A New Experience of Christ

GA 69c — 13 June 1910, Oslo

1. Christ in the 20th Century

Dear attendees! This year, too, I would like to express my extreme regret that I am unable to make the remarks I have to make today in your language. However, that is not possible, and so I apologize to you for being forced to speak in a language foreign to you about the subject of today's lecture.

It is intended to speak about this subject from the point of view of spiritual science, of spiritual research. This already indicates that the whole way of treating, of presenting the reflection on the Christ in the twentieth century, belongs to a field that is still not very popular today, because spiritual science or theosophy is not only unpopular in the broadest circles of our present-day education, but also still quite unknown. Yet it is precisely spiritual science that contains the mission to speak about the most important matters, about the innermost facts of the human heart in our time and the time to come. A brief consideration of the following can make this clear to us – especially in relation to our topic today.

Since I had the honor of speaking here last year on a similar topic, a heated discussion has taken place in Germany. In recent months, the words “Did Jesus Live?” could be read on the notice boards in all of Germany's larger cities. Numerous lectures were held that referred to this question, for or against, as to whether Jesus had ever lived. It is significant that there is no [external] evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was really a historical figure – he to whom millions of people looked up as the bearer of the greatest hopes, as the source of comfort in the deepest suffering. It is a significant fact that science in our time must raise the question of whether this universally beloved and sacred figure ever lived at all, and that there is no historical evidence that he really did live.

Just as it is significant that science in the study of external facts has come to this point of view, so it is also significant that in our time, little recognized by our education, a spiritual direction is asserting itself that must say purely from the facts of spiritual research: These facts of spiritual research reveal the reality of Jesus with a certainty that no external document, no external tradition can give. Where external fact-finding loses the possibility of proving the historical Jesus, spiritual research steps in, which will be more and more able to prove with absolute certainty the reality of Christ Jesus as a historical fact.

Our time has achieved great and monumental things in terms of external, physical fact-finding, and it is justifiably proud of them. Spiritual research, however, is obliged to point out that it is possible to create other instruments, other tools, that cannot be realized with the outer hands and cannot be seen with the outer eyes, but that can be created by man if he develops the powers that already exist in his ordinary soul life - the powers of thinking, feeling and willing - beyond the normal level. Spiritual science must point out that the powers of thinking, feeling and willing, as they are initially present in the normal development of man, can be increased, and that even today, as they have always existed since primeval times, there are spiritual researchers who not only use external instruments and tools for their research, but also develop those inner powers that lie dormant in the human soul.

Those who make themselves researchers in this way acquire new organs of perception that open up something to them that would otherwise have remained closed. These organs bring about on a higher level what happens on a lower level to a person born blind when he undergoes an operation and thereby gains his sight. It is the same with the spiritual world: it is reality, but only when the human being is able to raise the forces slumbering in him to the level of clairvoyance – true, not pathological clairvoyance – does it become a fact that he can experience for himself.

The same applies to spiritual research as to any other research: just as a person in everyday life cannot always go into a laboratory and work with retorts and other tools to extract nature's secrets, so an everyday person cannot, of course, get involved in everything that a spiritual researcher does. You can find some information about this in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But it must always be emphasized that it is the same as with what the chemist researches in his laboratory: one learns what he has researched with his tools, and what has been researched can then be grasped by the natural will to truth. It is the same in spiritual science or theosophy: individuals can become researchers and develop their powers of clairvoyance, then they can report on what can be seen in the spiritual world, and this can then be understood through reason, through natural [reason-based] thinking. Today we shall be presented with the results of spiritual research in a way that is comparable to a chemist telling you the results of his laboratory research.

