Twelfth Lecture

It will not improve in relation to the general culture of humanity until people in their social lives also perform acts that are dominated by this idea of pre-existence. In today's culture, one is only honest when one speaks, as Oswald Spengler does, of the decline of the West, insofar as one knows nothing about spiritual science or does not want to know about it. For only he who ascribes the power of this ascent and the strength of this ascent to the spirit active in human will, only he who now truly says out of the inmost conviction: “Not I, but the Christ in me!” But then one must also include this Christ in the idea of immortality; then one must actually appeal to the transformation of human nature, to the Christification of human nature, not merely to the pagan inclusion of the idea of God in the creed without the person having changed. The fact that it has been accepted in the broadest circles of the Protestant confession that the theologian Harnack could say: Only the Father-God belongs in the Gospel of Jesus, not the Christ, for Jesus taught only about the Father-God, and it was only later that Christianity adopted the view that Christ Himself is a divine being. — That is today's most modern theology: to exclude the Christ from Christianity. We spiritual scientists must reinclude Him. We must recognize how he fits into human history; we must permeate the cultural epochs with the Christ. Then they will not merely be what they are in Spengler's spirit, but will become something for our time that teaches us: we need a Naissance, not just a Renaissance, we need the rebirth of the spirit. This awareness is what really makes an anthroposophist, not the assimilation of individual teachings, but this awareness that we are called upon to enter not just into a rebirth, but into the birth of a spiritual element in our time. The more we become aware of this, the better we will become as adherents of the anthroposophically oriented worldview. But in order to become aware of this, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with the anthroposophical way of thinking by reading what has been offered and by inwardly contemplating what has been given and suggested. At the same time, becoming familiar with the anthroposophical way of thinking means everything else that is to arise from the depths of our consciousness. Threefolding is nothing other than a branch on the tree of Anthroposophy.