A Salient Point

Rudolf Steiner:

"The same feelings that people still have in moonlight, the men of old had, but much more intensely, when on waking they first caught sight of the Sun. They did not talk merely of the sunlight; they said something like this: “Out of this heavenly being there streams into us a radiance which permeates us with warmth and light, making of each one of us a personality.”

This was still felt by Julian the Apostate, and he believed it could be preserved. That was his mistake, and also his great tragedy, for man no longer experienced his personality through the physical rays of the Sun. This knowledge of the personality was brought to man by a spiritual path. That which the Sun out there in space could no longer give him, the experience that could no longer come to him from outside, now had to rise up from his own inner depths. Christ Himself had to unite His cosmic destiny with humankind, so that in the continual fluctuation of the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer we should not fall away from our onward path.

We must take fully and deeply in earnest that Christ had descended from spiritual heights and has united His destiny with that of men. What does this mean? When before the Mystery of Golgotha men looked into the world of the senses, they saw at the same time a spiritual element there; this I made clear when speaking to you about the perception of the Sun. All this was lost to men. They had to receive something in place of it; they had to receive something of a spiritual nature, and at the same time gain from this spirituality an impression of reality in the sense-perceptible world. That is a salient point in the Mystery of Golgotha and its relation to human knowledge."

Source: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2011/08/connection-of-luciferic-and-ahrimanic.html