The Reality of the Higher Worlds

GA 79 — 29 November 1921, Oslo

Jesus or Christ

Naturally I feel like a guest here in Norway and above all I have to thank the speaker most sincerely, who has just addressed such heartfelt words to me, and all of you who want to take an interest in some remarks that I will be able to make about the suggested problem in the short time available. I would like to say in advance that I actually feel doubly out of place within the theological movement, because I have always had to emphasize within the anthroposophical movement that anthroposophy does not want to be just any new religious foundation or even a sect, but that it actually wants to grow out of the scientific movement in general in the present day. It seeks to find the appropriate methods of research for the supersensible facts of human and world life. And only to the extent that the field of theology belongs to the general field of research is it also, so to speak, obliged, when asked, to contribute to theological research that which it believes it can bring to this area using the methods of supersensible research. That is why, when a large number of young theologians in Germany approached me, I said: I only want to help with what I can offer in the way of anthroposophy. But whatever is needed in a theological or religious movement today must be carried out by those personalities who are active in theological or religious life. The particular objection that is raised against anthroposophy from the standpoint of this life is that it seeks to ascend into the supersensible worlds by means of its research methods, that it seeks to develop certain powers of knowledge that otherwise lie latent in man in order to penetrate into the supersensible worlds by research. Theological circles, in particular, say that this is actually against religious sentiment, against religious piety, and that it must above all be rejected by Christian theology. And recently, what is meant has been expressed in such a way that it has been said that religion must work with the irrational, with the secret, which must not be unveiled by rationalism. It must work with that which does not want to be grasped, but which is to be revered as an incomprehensible mystery in deep, trusting reverence. The word has even been used: Christianity needs the paradox in order to be able to lead and educate the truly Christian religious life intimately enough and out of direct human trust.

If anthroposophy were to rationalize the irrational, in particular in the question of Christ Jesus, to pull down into sober rationality what is contained in the mystery of Golgotha, then the objections that are made in this direction would be justified. And these objections are complemented by yet another. Anthroposophy, because it is not Gnosticism, not mysticism, not unhistorical orientalism, looks squarely at the historical becoming in the development of humanity. Gnosticism is unhistorical, mysticism is unhistorical, all oriental world-views are, in a certain sense, unhistorical. Anthroposophy is thoroughly a Western world-view in relation to this

methodical point of view, and it takes the historical becoming as a real one, as one is accustomed to in the scientific life of the Occident. And so it is absolutely compelled to place the personality of Jesus in the historical life of humanity. It knows what the historical Jesus contains for humanity, and it is only compelled, for reasons that I would like to discuss today, to ascend from the human being Jesus, as observed in earthly life, to the supermundane , extraterrestrial, cosmic Christ-being, who embodied Himself in the man Jesus, and in a certain sense one can truly speak of Christ and Jesus as two separate beings.

It is said that what Anthroposophy has to say about the cosmic, even telluric Christ is actually irrelevant to the religious sensibilities of today's humanity, because when it comes to historical development, today's humanity wants to limit its view to the earthly, and the cosmic Christ is simply no longer needed alongside the historical Jesus.

Now, the first thing I will have to show is how Anthroposophy, in turn, must proceed in the face of world facts, and how it comes to a very special position regarding the Mystery of Golgotha from its research methods.

Anthroposophy seeks first of all to grasp in a very definite, clear and disillusioned way what has developed, especially since the middle of the 15th century, in Western humanity as “objective knowledge”, as I would like to call it. Through this objective knowledge, nature has already been explained, systematized, and understood in accordance with its laws in a magnificent way. The fact that the human being becomes rationalistic, I could also say abstract, in relation to knowledge is a concomitant, a subjective parallel phenomenon of a sound natural science. The world of thought increasingly takes on the character of mere images. If we go back even further than the 15th century, we find everywhere that the world of thought does not have the pictorial character, the abstract character that merely seeks to describe reality without containing it, which it has assumed since the mid-15th century, particularly since the time of Galileo, Giordano Bruno and so on. Today, at most, ideas represent a picture of reality to us. If we go back before the 15th century, man still has the feeling that a real spiritual reality is transported into himself when he devotes himself to the world of ideas. Man not only has the abstract world of ideas, he has the world of ideas imbued with spirit, permeated with spiritual reality.

