The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary Remarks on These Lectures

[ 1 ] Readers of this series of lectures who did not witness what was taking place at the time it was delivered within the Theosophical Society, which was then under the authority of Annie Besant, may take offense at the fact that in many places it strikes a polemical tone, particularly against the view of Christ advocated by this figure. To understand this tone, one must bear in mind that at that time, for many of the people to whom these reflections were addressed, Annie Besant’s authority still carried some weight, and that the speaker had to defend his conception of Christ, which he never presented in any other way than here. Now that these struggles are long past, some might argue that the polemical passages could perhaps be deleted. However, in the opinion of the editors, the lectures should simply be preserved historically, just as they were delivered at the time. And for some, it might not be without interest to see against which superstitions—contrary to all Western sensibilities—the view of Christ presented here had to be defended. If one considers the matter properly, one will likely also see that the lecturer was not, after all, engaged in the dogmatic squabbles common in ideological societies and sects, but rather about the validity of what he had to answer for before his scientific conscience against a confused belief system stirred up by personal interests—a belief system that one might certainly assume, in the face of reasonable people, to be self-contradictory due to its absurdity, yet which was, within the Theosophical Society at that time, held up as something of equal validity to what the speaker had presented. In the real world, even that which runs counter to all reason can play a role.

[ 2 ] Well, the fact that the speaker had to stand by his views on Christ—which he had been asserting since 1902 and which had previously not been contested at all by prominent members of the Society—led, among other similarly unfortunate developments, to the Theosophical Society, under Annie Besant’s authority, expelling all those members who, for the reasons put forward by the speaker, took a negative stance toward Besant’s heretical beliefs. The Theosophical Society behaved exactly in accordance with the customs of all inquisitors in a matter that, on the part of the speaker, was neither intended as dogmatic squabbling nor treated as such. He wished only to engage in a factual discussion. But it turned out just as it always does when objective arguments encounter fanaticism born of personal interests. Well, the matter led to those who had left the Theosophical Society forming an Anthroposophical Society, which has since grown in membership. And when one considers the absurd slanders hurled into the world against the Anthroposophical Society—and against the speaker in particular—by the Theosophical idol Annie Besant, as well as by many others blinded by this idolatry, and when one considers many other things that have since emerged from the bosom of this Society as products of “the noblest human love,” then one will be unable to view the separation of the Anthroposophical Society from the Theosophical Society as anything at all bad. And even some readers of these lectures who were interested in the separation at the time will regard the traces of the struggles that appear here and there in the reflections as a document pertaining to something that must be understood in light of the circumstances of that time, from which one had to speak, and also as a testimony to the various difficulties one encounters when one feels compelled to defend something for purely objective reasons. And whoever does not accept even that should have enough tolerance to skip over, without resentment, that which he believes does not concern him, but which nevertheless had a certain significance—one that should not be underestimated—for those to whom the lectures were addressed at the time they were delivered.

Berlin, 1918
Rudolf Steiner