The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] We have now advanced a difficult chapter of our worldview to the point where we have learned, to some extent, to perceive the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sensory world. We have come to recognize that behind such phenomena—which at first glance reveal little of the fact that the spiritual, in the unique form in which we experience it in our own inner life, lies behind them—there are nevertheless spiritual activities, spiritual qualities, and characteristics. What appears to us, for example, in ordinary life as a warm quality—as heat or fire—we recognized as the expression of sacrifice. In what confronts us as air and again reveals so little, at least to our understanding, of its spiritual nature, we recognized that which we called the bestowing virtue of particular world beings. And in water, we recognized what can be called resignation, renunciation.

[ 2 ] In earlier worldviews—and this should be noted in passing—people naturally sensed and recognized the spiritual in the external material world; evidence of this can be found in the fact that particularly volatile substances were designated by the word “spiritus,” which we today apply in a specific sense to the spiritual when we say “spiritual”; and in the external world it can indeed happen that people relate this “spiritual” so little to the spiritual, to the supersensible, that once, as some of you may know, a letter was addressed to a Munich spiritualist society, and since no one knew what a spiritualist society was, the letter was handed over to the chairman of the Central Association of Spirits Dealers.

[ 3 ] As we now turn our attention to that significant transition that took place in the evolution of the Earth from the old Sun to the old Moon, we must consider a different kind of spiritual development. However, we must begin with what we encountered last time as “renunciation.” There we saw that this renunciation essentially consists in spiritually advanced beings renouncing the acceptance of the sacrifice, which, as we have recognized, is essentially the sacrifice of the will or the substance of the will. If we imagine this in such a way that certain beings wish to sacrifice what constitutes their substance of will, and through the renunciation of higher beings they are, so to speak, denied the acceptance of this will, then we will easily be able to rise to the concept that the substance of will which the beings in question actually wished to sacrifice to higher spiritual beings must remain within the beings who wish to sacrifice but cannot. Thus, in the context of the cosmos, we are readily presented with beings who are ready to offer their sacrifice—that is, who are in a certain sense ready to fervently give up what lies within them—but who cannot do so and must therefore retain it within themselves. Or, to put it another way, this means that these beings, by rejecting the sacrifice, are unable to establish a certain connection with higher beings that would have been theirs had they been permitted to make the sacrifice.

[ 4 ] In a personified, one might say, world-historically symbolic way, what we are meant to focus on here—though it is intensified there—is presented to us in the figure of Cain, who stands opposite Abel. Cain, too, wants to send his offering up to his God. But his offering is not pleasing, and God does not accept it. He accepts Abel’s offering. What we wish to focus on here is the inner experience that can arise from Cain finding his offering rejected. If we wish to rise to the level of understanding that is at stake here, we must realize that, when dealing with the realms we are discussing, we must not carry over into these higher realms concepts that have meaning only in our ordinary lives. It would be wrong to speak of the rejection of the offering as resulting from guilt or wrongdoing. There can be no question yet of guilt or atonement, as we know them in our present ordinary life, in these regions. Rather, we must view these beings in such a way that, on the part of the higher beings who rejected the sacrifice, it is a renunciation, a resignation. In what we characterized eight days ago as a soul mood, there is nothing that constitutes guilt or omission; rather, it contains all that is great and significant that can lie in a renunciation, in a resignation. It remains true, however, that the other beings who wished to offer the sacrifice must generate within themselves a mood from which we can sense that something is beginning—albeit an extraordinarily subtle opposition—against those beings who reject the sacrifices. This is why, in relation to Cain, where it is presented to us at a later time, this is depicted to a heightened degree. We will therefore not encounter the same mood that we find in Cain in those beings who are developing from the Sun toward the Moon; we will find this mood in them to a different degree. And we can only become acquainted with the mood that asserts itself there if, as we have done in the last lectures, we look again into our own souls and ask ourselves where we can find such a mood within our own souls, and what soul conditions might indicate to us what the mood is that must develop in the individualities whose offerings have been rejected.

