God and Humanity in an Evolving Universe: Rudolf Steiner’s Christology and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming in the Work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

Abstract

This article explores Rudolf Steiner’s Christology within the framework of cosmic evolution, focusing on the Second Coming of Christ as a pivotal metaphysical event. Identifying a scholarly lacuna regarding Steiner’s developmental cosmology and the work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, the study adopts an immanent–synthetic methodology to demonstrate a sacramental, participatory epistemology. The first part unfolds Steiner’s vision of the ‘Mystery of Golgotha’ as a cosmic turning point where a macrocosmic death process is reversed into a resurrection life stream. The second part examines Ben-Aharon’s esoteric development of these ideas into a contemporary ‘knowledge drama of the Second Coming.’ Through the spiritualization of consciousness, Ben-Aharon describes an individual ‘essence-exchange’ with the Christ impulse within the ‘abyss of nothingness’ of our age. Finally, the article discusses the social–metaphysical implications of this drama through the ‘Reversed Cultus.’ Here, the indwelling Christ is recognized as humanity’s ‘Higher Self,’ grounding a new community and ‘school of love’ capable of responding to the technoscientific challenges of mechanization of intelligence and life. By positioning the human being as a co-creative agent in cosmic becoming, the article argues for a renewed understanding of the Second Coming as a new step in humanity’s spiritual evolution.

1. Introduction

The following article presents Rudolf Steiner’s Christology as it relates to his understanding of cosmic evolution, focusing specifically on the role of the Second Coming of Christ and how this element of Steiner’s Christology has been developed by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. The aim of the article is to present Steiner’s understanding of the ‘Christ impulse’ in order to show his conception of humanity as an active and creative agent in cosmic evolution and how it can be related to our time. In the first part we focus on Steiner’s cosmology and Christology, leading to his prophecy about the Second Coming of Christ. The second part of the article centers on the work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon who has developed Steiner’s Christology into a contemporary living ‘knowledge drama of the Second Coming.’ We end by showing how Ben-Aharon leads the knowledge drama into the task of creating a new community and social process founded upon the experience of the Other as the bearer of the Christ as the Higher Self of humanity.

The last decades have seen an increase in academic scholarship on Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy. The publication of a critical edition of Steiner’s writings (in German) by fromann-holzboog (Clement 2013) and the establishment of Steiner Studies, International journal for critical Steiner research (2020) has been instrumental in this development. Recently, the 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference at Harvard Divinity School (Harvard Program for the Evolution of Spirituality 2025) made the presence of Steiner’s anthroposophy in contemporary academic landscape more visible.

Steiner developed anthroposophy through an engagement with German idealism and his later leadership in the Theosophical Society. Significant debate exists regarding the extent to which Steiner’s thinking and cosmology drew from Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine versus his own independent research and experience (Zander 2007; Traub 2011; Skagen 2020). However, Steiner’s system is distinguished by a specifically Western, developmental evolutionary conception; his Christology, in particular, departed significantly from Blavatsky and later theosophical developments.

While there are a number of publications that present Steiner’s Christological and spiritual ideas while aiming toward an anthroposophical audience, there are yet few publications that present Steiner’s work outside of this context. Martin Samson’s The Christology of Rudolf Steiner looks at Steiner’s Christological ideas from within the contemporary theological academy (Samson 2023). However, this dissertation remains within a theological context, without going into the specific intersection of the experiential basis of the ‘knowledge drama,’ as does the work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. This development of Steiner’s Christology remains entirely unexplored in secondary literature.

Ben-Aharon represents a central figure on the anthroposophical scene, with more than ten publications on central themes of anthroposophy, especially Christology and epistemology.1 His first publication, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century (Ben-Aharon 2025), published in 1993, described his spiritual experience of the Second Coming of Christ. In 1994 this was followed by The New Experience of the Supersensible, The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of our Time which presented the epistemological and spiritual–scientific foundations of Ben-Aharon’s research and experience of the Christ event (Ben-Aharon 2007). Subsequent publications have broadened this to other areas of anthroposophy as well as contemporary philosophy and social and cultural issues.

Ben-Aharon’s work has received attention within the anthroposophical commentary. In his review of Ben-Aharon’s 2016 book Cognitive Yoga, David Adams praised Ben-Aharon for writing ‘a most extraordinary book—probably the most extraordinary book that has been written within anthroposophy since the original work of Rudolf Steiner’ (Adams 2018, p. 30). Adams goes on to review, in detail, Ben-Aharon’s development of Steiner’s remarks about a cognitive light yoga of thinking and perception, writing that, after reading Cognitive Yoga, ‘you can start interpreting many things Steiner said in a new light, and it also provides new, fresh, seemingly more experiential understandings’ (Adams 2018, p. 31). This assessment stands in contrast to those of Andreas Neider and Franz Hofner, who reviewed The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century in the German anthroposophical magazine Die Drei on the occasion of the book’s German publication in 1994. Neider finds Ben-Aharon’s work on the one hand to be an ‘extraordinary book’ which ‘impressively challenges the reader’s searching questions and their tentative struggle for insight; it calls upon them to take up a unique, imaginative mode of cognition, to expand upon it, and to arrive at an independent judgment’ (Neider 1994, p. 947). On the other hand, Neider writes critically that ‘everything the author recounts consists of personal and therefore subjective imaginations’ (Neider 1994, p. 946), effectively devaluing any objective spiritual significance of Ben-Aharon’s research. While Neider’s critique of Ben-Aharon is ambivalent, Franz Hofner is outright dismissive, implying that the ‘imagination’ presented in this book is the result of a subjective ‘projection’ (Hofner 1994). Hofner bases his verdict on his own interpretation of Ben-Aharon’s description and language. Hofner also writes that the work lacks any epistemological foundations, despite the fact that Ben-Aharon in the introduction to The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century explicitly relates the results presented in this book to the ‘knowledge drama’ developed and presented in The New Experience of the Supersensible.

Contra these criticisms, we argue in this article that Ben-Aharon’s work consistently develops Steiner’s Christology in relation to our time and that his work is giving precisely the epistemological foundations for approaching the Christ event that Steiner claimed belong to our time. While we will not go into the more technical and experiential details of Ben-Aharon’s depiction of the epistemological transformations—preliminary aspects of this have been published in ‘From Philosophy to Spiritual Science—Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon on Gilles Deleuze and Rudolf Steiner’ published in Steiner Studies (Eftestøl 2025)—we show how his work develops Steiner’s Christology into a contemporary ‘knowledge drama’ which also involves a social dimension, and how this represents a contemporary development and answer to Steiner’s call for engaging with the Christ event of our time. This has not been studied previously, neither in anthroposophical nor academic commentary.

Given the centrality of this topic in Steiner’s thinking, this represents a significant lacuna in the expanding field of Steiner studies. Furthermore, the fact that Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has produced a substantial body of work over three decades—directly engaging with this topic from an esoteric–experiential perspective—offers a compelling basis for exploring how these results relate to and expand upon Steiner’s foundational ideas.

In addressing this lacuna, this study adopts an immanent–synthetic methodology. Rather than a purely contextualizing approach—which often risks reducing esoteric ideas to historical or sociological influences—this method seeks to unfold the internal logic of these works from within their own ‘spiritual–scientific’ framework.

By focusing on the work of Ben-Aharon as a response and contemporary ‘update’ of Steiner’s Christology, specifically with regard to the Second Coming, a mutual illumination of their work can be won. Steiner’s claims about the Second Coming call for an experientially based evaluation and rethinking, and we claim to see this in the work of Ben-Aharon. To contextualize Steiner’s Christology in a broader contemporary theological and philosophical discussion is beyond the scope of this article. However, we aim to contribute to the groundwork for such further study.

In this article we define anthroposophy as a ‘spiritual science,’ that is, a method seeking the ‘spiritualization of consciousness’ through a participatory epistemology, rather than a purely mystical or dogmatic set of beliefs. By prioritizing the internal consistency of the ‘knowledge drama,’ we can more accurately map the metaphysical transitions—such as the ‘essence exchange’ between human and cosmic consciousness—that constitute the core of this developmental Christology. Furthermore, adopting this participatory framework, we aim to demonstrate a sacramental epistemology that reconciles modern spiritual experience with rigorous metaphysical inquiry. We argue that the ‘Knowledge Drama’ is not merely a subjective psychological state, but a valid cognitive path to cosmic reality, wherein human consciousness becomes a site of co-creative participation in the evolution of the world.

2. The Cosmic Perspective: Cosmogenesis and Christology in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy

Steiner outlines his cosmogenesis in the book Occult Science (Geheimwissenschaft, 1910) but describes his conception of cosmic evolution from several perspectives in his lectures and esoteric lessons, using both eastern Hindu as well as western Christian esoteric concepts. In his notes to Edouard Schuré from 1906, Steiner describes the overarching trinitarian idea of humanity’s creation as moving through three different conditions of consciousness. In the first, original state, the human being is one with the divine world, and the human ‘is still a member of a higher order ‘I’’ (Steiner 2001, p. 223). The second state which follows is brought about by the birth of the individual human I together with the gradual loss of the connection to the spiritual world:

This higher [second] state is brought about by the loss of clairvoyance. The observation of an external world begins. The third state of consciousness is brought about by clairvoyance reappearing within the ‘I’ so that the human being becomes a self-conscious clairvoyant.

(Steiner 2001, p. 223)

From this threefoldness, which he says underlies cosmic becoming, Steiner goes on to outline the planetary evolution which he would later publish in his Occult Science in 1910 (Steiner 1989). As has been noted by many scholars, although this cosmology strongly resembles Helena Blavatsky’s seven cosmic ‘rounds’ in The Secret Doctrine (1888) (Blavatsky 2011), Steiner’s cosmic picture incorporates more of the Western developmental evolutionary conception of creation than Blavatsky’s circularity. This idea of fall and redemption as a cosmic–historical process can be found in Western esotericism, such as in the theosophy of Schelling:

History is an epic composed in the mind of God. It has two main parts: one depicting mankind’s egress from its center to its farthest point of displacement; the other, its return. The former is, as it were, history’s Iliad; the latter, its Odyssey. In the one, the direction is centrifugal; in the other, it becomes centripetal. In this way, the grand purpose of the phenomenal world reveals itself in history. The ideas, the spirits, must fall away from their center and insert themselves into the particularity of nature, the general realm of the falling-away, so that afterward, and as particularities, they may return to indifference and, reconciled with it, may be able to abide in it without disturbing it.

(Schelling 2010, pp. 44–45)

In Steiner’s idea of cosmic evolution this complete process—the Iliad and Odyssey together, fall and redemption—is the very creation of the human being and this creation of the human is the creation of freedom within the cosmos. The whole arc or ‘U’ of fall and redemption therefore constitutes one continuous trajectory of cosmic creation through which the Divine world gives birth to the human being before it passes through humanity in the creation of cosmic freedom.

the Logos can only take joy in life that develops independently, life which proceeds from Him, and for which He sacrifices and gives Himself. There begins the process of the development of matter, in which the qualities of the Being [the Logos] are reflected and active, until these mirror-images, as separated forms, begin their own activity and thus spiritualize and ensoul matter more and more, until it becomes one with the Being again.

(Steiner 2001, p. 231)

The first part—Schelling’s Iliad—is a ‘condensation’ of spirit into matter, a ‘process of the development of matter, in which the qualities of the Being [the Logos] are reflected and active’ (Steiner 2001, p. 231). Steiner describes this concretely as three ‘planetary incarnations,’ three previous cosmic actualizations of the universe. The second part or ‘Odyssey’ is the transubstantiation and spiritualization of all of creation, where ‘these mirror-images, as separated forms, begin their own activity and thus spiritualize and ensoul matter more and more, until it becomes one with the Being again’ (Steiner 2001, p. 231). Humanity thus returns to the creative source as a communion between humanity and the Logos of the Divine world, incorporating itself as a new tenth hierarchy of the heavenly choir of creation. ‘These forms all lead their own separate existences and pass through the cycle of evolution in order to—as highly developed individualities—become one again with the Logos, who receives through them the richness of experience’ (Steiner 2001, p. 231). This ascending process is likewise outlined as three coming actualizations or incarnations of a progressively spiritualized universe, each mirroring a previous one in its nature.

For Steiner the very pivot where the process of particularization and individuation is reversed into one of integration and reconciliation—where the fall of Adam is reversed into the creation of a new Adam of the future—is the incarnation of the Christ.

Thus, we are to view the Christ Event on earth as the reversal of the process within the world of monads that took place with ‘Adam’. Paul expresses this quite clearly when he calls ‘Christ’ the ‘reversed Adam’. The external historical event is merely the actual symbol [tatsächliche Symbol] for the inner spiritual process.

(Steiner 2001, p. 71).

The mystery of Golgotha is ‘the turning-point of time’ (Steiner 1994), and from the living forces of Christ working from within nature, historical time, and humans themselves, humanity receives the impulse of its gradual ascending process of redemption and transubstantiation. The creation of a new Heaven and a new Earth is therefore a process of spiritual evolution, growing forth from the old earth and the old cosmos.

As Martin Samson writes, Steiner’s evolutionary Christology bears resemblance to Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of Christogenesis and the Omega Point in cosmic evolution. For de Chardin ‘science, in this case, evolutionary theory, has infused new blood into Christianity,’ making possible the view of redemption as process being fulfilled in a historical evolution (Samson 2023, p. 39). Teilhard de Chardin conceives of the Omega point as what ‘increasingly pulls evolutionary trajectories into similar directions […] culminating in Christ as the final in-volution of the universe’ (Lindholm et al., forthcoming). The idea that, through the mystery of Golgatha ‘Christ invests himself organically with the very majesty of his creation’ (Chardin 2008, p. 297), is structurally similar to Steiner’s idea of the Christ impulse more and more permeating creation. However, de Chardin views cosmogenesis as inherently tending towards Christogenesis, the mystery of Golgotha being the revelation of the evolutionary impulse or Logos. While Steiner could be said to also hold aspects of this view, his Christology is defined by a stronger emphasis on death and cosmic alienation as condition for the emergence of freedom. For Steiner, the incarnation of Christ brought a wholly new impulse of life and becoming into a dying universe.

Not only the human body, but the whole of the earth and even the cosmic–planetary system in which it is part, is the body into which the Christ incarnated to redeem and resurrect. The incarnation, death and resurrection of the Christ at the mystery of Golgotha was the turning point of time through which the future of the evolution of humanity and the earth was implanted into time. From this event, a future cosmos will evolve as the transubstantiation and resurrection of the earth. As the first-born of the new Adam of the future, the resurrected Christ carries this future being of humanity and the earth.

Whereas the Christ impulse of cosmic transformation and redemption is a grace-given event, its human individuation requires both effort and grace, and the fulfillment of resurrection in evolution is therefore increasingly a divine–human co-creative process. As a consequence of the incarnation and resurrection, the Divine ground of Being increasingly envelops and transforms creation, and humanity consequently proceeds from a more passive–receptive state to a more active and co-operative agent in cosmic becoming. The cosmic significance of this is that the realization of resurrection as a cosmic impulse of sacrificial and creative love now comes together with the cosmic impulse of freedom, developed in and through humanity’s fall and disconnection from the living forces of the Divine ground. The resurrected Jesus Christ is thus the first born of the new redeemed and recreated state of humanity as a new tenth hierarchy of freedom and love in the cosmic choir of creation.

These two aspects—the cosmic dimension of the mystery of Golgotha and the evolution of freedom with humanity’s potential Theosis—come together in Steiner’s view on the mystery of life and death in the cosmos as a whole. Not only the state of the human being, but cosmogenesis as such is bound up with the mystery of death and resurrection.

For death is nothing other than the expression of the fact that the former supersensible world had arrived at a point from which it could no longer proceed through itself. A universal death would have been necessary for it, had it not received a new infusion of life. And so, this new life has become a struggle against universal death. From the remnants of a dying world, hardening within itself, the seeds of a new one blossomed. That is why we have dying and living in the world.

(Steiner 1992b, p. 207)

The process of materialization which gives birth to multiplicity and individual centers of experience involves a gradual alienation and fragmentation of the universe in which matter condenses out of its eternal life and becomes increasingly ‘inert’ and ‘calculable’ according to external laws. This amounts to a cosmic death process:

The consciousness of the seer finds the macrocosm increasingly alive, the more his vision penetrates into the past. In the far distant past, the macrocosm so lives that there ceases to be any question of ‘calculating’ the manifestations of its life. Out of this living condition man is then brought forth as a separate being, while the macrocosm enters more and more into the ‘calculable’ sphere. But in this it undergoes a slow process of death. In the same measure in which man—the microcosm—arises as an independent being from the macrocosm, the macrocosm dies. In the present cosmic time, a dead macrocosm is existing.

(Steiner 2007, p. 167)

A cosmic death through which a fundamental duality emerges within reality is envisioned by Steiner as the condition for the evolution of freedom in the cosmos. In light of this perspective, we can see how the mystery of Golgotha as the turning point of time gains its cosmic significance. Not only the human being and the salvation of the individual soul, but the whole cosmos is subjected to a process of death and resurrection.

Thus, in human evolution, there is a point where, within the entire planetary system, the life belonging to this system itself takes the place of everything originating from a previous system. In history, this point is the appearance of Christ. In this regard, it marks the center of human evolution.

(Steiner 2001, pp. 226–27)

The dying out and fragmentation of the macrocosmic wholeness and the emergence of the human being as microcosmos, creates the condition of freedom in the cosmic system. But this can only be fulfilled if an impulse and life stream of resurrection is given. In Steiner’s cosmology, this is what entered cosmic evolution through the mystery of Golgotha. From this point onwards, parallel streams of death and resurrection, old and new, continues, with the new Christ impulse of resurrection taking over from the life coming from a previous cosmic system. This transformation and transubstantiation of the present dying cosmos creates of it a new spiritual state, which Steiner designates as the future ‘Jupiter,’ ‘Venus,’ and ‘Vulcan’ incarnations of the cosmos. In this evolutionary trajectory the earth—which once departed from the spiritual sun—will rise from a receptive planet to become a new sun, a creative life-giving star in the universe.

3. The Second Coming of Christ—The Second Turning-Point of Time

A central part of Christian soteriology and eschatology is the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ. A central passage describing this is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

While traditional literalism views this passage as referring to a physical descent, Steiner sees it as an ‘etheric’ event.2 In Steiner’s process-oriented Christology the Second Coming is understood as a part of the evolutionary process of resurrection outlined above. Steiner describes the Second Coming of Christ as ‘the greatest mystery’ and ‘most important event of our time’ (Steiner 1984, pp. 28–30) and as a new beginning in the evolution of the Christ impulse, beginning in the twentieth century. As such, it marks the beginning of a new age.

In the Bible, the Second Coming or Parousia of Christ is often associated with the ‘end of the world,’ such as in Matthew 24:3: ‘And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world [aiōnos]?’ The Greek word aion/aeon which is translated as ‘end of the world’ means among other things ‘duration’ or ‘age.’ In Biblical scholarship this phrase, which in Greek is synteleia tou aiōnos, is understood as the consummation of the age where the term synteleia suggests a ‘ripening’ or completion of forces of an age rather than a mere termination (Kittel and Friedrich 1964).3 As such, the words of the Bible can also be read as pointing to a process of transitioning to a new age. According to Hermann Sasse in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, this was especially understood in Jewish and early Christian eschatology:

If according to the teaching of Jewish and early Christian eschatology the resurrection of the dead implies the transition from the one aeon to the other and the beginning of the new and eternal creation, the new aeon has begun already, though as yet concealed from the eyes of men, in and with the resurrection of Christ, inasmuch as this is the beginning of the general resurrection.

(Kittel and Friedrich 1964, p. 207)4

Steiner’s evolutionary understanding departs from the ‘imminent apocalypticism’ of the first century. Instead, Steiner aligns with an ‘inaugurated eschatology’ where the resurrection initiates a hidden, ongoing transformation of the human constitution. This aligns the biblical ‘harvest’ with an evolutionary ripening of the ‘etheric’ consciousness, a view that resembles Teilhard de Chardin’s later concept of Christogenesis mentioned above. Steiner refers to this experience of the Second Coming as a renewed Damascus event

St. Paul was convinced through such perception in the event of Damascus. This same etheric vision will be cultivated as a natural faculty by individual persons. To experience an event of Damascus, a Paul event, will be an increased possibility for human beings in the coming period… Christ will reappear because human beings will be raising themselves toward Him in etheric vision.

(Steiner 1984, pp. 27–28)

This ever-increasing strength of the revelation of the Christ impulse, of the process of resurrection in and of earth and humanity, is a long process of realization. Steiner claims that the spreading of the Christ impulse during the first two thousand years for the most part was a matter of the heart, of religious devotion without a conscious grasping of its reality in thinking. The Christ impulse was working mostly half- or unconsciously in the realm of feeling and devotion, changing the constitution of humanity. But the self-conscious life of thinking was not yet penetrated by this impulse. Philosophy and cognition on the one hand, and faith and mystical experience on the other, were two different domains. Thus, in the human being, the Christ impulse of resurrection worked on unconsciously, while self-consciousness and human thinking continued to individualize itself by means of the death process responsible for paralyzing and separating human consciousness from supersensible reality (Steiner 1983, p. 26). In the human organization, these two processes run parallel, independent of each other. As human thinking and self-consciousness continues to strengthen itself on the basis of the death process active in the human organization, Christ’s impulse of resurrection works unconsciously in nature, and this split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ grows.5

In the evolutionary process, the Second Coming of Christ belongs to the moment when the two processes of resurrection and the intensification of the forces of death active behind human individuation reach a critical threshold. As a result of this, new faculties and forces of life become available to enter human consciousness. The seeing of Christ in the clouds of Heaven referred to above and also in Matt. 24:30 and Rev. 1:7 is thus by Steiner understood as a new spiritual vision coming about through the naturally developing faculties, ‘that human beings will be able to attain the new faculty of perception in the etheric [realm]’ (Steiner 1984, p. 26). At the same time, the apocalyptic dimension of the cosmic death process also belonged to this time in Steiner’s prophecies: ‘But before this, everything that remains of the old must be driven into nullity; the clouds must gather. Man must find his full freedom out of this nullity. Man must find his entire strength out of the nothingness’ (Steiner 1982, p. 121).

The Second Coming of Christ signifies the moment when this split or abyss within the human being’s relation to cosmic becoming reaches a critical threshold. Steiner calls this ‘the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being’ (Steiner 2007, p. 184). These consciousness-sustaining ‘death forces’ sever the connection between human consciousness and the living forces of the cosmos such that ‘in his momentary ideation or forming of ideas man lives not in an element of real being, but only in a mirroring of being—in a picture-being’ (Steiner 2007, p. 184). As Steiner writes: ‘in this fact the possibility of development of Freedom lies inherent’ (Steiner 2007, p. 184). However, since the possibility of developing and realizing freedom is at the same time the final dying out of the last remnant of the life of cosmic creation holding sway in human consciousness, the human being plunges into an abyss of nothingness.

This is a critical point in cosmic evolution: the realization of true human freedom depends on losing the living connection to the spiritual world in human consciousness in order to, out of this negative freedom, take hold of and remember the spirit. Only when self-consciousness is fully freed from cosmic life can this freedom be actualized in the abyss of nothingness. But if this is not realized, the spirit-forgetfulness of humanity will threaten to obliterate and derail the cosmic evolution of the human being. The dying out of the creative forces of the cosmic past threatens to place the consciousness of the human being outside of the forces of the cosmos, in a sphere of ‘non-being’ which will totally disconnect human evolution from the divine world:

In relation to the Cosmos, man plunges into non-being. He frees himself in ideation from all the forces of the Cosmos. He paints the Cosmos while he himself is outside it. If this were all, freedom would light up in the human being for a single cosmic moment, but in the very same moment the human being would dissolve away.

(Steiner 2007, p. 184)

Steiner thus understands the problem of freedom to enter into a new stage. Although the question of free will has been discussed for centuries, for Steiner the reality of freedom enters into the phase of a real metaphysical drama. This ushers humanity into the age of the apocalypse—the end of the cosmic creativity and becoming of the past. However, at the same time, the Second Coming of Christ is the birth of new forces of resurrection from the future, becoming available to human thinking and consciousness. This uniting of cognition and freedom with the Christ impulse of resurrection is what Steiner calls the Michaelic Christ impulse: ‘It is the working of Michael and the Christ impulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the gulf’ (Steiner 2007, p. 184).

Thus, the evolutionary process—the intensification of the death process behind the individuation of consciousness on the one hand, and the unconscious life of resurrection of the Christ impulse on the other—reaches the point at which a new confrontation and merging of life and death is to take place in human consciousness. This new beginning of ‘the turning point of time’ is thus the beginning conscious individuation of the Christ impulse.

From a cosmic being man has become an earthly being. He has the potentiality to become a cosmic being once again, when as an earthly being he has become himself… since the Christ impulse has been living with the Earth, man in his self-conscious being is given back again to the cosmos.

(Steiner 2007, p. 183)

As we will see below in the work of Ben-Aharon, when this is brought to consciousness, the forces of death constitutive of human self-consciousness are merged with the life-forces of resurrection of the Christ impulse, and the life of Christ dies into the underlying forces of human consciousness. Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha becomes an individual experience. The death behind human individuation is then revealed and resurrected to new life. Christ is crucified, dies and is resurrected in the human soul; Christ-consciousness is born, and a new beginning in human evolution is actualized.

In Rudolf Steiner’s conception of history, the Second Coming of Christ is a new beginning, a second turning point of time in which the first turning point—the mystery of Golgotha—moves into the core of the individuation of human consciousness. However, this individuation of the processes of death and resurrection in human consciousness belongs to an evolutionary drama of freedom. Because the human being is the moment of freedom through which cosmic evolution must go, then it is only the human being—Anthropos—who can unite the old dying cosmos with the new earth and cosmos that the Christ impulse brings to resurrection. As a cosmic drama of freedom, there is no given answer to this outcome. ‘That is the great point of divergence: either downward or upward’ (Steiner 1982, p. 121).

According to Steiner, the mystery of Golgotha is a cosmic fact, but the knowledge or wisdom that makes resurrection a fact of human consciousness, and consequently unites the cosmic impulse of freedom with the Christ impulse of resurrection, depends on human self-knowledge. The role of cognition, of human thinking and consciousness, thus becomes the site of a real cosmic drama—a knowledge drama of the Second Coming.

4. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

In an interview published as preface to the book The New Experience of the Supersensible, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon tells of how his work with Steiner and anthroposophy began with a ‘Damascus event’—an experience of the resurrected Christ, as St. Paul described it in his letters, and as explained by Steiner as an experience of the Second Coming of Christ.6 This puts in the center of his development of Steiner’s work the question of how to transform and unite cognition with the experience of the Christ event. Later, Ben-Aharon published this in the four-volume The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (Ben-Aharon 2024a).

In this work Ben-Aharon engages Steiner’s epistemology, both from the early philosophical phase as well as the later one where Steiner outlined principles for a spiritual science. In Ben-Aharon’s text, Steiner’s epistemology is recreated and formulated as a systematic development of stages in a drama of metamorphosis of consciousness and the human being as a whole. As such, epistemology and depictions of processes of spiritual transformation and enlightenment are merged to become a meditative–epistemological text which traces and maps important stages of spiritual transformation. The goal of this process is that the knowledge process metamorphoses into a spiritual participation in the Christ event.

The first and foundational level of this process takes Steiner’s question of the self-observation of thinking and leads it into an intensified experience through which thinking becomes an experience of living forces. By means of this, Ben-Aharon explores the central problem of the relation between life and death in human thinking, thus leading the knowledge process into the central issue outlined above. Following Ben-Aharon, when epistemological problems are actualized as a spiritualization of thinking, transforming it into the force of pure thinking, consciousness gradually expands into a field of etheric life forces, and consciousness can awaken within a higher spiritual world.

As shown in Eftestøl (2025), Ben-Aharon’s depiction of the transformation of thinking into a non-organic etheric life finds a parallel in the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, which Ben-Aharon himself has characterized as the first stage in the formation of a spiritual science (Eftestøl 2025). Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari are here understood as giving philosophical expression to inspiration coming from the Event of the Second Coming in the twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari, though they operate within a secular and atheist framework, thus articulate the pivotal transformation of thinking from dead representation to intensive, non-organic life.7

On the basis of such a transformation of thinking, Ben-Aharon depicts the possibility of experiencing and exploring the process of individuation and incarnation whereby a supersensible state of consciousness transforms into the physical–sensible consciousness that characterizes our everyday rational mind:

When we stand consciously awakened in this etheric event, in each moment when ordinary consciousness is born out of supersensible consciousness, we observe the formation of ordinary consciousness from both sides at once. We see how in each moment in which I become conscious and say to myself, now ‘I think’, the life stream is split into two parts. On the one hand, there lights up in etheric perception the dark and dead part which was and ‘is’ no longer living, while the living part sinks down and disappears into an unconscious state of continuous sleep.

(Ben-Aharon 2024b, p. 70)

Within this field of experience, the thinker can approach the unconscious ‘living death forces’ constitutive of normal human consciousness. Delving into the creation, destruction and recreation of human self-consciousness as a real initiatory drama of cosmic forces, the abyss of nothingness in human evolution and the experience of death and resurrection is individualized. Thus, the modern Christ event becomes ‘experience’:

[A] universal real self, which first kills the living to create self-conscious thinking and perceiving, and second raises this dead thinking and resurrects it to self-conscious spirit life, does exist. Through the given meeting with the etheric Christ, described in the first volume, it is revealed as our higher self. In the knowledge drama, we gradually grow into his activity, in full consciousness. We become aware how, through self-sacrifice, he constantly kills the living and enlivens the dead, to make himself ever more self-conscious, to know himself consciously as an individualized human-cosmic self.

(Ben-Aharon 2024b, p. 75)

This awakening of the indwelling Christ in the human soul and individualization of the second mystery of Golgotha as life, death and resurrection of consciousness in the human soul, enacts what Ben-Aharon terms an ‘essence exchange’ (Ben-Aharon 2024b). The human being is granted a cosmic Self as the Christ passes through, and the evolution of the Cosmos receives the impulse of freedom through the self-consciousness offered by the human being. In this way, the ‘bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness, over the abyss of spirit forgetfulness’ is built (Ben-Aharon 2024b, p. 313), and a new Earth, with its forces of resurrection coming from the future, is actualized within the old dying earth.

In the above, the Second Coming of Christ was related to the evolutionary process of resurrection stemming from the mystery of Golgotha on the one hand, and on the other to the intensification of the death forces constitutive of human consciousness and freedom, related also to the stagnation and dying out of the evolutionary impulse of creation.

In Steiner’s understanding of history, this Second Coming is related to the fact that only since the 20th century have the creative forces sustaining individual self-consciousness ripened to the extent that they can sustain the perpetual act of individualization independent of the processes of life and death within the physical–etheric body. Thus, individuation can take place ‘outside’ the reflection of consciousness produced by the physical body. When consciousness is not only coming about through the reflective processes of the physical organization but in the experience of abstracted, pure thinking, the self experiences itself inside the abyss of nothingness. Here, in this ‘human state of singularity’ (Ben-Aharon 2024a, p. 127), the dying life behind cognition found in pure thinking can be resurrected as spiritual self-consciousness, opening to the vast field of life forces in the spiritual world. Before the 20th century self-consciousness would have merely vanished when exposed to the spirit. According to Ben-Aharon, today a meeting with the Christ can take place in this abyss of nothingness, where freedom is to be steeled:

But the true Michaelic spirit rejoices in a pure thinking, which is born in death and owes death its light-filled precision. But also, by overcoming death, such pure thinking can become the new crystal clear eye of the spirit. Therefore, without entering with our whole soul force into this abyss, and feeling it personally as our own absolute crisis of knowledge, the age of Michael cannot be actualized, no true knowledge drama can be born out of anthroposophy, and no true experience and knowledge of the crucified and resurrected Christ in the second Mystery of Golgotha can be gained. But the etheric bridge over the ‘abyss of freedom in human evolution’, can only be built, if it is steeled and grounded in this knowledge-dramatic process of the death and resurrection of cognition. This means, however, that since the beginning of the age of Michael in 1879, the Christ has taken on Himself the fate and destiny of self-conscious thinking. That is, He is continuously crucified at the place where we continuously kill our living etheric body and our connections to the living universe, and the forces of living, creative time, in order to know that which we have killed, consciously and freely.

(Ben-Aharon 2024b, p. 57)

Between the mystery of Golgotha and the time of the Second Coming, the growing intensification of the difference between death and life creates an evolutionary ‘time difference’ as the space or abyss of freedom. This difference between the impulse of resurrection working in nature and the unconscious, and the strengthening of human self-consciousness grounded in the death forces of the cosmos, implies an abyss between life and death that the Second Coming harmonizes. However, this depends on the Second Coming of Christ being actualized by humanity, embodying this time difference as its living ‘space’ of freedom. Without the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, this re-timing and harmonization would not occur, and the old and new, the dying part of evolution and the resurrection of the earth, would split apart in two distinct cosmic evolutions.

The weight of humanity’s responsibility for cognizing its own spiritual nature and being as a real knowledge drama taking place from within ‘the abyss of nothingness in human evolution’ (Steiner 2007, p. 184) comes out in Steiner’s admonition that the realization of the Second Coming of Christ depends on human participation: ‘The faculties I have described are like seeds in the soul. In the future they will be developed and we must say that human destiny will lie, to a certain extent, in one’s own hands’ (Steiner 1984, p. 157). The new forces of resurrection that become available to human consciousness are like seeds in the soul Steiner claims, and they will have to be developed and nurtured if this potentiality is to be actualized:

During our epoch, it is more likely than ever before that people will be unable to comprehend this most important event for humanity. People might fail to understand that it provides a real glimpse into the spiritual world, though only a shadowy and vague one. There might be so much evil and materialism on earth, for example, that most of humanity would not show any understanding.

(Steiner 1984, p. 26)

This shows how, in Steiner’s vision, cosmic evolution more and more tends towards a human–divine creativity, depending on human participation. The bridge-building between the human state of consciousness and the spiritual world is, in this perspective, not simply the project of a separate individual acquiring higher states of consciousness, but an integral part of cosmic evolution. Cultural developments in science, philosophy, art and social life in general all belong to this knowledge drama.8

The timing and the open question about its actualization in human consciousness were left as a testament by Steiner, who died in 1925. Ten years later Europe would already be in full fire, on its way to full destruction, industrialized genocide and moral suicide. According to Ben-Aharon, this total submission to the forces of death and evil destruction must be understood as the consequence of a cosmic evolution in which the thread of world becoming died out before the Christ event of the Second Coming could be actualized by human beings:

But since 1933, this burning thread of light, the last remnant of the primordial stream of world becoming, has totally vanished and was annihilated in the abyss beneath the threshold, into which humanity was rapidly falling. One can only understand the occult history of the twentieth century and of our present time, if one is courageous enough, to contemplate the recent discoveries of modern spiritual science communicated here.… And this means that today one cannot build the new ground from the forces of the old stream of world becoming, the old earth and heaven, which have been collapsing into the abyss ever since 1933. Only the new Heaven and earth, formed by the Christ in His present appearance, words, and deeds, active through free human hearts, can become the new earth star ground under our spiritual feet.

(Ben-Aharon 2024c, p. 20)9

Accordingly, as long as the question of the human being’s self-knowledge as a real knowledge drama of the Second Coming remains suppressed, the logic of the abyss will determine human culture. This abyss of nothingness, opened within human becoming, will continue to be externalized and the force of death behind individuation grow and metamorphose to become the very foundation for human life and culture. In Steiner’s vision of cosmic creation, when the time of the Second Coming of Christ arrives, humanity emerges as an active agent of evolution, co-determining its course. Depending on which potentialities are realized or remain unactualized, the formation and transformation of the human being and its world will follow suit. After the twilight of humanity in the twentieth century, the question of our and the following centuries will be to what extent the reality of resurrection can flow into human consciousness, social life and culture and become a creative force. In the preface to The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art Ben-Aharon connects this question to the unfoldment of artificial intelligence and the reshaping of the human being and the earth through purely technological means. The following passages highlight this shift and the critical choice facing humanity as we confront the new forces unleashed by the event:

In my early twenties I experienced for the first time the fact that we are becoming co-creators in an astounding and creative cosmic evolution. I realized also to what extent this experience changes our understanding of our becoming and its role in the universe. […] However, the creative and uplifting energy of the event can be captured and utilized also to serve other goals. Everything positive, beautiful and valuable in our life can be also misused and reversed into its very opposite. The science and technology, that express some of our age’s most creative and valuable human capacities and achievements, can be harnessed to serve one sided, narrow, and cold conceptions of nature, human nature, and the cosmos when its plans for the future of human transformation and redemption are based on purely technological, mechanistic grounds.

I have no doubt that the materialistic scientific-technological utopia will be realized, one way or another. After all, it has been well underway for centuries and it was, is and will continue to be supported by the brightest and richest. We must understand that it will demonstrate in a practical way, a complete technological mastery and transformation, indeed, transubstantiation, of everything we still consider today to be “human,” including all the biological-genetic forces that determine our physical evolution, as well as all our intellectual capacities. All that we came to be, in so far as we are physically-organically embodied beings, will sooner or later be mastered by super-human technology, intelligence and creativity. Humans will produce AI machines that will make them physically immortal and infinitely clever, that is, humans are becoming superhuman, or subhuman, depending on our point of view.

One thing is therefore quite certain: the future of the human as we knew it is truly coming to an end. The only question is: what sort of an end is it going to be?

(Ben-Aharon 2018, pp. 1–2)

As long as the forces of death constitutive of individual human consciousness remains ‘unthought’ and suppressed, human development will bypass the conscious individuation of the Christ impulse of resurrection. Following Ben-Aharon, only when these death forces are consciously confronted, and one realizes how, in each act of ordinary thinking and perception, the etheric Christ is crucified on the cross of cognition, can the forces of resurrection be individualized. For Steiner, bypassing this second mystery of Golgotha as an individual knowledge drama would mean to miss the goal of cosmic evolution: the merging of freedom and love. In this case, evolution would spiral towards a cosmos into which the human being will be absorbed without the Christ impulse. A kind of spiritual machine–cosmos emancipating itself from the spiritual telos of cosmic evolution would emerge, actualizing a very different future than the one incarnated through the Christ impulse.10 According to Steiner, such a development was already underway in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms…. Now he mechanizes them, materializes them. We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. Men do not even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, and that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside them that is becoming independent…. Man has accepted the ahrimanic character by creating a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world.

(Steiner 1993, pp. 50–51)

However, Steiner saw this technoscientific development as an integral and necessary part of cosmic evolution. The problem is not technology in and of itself, but the one-sidedness it brings about and thus the question is how it is developed and to what degree cultural development is able to also develop a degree of spiritual knowledge and consciousness corresponding to the degree human life and consciousness is infiltrated and determined by technology:

In such places [the American continent], the will is present to harness human power together with machine power. These things must not be treated as if one ought to fight against them. That is a completely mistaken view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. The only question is whether, in the course of world history, they are brought onto the stage by those who are selflessly familiar with the great goals of earthly becoming and who shape these things for the healing of humanity, or whether they are brought onto the stage by those groups of people who exploit these things only in an egoistic or group-egoistic sense.… the forging together of the human being with the machine-like being [Maschinellen Wesen]—this will be a great, significant problem for the rest of earthly development.

(Steiner 1992a, pp. 218–19)

This could be connected to Steiner’s last, testamentary text on the relation to technology. Here he again stresses that the mechanical–technological is a domain in which the moral element is no longer present as a living power. In this Ahrimanic realm, the forces no longer originate from the divine beings behind human evolution. Having emancipated itself from the evolutionary ideal and telos of freedom and love, this realm depends on humanity raising itself in spiritual experience and knowledge in order to reconnect and redeem this developmental tendency of the universe. Thus, again we see how, in Steiner’s vision, a ‘cosmic death’ is at work in evolution, how humanity faces the abyss of nothingness in cosmic evolution and also faces the task of rising in spiritual knowledge and becoming in order not to be overcome and absorbed into the developing sub-nature:

[B]y far the greater part of that which works in modern civilization through technical science and industry—wherein the life of man is so intensely interwoven—is not Nature at all, but Sub-Nature. It is a world which emancipates itself from Nature—emancipates itself in downward direction.… In this mechanical-material domain, all the Divine-Spiritual Being connected with the origin of human evolution, is completely absent. The purely Ahrimanic dominates this sphere.… [I]n the age of Technical Science hitherto, the possibility of finding a true relationship to the Ahrimanic civilisation has escaped man. He must find the strength, the inner force of knowledge, in order not to be overcome by Ahriman in this technical civilisation. He must understand Sub-Nature for what it really is. This he can only do if he rises, in spiritual knowledge, at least as far into extra-earthly Super-Nature as he has descended, in technical Sciences, into Sub-Nature.

(Steiner 2007, pp. 217–19)

Steiner saw the human being as part of a cosmic evolution, where a critical problem emerges when the descending process of individuation must be turned around, and give rise to a new, ascending process of resurrection. The mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse is the force of resurrection and cosmic creativity that makes this possible. However, in Steiner’s view, humanity is not merely a recipient of divine grace, but also has a future task, of receiving and individuating this Christ event so as to grow back into the spiritual cosmos on the basis of its cosmic realization of freedom. Although humanity is one among an infinite pleroma of beings, in this regard, it has a unique role to play. The human being carries the divine spark—the I am—within the created cosmos, and when the human ‘I’ is united with the Christ impulse, freedom and love are realized as the foundation for the creation of new worlds. To what extent the end of the old becomes a new beginning is thus a question of the degree to which the knowledge drama of the Second Coming is realized. Whether the paralyzing forces of death and disconnection behind human individuation will continue to determine human culture, inserting a new technologically mediated connectivity, or if these forces will be transformed and transubstantiated in and through the experience of Christ’s life, death and resurrection in human heart and mind is at the core of this drama.

The knowledge drama of the Second Coming of Christ is thus the second turning point of time and as such ‘the beginning of a totally new evolution for humanity and for the evolution of the earth and cosmos’.

(Ben-Aharon 2024c, p. 14)

However, this reversal of the line of individuation from descent to ascent also implies the question of new communities. Growing back into the spiritual world, reconnecting with the gods, is a process of integration, and the most immediate place where this abyss is bridged is in the human meeting. The Second Coming of Christ thus also implies the question of a new kind of individuation, one that is no longer based on the old forces of the dying cosmos but on the forces of resurrection in which humanity and the spiritual world grow together in a new cosmic multiplicity. This process is what Steiner called the reversed cultus, and what Ben-Aharon points to in the sub-title of the fourth volume of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming: The Creation of the Earthly Human Sun—The New Human Meeting and Michaelic Community.

5. Growing Together: The Reversed Cultus and Co-Creative Evolution

In the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, Ben-Aharon portrays how the Christ can be individualized through a stepwise process of the spiritualization of thinking, feeling and will, so that the Pauline words increasingly become a reality: ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Gal 2:20). When the ordinary self dies to itself, the individual experiences how his or her ‘true Ego—Christ’s given Ego—will come to meet him ‘out of the cosmos.’ Only then do we find out that ‘this is indeed the case… out of a yet unknown world… our real Ego…. comes toward us’ (Ben-Aharon 2022, p. 73).

Through this possibility of transforming self-consciousness from self-centeredness to a ‘self-less self-consciousness’ a new kind of community can be formed. The foundation and source of this lies in the individuation of Christ’s Ego as the universal Higher Self of Humanity. This transformative process can be intensified in the meeting with another human being and become the foundation for the creation of a wholly new community based on a new sense of responsibility for the Other. As one can allow Christ’s I to become individualized through one’s True I, so will the other human likewise become the revelation of one’s true, Higher Self.

As Rudolf Steiner pointed out, this was and is the fundamental rule of occultists and today it must become the life habit of all humans who experience concretely and consciously the weaving and pulsating of the living Christ between members of the community. In the past, only initiates knew that ‘it is a fundamental maxim of occultists to see the other person as the revelation of one’s own Higher Self, because he knows then he must find the other in himself.’ Through the fully conscious individuation of the meeting with the etheric Christ, this fundamental maxim will become the new source of life and healing, nourishing and regulating the spiritual relationships between human beings.

(Ben-Aharon 2024c, p. 87)

The ideal of this new human meeting is that both individuals awaken spiritually through the Other, offering their self-consciousness as a gift through which the other can individualize him- or herself. Both individuals can then experience how their Higher Self comes towards them through the gaze, voice and appearance of the Other. When this is done consciously together, both participants can experience a new process of individuation. Because each receives her Self through the Other, both together weave a new being, beginning to work creatively out of the Christ word: ‘For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them’ (Matt. 18:20).

This spiritual connection, formed by a mutual offering and transformation of self-consciousnesses of both participants becomes a true gate through which also the soul elements of the Other—his or her thinking, feeling and willing—can begin to be experienced from the inside. When this happens, the human meeting becomes real participation of soul, and the speculation, interpretation and projection that fill normal social life can fall away. Because individuals can begin to sense each other’s world of thoughts, feelings and will impulses, the foundation for a new social and communal life can be created.

Based on the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, such human meetings create a new, collective state of spiritualized consciousness. When this state is consciously shared by a community of people, this spiritual-soul consciousness grows exponentially. In this way social life becomes a ‘reversed cultus.’ In The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity: The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner: An Esoteric Study (Ben-Aharon 2020), Ben-Aharon describes how such processes can become the foundation for creating a new community. The more individuals are mutually offering their self-consciousness and soul—and eventually bodies as well—to allow the etheric Christ to dwell among them, the whole community is resurrected and lives in each one of the members, and each member lives in the spiritualized consciousness of every individual. In this way, individual spiritual development and communal formation and development mutually strengthen and enhance each other. The fruits of the work of each individual are shared among the community. Thus, the spiritual development and learning of individual members become communalized, and everyone receives the fruits of the work of the whole community. These fruits are multiplied through the individualization process of each member and can be offered back to the source, to the spiritual world. Thus, a communal individuation can take place in which the ideals of freedom and love can be realized. In this future community and ‘school of love’ that the Second Coming makes possible, people will ‘learn how to embody in their hearts, souls and bodies, the whole life cycle of love, from its innocent heavenly birth, to its earthly death and spiritualized resurrection’ (Ben-Aharon 2020, p. 114). Such true social warmth of mutual recognition and responsibility is realized to the extent that each individual recognizes the Other as one’s higher Self, manifesting as ‘primordial, infinite obligation’ (Ben-Aharon 2018, p. 162).11 The past of individuation, the karma that brought us here and that created this meeting face to face, thus becomes the fertile hummus for the resurrection and creation of new moral consciousness.

You implant in me your true karmic will for my healing, and I implant in you my true will of your healing. And out of this mutual impulse of healing, we work on transforming our shared karma. Thus, the new moral will of human beings circulates through the soul of each other.

(Ben-Aharon 2024c, p. 143)

In a reversed cultus, the community ‘undergoes a process of gradual progression and spiritualization of cognition from below upwards, from the physical, to the etheric, astral and spiritual world’ (Ben-Aharon 2020, p. 263). This means that the community not only lives and works spiritually among themselves, but also takes seriously and begins to experience the higher worlds and the angelic hierarchy that constitutes it. Growing and expanding in consciousness means that each takes into their work also the beings of the third hierarchy, which Steiner outlined as the spirits formative of human soul life; Angels, Archangels and Archai. When the community consciously offers their mutual spiritualization-process to the realm of the angels, the angels can descend to become active members in the community. In Ben-Aharon’s outline of the reversed cultus, this communion creates the first rung of the ascending ladder in which humanity begins to work consciously with the spiritual hierarchy. When ‘angelic consciousness’ is created by the offering of human self-consciousness to the Other, this fruit of the human meeting can be offered as an organ of consciousness to the next level of Being. Then, this ‘astral substance’ formed within the angelic hierarchy can be raised and shared with the Archangels who create a unified communal group-self. This communal self can be further offered to Archai and the time spirit, Michael, as the Being who transforms and unites the Self of a community with the Being of humanity, the I AM. Thus, the knowledge drama and the reversed cultus together form a co-creative and sacramental epistemology which both Steiner and Ben-Aharon would see as the actualization of a new stage in humanity’s evolutionary development:

This Spiritual Science works from below upwards, stretching out its hands as it were from below upwards to grasp the hands of Michael stretching down from above. It is then that the bridge can be created between humans and the Gods.

(Steiner in a lecture from 17 December 1922, cited in (Ben-Aharon 2020, p. 124))

In the vision of the future spiritual–social life developing from working with the reversed cultus, Ben-Aharon envisions a radical shift from associative social forms to a relational ontology of the spirit. Concretely, this means the creation of a new communal organism capable of hosting a higher spiritual being. As the community grounds the experience of participating in the universal being of humanity, their shared soul life undergoes metamorphosis. This collective life is no longer bound by localized group interests or exclusive identities; instead, it expands to include the emerging universal soul of humanity—the resurrected Anthroposophia. In this sense, the community becomes the ‘chalice’ for a shared consciousness and the spiritual being of humanity that transcends the boundaries of the private or partisan ego. While this may sound like a distant ideal and, as Ben-Aharon writes, to some appear as fantasy, he makes clear that the creation of such communities is necessary for the positive evolution of humanity. Rather than a mere utopia, this vision is presented as a metaphysical horizon toward which humanity must orient itself; the ‘Second Coming’ is not a future event to be awaited, but a participatory process that must be initiated through the social and cognitive work of today (Ben-Aharon 2020, p. 119).

6. Conclusions

In this article we have presented Rudolf Steiner’s Christology in an evolutionary perspective, discussing its relevance for our time through the work of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. According to Steiner, the 20th Century would be the time of great spiritual upheavals and transformations, rooted in a new revelation of the living Christ. Humanity would develop faculties of etheric perception, leading to a living encounter with the Christ in his Second Coming. More than one hundred years after Steiner, the question arises whether any such development can be perceived. We have presented the work of Ben-Aharon to argue for this. In our reading, Ben-Aharon represents a contemporary answer to, as well as update of Steiner’s Christology, sourced in living experience and recent epistemological developments. The two central concepts that informed this discussion were the ‘Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming’ and the ‘Reversed Cultus’ as a spiritualization of consciousness taking place both in the cognitive domain as well as ethically through the human meeting and community building. Central to these ideas are the perspective of humanity becoming a co-creative actor in cosmic evolution. Both the epistemological development as a knowledge drama, its technological–materialist challenge, and the social–moral potential of a new universal consciousness manifesting in new communities were presented as belonging to this new phase of cosmic creativity. Further analytic and comparative work is needed to contextualize and evaluate Steiner and Ben-Aharon within greater philosophical, theological and societal–cultural developments. We thus hope that this article may contribute to further critical appraisals of Steiner’s Christological work, its development in Ben-Aharon’s publications and activities, and its relevance within contemporary society and culture.