First Berlin Lecture

The Mystery of Golgotha, the living in of the Christ Impulse, came into the world. At what time did it come into the world? Today, through our spiritual deepening, we know what flowed into a human body at that time to become the property of the development of the earth, the development of humanity on earth. The preparatory studies we have undertaken have enabled us to some extent to grasp the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Future periods of time, as we have often emphasized, will understand it even more clearly. But how is it, one may ask, with the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha precisely in the time in which it took place? It is indeed a matter of our grasping the reality of this Mystery of Golgotha, of understanding what it really is about. Is it a matter of what was taught to humanity at that time? If that were the case, then those who say that most of the teachings of Christ Jesus were already present in earlier periods might perhaps claim some semblance of justification; although, as we know, this is not entirely true either. But that is not the main point. What is important is something quite different, namely, what happened at Golgotha and in connection with it, what would have happened even if no human soul in the wide orbit of the earth had understood it. For it is not a matter of a fact being immediately understood, but of its happening. The significance of the fact of Golgotha is not based, in the first place, on what people have understood of it, but on what has happened for humanity, so that the current of this event has found expression in the spiritual facts of the world.