In relation to rationalism, in relation to natural history, the more recent centuries have indeed achieved great things. And we see more and more how the other historical sciences are also being seized by the attitude and way of thinking that is prevailing there. And anyone who has followed the change in research methods in recent centuries, even in theology, can see that the research attitudes have been driven entirely in the direction of the natural sciences, because in modern times history has definitely taken on the character of a scientific way of thinking. And so Christology gradually became an historical “Life of Jesus” research. This is perfectly understandable in view of the entire course of the development of the spirit in modern times. One must realize that it was bound to happen. But it must also be understood that this direction, if pursued further, is at the same time likely to rob Christianity of Christ and to approach more and more to what even the historian, neutral with regard to religion, can give, such as Ranke, who, after all, included the personality of Jesus in the historical becoming as the noblest being, that has ever walked the earth. More and more, theology has approached historical research, and today we find a large number of theologians who, in their research attitude and methods, hardly differ much from historians of the rank of Ranke himself.

In contrast to this, anthroposophy asserts that certain powers of cognition, which remain latent in people in ordinary life and in ordinary science, of which one is not aware, but which are present in every human being, can be brought up can be brought forth from consciousness, that these insights then lead out of the mere world of the senses and lead to the fact that the human being can grasp a supersensible world with his cognition in the same way as the sense-gifted human being can grasp the world of the senses. In this way, through a treatment that is no longer representational, that has nothing to do with ordinary rationalism either, but that rather approaches a real experience, one comes to know the supersensible world itself.

Now it is very common to err and believe that Anthroposophy seeks to transfer the characteristic properties of knowledge, as they exist in science and rationalism, to the supersensible realm. It is therefore itself a rational system that erasing the irrational, the paradoxical, the mysterious, and demanding a logical assent to what it wants to see as the Mystery of Golgotha, and not a voluntary assent of trust, based on reverence, as must remain in religion. But now the whole picture of the world changes completely, and so does man himself, when one rises from the scientific, historical layer of knowledge to the supersensible layer of knowledge, if I may use the expression. If we want to present the most important characteristic — I can only hint at all these things — for the ordinary objective, scientifically recognized method today, it is this: for those who really honestly draw the final consequences of this natural science and this rationalism, it splits the world into two. One does not always pay attention to these two areas because one has a certain unconscious fear of drawing the final consequences. But anyone who, like me, has met people who have suffered deeply from this, I would say, two-pronged division of human nature, who have also gone to the last consequences of modern thinking with their minds, with their religious feelings, and who has seen what pain and what directional lack of soul, especially in relation to the deepest religious feeling, can be linked to this dualism of modern rationalistic natural science in its position towards man, will still be inclined to reflect on how this dualism has also led to something epistemological on religious ground. For science exerts too great an influence on the human mind. One feels too strongly responsible to its views not to want to emulate the other scientific methods, if they are to be reliable, precisely in the scientific-historical-realistic method.

But where does this method lead in its final consequence? It leads to the emergence of a deep chasm, one that is truly unbridgeable for external, objective knowledge, between what we have to recognize as scientific necessity and what we grasp in moral-ethical life, what our actual human dignity first guarantees us. And the moral-ethical life, when it is properly experienced, appears to us as a direct emanation of divinity, thus leading us directly to religious devotion, to religiosity itself. But the deep gulf between this ethical-religious life and that which knowledge of nature reveals to the physical man, can indeed be veiled by a mist for human observation, because there is a certain inward unconscious fear, but for the one who approaches human nature quite honestly, it cannot be bridged with natural science itself. On the one hand, we have the justified scientific hypothesis, the Kant-Laplace theory, regarding the beginning of the Earth. Today it is modified. Naturally I will not speak about it in detail. But even if it is modified today, it stands as something that, in the origin of the world, is indifferent to the development of humanity, in which the ethical-divine ideals arise, to which one devotes oneself as to a certainty that lives only in images. And if we look at the end of the earth from a scientific point of view, we are presented with a justified scientific hypothesis, the theory of entropy, which speaks of heat death at the end of the earth. So, out of scientific necessity, we have placed man between the Kant-Laplacean world nebula and the heat death. There he lives in the midst of it all, devoting himself to his ethical and religious ideals, but ultimately finding them unmasked as illusions, for at the end of the evolution of the earth stands nevertheless the heat death, the great corpse, which buries not only that which exists in physical and etheric form in the evolution of the earth, but also all that is contained in ethical ideals.

It is truly not out of religious rationalism, but precisely out of the knowledge that arises in me in an elementary, cognitive way, that I must reckon with the fog with which people deceive themselves about what approaches them and can become the most painful experiences of the soul that a person can be exposed to, I must also reckon with the fact that people have sought the excuse, which was not yet present in all ancient religions and also in the early days of Christian development: to distinguish between knowledge and belief. For knowledge gradually becomes a Moloch through the power it must exert on the human mind, and must gradually devour faith if that faith cannot hold on to a higher, truly supersensible knowledge, which in turn can penetrate to something like the mystery of Golgotha.

