The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Nineteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to add a few things to supplement the manifold occult facts and perspectives we have cultivated here this winter. It has often been emphasized how what we call spiritual science should intervene in human life and how it can become life, action, deed. Today, however, we will take a few additional looks at the great developmental processes of the universe as they express themselves in human beings. And first I would like to draw your attention to a fact that can shed much light on the nature of world development, if you are willing to see it in the right sense.

[ 2 ] Consider first the difference between animal and human development from a purely external point of view. You need only say a single word and hold a single idea before you will soon notice the difference between the concept of animal and human development. You need only consider the word “education.” True education is impossible in the animal world. Through training, animals can be taught to perform certain tasks that deviate from what is instinctively imprinted in them, what is inherent in them from the outset and then expressed. But one must go very far indeed in the enthusiasm that one can develop as an avowed dog lover if one wants to deny the radical difference between human education and what we can do with animals. Now we need only recall an important insight of our anthroposophical worldview, and the basis of this initially superficial fact will become clear to us.

[ 3 ] We know that human beings develop gradually in a very complicated way. We have repeatedly emphasized how human beings develop in a completely different way during the first seven years of their lives, until they lose their baby teeth, than they do later, until the age of fourteen, and then again from the age of fourteen to twenty-one. We will only touch on this briefly today, as you are already familiar with it. We know that, from a spiritual scientific point of view, human beings are born several times.

[ 4 ] Human beings are born into the physical world when they leave their mother's body, shedding the physical mother's shell. But then we know that when the human being has shed the physical mother's shell, he is still enclosed in another, second, etheric mother's shell. When the child grows up to the age of seven, what we call the etheric body of the child is surrounded on all sides by external ether currents that belong to the environment, just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical mother's shell until birth. And with the change of teeth, this etheric shell is shed, and only then is the etheric body born, at the age of seven. But then the astral body is still enveloped in the astral mother's shell, which is shed at puberty. After that, the astral body of the human being develops freely until the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, when the actual I of the human being is basically born, when the human being first awakens to complete inner intensity, when that which has developed as an I through the various incarnations he has undergone in the past emerges from within.

[ 5 ] For clairvoyant consciousness, a very special fact emerges here. Observe a very young child for a few weeks, perhaps even months. You will see the head of this child surrounded by etheric, astral currents and forces. However, these etheric-astral currents and forces gradually become less distinct and disappear after some time. What is actually happening here? You can actually deduce what is happening without clairvoyant observation, but clairvoyant observation confirms what is now being said. You can tell yourself that immediately after birth, the human brain is not yet as it will be later, after a few weeks or months. The child already perceives the outside world, but its brain does not yet have the instrument that enables it to connect external impressions in a certain way. There are individual connecting nerves that run from one part of the brain to another and are only formed after the child is born. These connecting strands, through which humans gradually learn to mentally link what they see in the outside world, are only formed little by little after the child is born. A child will, say, hear a bell and will also see the bell, but it will not immediately connect the auditory and visual impressions to the judgment: The bell is ringing. It learns this only gradually, because the part of the brain that is the instrument for the perception of sound and the part that is the instrument for visual perception are only connected with each other in the course of life. Only then is it possible to make a judgment and say: What I see there is the same thing that sounds. Thus, such connecting strands are formed in the brain, and the forces that differentiate the connecting strands can be seen by the clairvoyant in the first weeks of a child's development as something that still envelops the brain. But what envelops the brain enters the brain and later lives inside the brain, no longer working from outside, but inside the brain. What works externally in the first weeks of a child's development could not continue to work on the entire development of the growing human being if it were not protected by the various envelopes. For if what I have just described, what works from outside and then enters the brain, is inside, then it develops under the protective shell, first of the etheric body, then of the astral body, and only at the age of twenty-two does what has worked from outside become active from within. What was outside the human being in the first months of its existence, what was then poured into it, becomes active without a shell only between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, when it becomes free and then develops the intensity that has already been mentioned.

