The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the course of these lectures, we have gained an understanding of how earlier preparatory states from the ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon eras flowed into our earthly existence. Of course, we must always bear in mind that the most essential thing that can interest us in this entire process of Earth’s evolution is the development and formation of the human being itself. We know, after all, that in our entire planetary evolution, the human being is, so to speak, the first-born. When we look back at the ancient Saturn era, we notice that during this period of warmth we find only the first rudiments of the physical human being, and that nothing of all that still surrounds us today—what we encounter in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms—was yet present. These kingdoms were added to the human kingdom only later. And we must therefore ask: What, then, is the actual situation regarding the development of humanity during the Earth’s formation, in the sense of the Genesis account, in more detail?

[ 2 ] As the lectures progress, we will see that everything we hope to glean today from spiritual scientific research will indeed prove true. If we look at Genesis so superficially, it might seem to us as though human beings appeared, as it were, out of nowhere on the so-called sixth day of creation. But we know that humanity is the most important thing of all, that the other kingdoms are, as it were, byproducts of the becoming of humanity. And that is why we must ask ourselves: What of humanity in the days of creation that preceded the sixth? Where are we to look for humanity there? — If the becoming of the Earth represents a kind of repetition of Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, then it must be assumed that the becoming of humanity, above all else, always repeats itself; that we need not look for humanity only on the sixth day of creation, but already before that. How is this apparent contradiction explained—that Genesis does not speak of humanity already before that?

[ 3 ] Well, there is one thing to point out first. When Genesis begins to speak of the becoming of humanity, it speaks of Adam, and in a certain sense, in the ancient priestly language of Hebrew, the term Adam coincides with our term “man.” But we must understand this term Adam more precisely. It evoked in the soul of an ancient Hebrew sage a concept that we could roughly render in English with the word “the earthly one.” Thus, the human being as such is the earthly being par excellence, the crowning achievement, as it were, of all earthly existence—that which ultimately emerges as the fruit of becoming earthly. But everything that ultimately converges in the fruit is, of course, already present beforehand in the entire being of the plant, to stay with the image. We will not find the human being in the preceding days of creation unless we realize that in reality it is not the physical aspect of the human being that precedes the spiritual-soul aspect, but that the opposite is true: the spiritual-soul aspect precedes the physical. What we have before us today as the physical human being on Earth, what we first address as a human being, we must imagine something like this: as if we had a small mass of water that we allow to solidify into ice through cooling. Just as water solidifies into ice, so must we imagine the spiritual-soul human being, through the work of the Elohim on the sixth day of creation, as solidifying, as it were, condensing into the earthly human being. Thus, the progression to the sixth day of creation is a condensation of the spiritual-soul human being into the dense earthly human being. Quite naturally, we will not have to seek the human being on the preceding so-called days of creation in the realm of what initially forms supersensibly as physical waste or as the laws of the physical waste of becoming human, but rather we will have to seek the human being beforehand in a spiritual-soul state. So when we speak in the sense of Genesis that on the first day there was the inner movement and the outward manifestation, we must not seek the human being for this first day of creation in the earthly realm, but in the sphere surrounding the Earth as a spiritual-soul being. We must say: his earthly existence is preparing itself as a spiritual-soul being.

[ 4 ] Today I would like to begin by connecting the findings of spiritual science with the Book of Genesis. What is taking shape in the very earliest stages of human development when Genesis tells us that the two complexes—that which stirs within and that which manifests itself outwardly—arise through cosmic thinking? When the Spirit of the Elohim weaves and broods through these complexes, what is taking shape within humanity? What we might call the feeling soul in the sense of our current discussions in the field of spiritual science—that which we must regard today as an inner aspect—is preparing itself, in the sense of Genesis, on the so-called first day of creation up to the moment when it is said: “Let there be light, and there was light.” In all of this, the soul of feeling—as the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being—is contained, so to speak, within the spiritual sphere. So, to make this clear, we will say: We first seek the soul of feeling in the vicinity of the Earth and place it in the position that is usually called the first of the days of creation. — So there, where the Elohim and their ministering beings carry out their work in the sphere surrounding the Earth, where a spiritual-soul being weaves, there we have, just as we see the clouds in the atmosphere today, a spiritual-soul aspect of the human being in this spiritual-soul atmosphere—namely, first and foremost, the human being’s sentient soul. Then human development proceeds, and as we follow the human being further, we must seek what we call the intellectual or emotional soul. The feeling soul progresses to the intellectual or emotional soul, and we have, in the sphere of the Earth, this sort of spiritual thinning of the feeling soul into the intellectual or emotional soul on the second of the so-called days of creation. Thus, where the tone ether strikes into the becoming of the Earth, where the upper material masses separate from the lower ones, there belongs to the upper sphere, weaving within it, a human being who is present only in the form of a potential in the sensory soul and the intellectual or emotional soul. As a third stage, we must then conceive of humanity’s progression toward the consciousness soul, so that we should conceive of the entire process presented to us in Genesis in such a way that on this third day of creation, down on Earth, through the influence of the life ether, the green, the plant-like, develops in accordance with its kind, as we have described. The Earth brings forth from itself—though only in a way that can be perceived supersensually—the foundation of plant life, and above, in the ether, weaves that which we must designate as the consciousness soul in connection with the feeling soul and the intellectual or emotional soul.

