עברית ‘We have to strip the world bare of its secrets and drag it into the desert of concepts, reiterating all the time that we are anthroposophists!’
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
The Second part of the First lecture of the Christmas Cycle:
World History in the Light of the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael
Delivered in Forum-3, Stuttgart, December 24, 2023- January 1, 2024
First Lecture, Second Part
Christ’s Gift of the Key of Death
‘We have to strip the world bare of its secrets and drag glorious works of art into the desert of concepts, reiterating all the time that we are anthroposophists!’
As we described in the first part of the lecture, in the knowledge-dramatic process of spiritual science, the work with this double-edged sword of the I, the Ego, the gift of the Christ to humanity in our time, became the foundation of the modern knowledge process. It begins in the free spiritual activity of the I in physical world, schooled in The Philosophy of Freedom, described also in my book, The Three Meetings, and build the true spiritual I and self through the forces acquired by the individuation of the gift of Christ’s Ego. With this true I one could develop the cognitive spiritual forces to research the etheric appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ. So one can say that in this Imagination that the belove pupil John formed out of his supersensible meeting with the resurrected Christ, we have a most exact portrayal of the gift of the Ego of Christ that he offers today to each person. By means of the forces of His powerful Ego force, we work also with the other forces of the Christ, individualize them to make them our own, and create the knowledge drama of the Second Coming with their help, knowing that it is not our ordinary I, but the I AM of Christ who works, weaves, speaks and acts through us.
The Gift of the Key of Death
After describing the reception and individuation of the gift of the Ego of Christ, we turne to verse 18 of the first chapter of Revelation, in which Christ showed John how His death and resurrection became part of His eternal Being:
I am the living one, I was dead, and now behold I am alive for ever and ever. I have the keys of death and evil.
In the knowledge-dramatic process this part of the Imagination became a most essential element. Through the indwelling I of Christ, when it becomes an operative power in the true I, we realize inwardly how the struggle with the forces of death and evil belongs very much to the work of this Being, who first procured the key of death through the mystery of death and was resurrected through death in the Mystery of Golgotha, and the key of evil in the second Mystery of Golgotha, when He went through evil and was resurrected through evil. It was clear, that in His present etheric appearance, He offers man the two keys as an expression of the two mysteries of Golgotha, the physical and the etheric. Let us indicate briefly what role the ‘keys’ of death and evil have in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.
Where do we meet the forces of death? Most immediately in our wakeful daily consciousness, thinking, and perception. In every moment that we open our eyes to see, and represent what we see, smell, taste, and touch, where we create mental pictures of things out there, everything is represented, immediately, as objects separated in space from us. For modern people, it is simply a given fact that everything we perceive is outside us, and is not us. Also, the books that we read, that are printed in physical matter, that contain the holiest and most wonderful content and spiritual revelations, are still, to begin with, given to our external sensory perception and are represented in our consciousness as mental representations, which we take in with our ordinary thinking, and understand with our intellect. As Rudolf Steiner always said: it is necessary that in the present stage of the evolution of consciousness and freedom, people will be able - to begin with – to understand the results of spiritual research by means of their common intellect. Without it, no one can progress to develop truly modern clairvoyance, because this clairvoyance must be as exact and logical as our modern thinking, mathematics, and science.
Nevertheless, this is only the first – necessary - but only the first step, and if you get stuck there, you will not truly experience what spiritual science is. Therefore, Rudolf Steiner also repeatedly warned his students from the dangers of intellectualism. He said: we live in a time, where everything that we experience spiritually must be transformed into ordinary concepts and representations, so that it will be available to all people. But the other side of this, is that it must be killed and thus transformed into those Ahrimanic creations called books. We must do it for the sake of our time, but it is a tremendous sacrifice too, and our heart bleeds when we do it, but we should know that we kill the living and creative spirit when we do it. Let us hear how he described it, which he did only rarely, being so compassionate and careful not to hurt our tender human sensitivities.