[ 5 ] This mood within us—and we are drawing ever closer to earthly human life—which every soul actually already knows in its vagueness and at the same time in its tormenting nature, in the way that we can fully expect to discuss “The Hidden Depths of Soul Life”—this mood, which every soul knows as reigning in the hidden depths of soul life, sometimes rises to the surface of our soul life; then it is perhaps least agonizing. But we humans often go about with this mood without being fully aware of it in our conscious mind, and yet we have it within us. One might recall the poet’s words to emphasize all the more the vague torment, the nuance of pain associated with it: “Only those who know longing know what I suffer.” What is meant here is longing as a mood of the soul, longing as it lives in the souls of human beings—not only when they strive for this or that.

[ 6 ] In order to understand what was happening spiritually during the developmental phases of Old Saturn and the Sun, it was necessary for us to turn our gaze to specific states of the soul that, so to speak, only arise when the human soul begins to strive, when it organizes itself upward toward a higher aspiration. We saw this when we tried to clarify the nature of sacrifice from within our own soul life, when we tried to understand what the human being attains as wisdom—that which we see trickling in and which arises from what one might call a willingness to give, a readiness, so to speak, to surrender oneself. As we thus ascend to more earthly conditions that have developed from earlier ones, we encounter a soul mood that is similar to much of what a human being can still experience today. We must only be clear that the entire life of our soul—insofar as our soul is embedded in an earthly body—lies as an upper layer over a hidden soul life that takes place down in the depths. Who, after all, is not aware that such a hidden soul life exists? Life itself teaches us sufficiently that such a life exists.

[ 7 ] Let us now suppose, in order to gain some insight into this hidden inner life, that a child might have experienced this or that at the age of seven or eight, or at some other stage of life; for example, it experienced something to which children are very often particularly sensitive: injustice—injustice in the form of being accused of having done this or that, which in truth it did not do, but the people around the child, for the sake of convenience and to at least deal with the matter, accused the child of having done this or that. Children have a particularly keen sensitivity when injustice is done to them in this way. But, as life goes, once this experience has become deeply ingrained in the child’s life, later life lays the other layers of the soul’s existence over it, and the child has forgotten the matter as far as everyday life is concerned. It might well be that such a thing would never resurface. But let us now suppose: in the fifteenth or sixteenth year, the child experiences, say at school, a new injustice. And now what otherwise lies deep within the surging soul comes to the surface. The child doesn’t even need to be aware of it; they may form entirely different ideas and concepts, yet a reminiscence of what they experienced in earlier years is at work. But if what had happened earlier had not occurred, then, for example, if the child is a boy, he would go home, cry a little, perhaps even grumble a bit, but he would get over it. But since that earlier event did happen—and I emphasize explicitly that the child need not know what took place there—it has an effect, an effect beneath the surface of the soul’s life, just as waves can be stirred up beneath the smooth-looking surface of the sea. And what might otherwise have been reduced to crying, lamenting, or ranting now becomes a student’s suicide! Thus do the hidden depths of the soul’s life surge up from the depths. And the most important force that reigns down there, that reigns in every soul and sometimes surges upward in its very own form, but is most significant when it surges upward in such a way that the person is not aware of it—that is longing. We also know the names this force bears in the outer world, though these are merely metaphorical, vague names, for they express relationships that are complex and thus do not rise into consciousness at all.

[ 8 ] Take a phenomenon that you all know all too well—city dwellers perhaps less so, but they have experienced it through others—a phenomenon known as “homesickness.” If you were to examine what homesickness really is, you would see that, at its core, it is different for every person. Sometimes it is one way, sometimes another. Sometimes the person longs for the intimate stories they heard in their parents’ home; they do not realize that they are longing for home; what lives within them is an indefinable urge, an indefinable desire. Another longs for their mountains or for the river where they so often played as the waves lapped before them. People are often scarcely aware of what is at work in their souls, but we summarize all these various qualities under the term “homesickness,” expressing something that can manifest in a thousand different ways, and which is nevertheless best described when we characterize it as a kind of longing. Even more indefinable are the longings that perhaps stand out as the most tormenting in life. People are not aware that it is longing, but it is. But what is this longing? We have just stated that it is a kind of will, and wherever we examine longing, we can see that it is a kind of will. But what kind of will? It is a will that, as it is at first, cannot be satisfied, for if it is satisfied, the longing ceases. It is a will that cannot be lived out that we call longing.

