The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] It might easily seem as if, in the times following the Mystery of Golgotha, no rays of inner spiritual enlightenment had illuminated humanity; and it might seem as if such a state were universal among humanity, with a particular intensification continuing into our own day. But this is by no means the case, and if we want to see these things clearly, we must make a distinction between what is generally prevalent in humanity and what is happening here and there within humanity in such a way that it can be noticeable to people in various areas of life. It would indeed be discouraging for many people today if they had to keep telling themselves: Yes, we are told about a spiritual world, but the paths into this spiritual world are actually closed to people today. And many people today come to this discouraging conclusion. But this discouraging judgment actually comes only from the fact that one does not have the greater courage to say yes unreservedly where paths into the spiritual world are clearly visible. Nor does one have the courage to always make an unbiased judgment in this area. Therefore, it may seem, but it is really only an appearance, that we are too far removed from those times when, through atavistic clairvoyance, the spiritual world was open to the whole of humanity to a certain degree, or from later times when it could be opened to individuals through initiation into the mysteries. Certain threads must be drawn connecting ancient times of human development with the present in order to arrive at a full understanding of the mysteries of human existence, especially of such phenomena as we have just discussed in these reflections with regard to the mysteries. I would therefore like to take an example from more recent times, something that is accessible to everyone and that can have the effect of encouraging people to take the decision to seek the paths into the spiritual world. And I would like to pick out just such an example from the wealth of examples that could be chosen, one in which we can see how such phenomena are again misjudged in the present—I mean, of course, a further present—from a materialistic point of view.

[ 2 ] You will all have heard something about the poet Otto Ludwig, who was born in the same year as Hebbel and Richard Wagner, 1813. Otto Ludwig was not only a poet—perhaps one could even argue that he was not a particularly outstanding poet, but that is not important at this point—he was a person who had made a habit of observing himself closely, who sought to gain self-knowledge gain self-knowledge, and who succeeded in gaining many insights behind the veil that most people today initially draw over their own inner lives. Otto Ludwig once described very beautifully what he notices when he conceives poems that he wants to write himself, or when he reads poems by other people and allows them to affect him. He comes to the conclusion that he does not read or conceive like other people, but that something extraordinarily lively begins to stir within him, both when he writes his own poetry and when he reads and allows other poems to affect him. Otto Ludwig describes this very beautifully. I want to share this passage with you because you will see in it a piece of self-knowledge of a thoroughly modern man who died in the second half of the nineteenth century and who, in expressing this self-knowledge, speaks of things that seem to our materialistic age to be the stuff of wild fantasy. But Otto Ludwig was not a fantasist. He may have been a brooder when it came to his own self, but anyone who lets his poetry sink in will see that there was something thoroughly healthy about the man. And anyone who lets the information we have about his life sink in will find, alongside a certain brooding tendency, something thoroughly healthy in this man. Now, this is how he describes the workings of his own soul when he writes poetry himself or allows poetry to affect him:

[ 3 ] “A mood precedes it, a musical one, which becomes color to me, then I see figures, one or more, in some position and gesture, alone or in relation to each other, and this like a copperplate engraving on paper of that color, or more precisely, like a marble statue or a plastic group on which the sun falls through a curtain of that color. I also experience this phenomenon of color when I read a work of poetry that has moved me; when I put myself in a mood like that evoked by Goethe's poems, I see a rich golden yellow, tinged with golden brown; with Schiller, I see a radiant crimson; with Shakespeare, every scene is a nuance of the particular color that the whole play has for me. Strangely enough, that image or that group is usually not the image of the catastrophe, sometimes only a characteristic figure in some dramatic position, but this is immediately followed by a whole series, and from the play I do not first experience the fable, the novella-like content, but soon after, sometimes moving forward, sometimes backward, starting from the situation I first saw, new plastic-mimic figures and groups shoot up until I have the whole play in all its scenes; all this in great haste, my consciousness completely passive, and a kind of physical anxiety gripping me. I can then reproduce the content of all the individual scenes in any order I choose, but it is impossible for me to condense the novelistic content into a short narrative. Now the language joins the gestures. I write down what I can, but when the mood leaves me, what I have written is nothing but dead letters. Now I set about filling in the gaps in the dialogue. To do this, I have to look at what I have with a critical eye.”

[ 4 ] So here you see a strange man who, when he reads Schiller's plays, feels crimson, which is truly horrible for the materialistic-minded person of today; when he reads Goethe's plays or poems, he feels golden yellow turning to golden brown; who has a color sensation with every piece of Shakespeare, and a nuance of this color sensation with every scene; who, when he conceives or reads a poem, has figures like a copperplate engraving on a specific colored background, or even sees plastic-mimetic figures with gestures, on which the sun falls through a curtain that spreads the light that gives him the overall mood.