[ 6 ] Now let us consider this human development, which takes place gradually. Let us compare it with the development of a plant. We know that here in the physical world, where it first appears before us, a plant has only its physical and etheric bodies, but it has the astral body around it; inside, however, it has only the physical and etheric bodies. The plant emerges from the seed, its physical body forms, and then its etheric body gradually develops. But the plant has only this etheric body. Now we have seen that the human etheric body still has the astral body around it until sexual maturity, and that only then is the human astral body actually born. However, after reaching sexual maturity, the plant cannot give birth to such an astral body, because it does not have one. The necessary consequence of this is that the plant has nothing left at sexual maturity that can be further developed. It has fulfilled its task in the physical world when it reaches sexual maturity. After it is fertilized, it dies. Yes, you can observe that something similar happens even with certain lower animals. You can observe how, in lower animals, the astral body is not yet completely drawn into the physical body to the same extent as in higher animals. Lower animals are characterized precisely by the fact that the astral body is not yet completely within the physical body. Take the mayfly; it comes into being, lives until fertilization, is fertilized, and dies. Why? Because it is a being which, like the plant, has its astral body largely outside itself and therefore can no longer develop once sexual maturity has been reached. In a certain sense, humans, animals, and plants develop similarly until they reach sexual maturity. The plant now has nothing left that requires development in the physical world; it dies after reaching sexual maturity. The animal still has its astral body, but no ego. The animal therefore still has a certain amount of potential for development after reaching sexual maturity. The astral body becomes free, and as long as the astral body continues to develop freely, as long as there are possibilities for development within it, so long does the higher animal continue to develop after reaching sexual maturity. However, the astral body of animals in the physical world does not have an ego within itself. The ego of the animal is a group ego; it always encompasses an entire group and exists in the astral world as a group ego. This group ego in the astral world has completely different possibilities for development than the animal here in the physical world. But what the animal possesses as an astral body has a very narrowly defined possibility for development. The animal has this possibility for development within itself as an inherent capacity as soon as it enters the world. The lion has something that lives out in its astral body as a sum of drives, instincts, and passions. And what lives there in its astral body in the form of drives, desires, and passions can live out. This lives until an ego could be born; but this is not there, it is on the astral plane. Therefore, when the animal has just reached the stage where the human being enters the twenty-first year of life, its potential for development is completely exhausted. Of course, the length of life varies according to circumstances, for animals do not all live to be twenty-one years old. But what is actually animal development is lived out by the human being until the age of twenty-one, when the I is born. Of course, you must not now say that human development up to the age of twenty-one is animal development, for it is not. Rather, what becomes free at the age of twenty-one is already present in the human being from the beginning, from the moment of conception, but now it becomes free. Because there is something in humans from the very beginning that becomes free at the age of twenty-one, humans are not animal beings from the beginning, but rather this ego works within them from the beginning, even if it is not free. And it is this ego that can actually be educated. For it is this I, with what it has worked out in the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, that progresses from incarnation to incarnation. If nothing new were added to this ego in a new incarnation, human beings would be unable to take anything with them from their last life between birth and death when they died physically. And if they could not take anything with them, they would be at exactly the same stage in the following life as in the previous one. Because we see human beings undergoing development during their lives and because they acquire and absorb within themselves what animals cannot absorb, since the animals' potential for development is limited by their predispositions, human beings continually enrich their ego, thereby rising higher and higher from incarnation to incarnation. Because humans carry within themselves the ego, which is only born at the age of twenty-one but is already at work before that, education is applicable to them, and they can be made into something other than what they were from the beginning according to their predispositions. The lion brings its lion nature with it and lives it out. Human beings do not only bring their nature with them as the general nature of the human species, but they also bring with them what they have already acquired as the self in their last incarnation. However, this can be transformed further and further through education and through life, so that it is given a new impact when human beings pass through the gate of death and then have to prepare themselves for a new incarnation. This is what we must hold fast to: that human beings take in new facts of development and continually enrich themselves.

