East and West, and the Roman Church
GA 203
Lecture I
5 February 1921, Dornach
In the November number of the Roman Catholic Hochland an article has appeared, entitled “Three Worlds,” bearing the author's name Hei Lung. It is about the civilisation of our present age and its impulses, and is written from the Chinese standpoint. It does not interest us here to inquire how deeply this essay is rooted in Chinese civilisation or what it signifies as regards that civilisation; what must interest us far more is the fact that it appears within our own European world and sets out to consider the civilisation of our present age from a certain point of view. In the first place it deals with a division into three worlds centering round three significant impulses of culture or civilisation in the present age. The first impulse for civilisation which the author distinguishes is the modern Western civilisation, to which he then opposes the second impulse of civilisation, the Eastern, Asiatic culture. About the third impulse we shall have to speak later. He considers our modern European civilisation from an Asiatic point of view, from the point of view innate in a man whose ideas spring from an ancient civilisation of the Earth and are expressed in the feeling of a human being who stands in the midst of what has until to-day been considered as the Asiatic culture, a civilisation having its source in ancient, gigantic, mighty treasures of wisdom which have now fallen into decadence.
There is a great deal in this man's feelings (and it lives there with deep intensity) of what one may call a devastating criticism of modern European civilisation. The Asiatic of to-day (as one can see also, for instance, in Rabindranath Tagore) speaks from a point of view derived from primeval civilisation; and he speaks from that point of view about the civilisation of modern Europe, and criticises, in a purely negative way, all that our modern Europe has to offer. Listen to the following sentences from the essay and you will see at once what a critical spirit finds utterance in that which resounds to us from Asia concerning our modern civilisation.
“Indeed, the modern European learning has something of a wretched spirit of servility. It has assumed something of the plodding nature of a technical age. It pours into the world as a hair-splitting specialisation, clouded and encircled by thousands of quotations, and steel-clad with statistics and trivial experiments. It no longer possesses any depth, any wisdom, or any life! Its results may be highly valuable, judged by its own standard; but no other valuation is permitted, and anyone who wishes for another is in danger of being considered behind the times—even medieval. It is the same in the economic sphere. There the machine has superseded life, and the competition of industry fills all the gaps with new needs and new ways and means to satisfy them; and so the organisation of society drags on a while longer completely disinherited; and in its midst the broad masses of the people appear quite docile. Yes, the age of world-embracing trade, of never-resting machines, of standing armies, of cinematographs, of machine guns, sky-scrapers, gramophones, and cosmic riddles—finds utterances in the breast of man and cries aloud: ‘All this is subject to me.’ But the angry elements and the human ‘atoms’ echo sinisterly, they give out a sinister echo which expresses itself in the wars and revolutions still taking place to-day. In all the restlessness one hears the cry: ‘All this is tending to destruction.’”
That indeed is a sharp criticism of what has arisen within modern human evolution as the European civilisation. Let us attempt for once to put before us the essential characteristics of this European civilisation. In reality it is rooted in what has been produced (and often described in our lectures) in the last three to four centuries, during which the Natural Sciences have emancipated themselves in a certain sense from the historical tradition and from the religious life of former ages. This modern civilisation is also rooted in the world of modern technics, which has united itself with modern Natural Science. Everything which has sprung up and developed out of human depths manifests a certain opposition towards historical tradition. The personalities who stand at the starting point of our modern civilisation are a characteristic of our European life in this sense.
Let us consider, for instance, such a personality as Copernicus, to whom one has to look back for a great part of what lives in this European civilisation in the direction I have characterised. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic priest, and so he lived in the first place with those ideas into which he was educated as a Catholic priest; but he lived in an age in which, side by side with what his education gave him, something was put into his soul which later developed into the mechanical perception of the heavens of modern times. From this same source has also come what has developed into the mechanical world-conceptions of our recent times, and even the mechanical world-ordering in political and also in the economic life.
While all this took possession more and more of the widest circles of civilisation in the West, it developed in such a way that according to Eastern perception it has only a body and no soul. The soul was altogether lacking. It appeared to the oriental as if everything he sees in the European is to be traced to this lack of soul, this passing over into men's thinking of what is purely mechanical. Whenever he faces a man of the West the Oriental feels himself absolutely misunderstood by the European in his whole feeling, and in everything which he calls his wisdom. Characteristic passages could be quoted again from this article to the effect that Japan has assimilated something of the Western European civilisation and, thereby exposed itself, according to the Eastern view, to a certain danger.
