Lectures on Christian Religious Work II

GA 343 — 5 October 1921, Dornach

Nineteenth Lecture

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few more words in continuation of what was said yesterday and the days before, and then I would ask you to use the next discussion hour in such a way that all the individual questions that are on your minds are actually put forward, so that we can then turn the hour into a real discussion. Today I would like to do it differently for the reason that what I said yesterday makes it absolutely necessary to look at the whole thing from the other side as well, namely to also consider the subjective process of redemption. We have, so to speak, set out what belongs to the act of redemption outside of man and must now say something about the other part of the question, about how redemption looks in the Lutheran sense, in the anthroposophical sense and so on, and that in relation to redemption, insofar as it is something subjective.

The first question that arises, my dear friends, is what are we to be redeemed from, what do we need to be redeemed from, what is it about human beings that is in need of redemption? I must confess that I have actually found the most inaccurate ideas about this question in the sphere of Christianity, and this is because people today do not like to go into things in detail and ask questions quite seriously. You know, of course, that the act of redemption is actually something outside the course of the ordinary external development of the world. This can already be seen from all that I said yesterday. Therefore, the relationship between the act of redemption and the human being must also be something that leads the human being out of his subjectivity. Now, the concept of original sin already suggests something that leads out of the human being's subjectivity, because essentially it is about redemption from original sin. Of course, this raises the big question: what is original sin? Now, however, one finds that in many conceptions of original sin there is actually, one can say, in the truest sense of the word, blasphemy. For if one is convinced that everything that works and lives within creation owes its origin to the divine Creator, then one must ascribe to God the presence of a sin that is, as it were, injected into the course of the world. Such such ascribing of sin to God is in fact nothing less than blasphemy, and there is no way to maintain original sin on the one hand and on the other hand to speak of a God who, as the unified Creator, underlies everything. If you want to have any chance of arriving at a concept in this area that does not involve blasphemy, then you have to be able to hold on to the tri-personality of God.

The tri-personality of God does not at all imply a transition from monotheism to a polytheism, to a tri-theism, but it is absolutely, if it is understood, properly compatible with a thoroughly monotheistic world view. But the question arises: by what subjective power do we humans come to a sense of the deity? It may be said that within the mystery, the Christian mystery and the mystery outside of Christianity, no other view of how to reach God has ever been accepted than that God lives in love. And it is actually a matter of clear insight, in the sense in which I expressed it this morning, of complete human insight into the sentence that God lives in love. This sentence can only be understood if we ask ourselves: what other paths could there be to God than the one that, if I may put it this way, is paved with love? What other paths to God could there be, or rather, in what imaginations could we see God except in the imagination of love?

There are two other ways to approach God through inner experience, besides love. There are two other possibilities, namely the way of wisdom and the way of power. And from there one could have the three judgments: God lives in wisdom, God lives in love, God lives in power. After all, something like this has emerged from certain confessional backgrounds, which already lack the full human clarity in this area: all differentiations have been swept aside, so to speak, and God is worshipped or prayed to as the Almighty, the All-loving, the All-knowing. It is impossible to arrive at a pure and correct relationship between human beings and humanity and God for our time after the Mystery of Golgotha if one starts from the sentence: God is attainable through wisdom. It was one of the most profound sentences that has been spoken through the Gospel: God is not attained through wisdom. Of course, God lives in wisdom, but this must not be revealed to humanity in such a way that humanity in this day and age simply wants to find God through wisdom. For if we imagine the wise God, then, if we attach any real, concrete value to the idea, we must imagine this wisdom of God, which then works in the world, as surpassing all human wisdom; and then we immediately come to find no bridge to God by the way of wisdom. We lack the bridge if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, because God's wisdom must infinitely outshine all human wisdom and we could never enter into the weaving and essence of God if we wanted to build the bridge with human wisdom.

We will always find an abyss, my dear friends, if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, the abyss at which we must absolutely stop. It is not the case that we cannot regard our human wisdom as a gift from God, it is. But we must not seek God on the path of wisdom, nor must we seek God on the path of power. For if we were to seek God by the way of might, the might of God would tower so high above all in the one seeking Him that all individual freedom would be excluded. And so it would be impossible for any freedom of the human being to develop on this earth if we were to seek God only by the way of that which is truly involved in Him as Almighty.

