The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in the “Bremer Nachrichten” of February 8, 1906

The day before yesterday, Dr. Steiner, General Secretary of the Theosophical Society, spoke to a large audience at the Trade House about brotherhood and the struggle for existence. He said the following: Two ideas arise in the mind of anyone who observes human social life according to its dominant forces. The one expresses the great ideal of humanitarians: brotherhood; the other that in which so many see a law of harsh reality: the struggle for existence. With a heavy heart, many say to themselves: Brotherhood is a beautiful ideal, but like so many other beautiful goals, only the slightest part of it can be realized in practice. Many human communities existed and still exist today in order to implement the ideal mentioned above in life. For thirty years, the so-called theosophical movement has joined them, and it has spread to most educated countries. It has made it its first principle to found the core of a general brotherhood of man. It regards, among other things, the spiritual deepening of life, feeling and thinking as one of its most important means. For it, brotherhood is not just a demand that applies to details of life; for it, brotherhood is what must necessarily arise when people recognize their true spiritual essence. It does not just speak of what is there for the senses and the mind, but seeks to clarify that spiritual forces and abilities lie dormant in people, through which they are citizens of an invisible world. It provides proof that the struggle for existence is only a necessary property of the lower physical world, but that unity and harmony set in immediately when man devotes himself to his higher powers. It is certainly not ignoble minds that believe that struggle is a mediator of human progress, that the forces of creation and action are steeled precisely by competition. A truly spiritual insight will never fall into the one-sidedness of regarding this competition only as a product of injustice and inhumanity. On the contrary, it proves that competition is a necessary consequence of the laws in the physical world. But it also proves that those who see struggle as the only means of civilization fail to take into account the existence of a higher world. Humanity owes all of modern civilization to purely materialistic thinking, which has harnessed the forces of nature to the service of progress in such a tremendous way. Present-day industrialism and commerce have emerged from this thinking. They stem from the knowledge of the physical world. And the harmony of humanity, which must necessarily follow in the wake of this external culture, can also come from nothing but knowledge. Knowledge of the physical separates man from man, but knowledge of the spiritual unites man with man, for it shows how the individual is nothing without all of humanity. - The speaker was rewarded with enthusiastic applause.

Lecture notes by Marie Steiner

There is [an] inner relationship between Theosophy and what Freemasonry contains. There is [a] great fear of [the] Freemasons. - In Vienna, where [a] university professor and other people were present, a gentleman in my presence, a high-ranking Catholic cleric, told the following: In Rome, a dozen Dominicans [gap in transcription] had said that it was true [gap in transcription] another Catholic clergyman said that one should not go out on the streets in the dark because the Freemasons were about.

Lessing was asked if he had discovered anything dangerous to the state or anything else dangerous. No, but [gap in transcription] glad if anything [gap in transcription].

Goethe drew [the] strength for the deepest things from freemasonry [gap in transcript].

Freemasonry is said to be older than humanity because it comes from the light and earth is older than [gap in transcript].

Freemasonry is derived from Adam, because [the] apron is derived from the fig leaf.

Symbols from workshop.

Freemasonry represents a community of people who have the goal of developing.

A Mason is above all committed to improving himself to the point where he is a worthy co-worker in the construction of humanity.

The meaning of life on earth is that we remodel and rework our planet. - More and more, human labor is intervening in our earth.

What will the earth be one day? A building that man completes. And it is the duty of every human being to participate in this building.

Three forces must be built into the construction of the temple, otherwise chaos will result. The three columns on which this temple rests are wisdom, beauty and strength.

Wisdom, when he ennobles his mind.

Beauty, when he ennobles his soul.

Strength, when he ennobles his will.

Therefore, these three columns are considered the foundation of all work.

Building is done on the outside and on the inside - and best of all when these three are built in.

Free masonry is everything that happens with the help of wisdom, beauty and strength.

The correct construction of the earthly temple is meant, not just the inner being of man.

One must understand how the creation of works of art is related to masonry. Imagine the beautiful connection between the building and the soul in a Gothic cathedral in a medieval city.

A true building was one that reflects the fact that wisdom, beauty and strength live in the soul.