[ 7 ] Now we ask ourselves: What actually happens when human beings enrich themselves outwardly through such facts of development? First of all, we must ascend to three very important concepts that are somewhat difficult to grasp. And since we are in a branch that has been working on this for years, it will probably be possible to ascend to somewhat higher concepts that are more difficult to comprehend. To understand these three concepts, first consider the entire mature plant; take a lily of the valley, for example. There you have the plant in one form. But then you can also have the same plant in another form, as a small seed. Imagine you take the seed and you have a tiny structure in front of you. If you place it in front of you, you can say: Yes, the seed contains everything that I will later see as roots, stems, leaves, and flowers. So I have the flower in front of me as a seed and then also as a fully grown plant. But I could not have the seed in front of me if it had not been produced by a previous lily of the valley. However, for clairvoyant consciousness, something else is also the case. When clairvoyant consciousness looks at the mature lily of the valley, it sees the physical lily of the valley permeated by an etheric body, a kind of light-flowing body that runs through it from top to bottom. But in the case of the lily of the valley, the etheric body does not protrude very far from the physical plant body and does not differ greatly from it. But if you take the tiny seed of the lily of the valley, you will find that the physical seed is small, but a beautiful etheric body is integrated into this seed, radiating around it, in such a way that the seed sits at one end of the etheric body, just as the nucleus of a comet relates to its tail. The physical seed is actually only a condensed point in the light or etheric body of the lily of the valley. When someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science has the fully grown lily of the valley before them, then the essence that was first hidden is developed for them. When they have the seed in front of them, where the physical is very small and only the spiritual is large, they say: The actual essence of the lily of the valley is wrapped up in the physical seed. So when we look at the lily of the valley, we have two states to distinguish. One state is where the entire essence of the lily of the valley is involution: the seed contains the essence wrapped up, involved. As it grows out, it passes into evolution, but then the entire essence of the lily of the valley slips back into the new seed that is coming into being. Thus, evolution and involution alternate in the succession of states of a plant's essence. During evolution, the spiritual disappears more and more and the physical becomes powerful, while during involution, the physical disappears more and more and the spiritual becomes more and more powerful.

[ 8 ] In a certain sense, we can say that evolution and involution alternate in human beings, only more starkly. There you have the human being before you between birth and death: a physical body and an etheric body coincide as the physical, the spiritual also coincides in a certain way — the human being has evolved as an earthly human being. But when you see human beings passing through the gate of death — observed clairvoyantly — they do not even leave behind as much of their physical life as the seed of a lily of the valley. The physical disappears so completely that you can no longer see it, and everything is enveloped in the spiritual. Human beings now pass through the Devachan, where they are in involution in relation to their earthly nature. Evolution is between birth and death, involution between death and a new birth in relation to the earthly human nature. But there is now a tremendous difference between humans and plants. We can speak of evolution and involution in relation to plants, but in relation to humans we must also speak of a third factor that comes into play. If we did not speak of a third factor, we would not be able to fully comprehend the entire development of a human being. Because plants always go through involution and evolution, every new plant is a repetition of the old one, exactly the same as the old one. The essence of the lily of the valley always winds itself into the seed and then out again. But what is the case with humans?

[ 9 ] We have just recognized that humans take in new elements of potential development during their lives between birth and death. This enriches them. That is why it is not the same with humans as with plants. The subsequent evolution of humans on Earth is not a mere repetition of what has gone before, but is linked to an elevation of their existence. What humans take in between birth and death is also woven into what was already there before. And that is why there is not a mere repetition, but rather that which evolves appears at a higher level. Where does what man takes in actually come from? How are we to understand that he receives and takes in something new? Please follow me very closely now, for we are coming to one of the most important and also most difficult concepts. And it is not without reason that I am saying this in one of the last lessons, because you have the whole summer to think about it. One should think about such concepts for months and years, because then one gradually comes to understand their full depth. Where does that which is constantly being added to the human being come from? Let us try to understand where it comes from by means of a simple example.