“The Japanese people have indeed exposed themselves to the danger of exchanging their deeply-founded patriotism and ancient knightly chivalry for European piracy and spirit of exploration. Nevertheless that ancient ferment will not at once prove ineffective, which helps to preserve the ancient achievements in the East, and joins together the East of Asia with the South in one Great Unity—I mean, the ferment of Buddhism.”
So what the Asiatic perceives in what comes to him from Europe is practical piracy and the spirit of exploitation. The Asiatic regards the matter in such a way that, with a mechanical view of the Cosmos, with all that has poured into the East in opposition to the older tradition the practical spirit, the tendency to exploitation flows in too. The Asiatic holds that the Europeans have gradually forgotten to carry the element of soul into what expresses itself as their culture or civilisation. The Asiatic has the idea that Europeans no longer knows to-day the meaning of soul. The following words, for example, are very characteristic.
“What then has Europe done?” (He means in recent years.) “Where are now their holiest treasures? Buried, forgotten, pushed aside, or piled up in museums, fully docketed.”
What is really fundamentally true is seen by the Asiatic in very sharp outline. He sees how the European has reached the point of taking treasures that were formerly the very life of Europe but which only had influence on man because they were placed in a suitable architectural setting so that men felt the same spiritual influence streaming to them from the paintings on the walls, and speaking to them our of the architecture—the European has taken these treasures and shut the away in museums, where they remain piled up and ticketed, preserved only as antiquities. The Asiatic feels very strongly that that which was the soul of a former civilisation has been labeled in this way because the European fundamentally no longer knows what soul is in the world, in the Eastern sense. And so the Asiatic sees in Europe pre-eminently lack of soul.
“These people of the East, of this second world, had they holy treasures? Could they dare, when smashed down a dozen times by the combined bombardments of Europe, to act independently and indeed spiritually?” That might be dangerous to European civilisation. The Asiatic asks whether it is worth while to learn this—if one wishes to to be human in the full sense of the word, and does not consider the world only from the standpoint of the bodily mechanisation, but from that of the soul—whether it is really worth while to apply one's interest to that which is, above all, so important to the European.
“In full view of the great walls of the Summer Palace on the Hill of Ten Thousand Delights, there rested one afternoon the widowed Empress of China, nearly 70 years of age. Se sat on a throne covered with golden silk, and it was placed in her favourite spot on the wonderfully artistic marble ship afloat on the great lake. In the middle of all the magnificence around her, there were smashed sculptures, paintings, and glass works of art from the pavilions; and turning to a new lady of the Court, the Empress Tzi-Hei said: ‘That was done by the European soldiers (in 1900), and I did not desire to restore those things and so forget what they teach.’ She was thinking of all those bitter experiences and of how, almost 40 years ago, a faithful State Councillor had described to her the spirit of the Europeans in these words: ‘They have concluded some twenty treaties with China which contain at least 10,000 written characters. Is there in any one of them even a single word referring to respect for parents of to fulfillment of one's duties, a single word which has any reference to the right observing of ceremonies, of duties, of purity, of the development of a right feeling of modesty—which are the four basic sentiments on which our race rests. No, and again no. Everything of which they speak concerns material advancement.’ (Wu Ko Tzu Hei, 1873.) That Empress therefore could not possibly have any respect for the ‘ideal’ side of that European explanation, which was the Christian Missionary's; because as the leader of a State, all her life long, she had heard only of the material advantages which those European powers acquired by their protection of the Missionaries. She had a sharp eye for the whole spiritual backwardness and encroachment of those Europeans who forced themselves on her, although towards the end of her life she learned to value their technical methods, their railways, their mines, their armies and navies; but only as a means to an end. Although often calumniated, she was really a great personality. Every day she devoted the morning hours to her Executive Ministers, listening to advice, asking questions and hearing reports from the vice-regents, examiners and censors and frequently she listened to a very freely spoken and at times uncomfortable judgment.”
