8. The Essence of Christianity

And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stands at the starting point of humanity, but which has gradually been lost until people had only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when the greatest impulse, the Christ impulse, struck humanity, which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, bringing the soul the possibility of ever higher and higher ascent, of ever higher and higher life, until man is so far advanced in terms of his earthly existence that he can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Nothing fulfills us as significantly, deeply and powerfully as this, which we can understand as a characteristic of the actual mission of humanity within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he sees himself surrounded by the physical-sensual world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, he knows that through them he reaches up into a spiritual world. And he knows that from this spiritual world, spiritual forces and entities extend into his existence. But man cannot live his way up into the spiritual worlds with mere abstract concepts and ideals, because just as he is here in the physical world as a personality, so he must also educate himself as a personality into the spiritual world. Therefore, only a model personality can lead him there - that is the Christ-personality!