[ 10 ] Suppose you have a person standing in front of you who is facing two other people. Let us take everything that belongs to development and put it together. Let us take the person who is looking at the other two and say: He has gone through previous incarnations and has developed what previous incarnations have placed within him. This is also the case with the two other people standing in front of him. But now let us assume that this person says to himself: The one person next to the other looks very nice here. — He likes the fact that these two people are standing next to each other. Another person would not necessarily have this pleasure. The pleasure that one person derives from their standing together has nothing to do with the potential for development of the other two, because they have not earned the right to stand next to each other and please the third person. It is something completely different, depending solely on the fact that he is standing opposite these two people. So you see, the person forms an inner feeling of joy at the fact that the two people standing in front of him are standing together. This feeling is not conditioned by anything related to development. There are things in the world that arise simply because facts are brought together. It is not a question of the two people being connected by their karma. Let us consider the joy he feels at liking the two people standing next to him.

[ 11 ] Let us take another case. Let us assume that a person is standing at a certain point on earth and looking up into the sky. There he sees a certain constellation of stars. If he were to stand five steps further, he would see something different. This sight evokes in him a feeling of joy that is something completely new. In this way, the person experiences a sum of facts that are completely new and not conditioned by his previous development. Everything that the lily of the valley brings is conditioned by previous development. But this is not the case with what affects the human soul from the environment. Human beings have a whole host of concerns that have nothing to do with their previous development, but which exist because they come into contact with the outside world through certain circumstances. But because human beings experience this joy, it has become something within them, it has become an experience for them. Something has arisen in the human soul that is not determined by anything previous, that has arisen out of nothing. Such creations out of nothing arise continually in the human soul. They are the experiences of the soul, which are not experienced through facts, but through relations, through relationships between facts that one forms oneself. I ask you to distinguish carefully between experiences that one has from facts and those that one has from the relationships between facts.

[ 12 ] Life really falls into two parts that merge into each other without a boundary: experiences that are strictly conditioned by previous causes, by karma, and those that are not conditioned by karma but enter our field of vision anew. There are, for example, whole areas of human life that fall into this category. Suppose you hear that someone has stolen something somewhere. Now, of course, what has happened there, the whole deed, is conditioned by this or that karmic process. But let us assume that you only know about the theft and do not know the person who stole; therefore, in the objective world, it is a very specific personality who stole. You know nothing about them. But the thief does not come to you and say, “Lock me up, I have stolen,” but you have to piece together facts from all kinds of clues that can provide you with proof that this or that person is the thief. What you go through in terms of concepts has nothing to do with objective facts. It depends on completely different things, including how clever or not clever you are. What you come up with does not make that person the thief; it is a process that takes place entirely within you, which is added to what is there externally. Basically, all logic is something that is added to things externally. And all judgments of taste, all judgments we make about beauty, are such things that are added. Thus, human beings continually enrich their lives through what is not conditioned by previous causes, through what they experience by placing themselves in this or that relationship to things.

[ 13 ] If we now quickly go through the whole of human life in our minds and let it pass before our eyes as it developed through ancient Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon up to our Earth's development, we find that on Saturn there could not yet be any question of human beings being able to relate to each other in this way. There was only necessity. This was the case on the Sun and also on the Moon, and as it was with humans on the Moon, so it is today with animals. Animals experience only what is conditioned by previous causes. Only humans have completely new experiences that are not conditioned by previous causes. Therefore, only humans are capable of education in the truest sense of the word. Human beings alone always add something new to what is karmically conditioned. Only on Earth do human beings gain the ability to add something new. On the Moon, their development was not yet so far advanced that they could add anything new to what was already in their nature. Although they were not animals, they stood at the stage of animal development. They were conditioned by external causes in what they did. But they still are today, to a certain extent, for only slowly do experiences that are free experiences creep into human beings. And they creep in all the more as human beings stand at a higher stage of development. Take Raphael's paintings and imagine a dog standing in front of them. It sees what is objectively there; it sees what emerges from the paintings themselves insofar as they are sensory objects. But suppose a person stands in front of these pictures; he sees something completely different in them; he sees what he can only form because he has already developed to a higher level in previous incarnations. And now take a genius, for example Goethe; he sees much more, he knows what it means, why one thing is drawn this way and another that way. The more highly developed a person is, the more he sees. So the more a person's soul is already enriched, the more he adds such relationships of soul experiences. These become the property of his soul; they become what is deposited in his soul. But all this has only become possible with the development of humanity on Earth. Now the following happens.