Now, that is an Asiatic criticism, and a criticism which would always be given in like manner if we heard it from the mouth of any person who stands to-day in what has remained in Asia as the relics of the old Wisdom. Every Asiatic would naturally contrast the world he sees in Europe with the second world, which is the world he himself possesses and to which he still looks,—not seeing that it is a world which has fallen into decadence; for it is indeed a world which had its starting-point in an Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition incomprehensible to the European, but which has now fallen into decadence. The Asiatic who is an educated man in our sense of the word, always speaks—as Asiatic—in such a way as to make it plain that his feeling is like this: The Earth is the dwelling place of mankind; on this Earth there once dwelt higher beings than those we call man, and they founded a civilisation which human beings took over and lived in. And the Asiatic believes he is still living in that divine civilisation. The Earth has taken over, as it were, the inheritance of a primeval treasure of wisdom which spoke to the whole man, not merely to the intellect, as the Modern European mechanistic culture does. The Asiatic has no interest in what might come of the Earth, apart from the fact that it is the bearer of what has remained as an ancient inherited treasure of wisdom.
Now my dear friends, it must be admitted, the modern European is absolutely lacking in understanding for this whole method of thinking and feeling; that must be admitted.
The modern European reads his Homer and his Aeschylus, and values them in a certain sense; but he cannot take even the very opening words in earnest. He cannot do this, because he is the outcome of our modern civilisation. How can the European of to-day take seriously what resounds from ancient European times? He reads his Homer, and in the very first lines he finds these words: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!” Homer does not say he is relating the story, but the Muse, which means that a Spiritual Being in his own inner being is relating it. The Europeans does not take this very first line seriously, he takes it as a phrase. He regards it, well, just as something that is said. He has no real feeling of how the Greek knew his soul to be used by Divine Beings, who really spoke in his soul; so that when his mouth spoke, it uttered not what his intellect imprinted on his mind, but what a Divine Being was speaking within him. Who is there to-day who understands deeply and earnestly that the Greek, when he sang, felt himself to be the vessel of a Divine Being? How then did the Greek feel? He saw in that Divine Being something which once upon a time fashioned on the Earth a civilisation, formed for beings one has to call men, though of course they were not human in the sense of to-day. The Greek believed that that Divine Spiritual Being still lives amongst mankind and is able to inspire men; but it must not be supposed that it is only a voice in the inner being. Hence that deep opposition that meets us to-day whenever we compare Homer with Aeschylus. Homer sings while letting the Muse sing, Homer sings as the composer of Epic; he sings as a narrating poet. That is connected with the perception that ancient Beings, who once descended from spiritual worlds to the Earth, were still active in man and could sing of what had been and of that whence the Earth proceeded and whence developed everything within which we live. If one is to relate in this very way in narrative form, describing what has produced our present civilisation, one must go back to those divine Spiritual Beings who once descended from higher spiritual worlds and can still inspire men. Herein for the Greek lay the nature of the Epic &mdash the Epic was uttered by Beings who had come over to this Earth from previous incarnations of the Earth.
On the other hand, the Greek felt that something else lived in man, which would only find its real development in the future, something which is, at yet sub-human in man. This the Greek felt to be Dionysian, and through those forms of the Gods he introduced, however lightly, in the Dionysian something of the animal characteristics. That which spoke from the depths of the impulses of human emotion, of human will-power, was felt by the Greek as something which is still chaotic in man; only in future worlds in which the Earth will incarnate, will there be found as tranquil an expression for its being as man now has in his epic, where he can relate in quiet contemplation and observation.
Now that which is the Dionysian element and still forces itself out of man in and animal way,—that the Greek inscribes in his Drama. Therefore we see shining in Aeschylus the God Dionysus, who in a primeval dream of Greece was at first the chief person there;—and round him the chorus developed and sang of all that related to Dionysus. When the Greek looked within himself he could say: “In me there lives something higher than man, something which has come from primeval worlds to the Earth. If I give myself to that, I give myself to something superhuman and I say: ‘Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.’” Then the Greek turned to the spiritual past from which man has come, and wrote Epics. Then the Greek turned to the future, he saw that which would only develop into man in the future, when the Earth shall be, as it were, superseded by other worlds; he saw that in the Dionysian animal-spiritual form, and he saw it in a state of dramatic agitation and dramatic movement. When he looked at man from outside, he did not speak of the Muse, but of Dionysus, and then he became not epic but dramatic. The really human element the Greek only perceived in Poetry, the superhuman he saw in the Epic, and the sub-human in the Drama, creating the germ for the future. That which was really the human element, rhythmically ebbing to and fro in human nature itself,—that the Greek saw in Poetry. Such was the position assumed by the Greek in this spiritual-physical world, thus did he feel himself related to his spiritual-physical world. On the one hand, the invocation to the Muse must be taken seriously if we really desire to present the thought-life of the Greeks. On the other hand the fact that their original drama did not actually present human events, but the working of Dionysus in man—that again we must take in all earnestness; for we must point out that the Greek spoke somewhat as follows: “If one wishes to regard man not inwardly, but only from without, one must meet the form of Dionysus. Apollo and Dionysus—Apollo the leader of the Muses, the preserver of that which incorporates itself from the past into the present of the Earth; and Dionysus, the agitating desolating germ, which will only attain to clarity in the future.” Those are the two great opposites—Apollo and Dionysus. And between them in the middle the lyric element of the Greeks.