The pointed arches are nothing other than the folded hands of the mystic.

The deep ancient intentions come from the place where all human knowledge comes from: from the mysteries.

The principle of learning there was transformation of man.

The goal of these ancient mysteries was the birth of the spiritual man in man.

There are two ways of approaching the truths: through revelation and through bright, clear realization.

Today, theology is the most materialistic. Until the sixteenth century, it was taught that the six days were an astral dream experience of Adam.

The Temple of Solomon is considered the symbol of the great earthly temple.

In Solomon was depicted the priest-king who had come to wisdom through revelation.

In Hiram Abiff [was depicted] the man who had come to wisdom through himself.

The symbols of mathematics and mechanics are taken from dead nature, because man can tame it. He cannot yet tame the living; he can neither produce a plant, nor an animal, nor his own kind from his own power. For this he still needs the revelation of the living forces.

Only the higher nature of man can contribute to progress, the lower must recede.

“We must have places where all the lower nature is silent and only the higher nature speaks.”

The moment the Mason puts on the apron, the lower nature is no longer there – the mason commits himself to this. The entire symbolism of Freemasonry is an allegorical representation of the path that the higher man has to follow, a reflection of inner development.

To be an apprentice means to make up for what our brothers have achieved in the past.

To be a fellow journeyman means to be allowed to live with the old brothers of humanity.

Only a Master is to be allowed to work on the construction of the temple.

Such a ceremony is a reflection of the secrets of the higher worlds themselves.

Theosophy is the inner truth of these ceremonies; it says what these ceremonies show. It has the spirit of these signs and images.

[Possibly a question and answer session from here on out]

The three journeymen: the illusion of personal self, doubt, and superstition.

Man must pass through the various stages of superstition in order to arrive at knowledge. 1906

He must go through the illusion of personal self to achieve selflessness.

Those who delve into every year that Christ Jesus lived have the 33 degrees of Freemasonry.

One needs knowledge to feel compassion – walking in the light.

Only comfort of a higher kind is [it] to shy away from knowledge.

Because the Freemason wanted to see women confined to the family, he excluded them from the lodge.

Something happened on higher planes that made it a necessity for women to be drawn into all ritual work.

The male organism is bound by the forces of life. The forces of vril, the living ones, which will be conquered by women.

Theosophy represents more the studying, ideal side, freemasonry the practical side.

The occult cooperation of man and woman is the future significance of freemasonry. The excesses of the male culture must be held back by the occult powers of women.

Initiation in ancient times and now:

The etheric body was taken out of the body while in a deep trance, like: think of a hand falling asleep; the ether part then visibly hangs out of it. Thus the whole etheric body emerged in the ancient adept, and the impressions of the higher worlds were imprinted in it (as with a seal and stamp).

Now the astral body is worked on so intensely that it transmits the impressions further to the etheric body, and from there to the physical body.

Christian initiation:

1) Washing of the feet: bowing down before everyone through whose humiliation we have risen higher.
2) Flagellation
3) Crown of thorns: accepting every slander, every scorn and mockery with absolute equanimity.

The Apostle Paul and Theosophy. Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, spoke on this topic at the Logenhaus on Sögestraße. The speaker's main points were as follows: The source of what we see is to be sought in the spiritual world, and to explore this is the task of theosophy. One of the greatest minds of all times is closely related to our modern understanding of theosophy: the Apostle Paul. He taught the knowledge of God (theosophy) and, through his correct recognition of the Christ Being, he has the merit of becoming the founder of the Christian worldview. The Apostle Paul's conviction is based on a supersensible experience. He looks beyond the world of the senses and recognizes its origins in the spiritual world. Only a worldview that is based on the supersensible can understand him. The theosophical worldview is such a worldview. It recognizes that there are forces in man that can develop in such a way as to enable him to penetrate into the world of the spirit. This was made possible for the Apostle Paul by grace. For modern-day theosophy, the human being is not just an external entity. In all living beings in which the “I” reveals itself, it is the same at its core, but very different in its degree of development. The highest “I” is embodied in Jesus, which was there before all people, and is therefore unique. As an all-encompassing divine being, it triumphs over death. These are also the thoughts of the Apostle Paul. Christ is the fulfillment of the law. He brings about through the impulse of his life what the outward law aims at: the harmony of men among themselves. To the Jews he was an abomination because they were bound by the law; to the Greeks he was foolishness because they believed that they could only attain knowledge of their divine essence through initiation into the mysteries. Paul, a representative of the true Christian philosophy of life, teaches that through union with Christ we are led back to the Father, to the Spirit from which we proceeded. The opponents of this philosophy of life should remember that they have learned the feelings with which they seek to combat Christianity from Christianity.