[ 5 ] Thus does the soul-spiritual human being weave within the sphere of the Earth’s becoming. He is, as it were, present within the substance of the various spiritual beings. In essence, he has no independent existence up to that point. It is as if he were formed as an organ within the Elohim, the Archai, and so on, existing within their bodies as a part of them. It is therefore natural that we are told of these beings, for only they are truly individualities in this era of the Earth’s formation; for the fate of these beings also describes the fate of the human potential. But, as you can easily imagine, if humanity is ever to truly populate the Earth, something must occur that we might describe as a gradual densification of the human being. This soul-spiritual aspect must gradually, as it were, clothe itself with the physical. Thus, at the end of what we encounter in the Bible as the third day of creation, we have a spiritual-soul human being in the making, just as we speak today of the conscious soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the feeling soul. All of this must be clothed, as it were, with an outer garment. Within these spiritual-soul spheres, the human being must first receive the garment of the astral body. Let us try to imagine what we actually mean by this: After this third day of creation, the human being must now clothe themselves with the astral body. — Where, then, do we find the human being’s astral body in today’s life, as it were set apart before us, so that we can study its laws? Well, we have this astral body, albeit in a completely different form than it was in the time described in Genesis, separated from the human being when the person sleeps. There the person leaves their etheric and physical bodies in bed, and the person themselves is then present in the astral body, which contains the I.

[ 6 ] Now recall some of the things I have told you in past years about the peculiar life of this astral body during sleep. Recall also what you can find on this subject in my *Esoteric Science*. Then you will say to yourselves: When this astral body has emerged from the physical and etheric bodies, connections begin to form—as it were, currents flowing from this astral body out into the cosmic environment. When you return from the sleeping state to the waking state in the morning, you have, as it were, drawn the strengthening forces from the entire cosmos during the sleeping state. In a certain sense, your astral body was integrated into the entire surrounding cosmos through its currents during the night. It was in connection with all the planetary beings that belong to our Earth. It sent its currents to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, and within these planetary beings are the strengthening forces that send into the astral body what we need to be able to continue the waking state upon our return to the physical and etheric bodies. Our astral body is, as it were, poured out and expanded into a cosmic existence during the night. The clairvoyant consciousness sees the astral body, as we fall asleep, in a certain sense leaving the physical body. This is, of course, an imprecise expression. Like a spiral, the astral body winds its way out of the physical body; it floats like a spiral cloud. But what one sees there is only the beginning of the currents that branch out from this astral body. They actually go out into the space of the worlds and draw in forces, imbuing themselves with the forces of the planets. And if someone were to tell you that the astral body is what one sees with gross clairvoyance as a cloud, so to speak, hovering near the physical body, then they are not telling you the truth at all, for this astral body is spread out over our entire solar system during the night. During the sleeping state, it is, so to speak, in connection with the planetary beings. That is why we also speak of an “astral” body. All other explanations for the term “astral body,” which was coined in the Middle Ages, are incorrect. We speak of the astral body because, during the human being’s sleep, it is in a certain inner connection with the stars, with the astral world; because it rests within it; because it absorbs its forces.