[ 14 ] Man develops in his own way through the following ages. We know that the Earth is being replaced by Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. During this development, the sum of experiences that man has had beyond his earlier causes becomes greater and greater, and his inner life becomes richer and richer. What he has taken with him from earlier causes, from the Saturn, Sun, and Moon ages, will become less and less significant. They develop out of earlier causes, they shed them. And when human beings arrive with the Earth on the volcano, they will have shed everything they absorbed during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods. They will have cast off everything.

[ 15 ] Now we come to a difficult concept; it will be explained by means of a comparison. Imagine you are sitting in a car, imagine you have been given it as a gift or inherited it. You drive off in this car. A wheel on the car becomes damaged. You replace the old wheel with a new one. Now you have the old car, but a new wheel. Let's assume that after some time a second wheel becomes damaged, you replace it and now you have the old car and two new wheels. In the same way, you replace the third, fourth wheel, and so on, and you can easily imagine that one day you will actually have nothing left of the old car, but have replaced everything with new parts. You have nothing left of what you inherited or received as a gift. You are sitting there again, but basically it is a completely new vehicle. And now transfer this to human development. During the Saturn period, human beings received the structure of their physical body, which they gradually developed: the etheric body on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon, and the ego on Earth. They develop it gradually. But they develop more and more in this ego, which are new experiences, and they shed what they have inherited, what was given to them earlier by Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. And a time will come—this is the time of Venus development—when human beings will have cast off everything that was given to them by the gods during the Moon, Sun, Saturn, and the first half of Earth development. He will have cast off all of this, just as in our comparison the individual pieces are cast off from the wagon. And he will have gradually replaced everything with what he has taken in from the circumstances, what was not there before. So human beings will not be able to arrive on Venus and say: Now all of this is still in me from the Saturn, Sun, and Moon developments — because they will have already cast all of that off. And at the end of his development, he will still carry within himself what he has not received but has worked out for himself, what he has formed out of nothing. There you have the third thing that is added to evolution and involution: creation out of nothing. Evolution, involution, and creation out of nothing—that is what we must consider if we want to grasp the full greatness and majesty of human development. And so we can understand how the gods first gave us our three bodies as vehicles, how they gradually built up this vehicle and then gave us the ability to gradually overcome it again, how we are allowed to throw away the vehicle piece by piece, because the gods want to make us piece by piece in their image, into what can be said: I have been given the potential to become what I am meant to be, but out of this potential I have created a new being for myself.

[ 16 ] What humans will see in the distant future as a great and wonderful ideal, not only to have consciousness of themselves, but to have consciousness of their own creation, has already been developed by great, higher spirits in the past. And what human beings will only experience in the distant future is already being developed in this time by certain spirits who were involved in our development before. We have said that during the Saturn evolution, the thrones poured out what we call the substance of humanity, and that the spirits of personality poured into this substance of humanity what we call the forces of personality. But the spirits of personality, who were powerful enough at that time to pour their personality character into this substance poured out by the thrones, have since risen higher and higher. Today they have reached the point where they no longer need physical substance for their further development. On Saturn they needed the physical Saturn substance, which was also the basis for human substance, in order to live at all; on the Sun they needed the etheric substance, which flowed out into the etheric body of the human being; on the Moon they needed the astral substance; here on Earth they need our I. But now they will continue to need what this I itself develops, what human beings create from pure conditions, that which is no longer physical, etheric, or astral body, no longer the I as such, but what emanates from the I, what the I brings forth. The spirits of personality will use this, and they are already using it today in order to live in it. They lived on Saturn in what is now our physical body, on the Sun in what is now our etheric body, and on the Moon in what is now our astral body. Since the middle of the Atlantean epoch, they have begun to live in what human beings can bring forth from their ego as something higher.

[ 17 ] What do human beings bring forth from their ego as something higher? Three things. First, what we call lawful thinking, our logical thinking. It is something that human beings bring to things. When human beings do not merely look out into the external world, do not merely observe, when they do not merely run after the thief in order to find him, but in such a way that the lawfulness of observation becomes apparent to them, when they think thoughts that have nothing to do with the thief but nevertheless capture the thief, then human beings live in logic, in true logic. This logic is something that humans add to things. By surrendering to this true logic, the ego transcends itself.

