Christ Mystery (1): by Adolph Arenson

The Christ Mystery (1)

A Lecture delivered on 26th, November,1930, Dornach. By Adolf Arenson. For Members only.

THE revelations of Rudolf Steiner which issue from his investigations in the spiritual world, are not only an undying offering which he dedicated to humanity; they are a summons to everyone of us to accept this gift as an active force, to make it a possession of the soul by personal effort, so that we may in our turn offer it again as a sacrifice to the Godhead. Here lies the glory of the gift: that if we accept it in the right spirit, it makes us companions of the Gods and establishes us as co-operators in the development of the great Cosmos.

Humanity has taken up a sceptical if not a wholly negative attitude towards this gift from heaven, and only a very small group of men has gathered round the spiritual seeker so as to be made worthy to receive his work and transmit it to the world. The task of these few is hard and responsible. It demands not merely modesty, humility, surrender but also, and on the other hand, critical judgment and careful (prudent) study of what is given. How else indeed could we make it the possession of our own souls in a sense which would not leave these words an empty phrase? The modern psychical constitution of humanity demands both an emotional and still more a clear intellectual understanding of truth. This was often the express message of Steiner in his lectures, and, more, it was the life he lived before our eyes, a life which was established on the firm foundation of clear thinking. In this company I need not emphasise this, for you all know how to take a just estimate of the philosophical works of Rudolf Steiner.

But how can we convince ourselves of the truth of this message which we are given from supersensible worlds – we have not yet at our command the faculties of imagination, inspiration, and intuition? I have tried in many lectures to point out how a proper co-ordination of the facts given us by spiritual science can demonstrate the truth of what we are told, and moreover how a new faculty which had lain hidden and secret, grows within and is one which Rudolf Steiner did not proclaim to us but which we have created in ourselves by the right study of these spiritual facts. Of course a right study involves that we should bear the single facts for long periods, often for years, within our souls, that we should create an inner union with them and allow them to work meditatively upon ourselves, before we proceed to the co-ordination.

For my subject to-day I want to employ this method, which seems to me, in view of the difficulty of the problem, most likely to lead to positive results.

In order to pave the way for a proper understanding of the Christ in etheric garb, our starting point must be the Mystery of Golgotha. And the first necessity is to clear up ideas, to put facts in their right aspect, that we may not at the start take the wrong direction. What was it that happened after the Mystery of Golgotha? Where are we to look for the Christ after He had fulfilled His mission on Golgotha?

The ordinary view among our members which I frequently come across is more or less, that after the descent into hell, the resurrection and the ascension, Christ lives in the highest spiritual worlds from which He is at present again descending – descending now not to the physical plane as He did 2,000 years ago, but only to the etheric world where He will show Himself to humanity: first only to few but in the course of the next 3,000 years to all mankind. This is naturally only an outline but even this outline is sufficient to show the fundamental error at its clearest. It is true that the Christ being is a great and sublime being, penetrating even to the highest spheres; but that fact in itself by no means exhausts the whole being of Christ. Let us put together something of what Rudolf Steiner said on this point.

Christ, in spite of his overwhelming sublimity, was able, during three years, to express Himself in a human body. Since then Christ no longer reveals Himself in a physical human body; for that He gave up to the earth. [Lecture 2nd May, 1913.] And this was one of His acts of redemption.

We know in our own case that when we surrender our physical body to the elements of the earth, this is not a process which leaves the earth unaffected. What we give back to the earth at death is not the same as what we received from the earth when we built up our body in our mother's womb. For during our passage between birth and death these substances have served as the instrument of a spiritual being, our own ego. There is a continual change in the earth because the substances of human bodies which are given to the earth are other after death than they were before birth or conception. To realise this may help us to see the great significance of the return by Christ to the earth of the body in which He had lived and worked for three years. The physical body which Jesus surrendered to Him was a very highly developed being, brought through a series of 42 generations through Judaism to the highest stage of perfection. This body moreover was worked on by the great initiate, Jesus of Nazareth, for thirty whole years so that it might be made always more godlike. Then the Christ took possession of it and removed the last traces of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, which none but a God could remove.