And here Anthroposophy must point out how what is given by the rigid, natural-scientific necessity becomes a mere phenomenon for its supersensible knowledge, how the world that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears is reduced to mere phenomenalism. Today I can only report on these things more or less, but anthroposophy seeks to prove that in what we see we are not dealing with a material world at all, but that we are dealing with a world of phenomena. And in supersensible knowledge the sense world, as it were, loses some of its rigid density, but on the other hand the ethical-religious world also loses some of its abstractness, its remoteness from sense necessity. The two worlds approach each other. The ethical-religious world becomes more real, the sense-physical world becomes more phenomenal. And not through speculation, not through an abstract philosophical method, but through a real experience, a world is built that lies beyond our ordinary sensory world. And this world, which is sought, no longer has that contrast between the ideal and the real. Both have approached each other. I would say that the laws of nature become moral in this world, and the moral laws condense into a natural event. And just to mention one thing: although anthroposophy also posits something like a heat death at the end of the earth, for it that which man carries within him as moral and religious ideals becomes something like a real germ, which, as with plants, carries the life of this year over into the next year. In this respect, anthroposophy comes very close to the paradoxical in relation to modern science. However, I dare to say it anyway because I believe that it will cause less offence in the circle of theologians than in the circle of rigid natural scientists, that anthroposophical spiritual knowledge recognizes how the so-called law of the conservation of force and of matter no longer holds good in this world, which is described as supersensible, and how this law of the conservation of matter and of force has only relative validity in the world which appears as the world of nature and which is grasped by rationalism.

Anthroposophy teaches us to recognize that not only matter is present and transforms in the human organism, and teaches us to recognize not only metamorphoses of matter. Outside of the human organism, in the rest of nature, the law of conservation of energy and matter applies, but in the human being itself, anthroposophy teaches us a complete disappearance of matter and a resurrection of new matter out of mere space. And anthroposophical spiritual science may, if I may use a trivial comparison, point out that the ordinary idea of matter and force in the human organism is like someone saying that he has counted how many banknotes one carries into a bank and how many one carries out again, and that if one considers long enough periods of time, the amounts are the same. This is also how one proceeds when studying the law of the conservation of matter and energy: one sees that as much energy goes into matter as comes out. But just as one cannot assume that the banknotes as such are transformed in the bank, but rather that independent work must be done there – the banknotes can even be re-stamped and completely new ones can come out – so it is also in the human organism: there is destruction of matter and force, creation of matter and force.

This is not something that is fancied lightly, but is recognized through rigorous anthroposophical research. What applies to the external world, the law of conservation of matter and energy, also applies to the intermediate stage of development; but if we go to the end of the earth and may assume with a certain justification the heat death, then we do not see a large cemetery, but we see that everything that man has developed in the way of moral and ethical ideals, of divine spiritual convictions, can truly unite within him with the newly emerging material, and that consequently one is dealing with a real germ of further development. The death of the outer material is overcome by what is emerging in man.

In anthroposophical spiritual science, we find something that clearly shows how ethical and moral forces are also directly effective within the material. In the case of humans, this initially remains subconscious for ordinary consciousness. But, to say it again, for the consciousness that is attained in anthroposophical research, one definitely comes to recognize that the ethical-moral-religious is condensed into reality, and that which lives in the external material dissolves into mere phenomenal existence. In this way, the two worlds are brought closer together. But they are also brought closer when one looks at the way in which man now behaves in this higher knowledge. We are accustomed to speak and judge logically when we apply ordinary rationalism to the external natural world and thus proceed from logical categories that are quite justified for the external sensual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science also departs from this kind, simply out of objective necessity. It must depart because it experiences and observes different things with its methods of knowledge. And two concepts arise in particular — many other concepts arise as well, but these two are particularly important to us today — which are otherwise only known indirectly, as objects, but which are not applied as logical concepts are applied. In knowledge, too, that which is otherwise formal and ideal becomes expression, revelation, and reality is approached.