[ 18 ] Secondly, the ego transcends itself by developing pleasure and displeasure in beauty, the sublime, humor, the comical—in short, in what humans themselves produce. Let's say you see something out in the world that strikes you as stupid. You laugh at it. The fact that you laugh at it has nothing to do with your karma. A stupid person might come along and think that what you are laughing at is clever. That is something that arises from your own unique position. Or let's say you see a hero who is being attacked by the world, who initially holds his own but ultimately meets a tragic end. What you see there is determined by karma, but what you feel as a sense of tragedy is new.

[ 19 ] Necessity of thought is the first thing, pleasure or displeasure is the second. The third is the way you feel compelled to act under the influence of circumstances. This too is not merely karmically determined, the way you feel compelled to act, but by your relationship to the matter. Let us assume that there are two people on one side who are placed in such a way that they are determined by their karma to work something out together. But at the same time, the development of one is more advanced than that of the other. The one who is more advanced will work it out, the other will save it for later and will work it out later. One will develop kindness of heart, the other will not empathize. This is something new that comes into development. You must not regard everything as conditioned, but it depends on whether or not we allow ourselves to be guided in our actions by the laws of justice and fairness. New things are always being added to our morality, to the way we fulfill our duties, and to our moral judgment. In our moral judgment in particular lies the third element, through which human beings transcend themselves, through which the I is increasingly elevated. The I brings this into our earthly world, and what is brought into the earth in this way does not perish. What human beings bring in from epoch to epoch, from age to age, in the results of logical thinking, aesthetic judgment, and the fulfillment of duty, forms a continuous stream that provides the matter and substance in which the spirits of personality embed themselves in their present development.

[ 20 ] This is how you live your life, this is how you develop yourself. And while you are developing, the spirits of personality look down on you and ask you continually: Are you also giving me something that I can use for my own development? And the more a person develops in terms of thought content and richness of thought, the more he tries to refine his aesthetic judgment and fulfill his duty beyond what karma dictates, the more nourishment the spirits of personality have, the more we sacrifice to them, and the more corporeal these spirits of personality become. What do these spirits of personality represent? Something that in the human worldview is called an abstraction: the spirit of the times, the spirit of different epochs. For those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, this spirit of the times is a real entity. The spirits of the times, which are nothing other than the spirits of personality, stride through the ages. When we look back to ancient times, to the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Babylonian, Greek-Latin eras, right up to our own time, we find that, apart from the nations, apart from all other differences between human beings, what we call the spirit of the age is always changing. People thought and felt differently five thousand years ago, differently three thousand years ago, and differently today. And what changes are the spirits of the times or spirits of personality, if we speak in the sense of spiritual science. These spirits of personality undergo a development in the supersensible realm, just as the human race undergoes a development in the sensible realm. But what the human race develops into the supersensible is food and drink for these spirits of personality; they enjoy it. At a time when people would live their lives without developing a wealth of ideas, without liking or disliking, without a sense of duty that goes beyond mere karmic impulse, at such a time the spirits of personality would have nothing to eat, they would become emaciated. Thus our life is related to such beings who invisibly weave through and live through our lives.

[ 21 ] I told you that human beings add something new to development, creating something out of nothing, as it were, in addition to involution and evolution, but that they could not create anything out of nothing if they had not first received the causes into which they have placed themselves, as into a vehicle. In the Saturn evolution, this vehicle was given to them; piece by piece, they throw it overboard and develop into the future. But he must have received the foundation for this, and if the gods had not first created the foundation for him, he would not have been able to accomplish anything that can be created out of nothing. The fact that the conditions of the environment can have such an effect on us that they are truly fruitful for our further development depends on such an event, on a good foundation. For what has become possible through the fact that human beings can create something new out of their circumstances, that they can make the relationships in which they find themselves a foundation for new things that they create themselves, that human beings have become capable of thinking something that goes beyond the things they experience in their environment, of feeling more than what is purely objectively before them? What has come about as a result of human beings being able to work beyond their pressing karma and live in the duty of truth, fairness, and kindness?