[ 7 ] When you consider this fact, which is still evident to clairvoyant research today, you will say to yourself: But then the first currents that formed this astral body must also have flowed to humanity from the astral world, from the world of the stars. So this world of the stars must have existed during the formation of the Earth. — So when we say: On the so-called fourth day of creation, that which had previously existed as spirit and soul clothed itself with the laws and forces of the astral body — then on this fourth day of creation, the stars, the astra, must have unfolded their activity in the sphere of the Earth.

[ 8 ] This is also what Genesis tells us. When, on what is called the fourth day of creation, we are told that “the astral body of the human being is formed with its own laws,” Genesis quite correctly draws a parallel between this clothing of the human being with the astral body—while he still hovers in the spiritual or astral environment of the Earth—and the activity of the starry world that initially belongs to our Earth. Thus, there is also a deeper meaning in the account of Genesis that is in complete harmony with what clairvoyant research has to say to us today about modern human beings. We shall see that, admittedly, in the time of which Genesis speaks, this astral body was not as our astral body is today at night, but its laws were the same. What unfolded within it as activity was the same.

[ 9 ] We must therefore expect that, during the period described in Genesis as the fifth day of creation, a further densification of the human being will take place. The human being remains a supersensible, ethereal being, but a further densification occurs—a densification within the ethereal. Humanity still does not touch the earth; it still belongs, so to speak, to the more spiritual-etheric sphere surrounding the earth. And here we touch upon something that is extraordinarily important to understand for the entire development of the human being in relation to the Earth. When we turn our gaze to the realm closest to the human being—the animal realm—we can ask ourselves the question we have already touched upon more than once: Why, in fact, did these animals become animals, and why did the human being become human? — That human beings first developed out of the animal realm, as the crude materialistic conception of the present day imagines, is something that not even a superficial, abstract reason can admit, if it truly understands itself. But if we consider the process in terms of time, if we turn our gaze, as it were, to the process of becoming earthly, we must nevertheless say: Before human beings visibly appeared as earthly beings, the animals appeared. — For human beings to have been able to become human on Earth, it was necessary that they encounter the appropriate earthly conditions for their densification. Suppose that in the time designated as the fifth day of creation, human beings had become earthly beings as they are today—that is, dense enough to be called earthly beings—what would have happened then? If, at that time, humanity had already descended, so to speak, into dense earthly existence, then it could not have become the form and being that it has become, for the earthly conditions were not yet ripe at that time to give humanity this form. Humanity had to wait in the spiritual realm and had to leave earthly development to its own devices, because it could not yet provide the conditions for earthly existence. It first had to mature within a spiritual-soul, a more ethereal sphere. Had he not waited with his descent to Earth, he would simply have been clothed in an animal form. That is why animals became animals: because the soul-spiritual being, the group-soul aspect of these animal forms, descended when the Earth was not yet ripe, when it could not yet provide the conditions necessary for the earthly human form. Humanity had to wait above in the spiritual realm. That which became animal descended, so to speak, too early in relation to becoming human. The Earth was filled with air and water during that time, which is described to us as the fifth day of creation. Humanity was not permitted to descend and form an earthly physical body within it. The animal beings, the group souls of the animals that descended there, became beings of the air, beings of the water. So while certain group souls clothed themselves in a body derived from the conditions of the air sphere and the substance of water, humanity had to wait in the spiritual realm in order to later assume its human form.

[ 10 ] Genesis recounts the entire process with tremendous spiritual insight. What would have happened, for example, if humankind had descended into dense matter as early as the fifth day of creation? Then the power that was bestowed upon their physical humanity—the power that came about because the Elohim, as it were, ascended to their unity—could not yet have been granted to them. We have, after all, spoken of this unification of the Elohim and have said that Genesis depicts this in a wonderful way by first speaking of the Elohim and then of Yahweh-Elohim. We have characterized the nature of the Elohim by saying: They wove within the warmth; the warmth was their element, as it were the physicality through which they immediately manifested themselves. — When, at the end of that series of developments presented to us in Genesis, the Elohim evolved to the point where we can speak of a unified consciousness, of a Yahweh-Elohim, a change also took place in the nature of these Elohim.

[ 11 ] And this transformation follows the same pattern as the transformation of the other beings of the hierarchies. Recall that we spoke of the body—let us say, of the Thrones. We said that at the beginning of our planetary evolution, it sacrificed itself to become the element of heat of ancient Saturn. We have also said that we must seek the corporeality of the Thrones during the old Sun in the airy element, during the old Moon in the watery element, and during our Earth era in the earthy or solid element. This was, as it were, the advancement of the Thrones, that they ascended by condensing their being more and more from the heat-like state to the earthy one.

