עברית The Christ will appear for the Earth when almost everyone has abandoned Him; when all that mankind knows of Him is His name'.
The Modern Damascus Experience
The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia
From Chapter 1:
The Ur-Phenomena of the Modern Christ Experience
Paul’s Christ Experience and the Birth of Christian Platonism
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 Phari- sees 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 Jerusa- lem 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 mankind 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.
Two thousand years ago, in the esoteric school that Dionysius the Areopagite, the pupil of Paul, founded in Athens, the two sun streams were connected for the first time on the earth: the Christ that descended to the earth from the sun in the Mystery of Golgotha, beginning His activity in the spiritual aura of the earth, and the sun stream of Michael’s cosmic intelligence descending after him to become human thinking. Through Paul and Dionysius, the Platonic stream of Greek thinking, still connected to the Mysteries of Eleusis, was united for the first time with the Christ, and this united stream continued to spiritualize the evolution of thinking in Europe until Rudolf Steiner transformed it into modern spiritual science in the Philosophy and Freedom at the beginning of the new Age of Michael. And our central task since the end of the twentieth cen- tury is to unite Rudolf Steiner’s creation to the etheric appearance of the Christ, making anthroposophy in the twenty-first century into a revelation of Christ’s new appearance. Let us, therefore, briefly survey the main stages of the development of this united Michaelic-Christian, earthly-human Sun impulse in the last 2000 years.
In the esoteric school of Paul and Dionysius the Areopagite in Athens, Platonic and Neo-Platonic Christianity was founded. ‘Under him [Dionysius] the school had its time of blossoming, because Dionysius taught these mysteries in a wholly special way, while St Paul spread the teaching exoterically.’
We cannot describe this school in greater detail now, and only note that our investigations of its mysteries were guided by the fact that ‘when we study the Eleusinian Mysteries (that were extirpated root and branch), it is evident that in the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha the Risen Christ was Himself present in the Mysteries in order to reform them’, a process experienced with great intensity in the present etheric second Mystery of Golgotha.
A similar process is taking place today, as the etherically Risen Christ is present in the new Michaelic Mysteries, inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner in 1923-4, to inspire us how to reform them, as he reformed the ancient mysteries. The possibility to resurrect old anthroposophy in the twenty-first century is the result of this continued spiritual reformation and transformation.
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 spiritual support he needed to consolidate and ground the experience of illumination which he had on the sea coming back from Constantinople 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 of John of Salisbury, Bernard of Chartres, Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis, who taught 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]’.
In Chartres the esoteric experience and method, formed by Paul and Dionysius directly out to the first etheric Christ event, lit up again and spiritualized thinking through its union with Pla- tonism and Aristotelism. It kept the last vestiges of the original etheric Christ experience alive on the earth until the fifteenth century. And it had to wait until the end of the 20th century, to light up again on the earth, when ‘we are already [at the end of the twentieth century] after “the appearance of the Sun” that took place in etheric Imagination for earthly life. The Christ will appear for the Earth when almost everyone has abandoned Him; when all that mankind knows of Him is His name.
The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael and Anthroposophia
1st chapter: The Ur-Phenomena of the Modern Christ Experience
Paul’s Christ Experience and the Birth of Christian Platonism