Today we stand at an important and prominent epoch in the development of humanity with regard to our conception of Christ and our entire position on the Christ problem. Believe me, anyone who takes the standpoint of spiritual science is not quick with the word: “We are in a transitional epoch.” He knows that this word has already been used for every epoch. He uses it only when the spiritual-factual context demands it, when a particular epoch is something very special. We live in a time that spiritual research can only compare with the even more significant age of the last centuries before the initiation of Christianity, when people's expectations were at their highest, waiting for an event that had to come and found expression in the words of John the Baptist: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdoms of Heaven - the spiritual world - have drawn near.” Today the spiritual researcher lives in a similar expectation, and in a similar way we may speak to present-day humanity: We are on the threshold of a new Christ-revelation. Admittedly, it will be of a completely different nature than the one 1900 years ago.

What does spiritual science understand by the Christ when it speaks of the new Christ-Revelation in the twentieth century? For spiritual science, the Christ is the highest impulse that has entered into the development of humanity. All those who have ever been able to see through the spiritual life of humanity with a clairvoyant eye have always spoken of the Christ, only they used different names. The great teachers in ancient India, who are usually referred to as the holy Rishis, also spoke of the Christ. But how did they speak of him? They spoke in such a way that all those who understood them could know: When they spoke of “Vishvakarman” - that was the name by which they designated Christ - then they spoke of the highest spiritual power to which man can rise when he immerses himself in his own soul forces - disregarding everything that gives external, sensual perception - and looks out at the great facts of the world or looks into his own inner being. When man looks out into the world and sees through what expands in space and takes place in time as Maya, as illusion, and when he sees behind this veil of Maya what underlies the sensory world, the Vedic teaching calls this “Brahman”. If man looks into his inner being, at his true self, as a part of that which lives and weaves in the world, it calls it “Atman”. Thus the ancient Vedic teaching of Vishvakarman speaks of that which weaves through space and time as “Brahman” and that which appears as an inner revelation as “Atman”. But there was one thing that the Vedic teachers impressed upon their listeners again and again: that only when man frees himself from all sense perception, when he frees himself from everything that is visible in outer space, can he gain insight into the essence of Vishvakarman, of Brahman and Atman.

Then came the time when another great leader of human development pointed to the Christ. Those who can see beyond names and labels know that the great Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the Christ-revelation. What did Zarathustra speak from his clairvoyance, which he had acquired in the same way that clairvoyance is spoken of here today, when he pointed out the sun shining in outer space to his listeners? How did he speak of the sun? [He spoke thus:] When you look up at the sun and see the physical light of the sun, this physical light is only the garment of the spiritual being. This body of the spiritual being is related to that which truly lives in the sun, as the outer human body is related to that which, spiritually, as the soul, permeates, interweaves and lives through the human body. But that, he called - the word is not important here - “aura” or “Ahura Mazdao”. For the inner eye, it is perceptible as inner light, in contrast to the outer body. For the clairvoyant eye, an aura is what a person experiences spiritually. Thus Zarathustra pointed people up to the sun: the outer light of the sun is the physical body for the spirit of the sun, which he called the “great aura” in contrast to the small inner light in man. The great solar aura was for Zarathustra that which lives and works in all human development. For him, it was also that which man reaches when he seizes the inner power of the soul, when he immerses himself in himself. Thus Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the great spirit of the sun, but he spoke of it as a real, actual spirituality that permeates and animates the world.

Natural science investigates the matter that makes up the human being and also works out in the universe. In relation to the body, it sees the human being as part of the macrocosm. But the longing has never been extinguished in man to recognize his belonging to the great universe not only in a material and sensual way, but also to find the connection between the spiritual that permeates and fills him with life and the spiritual in the world. Today, the longing lives in many people for what Zoroaster proclaimed as the solar aura, as the great aura. He spoke of the spirit that flows into the human heart as sunlight flows into the earth and awakens the plants to life. He expressed it particularly impressively in the following words:

I will speak, now come and listen to me, you who come from near and far and long for it. I will speak of the one who can be revealed to the spirit. And no longer shall the deceptive mind confuse those men who bind themselves to materiality and to the lower nature. I will speak of that which is the first and greatest in the world, which He has revealed to me, the great Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazda.

Thus Zarathustra wanted to imply that it is possible to recognize spiritual facts in the same way as one recognizes material facts, which fill space and develop in time.