[ 5 ] You see, such a thing must be understood correctly. Such a thing is not yet clairvoyant, but it is the path into the spiritual world. Anyone who wants to understand this mood correctly from spiritual science can understand it if they say to themselves: Otto Ludwig becomes conscious of the eye, the spiritual eye. For if he were to continue along this path, he would not only have such moods, but just as physical objects appear to the outer eye, spiritual beings would appear to the spiritual eye and be perceived as his own feelings. Just as when you move your eyes very slightly in the dark, you see, I would say, sparkling light, light that, I would say, flows out of the eye and fills the room, so it is with Otto Ludwig. His soul radiated moods, but these moods are color moods, tone moods. They begin with the musical, as he rightly says, as tonal moods. He does not use them to gain spiritual insights; but we see how his soul is perfectly suited to finding its way into the spiritual world.

[ 6 ] So we cannot say that in modern times there are no people who realize that what we call the soul's eye, which was opened for the students of the mysteries in the way I have described in the previous reflections, is a reality. For these events were basically nothing other than events designed to make the soul's eye perceptible, to make the human soul aware that this soul's eye exists. That such things as I have just mentioned are not properly appreciated in the present day can be seen from the remarks made by Gustav Freytag when he speaks about Otto Ludwig. Gustav Freytag says:

[ 7 ] “The work of this poet, however, was, like his whole being, similar to that of an epic singer from a time when the figures floated around the poet's head, alive with sound and color, in the twilight of the dawn of humanity.”

[ 8 ] The fact is quite correct, but it has nothing to do with poetry. For what Otto Ludwig experienced was not experienced in ancient times only by poets, but by all human beings, and in later times by those who were initiated into the mysteries, whether they became poets or not. So it has nothing to do with actual poetic power. And there, where the materialistic eye of modern man does not look, behind a certain veil in his own soul, is what Otto Ludwig describes, which is present in every human being today, not just in poets, but in every human being. The fact that Otto Ludwig was a poet has nothing to do with this phenomenon; it is something that runs parallel to it. Someone can be a much greater poet than Otto Ludwig, and what he is able to describe can remain entirely in the subconscious. It is present in the depths of the subconscious, but it does not need to rise to the surface. For poetry, and art in general, today consists of something other than the conscious processing of clear impressions.

[ 9 ] I wanted to mention this to give you an example of a person — and people of this kind are by no means rare, they are very, very common — of a person who is definitely on the path to the spiritual world. When one applies to oneself the things described in How to Know Higher Worlds, one does not create something new, but rather brings to consciousness what is already present in the soul, so that one learns to use it consciously, to apply it consciously. That is what we want to hold fast to. The difficulty lies much less in the fact that today it is, so to speak, difficult to penetrate the veil that covers what lives unconsciously in the soul, but rather in the fact that today it is not easy to find the courage to engage with these things; that most of those who would like to engage with them out of certain longings and needs of the heart and of knowledge feel compelled and driven to acknowledge the matter only a little bashfully in the closest circle and not to let anything of it show when they step out again into the circle of the very clever people of the present day. Certainly, it is not necessary that what we might today, because we live after the year 1879, must call the right thing in this field should be found everywhere, but when we look at the recent past, we can see that in some cases there is a high degree of clairvoyant powers, truly clairvoyant powers, which we must not, on the one hand, either fully acknowledge and surrender ourselves completely to, or, on the other hand, immediately regard as something dangerous and to be rejected.

