The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] In these winter lectures, we have been preoccupied from many different angles with the question of the nature of Christ, and we have tried in many different ways to clarify what we call the Christ impulse in human evolution, as the most powerful force within our entire earthly evolution. It is therefore understandable that, first of all, this subject cannot be exhausted at all, but that one would have to do an infinite amount of work, so to speak, if one wanted to clarify the Christ impulse in all its aspects. On the other hand, however, it can also be clear that, according to all our assumptions, everything that can be of interest to human beings is basically connected with the discussion of the Christ appearance. We have seen that the Gospels themselves seek to approach the essence of Christ from four different sides, and we have hinted at various things concerning the mysteries of the individual Gospels.

[ 2 ] We have only been able to shed light on the Gospel of Matthew to a certain extent. It will have to be left to later lectures to return to the mysteries of the Gospel of Matthew in context, in order to then delve into the depths of the Gospel of Mark. If we were to attempt, at the end of winter in our branch, to give even a few sketchy hints about what remains for us, this would destroy the unity of the lectures for the coming months. Therefore, today and next time, I will touch on questions that approach the Christ problem from a different angle, namely the question of the connection between the human conscience and the impact of the Christ impulse on human evolution. This will achieve something else at the same time. Next Thursday we will have a public lecture on the human conscience, and today we will also speak about the same topic here in the branch. This is done with a very specific intention, an intention that will come up again and again in our spiritual mind. The intention is to show that the same subject should be discussed in a different way in a working group such as ours than in a public lecture intended for those who do not yet belong to the spiritual scientific movement. Among the many things that should become fixed qualities in the mind of an anthroposophist is the feeling that the things of the world should be approached from the most diverse points of view and sides, and that someone who already has certain prerequisites can speak and hear about a thing differently than someone who does not have such prerequisites. When we speak in a working group, we assume that the mind has, to a certain degree, lived its way into the ideas of a spiritual world, that it is immersed in the sensations and feelings of the spiritual world, and that from these sensations, feelings, and thoughts that have been taken in about the spiritual world, an idea about such a thing as the human conscience can be formed. The answer to such questions can therefore be drawn from much greater depths in a working group than in a public lecture given to a non-anthroposophical audience. After all, these public lectures are intended to gradually provide something like proof that the truths we know in spiritual science are really truths, by drawing on the phenomena of the soul life, which are initially treated as external experiences. This is a different task from speaking for the spiritual scientist himself, who already has certain prerequisites, convictions, and perhaps also certain views about the spiritual world. The spiritual scientist should gradually learn to draw the concepts and ideas that explain this or that to him from the most diverse sources and perspectives, and the spiritual scientist should learn to break the bad habit, which is nevertheless necessary in outer life, of speaking about a thing in only one way.

[ 3 ] The human conscience is something that must touch us in the depths of our soul. And where philosophers and other thinkers have confronted us about the world for centuries, it is usually the question of what we call the human conscience that has interested them. One could easily succumb to an illusion when confronted with a phenomenon such as conscience: the illusion that has already been referred to several times as an illusion, and which consists in believing that everything that is present in the human soul today has always been there. But we have seen that the most diverse soul capacities and soul processes that have developed in human beings over the course of millennia were completely different in primeval times than they are today. And many of the things that we today consider the most precious and significant in our soul life were not possessed by our souls when they walked the earth in other incarnations many millennia ago. Passing through various incarnations does have a meaning. We have often emphasized this. The purpose is that the soul, in developing from one embodiment to another, can acquire ever new abilities and powers, that the soul truly goes through a history, that its earthly existence is a period of learning, that it was something else at the time when our embodiments began, that it is something else now, and that it will be something else in the distant future.

[ 4 ] Even the human conscience, that precious gift of the human soul, which calls out like the voice of God to the good and evil in every individual human being, even this precious gift of the human inner being has not always been there. This conscience is also something that has developed. And it is not even that long ago that this human conscience first appeared and has since continued to develop further and further. And even though it is a precious asset, it is not destined to live in the human soul in the same way through all subsequent incarnations as it does now. It will continue to develop, it will take on other forms, it will prove to be something that man must acquire, something that will bear fruit for him, and something that in later times, when he has these fruits, will be something he can look back on and say: There was an epoch when it became possible for me, in passing from incarnation to incarnation, to incorporate into my soul existence that which is conscience, and now I have the fruits of what I once incorporated into my soul. Just as we look back today on a time when our souls were in other embodiments and did not yet have what we now call conscience, so in later times our souls will look back on our present incarnations and say: Blessed be that past! Thanks to those gifts that were given to us in the past as human conscience! Had we not been able to develop human conscience in our souls at that time, we would now lack what we need for our present life!

[ 5 ] From this we can already see that conscience belongs to the spiritual assets of the present, and that understanding something of the nature and essence of human conscience is like understanding our present and the soul life of our present. The fact that it came into being has already been pointed out in many contexts. Next Thursday, we will also point out that one can, so to speak, point with one's finger to the moment when conscience was first discovered for the human soul. If we go back a few centuries to ancient Greece, we find the great poet Aeschylus barely half a millennium before the beginning of the Christian era. When we look at him, this powerful genius of ancient Greek drama, when we let his characters work on us, we find in his dramas what we today call conscience, but not yet with a similar expression. Half a millennium before the beginning of the Christian era, the greatest dramatist had no expression for what we today call the human conscience. If he wants to express the human soul process that would correspond to what we today call conscience, he must do so in such a way that someone who has committed the injustice of matricide, for example, looks into the spiritual realm through the violence of this event and sees figures in the spiritual realm that ancient Greece called the Erinyes and later Roman culture called the Furies. This means that someone who has committed an injustice such as matricide does not hear in Aeschylus what we today call the reproaching voice of conscience within ourselves, but is compelled to see spiritually the figures that surround him like avengers of his deed.

[ 6 ] This is one of the special proofs that you can find in the historical development of humanity for what has just been characterized in a comprehensive way. The human soul was very different in ancient times. We have always emphasized that the human soul only gradually developed its present ability to perceive the physical-sensory world through the senses as it does today, and to use the intellect as it does today. We have emphasized that in ancient times the soul had a certain clairvoyance as a normal faculty. At the time of Aeschylus, this clairvoyance only occurred in special cases. The soul becomes clairvoyant, for example, in order to see what it has done in the physical world through its wrongdoing. The soul of Orestes becomes clairvoyant after he has committed matricide. There it sees the spirits it has awakened in the spiritual world through its deed. They press in on it. It is not something like conscience that sits within the soul, but clairvoyant consciousness arises to see the disorder that has been awakened by the wrongdoing committed in the physical world. We would find this everywhere in ancient times: someone who has done something wrong does not yet hear the warning voice of conscience, because in ancient times the soul is in a state of clairvoyance and sees what has been created in the outer world through the wrongdoing.

[ 7 ] What happens when an injustice has been committed? Something is created by ourselves in the spiritual world. It is only a materialistic prejudice that an injustice can pass without something being created in the spiritual world. Injustice produces very specific processes in the spiritual world, effects that radiate from us, invisible to the outer senses, but present for spiritual vision. And such spiritual processes, which radiate from someone who has done something wrong, are food for certain beings that actually exist in the spiritual world. Such beings cannot always reach human beings. If a person does not have the kind of emanations that come from wrongdoing, then they cannot reach him. It is just like a room: if the room is completely clean, there can be no flies in it. There are none inside. But if the room is full of all kinds of dirt, food scraps, and so on, the flies are immediately there. The moment a person radiates certain spiritual vibrations through their bad deeds, beings that feed on them surround them. The great Greek tragedian Aeschylus had these beings surround Orestes. What we hear today as an inner voice was still so conscious to the Greek tragedian Aeschylus that he allowed it to appear in external forms, because he knew that in special cases, what was common to all souls in earlier times still occurred: a certain clairvoyant consciousness. Something of everything that came before remains for later times and then appears as atavism, but only in abnormal cases. Therefore, it is not something to be criticized when, for example, something similar appears in Shakespeare, a kind of objectified conscience.

[ 8 ] But then we need only go a little further in Greek art, from Aeschylus to Euripides, and Euripides, the later tragedian, shows us that he already has the concept of conscience. Thus we see in ancient Greece how, in the half-millennium before the Christian era, the concept of conscience gradually emerged. Look for a word in the Old Testament for what we today call conscience: you will not find it. Conscience is something that first entered the human soul as a capacity. And if we look not at short periods of time but at long periods, we can see that conscience is something that entered the human soul at about the same time as the Christ impulse took hold in the soul. One might say that conscience follows the Christ impulse almost like a shadow as it enters into world history. In order to understand this, we must now bring to life within ourselves many things that we have acquired over the years and that we must make fruitful in order to comprehend what the human conscience actually is.

[ 9 ] If we want to understand in a deeper sense what conscience is, we must focus our attention on the very moment when human development approached the Christ impulse, took it up, and then progressed into our time. We know that we are dealing here with three cultural epochs of human development, which we call the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the Greek-Latin culture, and our present culture. We can leave aside the two preceding cultures, the ancient Indian and the ancient Persian, because at that time our souls were still far from even suspecting what we now call conscience. In the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, we gradually see how everything that then rose to the highest height it could reach was prepared in order to attain the significant impulse in the Greek-Latin culture that was received as the Christ impulse. And then we see in our own time the epoch in which this impulse is being processed. And this processing will become ever greater and more significant in the coming age.

[ 10 ] If we now recall a little more precisely this development that has taken place from the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the Greek-Latin epoch to our own time, we see that in each of these epochs a particular member of the human soul has been developed. Of the three members of the human soul, the one we call the sentient soul was developed during the Egyptian-Chaldean period, that is, we had to be embodied in Egyptian-Chaldean bodies in order to be able to properly absorb those abilities that are suitable for the special development of the sentient soul. Then, as souls, we took this quality with us into our next incarnations during the Greek-Latin epoch in order to develop the intellectual or mind soul. And with the fruits we have gained from the Greek-Latin epoch, we live in our present incarnations in order to gradually bring to ever higher development what we call the powers of the consciousness soul. Thus our soul as a human being is formed during these three ages. And when our time is over, our soul will ascend to the development of the ability of the spirit itself. This will be in the sixth cultural epoch. Here we see the profound meaning of our successive incarnations. Their purpose is to enable us to gradually acquire those abilities which we know as those of the human soul, and in a wider sense also those which go beyond the mere life of the soul.

[ 11 ] Thus, during the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, our souls acquired the powers of the sentient soul and developed these powers, while during the Greek-Latin period they acquired the powers of the intellectual soul or mind soul. Normally, human beings had to ascend to the intellectual soul before the Christ impulse could be exerted upon them.

[ 12 ] But this development took place in a very different way at different points on the earth. For if we wanted to believe, with a certain complacency of soul, that everything in the development of humanity takes place as simply as possible, we would never be able to understand human development. One must learn a great deal in order to be able to reflect to some extent on the great thoughts of the guiding world beings! And it is the greatest arrogance when a person says that truth is simple, for then he wants to twist truth to suit his own convenience. It is only a fruit of convenience when it is said that truth must be simple. But the truth is complicated, because the spirit of the guiding world beings can only be understood by us if we make the greatest efforts to immerse ourselves in the thoughts of the guiding world spirits — even into the most subtle thoughts. So we must not believe that we have already exhausted everything when we say: Our souls have developed through the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, through the Greek-Latin culture, and through our present cultural epoch. Let us place ourselves for a moment in the time when there was no Greek-Latin being, but only the Egyptian-Chaldean culture.

[ 13 ] At that time, people also lived in the regions of Greece and in the countries of the Roman Empire; they lived, so to speak, before the Greek-Latin era in the countries of the later Greek-Latin culture. And in our regions too, on the ground we walk on today, people lived at the time when the Egyptian-Chaldean culture was unfolding in Asia and Africa. While in Asia and Africa, at the time of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, certain souls were undergoing, in the most eminent sense, what was to prepare them to receive the Christ impulse, other souls were living in the regions of the later Greek-Latin culture, preparing to contribute something entirely different to the overall development of humanity. Similarly, people lived in our regions who were preparing for something else. Not only do our souls take on different abilities in successive ages, but souls also live side by side in the same ages. This has a wide variety of effects on souls, and this creates a further complication in development. This brings more to human development than if everything had proceeded in a straight line. In fact, preparations had to be made both on Greek-Latin soil and in our regions so that the right elements could be brought into cultural development from the most diverse sides. The Asian and African peoples had a completely different task, the southern European peoples had a completely different one, and the peoples of central and northern Europe had yet another completely different task. They all had very different things to contribute to the overall development of humanity, and they were able to contribute different things because their predispositions and their entire education were fundamentally different from those of the others.

