Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Steiner Rudolf
Title : From Jesus to Christ Ten lectures given in Karlsruhe from 5th to 14th October, 1911
Year : 1911

Link download : Steiner_Rudolf_-_From_Jesus_to_Christ.zip

Lecture 1. The object of these lectures is to place before you an idea of the Christ- Event in so far as it is connected with the historical appearance of the Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So many questions of the spiritual life are bound up with this subject that the choice of it will enable us to make a wide survey of the realm of Spiritual Science and its mission, and to discuss the significance of the Anthroposophical Movement for the spiritual life of the present time. We shall also have the opportunity of learning what the content of religion is. And since this content must spring from the common heritage of mankind, we shall seek to know it in its relation to the deeper sources of religious life, and to what the sources of occult science have to tell us concerning the foundation of all religious and philosophic endeavours. Much that we shall have to discuss will seem to lie very far from the theme itself, but it will all lead us back to our main purpose. We shall best come to a more precise understanding of our subject — modern religious life on the one hand and the spiritual-scientific deepening of spiritual life on the other — if we glance at the origins both of religious life and of occult spiritual life in recent centuries. For as regards spiritual development in Europe during this period, we can discern two directions of thought which have been cultivated with the utmost intensity: on the one hand an exaggeration of the Jesus- Principle, and on the other a most careful, conscientious preservation of the Christ-Principle. When we place before our minds these two recent streams, we must see in the exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle a great and dangerous error in the spiritual life of those times, and on the other side a movement of deep significance, a movement which seeks above all the true paths and is careful to avoid the paths of error. From the outset, therefore, in our judgment of two entirely different spiritual movements, we have to ascribe serious errors to one of them and most earnest efforts after truth to the other. ...