עברית Since my Christ experience, I looked up with outmost devotion and veneration to St Paul, that immediately became for me, through Rudolf Steiner's lifework, the Saint Patron and presently irreplaceable source of spiritual inspiration in all matters related to the modern Etheric Christ Experience. I therefore tried to demonstrate, albeit in a strongly condensed manner, how I used this inspiration in my spiritual research, in the 2nd chapter of my basic book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, to which I gave the title: St Paul at the Gates of Damascus.
The New Experience of the Supersensible
From Chapter 2
St Paul at the Gates of Damascus
"The contemplation of St Paul's Christ experience at the gates of Damascus, as communicated in the Acts of the Apostles and in his Epistles to the first Christian communities, offers a most important help in creating the right spiritual awareness in order to decipher the riddles of the modern Christ experience. In that sense it is, and always will be, a modern event: an archetype of a radical transformation in man's relationship to the Christ. Before embarking on our study in greater detail, let us emphasize again the nature of this change.
Before Damascus- and, as we saw above, this pertains also to the experiences of Christ's disciples- man's relationship with the Christ was unconscious; it was regulated either generally through Jehovah, as a 'night god', (1) or through the old temple initiation of the eastern cultures. The reason for this was based first and foremost on the fact that humanity, as an earthly ego creation, was still in the making, and the Christ was its creative source. For humanity as a whole He was always the sacrificial divine Being, through whom everything that was made was actually realized in earthly evolution. In great, epochal acts of cosmic-earthly sacrifices, He shaped humanity from the very first steps of its earthly evolution, forming it in the process more and more in His likeness (2) and, as we saw above, increasingly forming Himself also in the likeness of man (3) until the time came when both sides were ripe enough to allow a mutual ‘face to face' penetration to take place. (4) The first was Jesus of Nazareth',, complete merging in spirit, soul and body with the cosmic Christ. This event is the eternal cornerstone of the whole temple of Christ- permeated humanity, the archetypal form of all future meetings of Christ with humanity up to the end of earthly evolution. (5) As Rudolf Steiner repeatedly pointed out, in the transformation of Saul to Paul at the gates of Damascus-though taking place before the middle of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch-we can see the first form of an experience of the Christ which belongs essentially to the fifth cultural epoch and beyond, The reason for this modernity can be explained in the following way.
Though St Paul was an initiate in the old Hebrew Mysteries, (6) his actual meeting with the Christ was, on the other hand, a natural, midday experience, taking place in full self-consciousness for the first time in human evolution, It was the first naturally 'bridged' spiritual experience ever, welding together all those opposites that up to our own time divide and separate our true soul-anti-spirit life from our physical, external life. The spirit shone through and inside the physical world without suppressing it entirely, as was the case in the old initiation. It was at once a delicately sensible and supersensible experience, a day and a night experience, a fully incarnated as well as a mighty excarnated experience, a most personal and yet absolutely universal event, and so forth. In other words, St Paul's experience shows, at least as a first indication, in the form of the supersensible experience itself, the beginning of the modern knowledge drama of the Second Coming, which the modern Christ experience brings to full expression. But as a matter of fact, this also means that Christ assumes His new and future-orientated creative role in regard to humanity, He appears as educator and initiator of the human ego towards freedom and love, establishing man's future mysteries, of self-consciously acquired spirit knowledge. (7) And this revealing of Himself openly as an initiator of modern man, transforming man directly out of the spiritual world without impairing in the least his self- consciousness but rather strongly consolidating it in supersensible reality, teaching, as it were, publicly the most intimate secrets of His Community and communion with humanity-this is the true nature of His etheric Second Coming, which begins in the twentieth century. (8) We can now look more closely at some of the basic elements of St Paul's experience at the gates of Damascus.
