Christ and the Human Soul: The Meaning of Life – The Spiritual Foundation of Morality – Anthroposophy and Christianity (CW 155) (Volume 155)

Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner #CW 155

by Rudolf Steiner, Agnes Schneeberg-De Steur (Translator), Bastiaan Baan (Introduction)

In these four remarkable lectures, Steiner contends that Christ has been working on the behalf of humankind since the very beginnings of human existence, long before the inception of Christianity. Steiner indicates how--in the ancient mystery schools and in the miraculous events depicted in the Old Testament--the guiding hand of Christ shaped and developed human cognition.

The ultimate divine intervention took place with the incarnation of Christ in human form, which culminated in the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this grand event, the opportunity arose for every soul to develop immortal individuality and "I" awareness. Steiner clarifies the difficult concepts of sin, guilt, and karma and explains the meaning of "forgiveness of sins" and the "resurrection of the body." Looking forward to future great periods of evolution, he speaks of the separation of humanity into the two races of good and evil and describes how Christ will continue to work in that critical time of human development.

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1984

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


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.