IV. Theosophy and Christianity

Our present time is not a time that loves to rise to the spirit in its liveliness. There are ideals that people look up to, and they talk a lot about ideals, but the 19th and early 20th centuries do not want to know much about the possibility of realizing these ideals, about the spirit being present and active, and about the task of recognizing it. This distinguishes our time quite significantly from the time of the great spirits who originally developed Christianity in accordance with the founder of Christianity. Go back to the early days of Christianity, to Clement of Alexandria, for example, and you will find that at that time all scholarship, all knowledge, was there for one purpose only: to understand how the living Word, the Light of the world, could become flesh. Our age does not like to rise to such heights of spiritual perception. Just as we have limited ourselves in our scientific view to seeing only what is purely factual, what the eyes can see and the senses can perceive, so too are religious creeds full of such materialistic views. And it is precisely the representatives of such materialistic views who believe they understand the creed best. They do not know how strongly materialistic thoughts have taken hold unconsciously. Let me show you just one example.