[ 14 ] For if we turn our gaze to the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, to the souls that reached their peak in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, we must say: these peoples developed certain abilities of the sentient soul, which can be developed particularly well when one takes up the wonderful teachings that flowed from the Egyptian sanctuaries at that time, or the wonderful astrology that came from the Chaldean sanctuaries. What flows from the various cultural centers is there to advance the souls. For basically, the true meaning of what flows from the various cultural centers is not what these cultural currents contain, but what they contribute to the development of the human soul. The content passes away! And only those who are completely deluded can believe that in a few centuries our present science will not have sunk into oblivion, just as certain things of Egyptian-Chaldean culture have sunk into oblivion. Anyone who believes that the Copernican worldview represents eternal achievements is greatly mistaken; it will later be just as outdated as the achievements of Egyptian culture are today. In terms of their content, these things will pass away, just like many other things in human development. For example, we stand before that wonderful painting, which you are all familiar with at least in pictures, Leonardo da Vinci's “The Last Supper.” If we want to see it today in Milan, we see only faint outlines, and we know that it will not be long before nothing more will be visible of what Leonardo da Vinci put his best efforts into. Nor will there be anything left to see later of the magnificent works of Raphael, which today so deeply move the soul when you allow them to work on you. All these works will crumble to dust, and no memory of them will remain on the physical plane. The content of these works, like the content of cultures, will pass into death. But when we stand before these pictures, for example, we should remember that they flowed from Raphael's soul, and that Raphael's soul became different after conjuring these pictures out of itself than it was before. And the millions and millions of people who are uplifted by them take the content of the pictures into their souls and thereby become something else. And when the whole earth is once crushed to dust—which it most certainly will be—then nothing will remain of the external institutions of cultures, but what the souls have taken in will pass over into eternity. For human souls, what cultures offer, what flowed from the sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea in the form of wisdom that was noble for that time, is there. Human souls were to advance by a corresponding amount. And what they had advanced by made them more mature to receive new goods, those goods which then, in the Greek-Latin culture, brought the souls forward again. If our souls had not absorbed what they were able to absorb during the Greek-Latin period, they would not now be able to live their way into the consciousness soul. That is progress in time.

[ 15 ] If we remember some of what has been said in public lectures, we know that what we call the I works in the three soul members. Out of the chaos of soul experiences that confront us in the feeling soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul, the I gradually develops, crystallizes out of all this, but not in the same way at different points on the earth. For example, while the Egyptian-Chaldean culture was developing in Asia and Africa, people there developed in such a way that they allowed the revelations of the Chaldean and Egyptian sanctuaries to influence their souls for a long time. The peoples of Europe, who were far removed from this, developed in such a way that they had, in a sense, already taken a step forward. In the European regions, people had already developed the I in their sentient soul in a certain way, a strong feeling, a strong sense of the I.

