The Apocalypse of St. John
GA 104
17 June 1908, Nuremberg
Spiritual Science. The Gospel. The Future of Mankind
In the autumn of this present year Nuremberg can celebrate an important centenary, for it was in 1808 that this city received one of the greatest German spirits within her walls. He was one of those spirits of whom we hear little to-day and whose works are understood still less; but he will signify very much for man's intellectual life in the future when he is once understood. He is doubtless difficult to understated and it may be some time before people grasp him again. In the autumn of 1808 Hegel became Director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.
Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps take as foundation for what we are going to study. He said: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ, with the outer historical figure. And it is the greatness of the Christian religion that every grade of consciousness can grasp the historical external figure, while at the same time it is a challenge to the most earnest labours of the mind and the deepest penetration. The Christian religion is comprehensible at every stage of culture and yet at the same time it challenges the deepest wisdom.—These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.
That the Christian faith, the message of the Gospel, can be understood at every stage of consciousness has been taught for a period to be reckoned almost in millennia. To show that it is a summons to the deepest thought, to a penetration into humanity's whole fund of wisdom, will be one of the tasks of Spiritual Science, if this is understood in its true sense and inmost impulse and made the guide of human life. What we are to consider to-day will be misunderstood if it is thought that Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is in any way a new religion or desires to establish a new religious faith in place of an old one. One might say, not to be misunderstood, if Spiritual Science is grasped aright, it will be clear that though it is a sure and firm supporter of religious life, in itself it is no religion, nor will it ever contradict any religion as such. It is another matter, however, for it to be the instrument to explain the profoundest truths and the most earnest and vital secrets of religions and show how they may be understood.
It may seem somewhat far-fetched if we make the following comparison in order to show the relation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy to religious documents (and to-day we shall be concerned with the religious documents of Christianity). Anthroposophy is related to the religious documents as mathematical instruction is related to the books on mathematics which have appeared in the course of mankind's history. We have an old work which is really of interest only to students of history versed in mathematics, namely, the geometry of Euclid. It contains for the first time in a scholastic form the mathematical and geometrical facts that are now taught to children in school. How few of the children are aware, however, that all that they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, etc., stands in that old book, that it was given to humanity then for the first time. It is quite right to make the child conscious that one can realize these things in oneself, that if the human spirit sets its forces in motion and applies them to the forms of space it is able to realize these forms without reference to that ancient book. Yet someone who has never heard of the book and has been taught mathematics and geometry will value and understand it in the right sense if he one day comes across it. He will know how to prize what was given to mankind by the one who set this work for the first time before the human spirit. In this way one might characterize the relation of Spiritual Science to religious documents.
The sources of Spiritual Science are of such a nature that if it is understood in its true impulse it is not to be referred to any kind of document or tradition. Just as knowledge of the surrounding sense-world is given us by the free use of our forces, so can the knowledge of the super-sensible, the invisible lying behind the visible, be given us by the deep-lying spiritual forces and faculties slumbering within the human soul. When man uses the instruments of his senses he can perceive things lying before him and combine them with his intellect. In the same way someone using the means given him through Spiritual Science can look behind the veils of sense-existence to the spiritual causes, to where beings weave and work which are imperceptible to the physical eye and ear. Thus it is in the free use of man's forces, though they are still slumbering as super-sensible forces in the majority of men, that we have the independent source of spiritual knowledge, just as the source of external knowledge lies in the free use of forces directed to the sense-world. And when man possesses the knowledge which introduces him into the super-sensible behind the sensible, the invisible behind the visible, a knowledge as definite as his knowledge of outer objects and events, then he may go to the traditional books and records. Furnished with super-sensible knowledge he may approach the records through which, during the course of evolution, tidings have reached man of the super-sensible world, just as the geometrician approaches the geometry of Euclid. And then he tests them as the modern geometrician tests the geometry of Euclid; he can prize and recognize these documents at their true value. Nor does one who approaches the records of Christianity equipped with knowledge of the super-sensible world find that they lose in value; indeed on the contrary, they appear in a more brilliant light than they showed first to the mere believer, they prove to contain deeper wisdom than had been dreamt of earlier, before the possession of anthroposophical knowledge.
But we must be clear on another point before we can realize the right relation of Anthroposophy to the religious documents. Let us ask ourselves who is better able to judge the geometry of Euclid—one who can translate the words and give the contents without having first penetrated into the spirit of geometry, or one who already understands geometry and is therefore able to discover it in the book? Let us think of a mere philologist, one who knows nothing of geometry, how many incorrect statements would appear if he tried to convey the meaning of the contents. Many have done this with the records of religion, even those who are supposed to be chosen to fathom their true sense. They have gone to these records without first having any independent knowledge of super-sensible facts. And so we have to-day most careful explanations of religious documents, explanations that explore the history of the time and show how the documents originated, and so on. But the explanations resemble explanations of Euclid's geometry by a non-geometrician. Religion—and this we will hold fast—can only be found if one is aided by spiritual-scientific knowledge, although Spiritual Science can only be an instrument of the religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized through the content of the human heart, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man's sensitive soul sends up all that is best in it to the super-sensible beings and powers. The character of a man's religion depends on the fire of these feelings, the strength of his sensitivity, just as it depends on the warm pulse-beat in the breast and on the feeling for beauty how a man will stand before a picture. True it is that the contents of the religious life is what we call the spiritual or super-sensible world. But just as little as an aesthetic feeling for art is the same as an inner grasp of its laws—though it may assist understanding just as little are the wisdom, the science, that lead into the spiritual worlds the same as religion. This science will make religious feeling more earnest, worthier, broader, but it will not be religion itself. Grasped in its true sense it may lead to religion.
If we wish to understand the force and significance, the real spirit of the Christian religion we must penetrate far into spiritual life. We must look back into times of a primeval past, the pre-religious age of mankind, and try to envisage the origin of religion. Is there a pre-religious age of humanity? Yes, a time existed on earth when there was no religion; this is acknowledged by Spiritual Science though in a very different sense from the assertions of materialistic civilization. What does religion signify for mankind? It was and for a long time will still be that which the word itself signifies. The word “religion” means the uniting of man with his divine element, with the world of the spirit. The religious ages are essentially those in which man has longed for union with the divine, be it out of the sources of knowledge, or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if it were permeated by divine forces. Ages in which man had an inner premonition rather than definite vision, in which he rather sensed that a spiritual world was around him, than saw it—these are the religious ages of our earth. And before these ages were others when man did not need such a sense of longing for union with the super-sensible spiritual world, because he knew that world, as to-day he knows things of the sense world. Does man need to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants, animals? Does he need documents or doctrines to prove to him or let him surmise that there are rocks, plants, animals? No, for he sees them round him and needs therefore no religion of the sense-perceptible world. Let us imagine someone from quite another world, possessing quite different senses and organs of knowledge, one who would not see the stones, plants and animals because to him they were invisible. Let us imagine that he was informed through writings or in some other way of their existence, which to you is a matter of direct sight and knowledge. What would that be for him? It would be religion. If he were informed through some book of the existence of stones and plants and animals it would be religion to him, for he has never seen them. There was a time in which humanity lived amongst those spiritual beings and deeds that are recorded in the religious teachings and teachings of wisdom.
The word “evolution” has become a magic word in many fields of thought to-day, but it has been applied by science solely to outer sense-perceptible facts. To one who regards the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science everything is in process of evolution, and most of all the human consciousness. The state of consciousness in which man lives to-day, through which when he wakes in the morning he is able to grasp the world with his senses, this state has evolved from a different one. We call the present consciousness the clear day-consciousness. But this has evolved from an ancient state which we call the dull picture-consciousness of mankind. There, however, we reach back to humanity's early evolutionary stages of which anthropology tells nothing, since it uses only the instruments of the senses and methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through stages in the far past which are the same as the animal creation passes through to-day. We have seen in earlier lectures how the relation of man to the animal is to be understood. Man was never such a being as the present animal, nor is he descended from beings like them. If we were to describe the forms out of which man has evolved they would prove very different in appearance from the present-day animal. These are creatures which have stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution, con-served these stages and hardened them. The human being has grown beyond his earlier evolutionary stages, the animal has gone down below them. So in the animal world we see some-thing like laggard brothers of humanity, who no longer, however, bear the form of those earlier stages.
The earlier stages of evolution took their course when there were different conditions of life on the earth, when the elements were not distributed as they are to-day, when the human being was not encumbered with the kind of body he now bears, and yet was man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the course of evolution for his entry into the flesh, was able to wait until the fleshly materiality had reached a condition in which he could develop the forces of the present spirit. The animals were not able to wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was right. They were therefore obliged to stay behind. We can thus picture that the human being has lived under other conditions and other forms of consciousness. If we follow these back for thousands and thousands of years we shall always find different ones. What to-day we call logical thought, intellect, understanding, has only evolved late in man's history. Much stronger were certain forces in him which are already beginning to decline, such, for instance, as memory. In an earlier age memory was far more developed than it is now. With the growth of the intellect in mankind, memory has stepped essentially into the background. If one uses some measure of practical observation one can recognize that what Spiritual Science relates is not said without foundation. People might assert that if that were true about memory, then a person remaining backward in development by some accident, should be backward least of all in memory. It could also be claimed that if intellectuality were fostered in a person artificially kept back, then his memory would suffer. Here in this city a characteristic case of this very nature is to be found.
Professor Daumer, whom one must hold in the highest esteem, observed this case very thoroughly. It was the case of that human being, so enigmatic for many people, who was once placed into this city in a mysterious way, and who in just as mysterious a way met his death in Ansbach. An author, in order to indicate the mystery of his life, wrote that as he was carried out to burial the sun was setting on the one horizon and the moon was rising on the other. I speak, as you know, of Caspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been asserted, if you look only at what has been fully verified, you will know that this foundling—who was one day simply there in the street, and who since he did not know whence he came, was called the Child of Europe—could neither read nor write when he was found. At an age of twenty years he possessed nothing of what is gained through the intellect but he had a remarkable memory. As they began to instruct him, as logic entered his soul, his memory disappeared. This transition in consciousness was accompanied by something else. He possessed at first an incredible, an entirely inborn truthfulness and it was precisely in this truthfulness that he went more and more astray. The more he nibbled, so to say, at intellectuality, the more it vanished. There would be many things to study were we to enter deeply into this human soul which had been artificially held back. It is not difficult for the student of Spiritual Science to credit the popular tradition, so unacceptable to the learned people of to-day, which relates that while Caspar Hauser still knew nothing, while he still had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different form, he exercised a remarkable effect upon quite savage creatures. Savage animals humbled themselves and became mild, something streamed from him that made such beasts gentle, although they savagely attacked anyone else. We could in fact penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, so enigmatic to many, and you would see how things that cannot be explained from ordinary life are led back through Spiritual Science to spiritual facts. Such facts cannot be learnt by speculation but only by spiritual observation, though they are comprehensible to an unbiased and logical thinking.
All this has only been said in order to show you that the modern consciousness has evolved from another, an age-old-state when man was not in direct touch with outer objects in the modern sense, but on the other hand was in connection with facts and beings of the spiritual world. A human being did not see another's physical form—nor did this form resemble that of to-day. When another being approached him a sort of dream-picture arose and by its shape and colouring he knew whether the other was antagonistic to him or sympathetic. Such a consciousness perceived spiritual facts and the spiritual world. To-day man is among beings of flesh and blood, at that time, when he turned his gaze to himself and himself was soul and spirit, he lived among spiritual beings. They were present to him, he was a spirit among spirits. Although his consciousness was only dreamlike, yet the pictures that arose in him were in living relation to his environment. That was the far distant age when man still lived in a spiritual world. Later he descended from it in order to take on a corporeal nature suited to his present consciousness. Animals already existed as physical creatures while man still perceived in spiritual realms. He lived at that time among spiritual beings, and just as you need no proof to be convinced of the presence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primeval times needed no testimony in order to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and divine beings and therefore needed no religion. That was the pre-religious age.
Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness changed into the modern. Colours and forms are no longer perceived as floating in space, colour is laid upon the surfaces of sense-objects. In the same measure as man learnt to direct his senses to the outer world, did this outer world draw itself like a veil, like the great Maja, over the world of spirit. And humanity had to receive tidings of the spiritual world through this sheath, religion became necessary.
There is also a state, however, between the time preceding a religious consciousness and the time of actual religion: there is an intermediate condition. Thence are derived the mythologies, sagas, folk-stories of the spiritual worlds. It is a dreary arid learning that has no inkling of real spiritual events and asserts that all the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology with its accounts of the deeds of the gods are merely inventions of popular fantasy. They are not inventions, the peasant folk do not indulge in such fancies and if they see a few clouds stretched across the sky, say that they are little sheep. That the people have such fantasies is a fiction of our modern learnedness which abounds in lively fantasy about such things. The truth of the matter is quite different. The old saga and stories of the gods are the last relics, the last memories of the pre-religious consciousness. They are records of what men themselves have seen. Those who described Wotan, Thor, Zeus, etc., did so because they remembered that such things had been experienced once upon a time. Mythologies are fragments, broken pieces of what had once been experienced. The intermediate stage was shown in another way as well. Even when clever men had already—let us say—become very clever, there were still persons who under exceptional conditions (call them states of insanity or being carried away, as you will) could see into the spiritual worlds, who could still be aware of what in earlier times was seen by all. They recounted that they themselves still saw something of the spiritual world. This was linked with the memories and led to a living faith among the people. That was a state transitional to the state of actual religion.
We may ask: what paved the way in mankind to an actual religion? It was because men found a means of so developing their inner being that they were once more able to behold the worlds from which they had sprung, which they used to see in a dull consciousness. And here we touch upon a chapter which to many modern minds contains but little probability, the question of initiation. What are initiates? They were those who so developed their inner nature of soul and spirit through certain methods that they grew again into the spiritual world. There is initiation! In every soul super-sensible forces and faculties lie dormant. There is, or at least there can be, a great and mighty moment when these forces awaken. We can gain some idea of this moment if we picture the general course of human evolution. To speak in the words of Goethe we can say that we look back into the far past when the human body had no such physical eye or physical ear as exist to-day. We look back to times when there were undifferentiated organs, able neither to see nor to hear, at the places where these organs are now situated. A time came for physical humanity when such blind organs evolved to radiant points, gradually evolved until light itself dawned upon them. In the same way a time came when the human ear had developed to such a stage that the former silent world revealed itself in tones and harmonies. The sun's forces worked upon the formation of the human eye. And to-day man can live the life of spirit and thus develop the organs of soul and spirit which are largely undeveloped in present mankind.
The moment is possible and for many has already dawned when the soul and spirit are transformed just as once the external physical organism was transformed. New eyes and ears arise through which the light shines and tones resound out of the spiritually dark and silent world. Development is possible, even to the point of living into the higher worlds. That is initiation. And the Mystery Schools provided methods of initiation as in ordinary life the methods of the chemical laboratory or of biological research are made available. The difference is only this—official science has to prepare instruments and other apparatus for its use, while he who would become an initiate has but one instrument to perfect, namely, himself in all his forces just as the force of magnetism can lie dormant in iron, so there slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. And so the time came when normal humanity saw only physical sense-existence and when the leaders were initiates. These could see into the spiritual worlds and give information and explanation of the facts of that world in which man had earlier lived.
To what does the first stage of initiation lead? How does it appear to the human soul? Do not imagine that this development is merely a matter of philosophic speculation, a spinning out, a refinement of ideas. The ideas man has about the sense-world are transformed when he grows into the spiritual world. No longer does he apprehend things through sharply outlined concepts, but through pictures, through Imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual process of world creation. The firm definite contours of the physical material world exist, in fact, nowhere else. In the world creative process the animal does not appear with clear outline. One has there something like a basic idea of the animal from which the diverse external forms can originate, a living reality, membered in itself. One must take one's stand strictly on the basis of Goethe's words: “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” The initiate learns at first to know and grasp in pictures, he learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must be more mobile than that which serves us for apprehending the surrounding sense-world. Hence this stage of development is called the Imaginative Consciousness. It leads man again into the spiritual world, but not in a dull twilight state. The initiate consciousness to be gained is clear and bright, as clear as man's consciousness by day. There is thus an enrichment, the spiritual consciousness is added to the day-consciousness. In the first stage of initiation man lives in the imaginative consciousness. The documents of humanity record what the initiates experienced in the spiritual world just as information with regard to the science of geometry was imparted to mankind through Euclid. We recognize what stands in these records when we go back to the sources—the spiritual vision of the initiates.
Those were the conditions prevailing among men up to the appearance of the greatest Being who has trodden upon the earth, Christ Jesus. With his appearance anew element entered evolution. If we would understand the essential nature of the new element bestowed on mankind through Christ Jesus, we must realize that in all pre-Christian initiation the candidate was completely withdrawn from ordinary life, he must work upon his soul in centres of profoundest secrecy. Above all we must realize that when man raised himself again into the spiritual world something of that merely dreamlike picture-consciousness still remained. Man had to retreat from this sense-world to be able to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary to-day has been brought about through the appearing of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ-principle has entered humanity, the Central Being, the very Centre of the spiritual world, has once existed historically in a human being on this earth. It is the same Being for whom all these have longed who have developed a religious life, who have beheld in the Mystery Centres, who have left the sense-world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man confronts it as his highest nature, this has entered humanity's evolution with Christ Jesus. One who understands something of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the coming of Christ Jesus is a prophecy of him.
When the ancient initiates wished to speak of the highest that was accessible to them in the spiritual world, of that which they were able to see as the origin of all things, then under the most diverse names it was of Christ Jesus that they spoke. We need only remember the Old Testament, itself a prophecy. We remember how when Moses was to lead his people he received the command: “Say to thy people that the Lord God has said unto thee what thou shalt do.” Then Moses asks: “How will the people believe me, how can I convince them? What shall I say when they ask who has sent me?” And he was commanded: “Say the ‘I-am’ has sent thee.” Read it again and compare as exactly as you can with the original text and you will see its significance. The “I-Am,” what does that mean? The “I-Am” is the name for the divine Being, the Christ-principle of man—the Being of whom man feels like a drop, a spark, when he can say “I am.” The stone, the plant, the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation inasmuch as he can say “I am” to himself, he can utter a name which does not hold good for anyone but the one who utters it. You alone can call yourself “I”; no one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks within itself in a word to which none other has entrance except a Being which comes to the soul through no external sense, on no outer path. Here Divinity speaks. Hence the name “I-Am” was given to the Godhead whose being fills the world. “Say that the ‘I-am’ has told thee !” Thus was Moses to speak to his people.
Men learn only gradually to understand the true, deep meaning of this “I-am.” Human beings did not feel themselves as individuals at once. You can still find this in the Old Testament, these men did not as yet feel individual. Even the members of the German tribes, right into the time of the Christian Church, did not feel themselves to be individualities. Think back to the Cherusci, the Teutons, etc., the German tribes in whose land modern Germany now lies. The separate members felt the tribal ego, and themselves as a part of it. A man would not have said “I am” in the clear, definite way it is said to-day; he felt himself part of an organism composed of those who were related by blood. This blood-relationship assumes the greatest proportions among the followers of the Old Testament religion. The individual felt himself sheltered in the whole folk which for him was ruled by one Ego. He knew the meaning of “I and the Father Abraham are one,” for he traced the blood-relationship back through the generations to Abraham. If he wished to go beyond his single ego he knew himself to be sheltered in the Father Abraham, from whom flows all the blood through the generations, which is the external bearer of the common Folk-Ego.
Now if this expression, which signified the highest they knew to the people of the Old Testament is compared with what has been brought through Christ Jesus then a lightning-flash illumines the whole advance that has come about through Christian evolution. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I-am.’” What does this mean? “Before Abraham was the ‘I-am.’” (That is the right rendering of the biblical passage.) It means: Go back through all generations, and you find something in yourself, in your own individuality which is even more eternal than what flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, was the “I-am,” that Being which draws into every human being, of which each human soul can directly feel something in itself. Not “I and the Father Abraham,” not I and a temporal Father, but I and a spiritual Father, who has no part in anything perishable, we are one! I and the Father are one. The Father dwells in each separate individual, the Divine Principle lives in him, something which was, which is, and which is to be.
Men have actually only begun after 2,000 years to feel the force of this world-impulse; in future ages, however, they will realize the significance for mankind of this forward step in the remission and evolution of the earth. What the ancient initiates tried to reach could only be realized if one went beyond the individual human being and grasped the spirit of a whole people. If the normal man heard that he would say: That is a transient entity which begins with birth and ends with death. But if he were initiated in the secrets of the Mysteries, he saw as the Folk Spirit, as the actual Being who flows through the blood of the generations, that which was only dimly sensed by the others. He could see what can be reached only in the spiritual realm and not in external reality. He could see a divine Being who flows through the blood of the generations. To stand face to face in the spirit before this God could only take place in the Mysteries.
Those who were round Christ Jesus with full understanding as his intimate pupils were conscious that a Being of divine spiritual nature stood outwardly before them, clothed in the flesh as human personality. They were sensible of Christ Jesus as the first human being to bear a Spirit who otherwise was felt only by interrelated groups, and who could only be seen in the spiritual world by initiates. He was the Firstborn among men.
The more individualized a man becomes the more he can become a bearer of Love. Where the blood links men together they love because they are led to what they should love. When man is granted individuality, when he tends and nurtures the divine spark within him then the impulses of love, the waves of love, pass from man to man out of the free heart. And thus with this new impulse man has enriched the old bond of love that is bound to the blood-tie. Love passes over gradually into spiritual love which flows from soul to soul and which will ultimately encompass all humanity in a common bond of brother-love. But Christ Jesus is the Force, the living Force, once historically and externally present, through whom for the first time mankind has been brought to the bond of brother-love. Men will learn to understand this bond of brother-love as the perfected spiritualized Christianity.
People say very lightly to-day that theosophy should seek the common kernel of truth in all religions, for the contents of all religions are the same. People who talk like that and only compare religions in order to note the abstract resemblance have no understanding of the principle of evolution. World evolution is not without meaning. All religions undoubtedly contain the truth, but inasmuch as they evolve from form to form they evolve to higher forms. It is true that if you search deeply enough you can find teachings in other religions that are also to be found in Christianity. Christianity has not brought new doctrine. The essential element of Christianity does not lie in its teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions, in their case it was a matter of what they taught. If they themselves had remained unknown, their teaching would have been preserved and this would have been enough. But with Christ Jesus that is not the point. What matters is that he was there, that he has lived here on this earth in a physical body. Not belief in his teaching but in his Person—that is the essential thing. The point is that he has been beheld among mortals as the Firstborn; whom one asks: if Thou wert in the position in which I find myself, wouldst Thou feel as I do? Wouldst Thou think as I am now thinking? Will, as I am willing? That is the important thing, that he is the greatest example as Personality, with whom it is not a matter of listening to his teaching, but of looking at him himself, and seeing how he acted. And so the intimate pupils of Christ Jesus speak quite differently from the pupils and disciples of other religious founders. It is said of those: The Master has taught this or taught that. The disciples of Christ Jesus say: We are not telling you invented myths and doctrines; we say to you what our eyes have seen, our ears heard. We have heard his voice, our hands have touched the Source of Life whereby we have community with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: “You shall bear witness for me in Jerusalem, in Judea to the end of the world.” These words contain a very great significance; testimony shall you bear for unto the end of the world. That means that there will at all times be those who, just as the men in Judea and Galilee, could say out of direct knowledge who Christ was, in the sense of the Gospel.
“In the sense of the Gospel”—what does that mean? Nothing less than that he was from the beginning the Principle that lived in all creation. He says, “If you do not believe in me, believe at least in Moses, for if you believe in Moses, then you believe in me, for Moses has spoken of me.” We have to-day seen this. Moses has spoken of him by saying: The “I-Am” has said it to me; the “I-am,” who up to then was only perceptible in the spirit. The fact that the Christ has entered visibly into the world, appearing as man among men, is what distinguishes the Christ-gospel from the divine proclamations of other religions. In all of these religions spiritual wisdom was directed to something which was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something entered the world which was to be grasped as the sense-perceptible itself. What did the first disciples experience as the ideal of their wisdom? No longer merely to understand the life of the spirits in spirit-land, but how the Highest Principle could have been present on the earth in the historical Personality of Christ Jesus. It is much easier to deny divinity to this Personality than to acknowledge it. Here lies the distinction between a certain doctrine of early Christian times and what we may call inner Christianity—the distinction between Gnosis and esoteric Christianity. The Gnosis certainly recognizes Christ in his divinity, but it could not raise itself to the conception that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes. He says: You shall look upon Christ Jesus; not as something to be grasped purely in the invisible, but as the Word which has become flesh and dwelt among us. You must know that with this human personality a force has appeared which will work into the farthest future, which will encircle the earth with the true spiritual love as a force that lives and works in all that lives into the future.
And if man gives himself up to this force he grows into the spiritual world from which he has descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate's vision can already reach to-day. Man will divest himself of what belongs to the senses when he penetrates into the spiritual world. The candidate who was initiated in ancient times could see in retrospect the far past of spirit-life; those who are initiated in the Christian sense through receiving the impulse of Christ Jesus are enabled to see what becomes of this earthly world of ours when humanity acts in the sense of the Christ Impulse. As one can look back to earlier conditions, so, starting from the coming of Christ, one can look into the farthest future. Consciousness will alter again, there will be a new relation of the spiritual to the sense-world. Earlier initiation was directed to time past, to age-old wisdom; Christian initiation reveals the future to one who is to be initiated. That is a necessity; man is to be initiated not only in wisdom, or in feelings but in his will. For then he knows what he is to do, he can set himself a goal for the future. Ordinary everyday people set themselves aims for the afternoon, for the evening or the morning; the spiritual man is able, out of spiritual principles, to set himself distant aims which pulse through his will and make his forces quicken. To set goals before humanity means in the true, highest sense, in the sense of the original Christ principle, to grasp Christianity esoterically. In this way it was grasped by the one who has written the great principle of the initiation of the will—the writer of the Apocalypse. We misunderstand the Apocalypse, if we do not understand it as the impulse given for the future, for action and deed.
Everything that we have let pass before us to-day can be understood out of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. I have been unable to give more than a slight sketch. When through Spiritual Science one grasps what lies behind the sense-world, one can look with understanding at all that has been given in the Gospels, at what has been proclaimed in the Apocalypse. And the more deeply penetrating is one's approach to the super-sensible worlds, the more profound is what one will find in the Christian documents. The records of Christianity will appear in higher brilliance, with deeper truths when one goes to them strengthened with the spiritual vision that may be gained by the help of Anthroposophy. True it is that the simplest heart can have some feeling of what truths lie hidden in Christianity. But man's consciousness will not be satisfied for ever with a dim sensing, it will evolve higher and wish to have knowledge and under-standing. Yet even when it mounts to the highest teachings of wisdom, there will always be mysteries in Christianity still more profound. It is for the simplest heart but also for the most developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again as pictures, and so the naive consciousness may divine what truths are slumbering there. Man, however, will demand knowledge and not faith—and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. If the explanations of the Gospels are given him through Spiritual Science he will be able to find the fully satisfying content in Christianity. Hence Spiritual Science will take the place of the highest philosophies of the past. It will bear testimony to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: “Profoundest thought is linked with the historical external figure of Christ Jesus, and every degree of consciousness—therein lies the greatness of Christianity—can grasp it externally. At the same time, however, Christianity demands the deepest and most penetrating wisdom. Christianity is for every stage of culture, but it can meet and satisfy the highest demands.”
Geisteswissenschaft, Evangelium und Menschheitszukunft
[ 1 ] Nürnberg kann im Herbst dieses Jahres eine schöne Jahrhundertfeier begehen. Denn es war im Herbst 1808, als diese Stadt in ihren Mauern einen der größten deutschen Geister aufgenommen hat, einen derjenigen deutschen Geister, von denen freilich heute nicht gerade viel gesprochen wird, dessen Werke noch weniger verstanden werden, der aber für die Zukunft des menschlichen Geisteslebens, wenn er einst verstanden werden wird, sehr viel bedeuten wird. Er ist allerdings schwer zu verstehen, und deshalb mag es einige Zeit dauern, bis die Menschen ihn wieder begreifen werden. Im Herbst 1808 wurde Hegel Direktor des Königlichen Gymnasiums in Nürnberg.
