Lecture XI

Many people experienced this in the right way and they used the right images for it. They said to themselves: once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly expanses; he saw the sun, but not the sun as we see it today. Today there are physicists who believe that out there in the universe there floats a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that physicists would be astonished if they could build a cosmic balloon and reach the sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into nothingness but beyond nothingness, far beyond the sphere of nothingness. The modern materialistic cosmologies developed today are pure fantasy. In more ancient times, people did not picture the sun as a gaseous sphere floating in heavenly space; .the sun in their view, was a spiritual being. Even today the sun is a spiritual being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a spiritual being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the sun. This central spiritual being was experienced by a more ancient humanity as one with the Christ. When speaking of Christ, the ancients pointed to the sun. More recent humanity must now not point away from the earth but rather toward the earth when it speaks of the Christ. It must search for the sun in the Man of Golgotha.