We must therefore, my dear friends, look back to such conditions of the primeval culture of Europe if we are to unite the right feeling with what we see around us to-day, when this feeling of self in the Cosmos contrasts with the Gods of the Past and the Gods of the Future; we must set over against each other this ancient epoch of European civilisation with what lives to-day as the mechanical view of the Cosmos, which the Asiatic so sharply criticises. We must have a feeling for how much such a modern as Goethe was placed, not of course in such a mechanism as we live in now, but in an age nevertheless in which the germ of this mechanism was already developing. We see how Goethe, with every fibre of his soul, longs to turn from this European life to what European civilisation once was. That is what lay in the feeling of Goethe when, in the 80's of the 18th century, he longed for Italy and for what was still there in Italy although in decadence, in order to have a feeling for that out of which European civilisation had sprung.
We must quite clearly realise that although the Asiatic lives in the decadence of that ancient civilisation, yet in spite of the decadence of his own civiisation, he has a clear feeling for what it once was and what it has become. Hence his sharp criticism which works with such intensive shadows; all the time exalting those lights which, according to his view, are still to be seen in the East; for even if they are externally clouded, yet, according to his view, they still have soul. And when he turns to his own soul he feels no need for interests which spring from an admiration of railways, steamboats, cinemas, gramophones, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, and so on. No, such thinking about World Riddles is absolutely foreign to the Asiatic, because it all rests simply on the combining of what one's sense organs perceive, whereas the Asiatic still knows as a reality that humanity once received from mighty Spirits that which lived in the soul and made man a human being.
In this connection, my dear friends, man has become very trivial to-day; for it is trivial to believe that what lived earlier in European civilisation was part of an age of childhood, and that that alone is great which European humanity has produced in recent times, especially in the 19th century. To-day when we are living in the age of great decisions, people really ought to transcend that triviality, and raise themselves to the possibility of seeing that it means something that over there in the East, there still are human beings who have in their soul something of the consciousness of Spirit and Soul, and who with a destructive, sharp, biting criticism, look at all those things which to the European comprise his greatness. We ought to realise that this is of significance, as we ought to say: That which lives thus in the Asiatic souls will one day be capable of leading to a European catastrophe,—for, my dear friends, it has a strong impulse for souls. It possesses a strong fascination for souls, because they have been devastated in a mechanical civilisation and cannot raise themselves up to construct something themselves out of the soul and spirit. Those human beings who feel the desolation of the European mechanical life to-day—rather than look to that which could be built up here, they would much prefer to take over from the decadent East the spirituality which has again become necessary to them. Hence they do not want to listen when the words ring across to us from Asia: “What has Europe done? What has become of its old holy treasures? Buried, forgotten, pushed aside, or labeled and piled up in museums. As far as the eye can reach, the Asiatic can only see bad taste in the West. And when Europe recovers and pulls itself together again out of the desert of hate and destruction, and the desert of force that leads to distress and privation, it will probably go on manufacturing, striking, colonising, militarising, gaining more andmore of the entire world, but losing more and more of its own soul.”
And now he goes on to point to something which a European has said. The European who is quoted only carries what he has to say to what I must call a very lazy criticism. Let us hear further: “Or must we expect a new salvation from America? Such a qualified judge as Kühnmann comes to the following conclusion (Germany and America. Chapter 8.) ‘Before 1914 no one knew what America really is, now at last we know. American signifies no progress and no teaching for the moral world. It gives us no new thought of any higher humanity. On the contrary, those sins which cling to modern Europe civilisation appear nowhere so terribly naked and unbounded as in America. That consciousless, blind, self-seeking of gold is the dominating thought. Nowhere does it wear more openly and destructively the garment of hatred, in the hypocrisy which talks of the service of humanity, when all the time what thinks and acts is the cold sense for self-seeking.’”