[ 2 ] Hegel hat einen Ausspruch getan, den wir vielleicht gerade heute als einen Richtspruch an die Spitze unserer Betrachtungen setzen dürfen. Hegel sagte: Der tiefste Gedanke ist mit der Gestalt Christi: mit dem Geschichtlichen und Äußerlichen vereinigt, und das ist eben das Große der christlichen Religion, daß sie bei aller dieser Tiefe leicht vom Bewußtsein in äußerlicher Hinsicht aufzufassen ist und zugleich zum tieferen Eindringen auffordert. Sie ist so für jede Stufe der Bildung und befriedigt zugleich die höchsten Anforderungen. — Das sind Worte Hegels, des deutschen Philosophen.
[ 3 ] Daß die christliche Religion, daß die Verkündigung des Evangeliums für jede Stufe des Bewußtseins begreiflich ist, das hat eine Zeit gelehrt, die fast schon nach Jahrtausenden zu rechnen ist. Daß sie auffordert zu den tiefsten Gedanken, zu dem tiefsten Eindringen in die Weisheitslehren des Menschentums überhaupt, das zu zeigen wird eine der Aufgaben sein der anthroposophischen Geistesströmung, der Geisteswissenschaft, wenn diese in ihrem richtigen Sinn, in ihren innersten Impulsen erfaßt und zum Herrn des menschlichen Lebens gemacht werden wird. Man würde die heutige Betrachtung mißverstehen, wenn man des Glaubens wäre, Anthroposophie oder Geisteswissenschaft sei in irgendeiner Beziehung eine neue Religion, wolle irgendein neues Religionsbekenntnis an die Stelle eines alten setzen. Man möchte sogar, um nur ja nicht mißverstanden zu werden, sagen: Wird einmal Geisteswissenschaft richtig verstanden werden, dann wird man sich klar sein darüber, daß sie als solche zwar die festeste, die sicherste Stütze des religiösen Lebens ist, daß sie selbst aber keine Religion ist, daß sie daher auch keiner Religion jemals als solcher widersprechen wird. Etwas anderes ist es aber, daß sie das Instrument sein kann, das Werkzeug, um die tiefsten Weistümer und Wahrheiten und die ernstesten und lebensvollsten Geheimnisse der Religionen zu erklären und zum Verständnis zu bringen.
[ 4 ] Es liegt vielleicht etwas fern, wenn man, um das Verhältnis von der Anthroposophie zu den Urkunden dieser oder jener Religion zu schildern — und heute werden wir es mit den religiösen Urkunden des Christentums zu tun haben —, den Vergleich macht: Anthroposophie verhält sich zu den religiösen Urkunden wie die mathematische Lehre zu den Urkunden, welche im Laufe der geschichtlichen Entwickelung der Menschheit als mathematische Lehrbücher oder Bücher überhaupt aufgetreten sind. Da haben wir ein altes Buch, das eigentlich nur der mit der Mathematik bewanderte Geschichtsforscher näher ins Auge faßt: die Geometrie des Euklid. Sie enthält zum erstenmal in einer schulmäßigen Weise dasjenige aus der Mathematik und Geometrie, was heute die Kinder in der Schule schon lernen. Wie wenige aber dieser Kinder werden sich dessen bewußt, daß alles das, was sie über parallele Linien, über das Dreieck, über die Winkel und so weiter lernen, in jenem alten Buche steht, daß es da zum erstenmal der Menschheit geschenkt worden ist! Mit Recht erweckt man im Kinde das Bewußtsein, daß man diese Dinge aus sich selbst einsehen kann, daß, wenn der menschliche Geist seine Kräfte in Bewegung setzt und sie anwendet auf die Formen des Raumes, daß er diese Formen einzusehen imstande ist ganz ohne Rücksicht auf jenes alte Buch. Einer aber, der vielleicht gar nichts gewußt hat von diesem Buch und die mathematischen und geometrischen Lehren in sich aufgenommen hat, er wird, wenn er es einmal kennenlernt, es in dem richtigen Sinne würdigen und verstehen. Er wird zu schätzen wissen, was derjenige der Menschheit gegeben hat, der dieses Buch zum erstenmal vor ihren Geist hingestellt hat.
[ 5 ] So möchte man das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zu den religiösen Urkunden charakterisieren. Die Quellen der Geisteswissenschaft sind so, daß die Geisteswissenschaft auf keinerlei Urkunden, auf keinerlei Überlieferung angewiesen sein soll, wenn sie ihrem richtigen Impulse nach verstanden wird. So wie uns das andere Wissen der Menschheit die Erkenntnis der umliegenden Sinneswelt dadurch verschafft, daß der Mensch seine Kräfte frei gebraucht, so verschaffen uns die tieferliegenden, zunächst in der Menschenseele schlummernden geistigen, übersinnlichen Kräfte und Fähigkeiten die Erkenntnis dessen, was als Übersinnliches, als Unsichtbares allem Sichtbaren zugrunde liegt. Ebenso wie der Mensch, wenn er seine Sinneswerkzeuge gebraucht, imstande ist, das, was sich dem äußeren Sinnesscheine darbietet, wahrzunehmen, wie er imstande ist, das Wahrgenommene mit seinem Verstande zu verbinden und zu verknüpfen, ebenso ist der Mensch, wenn er die durch die Geisteswissenschaft ihm überlieferten Methoden gebraucht, imstande, hinter die Kulissen des sinnlichen Daseins zu schauen, dorthin, wo die geistigen Ursachen liegen, wo die Wesen weben und arbeiten, die das sinnliche Auge nicht sieht, die das sinnliche Ohr nicht hört, wohl aber das übersinnliche. So liegt im freien Gebrauch der menschlichen Kräfte, wenn sie auch bei einem großen Teil der heutigen Menschheit als übersinnliche Kräfte noch schlummern, die Quelle, die unabhängige freie Quelle geistigen Wissens, wie im _ freien Gebrauch der auf die Sinneswelt gerichteten Kräfte die Quelle des äußeren Wissens liegt. Dann aber, wenn auf irgendeine Weise der Mensch sich in den Besitz der Erkenntnisse gesetzt hat, welche ihn einführen in das Übersinnliche hinter dem Sinnlichen, in das Unsichtbare hinter dem Sichtbaren, wenn er sich davon ein ebensolches Wissen erwirbt, wie es das sinnliche Wissen von den äußeren Gegenständen und Geschehnissen ist, dann mag er, ausgerüstet mit diesem übersinnlichen Wissen, ebenso an die Überlieferung gehen, an die Bücher und Dokumente, an die Urkunden, durch die im Laufe der Entwickelung Kunde zu den Menschen gekommen ist über das übersinnliche Gebiet, wie der Geometer herantritt an die Geometrie des Euklid. Und dann prüft er sie von einem ähnlichen Standpunkt aus, wie der heutige Geometer die Geometrie des Euklid prüft. Dann kann er diese Urkunden ihrem wahren Wert nach schätzen und anerkennen. Und derjenige, der diesen Weg geht, der wirklich ausgerüstet mit den Erkenntnissen der übersinnlichen Welt herantritt an die Urkunden der christlichen Verkündigung, für den verlieren diese Urkunden wahrhaftig nicht an Wert. Ja, im Gegenteil, sie erscheinen in höherem Glanz, als sie erst dem bloß gläubigen Gemüt erschienen sind. Sie zeigen, daß sie tiefere Weistümer enthalten, als der Mensch früher vor der anthroposophischen Erkenntnis geahnt hat.
[ 6 ] Aber noch über eine Frage müssen wir uns klar werden, damit wir die richtige Stellung gewinnen gegenüber dem Verhältnis der Anthroposophie zu den religiösen Urkunden. Fragen wir uns einmal: Wer ist der bessere Betrachter der Geometrie des Euklid, derjenige, der die Worte des Buches wörtlich übersetzen kann und, ohne erst eingedrungen zu sein in den Geist der Geometrie, den Inhalt des Buches enthüllen will, oder derjenige, welcher erst Geometrie versteht und daher auch die Geometrie in jenem Buch zu finden weiß? — Denken wir uns einen bloßen Philologen gegenüber dem Geometriebuch des Euklid, einen, der nichts verstünde von Geometrie: wieviel Unrichtiges würde da herauskommen, wenn er den Sinn des Buches enthüllen wollte! So haben es viele mit den religiösen Urkunden gemacht, selbst solche, die berufen sein sollten, den wahren Sinn derselben zu ergründen. Sie sind an diese Urkunden herangegangen, ohne daß sie erst, unabhängig von ihrien, etwas wußten von dem, was über das Übersinnliche zu ergründen ist. So haben wir heute recht sorgfältige Erklärungen der religiösen Urkunden, Erklärungen, die alles zusammentragen aus der Zeitgeschichte heraus, wie diese Urkunden zum Beispiel entstanden sind, aber die Erklärungen nehmen sich ebenso aus wie die Erklärungen der Geometrie des Euklid durch einen Nichtgeometer.
[ 7 ] Erkenntnis der Religion — das wollen wir festhalten — ist etwas, was man nur gewinnen kann, wenn man es mit Hilfe der auf geisteswissenschaftlichem Wege gewonnenen Erkenntnisse betrachtet, obwohl Anthroposophie nur ein Werkzeug des religiösen Lebens sein kann, niemals eine Religion selber. Religion wird charakterisiert am besten durch den Inhalt des menschlichen Herzens, des menschlichen Gemütes, jener Summe von Empfindungen und Gefühlen, durch die der Mensch hinaufschickt das Beste, was er an Empfänglichkeit in seiner Seele hat, zu den übersinnlichen Wesenheiten und Kräften. Von dem Feuer dieses Gemütsinhaltes, von der Stärke dieser Empfindungen, von der Art dieser Gefühle hängt der Charakter der Religion eines Menschen ab, so wie von dem warmen Pulsschlag in unserer Brust, von dem Gefühle für Schönheit es abhängt, wie der Mensch einem Bilde gegenübertritt. Der Inhalt des religiösen Lebens ist gewiß das, was wir die geistige, die übersinnliche Welt nennen. Aber ebensowenig wie ästhetisch-künstlerisches Empfinden dasselbe ist wie das, was wir nennen geistiges Erfassen der inneren künstlerischen Gesetze — obwohl das geistige Erfassen derselben das Kunstverständnis erhöhen wird —, ebensowenig ist jene Weisheit, jene Wissenschaft, welche in die geistigen Welten einführt, und Religion selber das gleiche. Diese Wissenschaft wird das religiöse Empfinden, das religiöse Fühlen ernster, würdiger, größer, umfangreicher machen, aber selber Religion will sie nicht sein, wenn sie im richtigen Sinne verstanden wird, obwohl sie zur Religion führen mag.
[ 8 ] Wenn wir nunmehr von diesem geisteswissenschaftlichen Standpunkt die Kraft und Bedeutung, den Sinn und den Geist der christlichen Religionsverkündigung verstehen wollen, dann müssen wir weit im geistigen Leben ausgreifen. Wir müssen den Blick werfen in Zeiten urferner Vergangenheit, mit anderen Worten, wir müssen zurückgreifen bis in die vorreligiöse Zeit der Menschheit, wir müssen versuchen, die Entstehung der Religion ins Auge zu fassen. Gibt es eine vorreligiöse Zeit der Menschheit? Ja, es war einmal eine Zeit auf der Erde, in der es keine Religion gegeben hat. Auch die Geisteswissenschaft muß eine solche Frage bejahen, obwohl in einem ganz anderen Sinne, als die materialistische Kulturweisheit es tut. Was bedeutet die Religion für die Menschheit? Religion war und wird noch lange für die Menschheit das sein, was schon ihr Wort ausdrückt. Das Wort Religion bedeutet: Verbindung des Menschen mit seinem Göttlichen, mit der geistigen Welt. Und im wesentlichen sind die religiösen Zeiten solche, in denen der Mensch sich nach der Vereinigung mit dem Göttlichen sehnte, sei es aus den Quellen eines Wissens oder aus einer gewissen Empfindung heraus, oder deshalb, weil er fühlte, daß sein Wille nur stark sein kann, wenn er von göttlicher Kraft durchströmt ist. Solche Zeiten, in denen der Mensch sozusagen mehr in sich ahnte, als daß er etwas Äußeres wußte, in denen er die übersinnliche Welt mehr ahnte, denn daß er sie geschaut, daß er sie um sich gehabt hätte, das sind die religiösen Zeiten unserer Erde. Und vor diesen Zeiten gab es andere Zeiten, wo der Mensch ein solch ahnendes, lechzendes Verbinden mit der geistig-übersinnlichen Welt nicht brauchte, deshalb nicht brauchte, weil er von dieser übersinnlichen Welt, von dieser geistigen Welt wußte, wie der Mensch der Gegenwart weiß von den sinnlichen Dingen. Braucht der Mensch überzeugt zu werden, daß es Steine, Bäume, Tiere gibt? Braucht er irgendeine Urkunde, eine Lehre darüber, die ihm bezeugt oder ihn ahnen läßt, daß es Steine, Pflanzen, Tiere gibt? Nein, denn er sieht sie, er erschaut sie um sich herum, und deshalb braucht er eine solche Religion des Sinnlichen nicht. Denken wir uns einen Menschen, der in ganz anderen Welten lebte, mit ganz anderen Sinnesorganen, Erkenntnisorganen ausgerüstet, der nicht die Steine, Pflanzen, Tiere sehen würde, weil sie unsichtbar wären für ihn, denken wir uns einen solchen Menschen, dem durch Schriften oder sonstwie die Kunde gegeben würde von Steinen, Pflanzen, Tieren: Was wäre dasjenige, was für Sie Anschauung, Erfahrung, unmittelbares Wissen ist, was wäre das für ihn? — Religion wäre es für diesen Menschen. Wenn irgendwo in einem Buche stehen würde, es gibt Steine, Pflanzen, Tiere, dann wäre das für diesen Menschen Religion, denn er hat es niemals gesehen.