[ 10 ] Admittedly, there are many factors that have long since dampened the courage to acknowledge clairvoyance, and so it has come about that Swedenborg, who has already been mentioned several times in your circle, has received such a strange assessment. He could also have a stimulating effect on many in that one could recognize in him an individuality that has made certain veils to the spiritual world transparent for himself. Swedenborg has, to a high degree, come to use and apply what can be called imaginative knowledge. This imaginative knowledge is necessary for anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world. It is indispensable, but it is nothing more than a kind of transition to higher levels of knowledge. Swedenborg had a particularly clear sense of imaginative knowledge. It was precisely because this imaginative knowledge was stirring and working within him that he was able to make statements about the relationship between the spiritual world and the external world that are highly remarkable for those who understand clairvoyance through examples. I would like to show you an example of how Swedenborg, in his attitude, I would say, stood to himself, how he thought and felt in order to keep the soul in connection with the spiritual world. He did not set out to look into the spiritual world in a selfish way. Swedenborg was already fifty-five years old when the spiritual world was opened to him. He was therefore a thoroughly mature man, and he had a thorough and energetic scientific career behind him. Swedenborg's most important scientific works are only now being published in many volumes by the Stockholm Academy of Sciences, and they contain things that may be guiding principles for external science for a long time to come. However, today we manage the feat of recognizing a man like Swedenborg, who had climbed to the summit of science in his time, as far as we like, and where we no longer like him, we declare him a fool. This feat is accomplished today with great dexterity. No one cares that a man like Swedenborg, who not only achieved in his science what others could also achieve—which would have been enough—but who towered above all his contemporaries as a scientist, that from the age of fifty-five he became a witness to the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] One question that particularly interested Swedenborg was: How do the soul and the body interact? Swedenborg wrote a beautiful treatise on this question after his enlightenment. In this treatise, he said roughly the following: There are only three possible ways of thinking about the interrelationship between the soul and the body. One view is that the body is decisive; sensory impressions are made through the body, the sensory impressions affect the soul, the soul receives these influences from the body, and that is what is decisive. It is therefore, in a sense, dependent on the body. A second view is possible, says Swedenborg, which is this: the body is dependent on the soul; the soul is that which contains the spiritual impulses. It creates the body for itself and uses the body during life. One must not speak of physical influence, but of psychological, spiritual influence. The third view, which is still possible, says Swedenborg, is this: both body and soul exist side by side, do not influence each other at all, but a higher power brings about harmony, a concordance, like the concordance between two clocks, one of which does not influence the other when they show the same time. A higher influence brings about harmony. So when an external impression is made on my senses, the soul thinks, but the two have nothing to do with each other; rather, a corresponding impression is simply made on the soul by a higher power, just as an impression is made on the soul from outside through the senses. Swedenborg explains how the first and third views are impossible for those who can see into the spiritual world, how it is clear to the enlightened that the soul is connected through its powers to a spiritual sun, just as the body is connected to the physical sun, but that everything that is physical is dependent on the spiritual-soul. So he explains, I would say, in a new way, what we have called the mystery of the sun in relation to the mysteries, the mystery that Julian the Apostate had in mind when he spoke of the sun as a spiritual being, which made him an opponent of Christianity, because the Christianity of his time wanted to reject the connection between Christ and the sun. Swedenborg renewed the secret of the sun for his time, as far as that is possible, through his imaginative knowledge.

[ 12 ] Now, I have only mentioned this because I want to show you what is actually going on in Swedenborg's soul as it is on the path to spiritual knowledge. Swedenborg gives a kind of philosophical treatise on this question, which I have just briefly touched upon, with reference to the observations he has made, but it is a treatise such as one who sees into the spiritual world would give, not as a modern philosopher employed at a university, who does not always see into the spiritual world. Now, at the end of this treatise, Swedenborg presents what he calls a “vision.” And by this vision he does not mean something he has imagined, but something he has actually seen, something that really stood before his mind's eye. Swedenborg is not shy about speaking of his spiritual visions. He recounts what this or that angel told him because he knows it; because he knows it as well as another knows that some physical earthly human being has told him this or that. He says: I was once in a vision; there appeared to me three representatives of the view of physical influence, three scholastics, Aristotelians, followers of Aristotle, that is, three followers of that doctrine which allows everything to flow into the soul from outside through physical influence. They were on one side. On the other side appeared three followers of Descartes, who spoke in a certain imperfect way, but nevertheless of spiritual influences on the soul. And behind them appeared three followers of Leibniz, who spoke of pre-established harmony, that is, of the independence of body and soul and of harmony created from outside. Nine figures, he says, surrounded me. That is what he saw. And the particularly shining leaders of each group of three figures were Leibniz, Descartes, and Aristotle himself. So he recounts that he had this vision, just as one recounts something from physical life. Then, he says, a genius rose up from the ground with a torch in his right hand. And when he waved this torch before the figures, they immediately began to argue. The Aristotelians asserted the physical influence from their point of view, the Cartesians the spiritual influence from theirs, and the Leibnizians with their master likewise. Such things, such visions, can go into great detail. Swedenborg recounts that Leibniz appeared in a kind of toga, and his follower Wolff held the corners. Such details always appear in these visions, in which these features are very characteristic. They began to argue. The reasons were all good, for one can defend everything in the world. After they had argued long enough, the genius appeared again, but now he held the torch in his left hand and illuminated the backs of their heads. Then they really got into the fight. They said: Now neither our bodies nor our souls can distinguish what is right. And so they agreed to throw three pieces of paper into a box. One said “physical influence,” the second “spiritual influence,” and the third “pre-established harmony.” Then they drew and pulled out “spiritual influence” and said, “So let us acknowledge spiritual influence.” Then an angel descended from the upper world and said, “But this is not merely because you happened to draw the slip of paper with ‘spiritual influence’ on it, but because it was intended by the wise governance of the world, because it corresponds to the truth.”