The two concepts that arise are those of health and illness. You will all agree with me that it is actually impossible to speak of “healthy” and “sick” for the logical categories in the ordinary sense world, of what is not only true but is recognized because it is healthy. In organic nature, we recognize health as a principle of growth and development; we recognize sickness as deformation, as an inhibition of normal development. But we do not speak of healthy and sick when we apply logical categories. When we ascend from ordinary objective knowledge to that which anthroposophical spiritual science applies, then we must begin to speak of healthy and sick. For observation compels us to find such, no longer ideas and concepts, but experiences — because healthy and sick are experiences — in the supersensible world, into which we enter. What in the world of sense-perception we designate by the mere abstraction 'true', we must have in the supersensible world as health. And what in the world of sense-perception we designate as 'untrue', as 'incorrect', we must have in the supersensible world as disease.

And here, not by forcibly trying to draw it about, but through the very honest and sincere progress of research, Anthroposophy is offered the possibility of linking up contemporary research with the New and Old Testaments. The gulf between research and the Old and New Testaments is really bridged. A new path to understanding the mystery of Golgotha is being created. Because something is being offered that is now very paradoxical. As I said, I can only give a more or less objective report today, but what I am presenting to you in a few lines is only the result of years of research, research that did not start from religious prejudices – please allow me to note that. I myself started out with a scientific education, grew up as free-thinking as possible in my youth, and brought no religious feelings with me from my youth. Through research, through what is the ultimate consequence of scientific research, I have been pushed to say what I believe I can say from the anthroposophical side about the origin of religious problems. So there is really no question of prejudice here, subjectively either. But one really does get to know nature more precisely through anthroposophical research – especially when one does research entirely in the style and spirit of science. Of course, one does not always admit this and wants to contaminate science, as it were, with all sorts of mysticism, which is unjustified: one really does learn to recognize nature more precisely, not only in terms of its phenomena and laws, but also by being able to form certain ideas about its quality, about what it actually is. And then you say to yourself: what is going on out there in nature also continues within people. What has happened outside the skin is also present inside the human skin. We find natural processes externally. We find natural processes internally. But – and now comes the paradox that is revealed by anthroposophical research – all ascending natural processes that tend towards fertility have only limited validity in humans; in humans they become processes of degeneration and destruction. And the great, powerful sentence arises from truly diverse observation of nature and from diverse anthroposophical consideration of the human being: Nature is allowed to be nature outside of the human skin; within the human skin, that which is nature becomes that which opposes nature.

Once one has resorted to supersensible methods of research, one sees how those forces that are constructive in outer nature become destructive in the human being, and how these destructive forces in the human being become the bearers of evil. This is the difference that anthroposophy has to show in contrast to mere idealism: anthroposophy can say that Nature is allowed to remain nature; the human being is not allowed to remain nature, not even in the body. For everything in the human being that is nature acting as nature continues to do so, becomes pathological and thus evil. Nature outside of us is neutral with regard to good and evil; within us it is also destructive in the body, causing disease and evil. And, as the anthroposophical view shows, we only maintain ourselves against that which reigns as evil in us by relating to external nature in the life between birth and death in such a way that we only allow it to reach the point of a reflection of external nature, that we do not grasp in our consciousness what organically reigns in the depths of our human being as the source of evil. We fulfill our consciousness by receiving sensory perceptions from the outside. We receive the external sensory impressions, but we only guide them to a certain point. They must not go any lower. There these external natural impressions would have a poisoning effect, as supersensible knowledge shows. We reflect them back. In this way a boundary is created between the organs of consciousness in the human being, which absorb external nature, and the place where nature continues, where it develops its constructive forces in the human being. The conscious processes do not penetrate below this boundary, but are instead reflected back and form our memory, our recollection. And that which lives in our memory is external nature reflected back, which does not penetrate deeper into us. Just as a ray of light is reflected back from a mirror, so the image of nature, not nature itself, is reflected back. For if man could bring himself to realize what lies behind his inner mirror, what lies down there where nature in him becomes evil, then he would become an evil being through the rule of nature in him.

But we cannot come to a full sense of self, to a self-contained self-awareness; this becomes quite clear to us when we limit ourselves to the mirroring images, to the memories, to the mere reflection of the external nature. What we summarize as self-awareness, what comes to life in us as I, can only come from our corporeality, it originates in human nature. Therefore, rationalism becomes just as neutral towards good and evil as the laws of nature. But if that which constitutes human self-awareness were to spread beyond the other part of the human soul, then in the present period of human life, with the awakening of the ego, we would have to have an irresistible inclination towards evil, towards that which is present in us as destructive natural forces. And now a significant insight arises that leads into the religious realm. The human being — as can be seen from the ordinary physical world from a supersensible point of view — who clearly abandons himself to all that is the working of nature, to all the forces that permeate natural phenomena, comes to say to himself: atheism is not merely a logical inaccuracy, atheism is really an illness. Not a disease that can be diagnosed in the usual way, but anthroposophical spiritual science can speak of it, because it gets the concepts of “healthy and sick” for the mere concepts of “right or wrong” from its supernatural point of view, that something morbid is present in the human being's composition of fluids, which is no longer accessible to external physiology and biology, when the human being says from his or her soul: There is no God. — For the healthy human nature — although it can become evil, but the evil remains precisely in the subconscious —, it says: There is a God.