[ 9 ] Es gab für den Menschen eine Zeit, wo er inmitten derjenigen geistigen Wesenheiten und Tatsachen schon gelebt hat, von denen ihm heute die Religionen und die Weisheitslehren Kunde tun.
[ 10 ] Das Wort Entwickelung ist heute auf vielen Gebieten der Weltanschauung ein Zauberwort geworden, aber es wird von der äußeren Wissenschaft doch nur angewendet auf äußere, sinnliche Tatsachen. Für denjenigen, der geisteswissenschaftlich die Welt betrachtet, für den ist alles, alles in Entwickelung, vor allen Dingen das menschliche Bewußtsein. Der Zustand des menschlichen Bewußtseins, in dem Sie heute leben, dutch den Sie, wenn Sie des Morgens aufwachen, vermöge Ihrer Sinnesorgane die Sinnenwelt sehen und begreifen, dieser Zustand des Bewußtseins hat sich aus einem anderen entwickelt. In der Geisteswissenschaft nennen wir diesen Bewußtseinszustand das sogenannte helle Tagesbewußtsein. Aber dieses helle Tagesbewußtsein hat sich herausentwickelt aus einem uralten anderen Bewußtsein, das wir das dämmerhafte Bilderbewußtsein der Menschheit nennen. Da kommen wir allerdings auf frühe Entwickelungszustände der Menschheit zurück, von denen eine äußere Anthropologie nichts meldet, aus dem Grunde nicht, weil sie sich nur der sinnlichen Instrumente und der Methoden des Verstandes bedient. Sie glaubt, daß der Mensch Zustände durchgemacht habe in urferner Vergangenheit, die eigentlich dieselben sind, wie sie heute unsere tierischen Wesen durchmachen.
[ 11 ] In früheren Vorträgen wurde schon darauf hingewiesen, wie wir uns geisteswissenschaftlich das Verhältnis des Menschen zu den tierischen Wesen zu denken haben. Niemals war der Mensch ein solches Wesen wie das heutige Tier es ist. Er stammt nicht von Wesenheiten ab, die so waren wie die heutigen Tiere. Die Entwickelungsformen, aus denen sich der Mensch herausgebildet hat, die würden, wenn wir sie schildern wollten, sich sehr unähnlich den heutigen Tieren erweisen. Die heutigen Tiere sind gleichsam auf früheren Entwickelungsstufen zurückgebliebene Wesenheiten, die diese früheren Entwickelungsstufen konserviert und sie in die Verhärtung gebracht haben. Der Mensch ist über seine früheren Entwickelungsstufen hinausgewachsen, die Tiere sind darunter heruntergewachsen. So sehen wir in der Tierwelt etwas wie zurückgebliebene Brüder der Menschheit, die aber nicht mehr die Form dieser früheren Entwickelungsstufen tragen. Die früheren Entwickelungsstufen verliefen in einer Zeit, wo die Erde andere Lebensbedingungen hatte, in der noch nicht die Elemente so verteilt waren wie heute, wo nicht der Mensch mit einem solchen Körper behaftet war wie heute und doch Mensch war. Er hat warten können, bildlich gesprochen, innerhalb des Entwickelungsganges mit seinem Hereinsteigen in das Fleisch, hat warten können bis zu der Zeit, wo diese fleischliche Materialität so hat werden können, daß er die Kraft des heutigen Geistes entwickeln konnte. Die Tiere haben nicht warten können, sie sind auf früherer Stufe verhärtet worden, haben früher Fleisch angenommen, als es am Platze war. Daher mußten sie zurückbleiben. So werden wir uns vorstellen können, daß der Mensch unter anderen Bedingungen und in anderen Bewußtseinsformen gelebt hat als heute. Wenn wir diese Bewußtseinsformen Tausende und Tausende von Jahren zurückverfolgen, werden wir immer andere finden. Was wir heute logisches Denken nennen, Intellekt und Verstand, das hat sich erst später in der Menschheit entwickelt. Viel stärker waren Kräfte der Menschen, die heute schon im Abnehmen begriffen sind, zum Beispiel das Gedächtnis. Das war in einer früheren Zeit ungeheuer viel mehr entwickelt als heute. Durch die zunehmende Verstandeskultur der Menschheit ist das Gedächtnis wesentlich in den Hintergrund getreten.
[ 12 ] Wer mit einigermaßen sehenden praktischen Augen in die Welt blickt, kann heüte noch erkennen, daß dasjenige, was so aus der Geisteswissenschaft heraus gesagt wird, nicht in der Luft schwebt. Man könnte sagen: Wenn das wahr ist, dann müßten die heutigen Menschen, die durch irgendeinen Zufall zurückgeblieben sind, zeigen, daß sie gerade im Gedächtnis am wenigsten zurückgeblieben sind. Sie müßten auch zeigen, daß, wenn man bei künstlich zurückgehaltenen Menschen sich bemüht, ihnen Intellektualität beizubringen, das Gedächtnis darunter leidet. Hier in dieser Stadt konnte man einen charakteristischen Fall dieser Art betrachten.
[ 13 ] Der nicht hoch genug zu schätzende Professor Daumer hat diesen Fall gut beobachtet an jenem für viele so rätselhaften Menschen, der einmal auf geheimnisvolle Weise in diese Stadt hier hereinversetzt worden ist, und der auf ebenso geheimnisvolle Weise in Ansbach den Tod gefunden hat; derselbe, von dem ein Schriftsteller sagt, um das Geheimnisvolle seines Lebens anzudeuten, daß, als man ihn hinausgetragen hat, ein Tag war, wo an der einen Seite am Rande des Himmels die Sonne unterging und auf der entgegengesetzten Seite der Mond aufstieg. Sie wissen, daß ich von Kaspar Hauser rede. Wenn Sie absehen von allem Pro und Kontra, das in bezug auf diesen Fall geltend gemacht worden ist, wenn Sie nur auf das sehen, was unter allen Umständen belegt ist, so werden Sie wissen, daß dieser Findling, der einfach einmal da war auf der Straße, der, weil man nicht wußte, woher er gekommen war, das Kind Europas genannt worden ist, daß er nicht lesen, nicht rechnen konnte, als man ihn fand. Er hatte in einem Alter von zwanzig Jahren nichts von dem, was durch den Intellekt erworben wird, aber merkwürdigerweise hatte er ein wunderbares Gedächtnis. Als man anfing ihn zu unterrichten, als die Logik in seine Seele trat, schwand das Gedächtnis. Dieser Übergang im Bewußtsein war auch noch mit etwas anderem verbunden. Eine unbegreifliche, geradezu eingeborene Wahrhaftigkeit war ursprünglich in ihm, und gerade an dieser Wahrhaftigkeit wurde er immer mehr und mehr irre. Je mehr er an der Intellektualität naschen durfte, desto mehr schwand sie dahin.
[ 14 ] Wir könnten manches studieren, wenn wir in diese Seele uns vertieften, die künstlich zurückgehalten worden war. Und gar nicht so unbegründet ist für denjenigen, der auf dem Boden der Geisteswissenschaft steht, die Volkstradition, die die gelehrten Leute von heute nicht glauben und die da berichtet, daß Kaspar Hauser, als er noch gar nichts wußte, noch gar keine Ahnung davon hatte, daß es Wesen außer ihm von verschiedener Gestalt gebe, daß er da eine merkwürdige Wirkung ausübte, wenn er mit ganz wütenden Tieren zusammengebracht wurde. Die wilden Tiere duckten sich und wurden ganz sanftmütig. Es streömte von ihm etwas aus, was bewirkte, daß solch ein Tier, das jeden anderen zornig anfiel, sanft wurde. Wie gesagt, wir könnten, weil sich solch ein Fall darbietet, der aus der Geisteswissenschaft heraus verstanden werden kann, tief in die Seele dieser merkwürdigen und für viele so rätselhaften Persönlichkeit eindringen, und es würde sich Ihnen ein Fall vormalen, aus dem Sie sehen könnten, daß alles das, was aus dem gewöhnlichen Leben nicht zu erklären ist, durch die Geisteswissenschaft zurückgeführt wird auf geistige Tatsachen. Freilich können solche geistigen Tatsachen nicht durch Spekulation, sondern nur durch geistige Beobachtung gewonnen werden, aber verständlich sind sie für das allseitig umfassende und logische Denken.
[ 15 ] Das alles sollte nur gesagt sein, um Ihnen zu zeigen, wie Sie den Weg finden können zu dem Gedanken, daß sich der heutige Bewußtseinszustand herausentwickelt hat aus einem uralten anderen Bewußtseinszustand, in dem der Mensch nicht in einer unmittelbaren Berührung mit den Sinnesgegenständen im heutigen Sinne stand, dafür aber mit den geistigen Tatsachen und Wesen in Beziehung war. Da sah der Mensch nicht die physische Gestalt des anderen, die es ja auch in der heutigen Form damals noch gar nicht gegeben hat. Wenn sich ihm eine andere Wesenheit näherte, stieg in seiner Seele etwas wie ein Traumbild auf. Je nachdem, wie es gestaltet und gefärbt war, zeigte es ihm an, ob die Wesenheit ihm sympathisch oder antipathisch gesinnt war. Ein solches Bewußtsein nahm die geistigen Tatsachen und dadurch die geistige Welt überhaupt wahr. So wie der Mensch heute mit fleischlichen Wesen zusammen ist, so lebte er in jener Zeit, wenn er den Blick auf sich selber richtete und sich selbst Seele und Geist war, unter geistigen Wesenheiten. Sie waren vorhanden für ihn. Er war ein Geist unter Geistern. Wenn er auch nur eine Art Traumbewußtsein hatte, so waren doch die Bilder, die in ihm aufstiegen, in einem lebendigen Verhältnis zu seiner Umgebung. Das war die alte Zeit, in welcher der Mensch noch in einer geistigen Welt lebte, aus der er später heruntergestiegen ist, um sich eine sinnliche Fleischlichkeit zu schaffen für das für ihn passende heutige Bewußtsein. Die Tiere waren schon da als physische Wesenheiten, als der Mensch noch in geistigen Regionen wahrnahm. Der Mensch lebte dazumal unter geistigen Wesen, und ebensowenig wie Sie eines Beweises bedürfen, um überzeugt zu sein vom Dasein des Steines, der Pflanzen, der Tiere, ebensowenig brauchte der Mensch in dieser Urzeit ein irgendwie geartetes Zeugnis, um von geistigen Wesen überzeugt zu sein. Er lebte unter Geistern und Göttern, deshalb brauchte er keine Religion. Das war die vorreligiöse Zeit.
[ 16 ] Dann ist der Mensch heruntergestiegen, die frühere Bewußtseinsform hat sich in die heutige verwandelt. Der Mensch sieht nicht mehr im Raume schwebende Farben und Formen, sondern die Farben sind über die Oberflächen der sinnlichen Dinge hingelegt. In demselben Maße, wie der Mensch lernte, seine äußeren Sinne auf die äußere Sinneswelt zu richten, in demselben Maße zog sich diese äußere Sinneswelt wie ein Schleier, wie die große Maja hin über die geistige Welt, und der Mensch mußte durch diese Hülle hindurch Kunde erhalten von der geistigen Welt. Religion wurde notwendig.
[ 17 ] Es gibt aber auch einen Zustand zwischen der Zeit, die dem teligiösen Bewußtsein vorangeht, und der des eigentlichen religiösen Bewußtseins; es gibt einen solchen Zwischenzustand. Aus ihm heraus stammen die Mythologien, die Sagen, die Geschichten der Völker von den geistigen Welten. Es ist eine Gelehrsamkeit vom grünen Tisch, die nichts von den wirklichen geistigen Vorgängen ahnt, die da behauptet, die Gestalten der nordischen oder deutschen Mythologie, der griechischen Mythologie, alle die Urkunden von den Göttern und Göttertaten seien Erdichtungen der Volksphantasie. Das sind nicht Erdichtungen der Volksphantasie. Das Volk dichtet nicht so, daß es sagt, wenn man einzelne Wolken hinstreichen sieht, das seien Schäfchen. Daß das Volk so dichte, ist eine Dichtung unserer heutigen Gelehrsamkeit, die voll lebhafter Phantasie in solchen Dingen ist. Die Wahrheit ist eine ganz andere. Alles, was in den alten Göttersagen und Geschichten enthalten ist, sind die letzten Überbleibsel, die letzten Erinnerungen aus dem vorreligiösen Bewußtsein. Kunde ist den Menschen geblieben von dem, was sie selbst gesehen haben. Diese Menschen, die Wotan, Thor, Zeus und so weiter beschreiben, sie haben es deshalb getan, weil in ihnen eine Erinnerung daran vorhanden war, daß man solches einmal erlebt hatte. Brocken, zum Teil abgerissene Stücke von dem, was man einst erlebt hatte, das sind die Mythologien.
[ 18 ] Noch in anderer Beziehung war der Zwischenzustand vorhanden. Auch in der Zeit, als die gescheiten Menschen, sagen wir einmal, schon sehr gescheit waren, da gab es noch immer solche, die wenigstens in Ausnahmezuständen — nennen Sie sie Entrücktheit oder auch Verrücktheit, wie Sie wollen — hineinschauen konnten in die geistigen Welten, die noch wahrnehmen konnten, was früher die Menschen in ihrer Mehrheit sahen. Die erzählten, daß sie selbst noch etwas gesehen haben von der geistigen Welt. Das verband sich so mit den Erinnerungen, daß ein lebendiger Glaube lebte in den Völkern. Das war ein Übergangszustand zu dem eigentlich religiösen Zustand.
