Christ Module 13 – Teachings through the ages

From Anthroposophy

This Module is about the teachings about Christ and the Christ Impulse through the ages, with different names and languages in the various cultures.

Schema FMC00.090 below provides an overview of the various names in different epochs and cultural ages.

Atlantean epoch

  • Sun Mysteries on Atlantis: the Spirit of the Sun

Current Postatlantean epoch

Northern stream
Southern stream
Merged streams

Aspects

the spreading of Christianity

  • Christianity grew into ever new areas and among new tribes through its adaptability and this expanded more and more but in multiple forms. Examples: inclusion of pagan religious form with Christian essence, Mithras festival, Christmas festivals and saints, etc. "From the very beginning, Christianity's task in conquering the physical plane was to work its way into the human personality; it does not build on old forces, but seeks to work through manas or spirit-self." (1904-06-24-GA092; see Reconquista#1904-06-24-GA092)
  • Christianization of central Europe, see Central European cultural basin.

Other

  • Christianity began as a religion but is greater than all religions (1908-05-13-GA102)
    • earlier epochs like in the Atlantean epoch did not need a religion because Man's clairvoyant experience of the supersensible was a fact. The latin 'religere' means to connect, and so religion is a connection of the sensual with the supersensible. The time of the rising materialism needed religion.
    • in the future people will again have experiences in the supersensible and higher spiritual worlds, then they will no longer need religion. Even when people have overcome religious life, Christianity will remain and human beings shall be bearers of spiritual Christianity.
  • relativity of the faculty of thinking, information and knowledge for the spreading of the Christ Impulse, on the contrary Christianity spread through 'simple' souls touching the heart of people, facing intellectual resistance and no understanding (1913-10-01-GA148)
  • difference between 'organized, human' religion, theology, faith, spiritual science
    • belief systems (see worldview) vs experiential (see initiation and initiation exercises, and God experience)
    • faith had a different meaning at the time of the Christ and the Gospels as it has today .. then with Faith was meant an active force accomplishes something .. not simply evoke an idea or to awaken knowledge (as is how the word is used today). (1917-04-10-GA175)
  • MoG and its impact on conceptions of two key phenomena in the life of mankind: death and heredity (1918-10-06-GA184)

Various more

Inspirational quotes

1901-GA008 quotes Augustinus

One of his most significant utterances is the following:

"What is now called the Christian religion already existed among the ancients, and was not lacking at the very beginnings of the human race. When Christ appeared in the flesh, the true religion already in existence received the name of Christian"

(Augustinus, Contra Faustum 33:6)

1908-05-13-GA102

The clairvoyant Atlantean did not need a religion because the experience of the supersensible was a fact for him. All human development originated in such a time. Then the vision of the spiritual world faded.

Religere means to connect, and so religion is a connection of the sensual with the supersensible. The time of the rising materialism needed religion.

But the time will come when people will be able to have experiences in the supersensible world again. Then they will no longer need religion. The new vision requires the bringing along of spiritual Christianity, it will be the consequence of Christianity. This is the basis for the sentence that I ask you to remember as particularly important: Christianity began as a religion, but it is greater than all religions.

What Christianity has given will be taken along into all times of the future and will still be one of the most important impulses for humanity when religion as such no longer exists. Even when people have overcome religious life, Christianity will remain. That it was first a religion is connected with the development of humanity; but Christianity as a world view is greater than all religions.

also as epilogue in the book 'The Christian Mystery. A collection of early lectures by Rudolf Steiner' titled: "Christianity Began as a Religion but Is Greater than a Religion"

The necessary antecedent of the new vision is that human beings shall be bearers of spiritual Christianity. This is the basis of the sentence of which I would ask you to realize the profound significance: Christianity began as a religion but is greater than all religions.

What Christianity bestows goes with us into all ages of time to come and will still be one of the essential impulses in humanity when religion, as we know it, is no longer in existence. Even when religion, as such, has been transcended, Christianity will remain.

The fact that it was first of all a religion is connected with the evolutionary process of humanity. But Christianity as a world view is greater than all religions.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.090 lists various names of Christ used across the ages:

FMC00.090.jpg

Schema FMC00.397 captures the essence of the Christianity and the statement 'blessed who believe without seeing'. Seeing refers to the astral experience during the initiation process, a tradition for many thousands of years, since the Atlantean mysteries and the millenia before Christ.

What happened in the three years of Christ Jesus was a public enactment of what the pupil lived through during the old initiation processes, and these are also the stages in the life of Christ to be found in the Gospels.

