1 lecture, Stuttgart, March 6, 1910 (CW 118) "The being whom we call Christ once walked the earth in flesh and blood at the beginning of our era. He will never again return in a physical body, for that was a unique event and will not be repeated. But He will come again in an etheric form in the period I have mentioned. People will learn to perceive Christ by virtue of growing towards him through this etheric perception." Many contemporaries of Jesus Christ were unaware of his incarnation on Earth at the beginning of the modern era. Moreover, today, says Rudolf Steiner, many remain ignorant of the most important event of our the appearance of Christ in the etheric, life realm of the Earth. Fundamentalists and millennial groups are awaiting the second physical incarnation, whereas atheists and materialists deny spirit altogether. Nevertheless, an incisive transformation is occurring in the human soul that will lead to an emerging clairvoyance. Just as Paul perceived Christ at Damascus, it is appropriate that every human being should experience him today. This lecture is translated from the German book Das Ereignis der Christus-Erscheinung in der ätherischen Welt (GA 118).
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.