[ 13 ] Yes, you see, Swedenborg recounts this vision. Certainly, everyone is free to find this vision highly insignificant, perhaps even simple-minded; but that is not the point. The point is not whether it is simple-minded or not, but that it exists. And what may seem most simple is precisely what is deepest. For what appears here in the physical world as lawlessness, as chance, as abandonment to chance, so to speak, is something quite different when seen as a symbol in the spiritual world. And it is so difficult to come to an understanding of chance because chance is only a shadow image of higher necessities. But Swedenborg wants to hint at something special, that is, not he wants it, understandably, but “It” wants it in him. This image forms because “It” wants it in him. For this is a precise expression of the way in which he arrived at his truths, a precise expression of the spirit from which he wrote this treatise. What did the Cartesians do? They wanted to prove spiritual influence on the basis of human reason, on the basis of understanding. One can certainly arrive at the right conclusion that way, but it is like a blind chicken finding a grain of corn. The Aristotelians were no more stupid than the Cartesians; they asserted physical influence, again on the basis of human reasoning. The Leibnizians were certainly no more foolish than the other two, but they asserted pre-established harmony. Swedenborg did not follow these paths to the spirit at all, but developed everything that human art is capable of in order to prepare itself and then receive the truth. And this receiving of truth—not the making of truth, but this receiving of truth—this acceptance of truth, that is what he wanted, or that is what he wanted to express by pulling the slip of paper out of the box. That is the essence.

[ 14 ] However, such things do not find their proper value in our minds when we think them up, but our minds only relate to these things in the right way when we have them in pictures, even if the pictures may be considered simplistic by intelligent people. For pictures have a different effect on our souls than intellectual concepts; pictures prepare our souls to receive the truth from the spiritual world. That is the essence of the matter. And if one considers these things properly, one will gradually find one's way into concepts and ideas that are truly necessary for people of the present, that people of the present must attain, and that today appear inaccessible to people only out of aversion — not for any other reason — out of aversion arising from materialism.

[ 15 ] The whole spirit of our considerations has been aimed at viewing human evolution in such a way that it first followed its course until a certain point of rupture. The mystery of Golgotha falls into this break. Then history continues. Both currents are, in a sense, radically different from each other, and we have sufficiently characterized the extent to which the two currents are radically different. But imagine the following once again in order to feel this difference sufficiently in your soul. Imagine that in ancient times it was always possible, without the human being making any special preparations in his soul connected with activity, for in the mysteries these were connected with external events, with cultic acts — the human being, through the fact that something external was performed, something external happened, came to the conviction of the spiritual world and thus also of his own immortality, because this was still inherent in their physical nature before the Mystery of Golgotha. With the Mystery of Golgotha, the human body lost the ability to allow the conviction of immortality to rise up from within itself, so to speak; understand the expression correctly: to allow it to rise up. The possibility ceased. The body no longer allows the perception of immortality to be squeezed out of itself. This was prepared in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and it is really extremely interesting to see how this colossus of a thinker, Aristotle, a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, made every effort to to comprehend the immortality of the soul, but comes to nothing other than a kind of immortality that is really a very strange conception of immortality. For Aristotle, man is only a complete human being if he has his body, if he has his body properly. And Franz Brentano, one of the best Aristotelians of modern times, says in his reflection on Aristotle that a human being is no longer complete if any limb is missing; how can he be a complete human being if his entire body is missing? So that for Aristotle, when the soul passes through the gate of death, it is less than it was here in the body. This is the inability to truly see the soul, as opposed to the ancient ability to perceive the soul in its immortality. But now the peculiarity arises that Aristotle is the leading philosopher throughout the Middle Ages. The scholastics say that everything that can be known was known by Aristotle, and as philosophers we can do nothing else but rely on Aristotle and follow in his footsteps. They no longer want to develop intellectual abilities and powers that go beyond the measure of Aristotelianism. This is very significant. And this leads, I would say, to the cardinal insight into the fact why Julian the Apostate, in the Constantinian era, rejected Christianity as it was lived out in the Church of that time. One really has to see these things, I would say, in a higher light. Apart from Franz Brentano, I myself have known one of the very best Aristotelians of the present day, Vincenz Knauer, who was a Benedictine monk and who, out of his Catholic consciousness, actually stood in the same way to Aristotle as the scholastics stood to Aristotle, who, when he spoke about Aristotle, spoke in such a way that he wanted to grasp what could be known through human knowledge about the immortality of the soul. And Vincenz Knauer summarized his opinion in the following way, which is very interesting:

[ 16 ] “The soul, that is, the departed human spirit” — that is, the departed human spirit that has passed through death — “is therefore, according to Aristotle, not in a more perfect state, but in a state that is highly imperfect and not in accordance with its destiny. The image used to describe it is by no means the one often used, namely that of a butterfly floating in the blue ether of the sky after shedding its pupal shell. Rather, it resembles a butterfly whose wings have been cruelly torn off and which now crawls helplessly in the dust in the form of the most miserable worm."