[ 22 ] The fact that human beings have become capable of thinking logically and developing the necessity of thought has also created the possibility of error. The fact that human beings can find pleasure in beauty also creates the possibility that they can introduce ugliness and filth into the development of the world. The fact that human beings are capable of setting themselves the concept of duty beyond mere karma and of fulfilling it beyond karma has also created the possibility of evil, of duty-bound wrongdoing. Thus, precisely because human beings have the possibility of creating out of mere circumstances, they have been placed in a world in which they can also create and weave their spiritual life, so that this spiritual life becomes full of error, ugliness, and evil. And it was not only necessary to create the possibility for human beings to create out of these circumstances, but it was also necessary to give them the possibility of gradually creating what is right and beautiful out of these circumstances through their struggles and strivings, gradually creating those virtues that truly lead further in their development.

[ 23 ] In Christian esotericism, creation out of circumstances is called creation in the spirit. And creation out of right, beautiful, and virtuous circumstances is called the Holy Spirit in Christian esotericism. The Holy Spirit blesses man when he is able to create out of nothing that which is right or true, beautiful, and good. But in order for human beings to become capable of creating in the sense of this Holy Spirit, they first had to be given the foundation for all creation out of nothing. This foundation was given to them through the entry of Christ into our evolution. By experiencing the Christ event on earth, human beings became capable of ascending to creation in the Holy Spirit. Thus it is Christ himself who creates the most eminent, deepest foundation. When human beings become so firmly grounded in the Christ experience that the Christ experience is the vehicle in which they embark on their further development, Christ sends them the Holy Spirit, and they become capable of creating what is right, beautiful, and good in the spirit of further development.

[ 24 ] Thus we see how, as if in final conclusion of what has been imprinted on man by Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, the Christ event came to earth, giving man the highest gift that enables him to live in the perspective of the future and to create more and more out of the circumstances, out of what is not here and there, but depends on how human beings relate to the facts of their environment, which in the most comprehensive sense is the Holy Spirit. This is again such an aspect of Christian esotericism. Christian esotericism is connected with the deepest thought we can have about all development, with the idea of creation out of nothing.

[ 25 ] That is why no true theory of evolution can ever abandon the idea of creation out of nothing. Let us assume that there were only evolution and involution. Then there would be eternal repetition, as with plants, and only what began on Saturn would exist on the volcano. But in addition to evolution and involution, creation out of nothing comes into the middle of our development. After Saturn, the sun, and the moon have passed, Christ appears on Earth as the great enriching element, which causes something completely new to be present on the volcano, something that was not yet present on Saturn. Those who speak only of evolution and involution will speak of development as if everything were merely repeating itself in a cycle. But such cycles can never truly explain the development of the worlds. Only when we add to evolution and involution this creation out of nothing, which introduces something new into the existing conditions, do we arrive at a true understanding of the world.

[ 26 ] The lower beings show at most a hint of what we might call creation out of nothing. A lily of the valley always becomes a lily of the valley again; at most, the gardener could add something from outside that the lily of the valley would never have produced from itself. Then there would be something that would be a creation out of nothing in relation to the lily of the valley being. But human beings themselves are capable of inserting themselves into this creation out of nothing. However, human beings only become capable of this by rising to this freedom of self-creation through the freest act that can become their model. What is the freest act? The freest act is that the creative, wise Word of our solar system decided within itself to enter into a human body and participate in the development of the earth through an act that was not based on any previous karma. When Christ decided to enter a human body, he was not compelled by any previous karma, but did so as a free act, which was based solely on the foresight of the future development of humanity, which had never existed before, but first arose in him as a thought out of nothing, out of foresight. It is a difficult thought, but Christian esotericism will never disregard it, and everything rests on the ability to add the thought of creation out of nothing to evolution and involution.