The only way that truly leads to God, that connects the creature with the Creator, is the way of love, the love that man freely gives to God, which is nothing other than the universal human understanding of the love that God gives to man. This is the one thing that really does not lead us to an abyss, but rather leads us to finding a way to God, so that we do not have to look for some image when it is said that God lives in love, but that we have to imagine this as a reality before our soul. I am not speaking of something individual, my dear friends, but of something that, as I said, is the mystery wisdom of all times, whether it is brought out from the beginning of all knowledge or not, that is not important at this moment. What is important is that this knowledge: God is love – or: God lives in love – is the common mystery wisdom of all times.

Now, when we understand this in a living way, it has a certain consequence that we can visualize when we look at the overall development of man on earth. We live in a certain state of consciousness in our time. You already know from the lectures of the past few days that this state of consciousness has not always been there in the development of mankind, but that the present state was preceded by a much duller, dream-like state, which was, however, brightened up so that at that time man could perceive the divine in images which were like images in a dream, and that the actual dream-like awareness of God in all of nature has ceased around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that a new approach, a new way of finding the path to the divine has become necessary. We must therefore clearly distinguish the path that the human race has taken up to the proximity of the Mystery of Golgotha, from generation to generation, where consciousness was by no means awakened in the same way as it is today. Of course, for external activities it was similar to our present state of consciousness, but [people were] always able to put themselves, as it were, into states that lie between waking and sleeping and that led them to the divine through direct atavistic, imaginative contemplation, through contemplation of the divine in images. The oldest documents speak a great deal about this way of approaching the divine; that was the way, my dear friends, to approach the divine through wisdom, through human wisdom.

Why was it possible in those days to approach the divine through human wisdom? Yes, you see, the state of consciousness was subdued; as a result, man was protected from experiencing in the fullest sense, with the intensity that exists today, those qualities in his organization that are inherited qualities, that is, from experiencing everything that comes into the individual human being through inheritance. Of course, even in ancient times people attached importance to their inherited characteristics, to racial characteristics, to consanguinity and similar things, but this was always counterbalanced by the assumption of a spiritual element in these inherited characteristics. One has to imagine that, by entering the earth, man has come into such a community with the physical process of development that he had to absorb inheritance into himself, so that something is actually inherited through the blood. But man had not yet reached the stage of consciousness where he could fully live by these inherited qualities. In fact, man experienced the inherited qualities of original sin within himself when he was dreaming. These were the impulses that constantly pushed him away from the divine, constantly urging him to sink below the level of his humanity. But he had, as it were, the counterweight in the atavistic clairvoyance, so that he did not completely merge within this hereditary current. That he entered into this hereditary current with full consciousness only became clearly established around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; there man enters into this hereditary current more deeply and more intensely. Thus one can say: In the course of his evolution, man was led down to the experience of original sin, and he became in need of redemption from this inherited evil; but he only needed this redemption from the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha approached in the evolution of mankind. When man — if I may use the biblical image — entered the earthly element on earth through Adam's [fall into sin], he was lowered into the region of inherited qualities, but his consciousness was not yet so far advanced that he could be carried away by all that comes from inherited qualities. Original sin also developed, and so did being pushed into the inherited qualities. This is something that is given to the whole human race. It is something that lives in evolution as an impulse for the whole human race. This had to be counteracted by another impulse, which can now lift human consciousness up again, out of the sphere of inherited traits. This impulse was to be given by the Christ impulse. In a spiritual-soul way, man was to become acquainted with everything that he had previously experienced only in the blood, in the succession of generations, but which had become so that he was no longer allowed to experience it only in the blood.

Thus, in ancient times, mankind was allowed to seek the way to God through wisdom, and that is through human wisdom, which had not yet been fully entangled in original sin. This was corrupted in the last phases of paganism, and it was also corrupted in the last phases of Judaism; it is just that actually the historical records report only on these last phases and not on what preceded them.

What is it, then, that actually carries a person down into the region of inherited qualities within the earthly world? Let us ask what it is. We come across concepts that, I would say, are quite embarrassing for today's earthman, because one comes to speak about an area that today's man either very easily helps himself with all sorts of tirades, or or that he understands it in the sense in which it has become customary in recent times — as it can only be understood by anthroposophy as the culmination of the recognition of sin — in the psychoanalytical sense. We come to an area where the lowest phase of love life must be touched upon — only with regard to world orientation the lowest — that is, sexual love life. From the same source that a person is born human, from the same source arose what a person experienced in ancient wisdom. Only in this ancient wisdom, I would say, was the human being not fully awakened to life in the impulses of inheritance. Man is fully awakened here on earth through love, first of all as sexual love, and as a continuation of sexual love through child love and parental love, which, as long as they are bound by blood, always have something that pushes man deeper down than he should actually be in the world according to the original divine intention.