But how did He reveal Himself after that time? Just as the Redeemer revealed Himself to the world for three years in a physical body, He has revealed Himself since then directly as an angelic being, as a spiritual being standing one stage higher than man. And initiates who have been clairvoyant have found Him since the Mystery of Golgotha in the sphere of the hierarchy of Angeloi. After His incarnation in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ was certainly more than man. In the same way the Christ being is more than an angel; but just as He had the outer form of a visible physical human being during His change upon the earth, so His outer form since that time is that of an angel. [Cycle 44/1/13, 44/2/14.]

This is one of the facts which every member must be aware of. To be ignorant of it leads us of necessity to take a wrong path. How can we ever hope to have an understanding of the Christ in etheric garb if our ideas diverge from the line marked out by Rudolf Steiner at the very first step? When the first step is wrong, each successive step takes us further from the truth. I can give you an actual instance of the way in which these false ideas affect the visions of those members who have a certain clairvoyance, and how they lead straight away from Christ. About six months ago I had a letter from a clairvoyant member, giving me some experiences and knowledge received during the last years: his object being to prove to me that I was mistaken about the Bodhisattva of the twentieth century. I will quote a short passage verbatim: “On Sunday, 13th February, 1927, in the early morning there began the descent of the Christ into the etheric world and on that day also began the activity of the Bodhisattva. The incorporation of the Bodhisattva had taken place exactly three months before this great event: on Saturday, 13th November, 1926, during the morning hours.”

We can see here quite clearly how preconceived ideas influence clairvoyance. If this clairvoyant member had known that the Christ since 1909 had already begun to move in etheric form upon our earth, and that further ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ had been dwelling in the etheric world as an angelic being, [Cycle 44/1/13, 44/2/14.] the vision would have taken a different course, and would not tell of the Christ descending into the etheric world in 1927, or 18 years later than was actually the case. When I quote an instance like this I am obviously not trying to pour contempt on any error. My whole attitude towards people and things is far too serious for that. But Rudolf Steiner says that it is at times absolutely necessary to speak the truth that error may not do too much harm. [Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.] The truth is that the world of Imagination is boundless and that we live in a world of uncertainty unless we pass onward to Inspiration and Intuition. Read in Cycle 10 “The Gospel of Luke” what Steiner says about the stage of imaginative cognition. If we took these words seriously, we should be saved from such errors, both the clairvoyant himself and those to whom these visions are imparted as truth.

I have received many other objections to my lecture, but none which could not be answered by the objector himself with careful thought; for the basis of the answers is to be found in the lecture itself. To all those who have addressed me personally I have given all the information I could, but I cannot do more than that. For I am not talking to outsiders and I can hardly attempt after what Rudolf Steiner told us, to rob an anthroposophist of his right to think for himself.

We have before us then a double sacrifice of Christ: first His life for three years in a physical body, and second, His dwelling in the world which lies immediately above our earthly world, as a Being of the hierarchy which we call that of the Angeloi. Such sacrifices however which we can hardly comprehend, imply a further development of the being which makes them. Thus Christ has now the power to reveal Himself to mankind directly. You must understand what I mean. There will be increasingly more men who achieve an etheric clairvoyance not through occult methods but quite naturally in the course of their development. [Cycle 12/11/11.] During the next 3,000 years the whole of humanity will have the possibility to experience the Christ.

What have been the steps leading to this new phase? Steiner describes to us how since the sixteenth century materialistic and agnostic feelings of the deepest intensity penetrated into the supersensible worlds, by means of the human souls which passed through the gate of death. Just imagine what it means, that for centuries, and especially in the nineteenth and in the present, countless people have passed into the etheric world after death who are incapable of grasping a spiritual idea, who have no idea of the spiritual, even scorn it. Imagine a Fritz Mauthner who in his last work, shortly before his death, vaunts himself that from his first work to his last he adds that he knows he is soon to die – he has been true to his conviction that the spiritual has no existence except in the phantasy of man. Such a creed is appalling, and we may well believe, as Rudolf Steiner told us, that an obscuring of consciousness, a sort of unconsciousness, grew up in the world which stands immediately above this physical earth of ours. What was the significance of this?

