An Outline of Religious Ideas in post-Atlantean Times

When the gates to the supersensible world closed, man needed a bond, a connection between the sensual and supersensible worlds, in his artistic development. In the past, in Atlantean times, he did not need this because at that time he was still able to get to know the supersensible world through direct experience. The gods and spirits had to be related to people only after they had lost their perceptibility, just as one has only to relate plants to people who have never seen them. This is the basis of the religious development of the post-Atlantean period. Why then did a being of a supersensible nature like Christ have to appear and live on earth in a finite personality, in Jesus? Why did Christ have to become a historical personality? Why did the eyes of men have to be fixed on this figure? We have said that men could no longer see into the supersensible world. What had to happen so that the God could become an experience for them? He had to become sensual, to embody Himself in a sensual, physical body. That is the answer to the question. As long as human beings were able to perceive in the spiritual, as long as they were able to perceive the gods there in supersensible experience, no god would have needed to become man. But now the god had to be there within the sensual world. The disciples' words flowed out of these feelings to affirm this fact: “We have laid our hands in his wounds,” and similar ones. Thus we see how the appearance of Christ Jesus Himself becomes clear to us from the nature of post-Atlantean men, how we recognize why Christ actually had to reveal Himself for sensory perception. The strongest historical fact had to be there for people. The spiritual self had to be there in a sensory way so that people had a point of reference that could connect them to the supersensible world.