And so it becomes necessary, starting from love itself, to sanctify this love by replacing the blood ancestor, the blood-ancestral rule, with the ancestor to whom one professes allegiance, not because of inherited qualities but because of one's own qualities, which one can develop as a human being beyond inherited qualities, or which can be developed in a person beyond inherited qualities. To profess such an ancestor means to include in one's consciousness, in addition to blood relationship, the relationship that arises from free choice, from free decision, that is, to add to blood relationship the elective affinity with Christ, with the ancestor who appears as the ancestor of love, spiritualized love, which now has nothing to do with blood, and which can therefore take hold of the whole human race because it arises from free choice, because it is a choice affinity. Now arose the idea of seeking the inner impulses for freely choosing a being, that is, of being educated in the course of one's individual life in such a way that this choice is a free one, but that one then professes this ancestor, chosen in free election, just as one used to profess the God of Abraham through blood relationship. After all, all ancient religions are based on direct blood relationships. That which was lived in the polytheism of later times was nothing more than a transformation of the service to the ancestors, that is, the kinship felt with the ancestral god as the blood relative.

Now came the great realization that what had previously lived on earth only in the blood, what was somehow connected with the blood, had been handed over to the earthly life of the spirit and soul. Who handed it over? He who lives in the blood relationship and who sent the old wisdom out of the blood relationship into human consciousness. Who was it? It was the Father-God. It had to be recognized that the Father-God lives in such a way that human beings could remain human in a certain sense, right up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then he had to make a decision – and human consciousness is only possible because it understands something like this, because it moves beyond everything earthly not only to a supermundane experience, but to an [understanding of the] supermundane decision – to give up the one who was always connected with him, to give the son to the earth, to let him go through an event, as a result of which the son was no longer united with the father as he had been before, but where a different relationship between the son and the father had come about through the relationship of the son to humanity.

It is extremely difficult to put these things into words, but I will try to put it into words as clearly as possible, as clearly as I can.

We are referred back to the ancient recognition of the Father-God, who, subconsciously, passed through the generations with the blood, who enclosed the Son within himself, who, with wisdom, gave people the experience of love, and we are also referred to the ancient sacrificial service.

You see, my dear friends, in the later corrupted times of the Gentiles and also in the later corrupted times of the Jews, people did not seek the essence of the sacrifice in what the sacrifice actually is. Let us take the characteristic sacrifice, the animal blood sacrifice. What is its essential nature? That the animal sacrifice was performed did not alone constitute the essence of the sacrifice, but rather that something that belonged to someone or to a community was given up, and in such a way that this individual or this community no longer had the possession. That is an essential part of the sacrifice. The further back we go in the evolution of time, the more we find that this concept is inseparable from the concept of sacrifice: the giving up of something one possesses. Animal sacrifice only became such because the animal was given to the fire; in older times, all animal sacrifices were carried out on living animals. When the sacrifice was made on the living animal, the life also perishes; something living is sacrificed. It was therefore definitely intended that through the sacrifice one should redeem and free oneself from a possession that one had, a possession which, if understood in the usual egoistic sense, consisted in something that benefited one, in something that one had inherited. If you understand it in a spiritual sense, then the possession was something that brought you down below humanity, something that you only had through blood. This was also to be given up again in the blood sacrifice, insofar as it was to be taken away from people.