Note: the schema is based on early lectures on the Book of Revelation. See also Schema FMC00.100.

FMC00.397.jpg

Schema FMC00.266 provides a summary table from Elisabeth Vreede's letter from Dec. 1927, see also: Threefold Sun

FMC00.267.jpg

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

  • GA087 of October 1901 to April 1902 sketches the lineage from Heraclitus via Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers (Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato, Socrates), Philo of Alexandria and connecting this with the writers of the four gospels, the school of Paul and Dionysus Areopagite and down to Scotus Eriugena. Connecting in the underlying stream of Christ in Egyptian, buddhist, Greek myths and spiritual life.
  • GA008, the book 'Christianity as a mystical fact' (1902)
  • GA237, GA238 and GA240 contain the lectures of the period between 1 July upto 16 September 1924 in which the Michael School was sketched from the time of Plato and Aristotle, over the School of Chartres, upto the anthroposophical movement; not just on earth but also in the supersensible world, and including the inspiration by individualities from the spiritual world.

Reference extracts

1901-GA008

Augustine relates how he achieved spiritual vision. Everywhere he asked where the "divine" was to be found.

"I asked the earth and it said, I am not He; and all things that are in the earth confessed the same. I asked the ocean and the depths and all that lives in them, and they answered me: We are not thy God. Seek above us. I asked the fleeting winds, and the whole air, with all its inhabitants made answer: The philosophers who seek for the essence of things in us are deceived. We are not God. I asked the heavens, the sun, moon and stars, and they said: Neither are we the God whom thou seekest."

And Augustine perceived that there is but one thing which can answer his question about the divine: his own soul.

...

One of his most significant utterances is the following:

"What is now called the Christian religion already existed among the ancients, and was not lacking at the very beginnings of the human race. When Christ appeared in the flesh, the true religion already in existence received the name of Christian"

(Augustinus, Contra Faustum 33:6)

190X-GA034

from 'Luzifer' and 'Lucifer-Gnosis' magazines 1903-1908

DE version PDF p. 272-27

The religions are true, but the time has passed for many people when understanding was possible only through faith

Myths, legends, religions are the various ways in which the highest truths have been passed on to the majority of humanity.

This should continue, if it were sufficient. But it is no longer so. Humanity has now reached a stage of development in which a large part would lose all religion if the higher truths on which it is based were not proclaimed in such a form that even the sharpest mind can consider them valid.

The religions are true, but the time has passed for many people when understanding was possible only through faith. And the number of people for whom this is true will increase with unprecedented rapidity in the near future. Those who really know the laws of human development know this.

If the wisdom underlying religious ideas were not openly proclaimed in a form that would stand up to perfect thought, then complete doubt and disbelief in the invisible world would soon arise. And a time when this were the case would be, in spite of all material culture, a time worse than barbarism. Anyone who knows the real conditions of human life knows that man can no more live without a relation to the invisible world than a plant can live without nourishing juices.

1913-10-01-GA148

Let's then approach the other side of these thoughts. I have often spoken here in this city about the meaning of the Christ idea. And in books and lecture cycles we find diverse elaborations from spiritual science about the secrets of the Christ Being and the Christ concept. Each must come to the conclusion that when he absorbs what is contained in our books and lecture cycles a large amount of knowledge is required for a full understanding of the Christ Being; that one must depend on the profoundest concepts and ideas for a full understanding of what Christ is and what the impulse is which has traversed the centuries as the Christ-Impulse.

One could even come to the conclusion – were it not otherwise contradicted – that it is necessary to know all of theosophy or anthroposophy in order to work one's way up to a correct concept of Christ.

If we put that aside though, and look at spiritual development during the past centuries, we see from century to century a detailed, well-grounded science with the goal of understanding Christ and his appearance on earth. For centuries men have utilized their highest, most meaningful ideas in order to understand Christ.

Here also it would seem that only the most significant intellectual activity would be sufficient to understand Christ. Has it been the case though? A very simple consideration can prove that it has not.

Let us place on a spiritual balance

  • all that has contributed until now to the understanding of Christ by scholarship, science, also anthroposophy. Let us place all that on one scale of the spiritual balance
  • and let us place on the other scale in our thoughts all the deep feeling, all the impulses in people's souls which have aimed at what we call Christ,

... and we will find that

  • all the science, all the scholarship, even all the anthroposophy which we can muster to explain Christ, surprisingly springs up,
  • and all the deep feelings and impulses which have directed people to the Christ Being push the other scale far down.