Now as the materialistic thought, as especially exemplified in the official scientific attitude of to-day, can never understand the mystery of life, spiritual beings find it equally impossible to understand the mystery of death. The Christ had to live Himself in a physical body so that He might learn death. [Cycle 35/6/13.] This meant however the forging of the close link between humanity and the Christ, which has involved His being so closely bound to the earth since that time, [Cycle 2/5/30.] that He lives in the souls of men and experiences with them the life on earth. The Crucifixion has led to the salvation of mankind. But since the darkness of human consciousness has been carried by the dead into the supersensible worlds, the Christ has endured a second crucifixion in the etheric world as an angelic being. But there is no death in these worlds, only a diminution, an extinction of consciousness. “The coming of this unconsciousness into the spiritual worlds is also the resurrection of the Christ-consciousness in the souls of men between birth and death in the twentieth century.” [Lecture 2nd May, 1913.] Again: what Steiner called the spiritual crucifixion, the repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha, brought salvation to mankind. Thus he said that “it was for humanity's sake that there occurred what may be called a subversion or destruction of consciousness in the worlds which lie immediately above our world.”

Two thousand years ago humanity experienced the resurrection of the body through Christ – and we know that through this the “phantom” or spiritual body, in which the seed of death had been planted by Lucifer and Ahriman, was saved for mankind. We are experiencing to-day – and humanity will experience it in the future even more intensely – the resurrection of consciousness through the crucifixion of Christ as an angelic being.

I am well aware that words like this can give us an inkling of infinitely deep secrets of the cosmos, while at the same time they bring forward quantities of new difficulties whose solution can only be achieved by patient effort, serious study, and sincere meditation. The starting point for this can be given in the following words which contain the core of Rudolf Steiner's remarks: the physical body of Christ had to be crucified and broken up that the spiritual body might rise in all its purity, the “phantom” from which in the future the “phantoms” of all humanity will descend. The angel-consciousness had to be crucified and broken up, that the immediate Christ-consciousness may arise in the future in the souls of all men on earth. Steiner says on one occasion: Thus the Christ consciousness can be united with the earthly consciousness of man from the twentieth century onwards, since the death of the Christ-consciousness in the angelic sphere during the nineteenth century signifies the rising up of the immediate Christ-consciousness. That means that the life of Christ will be felt more and more definitely as a personal experience in the souls of men.” [Lecture 2nd May, 1913.] At the back of all this we have again the Judas problem in all the vastness of its tragedy: how can we grasp the fact that the most atrocious crime had to be committed in order that the world might find redemption?

It is quite useless to make our human feelings the standard for judging this appalling antimony; for, what took place in Palestine and in the sphere of the angels was a cosmic happening which we can only understand if we take in all its profundity the meditation which I have already quoted to you: Man is not in the world for his own sake, but in order to accomplish the plan of the gods. We shall never understand the world until we cease to dream in comfortably sentimental fashion of eternal bliss or eternal peace in spiritual worlds, and realise that in the spiritual worlds strife is the condition of things, strife of gods against gods. and that strife on earth is only a reflection on the physical plane of this battle of the gods. What we have to do then. is to achieve a right attitude towards such events. May I remind you of the day when Rudolf Steiner first told us of the victory of Michael in 1879, of the struggle of Michael with the Luciferic-Ahrimanic beings, which ended by Michael's flinging his adversaries into the abyss? When we heard this in 1908 and 1909, we all remember what feelings of joy thrilled us. We knew that the age of darkness was over, Kaliyuga had come to an end in 1899, Ahriman was overcome: now the days of joy were to begin, in which mankind should turn again to the spirit and from year to year the barriers should be broken down which had prevented the extension of spiritual science. That was our dream. What of the reality?

Michael had achieved his victory, he had trampled the ahrimanic beings under foot and flung them into the abyss. But what is this abyss? It is our earthly sphere. Michael has hurled the beings from the world where he rules down to the physical plane. Our problem now is to make into a reality on the physical plane the achievement of Michael in the supersensible worlds. Strife in spiritual worlds, strife on the physical plane: that is the way of creation. What is a creation, what is an evolution? It is the shaping into actuality of one of the unending masses of divine possibilities.

Hence with the first stirring of the creative will “Movement” is added to “blessed rest in Time,” as the occult expression has it. From unity comes duality. The law of polarity comes into being; the struggle begins. “When once one force begins to work in the universe, at the same moment a second force comes into being which is opposed to the first. The ‘event of becoming’ in the world runs its course under the law of polarity.”