[ 19 ] Und wie wurde der eigentlich religiöse Zustand angebahnt in der Menschheit? Dadurch, daß der Mensch die Mittel und Wege fand, sein Inneres so zu entwickeln, daß er die Welten, aus denen er herausgewachsen ist, die er im dumpfen Bewußtsein einstmals gesehen hatte, wiederum sehen, wiederum schauen kann. Da kommen wir auf ein Kapitel, das für manchen modernen Menschen recht wenig Wahrscheinliches enthält, zu dem Kapitel von den Eingeweihten. Was sind Eingeweihte der Menschheit? Eingeweihte waren diejenigen Menschen, welche ihr eigenes seelisches und geistiges Innere so entfalteten durch gewisse Methoden, daß sie wieder hineinwuchsen in die geistige Welt. Einweihung gibt es! Es schlummern in jeder Seele übersinnliche Kräfte und Fähigkeiten. Es gibt oder kann wenigstens geben für jeden Menschen solch einen großen, gewaltigen Augenblick, wo diese Kräfte erwachen. Diesen Augenblick können wir vor unsere Seele rücken, wenn wir uns vorstellen, wie die andere menschliche Entwickelung war. Sprechen wir mit Goethes Worten, so können wir sagen: Wir schauen zurück in Zeiten ferner Vergangenheit, in denen im heutigen physischen Menschenleibe noch kein solches physisches Auge vorhanden war, kein solches physisches Ohr wie heute. Zurück schauen wir in jene Zeiten, in denen an den Stellen, wo diese Organe jetzt sind, gleichgültige Organe waren, die nicht sehen und hören konnten. Es gab für den physischen Menschen eine Zeit, wo solche blinde Organe zu Leuchtpunkten sich entwickelten, wo sie sich allmählich mehr und mehr entfalteten, bis für sie das Licht auftauchte. Ebenso gab es einen Zeitpunkt, wo des Menschen Ohr so weit war, daß die vorher stumme Welt sich in Tönen und Harmonien offenbarte. — Ebenso wie die Sonne mit ihren Kräften daran arbeitete, seine Augen aus seinem Organismus herauszubilden, ebenso kann der Mensch heute seinem Geiste nach so leben, daß sich die vielfach für ihn heute gleichgültigen geistig-seelischen Organe in ähnlicher Weise entwickeln. Der Augenblick ist möglich, ist für viele schon dagewesen, wo sich ihre Seele und ihr Geist so umbilden, wie sich einmal umgebildet hat die äußere physische Organisation. Neue Augen und neue Ohren entstehen, durch die aus dem geistig finsteren und stummen Umkreis heraus das Licht hineinscheint und die Töne hineinklingen. Entwickelung ist möglich, auch zum Hineinleben in die höheren Welten. Das ist Einweihung. Und in den Mysterienschulen werden ebenso die Methoden dieser Einweihung den Menschen an die Hand gegeben wie in der äußeren Welt die Methoden, sagen wir, des chemischen Laboratoriums oder der biologischen Forschung. Der Unterschied zwischen den Methoden der äußeren Wissenschaft und der Einweihung ist nur, daß die äußere Wissenschaft sich Instrumente und äußere Hilfsapparate zurechtzurichten hat. Für denjenigen aber, der Eingeweihter werden will, gibt es nur ein einziges Instrument, das er ausbilden muß, und das ist er selbst in allen seinen Kräften. So wie im Eisen die magnetische Kraft schlummern kann, so schlummert in der menschlichen Seele die Kraft, einzudringen in die geistige Licht- und Tonwelt. So kam die Zeit, wo nur das Physisch-Sinnliche im Normalen gesehen wurde und wo die Führer der Menschheit aus solchen Eingeweihten bestanden, die hineinschauen konnten in die geistigen Welten, die Mitteilung machen, Erklärung geben konnten über die Tatsachen der geistigen Welt, in welcher der Mensch früher gelebt hatte.
[ 20 ] Die erste Stufe der Einweihung, wohin führt sie? Wie stellt sie sich dar der menschlichen Seele? Glauben Sie nicht, daß diese Entwickelung nur in philosophischem Spekulieren, im Ausspintisieren von Begriffen, im Verfeinern der Begriffe besteht. Das, was der Mensch an Begriffen hat über die äußere Sinneswelt, das verwandelt sich in dem Menschen, der hineinwächst in die geistige Welt. Es wird so, daß der Mensch jetzt nicht mehr durch scharf konturierte Begriffe begreift, sondern durch Bilder, durch Imaginationen. Denn der Mensch wächst hinein in das geistige, weltschöpfetische Verfahren. So bestimmt und fest umrissen wie die Gegenstände der Sinneswelt sind eben nur diese sinnlichen Gegenstände. Im weltschöpferischen Verfahren haben Sie nicht das Tier mit den festen Umrissen. Da haben Sie etwas wie ein Bild zugrunde gelegt, aus dem die verschiedenen äußeren Gestalten entstehen können, eine lebendige, in sich gegliederte Wirklichkeit. Man muß sich streng auf den Boden des Wortes Goethes stellen: «Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.» In Bildern lernt der Eingeweihte zunächst erkennen und begreifen, lernt er hinaufsteigen in die geistige Welt. Da muß sein Bewußtsein beweglicher werden als dasjenige, das uns dient zum Begreifen der um uns liegenden Sinneswelt. Deshalb nennt man diese Stufe der Entwickelung das imaginative Bewußtsein. Es führt den Menschen wieder hinein in die geistige Welt, aber nicht in dämmerhafter Weise. Dieses zu erringende Weihebewußtsein ist klar und hell, wie es der Mensch im hellen Tagesbewußtsein hat, wie dieses Tagesbewußtsein selbst. Der Mensch wird dadurch bereichert, daß er zu dem Tagesbewußtsein das Bewußtsein der geistigen Welt hinzugewinnt. So lebt er in dem imaginativen Bewußtsein in der ersten Einweihungsstufe. Und was diejenigen, die so eingeweiht waren, in den geistigen Welten erfuhren, davon ist in den Urkunden, in den Dokumenten der Menschheit Mitteilung geschehen, geradeso wie von der niedrigen Wissenschaft der Geometrie durch Euklid der Menschheit Mitteilung gemacht worden ist. Wir wissen, was in diesen Urkunden steht, wir erkennen es, wenn wir zurückgehen auf die Quelle, auf das Schauen der Eingewethten.
[ 21 ] So war es innerhalb der Menschheit bis zu der Erscheinung der größten Wesenheit, die über den Erdball geschritten ist, des Christus Jesus. Mit seiner Erscheinung tritt ein neues Element in die Entwickelung ein. Wenn wir uns klarmachen wollen, worin das wesentlich Neue, das der Menschheit durch den Christus Jesus geschenkt worden ist, besteht, dann müssen wir beachten, daß in allen vorchristlichen Einweihungsstätten der Mensch so eingeweiht wurde, daß ein völliges Herausgehen aus der übrigen menschheitlichen Entwickelung notwendig war, ein Arbeiten an seiner Seele in Stätten des tiefsten Geheimnisses. Und wir müssen uns vor allen Dingen klarmachen, daß noch immer etwas vorhanden war im Bewußtsein des Menschen von einem Überrest, wenn er sich wiederum heraufhob in die geistige Welt, jenes alten, bloß traumhaften Bilderbewußtseins. Der Mensch mußte hinwegeilen aus dieser Welt der Sinne, um in die geistige Welt eintreten zu können. Daß das heute nicht mehr notwendig ist, das wurde herbeigeführt durch die Erscheinung des Christus Jesus auf der Erde. Dadurch, daß das Christus-Prinzip in die Menschheit eingetreten ist, ist das Zentralwesen, das Mittelpunktswesen der geistigen Welt geschichtlich, historisch in einem Menschen einmal auf dieser Erde dagewesen, dasselbe Wesen, nach dem sich gesehnt haben alle diejenigen, die ein religiöses Leben entwickelt haben, die geschaut haben in den Einweihungsstätten, die weggeschritten sind von der sinnlichen Welt, um in die geistige Welt einzutreten. Das Wesen, von dem verkündet worden ist, daß ihm der Mensch als seinem Höchsten gegenübersteht, das ist mit dem Christus Jesus in die Menschheitsgeschichte eingetreten. Und derjenige, der etwas versteht von echter Geisteswissenschaft, weiß, daß alle religiöse Verkündigung vor dem Erscheinen des Christus Jesus eine Vorverkündigung des Christus Jesus ist.
[ 22 ] Wenn die alten Eingeweihten von dem Höchsten haben sprechen wollen, was ihnen in der Geisteswelt zugänglich war, was sie haben schauen können als den Urgrund aller Dinge, dann haben sie in den verschiedensten Namen von dem Christus Jesus gesprochen. Wir brauchen uns nur an ein Beispiel, an das Alte Testament zu erinnern, das auch eine Vorherverkündigung ist. Wir erinnern uns daran, wie Moses, als er sein Volk führen sollte, den Auftrag erhielt: Sage deinem Volke, daß das, was du tun sollst, der Herr, der Gott, dir gesagt hat. — Da sagt Moses: Wie werden mir die Leute glauben, wie werde ich ihnen eine Überzeugung beibringen können? Was muß ich sagen, wenn sie mich fragen: Wer hat dich geschickt? — Und es wird ihm der Auftrag: Sage, der «Ich-bin», der hat dich geschickt. — Lesen Sie es nach und vergleichen Sie es, so genau Sie können, mit dem Urtext. Sie werden sehen, um was es sich dabei handelt. Der «Ich-bin», was soll das heißen? Der «Ich-bin» ist der Name für die göttliche Wesenheit, das Christus-Prinzip des Menschen, für die Wesenheit, die der Mensch einem Tropfen, einem Funken nach in sich spürt, wenn er «Ich bin» sagen kann. Der Stein kann nicht «Ich bin» sagen, die Pflanze kann nicht «Ich bin», das Tier kann nicht «Ich bin» sagen. Der Mensch ist die Krone der Schöpfung dadurch, daß er zu sich «Ich bin» sagen kann, daß er einen Namen sprechen kann, der für keinen anderen gültig ist als für den, der ihn ausspricht. «Ich» können Sie sich nur selbst nennen. Kein anderer kann Sie «Ich» nennen. Hier spricht die Seele mit sich selbst, in jenem Worte, wo hinein nur ein Wesen Zugang hat, das durch keinen äußeren Sinn, auf keinem äußeren Weg zu der Seele kommt. Hier spricht der Gott. Daher wurde der Name «Ich-bin» der Gottheit, welche die Welt erfüllt, gegeben. Sage, der «Ich-bin» hat es dir gesagt! — so sollte Moses seinem Volke sagen.
[ 23 ] Nur langsam lernen die Menschen den tiefen Sinn dieses «Ich-bin» völlig verstehen. Nicht gleich haben sich die Menschen als Einzelmenschen gefühlt. Sie können es finden noch im Alten Testament: da fühlten sich die Menschen noch nicht als Einzelmenschen. Auch die Angehörigen der deutschen Stämme, selbst noch in den Zeiten der christlichen Kirche, fühlten sich nicht als Einzelmenschen. Denken Sie zurück an die Cherusker, Teutonen und so weiter, an die deutschen Stämme, in deren Land nun das heutige Deutschland ist. Der einzelne Cherusker fühlte mehr das Stammes-Ich, dem gegenüber er sich als Glied erschien. Der einzelne hätte nicht in der scharfen Weise, wie heute, «Ich bin» gesagt. Er fühlte sich zusammengefügt zum einigen Organismus derjenigen, die blutsverwandt waren.
[ 24 ] Den weitesten Umkreis nimmt diese Blutsverwandtschaft bei den Bekennern des Alten Testaments ein. Der einzelne fühlt sich geborgen im ganzen Volk. Dieses ist für ihn von einem Ich beherrscht. Er weiß es, was es heißt: «Ich und der Vater Abraham sind eins», denn er verfolgt die Blutsverwandtschaft durch die Generationen hinauf bis Abraham. Er weiß sich geborgen, wenn er über sein Einzel-Ich hinausgehen will, in dem Vater Abraham, von dem all das Blut, das der äußere Träger für das gemeinsame Volks-Ich ist, hinunterfließt in die Generationen.
[ 25 ] Nun, wenn wir mit dem Ausspruch, der jedem Bekenner des Alten Testamentes ein Hohes bedeutet, vergleichen, was der Christus Jesus hingestellt hat, dann haben wir wie blitzartig beleuchtet den ganzen Fortschritt, der durch die christliche Entwickelung hervorgerufen wurde. «Ehe denn Abraham war, war das «Ich-bin»? Was heißt das: Vor Abraham war das «Ich-bin»? — So ist nämlich die richtige Übersetzung und Interpretation der betreffenden Bibelstelle. Das heißt: Geht zurück durch alle Generationen, ihr findet etwas in euch selbst, in eurer Einzelindividualität, das noch ewiger ist als das, was durch alle blutsverwandten Generationen fließt. Ehe die Ahnherren waren, war das «Ich-bin», jenes Wesen, das in jeden Menschen hineinzieht, von dem jede Menschenseele etwas unmittelbar fühlen kann in sich selbst. Nicht ich und der Vater Abraham, nicht ich und ein zeitlicher Vater, sondern ich und der geistige Vater, der an nichts Vergängliches gebunden ist, wir sind eins. «Ich und der Vater sind eins.» In dem einzelnen Menschen findet sich der Vater. Das göttliche Prinzip lebt in ihm, etwas, was da war, was da ist, was da sein wird.
[ 26 ] Die Menschen werden, nachdem sie durch fast zwei Jahrtausende eigentlich erst angefangen haben die Kraft dieses Weltenimpulses zu fühlen, in künftigen Zeiten voll erkennen, was dieser Sprung innerhalb der Erdenmission und Erdenentwickelung für den Menschen bedeutet. Dasjenige, was man nur einsehen konnte, wenn man hinwegging über das Einzeldasein, über den einzelnen Menschen, wenn man den Geist eines ganzen Stammes faßte, das war es, was die alten Eingeweihten erreichen wollten.
[ 27 ] Wenn in der gewöhnlichen Welt irgendein Mensch das hörte, so sagte er: Das Ich ist etwas Vergängliches, das anfängt mit der Geburt und aufhört mit dem Tode. — Wurde er aber eingeweiht in das Geheimnis der Mysterien, dann sah er dasjenige, was der andere spürte und empfand, als dasselbe, was durch das Blut der Generationen rollt, was ein wirkliches Wesen ist, dann sah er seinen Stammesgeist. Was nur im geistigen Reich, aber nicht in der äußeren Wirklichkeit erreichbar ist, das konnte er schauen. Einen Gott, der durch das Blut der Generationen rinnt, konnte er schauen. Geistesauge gegenüber Geistesauge vor diesem Gotte stehen, das konnte man nur in den Mysterien.