Today, people feel the urge and the longing to recognize that, in terms of their soul and spirit, they have emerged from the world spirit. But there is no bridge that crosses the chasm [between the sensory world and the supersensible world]. However, spiritual science wants to build this bridge by developing the higher powers in the human soul. Spiritual science shows us how humanity develops over time. The goal of this development is revealed in what the spiritual researcher, the spiritual scientist, achieves by freeing himself from everything that is bound to external nature, to the external body. Humanity achieves this in a completely different form, slowly and gradually. Spiritual science in particular makes it very clear to us that there is real progress, real development in relation to inner human nature. Let us consider what the spiritual researcher can do: he can look into the spiritual world – not with the ordinary, everyday view, but only when he lifts his higher self out of the lower self through a powerful inner act of will, when he frees himself from the ordinary, everyday view; then he can see what is the subject of such a contemplation as today's. For the spiritual scientist, it is necessary to bring about very special conditions. The intuitive perception of sight and hearing that occurs of its own accord is quite different from what the spiritual researcher evokes through a powerful act of will, enabling him to see into the spiritual world independently of all corporeality. But what he achieves at a higher level of spiritual research will gradually become an ability of natural human powers. Man develops from epoch to epoch, from age to age. Ever higher powers of knowledge are acquired. This is why the spiritual researcher can speak of a new ability to perceive slowly developing in human progress. It must be said that the spiritual researcher can also, in a certain sense, see something prophetically in advance when he looks at the nature of souls in a particular epoch, at the forces that are striving towards a certain goal. And today these forces are striving towards a certain goal.

If we look back at the way people throughout the ages, throughout the centuries and millennia, have spoken of the Christ – albeit using different names – we find an enormous difference compared to the way it must be spoken today. In all ages before the beginning of our Christian era, the truly discerning spoke of the Christ as one who will come, as one who will reveal himself to people in the future in a completely different way. The spiritual researchers of that time said: Now only those who can rise to the higher worlds can see the Christ; they see the Christ in the supersensible, in the spiritual sphere. Thus the seers of India had beheld Vishvakarman, thus Zarathustra had beheld Ahura Mazdao.

Yet they always pointed out that the Christ would one day also reveal Himself to other human faculties of perception, not only to the heightened but also to the ordinary human faculties of perception, to the natural human powers of cognition. Thus, all spiritual research speaks of the Christ not only as a spiritual power, as a spiritual might that lives in humanity, but it speaks of the Christ in such a way that it is clear that the Christ - this being that has been spoken of at all times and will continue to be spoken of in the field of spiritual science in the future - actually once took on human form, that he really once lived as the historical Jesus.

For spiritual science, Jesus of Nazareth is something very special. We can compare it to what the great mechanic Archimedes once spoke of. He said: Give me a firm point for my lever, and I will move the earth. — He demanded a fixed point to which everything can be related. Only by having a fixed point can something in space be understood. Similarly, the course of time becomes understandable for spiritual science when there is a fixed point in historical development. And all initiates, all spiritual researchers before the beginning of our era, pointed to this fixed point as something that would come in the future. But we point to this fixed point as something that was there in the past, and we relate all events that will ever happen to this fixed point, to this hypomochlion. Therefore, within spiritual science, based on the facts and the results of this spiritual science, we speak of the historical Jesus as a reality. Spiritual science is also able to understand the Gospels in a new way by shining into their depths. If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will see that spiritual science itself sheds new light on the understanding of the Gospels. But spiritual science does not base its knowledge of the Christ Jesus on these documents. It says everything it has to say independently of all historical tradition. And only by comparing its results with the Gospels does it shed deeper light on them.

What does it mean that the Christ walked among people in the physical body of Jesus, that he accomplished what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, which can teach us that the spiritual always conquers the physical, that life always conquers death? What does this impulse mean in the further development of humanity? From the time when the Christ dwelt in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, man, when he descends into his own soul, can now experience as spiritual power within himself that which was previously merely cosmic, which he could only attain when he dwelled outside his body. Those who, because of their world-view, cannot admit that a power from the cosmos has penetrated into the individual human soul, has entered into it in order to be a power that continues to work in these souls, will never be able to comprehend the Christ-impulse.