[ 16 ] Here we come to an infinitely important point. People who were waiting with their egos moved to Asia and Africa at a time when what could be developed through the Egyptian and Chaldean sanctuaries had already been developed in the sentient soul. In the region of the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, souls were incarnated which, more or less without a clear sense of self, absorbed high teachings and a high culture. In ancient Chaldea, the high culture that existed at that time was sunk into a sentient soul that was not yet conscious of its self. Here in the north, such a high culture is not immersed in the soul. The soul remains more or less uncultivated, but in this lack of culture, in this soul of feeling unilluminated by any revelations from the sanctuaries, it develops an ego consciousness. We can say that among the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, self-consciousness is delayed; it first allows the sentient soul to absorb a certain culture until the later soul members are developed. In Europe, the ego does not wait, but develops already in the sentient soul. However, it waits with the absorption of certain cultural assets until the later soul members have developed. Thus, in Asia and Africa, we have embodied souls that are still almost completely unaware of their ego, but have something like inspirations of higher revelations in the sentient soul. In Europe, we have souls that do not have a particularly high culture, but which emphasize their individual ego, look within themselves as human beings, and feel themselves to be human beings. Between these two extremes stand the Greek-Latin peoples, who had the special task of developing the abilities of the intellectual soul. They developed the ego in the intellectual soul and were also able to absorb certain cultures in the intellectual soul at the same time. Thus, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture waited until a later time to develop the ego, while European culture developed it early on. In the Greek-Latin culture, this was balanced in a certain sense, as a certain culture was developed at the same time as the ego.

[ 17 ] This points to a great mystery of our human development, without knowledge of which we will never understand why the Christ impulse found such unhindered influence and acceptance in Europe.

[ 18 ] Why is that? Could Christ have appeared in Europe, could he have incarnated himself in flesh in Europe? No, he could not have done so. He appeared in the Greek-Latin period, when the intellectual soul had been developed. This was suited to receiving Christ, so to speak. But Christ should never have appeared in Europe, because the strong sense of ego remained there. This strong individual sense of ego was not suitable for producing a single human being who had the advantage over all others of being able to receive the highest alone. A premature sense of ego, an excessive feeling for the equality of human beings, had developed in the European countries. It would have been impossible for one personality to rise above the others as that personality rose above his contemporaries in Palestine, who were to form the vessel for Christ. The ego-feeling could not appear as intensely in Europe at an early stage if Christ was to find a body in which to incarnate himself. He therefore had to appear precisely where, at the border between Egyptian-Chaldean and Greek-Latin culture, it was possible to develop such a body that did not yet carry within itself the premature sense of self, but which nevertheless had the deepest understanding of the spiritual world that had been absorbed into Egyptian and Chaldean culture. But if Europe did not have the ability to provide the body for Christ, it did, however, through having developed the ego too early in the dawn of the new existence, have, above all other achievements, the full understanding, once Christ was there, to bring human beings the full consciousness of the ego, to comprehend this ego-consciousness, for the reason that the European peoples had taken up the sense of the I too early and had, as it were, grown together with it.

[ 19 ] We must take this into account if we want to understand the whole rise of the newer culture. In Asia and Africa we find people who know a great deal about the secrets of the world, who are very skilled in the production of certain symbols. In short, they have cultivated their sentient soul to such an extent that they have a rich inner life, but their sense of self is weak. In Europe, we find people who have less culture in terms of what can be acquired through external revelations, but we find there the type of person who searches within themselves, who finds firm support within themselves. Thus, the ground was prepared in Asia for the appearance of Christ; there could be a body into which Christ could enter. And in Europe we find people best prepared to understand the bringer of ego-consciousness. He brought the European peoples what they had been longing for. That is why it is precisely in Europe that the wonderful mysticism developed which wanted to take Christ into its own soul, into the I: Christian mysticism.

[ 20 ] Thus, at various points on earth, humanity is being prepared through the wise guidance of the world so that every moment of development comes into its own. One of the great achievements of the spiritual-scientific worldview is that we increasingly gain a sense of how wisely everything in human evolution and in the whole world has actually proceeded, how souls have been prepared over thousands of years on European soil so that they could find a firm point within themselves as early as possible, and how, in order to develop this firm point, were even held back by forces that were so highly developed in Asia. That is why the cultural stream from Asia is making its way here, and the strong sense of the I-personality is emerging in Europe. Yes, we can actually point out how the Adriatic Sea forms an almost fixed boundary between an even weaker sense of the I in Greece on the one hand, where people did not yet feel themselves as individual personalities, but rather as Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, belonging to their polis, and between the Roman cultural regions on the other hand, where the strong sense of self is very much developed in the consciousness of the Roman citizen, who stands firmly on his ground as a personality. In Greece, we still see in people what could be described as follows: the ego is still somewhat recessive, it is still more receptive to the outside world, more in a way where the ego does not need to be present.