[ 27 ] But then, if one is able to do that, one also gains great ideals in life, which may not extend over such vast distances that they can be called cosmic distances, but which are basically quite closely connected with the question: Why do we unite, for example, in an Anthroposophical Society? In order to understand this properly, to understand what the meaning of an Anthroposophical Society is, we must once again return to the idea that we are working for the spirits of personality, for the spirit of the age. When a human being is born into this world, he is first educated by the most diverse circumstances; these influence him and thus form the first stage of his self-creative activity. If people could only realize how this is really the preliminary stage, how human beings are placed in this or that location through their birth, and that the circumstances actually have a great suggestive effect on them. Let us try to imagine how different a person's life would be if they had been born in Rome or Frankfurt instead of Constantinople. He would have been placed in different circumstances, including certain religious circumstances, under the influence of which he would have developed a certain fanaticism for Catholicism or Protestantism. But now let us suppose that a small cog in the karmic wheel had turned and he had been born in Constantinople. Would he not then have become a quite tolerable Turk? There you have an example of how suggestive the conditions of the environment are for human beings. But human beings can step out of the mere suggestiveness of conditions and unite with other human beings according to principles they themselves have chosen and understood. They say to themselves: Now I know why I work together with other human beings. This gives rise, out of human consciousness, to social associations in which material is created for the spirits of the age, for the personality. Such an association is the Anthroposophical Society, where this connection is created on the basis of brotherhood. This means nothing other than that each individual contributes to the association in such a way that he acquires, in miniature, all the good qualities that make him a reflection of the whole society. Thus, what he develops in terms of thoughts, emotional richness, and virtues through the society, he offers as nourishment to the spirits of the personality. In such a society, what creates human coexistence is united with the principle of individuality. Through such a society, each individual is enabled to offer what he produces as a sacrifice to the spirits of the personality. And everyone prepares themselves for the position occupied by the most advanced, who have advanced so far through spiritual training that they have the following ideal in mind: When I think, I do not think to satisfy myself, but I think so that the spirits of personality may draw nourishment from it. I place my best and most beautiful thoughts on the sacrificial altar of the spirits of personality, and what I feel, I do not feel out of selfishness, but because it is to be nourishment for the spirits of personality. And whatever virtues I can practice, I do not practice in order to be regarded as this or that, but in order to offer sacrifices, to create nourishment for the spirits of personality. In this way, we have set before us as our ideal those whom we call the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. For this is how they think and prepare the development of human beings, which will lead them more and more to create new things and ultimately to develop a world of effects from which the old causes have disappeared and from which a new light shines into the future. The world is not subject to constant change in which it takes on completely different forms, but rather the old is perfected, and this improved old becomes the vehicle of the new. But then this is discarded, it disappears into nothingness, so that something new can emerge from this nothingness. This is the great, powerful idea of progress, that something new and ever new can arise.

[ 28 ] But the worlds are closed in on themselves, and you have just seen from the example I have given that this is why we cannot speak of a real destruction. It has been shown how the spirits of personality lose their effect on human beings on the one hand, but on the other hand resume their development, so that we are dealing with a world that is constantly rejuvenating itself, but of which we can say: That which is cast off would prevent further progress, and is given to another so that he in turn can continue on his way. No one should believe that they have to let something sink into nothingness because they have been given the opportunity to build something out of nothing. But what will prove to be new on the volcano will always form new shapes and cast off the old, and what is cast off will find its own way.

[ 29 ] Evolution, involution, and creation out of nothing—these are the three concepts through which we should understand the true unfolding, the true evolution of world phenomena. Only in this way can we arrive at concepts that explain the world to human beings and give them feelings of inner life. For if human beings had to tell themselves that they could create nothing other than what is inherent in them as a cause, that they could only live out the effects of this, then this would not strengthen their powers and ignite their hopes to the same extent as when they can say to themselves: I can create values worth living for and always add something new to what has been given to me as a foundation; the old will not prevent me from creating new blossoms and fruits that will live on into the future. This is part of what we can characterize by saying: The anthroposophical worldview gives people vitality, hope for life, and confidence in life, because it shows them that they can work in the future on things that today lie not only in the womb of causality but in nothingness; it offers them the prospect that they can, in the true sense of the word, work their way from being creatures to being creators.