The fulfilment of a creation is accomplished when the duality returns to unity. That is the cosmic law at the base of all evolution, which controls all evolution and which we can follow right into our earthly events. We can see how in the cosmos sun and earth which still formed unity at the Polarian stage of earth evolution, are now separated, and we know that in the distant future they will be again united. In the same way spiritual research shows us that from an earlier unitary body of man the male and female have been formed, which later on will be re-united and exhibit the results of all that has been gained on both sides in experiences and capacities. Further we know that the life in harmony within the godhead, which formed an immediate unity in the earliest ages of humanity, has developed into duality. In the East, the initiate found the divine spiritual being by descending into the depths of his own soul; in the northern lands, in the Germanic mysteries of the Druids and Trotten it was a passing out of oneself, an ecstatic surrender to the external world which led the initiated to the. godhead. These two forms of initiation then recombined in the Christian initiation, which, as Rudolf Steiner says, represents the higher unity of the ecstatic initiation of the North and the mystical descent of the East. [Cycle 17/5/2.]

By these methods we can raise the ideas of good and evil to that which they truly are in the world-process: forces which further evolution, the necessary means to the fulfilment of our human mission. However wide the gulf – so wide it seems that our human feeling and thinking must feel it to be unbridgeable – the might of Karma, which presses upon us to-day from without but in future will more and more be formed within from the soul of a spiritually self-developing humanity, connects up force and counter-force. In man himself, created to-day, both in his form and psychic constitution, on the basis of polarity, that polarity will be restored to equilibrium when man succeeds in a complete grasp of the Christ impulse and in raising the ideal of humanity which Christ has lived before our eyes, to be a reality for all mankind.

This gives us another standpoint from which to view the sacrifice of Christ. Christ had to live the life which is to be the goal of development for every single one of us. Here also an iron law rules, pointing the way which leads to the fulfilment of humanity's mission. And it is our duty to learn these laws. Every faculty which man possesses comes to him from spiritual worlds: there is nothing which man has in origin created from himself. His thinking, his moral sensitivity which is peculiar to him to-day was in the first place transmitted to him from spiritual worlds. Further it is a law in human evolution that every quality and faculty appears first of all in a comprehensive sense in a single individual; then it gradually passes, even if only in the course of centuries, into all mankind so that everyone may in the end himself acquire the quality and develop the faculties in personal activity. [Cycle 15/7/3.]

We can get some idea of this law if we notice, for instance, how Aristotle first displayed the faculty of logical thinking which is to-day the property of all mankind. But on the other hand the faculty in itself is the gift of the gods which could only gradually flow into mankind. In the same way with the moral sense, with sympathy and love – all these had first to stream into man. If we then ask how one man can achieve this complete representation in his life of a single faculty, and can do it in such a way that he does not slavishly follow the commands of another but obeys his own impulse active from his own inner self, we come again to the problem of the Bodhisattva which I tried to disentangle from another point of view in my lecture of 30th March, 1930.

The Bodhisattvas are the intermediaries between the divine spiritual beings and mankind; they are the teachers of men. The content of their teaching comes from Christ Himself, in Whose immediate presence they live and Whose being pours into them. [Cycle 9/9/19.] We can see even from these few words in what extraordinary heights these beings live. Christ Himself is the guide and leader of the great community of Bodhisattvas, of whom there are twelve – six having prepared the way for the Christ, the other six having the task to develop in humanity what is still to stream into it from the Christ. [Cycle 9/9/19.] When the twelve have achieved their mission, the period of the earth-creation will come to an end. The message delivered by the whole band of Bodhisattvas is the teaching of the Christ. [Cycle 10/7/14.] The secret of the great community of the twelve Bodhisattvas is mirrored, as by an earthly symbol of a heavenly condition, in all that is symbolised by the number twelve in spiritual development on earth. [Cycle 12/7/17, 17/1.] For instance the community of the twelve in the Mysteries of the Trotten, the twelve disciples, the twelve knights of King Arthur. Further “they, the Bodhisattvas, ascend to the world of providence, for it is their task to guide the world from time to time by that providence.” [17/1.] But that they may accomplish their mission – i.e., give to mankind what has been given them by the Christ, the Bodhisattvas must themselves incarnate in a human body, thus associating themselves in most intimate fashion with a human being. Yet this is possible only to a limited extent, since they stand on so ineffably high a level that, especially at the beginning of their work, they can only embrace a part of the human entity. Thus as Steiner says, they never leave the spiritual world completely when they incorporate themselves with a human being, [Cycle. 10,12/9.] and the human body can only partially contain the essence of the Bodhisattva. His being is also too great to find a home in a human body, so that we have only a portion within the human sheath, while the greater part remains in higher worlds. [Lecture 13/4/10.]