[ 17 ] It is very significant that those who know Aristotle well readily admit that human knowledge should actually come to no other conclusion than this. — But this shows that some effort must be made to resist what has come out of this development. For without knowing it, today's materialism — as I have already mentioned — is actually completely under the influence of the abolition of the spirit that came about through the Council of Constantinople in 869, where, as I said, people no longer wanted to see human beings as composed of body, soul, and spirit, but abolished the spirit and allowed human beings to consist only of soul and body.

[ 18 ] Modern materialism goes even further. It now abolishes the soul as well. But this is a completely coherent development. So it takes some strength and courage to find the way back, so to speak, and to find it in the right way. Was it not so that Julian the Apostate, who was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, was aware that through a certain development of the human soul one could come to recognize the immortal character of the soul? He had knowledge of this secret of the sun. And now, from this point of view, he saw something that was actually terrible to him. He could not understand that it was necessary for what was terrible to him to happen; but it was terrible to him. What did he actually see? Looking back to ancient times, he saw how people stood either directly or indirectly through the mysteries under the guidance of extraterrestrial forces, beings, and powers. He saw that this could happen here on Earth, that things were being arranged from spiritual spheres through the knowledge that people had of these spiritual spheres. He saw that. And now he saw Christianity in Constantinianism taking on a form that applied the old basic forms of the Roman Empire to the Christian organization, to Christian society, so that Christianity inserted itself into what the Roman Empire had developed only for the external social order. He saw that. He saw, as it were, the divine-spiritual being stretched under the yoke of the Roman Empire. That was what he found terrible. One must realize that this was necessary for a time, but he could not bring himself to accept it, and this formed his opposition to what was happening outwardly. And it is necessary to consider a little the great period of the rise of Christianity before the Constantinian era, as I have already pointed out. For there were great impulses present, which were then only obscured and darkened by the incorporation of free human knowledge under the influence of the Christ impulse into the decisions of the councils.

[ 19 ] If one goes back to Origen, to Clement of Alexandria, one finds everywhere that these spirits are broad-minded, still have something thoroughly Greek about them, except that they carry in their souls an awareness of the greatness of what was accomplished through the mystery of Golgotha. But they speak about this mystery of Golgotha and about the one who went through it in a way that is simply heretical in the eyes of all denominations today. Actually, the great Church Fathers of the pre-Constantinian era are the worst heretics. They are recognized by the Church, but they are nevertheless the worst heretics. For as much as they are aware of what great things happened for the evolution of the earth with the mystery of Golgotha, they are not intent on eradicating the path to the mystery of Golgotha, the path of the mysteries, the path of ancient clairvoyance, which is what Constantinian Christianity wanted to do, as we have seen. Above all, it can be seen in Clement of Alexandria how great mysteries shine through his works, mysteries that are so secret that it is even difficult for people today to conceive of them at all. Clement of Alexandria speaks, for example, of the Logos, of the wisdom that pervades and permeates the world. He imagines this Logos as the meaningful music of the spheres of the world. He imagines it as something very alive. And he imagines that what is the outwardly visible world is, in a sense, the expression of the music of the spheres, just as the visible vibration of the strings is the expression of the musical wave motion. And so, for Clement of Alexandria, the human form becomes the image of the Logos. That is to say, Clement of Alexandria appeals to the Logos, and when he looks at the human form, it becomes for him like a confluence of sounds from the music of the spheres. Man is the image of the Logos, he says. And in some of Clement of Alexandria's sayings we find traces of the fact that the highest, highest wisdom lived in him, but completely illuminated by what emanates from the mystery of Golgotha. Compare this with what prevails today, especially the sayings I refer to in Clement of Alexandria, and you will gain a strange perspective on the right to acknowledge a man like Clement of Alexandria without understanding him.

