11. On the Essence of Christianity

For materialism, nothing counts but what it can perceive with its five senses; therefore, what Theosophy brings seems fantastic to it. We humans are too accustomed to relying only on our senses. With these external senses, we will never grasp and learn to understand Christ. But there are forces slumbering in man that enable him to develop [more refined] sensory organs within himself, which enable him to cognize higher things. The ancient Gnostics, the first church fathers, possessed such ability, such [higher] sense organs, and they testify with the mystics of the 13th and 14th centuries from their own experience of the higher human being that they have experienced Christ in themselves as a mystical fact. That means something. The first condition for understanding what happened at Golgotha is to experience Christ in one's own soul. And that is the significance of the theosophical movement: there are people, men and women, who, from their own experience, are informed about the truth of Christianity; they have had the practical experience of inner experience and can therefore speak about it in this way.