[ 28 ] Diejenigen, die mit dem vollen Verständnis als seine intimen Schüler um den Christus Jesus waren, sie hatten das Bewußtsein, daß ein Wesen geistig-göttlicher Natur für die äußeren Sinne in einer geschlossenen fleischlich-menschlichen Persönlichkeit vor ihnen stand. Als den ersten empfanden sie den Christus Jesus, als den ersten, der im einzelnen Menschen einen solchen Geist in sich hatte, wie ihn sonst nur zusammengehörige Menschenmassen in sich fühlten und wie er sonst nur in der geistigen Welt für die Eingeweihten zu schauen war. Der Erstling unter den Menschen war er.
[ 29 ] Je mehr der Mensch individuell wird, desto mehr kann er Liebeträger werden. Wo das Blut die Menschen zusammenkettet, da lieben die Menschen aus dem Grunde, weil sie durch das Blut hingeführt werden zu dem, was sie lieben sollen. Wird dem Menschen die Individualität zuerteilt, hegt und pflegt er den Gottesfunken in sich, dann müssen die Impulse der Liebe, die Wellen der Liebe von Mensch zu Mensch gehen aus freiem Herzen heraus. Und so hat der Mensch mit diesem neuen Impuls das alte Band der Liebe, die an das Blut gebunden ist, bereichert. Die Liebe geht nach und nach über in die geistige Liebe, die von Seele zu Seele fließt, die zuletzt die ganze Menschheit umfassen wird mit einem gemeinschaftlichen Band allgemeiner Bruderliebe. Der Christus Jesus aber ist die Kraft, die lebendige Kraft, durch die, so wie sie in der Geschichte war, wie sie sich äußeren Augen zeigte, zum erstenmal die Menschheit zur Verbrüderung gebracht worden ist. Und die Menschen werden lernen, dieses Band der Bruderliebe als das vollendete, als das vergeistigte Christentum aufzufassen.
[ 30 ] Man sagt heute leicht: Die Theosophie soll den einheitlichen Wahrheitskern in allen Religionen suchen, denn alle Religionen enthalten ja ganz das gleiche. — Die Menschen, die so sagen, die die Religionen nur vergleichen, um das abstrakt Gleiche zu suchen, verstehen nichts vom Entwickelungsprinzip. Nicht umsonst entwickelt sich die Welt. Wahr ist es, in jeder Religion ist die Wahrheit enthalten, aber indem sie sich von Form zu Form entwickelt, entwickelt sie sich zu höheren Formen. Der Wahrheit nach können Sie allerdings, wenn Sie tief genug forschen wollen, das, was das Christentum an Lehren enthält, in den anderen Religionen auch finden. Neue Lehren hat das Christentum nicht gebracht. Aber das Wesentliche im Christentum liegt nicht in den Lehren. Nehmen Sie die vorchristlichen Religionsstifter. Bei ihnen kommt es darauf an, was sie gelehrt haben. Denken Sie sich, diese Religionsstifter wären unbekannt geblieben; was sie gelehrt haben, das wäre geblieben. Damit hätte die Menschheit genug. Beim Christus Jesus aber kommt es nicht darauf an. Bei ihm kommt es darauf an, daß er da war, daß er im physischen Leibe hier auf dieser Erde gelebt hat. Nicht der Glaube an seine Lehre, sondern an seine Persönlichkeit ist das Ausschlaggebende, daß man hingeschaut hat darauf, daß er der Erstgeborene unter denen war, die da sterben können, bei dem man fragt: Würdest auch du in der Lage, in der ich mich befinde, so fühlen wie ich? Würdest auch du so denken, wie ich nun denke, so wollen, wie ich will? — Das ist das Wichtige, daß er das größte Vorbild als Persönlichkeit ist, bei dem es nicht darauf ankommt, hinzuhören auf seine Lehren, sondern darauf, ihn selbst anzuschauen, wie er es getan hat. Daher sagen die intimen Schüler des Christus Jesus etwas ganz anderes als die Schüler und Jünger anderer Religionsstifter. Diese sagen: Der Herr hat dieses, hat jenes gelehrt. Die Schüler des Christus Jesus aber sagen: Nicht ausgeklügelte Mythen etwa und Lehren sagen wir euch, sondern das sagen wir euch, was unsere Augen selbst gesehen, unsere Ohren selbst gehört haben. Wir haben die Stimme gehört, unsere Hände haben berührt den Quell des Lebens, damit wir Gemeinschaft haben mit euch. — Und Christus Jesus selber sprach: Zeugen sollt ihr mir sein in Jerusalem, in Judäa, bis ans Ende der Welt. — Damit ist etwas sehr Wichtiges gesagt: Zeugen sollt ihr mir sein bis ans Ende der Welt. Das heißt: Es werden immer solche da sein jederzeit, die ebenso wie jene in Judäa und Galiläa aus dem unmittelbaren Wissen heraus sagen können, wer Christus war im Sinne des Evangeliums.
[ 31 ] Im Sinne des Evangeliums, was bedeutet das? Nichts anderes, als daß er von Anfang an das Prinzip war, das in allem Schaffen lebte. Er sagt es: Glaubt ihr nicht an mich, so glaubt wenigstens an Moses, denn wenn ihr an Moses glaubt, so glaubt ihr an mich, denn Moses hat von mir gesprochen. — Wir haben es heute schon gesehen, von ihm hat Moses gesprochen, als er hingewiesen hat darauf: Der «Ich-bin» hat es mir gesagt — der «Ich-bin», der aber nur geistig wahrnehmbar war bis dahin. Daß der Christus sichtbar in die Erscheinung, sichtbar in die Welt getreten ist als Mensch unter Menschen, das ist es, was den Unterschied des Christus-Evangeliums ausmacht gegenüber der göttlichen Verkündigung von anderen Religionen. Denn bei diesen war alle geistige Weisheit auf etwas gerichtet, was außerhalb der Welt war. Jetzt, mit Christus Jesus, kam etwas in die Welt, was als Sinneserscheinung selbst begriffen werden sollte. Was empfanden die ersten Jünger als das Ideal ihrer Weisheit? Nicht mehr bloß zu begreifen, wie die Geister im Geisterlande leben, sondern wie das höchste Prinzip in dieser geschichtlichen Persönlichkeit des Christus Jesus hat auf Erden vorhanden sein können.
[ 32 ] Es ist viel leichter, dieser Persönlichkeit die Gottheit abzuleugnen, als so zu empfinden. Darin besteht der Unterschied einer gewissen Lehre der ersten Zeit des Christentums von dem, was man inneres Christentum nennt, der Unterschied zwischen Gnosis und esoterischem Christentum. Die Gnosis erkennt Christus in seiner Göttlichkeit zwar an, aber sie hatte sich nie aufschwingen können bis zu der Anschauung, daß das «Wort» Fleisch geworden ist und unter uns gewohnt hat, so wie es der Schreiber des Johannes-Evangeliums betont. Er sagt: Nicht nur als etwas, was bloß im Unsichtbaren zu begreifen ist, sollt ihr den Christus Jesus ansehen, sondern als das Wort, das Fleisch geworden ist und unter uns gewohnt hat. Ihr sollt wissen, daß mit dieser menschlichen Persönlichkeit eine Kraft erschienen ist, die in fernste Zukunft hinein wirken wird, die die wirkliche, geistige Liebe als eine Kraft um den Erdkreis herumspinnen wird, die da wirkt und lebt in allem, das in die Zukunft hinein lebt. — Und übergibt sich der Mensch dieser Kraft, dann wächst er in die geistige Welt hinein, aus der er heruntergestiegen ist. Wieder hinaufsteigen wird er bis dahin, wohinein der Eingeweihte heute schon schauen kann. Abstreifen wird der Mensch das Sinnliche, wenn er in die geistige Welt eindringt.
[ 33 ] Wie der Schüler, der in alten Zeiten eingeweiht wurde, einen Rückblick haben konnte auf die alten, auf die vergangenen Zeiten .des Geisteslebens, so erhalten diejenigen, welche im christlichen Sinne eingeweiht werden, durch die Teilnahme an den Impulsen des Christus Jesus die Fähigkeit zu sehen, was aus dieser unserer Erdenwelt wird, wenn die Menschen im Sinne des Christus-Impulses wirken. Wie man zurückblicken kann auf die früheren Zustände, so kann man, von dem Anfangspunkte der Erscheinung des Christus ausgehend, hinblicken in die fernste Zukunft. Man kann sagen: So wird das Bewußtsein sich wieder verändern, so wird der Mensch stehen im Verhältnis der geistigen zur Sinnenwelt. — Während so die frühere Einweihung eine Einweihung in die Vergangenheit, in uralte Weisheit ist, geht die christliche Einweihung dahin, dem Einzuweihenden die Zukunft zu enthüllen. Das ist das Notwendige, daß der Mensch nicht nur eingeweiht wird für seine Weisheit, für sein Gemüt, sondern daß er eingeweiht wird für seinen Willen. Denn dadurch weiß er, was er tun soll, daß er sich Ziele setzen kann für die Zukunft. Der sinnliche Alltagsmensch setzt sich Ziele für den Nachmittag, für den Abend, den Morgen. Der geistige Mensch vermag aus den geistigen Prinzipien heraus ferne Ziele sich zu setzen, die seinen Willen durchpulsen, seine Kräfte lebendig machen. So der Menschheit Ziele setzen, das heißt im wahren höchsten Sinn, im Sinn des ursprünglichen christlichen Prinzips, das Christentum esoterisch erfassen. So hat es derjenige verstanden, der das große Prinzip der Einweihung des Willens geschrieben hat, der die Apokalypse geschrieben hat. Man versteht die Apokalypse schlecht, wenn man sie nicht versteht als den Impulsgeber für die Zukunft, für das Handeln, für die Tat.
[ 34 ] Alle die Dinge, die wir heute an uns vorüberziehen ließen, sie sind aus der anthroposophisch orientierten Geisteswissenschaft heraus zu verstehen. Nur Skizzenhaftes konnte ich heute geben. Wenn man aus der Geisteswissenschaft heraus begreift, was hinter dem Sinnlichen steht, dann sieht man auch hin mit dem Verständnis auf das, was verkündet worden ist in den Evangelien, was verkündet worden ist im apokalyptischen Werk. Und je weiter man geht in dem Eindringen, in der Vertiefung nach den übersinnlichen Welten hin, desto Tieferes wird man in den christlichen Urkunden finden. Mit höherem Glanz, mit tieferem Wahrheitsgehalt und Inhalt erscheinen einem die christlichen Urkunden, wenn man, geschärft mit dem geistigen Blick, wie er gewonnen werden kann mit Hilfe der Anthroposophie, hingeht zu diesen Urkunden. Wahr ist es: Das einfachste Gemüt kann ahnen, welche Wahrheiten im Christentum stecken. Nicht immer aber wird sich das Bewußtsein mit einer Ahnung begnügen können, es wird sich höher entwickeln und wissen, erkennen wollen. Doch auch dann, wenn es sich zu den höchsten Weisheiten erhebt, wird es immer noch tiefe Geheimnisse geben im Christentum. Es ist für das einfachste Gemüt, aber auch für die höchstentwickelte Intellektualität. Der Eingeweihte erlebt es wieder als Bilder. Daher mag das naive Bewußtsein ahnen, welche Wahrheiten darin schlummern, aber der Mensch wird nach Erkenntnis verlangen und nicht nach Glauben, und auch dann wird er im Christentum Befriedigung finden. Er wird im Christentum den vollen befriedigenden Inhalt finden können, wenn ihm durch die Geisteswissenschaft die Erklärungen der Evangelien gegeben werden. Daher wird die Geisteswissenschaft an die Stelle selbst der höchsten alten Philosophien treten. Sie wird Zeugnis ablegen von dem uns eingangs vorgeführten schönen Hegelwort: Der tiefste Gedanke ist mit der Gestalt des Christus Jesus, mit der geschichtlichen und äußerlichen, verknüpft, und jede Art von Bewußtsein — das ist das Große am Christentum — kann der Äußerlichkeit nach dieses Christentum begreifen. Zugleich aber werden die tiefst eindringenden Weisheiten durch das Christentum herausgefordert. Für jede Stufe der Bildung ist das Christentum, aber es kann gerecht werden den höchsten Anforderungen.
Spiritual Science, the Gospel and the Future of Humanity
[ 1 ] This fall, Nuremberg will celebrate a significant centenary. For it was in the fall of 1808 that this city welcomed within its walls one of the greatest of German minds, one of those German minds that are not exactly talked about much today, whose works are even less understood, but who will mean a great deal for the future of human intellectual life when he is finally understood. He is difficult to understand, though, and so it may take some time before people will understand him again. In the fall of 1808, Hegel became director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.
[ 2 ] Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps place at the head of our considerations today as a verdict. Hegel said: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ: with the historical and the external, and that is precisely the greatness of the Christian religion, that for all its depth it can easily be grasped by the consciousness in an external way and at the same time invites deeper penetration. It is thus suitable for every level of education and at the same time satisfies the highest demands. These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.
[ 3 ] That the Christian religion, that the preaching of the gospel is comprehensible for every level of consciousness, has been taught by an era that can almost be counted in millennia. To show that it calls for the deepest thoughts, for the deepest penetration into the wisdom teachings of humanity in general, will be one of the tasks of the anthroposophical spiritual movement, of spiritual science, when it is grasped in its true sense, in its innermost impulses, and made the master of human life. It would be to misunderstand today's meditation to believe that Anthroposophy or spiritual science is in any way a new religion, that it seeks to replace an old religion with some new creed. One would even like to say, just to avoid any misunderstanding: Once spiritual science is properly understood, it will be clear that, although it is the firmest, most secure support of religious life, it is not itself a religion, and will therefore never contradict any religion as such. But it is another matter that it can be the instrument, the tool, to explain the deepest wisdom and truths and the most serious and life-filled secrets of religions and to bring them to understanding.