But in this awareness: there is a God – which is the direct expression of true human health, lies only that confession of God, which I would call the Father confession. Nothing else can we gain from delving into nature, from experiencing nature, than the Father consciousness.

Therefore, for those who remain within the bounds of modern science, nothing else can happen but that they come to the Father Consciousness, and the Son, the Christ Consciousness, is actually more or less lost from the series of divine entities, even if they do not admit it. And the fundamental character of Harnack's “Essence of Christianity” is, after all, that it says that it is not the Son who belongs in the Gospels, but only the Father, and the Son is only the one who sent the teaching of the Father through the Gospels into the world.

This view nevertheless gradually leads away from the real, true Christianity. For if one wants to retain Christianity, one must be able to add to the separate experience of the Father, which one attains in this way if one really has healthy human nature, the experience of the Son. This son-experience, however, is none other than that which arises, not from the experience of nature, but from the experience of something in man that exists above nature in him, an experience that belongs to what has nothing to do with nature, in contrast to which nature fades away to mere phenomenality. And then the possibility arises of adding the son-experience to the father-experience.

Just as the Father-experience is simply an experience of perfect, harmonious health, so the Son-experience is the fact that is inwardly experienced when man realizes that, in order to ascend to full consciousness of self, he must develop this consciousness of self in earthly life, and that this consciousness of self itself is thoroughly natural. And if he does not want to surrender it to evil, then this I must awaken within earthly life itself to a permeation with divine-spiritual content. It must become truth: Not I, but the Christ in me.

It must become truth because the I, which, as it is initially experienced, can still be within the experience of the Father, must by all means be transformed, metamorphosed. Man does not need to become ill from what the outer nature merely reflects, where it does not enter his consciousness himself, but only in the reflected images, in the reflections. But man must become ill in relation to his true human nature if he cannot, through his own freedom, find the cosmic power that does not merely behave like the source of what is there as healthy nature, but what becomes an ill being in man, if he cannot rise to that which now recognizes the necessary illness through the emergence of the I. The rest of the soul life could possibly remain healthy, but the firmness of the ego would have to make this soul life sick if the human being could not encounter in life, in the inner, sense-free experience, the being that can be found here on earth, but which is not of earthly nature, which can only be found through the free deed of the soul, and whose finding is therefore quite different from the finding of the father.

In Western Europe, the difference between these two experiences, the Father-experience and the Son-experience, is emphasized very little. If you go east and study something like the philosophy of the Russian philosopher Solowjow, then you will find that he actually speaks like a person of the first Christian centuries, only that he dresses what he says in modern philosophical formulas. He speaks in such a way that one clearly notices: he has a special experience of the Father and a special experience of the Son. He has an instinctive feeling for what must be recognized again from modern spiritual research: that one is born out of the Father, that it is a sickness not to recognize the Father, but that for the human being endowed with an I there must be a healing process, a supermundane Healer, and that is the Christ. Not to experience the Father means to be inwardly ill; not to experience the Christ means to see misfortune enter into one's life. The Father-question is a question of cognition. The Son-question is a question of destiny, is a question of good and ill luck. And only those epochs have been able to gain a sufficient conception of the way in which the Christ enters our lives that have regarded him as physician, as universal physician. For supersensible-anthroposophical research this is not a mere phrase, it is not something that has only allegorical and symbolic meaning: Christ the physician, Christ the savior or healer, the one who frees the I from the danger from which the Father cannot free it, because what is healthy can also become sick. And through the consciousness of self, health would have to be lost. What the Father cannot do, He has handed over to the Son. In a separate experience, the Christ enters into human consciousness quite apart from the Father.

And spiritual-scientific anthroposophical research can justify this experience quite scientifically and methodically. But here, first of all, something would arise that I would like to call: the eternally present Christ. We find him when we seek him deep enough in our soul being, we find him as an entity that we cannot extract from our own soul. We find him as we objectively find an external natural phenomenon outside of us. We encounter him after our birth in the course of our human development. We have to extract him from our moral perception. There he is the ever-present Christ.