Not before, but only from the event in Palestine onwards, was there a new impulse in human souls themselves. Since that time, there is something in human souls that was not there before. People easily understand that when a new substance is added, something new arises in the outer chemical mixtures of substances. They grasp this more easily than that something happened to all of humanity when Jesus walked the Earth, in that something new entered human souls from the supersensible realms. Like a new substance that continues to work in a mixture of substances, a completely new power is at work in human souls from that time on – a power that now takes these human souls further and further. Spiritual science shows us that, in fact, in relation to his innermost being, man has been predisposed to something completely new since the appearance of Christ on earth - something he was not predisposed to before. One would think that spiritual science must emphasize this with all sharpness, with all idealism.

Now spiritual research shows us that this impulse, which was planted in the souls of men at that time, can only develop slowly, that it has shown itself hardly perceptibly in the first time and only gradually - until the most distant future - will lead mankind to ever higher and higher things. In order to understand what is happening in man, we must consider another fact that spiritual science investigates. However, speaking of it is somewhat dangerous in our time, because few people of the present are inclined to go along with what has to be said here from spiritual science. It shows us - and now we are moving away from our actual topic - the following: It shows us the deeper aspects of human nature, it shows us something that developing humanity will surely grasp in a relatively short time, but which is still regarded by many as fantasy, as the greatest nonsense. What spiritual science shows us can be compared, on a higher level, to something that humanity has only recently come to accept as true on a deeper level – this must be emphasized again and again.

In the seventeenth century, not only laymen but also learned researchers who were firmly grounded in natural science believed that worms, insects and even fish could develop from river mud without the addition of a corresponding germ. And it was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who, in the seventeenth century, uttered the significant sentence: Living things can only come from living things. In a text from the seventh century A.D., for example, you will find an explanation of how living things develop without a germ—with a self-confidence with which things were asserted in some scientific writings at the time. You will find it stated there: If you pound a horse carcass, bees will come into being, and if you pound a donkey carcass, wasps will come into being. All this was schematized in the same way as is customary in many respects in our time. And when in the seventeenth century Redi proclaimed what was only scientifically proved in the nineteenth century – that living things can only come from living things – he was a heretic and only with great difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. In those days people who asserted such a thing were burned at the stake; today that is no longer fashionable. But today people are considered to be terrible heretics who, in a higher realm, namely in the realm of the spiritual, spread the same truth and show that what is spiritual and soul-like can only come from something spiritual and soul-like.

Today it is claimed that the spiritual soul of a human individuality – that which grows from day to day as qualities and characteristics of the soul – arises only from the qualities of the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. Now spiritual science shows that a spiritual-soul essence from a spiritual past penetrates into what is inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother and so on - just as a germ must be placed in the river and then unfolds in it – and that in what is inherited, the independent, individual, which comes from a previous existence of a spiritual-soul nature, unfolds. She shows that the soul and spiritual cannot be traced back to what lies in the physical line of inheritance, but to a soul and spiritual that has nothing to do with the physical. Fashion has changed: today, those who teach such things are punished by being branded as fools. Today, the authority is he who says: Living things can only come from living things. In the not too distant future, the other truth, that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things, will become common knowledge for all humanity. But then people will not be able to understand how humanity could once have believed otherwise.

But this view, if followed to its logical conclusion, is nothing other than what is called the doctrine of reincarnation, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth: what lives as spiritual-soul in the present life on earth has already lived in an earlier life on earth, and the present life on earth is the starting point for a future one. The spiritual soul of the past seeks a mother soil into which it can move, the mother soil of father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. One is just as necessary as the other. For those who have acquired clairvoyance and clairaudience, the view of repeated earthly lives is a matter of course.