It is no exaggeration to say that a tremendous impact has come from Christ and that the knowledge of Christ has contributed least to this impact.

It would have gone most badly for Christianity if people had to depend on all the learned disputes of the Middle Ages, the Scholastics, the Church fathers; or if people were only to depend on what we are able to muster through anthroposophy for an understanding of the Christ idea. If that were all, it would be very little indeed.

I don't think that anyone who has objectively followed the path of Christianity through the centuries could seriously contest these thoughts.

[Impact of evolution of thinking]

Let us direct our attention to the times when Christianity did not yet exist. I need only remind you of what most of you are familiar with. I need only remind you of the Greek tragedies in ancient Greece, especially in their older forms, when they presented the battling gods, or the men in whose souls the battling gods acted; also how the divine forces were directly visible on the stage. I need only to indicate how Homer thoroughly weaved his significant poetry with the working of the spirit; I have only to point to the great figures of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. With these names a spiritual life of the highest order appears before our souls. If we put all else aside and look only at the great figure of Aristotle, who lived centuries before the founding of Christianity, we realize that in a certain sense no increase, no advancement has taken place up to our time. Aristotle's thinking, his scholarliness is so awesome that it is possible to say that he reached a peak in human thinking which has not been improved upon until now.

And now for a moment we would like to consider a curious hypothesis, one which is necessary for the following days. Let us imagine that there are no Gospels from which we can learn something about Christ. We want to imagine that the documents known as the New Testament do not exist, that there are no Gospels. We will ignore what has been said about the founding of Christianity and will only consider the facts about Christianity's historical process in order to see what occurred during the following centuries. This means that without the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline Letters and so forth, we only want to consider what has really happened. This is of course only a hypothesis. What has happened?

If we look first at Southern Europe, we find a profound spiritual development at a certain point in time, as we have just seen in its representative Aristotle – a highly developed spiritual life, which in the subsequent centuries went through a special schooling. Yes, at the time Christianity began to make its way through the world there were many people educated in the Greek way, people who had absorbed Greek culture. Even including a certain unusual man who was an energetic opponent of Christianity, Celsus, and who later persecuted the Christians. We find in the Italian sub-continent up to the second, third Christian century, highly educated men who adopted the profound ideas which we find in Plato, whose brilliance really appears as a continuation of Aristotle's brilliance – refined, strong figures with Greek culture – Romans with Greek culture, which added Greek cultural delicacy to Roman aggressiveness.

The Christian impulse pushed itself into this world. At that time the representatives of the Christian impulse were truly uneducated people in respect to intellectuality, to knowledge of the world, compared to the many Greek-Roman educated people. People without education pushed into the middle of a world of mature intellectuality. And now we can observe a strange scene: those simple, primitive natures who were the bearers of early Christianity were able to propagate it in a relatively short time in Southern Europe. And when we approach these simple, primitive souls who at that time spread Christianity, we may say: Those primitive natures understood the Being of Christ. (We don't have to consider the great cosmic Christ thoughts, but only much simpler Christ thoughts.) The bearers of the Christ impulse who entered into the arena of highly developed Greek culture didn't understand it at all. They had nothing to bring to the market of Greek-Roman life except their personal inwardness, which they had developed as their personal relationship to their beloved Christ; for they loved as a member of a beloved family just through this relationship. Those who brought Christianity to Greece and Rome were not educated theosophists; they were unlettered. The educated theosophists of that time, the Gnostics, had elevated ideas about Christ, but they could only give what we would have to place on the rising scale of the weighing balance. If it had depended on the Gnostics, Christianity would surely not have made its way through the world. It was no particularly educated intellectuality which came from the east and in a relatively short time brought ancient Greece and Rome to their knees. That's one side of the story.

From the other side we see intellectually superior people such as Celsus, Christianity's enemy, and even the philosopher on the throne, Marcus Aurelius, who used every contrary argument imaginable. Look at the immensely learned Neo-Platonists, who formulated ideas compared to which contemporary philosophy is child's play, and which surpasses our current ideas in profundity and horizon. And look at how these highly cultured people argued against Christianity, how they argued from the standpoint of Greek philosophy, and we have the impression that none of them understood the Christ-impulse. We see that Christianity was spread by bearers who understood nothing of the essence of Christianity; it was fought against by a high culture which could not understand what the Christ-impulse meant. It is noteworthy that Christianity entered the world in such a way that neither its adherents not its enemies understood its underlying spirit. Nevertheless those people had the strength in their souls to spread the Christ-impulse triumphantly throughout the world.