[ 9 ] We must describe this as the mood of those beings whose sacrifice has been rejected. What we can perceive in the depths of our inner life as longing has remained with us as a legacy from those ancient times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have other things as legacies of the old stages of development, so too have we retained from the phase of development we are discussing here all kinds of longing found at the depths of the soul, all kinds of unsatisfied will, of will held back. Thus we must also consider that through the rejection of sacrifice during this phase of development, beings arise whom we may call: beings with a restrained will. Because they had to carry this restrained will within them, they were in a very special situation. And one must once again place oneself in one’s own states of soul—for thoughts can scarcely reach these states—if one wishes to feel and empathize with these things.

[ 10 ] The being that can sacrifice its will merges, in a certain sense, with the other being. This, too, can be felt in human life: how one lives and interacts within a being to whom one makes sacrifices, and how one feels satisfied and happy when one can stand before the being to whom one makes sacrifices. And because we are speaking here of sacrifice to higher beings, to more comprehensive, universal entities, to whom the sacrificing beings must look up to as their highest bliss, what remains as a restrained longing of the will can never be the same in inner mood or inner soul content as what they could experience if they were allowed to sacrifice. For if they were allowed to make sacrifices, the sacrifice would be with the other beings. We may, as it were, use the comparison: if the beings of Earth and the other planets were allowed to make sacrifices to the Sun, then they would be with the Sun. If they were not allowed to make sacrifices to the Sun, if they had to withhold what they might otherwise sacrifice, then they are with themselves, are pushed back into themselves.

[ 11 ] If we grasp what has just been expressed in a single word, we realize that something is entering the universe. Understand clearly that it cannot be expressed any other way: the beings who sacrifice to another being that lives within them all, who would be devoted to a Universal, are now, if the sacrifice is not accepted, compelled to carry it within themselves. Do you not sense that something is flashing in here, what is called egotism, which later emerges as egoism in all its forms? Viewed in this way, one must feel what later—poured, so to speak, into evolution—lives on in the beings as a legacy. With longing we see egoism flash forth, at first in its weakest form, but we see it creeping into the development of the world. And so we see how beings who thus surrender to longing—that is, to themselves, to their egoity—are, in a certain sense, condemned to one-sidedness, to living merely within themselves, were it not for the intervention of something else.

[ 12 ] Let us imagine a being that is permitted to make sacrifices: it lives within another being, and it always lives within that other being. A being that is not permitted to make sacrifices can only live within itself. As a result, it is excluded from what it might otherwise experience in others—and, in this case, in higher beings. Excluded from evolution, these beings would already be condemned and banished into one-sidedness at this point, were it not for something entering into the development that seeks to overcome this one-sidedness. This is the entry of new beings who hold back the condemnation and banishment into one-sidedness. Just as there are beings of will on Saturn and beings of wisdom on the Sun, so we see the spirits of movement appearing on the Moon; however, we must not imagine spatial movement here, but rather understand “movement” in such a way that it has a more intellectual character. Everyone is familiar with the expression “thought movement,” although this is merely the flow, the fluidity of one’s own thoughts; but from this alone you will see that, if we wish to acquire a more comprehensive concept of movement, we must resort to something other than mere spatial movement—which represents only a single category of the totality of movement—to explain movement. When many people are devoted to a higher being who, as it were, expresses himself in all of them because he receives sacrifices from all of them, then all these many live in the One and are satisfied therein. But if the sacrifices are rejected, then the many live within themselves and cannot be satisfied. This is where the spirits of movement enter and, as it were, lead the beings—who would otherwise be dependent only on themselves—toward all other entities in a certain way, bringing them into a relationship with the others. The spirits of movement are not to be thought of initially merely as beings that change location, but rather as beings that bring forth something through which a being enters into ever-new relationships with other beings.

[ 13 ] One can get an idea of what has now been attained at this stage in the cosmos by reflecting once more on a corresponding state of mind. Who does not know that human longing, when it persists, must not undergo any change—who does not know how agonizing it becomes and traps a person in a state that becomes unbearable, which then, in the case of shallow-minded people, becomes what is called “boredom.” But from this boredom, which one can usually attribute only to shallow-minded people, there are all manner of intermediate stages up to those characteristic of the great, noble natures, in whom lives that which their own nature expresses as longing, and which cannot be satisfied in the outer world. And by what means is longing more fully satisfied than through change? The proof of this is that the beings who feel this longing seek relationships with ever new and new entities. The torment of longing is often overcome by what are changed relationships with ever new entities.