[ 12 ] Let us now ask ourselves: If the Elohim underwent a similar advancement—if they were allowed to ascend a level, as it were, as a reward for their work—what must have happened to them in this regard? — Then, as is entirely in accordance with the laws of nature, they had to proceed to the next stage of densification. Just as the Thrones, in ancient times, advanced from the warm element to the airy element during the transition from the old Saturn to the old Sun, so may we expect that where the Elohim attained unity consciousness, they would also advance, in terms of their outer manifestation and their outer activity within a physical form, from the warm element to the airy element. But this was not yet the case on the fifth day of creation, but only at the end of that line of development reported to us in Genesis. Had human beings thus been permitted to descend into the finer element of air as early as the fifth day of creation, they would have fared like the beings who sought their physicality in this air element. They became the animals living in the air because they could not be endowed with the power necessary to bring about the meaning of becoming earthly—the power of Yahweh-Elohim, following the advancement of the Elohim to Yahweh-Elohim. Man therefore had to wait. He was not permitted to take in the air. When those generic beings descended, he had to wait until the Elohim had become Yahweh-Elohim. Only then could the power be given to him—the power of Yahweh-Elohim. In the weaving of Yahweh-Elohim, in the air, he had to incorporate himself, but he was not permitted to take in the elemental existence of the air until he could receive it from Yahweh-Elohim. Genesis tells us this in a wonderfully spiritual way, saying: Man matured in a more spiritual-etheric existence and sought dense physicality only when the Elohim had ascended to become Yahweh-Elohim, when Yahweh-Elohim could form the earthly being of man by breathing air into him. — It was the outpouring of the Elohim themselves, who had become Yahweh-Elohim, that flowed into humanity with the air.

[ 13 ] Here we have yet another interpretation of Genesis that harmonizes so wonderfully with what modern spiritual research reveals to us; and here, in Genesis, you have a theory of evolution against which all the proud evolutionary theories of today are nothing but fantasy and amateurism. For Genesis leads us into the inner process of becoming, showing us what had to happen in the supersensible realm before human beings were permitted to advance to sensory existence.

[ 14 ] So we may say: Human beings had to remain in the etheric realm, while the other beings were already becoming physically condensed within the air and water spheres. And we may further say: The condensation of the human being into the etheric body takes place during the epoch that we call the fifth day of creation in the Bible. — So we do not yet find human beings among the physical beings of the Earth. It is only in the period we call the sixth day of creation that we must look for human beings among the actual beings of the Earth. There, so to speak, they are taken up by the process of becoming earthly, and we can say: What we today call the human physical body comes into being at that time, which is referred to in Genesis as the sixth day of creation.

[ 15 ] But now we must make one more thing clear. You would still be mistaken if you were to believe that you could have seen the human being who came into being on the sixth day of creation with your ordinary eyes, or even touched him with your hands so that you could have felt something. Even if a human being with today’s senses had been possible back then, he still would not have been able to perceive the newly created earthly human being. People today are too inclined to think materialistically. That is why they immediately imagine, regarding the sixth day of creation: “There, the human being existed just as he does today.” — The human being was indeed already physically present, but the weaving of warmth, for example, is also physical. If you enter a room somewhere and find differentiated heat currents within it that are not as dense as gas, you must already call that a physical existence, and physical existence already existed during the Saturn era, even if only as a heat substance. So to seek the human being in dense flesh on the so-called sixth day of creation—that must never be. We must seek them as earthly beings, in the physical realm; indeed, we must now seek them in the physical realm, but only in the finest physical manifestation—as beings of heat. When that event occurred, described by the beautiful words “The Elohim said: Let us make man!”, a being capable of perceiving states of warmth would have found certain differentiations within the warmth substance. Had it walked across the Earth, which at that time was covered with the generic forms of the plant and animal kingdoms in the air and water elements, it could have said to itself: Strange things are to be perceived here. In certain places, thermal impressions can be perceived—not yet gaseous impressions, but purely thermal ones. One finds certain thermal differentiations in the Earth’s surroundings. There, thermal beings flit back and forth. — Man was not even a gaseous being yet; he was merely a thermal being. Imagine everything solid about you gone, imagine everything liquid and gaseous gone as well, and of this human being that you are today, imagine only what pulsates as warmth in your blood—your blood’s warmth—and abstract from everything else; then you have what came into being back then when the Elohim spoke the creative word: “Let us make man!” And the next state of condensation comes only after the days of creation. The influx of what Yahweh-Elohim could give—the air—comes only after this sixth day of creation.