[ 20 ] When we speak today of spiritual science as something that wants to be part of the stream of Christianity, something that must blossom out of Christianity for our time, many people come along — we have experienced this, we are experiencing it — and say: Revival of the old Gnosis! And when it comes to Gnosticism, well, a large number of those who represent Christianity today begin to cross themselves as if before the living devil. But Gnosticism for the present time is spiritual science, only that advanced, present-day Gnosticism is something different from the Gnosticism that Clement of Alexandria knew. Nevertheless, how does Clement of Alexandria express himself, living in the second half of the second Christian century? He says: Faith, good, that is what one starts from. — Today's church confessor wants to leave it at that. Faith is already gnosis, he says, but it is a compressed knowledge of what is necessary, whereas gnosis is the confirming and strengthening proof of what has been accepted in faith, built upon faith through the teaching of the Lord, and leading it on to scientific irrefutability and comprehensibility. Here you have expressed what Clement of Alexandria said for his time, which must be realized for our time. You have expressed it as a requirement of Christianity that Gnosis, today's spiritual science, must play a living role in Christian development. Today's stump says: Science on the one hand — which he wants to limit to external facts — and faith on the other; faith should not interfere with science. Clement of Alexandria says: Faith is given to Gnosis, Gnosis to love, and love to the inheritance. This is one of those sayings that belong to the very depths of the development of the human spirit, because it bears witness to a deep alliance with spiritual life. We start from faith, but faith is given to Gnosis, that is, knowledge, insight. And from living knowledge, that is, from immersion in things, true love flows, and from true love flows the handling of the inheritance of the divine. The divine can only flow through humanity, flow forth as it flowed in the beginning, if faith is given gnosis, gnosis is given love, and love is given inheritance. — Such statements must also be viewed as evidence of the depth of such a spirit.

[ 21 ] And as difficult as it is on the one hand, it is necessary on the other hand to make the true form of Christian life accessible to people today. For if certain things are described correctly today, these things reveal the actual damage of our time. These damages have such an effect that people usually do not want to see how things actually work. You see, when a village in the Alps is buried by an avalanche, everyone sees the avalanche crashing into the village; but those who want to find the origin of the avalanche may have to look for it in a grain of snow up there. The collapse of the village caused by the avalanche is easy to observe; but that it may have been caused by a grain of snow is not so easy to ascertain, at least not in physical terms. Now consider the great events of world history! That we are now facing a terrible catastrophe for humanity is clear to see; that is the avalanche that has come crashing down. Where we must look for the starting points is where the grains begin to roll. Of course, we must then look for different grains; but we do not follow these grains until they become avalanches. And today people do not like to see certain things called by their proper names.

[ 22 ] Let us assume that someone wants to form an opinion today about what constitutes science in a particular field. How do they do that? On average, how do they do that? Well, they rely on the judgment of a man who is employed in the relevant field. Why is this judgment authoritative? Well, because the man in question has been appointed professor at this or that university. That is usually the reason why this or that is recognized as scientific today. But let's take a single concrete case. I know very well that you don't make yourself popular by calling things by their name, but that doesn't help; if things continue to be called by the wrong name by more and more people in our time, we will not get out of this mess. Let us assume that one of the authorities says the following: People are always talking about the body and the soul that are found in human beings. This is actually an unsatisfactory dualism, body and soul. The fact that we still talk about body and soul today is only because we have to express ourselves in language, and we did not create language in the present, but it has been handed down to us from an earlier time when people were much more stupid than today's university professors. Those stupid people still believed in the soul as opposed to the body. And when we talk about these things today, we have to use these words; we are slaves to language and, with language, actually slaves to stupid people who have not yet employed such clever professors as we are. Now he goes on to say: So, one must talk about body and soul; but the matter is completely unjustified. For if someone really comes along and speaks, completely uninfluenced by the people of the past, from today's point of view, he might say: Yes, I see a flower, and then I see another human being. I can see the other human being in relation to the color of his face, his shape, just as I see the flower. I only have to deduce the other. Now someone could come and say: Yes, but the other person also sees the flower, and the image of the flower lives in his soul. But that is mere deception. What is actually given to me in the perception of flowers, in the perception of stones, is a sensory impression, and this is also a sensory impression in human beings. That something else lives in the soul is only a vain illusion. There are only relationships everywhere.

