Second Coming, Page 4

When we speak, however, of “going to the Father,” we must remember that the Father is present in the lowest elements of mineral-physical creation. Indeed, if one contemplates the course of the human being between death and rebirth, it can be seen that one expands into larger areas rather than leaving the former (see I-33) so that one has the feeling of encompassing the entirety of (i.e., being one with) what is within one’s growing orbit (see Effects of the Christ-Impulse upon the Historical Course of Human Evolution/The Occult Background of the Christmas Festival [ECIH], The Etheric Being in the Physical Human Being [EBPHB], and The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations [DIN], Lect. 11, 4-20-15). How often we are told by Steiner that spiritual bodies interpenetrate, thus occupying the “same space” from the human perspective. At each level of Christ’s descent, he is assisted, and works through and in conjunction with, the spiritual Hierarchy at that level (see I-18), thus having “twelve legions of angels” (Mt 26,53) at his disposal while at the lowest level. Our concept of “leaving” one sphere and “going” to another is limited to the mineral-physical where two bodies cannot occupy the same space. It is not so in the spirit world. The highest is present in all that is.

Now, if Christ, in the fourth Cultural Era, the Greco-Roman, could be comprehended by human beings only in the physical, and if the human being is evolving higher, as the Bible assures us (e.g., 2 Cor 3,18; Phil 3,21), then it is apparent that in the present Cultural Era (see I-24 and I-25) he must be comprehended in the next higher state, namely, the etheric, as Steiner has said. His “First Coming” was thus in the physical, and his Second Coming will thus be in the etheric.

Let us look now at what Steiner said about the matter. While in all of the works cited above, Steiner speaks of the coming perceptions of Christ in the etheric world as the Second Coming, the most complete assembly of lectures thereon is in The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric (RCE). In the first lecture he speaks of Paul’s Damascus road experience as a vision (as of one “untimely born,” 1 Cor 15,8) of the etheric Christ, a first fruit, in a manner of speaking, of what is now more and more to be experienced by humans who develop the necessary organ of perception. The nature of Paul’s knowledge was based upon his own experience rather than what he learned from others (Gal 1,11-12). He was thus, along with others who had seen the risen Christ, an etheric “eyewitness,” the only type relied upon by Luke (Lk 1,2). And just as Paul did not rely upon any written or spoken word, neither will those who now come to experience Christ in the etheric world, by raising themselves up to an etheric vision of him (Jer 31,33; 2 Cor 3; Heb 10,15-16). Souls who fail in this incarnation to prepare themselves will have to wait until they are again incarnated and will thus lose the increased consciousness during their long term in the spiritual world. The face of the Earth will have changed in the interim.

In lectures 2 through 4 Steiner speaks of spiritual science as a preparation for the new etheric vision; of the part the Maitreya Buddha will play in bringing knowledge of the Christ to humanity 5,000 years after the Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama; of why reincarnation was not to be taught in Christianity for 2,000 years; and of various mysteries of the universe, especially those dealing with cometary and lunar influences.

We have already seen in the journey of the Prodigal Son, i.e., humanity in its Fall, redemption and reascent, how stages of descent must be transformingly retraced upon reascent. Steiner opens lecture 5 by saying:

There is a certain connection between the past and the future in the evolution of humanity.. . . There is a law according to which certain events are repeated in the evolution of humanity.

Steiner often mentions this. He speaks here of having done so in the last Stuttgart lectures (which do not seem to be in the Bibliography), and does so again later the same year in Occult History (OH), Lect. 3. More explicitly (RCE, Lect. 5, p. 79), he says,

It is an eternal cosmic law that each individual must perform a particular deed repeatedly. He must, above all, perform the deed twice—one time as though doing the opposite of the other time. What Abraham brought down for humanity into physical consciousness he will carry up again for humanity into the spiritual world.

Immediately prior to this extract he had said,

We stand, therefore, directly before such an evolution. We are retracing our steps, so to speak, along the path of evolution. With Abraham, consciousness of God was led into the brain; as we enter into a new age of Abraham, this consciousness of God is in turn led out of the brain and, during the next 2,500 years, we shall come gradually to know human beings who will have what the exalted secrets of initiation yield as the great spiritual teachings about the mysteries of the universe. Just as the spirit of Moses ruled in the age that has run its course up to our time, so does the spirit of Abraham now begin to reign in order that, having led humanity into a consciousness of God within the world of the senses, he may now lead humanity out again.

And immediately after the first extract he said,

We thus see that we are living in important, essential conditions in this age, and we understand that to disseminate spiritual science today is not something one does by preference but something demanded by our times.

Notably, Abraham is the one who led humanity into the age of the intellect and vanishing clairvoyance, approximately 2,000 B.C. Now, approximately that length of time after Christ, spiritual science (founded by Steiner to publicly reveal and expand upon what had been given privately and esoterically by Christian Rosenkreutz at the threshold of the Age of the Consciousness Soul; see I-19, I-24 and I-25) is the means of leading humanity back toward a new clairvoyance combined with intellect.³