[ 14 ] There we see, as the Earth goes through its lunar phase, how the spirits of movement bring change and movement into the lives of longing beings who would otherwise wither away—and boredom is also a kind of withering—and how they bring about a relationship with ever new beings or ever new states. Spatial, local movement is only one type of this more comprehensive movement we have just spoken of. We have movement when we are able to have a certain thought content in our soul in the morning, but do not need to hold onto it, instead being able to move on to something else. In this way, we overcome the one-sidedness of longing through diversity, through the change and movement of what is experienced. In the external space, we have only a particular kind of this change.

[ 15 ] Let us imagine a planet facing a sun. If it were always in the same position relative to the sun—if it did not move—it would remain in that state of one-sidedness that can only arise when it always faces just one side of the sun. Then the spirits of motion arrive, guiding the planet around the sun to bring about a change in its state. A change of position is merely one type of change among many. And by introducing this change of position into the cosmos, the spirits of motion merely introduce a specific aspect into what motion generally is.

[ 16 ] But because the spirits of movement introduce motion and change into the universe as we have come to know it, something else must also enter into it. We have seen that in this evolution, in the entire cosmic diversity that develops there as the spirits of movement, spirits of personality, spirits of wisdom, of will, and so on, the substantial also lives, which we have called “giving virtue,” the outflow of that which is radiated as wisdom and underlies the spiritual aspect of the air, the flow of gas. This now merges with the will transformed into longing and becomes, within these beings, what human beings now know—not yet as thoughts, but as images. We can best visualize this through the image a person has when they dream. The fleeting, fluid image of the dream can evoke a conception of ‘what happens within a being in whom the will lives as longing and is led by the spirits of movement into a relationship with other beings. And as it is brought into contact with the other being, it cannot fully surrender itself, since its own egoity lives within it. But it can take in the fleeting image of the other, which lives within it like a dream image. Hence what we might call the surging of images in the soul. We see the rise of image-consciousness emerging during this phase of development. And since we humans ourselves went through this phase of development without our present-day earthly ego-consciousness, we must imagine that during this phase of development we did not yet possess what we attain today through our ego, that we existed and moved through the cosmos with something living within us that we can only bring to mind today if we know longing.

[ 17 ] In a certain sense, if we do not consider states of suffering such as those experienced on Earth, we might imagine that they could not be any different from what the poet says: “Only those who know longing know what I suffer.” In a certain sense, suffering and pain, in their spiritual form, naturally enter our beings and the beings of others connected to our evolution during that time. And through the activity of the spirits of movement, the otherwise empty inner being—the inner being suffering from longing—is filled with the balm that pours into these beings in the form of images. Otherwise, these beings would be empty in their souls, devoid of anything other than what could be called longing. But the balm of images trickles in, filling the desolation and emptiness with diversity and thus leading the beings beyond their state of exile and damnation.

[ 18 ] If we take such words seriously, we have at the same time that which spiritually underlies what developed during the lunar phase of our Earth and which we now have in the deepest recesses of our consciousness, because the Earth phase of our being has come to lie over it. But we have it—and this will be demonstrated in a popular way in the public lecture the day after tomorrow—so deep within the depths of our soul that, like what swirls beneath the surface of the sea and drives waves upward, it can unfold without one knowing the reasons for what then enters consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness, we have such a soul life that can well up there. And what does this soul life tell the human being when it wells up? If we consider the cosmic background of this subconscious soul life, we can say: The soul life that we feel rising up from the depths of the soul is a surfacing of what has moved in from the lunar phase of evolution into what has entered us during the Earth phase itself. And when we truly contemplate the interplay of the lunar nature with our earthly nature, then we have the actual reason for what has been spiritually carried over from the old Moon into earthly existence.

