GA 131: From Jesus to Christ

From Jesus to Christ is a cycle of ten lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Karlsruhe between 5 and 14 October 1911, catalogued in his collected works as GA 131. The cycle sets out to do something its title states almost as a problem to be solved: to trace how the human being Jesus of Nazareth becomes the bearer of the cosmic Being that Steiner calls the Christ. Rather than retelling the Gospel story, Steiner approaches it from the side of spiritual research, asking what actually took place in the constitution of a human being so that, for three years, a being of the rank of the Sun could live and act through earthly flesh. The result is one of his most closely argued Christological cycles, written for an audience already familiar with anthroposophical ideas about the bodies of the human being and the great cosmic ages of evolution.

Place in Steiner's Work

GA 131 belongs to the dense series of Christ-centred lecture cycles Steiner gave in the years around 1911 and 1912, when he was working out in public a spiritual-scientific account of the events the Gospels describe. It stands close to the lectures on the individual Gospels, especially the cycle on the Gospel of St. John, and it presupposes much of what those earlier courses had laid down. The opening lecture famously contrasts two European spiritual streams: the exaggeration of the Jesus-principle that Steiner identifies with Jesuit will-training, and the careful cultivation of the Christ-principle he attributes to Rosicrucianism. This is not incidental polemic. It sets the method of the whole cycle, because Steiner wants to show that genuine knowledge of the Christ-Event arises by way of cognition and freedom, never by coercion of the will.

The cycle also points forward. Its central claim, that in our own age the Christ takes on a new cosmic office, gives GA 131 a place in Steiner's account of the future rather than only the past. For students working through the wider body of his Christology, this volume is the bridge between the historical Mystery and what Steiner held to be its continuing, living consequences for humanity.

Karlsruhe is worth noting as the setting. By 1911 Steiner was lecturing to members of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, and within two years that work would lead to the founding of the independent Anthroposophical Society. GA 131 therefore catches Steiner at a moment when he was sharpening the distinctively Christian and Western character of his teaching against the more Eastern emphasis of the movement he had so far belonged to. The very title, with its movement from Jesus toward Christ, signals an intent to ground his spiritual science in the central event of European religious history rather than to set it aside.

Themes and Structure

The ten lectures move from method toward Mystery. After the opening comparison of Jesuit and Rosicrucian training, Steiner turns to how a modern person can come to a direct, inward experience of the Christ. He describes how the path of knowledge loosens the etheric body from the physical body, so that the seeker can encounter, out of his own depths, the very pictures the evangelists set down, the Temptation on the mountain and the scene in Gethsemane among them. The point Steiner presses is that these can be experienced as inner truths, not merely received as reports.

From there the cycle reaches its first great turning. Steiner introduces what he calls the new event of our time: in our epoch the Christ becomes the Lord of Karma, taking up an office connected with the balancing of human destiny. In his words, recorded in the fourth lecture,

in our epoch Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for human evolution.

The middle lectures then build the anthropological foundation. Steiner takes up the Pauline contrast of the first and second Adam, the corruptible body inherited from the one and the incorruptible body received from the other. For Paul, he reminds his listeners, the risen Christ was the second Adam, the source of an immortal body just as the first Adam was the source of the mortal one. To make sense of this he introduces a concept central to the whole cycle: the Phantom of the physical body. The Phantom is the spiritual form-shape that organises the visible substances into a human figure, much as a sculptor's idea governs the marble. It was laid down in germ by the Thrones during the Saturn stage of cosmic evolution and worked upon further through the Sun and Moon stages, so that the mineral matter we eat and see is only its filling. The decay of Adamic humanity is, on this account, the gradual ruin of that Phantom, and the Resurrection is its restoration in incorruptible form. This is why Steiner can present the Resurrection not as a suspension of natural law but as the recovery of the body's original spiritual archetype.

The later lectures gather these threads around the Mystery of Golgotha itself, set against the Greek, Hebrew and Buddhist understandings of life and death. Steiner returns to his teaching of the two Jesus children and the role of Zarathustra, who through many lives had gazed most deeply into the spirituality of the great world, the Macrocosm. It was the Zarathustra-individuality, Steiner argues, that prepared the bodily nature of the Nathan Jesus until his thirtieth year, so that eyes and hands could endure the substance of a being from the Sun. He describes the three years from the Baptism in the Jordan to the cross as a span in which a human organism, no longer carrying an ordinary human ego, was inhabited solely by the Christ-Individuality, untouched by the Luciferic influences that work in every other person. Because that nature carried no personal ego of its own, what acted through it was the Sun-Being itself, the cosmic Logos drawing near to the Earth.

The closing pair of lectures distinguishes an exoteric path to the Christ, open to every devout soul who turns inwardly toward the Gospel, from an esoteric path of inner schooling, on which the seeker brings forth the Gospel pictures out of his own meditative experience. With that distinction Steiner returns the listener to the question of freedom with which the cycle began. The two paths are not rivals; the second is a deepening of the first, and both are meant to reach the same living reality without ever forcing the will.

Glossary Terms from this Volume

This volume is the primary source behind several entries in the Thalira glossary. Each term below links to its own dedicated entry, where the idea is treated at greater length:

Where to Read It

The full ten-lecture cycle is freely available in English translation. You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete GA 131 course alongside Steiner's other Christological cycles. For a printed or eBook edition, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks, where the cycle has long been kept in print.

Continue Your Study

If this cycle has opened questions for you, several next steps within Thalira's library will deepen the work:

  • Begin with the entry for Mystery of Golgotha, the event at the centre of GA 131, then follow its links outward into the surrounding Christology.
  • Browse the full Steiner glossary to see how the Christ-Impulse, the Sun Logos and the doctrine of the bodies connect to the wider vocabulary of spiritual science.
  • Trace the bodily teaching through the entry on the Second Adam, which carries Steiner's account of the corruptible and incorruptible body forward from Paul.
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