[ 23 ] You say to yourselves: What he is telling us, we cannot imagine! Well, thank God you can't imagine much, because the whole discussion is the most foolish talk there can be, it is, in a sense, personified foolishness. This personified foolishness is presented in connection with all kinds of careful investigations carried out in laboratories on the human brain, with all kinds of clinical results and so on. This means that the person in question is a fool. He is able to produce good clinical results because he has the clinics at his disposal; what he says about these things is pure folly. Such fools are not uncommon today; in fact, they are the norm. Of course, you don't make yourself popular by saying such things. The series of lectures published as a book by the man in question – forgive me, but curiously enough his name is Verworn, which means 'rejected', but of course I will allow that to be a coincidence on the physical plane – the book that reproduces the series of articles is called 'Die Mechanik des Geisteslebens' (The Mechanics of Spiritual Life). One could write about the “woodenness of iron” just as one could write about the mechanics of mental life, and it would make about as much sense. Yes, if our mental life, even in its most enlightened minds, is permeated by such “sharpness of thought” — Verworn describes what he sees, he merely mixes in his own foolish thoughts — then one need not be surprised if precisely those disciplines that do not have the good fortune to be true, at least in relation to the external and sensual, that cannot see anything external, are absolutely unable to find their way. Political science in particular, which lacks the crutch of external facts, should have ideas that are capable of bearing reality, but for the reasons I explained to you last time, it does not have them. However, people are coming to realize this for themselves. I have mentioned a very capable person to you: Kjellén, the Swedish thinker. He is certainly one of the very best. And his book “The State as a Form of Life” is ingenious; but towards the end he puts forward a strange idea which he cannot do anything with, but which others in the present day cannot do anything with either. He quotes a certain Fustel de Coulanges, who wrote “La cit€ antique,” and who argues in this book that it is very strange, when one goes back to the ancient states, the ancient pre-Christian states, that almost the entire state is always based on cult; the entire state is built on a spiritual-social order. So, you see, people are confronted with the facts, because I told you last time how social order flowed out of the mysteries, how it was really something spiritual. As people study these things, they come across such things, but they cannot understand them; they cannot possibly make sense of them. They cannot do anything with what history itself tells them, since so many documents have been taken away from them.

[ 24 ] All the less can anything be done with the other idea, which must arise again, and which we find precisely in the mysteries, and, I would say, in that most wonderful echo of the mysteries in Plato, and which I have indicated as a newer way of coming to Christ. When you read Plato's works, you encounter something peculiar. Plato places Socrates at the center of his contemplation, Socrates surrounded by his disciples. It is within Socrates' conversations with his disciples that Plato develops what he wants to say. Plato ties in with the dead Socrates in his writings. This is not just a literary device, but something more. It is, I would say, the continuation, the echo of what was lived in the mysteries, where the mystery students were led to communicate with the deceased, who continue to rule the outer sensory world from the spiritual world. Plato develops a philosophy by connecting with a dead person. This idea must be resurrected, this idea must return. And I have indicated how it must return. We must find a way to go beyond dry history, beyond the retelling of external events; we must come to the point where we can live with the dead, where we can resurrect the thoughts of the dead within ourselves. In this sense, we must be able to take the idea of resurrection seriously. This is the path on which Christ already reveals himself to humanity in subjective, inner experience, the path on which Christ can prove himself true. But part of this path is the development of what can be called the will in thinking. If you can only form thoughts as they arise when you look at the external sensory world, then you will not arrive at thoughts that enter into a real connection with the dead. We must gain the ability to bring thoughts up from our own being in an elementary way. The will must have the courage to connect with reality. Then the will, which thus becomes spiritualized, will touch spiritual beings just as your hand touches an external sensory object. And the first spiritual beings will usually even be those who are in some way karmically connected to us as dead people. The only thing necessary in all these things is that you do not seek instructions for them that are easily available, written down on a piece of paper, so to speak, to put in your pocket. These things are not that simple. Even well-meaning people say: How can I distinguish between dream and reality? How can I distinguish between fantasy and reality? Yes, in individual cases, distinguishing between the two according to a certain rule is not what one should be looking for. The whole soul must gradually attune itself so that it becomes capable of judgment, of arriving at a judgment in individual cases, just as one wants to judge in the sensory external world, without instructions for individual cases, but rather as one must educate oneself for a larger sphere in order to have a judgment about individual cases. The dream can be very similar to contact with reality, but one cannot say in individual cases: This is how you distinguish a mere dream from reality. What I am saying now may even be wrong in this or that case, because other points of view come into play. It is always a matter of trying to make one's whole soul capable of judgment for the spiritual world.