[ 19 ] Consider that, as we have characterized it, it was necessary for images to constantly emerge that were meant to satisfy a void. Then a concept of great weight and significance comes to mind: the yearning human soul in its longing, tormenting emptiness, which satisfies or harmonizes this longing through the interplay of images, which in turn can only take the place of other images. And when the images are there and have been there for a while, then it dawns again from the depths, that old longing, and the spirits of movement lead them toward new images. And once the new images have been there for a while, the longing strikes again for new images. And we must utter this weighty word in reference to such a life of the soul: If the longing is satisfied only by images that chase after new images, then this is the endless flow into infinity. Into this can enter only what must come when, in place of the images flowing into infinity, something steps in that can redeem the longing through something other than mere images—namely, through realities. In other words: that planetary incarnation of our Earth in which we have gone through the phase where the images brought about by the activity of the spirits of movement are the satisfaction of longing—this must be replaced by that planetary phase of Earth’s incarnations which we must call the phase of redemption. And we shall yet see that the Earth is to be called the “planet of redemption,” just as we can call the Earth’s previous incarnation, its lunar existence, the “planet of longing”—a longing that is indeed to be satisfied, but which, in its satisfaction, flows into a never-ending infinity. And while we live in earthly consciousness—which, as we have seen, brings us salvation through the Mystery of Golgotha—that which continually yearns for salvation rises up during this life from the depths of our soul. It is as if we had the waves of ordinary consciousness above, and down below, in the depths of the sea of soul life, the depths of our soul live as a longing, as something that always wants to rise up toward the fulfillment of the sacrifice, toward the universal being that suddenly satisfies the desire—not in the endless succession of images, but suddenly brings satisfaction.

[ 20 ] Earthly human beings already sense these moods—and they are the very best indeed when they do sense them. And those earthly human beings who, in our time and in keeping with our particular age, feel this longing, are essentially the ones who come to our spiritual scientific movement. Out there in life, people learn to recognize everything that satisfies their ordinary, higher consciousness in its details; but then what surges up from the subconscious is that which can never be satisfied in its details, that which yearns for the central essence of life. And this central foundation can only be provided by having a universal science that deals not only with the details but with the totality of life. What is at work in the depths of the soul and seeks to be brought up into the higher consciousness must be met, in the spirit of our present age, by an engagement with the universal existence that lives in the world; for otherwise, what rises up from the depths of the soul is that which yearns for something it can never attain.

[ 21 ] In this sense, spiritual science is a response to those longings that dwell in the depths of the soul. And because everything that later happens in the world has its preludes, we need not be surprised by a person—who, if he were living in the present age, would seek through spiritual science to satisfy the power of longing in his soul—if soul forces of which he was initially unaware, and which are like longings, were to consume him. Since he lived in an earlier age in which this spiritual wisdom did not exist and he therefore could not yet possess it, it is as if he were consumed by a longing for it, had an everlasting desire for it, and could not comprehend life—precisely because he is an exceptionally great spirit. While today something might trickle into his soul that would satisfy the longing for images which only the ode can drown out, he longed for this chasing of images to cease, and he longed for it all the more the more powerful this chasing of images was! And can the voice of this man, as it is now expressed, not appear to us as the utterance of a spirit living in a time when he cannot yet possess this spiritual wisdom, which pours into the soul’s longing like balm, when we hear him write to another:

[ 22 ] “Who would want to be happy in this world? Ugh, I’d almost say, ‘Shame on you,’ if that’s what you want! What short-sightedness, O noble soul, it takes to strive for something here, where everything ends in death. We meet, we love each other for three springs: and for an eternity we flee apart again. And what is worthy of striving for, if not love! Ah, there must be something else besides love, happiness, fame, and x, y, z, of which our souls dream not.

[ 23 ] It cannot be an evil spirit that stands at the pinnacle of the world; it is merely one we do not understand! Do we not smile, too, when children cry? Just think of this infinite continuity! Myriads of time periods, each one a life, and for each one a manifestation like this world! What, I wonder, is the name of that little star one sees on Sirius when the sky is clear? And this entire immense firmament is but a speck of dust against infinity! O Rühle, tell me, is this a dream? Between two linden leaves, when we lie on our backs in the evening, a view richer in premonitions than thoughts can grasp and words can express. Come, let us do something good and die in the process! One of the millions of deaths we have already died and will yet die. It is as if we were walking from one room into another. Behold, the world seems to me to be nested, the small resembling the great!” From a letter by Heinrich von Kleist from the year 1806.

[ 24 ] Thus the longing he was able to express in such words compels a spirit to write to a friend—a spirit who has not yet been able to find satisfaction for this longing through what the modern soul can find if it approaches spiritual science with energetic understanding. For this spirit is the one who, a hundred years ago, put an end to his life by first shooting his girlfriend Henriette Vogel and then himself, and who rests in that lonely grave at Wannsee, which closed over his remains a hundred years ago.