But one could only think in this way as long as one was allowed to believe that the innocent degree of consciousness, which does not reach down into original sin, is maintained, even when going through the moment when the blood fire, because the merging of the blood in the fire is, after all, the opposite act of what happens to the blood when it enters and pulses in the human organism, and what is precisely the carrier of original sin. But in order that what lies in the blood in the activity of the Father-God might be taken away for the whole human race in a uniform manner, the event of Golgotha had to be given to mankind through the sacrifice of the Son, so that henceforth the Son does not live in the succession of births as he formerly lived with the Father, but that he lives in that in which human consciousness immerses itself without falling into the powers that go through the succession of births, and that looks to him who has gone through death on Calvary. This victory over death and the feeling of what can be felt in this context, pulls one out of the context of being placed into original sin, as people said in ancient Christianity, in mystery Christianity. The elective affinity with Christ pulls one out of the original sin of blood relationship. You may sense your relationship to the event of Golgotha in a shadowy way, then this sense of yours brings about nothing but at most again wisdom, which was also there before the event of Golgotha, but you can also sense your connection with the Christ so strongly, you can strengthen your relationship to the Christ so much that you love him as you loved out of the blood. If you can do that, then your feeling of love for Christ works in you in the opposite way to how original sin worked in you. Then you heal the original sin in you. And then the Father God, the underlying of the world as the one aspect, the one person of the Godhead, the one mask or form of the Godhead, but which is connected to the other mask, the other form, the other person of the Godhead, to the person of the Son of God.

But in the succession of time, especially when we think of the time that lies behind the mystery of Calvary in the gray time of the origin of mankind, we think of the God who works through the blood and through the succession of generations. And we think of God the Father, who sacrificed his Son, to whom love – which, as we have said, is the only real way to God for man – to whom love in the spiritual and soul life in man can be kindled so much can be so strengthened when he contemplates the full tragedy, the full horror of the Mystery of Golgotha; and when this love becomes so strong, then there is indeed in man a power that counteracts original sin. This then asserts itself from the body, in the effect of the blood in the original sin, in the inherited qualities, but we do not then merge into these inherited qualities; we rise with the feeling and willing gaze that we direct to Golgotha, above life in the original sin in consciousness itself and thereby bring about such a strong power in consciousness that it counteracts original sin. There is no other way to counteract original sin than to look at the Mystery of Golgotha. My dear friends, there is no self-redemption to counteract this original sin, there is only the redemption through Christ, the redemption through the vision of Christ passing through the Mystery of Golgotha. And by developing this feeling towards Christ, which consists of nothing but love, we may now look up to the God of might, to the Father-God, who underlies the creative activity in the blood and who allowed this might of his to pass over into the working of the Son. So that we can say: We do not need to look to the omnipotence of God, as we stand today in the development of the times; we leave that beyond love; it is in God, but we do not find the way to God if we go this way of power.

The last emanation of the principle of original sin, my dear friends, is human knowledge that relies entirely on inherited characteristics. In the moment when – as a final phase – that which emerges from the impulses that lie in the blood flowing through the generations merges into knowledge, it becomes intellectualistic knowledge, it becomes the knowledge of modern natural science. It is the last phase of the original human sin; it is the spirit of antiquity transferred into the abstract; it is that which requires healing; it is that which makes it necessary for man now no longer to believe that he comes to God through the spirit alone, as it was possible in ancient times, when the divine was attained through wisdom. What is needed is the realization that man cannot attain the divine through wisdom alone, but that this path of wisdom must be sanctified. This is what has now come through the consequence of the event of Golgotha through the experience of knowledge in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have the third form of the Godhead. We have to look at the unified God in three forms. We now know that we may not behold the God of might without the mediation of the Christ in love, by reflecting back to the God of might what is given to us in the Christ, to whom we cleave through true love, and we also know that we may not receive any wisdom without sanctifying it, healing it through the Spirit sent to humanity through Christ. We must lift up human wisdom by the power of Christ, by the power that we have within us when we contemplate the event of Golgotha; we must regard it as sick and heal it by letting that supersensible permeate it, which can come to us and which is meant by permeation, by sanctification through Christ.

So, my dear friends, there can be no other redemption from original sin than that through Christ Jesus; the other sins are consequential sins. Individual sins are committed by man because he can be weak through original sin, can be inclined to sin. These individual sins find their atonement in what must be achieved through self-redemption; they must be atoned for through self-redemption in the course of earthly or supermundane life. But that which is the original sin, the mother of all other sins, that could only be taken out of the human race through the act of redemption by Christ. And the moment someone, through something like – call it anthroposophy, call it Christianity, call it religion, it does not matter – the moment someone comes to a true realization of these things, there can be no doubt about it. And if there is still doubt, it stems from the inability to put it into words. For in itself there must be something directly convincing, something freely convincing in what leads to the historical Christ in love and to His deed, to the event of Golgotha.

