Ancient Wisdom and the Heralding of the Christ Impulse

Here, then, we have the third harbinger after Elijah and John the Baptist. Now we understand many of the questions inevitably raised by those possessed of wider powers of perception. John the Baptist dies the death of a martyr before the event of Golgotha is drawing near. He lives through the dawn leading to the Mystery of Golgotha, through the time of prophecies and predictions, through the days of rejoicing, but not through the period of lamentation and sorrow. When this same mood becomes manifest again in the personality of Raphael, do we not find it comprehensible that with such deep devotion he paints pictures of the Madonna and of children, and is it not obvious why he does not paint the betrayal by Judas, the bearing of the Cross, Golgotha, the Mount of Olives? Any existing pictures of these subjects must have been commissioned, for the essential being of Raphael finds no expression in them. Why are such pictures alien to Raphael? Because as John the Baptist he did not live to experience the Mystery of Golgotha.