But once one has found this ever-present Christ, once one has justified him before anthroposophical research, then one enters into historical research differently than one did before. For that is the peculiar thing: when one ascends to the higher consciousness, one must first descend again to the ordinary consciousness. One cannot investigate the world of the senses in a higher consciousness. That would lead to nothing but empty talk. He who would develop only a higher consciousness, and so would know only what anthroposophy is, should certainly not speak about natural science, for he who wishes to speak about natural science must also know nature scientifically, in the way natural science investigates. Only then can he imbue the findings of natural science with the insights of supersensible research. A layman, a dilettante in natural science, is not permitted to talk about natural science, no matter how well versed he is in the knowledge of the supersensible worlds. The supersensible worlds have fundamentally the same significance for the sensory worlds as oxygen has when it is outside the lungs. The lungs are what nature is. Spiritual science must first be poured into natural science if natural science is to be fertilized.

But another field now presents itself, again not as a result of religious prejudice. We can arrive at it without historical consideration, without the help of the Gospels. It is what I would call the epoch of human development, which coincides with the Mystery of Golgotha.

If someone who does not penetrate to supersensible concepts and ideas can approach the Mystery of Golgotha, then he is tempted to proceed more and more merely in an outwardly naturalistic-historical way and to transform the Christ Jesus into the mere personality of Jesus. The one who rises to anthroposophical spiritual research finds the necessity everywhere to first penetrate what presents itself to him in the field of nature and in the field of ordinary history. He finds this not only in the historical mystery of Golgotha. The higher concepts can be applied directly and without prejudice to this. One can grasp what has taken place in the sensory world, as it has taken place, directly with supersensible research. And then one comes to the following. Then one sees that the development of the I, of which I have spoken to you, was not always present in the development of humanity. One finds, for example, that the further back we go in the development of speech, the more and more the I-designation is contained in the verbs, and that the I-designation for the self only occurs later. But this is only an external fact. Anyone who studies the psychology of history by permeating it with supersensible views will find that the ego experience was not there until around the 8th or 7th century BC, that it then slowly emerged, that the historical development in human history actually tends towards what one must describe as the dawning of the ego.

I believe that the dawn of this self was fully felt in Greek life, not only in the fact that people were aware that this self comes from nature and is therefore subject to nature, thus killing people when it develops for itself alone. That is why people in Greece really felt that it was better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. That was a thoroughly sincere feeling. But it was felt in another way as well. Anyone who really studies the great Greek playwrights, not with the superficiality with which it is so often done today, knows that they wanted to be doctors at the same time, that they wanted to shape the drama in such a way that the human being could heal through catharsis. The Greeks sensed something of the healing power in art.

And when we move from this age of historical development to the Roman world, we feel how the content of the human soul in religious life, in state life and in public life otherwise stiffens into abstract concepts. We find in humanity the great danger of becoming ill from the development of the ego. And we feel what it actually meant – I am not playing with words, although it may appear so, but it is the result of anthroposophical research – that in the Orient the “therapists” appeared, a certain order that set itself the task of really bringing sick humanity to recovery.

But what we see taking place in the course of historical development is that humanity did not wither and fall ill, as one would have had to assume if one had really looked impartially at the continuation of what was present in humanity as an impulse before the 7th, 8th and so on pre-Christian centuries. It does not wither, it does not become ill, it takes up an ingredient that has a healing effect from within. An historical therapy is taking place.

Those who have no feeling for the fact that the Old Testament and also the other ancient religions do indeed point out that the process of human development is a becoming ill through sin, those who do not see this becoming ill through sin, cannot perceive the radiance of something coming from outside the earth, from outside the telluric, and giving the earth a new impulse, just as the soil is given a new impulse by the fruit germ. One learns to understand how from that time on a fertilizing seed from supermundane worlds is poured in as a healing seed, for earthly humanity was truly becoming ill. And one learns to see how that which is cosmic, which is not merely telluric, intervenes in the evolution of the earth. And equipped with this insight, with the insight of a being who, as the great invisible therapist, intervenes in historical development, one follows the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. There it emerges, and even without being influenced by the Gospels, one finds it if one seeks it with the right star, not with prejudices, but with something that is the shining of an inner light.

There are really two ways of approaching it: one is to take all of science, not only the science that knows merely in the abstract what is right and what is wrong, but also the science that knows in the historical becoming what is healthy and what is sick, and to approach the Mystery of Golgotha as the three wise men or magi of the Orient approached it with the ancient science of astrology. But one can also approach it with a simple human heart, with human feeling.