[ 25 ] Take the case, which occurs very frequently: you dream, you believe you are dreaming; but people cannot so easily distinguish between dream and reality. Those who think about dreams today, incidentally, think along the lines of people such as Mr. Verworn, who says: You can do a nice experiment. Verworn cites the following beautiful experiment, which is also very beautiful as an experiment: Someone is sleeping, and you go to the window with a pin and tap. The person dreams, wakes up, and tells you that he has taken part in a gunfight. The dream exaggerates, says Verworn. What were only pinpricks have become gunshots. The dream exaggerates. How can we explain this? We explain it, says Mr. Verworn, by assuming that when we are awake, the brain is in full activity. In dream consciousness, the brain is in a reduced state of activity; the cortical consciousness is active; the cortical brain otherwise takes no part; it is the brain of lesser intensity. This is why dreams become so bizarre; this is why pinpricks become gunfire, and through the activity of the brain, the little pinprick becomes a firefight. —- Well, the audience is gullible because at the top of the page, where the subject is mentioned, it is said that the dream exaggerates, and at the bottom, not exactly in the words I have just used, it is said: The brain is less active, therefore the dream appears bizarre — and the reader has already forgotten what is written at the top. Therefore, he does not connect these things. All they need to believe is that an authority employed by the state says these things, so they have to believe them. — Belief in authority is something that is very frowned upon in the present day, as you know. Well, anyone who doesn't think that way about dreams is entitled to say the following. It could be right, and this way of thinking is the right one in this area. Let's assume you dream about a friend who has died. You dream a situation together with this friend; that is, you believe you are dreaming — and then you wake up. The thought when you wake up is, of course: That person has been dead for a long time! But it didn't occur to you in the dream that he was dead. Now you can find all kinds of clever explanations for the dream, according to the “mechanics of the mind”; but, if it is a dream, and the dream is nothing but a reminiscence of daily life, then you will find it difficult to understand that the strongest thought you can have, namely that your friend has died, does not play a part in the dream, when you have just experienced a situation that you know—you know this quite precisely—you could not have experienced with the living. Then the following judgment is justified, then you say to yourself: I have now experienced something with X that I could not have experienced in life, that I not only did not experience, but, given how life with him was, could not have experienced, and now I am experiencing it. Suppose that the soul is behind this dream image, the real soul that has passed through the gate of death is behind this dream image. Isn't it obvious that you don't witness death? The soul has no reason to show itself to you as dead; it lives on. And when you take these two things together and perhaps combine them with something else, you will come to say to yourself: My image is superimposed on a real encounter with the soul. And the fact that the thought of death does not occur to me is because I do not have a reminiscence, but rather a real dead person approaching me. With this person, I am now experiencing something that naturally takes the form of an image, but there is a situation that could not have existed. Furthermore, the thought of death does not occur because the soul lives, because there is no reason for it. And then you have every reason to say to yourself: So I live in a region where, when I have such a so-called dream, something does not come into play—and what I am saying now is important, extremely important—because what is characteristic of our physical life is the integrity of our physical memory. This memory is not present to the same extent in the spiritual world we enter, nor is it even present in the same way. Rather, we must first develop the memory that is necessary there. Physical memory is already bound to the physical body. Therefore, everyone who is familiar with this region knows that physical memory does not enter into it. No wonder that there is no memory at all of the dead, but rather an encounter with the living soul.

[ 26 ] People who were familiar with this speak of how what we call memory in physical life is something completely different in spiritual life. Anyone who has ever let Dante's great picture, the Commedia, the “Divine Comedy,” sink in, will, once they have this understanding, have no doubt that Dante had visions, that he was familiar with the spiritual world. For those who are familiar with the language of those who were acquainted with the spiritual world, the conclusive evidence is already contained in the introduction Dante chose for his Commedia. But Dante knew what he was talking about; he was no amateur in the spiritual worlds, he was, so to speak, an expert. He knew what he was talking about. Such a person also knows how ordinary memory does not enter into that sphere where we encounter the dead. And Dante speaks much of the dead, of how our dead live in the light of the spiritual world. With reference to memory, you will find the beautiful words in the Divine Comedy: “O highest light, so far above human understanding, lend me but a little of what you appeared to me, and let my tongue become so powerful that I may leave behind a spark of your glory for future generations! For if only a little of it returns to my memory, and something resounds in these verses, your victorious power will be better understood.” Here you see how Dante knew that one cannot comprehend what comes from the spiritual regions with an ordinary good memory. Some people today say: Why should we elevate ourselves to the spiritual world? We have enough to do with the physical world; the capable seek to find their way in this world! Yes, do these people have the right to believe that those ancient people who received wisdom in the mysteries were less sincere about the physical world? Only, they knew that the spiritual world plays into this physical world, that it works within it, that the dead still work among us, even if one denies it, and that one only causes confusion by denying it. Those who deny that those who have passed through the gate of death are active here in this world are like people who say, “Oh, I don't believe that's hot,” and then walk across a red-hot plate. Of course, it is not so easy to prove immediately the damage that is done when the influence of the spiritual world on the physical world is not taken into account, but instead one acts on the assumption that it can be denied. Our time is not very inclined to build the bridge that must be built to the realm where the dead and the high spirits are. In many respects, our age even has a hatred, a truly hateful attitude toward the spiritual world. And the spiritual scientist who wants to be honest has a responsibility to familiarize himself with the hostile forces of our spiritual development, to look at them a little. For the matter has really deep roots; it has its roots where the roots lie for all the forces that are working against true human progress today.