[ 25 ] It is a strange twist of fate, one might say of karma, that we are discussing the mood that best characterizes what we are trying to grasp when we speak of the interplay of the restrained sacrifices of will in longing, the satisfaction of that longing—which could come only from the spirits of the movement—and the urge toward a final satisfaction, as it could only come on the planet of redemption — it is a strange karmic coincidence that, according to our quite ordinary schedule, we had to speak here about this on a day that can remind us of how a spirit was able to express that indefinite longing in the loftiest of words and finally poured it into the most tragic of deeds that the longing could embody. And how could we fail to recognize that this spirit, in its entirety as it stands before us, is in fact a living embodiment of what lives deep within the soul—something we must trace back to something other than earthly existence if we are to recognize it? Did not Heinrich von Kleist describe to us in the most significant way what can live within a human being—as you will find described right on the first pages of “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity”—of that which transcends him, drives him, and which he can only come to understand later, if he does not first sever the thread of his life?

[ 26 ] Let us consider his *Penthesilea*: How much more there is in Penthesilea than she can encompass with her earthly consciousness! We could not possibly comprehend her in all her uniqueness if we did not assume that her soul is infinitely vaster than the narrow little soul—even if it is a great one—that she encompasses with her earthly consciousness. Therefore, a situation must come into play that artificially introduces the subconscious into the drama. Indeed, it must even be prevented that the entire process, as Kleist introduces her to Achilles, could be grasped by the conscious mind; otherwise, we would not be able to experience the full tragedy. Penthesilea is led to Achilles as a captive, but she is led to believe that he is her captive. Therefore, he is “her” Achilles. - What lives in the conscious mind must be immersed in the unconscious.

[ 27 ] And how does this subconscious factor play a role in a story such as “Käthchen von Heilbronn,” particularly in the strange relationship between Käthchen and the weather from the beam, which does not take place in the conscious mind but in the deeper layers of the soul, where the forces reside of which humans know nothing, forces that pass from one to another. When we have this before us, we sense the spiritual that lies within the ordinary forces of gravity and attraction in the world. Do you feel what lies in the forces of the world, for example in the scene where Käthchen stands before her beloved, where we see what lives in the subconscious and how it is related to what lives out in the world, and what is described with the sober, dry words “forces of attraction—and so on—of the planets”? Yet even a penetrating and aspiring spirit a hundred years ago could not delve into this subconscious. Today it must happen.

[ 28 ] And so, in a completely different way, the tragedy of a “Prince of Homburg” stands before us today. I would like to know how the abstract thinkers, who wish to derive everything that man accomplishes solely from reason, intend to explain a character such as the Prince of Homburg, who performs all his great deeds in a sort of dreamlike state, including those that ultimately lead to victory. And Kleist clearly points out that he could not achieve victory from his conscious mind alone, that even according to his conscious mind he is not even a particularly great man, for he whimpers in the face of death afterward. And only when, through a special impulse of will, that which lives in the depths of the soul is brought to the surface, only then does he summon his courage.

[ 29 ] What has remained to humanity as a legacy from the lunar consciousness is something that cannot be brought to light by abstract science, but must be brought to light by the multifaceted, subtle concepts that approach spiritual matters with all-encompassing, gentle contours—concepts provided by spiritual science. The greatest connects with the middle and connects with the ordinary.

[ 30 ] Thus we come to realize that spiritual science shows us how the states we experience in our souls today take shape in the cosmos, in the universe. But we also come to realize how what we experience in our souls can give us, and only give us, a concept of what lies spiritually in the depths of things. But we also see how our time had to come to satisfy what was longed for in the era that preceded ours, how people yearned for what only our time can provide. And a kind of reverence for such people—who, in times past, could not find their way in the face of what their hearts desired and what the world could not give them—a certain reverence for such people can also consist in our remembering how all human life belongs together and how people today can dedicate their lives to those spiritual movements which —as their fates show us—have long needed.

[ 31 ] Thus, on a day that marks the centenary of the tragic death of one of the most yearning of human beings, we may, in a sense, point to spiritual science as a bringer of salvation for human longing—a day that can very well remind us of how what spiritual science has to offer has been demanded by people, passionately yet wistfully, for a long time now. This is a thought we can grasp—and one that is perhaps also anthroposophical—on the centenary of the death of one of Germany’s greatest poets.