When one has encountered the ever-present Christ, whom one finds equipped with the organ in which the ever-present Christ says in a Pauline way: Not I, but the Christ in me makes me whole, and gives me back from death to life — then one finds in the history of mankind the man Jesus, in whom the Christ really lived. Thus the supermundane Christ-Being, the Healer, the great Therapist, flows together with the simple man from Nazareth, who could not have been other than simple, who could speak in his outer words to the poorest of the poor, who could also speak in his words to sinners — that is to say, to the sick — but who spoke to them words that were not merely filled with had been fulfilled in humanity up to that point – for then they would have remained as sick as they had become in Roman times, because they were permeated with mere abstractness – He spoke words of eternal life to them, which need not speak to the mind, which can speak to the heart, to that which is irrational.

Thus, one gets to know the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and one learns to recognize all the wonderful aspects that are described to us in the Gospel of Luke. But one is also led to all that the Gospel of John describes from inner experience about the healer, about the therapist, who is also the living Logos, the healing Logos. One learns to connect the synoptic gospels with the gospel of John at the same moment when one no longer approaches historical research with the rationalistic concepts of formally correct or incorrect, but when one approaches historical development with the higher concepts of healthy and sick. Then the “human being Jesus” loses nothing. For in that He is the one who is first chosen by the extraterrestrial being to take up within Himself what is the Christ-healing impulse, He has no need of all the wisdom of antiquity, which, after all, has only developed within the process of illness process, so that humanity could not recognize the divine through wisdom, but could only have recognized the external-natural in a morbid way through wisdom. One learns to recognize the one who, through fertilization from above, has become the being who walked the soil of Palestine. One learns to look at the personality of Jesus as the outer shell for the extraterrestrial Christ-being. One learns to recognize that the earth would have lost its meaning, that it would have perished in disease, if the great recovery through the mystery of Golgotha had not occurred.

Nothing irrational or paradoxical is taken from Christianity; rather, man is led back to that which cannot be grasped by reason, but only by living knowledge, which is attempted to be brought to man through anthroposophical research. On the contrary, it can be seen that the research into the life of Jesus has gradually become rationalistic, that for many people the “simple man from Nazareth” has already become the only one, that they cannot find the Christ again. But one cannot find the Christ through mere logic, even if it is historical logic. One can only find the Christ if one is able to follow the historical process with the in this respect higher concept of healthy and sick. Then one really comes to see that the sickness that would have gradually come over the human being through the awakening of the ego would have had to lead to the death of the spirit. For through the spreading of the I, which comes out of the body, the human being would have become more and more a part of nature. Nature would have poured itself out over his soul. The human being would gradually have succumbed to what then is his earthly death and finally the heat death of the earth. If we understand the impact of the Mystery of Golgotha as giving the Earth a new meaning, then we find that the historical development through the man Jesus, through his death on the cross and through his resurrection, is precisely what has been given to the Earth anew from the heavens. We learn to recognize what it means when the saying resounds: This is my beloved Son, today he is born to me. One learns to recognize that a truly new time is dawning for the Earth. One learns to recognize how people must gradually educate themselves to understand what has actually come into the evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha. And one wonders: how does this Mystery of Golgotha continue to work?

Well, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was taking place on earth, there was still something of what was on earth in ancient times: a certain instinctive knowledge. This was present in man without the development of the ego having taken place. The older human being did not have a clearly defined ego, but he had an instinctive knowledge. This had come to him through an instinctive, divine inspiration. In ancient times, this was the healing, the original therapeutic revelation. This original revelation faded more and more. The human being spread his I over his being. Precisely because of this, the human being became more and more ill. But the last remnants of the old clairvoyant, instinctive knowledge of the spiritual worlds were still there. Such remnants of ancient visions were present in the apostles, were present in the Gnostics, and in some others, even if they were not perfect enough. So it happened that with the last legacies of real ancient clairvoyance, Christ was still recognized, that it was still known that an extraterrestrial being had appeared in Jesus that had not been on earth before.

Paul had this experience most intensely. As Saul, he was in a certain way initiated into all the secrets that one could be initiated into from the dying embers of the old light of wisdom. Out of this dying old light of wisdom, he fought against Christ Jesus. In the moment when a vision arose from his inner being, in the moment when the Christ arose for him as the eternal presence, he also turned to the cross on Golgotha. The inner Christ experience brought him to the outer Christ experience. And so he was allowed to call himself an apostle alongside the others, the last of the apostles. Just as the apostles and disciples were still able to rise to the Christ experience through their inheritance from ancient times of clairvoyance, and to understand the resurrection, so too could Paul understand it. But with the spread of the ego, such understanding has increasingly declined. I would like to say: Theosophy has increasingly become theology. Through logic, man steps out of his natural existence, but enters into his development of the ego, which, however, ultimately leads to the disease we have been talking about.

