How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again? is the English title of GA 187, a cycle of nine lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered across the turn of the year from 22 December 1918 to 1 January 1919. The opening address was given in Basel; the remaining eight were spoken at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner offered these talks in the raw aftermath of the First World War, and the shadow of that catastrophe presses on every page. The subtitle often attached to the cycle, "The Ahrimanic Falsification of the Christ Impulse," signals its central concern: how a genuine relationship to the Christ can be recovered in an age that Steiner believed had lost the older, instinctive routes to the divine. Framed around the Christmas and New Year festivals, the lectures move between the intimate question of Christ's birth in the individual soul and the vast question of what humanity is meant to do with the spiritual forces newly pouring into earthly life.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 187 belongs to the final phase of Steiner's teaching, the years between 1917 and 1925 when his Christology and his reading of the modern crisis grew sharpest. It was given only weeks after the armistice of November 1918, and it stands close in time to his lectures on the threefold social organism, the social reform movement he launched in early 1919. Readers who know that social work will hear its first notes here, in Steiner's insistence that the war was the outer face of a hidden soul-catastrophe. The cycle also continues the Christology he had been building since the Gospel lecture courses of a decade earlier. Where those earlier cycles read the Gospels event by event, GA 187 asks a more anxious question: now that the old paths to the spirit have closed, by what means does a modern person, schooled in science and stripped of instinctive faith, actually meet the Christ again? The answer Steiner develops here, tying the Christ to a particular way of thinking, marks the volume as a bridge between his esoteric Christology and the practical, social concerns that would occupy his last years.
The setting matters to the mood of the cycle. Speaking at the newly built Goetheanum during Christmas week of 1918, Steiner addressed listeners who had just lived through four and a half years of war, and he refused to treat the season as an occasion for easy comfort. He returns repeatedly to the idea that a truth appearing in history rarely arrives at once in its finished form, often breaking in first in a premature or distorted way before it can be received rightly. This gives the whole volume its double character. On one side stands the tender Christmas imagery of birth and origin; on the other stands a sober reckoning with a civilization Steiner believed had brought disaster on itself. Within his larger body of work, then, GA 187 is one of the clearest places where his esoteric teaching and his reading of contemporary events meet in a single breath. It rewards the reader who wants to see how Steiner connected the most intimate spiritual experience to the public catastrophe of his own decade.
Themes and Structure
The nine lectures form a loose arc rather than a rigid system, yet several themes recur and deepen. The first two talks, both titled "The Birth of Christ in the Human Soul," take the imagery of Christmas as their starting point. Steiner treats birth and death as the two boundary events of physical life, events he calls spiritual mysteries hidden behind a thin wall, and he reads the Christmas picture as a reminder of the soul's spiritual origin. From this intimate ground the cycle widens. The middle lectures trace how Christianity entered the course of earth evolution, how it grew out of the older Mysteries, and how the very constitution of the human soul has changed over the centuries. Steiner describes a long shift from an age when human beings could still perceive repeated earthly lives toward the present age of the consciousness soul, in which intellect has become the dominant faculty.
That dominance is the volume's great problem. In the closing "Old Year and New Year" lectures, Steiner argues that modern scientific thinking, for all its precision, produces only images and specters of reality rather than reality itself. He calls this dissecting, defining habit of mind a mask worn by adversary powers, and he contrasts it with a second, living mode he names formative or shape-producing thinking, the Goethean thinking cultivated in his own spiritual science. The Christ Impulse, in Steiner's account, stands in the direct line of this formative thinking. He offers a striking practical test of whether a person has touched the living Christ: whether the spiritual thoughts they take up warm and change them rather than remaining cold theory.
they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the spiritual world
Steiner grounds this contrast in a picture of the human soul in layers. Below the surface of everyday consciousness, he suggests, a new spiritual current has been rising since the close of the nineteenth century, carrying with it what he calls the Spirits of Personality now moving toward the role of creators. Modern consciousness, well schooled in science, sits above this current and tends to resist it, treating the soul as a closed room rather than a receiving instrument. The whole task of the age, as Steiner frames it, is to let what stirs below flow up into waking awareness instead of walling it off. He is candid that this is not a comfortable path. To perceive these spiritual realities is to feel oneself drawn into a genuine struggle rather than lifted into blissful vision, and much of the cycle is spent preparing the listener for that seriousness.
Running beneath all of this is Steiner's diagnosis of the war. He names public figures of the day and argues that catastrophe follows when people in influential positions refuse to recognize the spiritual forces working through them, meeting the incoming spiritual wave with a purely mechanical intellect. A person who can only dissect and define, he warns, becomes numb to what surges within, and that numbness at scale is what a soul-catastrophe looks like from the inside. Set against this is the recovery of reincarnation as a living idea. Steiner argues that Christianity once had the task of holding back humanity's older consciousness of repeated earthly lives so that each single life could be met with full earnestness, and that the present moment calls for that consciousness to return. The cycle closes not with consolation but with a task: to think in a way that keeps the human being whole, and so to find the Christ again as an active force rather than an inherited creed.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 187 for the following entry, which unfolds one of the cycle's core images in more detail:
This term serves as a hub for the theme within our library. Following it will lead you to related ideas across Steiner's Christology, including the Mystery of Golgotha, the consciousness soul, and the Christ Impulse, each of which GA 187 touches in turn.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 187 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation of the cycle alongside the original German. For a bound edition, or to check current print and reference availability, search the publisher at SteinerBooks. As always, our study guide is meant to orient you before you turn to Steiner's own words, not to stand in their place.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas GA 187 raises, you might follow any of these paths through the library:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the Christ Impulse, the consciousness soul, and the Mystery of Golgotha connect across many of Steiner's volumes.
- Return to the GA Work Library to explore the lecture cycles from the same late period, including Steiner's social and Christological work of 1918 and 1919.
- Begin with the single glossary entry above, The Birth of Christ in the Human Soul, and let its cross-references guide your reading of the cycle itself.