The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

Rudolf Steiner repeatedly pointed out that the greatest spiritual event of this century is the etheric appearance of the Christ, whose experience and perception will be the outcome of the natural development of new, conscious, supersensible faculties of perception. The modern 'Damascus Experience' will be, for the first time in the evolution of human consciousness, a naturally given initiation. Those human beings who undergo this initiation "will not require documentary evidence in order to recognize Christ, but they will have direct knowledge as is today possessed only by the initiates". This development is a result of the inner law that underlies the spiritual evolution of human consciousness. This law states that "all the faculties that today can be acquired only by means of initiation will in the future be universal faculties of humanity. This condition of soul, this experiencing of soul, is called in esotericism the “Second Coming of Christ”. (1)

We hear today from many sides about true and significant Christ experiences. When we study these experiences, we might be deeply impressed by their truth and beauty, and we can share-if we open ourselves honestly to them-their healing, refreshing, graceful Life Spirit. In a real sense we become true anthroposophical participants in the spirit of our lime only if we find our way to a deep understanding and appreciation of such experiences. In the lest years there is growing evidence for an increased anthroposophical interest in this field. Valuable materials and diverse points of view concerning the different questions that arise through the anthroposophical study of such experiences are to be found in the volumes of the 'Des Âtherische Christus-Wirken' series (2). -Our own methodical approach will be described in Part 1 of this Introduction and will be demonstrated in Part II which follows.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has lived inside the earthly sphere and is unceasingly active therein. But during the greater part of this period humanity was still in the epoch of the mind (or intellectual) soul, or in its after-effects. Its approach to the Christ was conditioned by this tact, and was based mainly on the religions and mystical paths of the Middle Ages. Thinking, as well as self-conscious supersensible experience and research, had to humbly retire before such direct knowledge, and in the age of the mind soul this was dope for entirely necessary and justified reasons. However, in the age of the consciousness soul, and especially since the beginning of the new Michael age and the new age of light, Christ's being and activity can for the first time become the goal of fully individualized human experience and research. Anthroposophy is precisely this: the fully free human knowledge of a thoroughly Christ-permeated and transformed universe, nature, and human evolution and history. (3)
The more the epoch of the consciousness soul develops and the more it emerges out of the intellectual residues of its immediate past, the more this soul will be recognized in its true nature. And it’s true nature is indeed already highly spiritual. But spiritual means sovereign, creative and active, inwardly aflame with the fire of love and enthusiasm for the mysteries of the world and of man, and thoroughly irradiated and penetrated with the forces of clear, precise and living thinking and Imagination. It experiences any passivity, givenness and obscurity only as the resistance on which it can unfold and strengthen its independent cognitive and moral forces. These characteristics of the consciousness soul, if they are truly developed, are those that enable it to come to grips with the new, naturally developing faculties of supersensible perception, which bring about the modern Christ experience as a natural initiation event, because it finds in this event an infinite source of possibilities for the future strengthening and spiritualizing of its innate spirit forces.

The meeting with the Christ described in Chapter 4 combines in one event two aspects of human reality that are separated from each other in ordinary consciousness: the usually unconscious reality of the spiritual world and the experience of awakened self-consciousness. Supersensible self-consciousness is the new self-situation and self-reality constituted in this experience. That is, in this meeting, an objective supersensible reality is experienced as the formative force of human self-consciousness that, until now, was capable of individualizing itself in the physical world alone. Therefore, this meeting can become, by means of the spiritual-scientific method, an object of an independent, ongoing development and conscious spiritual research. We can conceive the essence of this meeting as an initiation process in the following way.

In the perceived world a Being appears-the only one of its kind in our world-through whose etheric appearance process the totality of the Idea, the divine archetype of man, can be directly experienced. Man, who participated actively in this world-forming process, knows this form of the Idea to be his own human-cosmic Self. What otherwise is possible only in the sphere of intuitive thinking-the self-transforming self-meeting through self-perception, in the self-realization process of the simultaneous inner creation and perceiving of pure ideas-is experienced here in an objective-supersensible way, in the consciousness soul's self-conscious participation in Christ's etheric appearance. This means that through self-conscious imaginative perception man sees and experiences in this initiatory meeting his own ideal spirit, being and becoming as it comes to meet him from without. In this naturally given initiation, man receives his deepest inwardness as it flows towards him from the objective reaches of the world periphery; his truest and most intimate Self comes to meet him from the farthest, infinite horizon of his world existence, in and through the cosmic-human being of the etheric Christ.

This event can become the greatest possible call for free development of the inner spiritual activity of the consciousness soul, because man learns in the experience to recognize himself ever more in his true nature. The profoundest impulses of will and knowledge are ignited, spurring him to ever-deepening self-knowledge, because he realizes that this meeting is in truth the beginning of an infinite self-meeting, revealing the heights and depths of the forming process of human nature from the remotest past to the farthest future.

From an anthroposophical, spiritual-scientific point of view, every experience, be it sensible or supersensible, is a given and therefore, as such, an external fact. So long as it is not thoroughly penetrated and transformed by the active and independent cognitive thinking and imagining forces of the consciousness soul, it remains a personal, subjective event that, notwithstanding its personal value, cannot become in this form a matter of scientific study. For spiritual science, therefore, such an experience must first become an object of anthroposophical research. This means that a mutual relation must be established between the spiritual-scientific activity and the Christ experience it investigates. This constitutes the life-question and task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. On the one hand, it has to ever again re-present and so re-member this experience in reflective and discursive thinking. That is, it has to despiritualize it in order to bring it down to ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, it has to use the inner forces of this experience in order to continually spiritualize the spiritual-scientific activity and so transform it into a fully modern and living path of anthroposophical initiation. The weaving together of the opposite, mutually complementary and enhancing movements of the despiritualizing of the modern Christ experience and the spiritualizing of spiritual scientific activity is the center of the Michael-Christ event of the present Michael age in the beginning of the new cosmic age of light.

It is, therefore, the nature of the unique spiritual situation of the human soul itself at the threshold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that determines not only the content of the present book but, above all, its form. The nature of the common Christ experiences consists in the personal salvation of the single human soul. Such an event is a fully justified end in and for itself. As was mentioned above, Rudolf Steiner characterized this experience also as a natural initiation through which man will have a direct knowledge of what until today only the initiate knew. But from the anthroposophical point of view this natural initiation fact can have a further significance, namely, by becoming a starting point for anthroposophical initiation science. This requires the development of a suitable method, the aim of which will be to transform the naturally given initiation experience into a fully individualized spiritual-scientific experience and knowledge.

Rudolf Steiner's spiritual-scientific investigations have shown that in St Paul's experience at the gates of Damascus these two aspects came together for the first time in human evolution. Paul's experience was a naturally given Christ event, but he was also an 'initiate of the old Cabala' 5 prior to this experience. In his case a naturally given initiation experience merged with old initiation knowledge, and his life task was to form out of the two the higher and new synthesis of the Christian path of initiation. This synthesis was his new spiritual creation. That is, the Pauline, consciously investigated Christ experience is the Ur-example of the self-conscious and free, active mutual reversal of the naturally given Christ initiation and the knowledge of Christ by means of modern anthroposophical initiation science.

In the twenty-first century Anthroposophy will increasingly become, in the course of its natural evolution, an expression of the flowing together of a growing number of individualized spiritual-scientific paths. Accordingly, the aim of the research presented here is to offer an intrinsically and essentially incomplete, purposefully experiential and experimentally Open example of such an individual anthroposophical path. In order to prepare its presentation, however, I will first describe the spiritual-scientific method of research which underlies it. This description can be introduced through the following consideration.

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