That was what the Asiatic quoted; nevertheless it is something which—when one feels it, one must say it—springs fundamentally from the triviality of his understanding. Here I must speak sharply. It is simply a bit of professional barking at something which, of course, lies obvious on the surface. Of course it is absolutely justified. It is justified ten times over. But behind his barking there is not that spiritual background which lies behind the Asiatic criticism of modern Europe. That which stands behind the Asiatic criticism of modern civilisation is something which speaks now in just the same way as once Homer spoke of the Muse. It is, moreover, something which gives a power such as once upon a time the Greek dramatist had when, on looking at man from outside, he dramatised his Dionysian emotions. When the Asiatic criticises European civilisation, something from out of the Cosmos speaks in him
That, my dear friends, is what a European should say for himself to-day; and with great intensity he ought to put that contrast before him, which we should be able to feel to-day if we take what lives in our literature, writings, and so-called education, and compare it with an age which believed that earthly-cosmic relationships are declared and related by divine spiritual souls.
And now we can turn to many people who begin, from the spirit of our modern European civiisation, to feel something of what lies within this civiisation. In the same number of this periodical, a number which is composed in a masterly way with reference to what is intended, with reference to something which most human beings cannot as yet see to-day, but which is nonetheless being put into practice by small and mostly demonical coteries, in this same number which, as regards this point, is composed in a masterly fashion, there is also to be found the discussion of a book by Hans Ehrenberg. The essay discussing this book is called Ways and Wrong Ways to Rome. We can see that Hans Ehrenberg in his book The Homecoming of the Heretic: A Guide by Hans Ehrenberg, being a University teacher of the present day, it is in a certain sense a representative personality, and possesses all the characteristics of a University Professor. I myself have learned that, through my own experience of him. Here we see how indignant he became with the desolating barrenness which lives in modern science and modern education. He sees the hopelessness, the unredeemedness of modern science and education. He sharply rejects everything which has appeared in the last of the whole of modern civilisation, and he would like a really religious spirit again to enter into that which comprises our modern civiisation; and he points out the path to Rome. He draws attention to the fact that besides the Epistle of St. Peter, there is the Epistle of St. John, and that to St. John is ascribed the words: “Little children, love one another.” It is very characteristic that the writer who is criticising the book puts by the side of “Little children, live one another” another saying of St. John. He says to Ehrenberg: I know another quotation from St. John: “If there come any unto you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.” There you have a learned man, who is deeply and religiously in Roman Catholicism; and he speaks entirely our of the spirit of Rome, whereas Ehrenberg merely trifles with the Roman spirit. The man who adds the above words to St. John's words “Little children, love one another,”—here I must express myself allegorically—knows that man needs muscles and bones, that he needs not merely muscles and sinews and tendons, but bones. And so, not now speaking allegorically, but in truth, man needs a doctrine, a teaching, a life of ideation which can support him and, on the basis of this life of ideation and of thought—as it were, attached to this life of thought just as muscles and sinews are attached to the bones—he needs love. Love must be attached to that which is the bony skeleton in man's spiritual life, namely the doctrine, the content. It is characteristic of many modern people of the type of Hans Ehrenberg, that they say: “Science contains nothing, science dries us up, it is unredeemed, science leaves our souls cold and dry; what we must cultivate is love.” But, my dear friends, that would mean: We must not look in the human organism for a healthy bony formation, for we cannot see why man needs bones; he would be far softer, more pliable, more adaptable in all relationships if he were rickety. Thus, on the one side we see the mechanism, and on the other that which tries with a certain justice to transcend this mechanism, but which strives for a “rickety” education. For love remains a mere phrase if it wishes to stand in this way, without the background of a spiritual doctrine. In that case it simply springs from the despair of those who, not having the courage for bony system of our civilisation, wish to remain stationary in a rickety civilisation.
In such spirits as the European who longs for the rickets of culture, and the Asiatic in whom still lives something of the strong skeleton of old oriental Wisdom, we can see nothing certain for the future.