The first stage of the Pauline experience results directly from the spirit radiance that emanates from the figure of the etheric Christ. It is what might be termed the powerful illumination of self- knowledge, by means of which man learns directly to see the true nature of his death forces. The second element is the experience of the transformation and remoulding of the human soul, as a result of Christ's demonstration of his real soul being in the soul world. The third and most difficult element to grasp is that process in which the Christ confers on man the future seeds of spirit, soul and bodily evolution, actually transferring into his self-conscious spirit hands the responsibility for the future evolution of humanity and the Earth. Let us, therefore, observe in St Paul's own words these three elements: self-knowledge, transformation of the soul, sowing the seeds of all future human evolution.
From the most external description of the events at the gates of Damascus, it is immediately evident that Christ's appearance illuminates man's being in such a way that it becomes the source of a most true and exact self-knowledge. Saul is immediately confronted with his inner Death being, with that part of the soul that continuously persecutes the Christ in us. Those shattering words, 'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ (9) have resounded esoterically ever since in each true, fully conscious meeting with the Christ-and in the twentieth century with an even greater devastating force. Especially for the anthroposophically motivated modern Christ experience-as I shall endeavour to show in Chapter 4- this is of the utmost significance. Through Christ's light, man begins to see to what an overwhelming extent the forces of illness and death (the luciferic-ahrimanic forces) penetrate and corrupt his soul and bodily sheaths. Man is actually convinced, beyond any possible doubt or self-delusion (because of the absolute clarity of his sight at this moment) that he, Saul, his daily self, is woven and formed almost entirely out of these forces; that, when compared with the sublime light being that emerges mysteriously out of the still completely unknown province of his soul life, it must be admitted, with no escape, that man's daily personality is constituted of those forces that cause evil, sickness and death in the world and in man-that is, out of those forces that are necessary in order to transform man into an independent, self-conscious, separated being in the cosmos.(10)
For St Paul the presence of this 'Saul' being within himself, and the basic, ever-present, duality of Saul-Paul, became the positive ground on which he based his whole life and teaching. Wherever we open his Epistles and come upon his descriptions of man, Christ, and man's transformation through Christ, we always find first of all this basic motif. (11) The fruits of this self-knowledge are twofold: firstly, a moral one; secondly, a cognitive one. The first finds its expression in the realization that love is the highest soul reality of Christ-permeated man. The second is the conscious striving towards clear knowledge of the Christ and man's transformation through Christ. So for St Paul, true self-knowledge- gained on the path of death and freedom to Damascus, immediately after his organizing and execution of the stoning to death of St Stephen and, striving mightily further to persecute all Christians wherever they happened to be- became the resurrected power of a new cognitive and moral life. We can also formulate it thus. Over and above his Saul-Paul duality, St Paul continuously endeavours to construct a bridge of free knowledge and moral love on which he could firmly stand, holding himself upright in the sight of the Christ and justifying his upright soul position. He must transform his self-knowledge, so we feel, into such a motivating moral and cognitive power that will enable him to freely develop his conscious knowledge capacities, in order to achieve an ever deeper penetration into the mysteries of Christ's being and activity. We can therefore say: the Christ experience, as St Paul experienced it, is not a momentary and passing 'lightning' event; the actual revelation is, in reality, the sowing of a seed of permanent, ongoing transformation in the human soul, effective for all subsequent development of the whole man. What one achieves in the Christ experience continues to take place on all levels if one understands it so. It is gradually transformed from an historical event in a specific time and place into an ever-present process of the evolving drama of spirit knowledge...
When we delve in such a way into St Paul's experience at the gates of Damascus, bearing in mind that only a very brief example could be given here, we discover the seed and archetype of the modern Christ experience: the beginning of that which will be completed only in the distant future but that must begin now, i.e. the self-conscious transformation of man through a free collaboration with the helping, guiding and initiating being of the Christ, building around His sacrificial life-model an ever- growing community of human beings who consciously work together under His direct guidance...".
Read the whole chapter:
The New Experience of the Supersensible- The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of our Age