Not that which lives in Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' (to give a specific example), can be a path that leads to Christ; the path can actually only lead away from Christ if one has the Christ merely as [the proclaimer] of the doctrine of the Father-God, where the main thing lies in the teaching. No, the path to the Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha, does not lie in a teaching, it lies in freely developing, freely flowing love. Only through this is the path to the Christ attainable. And when this freely flowing love is present, our wisdom will also take up within itself the Spirit, which is the healing, the Holy Spirit. This is the same Word, but it means at the same time that no other human relationship can redeem man than the relationship to the historical Christ, to the one who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is no other human relationship that can take away original sin from a person than the relationship to the historical Christ, who went through the mystery of Golgotha. The wisdom that only reveals itself as the last descendant of original sin says, with Harnack: “We don't want to talk about what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, after all, no eye has seen it; in any case, however it may have happened with the resurrection, the belief in resurrection, that is, the Easter belief, emerged from it. It is not Christian to speak in this way. And once, in an association called the Giordano Bruno Association (it was not the Giordano Bruno League), I explained how someone who speaks in the spirit of Harnack has no right to call himself a Christian, especially not in the sense of the newest spiritual consciousness, I pointed out the passage where Harnack says in his “Essence of Christianity” that what matters is not the factuality of the resurrection but the belief in the resurrection. Then the chairman, who was a well-informed man and who felt he was a well-informed Christian, told me that it was nowhere in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity,” that he had not read it in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”; and if it were in there, it would not be Protestant, it would be pagan-Catholic, because it simply resembled the statement – not me saying this, but him saying this – that was made by the Catholic side about the origin of the Holy Robe of Trier; there it also did not depend on where it actually came from, it depended on the faith that one associates with the Holy Robe of Trier; but that is not Protestant, that is pagan-Catholic. He had not found this in Harnack's Essence of Christianity, he said.

I told him that I did not have the book with me and that I would send him the page number tomorrow. But at the same time I saw from this how such ideas are received today and in what a trivial sense one takes such things seriously and lives into them. One does not feel at all that the literary products that appear in the theological field are no longer Christian at all, and that the Overbeck, who made a great impression on Nietzsche in Basel, was quite right in all that he wrote about modern theology [in his book] “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology”, in which he had actually already provided proof in the 1870s that modern theology, whatever it may be, is no longer a product of Christianity. And Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' is the least of all that has something to do with Christianity. If you replace the name Christ with the name Yahweh, the Father-God, wherever Harnack uses the name Christ, you are justified in saying that the person who wrote this book no longer knows the real relationship that the Christian must have with his Christ.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that we can feel the full seriousness of what needs to be done to renew Christian religious life if we do not feel how far removed from Christianity those are who often think they can uphold Christianity before the world today by sacrificing everything in this great apologetic process that theology undertakes before the world, ultimately even their relationship to Christ himself. One cannot imagine anything more un-Christian than Harnack's principle that the gospel does not belong to the Son, but only to the Father, and that the gospel is not a message from the Son, but only the message of the Son from the Father. Someone might confess something like this today under the pressure of modern materialism, but they would have to have the honesty to then stop calling themselves Christian.

There is no other way than to present these things in all their complexity and thereby rise to the realization: redemption from original sin means having such a relationship with the historical Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that this relationship pulses through our veins in a spiritual-soul way just as truly as blood pulses through our veins in a physical way. That is the power, that is the strength that can be called the power and the strength of faith. One should not seek an abstract concept for faith, but this strength, this power for faith. To believe means to find in one's soul such strength and such power for the Christ that this soul power, this soul strength is as great as that which the blood ties can achieve in us. Then we will find the way to the unified Christ of all humanity, to that unified Christ who, through the event of Golgotha, is also the real objective cause for every subjective act of redemption. But then we will no longer seek the act of redemption in external signs; on the contrary, we will seek through the sacraments that which is the real relationship of the human soul to the Christ. We will have to talk about this in the other part. Then we also do not seek in an abstract or mystical way a relationship to a Christ who eludes us, but we establish in the human spirit and in the human heart and in the whole human being an elective affinity to the Christ, just as we have a consanguineous relationship to the life of the Father-God, in so far as this life expresses itself in the blood of mankind, that is to say, in the life-creative power of mankind in the physical realm.

I have tried to present to you the subjective side of the idea of redemption. I do not believe that in this day and age one can arrive at an objective understanding of the subjective idea of redemption from other premises, from other antecedents.

I would now like to ask you, my dear friends, to prepare your questions well so that we can really get into a discussion, a back-and-forth of words, in the afternoons over the next few days.