This development must return to where it came from if it is not to lose the understanding of Christ. It must return to the possibility of recognizing Christ as a supersensible, supermundane being, so that it can correctly evaluate the personality of Jesus. We therefore also understand what took place after the time of the apostles, the apostolic fathers. We comprehend that struggle, that living struggle through the centuries, under the dying embers of the old knowledge and under the gradual emergence of self-awareness, in order to be able to look at the historical Christ.

Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion or be sectarian, but when it simply goes its way and rises to supersensible knowledge, then it encounters the Mystery of Golgotha among the facts of the earth, and indeed as that which gives the earth its meaning in the first place. And it teaches how to recognize through beholding what mere reason must inevitably lose sight of. She can, in turn, add to the outer historical personality of Jesus the inner divine being of Christ, through a path of knowledge that is not rationalistic. And one comes to the fact that the concept of Christ Jesus becomes more complete, only such that humanity must conquer through freedom.

One might be tempted to say that he can appear in the same way as the poor shepherds who first intuit the eternal Christ within themselves and then seek him outwardly in the child Jesus. However, it is not only possible to come to Christ Jesus through the poor shepherds, as many believe, because then science would emerge as the Moloch that would devour this naive belief. By truly developing science, one can also find the star that leads to Bethlehem again. Just as the simplest human mind can find the Christ in the innermost experience, if it only rises not only to reason, but to the feeling of inner sickness, then out of this consciousness of sickness, which is essentially the real feeling of the consciousness of sin, the Christ-experience, the meeting with Christ, can arise in a very naive way. But science cannot lead away from this experience, because when this science, as it must in all other fields, rises to supersensible vision, then the highest science, like the simplest human mind, finds Christ in Jesus.

And this is what Anthroposophy would like to accomplish in a modest way. It does not want to take away the mystery that is sought in reverent trust by the simple human mind, because the path that Anthroposophy takes may ascend to the higher regions of knowledge, but it does not lead to rationalism. As I have already indicated, it must steer clear of the pitfalls of irrationality and paradox. It must add the vital element of health and disease to the abstract right and wrong. It must add the great historical therapy to mere physical therapy.

Then this anthroposophical research, if it rises to the realization to which it wants to rise, will lead to the same thing that can be attained in the first place as the true secret, in silent trusting reverence, precisely as that which must remain unknown. For why do we speak of this unknown? Well, when you know a person not only from descriptions, when you do not just believe in his existence, but when you are led before his face, you come to see. But seeing does not become rationalistic because of that. The irrationality of the person before whom we are led does not cease. This person remains a mystery to us, because he has an intensive-infinite within him. We could not exhaust him with any ratio. Nor does anthroposophical knowledge exhaust the Christ, although it strives towards it with all longing and seeks to arrive there with all its means of knowledge, to see this Christ, not just to believe in him. He does not cease to be a being that cannot be absorbed by reason, even in vision. And just as little as a human being needs to be deprived of the earthly veneration that we show to every single human being, who remains a mystery even when we are led before his face, so the mystery of Golgotha remains a mystery; it is not dragged down into the dryness and sobriety and logism of the rational by anthroposophy. The irrational and paradoxical aspects of Christianity should not be erased by the Christ of Anthroposophy, but rather the irrational and paradoxical should be seen. And one can have just as much childlike, just as deep, and perhaps greater, childlike reverence for that which is seen as for that which one is merely supposed to believe in. Therefore, Anthroposophy is not the death of faith, but the reviver of faith. And this is particularly evident in the unravelling that Anthroposophy wants to give to the mystery of Golgotha, the connection of Christ with the personality of Jesus.

All this, however, is of course the subject of extensive research that has been going on for years, and yet it is only just beginning. And I must ask you to excuse me if I have tried to give you only a few guidelines in this already all too long lecture. But these guidelines may at least suggest that anthroposophy does not want to descend into the rationalism of ordinary knowledge and reveal the mystery of Golgotha without reverence, but that it wants to lead to it with all reverence, in all religious devotion, yes, in a deepened religious devotion, which is deepened because we only feel the right awe when we stand in direct contemplation before the cross of Golgotha. In this way, anthroposophy does not want to contribute to some kind of killing, but to a new revival, to a new inspiration of Christianity, which seems to suffer painfully from rationalism, which is fully justified for the external natural science.