1 lecture, Zürich, October 16, 1918 (CW 182) “Once one has passed through powerlessness and re-finds oneself, one also finds Christ. Before we can gain access to the Christ Impulse we must plumb the depths of our own feelings of insignificance, and this can only happen when we view our strengths and capacities without any pride.” ― Rudolf Steiner How does one find the Christ today? Steiner emphasizes the importance of working toward knowing one's Self ("I"-being), the significance of experiencing powerlessness, and the eventual resurrection from powerlessness. In this important lecture, Steiner also discusses the ancient Academy of Gondishapur, the significance of the year 666, the mission of Islam, and the crucial consequences of the Ecumenical Council of 869.
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.