[ 21 ] And when we cross the Adriatic Sea, we come to Rome and see the Roman citizen standing firmly on his feet, with an already developed sense of self. All this is connected with deeper, more significant underlying factors. These things do not happen in the world without corresponding events taking place in the spiritual world for the things that happen on the physical plane. We see that in Greek culture there is still a strong influence of the restrained ego. Much is still taken in impersonally there. The Greek does not feel himself to be an individual citizen, but a member of the Athenian, Spartan, or Theban organism. This must be cast off. The human being's longing to receive from outside must disappear, and the human being must enter into the inner soul if he is to become more and more a Western human being.

[ 22 ] What the great masses are to form must be exemplified by the great leaders, the great individualities of humanity. Here we see, if we allow something to enter our soul, what we have repeatedly pointed out, namely that the Greek still had a strong awareness that what is given to him from outside, without developing strongly within his personality, is something particularly valuable. Once again, I recall the saying of a highly educated Greek, which gives us a deep insight into the longing of the Greek people: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows! — The great value of the invisible, of the supersensible life, has not yet been understood. What can be extracted from the environment without the ego is extracted. And it is now deeply moving to see, precisely at this point, how a great leading personality stands at the turning point of the ages like a landmark, ready to cast off the attitudes of the past and take up the attitudes of the new, to say, as it were, resoundingly to the spiritual world: Now a time is coming when it will no longer be enough to take in what flows into the human personality without the ego, but when what comes into the human personality through the ego must also be taken in!

[ 23 ] This deed was accomplished in one of the great sages of Greek antiquity, Empedocles, who lived partly on the island of Sicily. In many legends that are now merely retold, there lies something extraordinarily profound. Empedocles, the great sage, who was not only a great philosopher but also an initiate into the deep mysteries of the time, who was one of the greatest statesmen of all time and at the same time a sacrificial priest in Agrigento, is the subject of a legend, but also of an occult truth, which tells that after fulfilling his task in Sicily, he plunged his body into Mount Etna in order to unite his outer shell with the soil of Sicily, thereby documenting, as it were: Now let firm faith in the self come, even if the outer shell disappears! — The sacrifice of Empedocles' outer shell was accomplished when he gave his shell to Mount Etna. Behind this lies a profound occult truth. For those who come to Sicily today, this will still be one of the spiritual events: that when they breathe the air of Sicily spiritually, they will still find the after-effects of Empedocles' deed. Empedocles' soul has been reincarnated; his body has acquired a special meaning by being consciously surrendered to the elements, so that today it can be found in the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily. Empedocles' body forms part of the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily.

[ 24 ] It was an important moment for me—and we may, of course, talk about such things with each other in our circle—when, a few weeks ago, I was able to say to our friends in Palermo about their Empedocles, in the immediate vicinity of that event, what I have just said to you: Anyone who consciously enters your place here in Sicily today still breathes spiritually what entered the air of Sicily through the sacrificial death of Empedocles!

[ 25 ] So we see how what we could indicate externally, spatially, with the Adriatic Sea—the boundary between East and West—is indicated by a great leader of humanity who, in order to continue his work in the West, consciously casts off that which enabled growth in the East, and wants to save for further development that which that is exalted above all elements of the outer physical plane.

[ 26 ] It is something tremendous to look into these differences, for they show how, in separate areas, separate things have been prepared so that the greatest could be achieved in diversity. Through the interaction of the most diverse, the goal of the overall development of humanity must be achieved. From this we can see that after Christ appeared in the East, he moved to the West and was received there by those who were prepared with a strong sense of self, so that they could understand the bringer of the strong sense of self. That was the secret of Christ's entry into the Occident, that he found prepared souls, and that these souls received him. Thus, in the East, we see humanity preparing everything that makes it possible for a body or physicality to arise, consisting of a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body, into which Christ can enter, bringing the impulse of love to Earth through the ego consciousness and with the ego consciousness. Love is what is brought to the earth in its most soulful, most spiritual form with Christ. We first consider love as it arises, so to speak, in its soul-spiritual form in the East; and then we continue to consider its development as it spreads to the West and is understood there.