In one lecture Rudolf Steiner allowed himself to be a little more direct in this regard. He said that there is nothing more terrible than experiencing the real human being, the cosmic threefoldness of the human being, and then having to describe it in the bare intellectual concepts of our time. This is a path that we must tread today, if we choose to bring spiritual knowledge to the most materialistic and intellectual age that mankind has ever entered into, or to give up thinking and understanding of spirituality altogether and thus let humanity’s connection to the spiritual world decline and become wholly Luciferic and Ahrimanic. If you feel and experience the real spirit, in nature and human nature, and then you come to a place where some anthroposophists have written those schemes on the blackboard, this really gives you the shiver of death in your heart. This is a remarkable statement by the gentle Doctor, who kept so many things to himself:
Thinking of the human being in all his majesty, I can scarcely think of anything more horrible than to be surrounded by living people, and to be in this hall and have on the blackboard beside yourself a chart of the seven principles of man, but so indeed it must be. [1]
It is a spiritual sacrifice for the modern spiritual investigator because the living experience is part of him, and therefore, when he transforms it into dead concepts, he is killing something in himself, in his own soul and bodies; he must kill it in order to make it dead for us, so that we can think and understand it with our ordinary thinking. This is the real process. He has to kill the spiritual experiences, and the knowledge derived from it, transform and translate the living spiritual life into modern abstract concepts, expressing it in the physical world, and let it be printed in physical books. This is necessary for our time, but the real challenge is this: are we going to resurrect this knowledge from the Ahrimanic books and the grave of the brain and return it to its cosmic life? Are we going to do the work necessary to take this knowledge back to the source of cosmic intelligence - the Michael-Sun wisdom - where it came from? We must feel, he says, in deeply shocking words - if we don’t take them merely into our dead head but into our active hearts, that
Anthroposophy is for us a cross and a sacrifice: that, in a sense, it takes away from us practically all the living substance of the world secrets that humanity has ever possessed, for everything that truly lives in the course of the evolution of mankind and all of the divine world as well, Anthroposophy must - to begin with - be a field of corpses. [2]
This is the truth; it is a powerful statement of such a fundamental truth. And this is the reason why in the knowledge drama this must always be experienced as the first impulse to resurrect the old and dying anthroposophy, sunk now for more than a century in the grave of civilization, which is the brain-grave of each one of us. Because the first thing, that no one can escape if he studies the literature of spiritual science, is to take consciously the fate of becoming an arid and intellectual anthroposophist, says Rudolf Steiner,
We have to strip the world bare of its secrets and drag glorious works of art into the desert of concepts, reiterating all the time that we are anthroposophists! [3]
And you can understand from these candid statements, why he was not very welcome in the anthroposophical societies, old and new, and was eventually thrown out of the anthroposophical society he founded himself! But the good news is that, though this process is inevitable in our time, other times are now at hand, and humans who dedicate themselves to this task, will find out that the living Christ is standing by them, to help them spiritualize dead anthroposophy from its century long decay in the grave of civilization. But in the present age of Michael, if we wish to combine spirituality and intelligence - which is Michael’s main goal - we must learn to both think and perceive the spiritual scientific truths. This means that we must go actualize this death and resurrection process in each moment in which we think, and do, anthroposophy. And this is the practical spiritual meaning of learning to handle and actualize the key of death, that the etheric Christ offers today to humanity.
If we do this, on a regular basis, then the good news is as follows:
Anthroposophy is a corpse which rises out of the grave, and celebrates its resurrection. Nobody will rejoice to find the world being stripped of its mysteries, but on the other hand, nobody will feel and know the creative power inherent in the mysteries of the world, as truly as those who realize that the source of their creative power flows from Christ. The Christ who, having carried the cross to the place of the skull, Golgotha, passed through death. This is the cross in the sphere of knowledge which Anthroposophy carries in order to experience death, and then from within the grave to see a new world of life rising up. [4]
This is the reason why, in the development of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming since the 80’s of last century, I had, first of all, as a first step, to work on the individuation of the forces of the Ego given by the Christ, symbolized by the double-edged sword of His mouth, and then come to terms with the first gift that He gives: the key of death, with which this work can be fulfilled. He gives humanity today this gift, the power to work rightly with the lord of death, to honour it, fully accept its true mission in human evolution, to transform death, and to resurrect it as a new force in the sphere of modern spiritual knowledge, feeling, will, and social and cultural life. And we feel that this gift was fully individualized when death has become our truest friend and ally, no longer enemy, but shows us its other side - the side transformed and spiritualized by Christ - becoming a force of ‘eternal soul awakening’. Rudolf Steiner says: the people that will do this in the future - his future is our present time - will see how death works on them.
They will have death as their constant companion... they will regard this having-death-beside-one as something natural. To have awakened in oneself the powers of eternal soul wakefulness means: to have death as a good friend and constant companion always by one’s side. [5]
But this gift of the key of death must not only be received, and kept in our gifts closet! One can be given the most wonderful gifts, and one can say, ‘Wow, what a wonderful gift, I can put in on the shelf to decorate my house! But this means that one doesn’t really take it. Spiritual gifts like this, are seeds; they are living spirit potentials; His gift must be cultivated and nourished in our soul, to individualize and actualize it in our process of knowledge. And then you can resurrect it out of the grave of your brain, as I also showed in my book The Three Meetings. You can find some precise explanations of this process also in Cognitive Yoga, where it is the main subject of the book. This means, that if we want to experience the Christ today in his new appearance, listen to his words, and perceive his deeds, we have first of all to accept the gift of His Self and use it to take from His hand also the gift of the key of death and make it our own, and go through death in order to meet him again, in the light of spiritual knowledge. This is something He offers to each person in our time, to become a free and independent, creative partner with Him, to go with Him and do what He does. He says: for 2000 years I spoke to human beings who were still babies, in the language of religious faith and feeling, which was right for the human babies, but now we have entered into the age of human maturity in the milky way; the age of freedom, and the consciousness soul unfolds its high spiritual forces, so now humans can join me as partners and do what I do, ‘and greater things’ - as He told His disciples in the last supper - and together we shall accomplish the infinitely creative and uplifting future goals of humanity and the sun-becoming-earth.
[1] Lecture of 12 December 1911 (GA 286).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Lecture of 9 September 1924 (GA 346).