[ 4 ] It may seem a little far-fetched when, in order to describe the relationship between anthroposophy and the scriptures of this or that religion — and today we will be dealing with the religious scriptures of Christianity — to make the comparison that Anthroposophy relates to religious texts in the same way that mathematical theory relates to the texts that have appeared in the course of the historical development of humanity as mathematical textbooks or books in general. There we have an ancient book that is actually only studied by the historian who is well-versed in mathematics: Euclid's Geometry. It contains in a scholasticized manner for the first time that which children today learn in school from mathematics and geometry. But how few of these children become aware that everything they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, and so on, is in that old book, that it was given to mankind for the first time in it! It is right to awaken in the child the awareness that one can understand these things by oneself, that when the human mind sets its powers in motion and applies them to the forms of space, it is able to understand these forms quite independently of that old book. But someone who may have known nothing of this book and has absorbed the mathematical and geometrical teachings, will, when he gets to know it, appreciate and understand it in the right sense. He will appreciate what was given to humanity by the one who first presented this book to their minds.
[ 5 ] This is how one would characterize the relationship between spiritual science and religious documents. The sources of spiritual science are such that spiritual science should not depend on any documents or traditions if it is understood according to its true impulse. Just as the other knowledge of mankind provides us with knowledge of the surrounding sensory world by man's free use of his powers, so the deeper spiritual, supersensible powers and abilities, which initially lie dormant in the human soul, provide us with knowledge of what, as supersensible, as invisible, underlies all that is visible. Just as man, when he uses his sense organs, is able to perceive what presents itself to the outer sense appearance, and is able to connect and link what he has perceived with his intellect, so too, when man uses the methods handed down to him through spiritual science, he is able to look behind the scenes of sensual existence, to where the spiritual causes lie, where the beings weave and work that the sensual eye does not see and the sensual ear does not hear, but the supersensible one does. Thus lies in the free use of human powers, even if they still slumber as supersensible powers in a large part of humanity today, the source, the independent free source of spiritual knowledge, as in the free use of the powers directed towards the sense world lies the source of external knowledge. But then, when in some way man has placed himself in possession of the knowledge that introduces him to the supersensible behind the sensual, to the invisible behind the visible, when he acquires from it knowledge just as solid as the sensual knowledge of external objects and events is, then, equipped with this supersensible knowledge, he may just as easily approach tradition, to the books and documents, to the records through which, in the course of evolution, knowledge has come to man about the supersensible realm, just as the geometer approaches Euclid's geometry. And then he examines them from a similar point of view as the present-day geometer examines Euclid's geometry. Then he can appreciate and recognize these documents for their true value. And for anyone who takes this path, who truly approaches the records of the Christian proclamation equipped with knowledge of the supersensible world, these records truly do not lose any of their value. On the contrary, they appear in a higher splendor than they did to the merely believing mind. They show that they contain deeper wisdom than man had previously suspected before the anthroposophical realization.
[ 6 ] But there is still another question we need to be clear about in order to gain the right perspective on the relationship between anthroposophy and religious texts. Let us ask ourselves: Who is the better observer of Euclid's geometry, the one who can literally translate the words of the book and, without first penetrating the spirit of the geometry, wants to reveal the content of the book, or the one who first understands geometry and therefore also knows how to find the geometry in that book? Let us imagine a mere philologist faced with Euclid's geometry book, someone who understands nothing of geometry: how much incorrect information would be revealed if he tried to reveal the meaning of the book! And so it has been done by many with the religious documents, even by those who should be called upon to fathom the true meaning of them. They have approached these documents without first knowing, independently of them, something of what can be fathomed about the supersensible. Thus we have today very careful explanations of the religious documents, explanations that gather together everything from contemporary history about how these documents came into being, for example. But the explanations are just as inadequate as the explanations of geometry by Euclid by a non-geometer.
[ 7 ] We want to make it clear that knowledge of religion is something that can only be gained by looking at it with the help of knowledge gained through spiritual science, although anthroposophy can only be a tool of religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized by the content of the human heart, the human soul, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man sends up the best of what he has of receptivity in his soul to the supersensible beings and forces. The character of a person's religion depends on the intensity of the feelings of this emotional content, just as the warm beating of our heart depends on the feeling for beauty when we encounter a painting. The content of religious life is certainly what we call the spiritual, the supersensible world. But just as aesthetic-artistic feeling is not the same as what we call spiritual comprehension of the inner artistic laws – although spiritual comprehension of them will increase our understanding of art – so too is that wisdom, that science, which introduces us to the spiritual worlds, not the same as religion itself. This science will make religious feeling, religious sentiment, more earnest, more dignified, greater, more comprehensive, but it does not want to be religion itself, if it is understood in the right sense, although it may lead to religion.
[ 8 ] If we now want to understand the power and meaning, the sense and spirit of the Christian proclamation of religion from this spiritual-scientific point of view, then we have to reach far back into spiritual life. We must cast our eyes into the distant past; in other words, we must go back to the pre-religious times of humanity and try to envision the emergence of religion. Was there a pre-religious time for humanity? Yes, there was once a time on Earth when there was no religion. Spiritual science must also answer such a question in the affirmative, although in a completely different sense than materialistic cultural wisdom does. What does religion mean for humanity? Religion was and will be for a long time for humanity what its word already expresses. The word religion means: the connection of man with his divine, with the spiritual world. And essentially, religious times are those in which man longed for union with the divine, whether from the sources of knowledge or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if divine power flowed through it. Such times, when man sensed more inwardly, as it were, than that he knew something outwardly, when he sensed the supersensible world more than that he beheld it, that he had it around him, those are the religious times of our earth. And before these times there were other times when man did not need such a sensing, longing connection with the spiritual-supernatural world, because he did not need it because he knew about this supernatural world, about this spiritual world, as man of the present knows about sensual things. Does man need to be convinced that there are stones, trees, animals? Does he need some kind of written record, some teaching about them that testifies to them or gives him a presentiment that stones, plants, and animals exist? No, because he sees them, he beholds them around him, and so he has no need of such a religion of the senses. Let us imagine a person who lived in a completely different world, equipped with completely different sensory and cognitive organs, who would not see stones, plants, and animals because they would be invisible to him. Let us imagine such a person who, through writings or otherwise, was given knowledge of stones, plants, and animals: What would be for you intuition, experience, direct knowledge, what would it be for him? — It would be religion for this man. If it were written somewhere in a book that there are stones, plants, and animals, that would be religion for this man, for he has never seen it.
[ 9 ] There was a time when man lived among the spiritual beings and facts that religions and wisdom teachings tell us about today.
[ 10 ] The word development has become a magic word in many areas of world view today, but it is only applied by external science to external, sensual facts. For those who view the world spiritually, everything is in development, above all human consciousness. The state of human consciousness in which you live today, through which you, when you wake up in the morning, see and comprehend the world of the senses by means of your sense organs, this state of consciousness has developed out of another. In spiritual science we call this state of consciousness the so-called bright day consciousness. But this clear day-consciousness has developed out of an ancient, different consciousness, which we call the dim image-consciousness of humanity. Here we are returning to the early stages of human development, of which an external anthropology reports nothing, for the reason that it makes use only of the senses and the methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through conditions in the distant past that are actually the same as those our animal creatures go through today.
[ 11 ] Earlier lectures have already pointed out how we have to think about the relationship between humans and animals from a spiritual science point of view. Man has never been a creature like today's animals. He does not descend from beings that were like today's animals. The forms of development from which man has emerged would, if we wanted to describe them, prove to be very unlike today's animals. Today's animals are, so to speak, entities that have remained at earlier stages of development, that have conserved these earlier stages of development and brought them to a state of hardening. Man has outgrown his earlier stages of development, the animals have grown below them. Thus we see in the animal world something like humanity's retarded brothers, who no longer have the form of these earlier stages of development. The earlier stages of development took place at a time when the earth had different living conditions, when the elements were not yet distributed as they are today, when man was not afflicted with a body like the one he has today and yet was still man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the process of development with his descent into the flesh, was able to wait until the time when this carnal materiality could become such that he could develop the power of today's spirit. Animals could not wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was appropriate. That is why they had to fall behind. We can imagine that man lived under different conditions and in different forms of consciousness than today. If we trace these forms of consciousness back thousands and thousands of years, we will always find different ones. What we today call logical thinking, intellect and mind, only developed later in humanity. The powers of people were much stronger, and these are already on the decline today, for example, memory. This was much more developed in earlier times than it is today. With the increasing intellectual culture of humanity, memory has been pushed into the background.
[ 12 ] Anyone who looks at the world with reasonably discerning practical eyes can still recognize today that what is being said from spiritual science does not just come out of the blue. One could say: If this is true, then today's people, who by some chance are retarded, should show that they are least retarded in memory. They should also show that when one tries to teach intellectuality to people who have been artificially held back, memory suffers as a result. Here in this city one could observe a characteristic case of this kind.
[ 13 ] Professor Daumer, whose work cannot be valued highly enough, observed this case well in the case of a person who was so mysterious to many, who was once mysteriously transferred to this city and who died just as mysteriously in Ansbach; the same person of whom a writer says, to hint at the mysteriousness of his life, that when he was carried out, it was a day when on one side of the sky the sun was setting and on the opposite side the moon was rising. You know that I am talking about Kaspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been raised in relation to this case, if you only look at what is proven under all circumstances, you will know that this foundling, who was simply there on the street, who was called the child of Europe because no one knew where he came from, that he could not read or do arithmetic when he was found. At the age of twenty, he had acquired none of the knowledge that comes from the intellect, but, strangely enough, he had a wonderful memory. When they began to teach him, when logic entered his soul, the memory vanished. This transition in consciousness was also connected with something else. There was an incomprehensible, almost innate truthfulness in him originally, and it was precisely this truthfulness that he increasingly doubted. The more he was allowed to nibble at intellectuality, the more it faded away.
[ 14 ] We could study many things if we delved into this soul that had been artificially restrained. And not so unfounded for those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, the folk tradition, which the learned people of today do not believe and which reports that Kaspar Hauser, when he knew nothing, had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different shapes, that he exerted a strange effect when he was brought together with very angry animals. The wild animals would cower and become very gentle. There was something that radiated from him that made such an animal, which would attack any other angrily, become gentle. As I said, we can, because such a case presents itself that can be understood from spiritual science, penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, which is so enigmatic for many, and a case would present itself from which you could see that everything that cannot be explained from ordinary life is traced back by spiritual science to spiritual facts. Of course, such spiritual facts cannot be gained by speculation, but only by spiritual observation, but they are comprehensible to the all-embracing and logical thinking.
[ 15 ] All this should only be said to show you how you can find the way to the thought that that the present state of consciousness has developed out of an ancient and different state of consciousness, in which man was not in direct contact with sense objects in the modern sense, but was related to spiritual facts and beings. Then man did not see the physical form of another person, which, after all, did not even yet exist in its present form at that time. When another being approached him, something like a vision arose in his soul. Depending on how it was shaped and colored, it indicated to him whether the being was sympathetic or antipathetic to him. Such a consciousness perceived the spiritual facts and thereby the spiritual world in general. Just as man is today with carnal beings, so he lived in those days, when he turned his gaze to himself and was soul and spirit, among spiritual beings. They were present for him. He was a spirit among spirits. Even if he had only a kind of dream consciousness, the images that arose in him were still in a living relationship to his surroundings. That was the ancient time in which man still lived in a spiritual world, from which he later descended to create a sensual carnality for the consciousness that suits him today. The animals were already there as physical entities when man still perceived in spiritual regions. Man in those days lived among spiritual beings, and just as you require no proof to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primitive times needed no testimony of any kind to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and gods, and therefore had no need of religion. That was the pre-religious time.
[ 16 ] Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness transformed into the present one. Man no longer sees colors and forms floating in space, but the colors are laid over the surfaces of sensual things. To the same extent that man learned to direct his outer senses to the outer sense world, to the same extent this outer sense world spread like a veil, like the great Maja, over the spiritual world, and man had to receive knowledge of the spiritual world through this veil. Religion became necessary.
[ 17 ] But there is also an intermediate state between the time that precedes the religious consciousness and that of the actual religious consciousness. From this intermediate state come the mythologies, the legends, the stories of the peoples of the spiritual worlds. It is a bookishness that has no idea of the real spiritual processes, which claims that the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology, all the records of the gods and the deeds of the gods are inventions of the popular imagination. They are not fabrications of the popular imagination. The people do not imagine that when you see individual clouds passing by, they are lambs. That the people imagine such things is a fabrication of our present-day scholarship, which is full of vivid imagination in such matters. The truth is quite different. Everything contained in the old sagas of the gods and in the old stories is the last remnants, the last memories from the pre-religious consciousness. What has remained with people is knowledge of what they themselves have seen. These people who describe Wotan, Thor, Zeus and so on did so because there was a memory in them that they had once experienced such things. Mythologies are the fragments, the partly torn-off pieces of what they had once experienced.
[ 18 ] The intermediate state was also present in another respect. Even in the time when people were, let us say, already very clever, there were still those who, at least in states of emergency, could see into the spiritual worlds. Call it rapture or madness, as you like. They could still perceive what most people used to see. They told of how they themselves had glimpsed something of the spiritual world. This combined with their memories in such a way that a living faith lived in the nations. That was a transitional state to the actual religious state.