Since however a Bodhisattva again and again associates himself with a human body and fills it so far as that particular body permits of it in its earthly constitution, he more and more succeeds in passing on to humanity the divine gift. Thus each Bodhisattva at some moment wholly fills the human being to which he is attached, becomes one with him, and can give him in its entirety what he received from the Christ and what it is his task to transmit to mankind. Thereafter there is no further need to descend to the physical plane for his mission is accomplished, and he himself passes from the level of a Bodhisattva to that of a Buddha. This it was which was accomplished with the historical Gautama Buddha. “When the being who has worked through the ages as a Bodhisattva, fulfils himself as man, as a whole and individual man, when everything is included in the human nature which in earlier times streamed in from heaven, when the power of a Bodhisattva shows his full powers in a single man, he becomes a Buddha. This was shown us by the Buddha. If the Bodhisattva had withdrawn earlier from his task, humanity would have been unable to partake in the service he rendered, that these faculties might flow in from the heights.”

On these lines then we can understand how facts which seem to our everyday thinking to be contradictory, can be reconciled in higher harmony. At one time Rudolf Steiner says: the Bodhisattva who was the inspirer and protector of Jeshu ben Pandira [Cycle 15/4/17.]; at another, the Bodhisattva who was incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira [Cycle 19/10/13.]; and again: Bodhisattvas are beings incorporated in a human body. [Cycle 10/2/7, 17/1.] In my lecture of 30th March, 1930, I said it was very confusing that Rudolf Steiner used diverging methods of description in different places. But I added that it was by no means a matter of chance that he did so. What I have said to-day will show you that the Bodhisattva is in truth the inspirer and protector of the man to whom he links himself, so that at each successive incarnation the link may be closer; that, on the other hand, the Bodhisattva is a being incorporated in a human body, the incorporations however being different in grade, since the climax of them all is to include the whole man, to permeate him absolutely and really to be one with him.

If we wish to reconcile these apparent contradictions we have to rise from the realm of the Spirits of Form to that of the Spirits of Motion, the realm situated next above it. Of course I do not mean that we have to “experience them in vision as in occult development” rather that we must not remain rigidly in the one sphere as is the case with most of us, but must boldly raise ourselves to the higher sphere. We can learn much by reading the first lecture of cycle 33 – “Human and cosmic thought.” The example there deals with a triangle, but we can find also examples and ideas which lend wings to our thought. I have to smile when discrepancies are pointed out to me in my lecture of 30th March: there are no discrepancies of mine in it, for I quote nothing but facts. You will find contradictions in Rudolf Steiner, and if you look through my “Guide to the lecture cycles of Rudolf Steiner” you will often find contradictory statements quite placidly printed next to each other on the same page. What does this really mean?

A year or two before the war Rudolf Steiner spoke, at a general meeting, of our work, and said that from then onwards he relied on the presence of a certain subtlety of perception in members so that it would be possible for him to give to us always higher results of his spiritual research. This sensitivity he described by saying that we must have penetrated so far into spiritual knowledge that it would not be necessary for him always to give the logical basis for every statement. We ourselves must develop in ourselves a sense of truth which would enable us to separate truth from untruth. This sensitivity is absolutely essential for anthroposophy. For spiritual science involves what to our ordinary thinking is contradiction, the contradiction of the living towards what is dead. There are countless contradictions in Steiner for his researches were made in the realm of the spiritual and living. We on our side must be careful not to notice only the contradiction, and must try to rise from dead to vital thought.

To-day when I have been trying to make clearer the being of a Bodhisattva, you will realise that the deed of Christ was possible for none but the Christ. A single human life had to experience the full mission of the earth. We were to have an actual presentation of the man who as the goal of divine activity stands before us in a mighty “Imagination” within the spiritual worlds, when we prepare ourselves between death and rebirth for a new incarnation. This ideal figure unites in itself all the streams of forces which the highest faculties of the spiritual hierarchies have imparted so that the earth's mission may be accomplished. Since the time of Saturn when the highest of the hierarchies laid the seed of the human form, through the Sun and Moon and Earth evolution we have had a convergence of all this divine activity. All this, incomprehensible as it may be to human thought, reached a sort of culmination when the Elohim in the words of Genesis cried out “Let us:make man.” This form, created in a mighty Imagination, was the culmination of the work of the gods: it was the unique, hitherto unknown something which Elohim added to the activity of the gods. Etheric body, astral body and ego, had all existed within the creation, and even if in the most varied metamorphoses, were proper to the spiritual hierarchies; but the human form was the creation of something new which gave the possibility of freedom.