You all know that the doctrine of repeated earthly lives is an ancient teaching and that it was spread with particular force in the East by Buddha and the religious community founded by him, and found its way into millions and millions of souls. But modern spiritual research does not take its teaching from Buddhism – this must be expressly emphasized. It is a misunderstanding of the facts to say that modern theosophy or spiritual science borrowed the doctrine of repeated earthly lives from Buddhism. There is no need to resort to an old teaching. Just as one does not need to resort to the writings of Euclid to prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, so one does not need to resort to Buddhism to prove reincarnation. Even today, the truth of repeated lives on earth can be investigated.

For him who really grasps the Christ Impulse, the truth of repeated earth-lives presents itself in a different way than for the follower of Buddha. Buddha emphasized the fact of repeated earth-lives over and over again. He set before humanity his so-called “Four Noble Truths”: Birth is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, not being united with what one loves, and being united with what one does not love is suffering. To be freed from the karma of having to descend again and again from the spiritual into an earthly body, to be freed as soon as possible from the urge for existence, to be freed from the urge to embody oneself: that is the impulse of the Buddha teaching. In the Buddha-doctrine, the teaching of re-embodiment presents itself to us one-sidedly. The Buddha-doctrine does not have the impulse to place into the human soul that which continues to have an effect through successive re-embodiments and awakens ever new and new powers in the individual human being. Spiritual science, however, modern theosophy, sees in the Christ impulse that which strikes the human soul, which seizes the will, educates and develops it, which works in the soul in such a way that when it is touched by the Christ impulse in one embodiment, it comes to life in a new way in the next embodiment, that the Christ impulse works into the next embodiment. And because it has an effect, this soul can develop its powers, which, through the power of the Christ impulse, are increased and developed to even higher heights.

Thus, in the Christ impulse, we see what continues to have an effect in the human soul from embodiment to embodiment, giving the following embodiments new meaning and new content. Therefore, we are not talking about freeing ourselves from the wheel of reincarnation as soon as possible, but about permeating ourselves more and more with the living Christ impulse. Through Christ's descent onto the physical plane, it has become possible for us to permeate ourselves with the Christ impulse as with a spiritual substance. The Buddhist religion is rightly called a religion of redemption. The Christian religion is not a religion of redemption, but of resurrection. What the Christ exemplified for us in the Mystery of Golgotha, with the conquest of death through the spirit, is repeated again and again when we resurrect in a new embodiment, fertilized by the Christ impulse.

Must we not say to ourselves: There will come a time when the works of art that have enchanted thousands upon thousands of human souls will crumble to dust? This is the case with both the greatest and the smallest of human achievements in our physical world: they all dissolve into dust. But if we look at the matter in terms of rebirth, of repeated lives on earth, then we say to ourselves: the artist has incorporated something of his soul into the material; but as a result, his soul has also become something else, his work has had an effect on the material, but it has also had an effect on the soul. - It is the same with every human being, but with the artist it is only most evident. In a new embodiment, we continue to work with the powers we acquired in the previous embodiment. These powers are reborn, resurrected, awakened to new life. So it is no longer absurd to say: the whole earth will one day be crushed into dust. Just as the body of the individual human being decays into dust, so the whole earth, the body of our planetary existence, will decay. But then human souls will have achieved something that will lead to new stages of existence. The earthly body will fall away, and humanity will move on to new forms. And the impulse that lives in it is the Christ impulse.

Spiritual science, with the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual researcher, looks at an epoch that is very close to us in time, when certain earlier events will bear fruit. All souls that have processed the Christ impulse throughout the Middle Ages, that have experienced the deep Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages, will then experience the Christ impulse in the sense of Paul: It is not I who live, it is not I who work, it is Christ. They will see their own inner being illuminated by the Christ-light. This is the important fact that must be pointed out. This fact can be foreseen by spiritual science as surely as an eclipse of the sun or moon can be foreseen by astronomy. Those people who have taken up the Christ impulse in their souls, who have permeated their will, feeling and thinking with it in the Pauline sense, will come again. And the fruits of their rebirth will show up in that what they have gone through at the time will revive as strength in their soul. In what way will it revive?