[Tertullian]

And such as Tertullian, who represented Christianity with a certain greatness. We see in him a Roman who was in fact, when we look at his language, almost a re-creator of the Roman language, who with an unerring accuracy enlivened words to the extent that we recognize him as an important personality. When we ask ourselves, however, about Tertullian's ideas, it's something else. We find that he showed very little intellectuality or high culture. Even Christianity's defenders didn't accomplish much. Nevertheless, such as Tertullian were effective, effective as personalities, for which reason educated Greeks could not really do much.

He was awe-inspiringly effective through something. But what? That is the important thing. We feel that this is really all important.

Through what did the bearers of the Christ-impulse work when they themselves didn't understand much about what the Christ-impulse is? Through what did the Christian Church Fathers work, even Origenes, who is considered unskillful. What is it that even Greek-Roman culture could not understand about the essence of the Christ-impulse? What is it all about?

But let's go farther. The phenomenon becomes more pronounced as we consider subsequent history. We see how over the centuries Christianity spread within Europe to peoples who, like the Germanic, derived from completely different religious traditions and who were united as a people, or at least seem to be united in their religious traditions. Nevertheless they accepted the Christ-impulse with all their strength, as though it were their own life. And when we consider the most effective messengers of faith in the Germanic peoples – were they the scholastic theologically educated ones? By no means! They were relatively primitive souls who went about among the people and in a primitive way, using ordinary ideas, speaking to the people, and captured their hearts completely. They knew how to use words in such a way that they touched the deepest heart strings of their listeners. Simple people went out to all regions, and it was they who worked most effectively.

So we see the spread of Christianity over the centuries. But then we wonder at how this same Christianity is the grounds for so much significant scholarship, science and philosophy. We don't underestimate this philosophy, but today we want to direct our attention to an extraordinary phenomenon — that up until the Middle Ages Christianity spread among peoples who had quite other ideas in their minds, until it belonged to their souls.

And in the not too distant future still other things will be emphasized about the spread of Christianity. When we consider the effect of the Christian impulse, it is easy to understand that in a certain time enthusiasm arose through the spreading of Christianity. But when we come to modern times this enthusiasm seems to be muted.

...[cont'd see lecture]

1917-04-10-GA175

What did Christ Jesus mean by faith or trust?

We have a far too theoretic, a far too abstract conception of faith today. Consider for a moment Man’s usual conception of faith when he speaks of the antithesis between faith and knowledge. Knowledge is that which can be demonstrated or proved; faith is that which is not susceptible of proof, and yet is held to be true. It is a question of the particular way in which we know or understand something. It is only when we speak of knowledge as faith or belief that we think of it as something which is not susceptible of final proof.

Compare this idea of faith with the conception which Christ Jesus preached. Let me refer you to this passage in the Gospels:

“If ye have faith and doubt not … but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.” (Matt. XXI, 21)

How great is the contrast between this conception of faith, paradoxically yet radically expressed in the words of Christ, and the present-day conception which in reality sees in faith simply a substitute for knowledge.

A little reflection will show what is the essence of Christ’s conception of faith. Faith must be an active force, a force that accomplishes something. Its purpose is not simply to evoke an idea or to awaken knowledge. He who possesses faith shall be able to move mountains.

If you refer to the Gospels you will find that wherever the words “faith” or “trust” appear, they are associated with the idea of action, that one is to be granted a power through which something can be effected or accomplished, something that is productive of positive results. And this is extremely important.

1918-10-06-GA184

And now we want to bring before our souls something which in some measure is suited to spread light over the Mystery of Golgotha from another point of view. I have in mind two phenomena about which I said a few words during our studies of the day before yesterday. These two phenomena in the life of mankind are, first,

  • the phenomenon of death, and secondly
  • the phenomenon of heredity — death which is connected with the end of life, and heredity with birth.

...

If the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, Man would have been able to gain only false conceptions about heredity and about death.

...

[Two key facts related to MoG]

Hence two facts that are inseparable from a true view of the Mystery of Golgotha are those which form, as it were, its boundaries: namely,

  • the Resurrection, which cannot be understood independently of
  • the Virgin Birth — born not in the way that makes birth a delusive fact few mankind, but born in a supersensible way and going through death in a supersensible way.

Discussion

Related pages

References and further reading

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