This human ideal, this ideal form which includes within itself the activity of all the hierarchies could only be experienced on this earth, if it was also to create the possibility for every human soul to rise someday to that height, and it was achievable only by Christ. But those that prepared the way and helped were and are the Bodhisattvas. Thus Rudolf Steiner says “It is first through knowledge of the Bodhisattvas that we can rise to the knowledge of the real meaning of the Christ.” [Cycle 30/1/3.]

Our task is, with the right attitude, the right truth-inspired thoughts and feelings, to prepare for the time which will have as fundamental a significance for the development of humanity as had the achievement in Palestine at the beginning of our era. [Cycle 19/3/3.] For this we need only to turn to the inexhaustible store of wisdom and love which Rudolf Steiner has given to us in his lectures since the beginning of the century. These lectures which speak in so direct and human a fashion can be our certain guide towards the goal: that this vital period shall find sufficient souls that it may fulfil itself in the way of the Christ, that it may not pass by unheeded or even be put to false use by adverse powers so that the work of the Christ be put to shame. Clearly when Rudolf Steiner says this period is second in importance not even to that in which the Christ Himself was on earth, we need no further proof that the forces of anti-Christ will rise up in power and might to heights which mankind has hitherto not conceived, indeed could not have conceived. Our business is to keep firm and irremoveable hold of that which Steiner in his spiritual research has told us of higher worlds: to remain unshakeably true to that being, who has given us knowledge of these tremendous cosmic secrets, to whom we owe it that we may consciously join in the work for the accomplishment of a mission which is the task not only of men but of gods. Above all else let us remain immoveably loyal to Rudolf Steiner and his work.

What was his work? what was the purpose for which he came among us from spiritual worlds, so that he might in a life of bitter sacrifice guide us on the way to the Christ? Let us be quite clear about this, basing ourselves not on any personal feeling or inclination, but on the words of Steiner himself, words which admit of no distortion or misinterpretation as long as we still have some sense of the truth. The task of Rudolf Steiner which he has brought us all into our very midst for our blessing, is to spread the tidings OF THE APPEARANCE OF THE CHRIST IN ETHERIC GARB. [Lectures, 4/11/11, at Leipsig.]

He says this in precise words; you can find it in the tenth lecture of the 15th Cycle.

If you imagine that he meant by these words any one else as this prophet or herald, you will have to be consistent in your perversity and say that he meant another also when at the beginning of the same lecture he says that “we have discussed this in detail during the last few hours” or “we described the nine beatitudes from this point of view yesterday.” But, further, he has expressed it definitely in the most diverse passages, that it was his task to proclaim the etheric Christ. Indeed what was the reason for the creation of anthroposophy but to proclaim this message? “It is the task of anthroposophy to proclaim the Christ in etheric garb.”

If we once begin to misinterpret Rudolf Steiner's own words, none of his great revelations is secure against being transformed into its opposite. Then we shall have ready helpers among those powers which are the adversaries of Christ. To be guilty of such a thing is to separate the work of Rudolf Steiner from his name; and that must not happen. Rudolf Steiner himself told us it must not be. For in that way we lay the foundation for his appearing to posterity as other than what he really is, the herald of the coming of the Christ in etheric garb. At present we are disputing among ourselves if he really was so. Can we do such a thing?

Put the actual historical facts before yourselves. All of us who had joined the Theosophical Society knew nothing more at that time than what H. P. Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant had told us, and as we now see was a mistaken view of the Christ. Then at the beginning of the century Rudolf. Steiner appeared. Up till 1908 he guided our minds away from the fundamental error of our understanding of the Christ's achievement; and then he proclaimed the second coming of Christ – but this time in etheric garb. And he emphasises that this is the most important event since the Mystery of Golgotha; for associated with it is that other fact of which we can at present have only a very partial understanding, that the Christ becomes master of Karma for the development of mankind.