[ 19 ] And how was the actual religious state initiated in humanity? Man found the means and ways to develop his inner being in such a way that he could again see and behold the worlds from which he had grown out and which he had once seen in a dim consciousness. Here we come to a chapter that contains little that is likely to appeal to many a modern man: the chapter of the initiates. What are the initiates of humanity? Initiates were those people who developed their own soul and spiritual inner being through certain methods to such an extent that they grew into the spiritual world again. Initiation exists! There are supersensible powers and abilities slumbering in every soul. There is, or at least can be, such a great, powerful moment for every human being when these powers awaken. We can bring this moment before our soul if we imagine what the development of the human being was like in the past. To use Goethe's words, we can say: We look back into times of the distant past when there was not yet a physical eye in today's physical human body, nor a physical ear like today's. We look back to those times when, in the places where these organs are now, there were indifferent organs that could not see and hear. There was a time for the physical human being when such blind organs developed into points of light, when they gradually unfolded more and more until the light emerged for them. Likewise, there was a point in time when the human ear had developed to the extent that the previously mute world revealed itself in sounds and harmonies. Just as the sun, with its forces, worked to develop his eyes out of his organism, so today man can live in such a way that the spiritual and soul organs, which are often indifferent to him today, develop in a similar way. The moment is possible, and for many has already arrived, when their soul and spirit are transformed in the same way as the outer physical organization was once transformed. New eyes and new ears arise, through which the light shines and the sounds resound from the spiritually dark and silent surroundings. Evolution is possible, even to live in the higher worlds. That is initiation. And in the mystery schools, the methods of this initiation are given to people in the same way as in the outer world the methods of, let us say, the chemical laboratory or biological research. The only difference between the methods of outer science and initiation is that outer science has to prepare instruments and external apparatus. But for him who wants to become an initiate, there is only one instrument that he must develop, and that is himself in all his powers. Just as magnetic power can slumber in iron, so slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. Thus the time came when only the physical and sensual was seen in the normal and when the leaders of mankind consisted of such initiates who could see into the spiritual worlds, who could give messages and explanations about the facts of the spiritual world in which man had lived earlier.
[ 20 ] The first step of initiation, where does it lead? How does it present itself to the human soul? Do not believe that this development consists only in philosophical speculation, in the spinning out of concepts, in the refining of concepts. The concepts man has about the external sense world are transformed in the human being who grows into the spiritual world. It happens in such a way that man now no longer comprehends through sharply contoured concepts, but through images, through imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual, world-creative process. Only these sensual objects are as definite and clearly outlined as the objects of the sensory world. In the world-creative process, you do not have the animal with fixed outlines. There you have something like an image as a basis, from which the various external forms can arise, a living, structured reality. We must stand firmly on the ground of Goethe's words: “Everything that is transitory is only a parable.” In images, the initiate first learns to recognize and comprehend, learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must become more mobile than that which serves us to comprehend the sensory world around us. That is why this stage of development is called the imaginative consciousness. It leads man back into the spiritual world, but not in a dim way. This consecration to be attained is clear and bright, as man has it in the clear consciousness of day, as this day consciousness itself is. Man is enriched by the fact that he gains the consciousness of the spiritual world in addition to the consciousness of day. This is how he lives in the imaginative consciousness in the first initiation. And what those who were initiated in this way experienced in the spiritual worlds has been communicated in the records, in the documents of humanity, just as the lowly science of geometry was communicated to humanity through Euclid. We know what is in these records, we recognize it when we go back to the source, to the vision of the initiated.
[ 21 ] Thus it was within humanity until the appearance of the greatest Being who walked the globe, the Christ Jesus. With His appearance, a new element enters into evolution. If we wish to realize what the essential novelty is that was given to humanity through Christ Jesus, we must bear in mind that in all pre-Christian places of initiation, man was initiated in such a way that it was necessary to withdraw completely from the rest of human development, to work on one's soul in places of the deepest mystery. And above all, we must realize that there was still something in the human being's consciousness of a remnant when he raised himself up into the spiritual world, that old, merely dream-like image consciousness. Man had to hasten out of this world of the senses in order to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary today was brought about by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ principle has entered into humanity, the central being, the center being of the spiritual world has historically existed once in a human being on this earth, the same being for whom all those have longed who who have developed a religious life, who have seen in the places of initiation, who have moved away from the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man faces Him as his Highest, that Being entered into human history with Christ Jesus. And anyone who has any understanding of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the appearance of Christ Jesus is a pre-proclamation of Christ Jesus.
[ 22 ] When the old initiates wanted to speak of the Highest, which was accessible to them in the spiritual world, which they could see as the source of all things, they spoke of Christ Jesus in the most diverse names. We only need to remember one example, the Old Testament, which is also a prediction. We recall how Moses, when he was to lead his people, received the order: Tell your people that what you are to do, the Lord, the God, has told you. — Then Moses says: How will the people believe me, how will I be able to convince them? What must I say when they ask me, 'Who sent you?' And he is instructed: 'Say, “I Am” has sent you.' Read it and compare it as closely as you can with the original text. You will see what it is about. What does “I am” mean? The “I am” is the name for the divine essence, the Christ principle in man, for the essence that man can feel within himself, drop by drop, spark by spark, until he is able to say “I am”. The stone cannot say “I am”; the plant cannot say “I am”; the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation in that he can say “I am” to himself, that he can speak a name that is valid for no one other than for the one who utters it. You can only call yourself “I.” No one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks to itself, in that word to which only a being has access that comes to the soul through no external sense, on no external path. Here the God speaks. Therefore the name “I am” was given to the Godhead, which fills the world. Say, the “I am” has told you! - so Moses should tell his people.
[ 23 ] Only slowly do people learn to fully understand the deep meaning of this “I am”. Not immediately did people feel like individuals. You can still find it in the Old Testament: people did not yet feel like individuals. Even the members of the German tribes, even in the times of the Christian church, did not feel as individuals. Think back to the Cherusci, Teutons and so on, to the German tribes in whose country today's Germany is. The individual Cherusci felt more the tribal ego, in relation to which he appeared as a member. The individual would not have said “I am” in the sharp way we do today. He felt himself to be part of the unified organism of those who were related by blood.
[ 24 ] For those who profess the Old Testament, this blood relationship has the broadest scope. The individual feels secure in the whole nation. For him, the nation is ruled by one I. He knows what it means: “I and Father Abraham are one,” because he follows the blood relationship through the generations up to Abraham. He knows he is safe when he wants to go beyond his individual self into Father Abraham, from whom all the blood, which is the external carrier for the common national self, flows down into the generations.
[ 25 ] Now, if we compare what the Christ Jesus presented with the saying, which means a great deal to every adherent of the Old Testament, we have, as if illuminated by lightning, the whole progress that has been brought about by Christian development. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I am’? What does that mean: Before Abraham was the “I am”? — That is the correct translation and interpretation of the relevant Bible passage. It means: Go back through all generations, you will find something in yourself, in your individual individuality, that is even more eternal than that which flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, there was the “I am,” that being that draws into every human being, of which every human soul can feel something directly in itself. Not I and Father Abraham, not I and a temporal father, but I and the spiritual Father, who is bound to nothing transitory, we are one. “I and the Father are one.” The Father is found in the individual human being. The divine principle lives in him, something that was there, that is there, that will be there.
[ 26 ] In the future, after almost two millennia of feeling the power of this world impulse, people will fully recognize what this leap within the mission and evolution of the earth means for man. What could only be grasped by ignoring the individual existence, the individual human being, by capturing the spirit of an entire tribe, that was what the ancient initiates wanted to achieve.
[ 27 ] In the ordinary world, when any man heard this, he said: The ego is something transitory that begins with birth and ends with death. But when he was initiated into the secret of the mysteries, then he saw that which the other sensed and felt as the same thing that runs through the blood of the generations, which is a real being, then he saw his tribal spirit. What can only be attained in the spiritual realm, but not in external reality, he could see. A God who runs through the blood of the generations, he could see. To stand before this God with the eye of the spirit, one could only in the mysteries.
[ 28 ] Those who were with the full understanding as his intimate disciples around the Christ Jesus were aware that a being of spiritual-divine nature was standing before them in a closed, carnal-human personality for the outer senses. They recognized Christ Jesus as the first, the first to have such a spirit within him in an individual human being, a spirit that otherwise only associated masses of people felt within themselves and that otherwise could only be seen in the spiritual world by the initiated. He was the first among human beings.
[ 29 ] The more the human being becomes an individual, the more he can become a carrier of love. Where blood chains people together, people love because they are led by blood to what they should love. If a person is granted individuality, and he cherishes and cares for the spark of God within him, then the impulses of love, the waves of love, must go from person to person out of a free heart. And so man has enriched the old bond of love, which is bound to blood, with this new impulse. Love gradually develops into spiritual love, which flows from soul to soul and will ultimately embrace all humanity in a common bond of universal brotherly love. But Christ Jesus is the power, the living power, through which, as it was in history, as it showed itself to the eyes of the outer man, humanity has been brought to fraternization for the first time. And men will learn to understand this bond of brotherly love as the perfected, spiritualized Christianity.
[ 30 ] It is easy to say today: Theosophy should seek the unified core of truth in all religions, because all religions contain exactly the same. — The people who say this, who compare religions only to seek the abstract same, understand nothing of the principle of development. It is not for nothing that the world develops. It is true that every religion contains some truth, but as it develops from form to form, it develops into higher forms. According to the truth, if you want to research deeply enough, you can find in Christianity what is contained in the teachings of other religions. Christianity has not brought new teachings. But the essence of Christianity is not in the teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions. With them, it depends on what they taught. Imagine that these founders of religions had remained unknown; what they taught would have remained. Humanity would have had enough of that. But with Christ Jesus, it does not depend on that. With him, it depends on the fact that he was there, that he lived here on this earth in a physical body. It is not belief in his teachings, but in his personality that is the deciding factor, that one has looked at the fact that he was the firstborn among those who can die, and asked: Would you too, in the situation I am in, feel as I do? Would you also think as I am thinking now, want as I am willing? — That is the important thing, that He is the greatest example as a personality, where it is not important to listen to His teachings, but to look at Him as He did. Therefore, the intimate disciples of Christ Jesus say something quite different from the disciples and followers of other religious founders. They say: The Lord taught this, the Lord taught that. But the disciples of Christ Jesus say: We do not tell you elaborate myths and doctrines, but we tell you what our own eyes have seen and our own ears have heard. We have heard the voice, our hands have touched the source of life, so that we may have fellowship with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in Judea, until the end of the world. This is a very important statement: You shall be witnesses to me until the end of the world. That means that there will always be people at any time who, just like those in Judea and Galilee, can say from direct knowledge who Christ was in the sense of the gospel.
[ 31 ] In the sense of the gospel, what does that mean? Nothing else, but that from the beginning he was the principle that lived in all creation. He says it: If you do not believe in me, at least believe in Moses, because if you believe in Moses, you believe in me, because Moses spoke of me. We have already seen today that Moses spoke of Him when He pointed out: “The ‘I am’ told me” - the “I am”, who until then was only spiritually perceptible. The fact that the Christ visibly appeared in the world as a human being among humans is what makes the difference between the Christ-gospel and the divine proclamation of other religions. For in these, all spiritual wisdom was directed towards something that was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something came into the world that was to be understood as a manifestation of the senses. What did the first disciples feel was the pinnacle of their wisdom? No longer merely to comprehend how the spirits live in the spirit realm, but how the highest principle in this historical personality of Christ Jesus could have existed on earth.
[ 32 ] It is much easier to deny the divinity of this personality than to feel this way. This is the difference between a certain doctrine of the early days of Christianity and what is called inner Christianity, the difference between Gnosticism and esoteric Christianity. Gnosticism does recognize Christ in his divinity, but it had never been able to rise to the view that the “Word” became flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the Gospel of John emphasizes. He says: Not only as something that can be comprehended only in the invisible should you see Jesus the Christ, but as the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. You should know that with this human personality a power has appeared that will continue to work into the farthest future, that will weave real, spiritual love around the world as a power, that lives and works in everything that lives into the future. And when a person surrenders to this power, he grows into the spiritual world from which he descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate can already see today. Man will cast off the sensual when he enters the spiritual world.
[ 33 ] Just as the disciple who was initiated in ancient times could look back on the old, on the past times of spiritual life, of spiritual life, so those who are initiated in the Christian sense, through participation in the impulses of Christ Jesus, receive the ability to see what will become of this world of ours when people work in the spirit of the Christ impulse. Just as one can look back at earlier conditions, so one can look into the farthest future, starting from the point of the appearance of Christ. One can say: Thus consciousness will change again, thus man will stand in relation to the spiritual and the sense world. While the earlier initiation is an initiation into the past, into ancient wisdom, the Christian initiation is to reveal the future to the person being initiated. It is necessary that man is not only initiated for his wisdom, for his mind, but that he is initiated for his will. Because through this he knows what he is to do, that he can set goals for the future. The sensual everyday man sets goals for the afternoon, for the evening, for the morning. The spiritual man is able to set himself distant goals based on spiritual principles, which pulsate through his will and quicken his powers. To set goals for humanity means to grasp it in the true highest sense, in the sense of the original Christian principle, esoterically. This is how it was understood by the one who wrote the great principle of the initiation of the will, who wrote the Apocalypse. One misunderstands the Apocalypse if one does not understand it as the initiator of the future, of action, of deed.
[ 34 ] All the things that we let pass us by today can be understood from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today I could only give sketchy outlines. If you understand from spiritual science what is behind the sensual, then you also look with understanding at what has been proclaimed in the Gospels, what has been proclaimed in the apocalyptic work. And the further you go in penetrating, in deepening into the supersensible worlds, the deeper you will find yourself in the Christian documents. The Christian documents appear to one with a higher radiance, with a deeper truth and content when one approaches them with the spiritual vision that can be attained with the help of anthroposophy. It is true: the simplest mind can sense the truths contained in Christianity. But the consciousness will not always be satisfied with a hunch; it will develop higher and want to know, to recognize. But even when it rises to the highest wisdom, there will still be profound mysteries in Christianity. It is for the simplest mind, but also for the most highly developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again in pictures. Therefore the naive consciousness may sense what truths lie dormant in it, but the human being will long for knowledge and not for belief, and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. He will be able to find full, satisfying content in Christianity when the explanations of the Gospels are given to him through spiritual science. Therefore, spiritual science will take the place of even the highest ancient philosophies. It will bear witness to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ Jesus, with the historical and external one, and every kind of consciousness - that is the great thing about Christianity - can grasp this Christianity according to its externals. At the same time, however, the most profound insights are challenged by Christianity. Christianity is appropriate for every level of education, but it can also meet the highest demands.