what comes from entering into earthly incarnations, the child that still had the qualities of the spiritual heights in which it may be eternal.

I wanted to present these ideas to you so that we can see from them how, in view of the human child's powers, which are at the same time his eternal powers, people can feel a supreme sense of what one has always felt and should continue to feel at the sight of the divine child at Christmas. And even if our knowledge must become different, even if we must gain the other conceptions in place of what the medieval conception saw in the picture that I indicated — the conception of the two Jesus children, the drawing over of the essence of the one into the other, the taking possession of the body of the Nathanian Jesus child by the Christ essence — then we can look with our most sacred feelings and with our strongest hopes to the realization that since the Mystery of Golgotha something lives in our human becoming that has been drawn into our earthly aura, to which we need only appeal in our joy of celebration, as hope for the indestructibility of our human being.

It is just as necessary for us to remember this as it was for the people who took joy in the simple games. Indeed, we may say something else: we take no less joy in the simple games. We feel connected to those people who found joy in these games because, in our way, we appreciate what was given to people when the child of humanity entered into earthly existence. We appreciate how they were given the strongest hope, the strongest impulse that human beings need to of Golgotha, can be sustained by the vision that, as in the physical cosmos the sun triumphs over earthly egoism, so in the depths of the human soul will live ever more and more the impulse that flowed out through the Mystery of Golgotha as the spiritual solar impulse of human evolution on earth. Once the event was there as a historical one, through which this impulse entered into earthly life, but it is meant to awaken again and again in remembrance, as can happen through such festivals. For it is true, on the one hand, that the Christ-being once entered into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha; and on the other hand, what Angelus Silesias said with the beautiful words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem

And not in you, you will remain lost forever!

What is born in Bethlehem should be born deeper and deeper in our own soul, so that we see fulfilled in this own soul what the medieval sensibility wanted to see fulfilled by seeing the destiny of souls permeated by the Christ impulse in those childlike figures, into the realms of the blessed and do not fall into the claws of Ahriman, to whom only those souls remain that have become so attached to earthly life that they appear old, while the destiny of the soul is not to grow old on earth, but to remain young. And only the fate of the body on earth is to grow old. Man's higher destiny is to preserve spiritual youth in this aging body in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, so that he may feel more and more within himself the hope that, however the winter storms may prevail in the soul and however the temptations temptations may live in the soul, the living confidence can never die that what has flowed into the earth aura through the Mystery of Golgotha can arise from the depths of the soul, and what we want to revive in our souls through such festivals.

So I tried to summarize what we can feel as the Christmas spirit from a reflection that seeks to combine with these few words what we feel about Christmas from our anthroposophical worldview with what people in earlier times experienced from the message of the divine child in a play like the one we presented. The words express this:

In the depths of man's soul
The spiritual sun lives confident of victory;
The right powers of the mind
They are able to sense it
In the winter of the inner life,
And the heart's hope:
He sees the victory of the spiritual sun
In the Christmas blessing light,
As the symbol of the highest life
In the winter's deep night.