All this I can only just touch upon. Read it for yourselves in the third and tenth lectures of the 19th Cycle and see the words Steiner uses to give us some idea, a conception of the significance of this. Connected with it also is that vast decision which will have to be made at the end of the century, on which the destiny of mankind for thousands of years will depend; the decision to which Rudolf Steiner referred in the last words which he wrung forth, though ill and physically broken, at Michaelmas, 1924. All this is associated with the coming of the etheric Christ. Rudolf Steiner emphasises again and again that it is his task, the task also of the anthroposophy which he founded and inaugurated, to proclaim the Christ in etheric form. He repeats it with all solemnity and seriousness in the various branches of the society, and even in his published works, through a series of years. No one but he has proclaimed it, he was the first and hitherto has been the only one – and but for him we should know nothing of all this, nothing of the coming of the Christ in etheric garb, nothing of the assumption by Christ of the karmic judgeship, nothing of the decisive struggle at the end of this century.

Now that I have given you the facts, read the lectures of November 18, 19, and 25, 1917 – I could cite a dozen others – in which he depicts to us the machinations of Ahriman in his hope of letting this vital achievement of mankind pass unnoticed, or even of putting another being in the place of the etheric Christ. A few sentences from the lecture of 18th November, 1917: “The Christ will live within the earth sphere as an etheric being. For mankind the problem is of the relationship which is to subsist between Him and them. The actual appearance of the Christ is subject to no outside influence, even of the greatest initiate. THE APPEARANCE MUST COME: KEEP FIRM HOLD OF THAT FACT. But means may be adopted for the understanding of this appearance in one way or another, for this or that effect of it.” And a few lines further: “There are Western fraternities whose aim it is to oppose the impulse of the Christ and to substitute for Him another individuality who has never appeared in the flesh, but is an etheric individuality, and of strictly Ahrimanic nature.” In my lecture of 30th March, 1930, I said: “let me remind you of the words of Rudolf Steiner, that we can only understand the act of the Christ if we have first attained the right attitude to the Bodhisattvas. But this means nothing less than that, if we fail to recognise the messenger of the Christ in the twentieth century, we run the danger of not recognising the Christ Himself when He appears in etheric form.” It was my duty to warn you thus; and Steiner himself had often done so. He said himself that attempts would be made to separate his name from his work – but that, he said also, must never happen. Anyone who has followed events in our society knows that these efforts are being made, that I am not talking of vague fears but, as always, of facts.

Now the essence of Ahriman's activities is to spread lies and error, to confuse mankind. How could he do this better than by achieving with the herald of the Christ what he hopes to do with the Christ Himself? What is more likely to make mankind more receptive to the final error than to put in the place of the true herald of Christ quite another being? In other words: can we not see that all these efforts which are showing their head after Rudolf Steiner's death, bear the mark of Ahriman on their forehead? Perhaps you will also understand the meaning for our times of the words of St. Matthew and St. Mark: that even the chosen shall be led into error. I can only repeat what I said at the close of my other lecture: Test what I say by the words of Rudolf Steiner himself. I have given you the material and have said nothing which does not find. confirmation in his own words. As this lecture also will be duplicated, with all the sources quoted, each one of you will be able to decide in peace for himself. I am forced to say this; and one who has for twenty-five years made it his object to put the lecture-material clearly before all members, finds it his sacred duty, in view of present circumstances, not to take shelter in comfortable silence. For my part I shall always work, on the basis of purely anthroposophical effort, for the spreading of the work of Rudolf Steiner, as long as life and strength are left to me, and I shall boldly stand up against every error. And the reason? that I may not be dumb when, some day I have to render my account and am asked what I did when attempts were made to belie Rudolf Steiner in his mission.

For another reason also I will work for the spreading of his teaching, for a reason which I have never mentioned till to-day but which I may and will more openly confess. In 1904 Rudolf Steiner sent me a letter, which I preserve most religiously, calling on me to develop myself by study so far that I could help and instruct others. He left it to me to take this vow upon myself – at the call of my higher self. Since that day right to the present I have never begun my work without renewing this vow. And however little I may have. succeeded, I have honestly made the effort.

It is only with great reluctance that I speak these words; for thereby I have reached the utmost limits of personal intimacy. But the words had to be spoken. And more than all, I have the purely human feeling towards Rudolf Steiner, to whom I owe everything that I am, a feeling which goes deep down within me: the feeling that gratitude is not yet dead upon earth.