[ 27 ] How was it possible that ego-consciousness could have such an effect in the West that it felt related to Christ? What had happened to the souls that had absorbed ego-consciousness at an early stage?

[ 28 ] The Egyptian-Chaldean peoples waited with the development of the I until the consciousness soul; the Greek-Latin peoples developed the I already in the intellectual or emotional soul; the culture of northern Europe developed the sense of I prematurely in the sentient soul. There it was early in the human soul. So the sentient soul and the ego-consciousness worked together here in a completely different way than anywhere else in the world. In Northern Europe, the sentient soul and the ego-consciousness first interpenetrated in human evolution. What happened as a result of the ego-consciousness already being established in the sentient soul of the European peoples before Christ entered human evolution and before they absorbed what had developed in Asia?

[ 29 ] This meant that a force of the human soul had developed with the sentient soul, which could only have developed because the sentient soul, which was still completely virgin and uninfluenced by other cultures, had become permeated with the sense of self. And this soul force became the conscience: the permeation of the sense of self with the sentient soul. Hence the remarkable innocence of conscience! How does conscience speak? It speaks in the simplest, most naive person as in the most complicated soul. It says immediately: That is right! That is wrong! — Without a theory, without any doctrine. With the force of an impulse, an instinct, what tells us: That is right! That is wrong! — Nowhere else will you find what developed in the West in the way we have discussed it today. That is why its first rays shine like the dawn toward Greece and from there to Rome, where it already appears very strongly. It is there that we first find the word conscience in Roman writers: conscientia. While we find it only sporadically in the Greeks, in the first hints in Euripides, we find it already very strongly emphasized in the Romans, already as a commonly used word. This is the influence of that cultural current that arose from the fact that the sentient soul and the ego-feeling have interpenetrated each other, so that the sense of self, which carries human beings upward from the lower to the higher, already speaks in the sentient soul like a voice of God, as otherwise only instincts, desires, and passions speak in the sentient soul, and there it speaks with the urge to do what is right in order to ascend to the higher self.

[ 30 ] Thus, in the development of humanity among the European peoples, we see conscience first emerging. From there it radiates out and then communicates itself to other people on earth. In this way, through wise world guidance, humanity has been prepared at a certain point so that conscience could be brought forth as a contribution to the overall development of humanity. With this, we have basically given everything that conscience explains to us. We have given that indefinable quality of conscience, the emergence of conscience from the depths of the soul. Conscience speaks as an impulse speaks, and yet it is not an impulse. Those philosophers who describe it as an instinct are far off the mark. It speaks with the same grandeur with which the conscious soul itself speaks when it appears; but at the same time it speaks with the elemental, more primitive forces.

[ 31 ] Thus we see how love appears on earth in the East, and conscience here in the West. These are two things that belong together: how Christ appears in the East, how conscience awakens in the West to receive Christ as conscience. In this simultaneous emergence of the fact of the Christ event and the understanding of the Christ event, and in the preparation of these two things at different points on the earth, we see at work an infinite wisdom that is present in evolution. We have thus pointed to the past of conscience.

[ 32 ] If we now remember what we have often emphasized, that now, after the Kali Yuga has come to an end, we are in a transition where new forces have to develop, then we will find it understandable that today we are also facing important questions concerning the development of our conscience. Last time, we emphasized strongly and sharply that we are approaching a new Christ event, in which the soul will become capable of perceiving Christ in a certain etheric clairvoyance and reliving the event of Damascus within itself. We may therefore ask the question: What will happen with the parallel event, with the development of conscience in the periods in which we are living? We will address this question next Sunday, May 8, and in doing so, we will also commemorate our anniversary in the best possible way by pointing to the vitality of the spiritual scientific movement and showing how the human soul forces are in a state of transition. We will see that conscience can be illuminated from many different sides. This will be done in a very exoteric way in the public lecture next Thursday, but even there, some things can already be assumed because these public lectures have been going on for a number of years. One can speak as deeply about conscience as we have spoken today, one can speak as exoterically as we will on Thursday, and one can speak even more deeply about conscience. It will take some time before we are able to do so.