[ 16 ] People will not understand their own origins until they resolve to conceive of their origins in such a way that, in the process of the Earth’s formation, a spiritual-soul aspect was present first, then an astral aspect, then an etheric aspect; and that, among the physical states, the state of heat existed first, and only then the state of air. And even regarding the moment when, after the six days of creation, we are told, “And Yahweh-Elohim breathed into the man the breath of life”—as long as people do not resolve to imagine themselves physically as beings of warmth and air at that moment, as long as they believe that something of the physical human being was already present there—as long as that is the case, people will not understand their own origin. The coarser arises from the finer, not the finer from the coarser. It is indeed very foreign to today’s consciousness to think this way, but it is the truth.

[ 17 ] If we consider this, it will become clear to us why so many creation accounts speak of the origin of humankind as a descent from the orbit of the Earth. And when the Bible itself, after speaking to us of the days of creation, speaks of the so-called Paradise, we must also seek something deeper behind this, and we will find the truth only if we understand it from a spiritual-scientific perspective. It is truly quite peculiar to those who know these things when Bible exegetes argue back and forth about whether Paradise, from which humanity then migrated, was located at this or that place on Earth. It is only too clear in many creation accounts, including in the Bible itself, that Paradise did not exist on the earth’s surface as such, but rather was elevated above the earth, so to speak, in the heights of the clouds, and that when human beings lived in Paradise, they were still warm, gaseous beings. Man certainly did not yet walk around on two legs on the earth at that time; that is materialistic fantasy. We must therefore imagine that even after the so-called “days of creation” had passed, man was still a being that belonged not to the earth but to the sphere surrounding it.

[ 18 ] How, then, did human beings, so to speak, descend from the celestial spheres to the earth, and how did the further densification take place from that state into which Yahweh-Elohim had placed them? Here we come to what you will find described quite precisely in my *The Secret Science*; here we come to what we call the Luciferic influence. If we wish to characterize more precisely what is meant by this Luciferic influence, we must imagine that beings—precisely those beings referred to as Luciferic—poured themselves, as it were, into the human astral body, so that the human being, having been formed by all the forces we have described thus far in the process of becoming earthly, subsequently absorbed the Luciferic influence within himself. We will understand this influence when we say: the human life of desire, the human life of longing, everything that is anchored in the astral body at all, was permeated by the Luciferic element; it was thereby, if I may put it this way, made more vehement, more passionate, more urgent in its desire-laden nature, and made more self-contained. In short, what we today describe with the term egoism—this inner desire to be self-contained, this focus on ensuring that one feels as comfortable as possible within oneself—this penetrated into human beings along with the Luciferic element. Everything good and bad that can be understood as being permeated by this inner sense of comfort entered into human beings with the Luciferic influence. It was, therefore, initially a foreign influence. From the astral body as it had been in the time when it was formed by the currents flowing in from the starry world—from the form the astral body had assumed—there now emerged a different astral body, one permeated by the Luciferic influence. The consequence of this was that the human air-heat body was contracted, further condensed. It was only then that what is called the physical human being came into being; it was only then that the further condensation of the human being took place. So that we can say: The pre-Luciferic aspect of the human being is contained in the elemental existence of warmth and air, and the Luciferic influence has crept into the liquid and solid aspects of the human being. — It has penetrated there; it lives within. In everything that is solid, in everything that is liquid, the Luciferic influence lives. And it is not really a figure of speech at all, but describes the facts quite clearly and quite accurately when I say: Through this compression of the human body brought about by the Luciferic influence, the human being became heavier and sank down from the orbits to the earth’s surface. — That was the expulsion from Paradise, as it is depicted figuratively. It was only then, so to speak, that the human being acquired the heaviness, the gravitational force, to sink down from the orbit of the Earth to the ground. This is the descent of the human being to the physical ground; this is what brought the human being down to the Earth, whereas previously he had dwelt in its orbit. We must therefore count this Luciferic influence among the true formative forces of the human being.