The Asiatic looks towards Europe. On the one hand he finds there a mechanical culture, the ethical expression of which, for him, is piracy and exploitation; and on the other hand he finds an expression of what has to link itself on to this, just as the muscles have to be linked on to the solid bones.
When the Asiatic contemplates that, he comes to an extraordinary conclusion, which however in certain circles is propagated with great joy, because—and I must lay stress on this—these circles know what they want. At this point, where I want you to see the tendency towards which all these instructions are running. I prefer to read it word for word. The essay, The Three Worlds, which is written from the Asiatic Chinese standpoint, characterises, as I have explained, the world of the newer European civilisation, the world of the Asiatic civilisation, and it then puts a third world there, which is characterised in the following way,—looking, and calling out, as it were, to Europe what the Asiatic thinks, and what still lives for the future outside Europe. “If Europe is not to die, what must it do?” That is what the Asiatic is asking; and he answers it as follows.
“In reality the synthesis must be the third thing, a third world; and this third world places itself above and between the others, indeed right in the middle of the others without losing its own characteristics, or at least without losing its power for education. It is itself the very oldest, coming from the super-nature of the inspired spiritual world, which has maintained itself for thousands of years in the tiny kingdom of a special people often in bondage, in the midst of a gigantic civilisation, and then as a Christian leaven, transforming antiquity and growing as a mighty tree under which the peoples dwell. That is the world of the Roman Catholic Church, in which that magnificent medieval human being was developed who, in reality, is the one and only harmonious European. The Catholic Church it is which has maintained herself in spite of all attacks; her voice has never been dumb even in the tumult of modern decay, and, as a matter of fact, it resounded as the one and only noble human voice in our age even as the deep tones of the bells resound over the noise and lewdness of the great cities. Where else is to be found the much-questioned judge of world-history? Where else is to be found the world-conscience, where else the guardian of morality? This world alone, the third world—that of the Roman Catholic Church—has seen everything come and go; she alone is the world of authority. Against the world of the East she will take again the conquering path of Francis Xavier and his disciples, which leads to salvation. In defiance of everything modern, she shows that there is more force and self-determination in humility than in all the consciousness of rulers. She knows how to clothe the beggar with kingly worth! She is the religion of magnificence and renunciation, of the harmony of affirmation and denial, of freedom in piety and of bondage in dogma, of Philosophia Perennis, of strict rites, of ceremonies and discipline, combined with a large-hearted understanding of adaptation, the religion that takes care for the social order, the religion of art, the religion of depths of feeling.” Should this world (the third world of catholicism) be anxious as to how it can maintain itself in the modern world? Even children of this Church have been afraid and ask with each Non possumus of Authority: “How can we go on?” “Oh ye of little faith! Have trust, for I have overcome the world!”—not “I have made an agreement with the world.” The harmony is to be sought higher, beyond the first and second world, in the supernatural, in the true super-human of the Divine Son and His Kingdom.
“The less vague the tones, the purer and more liberating will be finally the music of the song, after all dissonaces have come to an end. Oh Felix Culpa! Therefore it is well to work out sharply Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. A full and rich humanity will then result. In life, everything is interwoven, and all these three worlds exist together.”
Thus, my dear friends, what this Asiatic puts forward from the Chinese standpoint as the one and only hope for Europe is the Roman Catholic Church; and in a periodical which, as I have said, is composed in a masterly fashion and springs from people who well know the trend of present tendencies, we find this view advocated,—a fact which of course interests us far more than the actual content as such. We find it said that there exist three worlds in modern times. First there is the world of modern European civilisation which contains no soul. Then there is the old Asiatic civilisation. Europe as it is to-day cannot receive that because these two worlds do not understand each other. But in Europe there also lives the third thing; and that, we are told, is Rome, the Eternal Catholic Church. On that we must build, and to-day one can see many, many Europeans moving towards that goal.
What stands behind all these things is simply not seen by a great number of human beings, because these people are not ready to take their part in what is really working and weaving in our modern world. On the one hand they do not see the demand put upon them by a modern mechanical civilisation that is void of soul. On the other hand they do not see what a gigantic force of destruction streams out of what makes itself felt in Asia, and with what infinite power Rome works at the present times; they do not see with what purposeful forces both these are working. They do not want to see it, because it is too uncomfortable, and because, if they really see the matter clearly it will become necessary to adopt a certain point of view and then to work energetically with body, soul and spirit, in this sphere
We will speak of this tomorrow.