Spiritual science shows us that in the relatively near future, and then more and more in the coming millennium, a new spiritual power will develop in people's inner being, which cannot be described other than by pointing to the fact that it first manifested itself in Paul as a natural ability. Paul could not be convinced by everything he had heard about the Christ Jesus on the physical plane in Palestine. But it became clear to him that the Christ had lived and had risen when, through his opened supersensible organs of perception, through natural clairvoyance, he saw what we call the Event of Damascus. There, through inner experience, the Christ became a fact for him – the Christ who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who claim that the appearance of Damascus was a mere vision claim at the same time that the most important fact of Western culture, the religion of Christ, is based on an empty vision. Paul says that he has grasped the Christ within and can therefore see something completely new that underlies the world – something he could not have seen before. At first, only a few individuals will develop the ability to see as Paul did before Damascus. We are standing in the twentieth century before a new revelation of the Christ from the spiritual world. There will arise people, at first few, then more and more, who will see the spiritual, which is also in them, living and weaving out there in space, just as they see matter, which is also in their material body, living and weaving out there in space. And for them the truth of Zarathustra's teaching will become reality when the experience of the event of Damascus dawns on them, when they look out into space and see the origin of existence from which our soul and material being comes, when they see this in spiritual light.

We are standing before the entrance gate of a new historical development, a new revelation of the Christ. The Christ impulse continues to work in such a way that, in the end, the secrets of the existence of the Christ will be experienced by the souls as an experience. Physically, the Christ was only once in the world - this is shown to us by spiritual science - and it is a misunderstanding of the whole essence of the Christ to believe that a second time a physical being would appear that could be called a Christ. This is the problem: the Christ impulse allows ever new abilities to arise in the human soul, and the Christ will reveal Himself more and more to the newly awakened abilities. The Christ did not give the impulse for this, that He must come again and again in physical form and humanity must remain at the point where it has already stood. The ability to see Him spiritually has been awakened in it. He has come so that they may grasp Him spiritually and receive Him in ever higher and higher ways.

We are thus facing a spiritual revelation of Christ; this will send spiritual light to human beings and give them the strength to understand Christ more and more. In particular, the Christ impulse gives us the certainty that our incarnations in the future will no longer awaken in us the need to free ourselves from existence, but rather to penetrate it more and more. The Christ confession is a religion of resurrection – in contrast to Buddhism, which is a religion of salvation. This is the message that spiritual science or theosophy can give to humanity in our time: that we are facing a new revelation of Christ, that new capacities for knowledge are gradually coming into being in human souls, and that people will be able to look into the spiritual realm and see Christ and know: He is here! New capacities for knowledge will develop, through which the eternal, living Christ will reveal himself, first to a few, then to more and more people, and finally to all who follow the appropriate paths.

This is the message that spiritual science wants to bring to the West. And basically, spiritual science is nothing more than what wants to draw attention to this great fact, which we must not overlook. People should understand what is going to happen. The aim of modern theosophy, of spiritual science, is to prepare the way for this new revelation, to prepare the way in Western culture for the Christ of the twentieth century. It wants to be a servant of developing humanity. Just as the forerunner of Christ had to say: Change your state of mind, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand – namely in the human mind – so spiritual science of the present must say: Change your attitude, pay attention to what announces itself in the human soul as a newly emerging power, as the power of a new vision. Pay attention to it, change your soul's disposition. It becomes possible for the human being who permeates himself with the Christ impulse to penetrate into the realms of the eternal and the imperishable. And so we summarize our meditation:

Beings line up in rows across vast spaces,
Beings follow beings in the course of time.
Do you remain in the vastness of space, in the passage of time,
Such are you, O human, in the realm of transience.
But your soul rises mightily above them,
When she looks with foreknowledge or awareness, the imperishable
Beyond the vastness of space, beyond the passage of time.