[ 19 ] That is why we encounter a curious parallelism between the descriptions of the researcher working purely within the humanities and those found in the Bible. Just look at how, in my *Secret Science*, I have deliberately excluded everything that could easily have arisen had I drawn upon the descriptions in Genesis itself. I would like to say: I took great care to avoid that in the presentation of my *Secret Science*. — I consulted only spiritual scientific research. Then, at a certain point, described from a completely different perspective, the Luciferic influence emerges. But once one has found it, one encounters in the spiritual scientific description precisely that epoch which is described to us in the Bible as the so-called temptation of humanity by the serpent, by Lucifer. We then discover this parallelism in retrospect. Just as gravity, electricity, and magnetism are forces that today participate in the formation of the Earth in a more gross manner, so too is what we call the Luciferic influence a force without which the becoming of the Earth could not have taken place. And we must include this Luciferic influence among the forces constituting the Earth. Oriental creation accounts, in particular, therefore place Paradise—not as subtly as in the Bible—within the sphere of the Earth, not on the Earth’s surface itself, and they interpret the expulsion from Paradise as a descent from the Earth’s sphere to the Earth’s surface. Thus, in this realm as well, if we only know how to understand the words, the full congruence between spiritual scientific research and the Bible becomes apparent.

[ 20 ] But let us now consider another aspect. We have emphasized that the spiritual researcher does not have it as easy as those sciences that proceed more or less according to the principle that “all cows are gray at night” and that attribute the most diverse phenomena to the same cause. The spiritual researcher must see something entirely different where clouds form than where water forms on the ground. We have spoken of the Cherubim as the directing powers in the formation of clouds, and we have spoken of the Seraphim as the directing powers in what bursts forth from the cloud as lightning. If you now imagine that the expulsion from Paradise in truth leads back to a descent from the orbit, then you have described almost literally how the human being, through his own heaviness, falls from the Earth’s orbit and must leave behind the forces and beings that form the clouds and the lightning—the Cherubim with the flashing sword. Humanity falls, as it were, from the Earth’s orbit, from that realm where the cherubim reign with their fiery swords of lightning. There, through spiritual science, you have rendered—almost literally—what is depicted to us in the expulsion from Paradise when it is said: The Deity placed before Paradise the cherubim with the flame of the whirling sword. — If you take this to heart, then you can almost, one might say, grasp it with your hands, just as those ancient seers who gave us Genesis looked into the mysterious processes of this weaving and being of the human being in the etheric heights with full clairvoyant power, before he had fallen from those regions where the Seraphim and Cherubim reign. It is with such realism that the Bible describes these things, not merely to present comparisons or crude sensory images, but to tell us what is revealed to the clairvoyant consciousness.

[ 21 ] People today have little understanding of the ideas of ancient times. Today, people criticize the Bible so much, as if it were so naive as to tell us: “What was once paradise was a large garden, beautifully filled with trees, with lions and tigers roaming about, and humans right in the middle of it.” — Well, then it’s easy to criticize, and one frivolous critic went so far as to point out: If that had really been the case, what would have become of man if, in his naivety, he had ever reached out his hand to such a lion? — It’s easy to criticize when one first conjures up a fantastical image that Genesis never intended. Such views, in fact, only emerged in the last few centuries. People do not know much about the ideas of earlier centuries. The scholastics of the twelfth century would look quite astonished if they were to return today and hear what they themselves are said to have said about the Bible. It never occurred to any of the Scholastics to hold such views about the biblical account as people do today. People today could know this if they were truly willing to learn. One need only truly study the writings of the Scholastics; then one would see how clearly it is stated there that something else is at stake. Even if the awareness that the biblical account is a rendering of clairvoyant research had already faded to some extent, there was still something quite different from what took hold from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward as a grossly materialistic exegesis. No one in the early centuries of the Middle Ages would have thought of making such a claim. Today it is easy to criticize the Bible. One simply must not know that the ideas one fights against today only arose a few centuries ago. And those who argue most vehemently against the Bible today are fighting a fantastical product of human imagination and not the Bible itself. It is a struggle against something that does not even exist, something that has merely been conjured up. In contrast, spiritual science has the task of pointing back to the true meaning of the Bible by proclaiming the results of spiritual scientific research, thereby making possible those profound impressions that must overwhelm our soul when we learn to understand what resounds to us from ancient times in such a monumental form.