עברית When we speak about the present Christ experience to the learned ‘Pharisees and doctors of spiritual science’, we find ourselves in the same situation of Paul, when he spoke to the Pharisees in Jerusalem and the philosophers in Athens.
The Three Meetings
Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia
The Ur-Phenomena of the Modern Christ Experience: Paul’s Christ Experience and the Birth of Christian Platonism
It was in Paul’s esoteric school in Athens, that the first seeds of human thinking, born on earth through Plato and Aristotle, were connected to the Christ impulse for the first time, and continued to inspire and spiritualize thinking up to the late Middle Ages and, indeed, right into the dawn of the age of the Consciousness Soul, as the life and writings of Nicolaus Cusanus show. He could find, in John Scotus Erigena’s Latin translations of Dionysius, the spiri- tual support he needed to consolidate and ground the experience of illumination which he had on the sea coming back from Con- stantinople to Venice (1437). His De Docta Ignorantia (1440) was based on the writings of ‘the pupil of St Paul’, as he used to refer to Dionysius.
As Rudolf Steiner showed in his lectures on Aquinas and in the karma lectures in 1924, both major streams of thought in the West, in their highest medieval expression in the Platonic-Christian teachings in the school of Chartres in the twelfth century, and in the Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, were still deeply enlivened and animated by the spiritual forces of esoteric Christianity that started in the Pauline stream of Dionysius. For example, in the karma lectures Rudolf Steiner says that when the Platonic teachers from Chartres returned to the spiritual world at the end of the twelfth century, ‘the principle of the Mysteries had ascended to the heavens and sent down its Sun-rays thence upon all that was working on the earth [in the Aristotelian stream]’.
It must be emphasized that the anthroposophical Platonic-Aristotelian essence exchange since the end of last century, is possible only due to the present Damascus experience. The meeting with the etheric Christ alone offers the new spiritual forces, that make the resurrection of anthroposophy possible. In this respect too, the Pauline Christ experience from 2000 years ago is the archetype of the modern Christ experience.
Paul was equally schooled in esoteric Jewish lore and Greek philosophy. Confronting the Jews, he experienced the same violent rejection that Jesus experienced shortly before him, from ‘the Pharisees and doctors of the law’. About them Jesus said that they ‘hold the keys to the kingdom of heaven, but don’t use them to enter the spiritual worlds, nor let anybody else enter’. The same was Paul’s experience with the learned Greek philosophers in Athens. When he came to Athens, he addressed the Greek philosophers in the Areopagus sermon, described by his pupil, Luke. He began it by the historically significant words:
‘As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you’.
When we speak about the present Christ experience to the learned ‘Pharisees and doctors of spiritual science’, we find ourselves in the same situation of Paul, when he spoke to the Pharisees in Jerusalem and the philosophers in Athens. A century ago, modern spiritual science was given to humanity to prepare the Second Coming, as in the time of Christ’s first coming Jerusalem and Athens prepared the first coming. And yet, when we speak 2000 years after Paul about the modern Damascus event, a whole century after the death of Rudolf Steiner, we find very little understanding, not to mention fierce opposition. We realize that the living Christ is as unknown today as He was to the people of ancient Greek and Judea in the time of Jesus and Paul. For this reason, I placed the post-mortem words of the Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, as the motto to my book, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century: the occult significance of the 12 years 1933-1945 in the light of spiritual science, published in 1993:
‘There we are already [at the end of the twentieth century] after ‘the appearance of the Sun’ that has to take place in etheric Imagination for earthly life. The Christ will appear for the Earth when almost everyone has abandoned Him; when all that man- kind knows of Him is His name.’
The New Experience of the Supersensible was published in 1995 to describe, as comprehensively as I could at that time, ‘the appearance of the Sun’, that had indeed taken place in etheric Imagination, and was and still is largely ignored. In preparing the 2nd edition after some 30 years, I do so with the hope that in the third decade of the twenty-first century it will find some free and courageous human hearts to read and experience the Michaelic signs of the time.
Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia