A renewing of responsibility, a deepening of man’s moral life, can come only through a training in unselfishness, and under the conditions of the present age only those can go through this school who have won for themselves an understanding of real, all-pervading selflessness.
We can search through the entire evolution of the world without finding a deeper understanding of selflessness than that offered by Christ’s appearance upon earth. To know Christ is to go through the school of unselfishness. […]
Under the influence of materialism the natural unselfishness of mankind was lost to an extent that will be fully realized only in the distant future. But by contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, by permeating our knowledge of it with all our feeling, we may acquire again, with our whole soul-being, an education in selflessness. We may say that what Christ did for earthly evolution was included in the fundamental impulse of selflessness, and what He may become for the conscious development of the human soul is the school of unselfishness.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 152 – The Four Sacrifices of Christ – Basel, June 1, 1914
Translated by May Laird-Brown, and edited for this edition by Gilbert Church, Ph.D.
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