Report in the “Bremer Nachrichten” of November 9, 1909

Theosophical Society (Adyar), Bremen branch. Last Saturday, the Secretary General of the Theosophical Society, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin, spoke before a large audience at the Gewerbehaus on the topic of the higher significance of the Gospel of John. The speaker, as we were told, [among other things] stated the following: The two factors on which today's man relies when he searches for the sources of his religious concepts are, firstly, the abstract ideal that he creates in his heart of the Christ, and secondly, the external documents, the Gospels, to which he turns when he seeks consolation. The first leaders of Christianity had a different attitude to the Gospels than today's. They were not put off by the contradictions, but were glad that their view was opened in four directions. When one knows that each Evangelist wanted to portray a special aspect of the divine Being, then the apparent riddle of the Gospel of John, as the wisdom aspect, is solved. Today there is a new tool for the exploration of the tremendous Christ problem: spiritual research. Just as external science uses instruments to examine physical matter, so spiritual research uses its instrument, the human soul, to enter the spiritual world. With this developed instrument, the past can be fathomed without external records. Not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone needs to become a natural scientist. The unbiased person will use his sound reason to test the claims of the spiritual researcher. Critical research frays the fibers, spiritual research brings full light. There is not a single superfluous word in any of the four Gospels. Anyone who approaches them with a developed sense of truth has the impression that no more significant document could ever be created. This is especially true of the Gospel of John, which seems mysterious to people because of its beginning. The Logos (the Word) was called that which permeates the whole world, namely the ideas of wisdom. Man can form a certain idea of the wisdom-filled cause if he seeks to regard his own ego as a drop and the divine being as an ocean in which all ideas are contained. “In the beginning was the Logos” (John 1:1) can be translated as: “Before there was a visible world, there was the spiritual one, in which all the egos of humanity are rooted.” It will take a long development before man can recognize the highest human degree of development of the I, which was embodied in Christ Jesus. Not what was in him as a power was also in John; but the ability to recognize him completely was, for John means “seer”, or more correctly “feeler of God within”; because the forerunner, the Baptist, was such a one, the Evangelist could refer to him as a witness. The evolution of humanity is based on the law of love, which before Christ was linked to blood relationship. With the appearance of Christ Jesus, humanity was faced with the task of striving for the great ideal of universal brotherhood. Understanding from soul to soul, the cooperation of separated egos outside of blood relationship has only become possible with the appearance of Jesus. At the marriage at Cana, the mother was still a partner in the blood bond, which the Samaritan woman, as a stranger by blood, proves that the power of the ego penetrated into the alien soul. The resurrection of Lazarus proves the flowing over of his soul into the other being. The Mystery of Golgotha becomes understandable when one considers the development of humanity. The great Buddha, at the sight of death, gains the conviction that life is suffering; 600 years later, at the sight of the Christian symbol of Golgotha, the disciples gain the conviction of the victory of life over death. The spiritual world is not closed as long as man strives to let the spirit of Christ Jesus flow into him. Every sunrise can be a comparison for the awakening of the developed sense of truth. A forerunner for the understanding of Christ is the Gospel of John. — The speaker was rewarded with warm applause.

Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

Today in this branch meeting we will begin with several of life’s crucial issues that touch each of us daily. After that, we will rise to higher spiritual viewpoints for a while. I would like to start with two human qualities, two human errors or failings that are experienced as negative, as decreasing a person’s worth. We will speak about what we call envy and lying.

If you look around in life, you will easily notice that as a rule, there is a very natural antipathy to these two human qualities. Also, when we look up to other people as leaders among human beings, we see that they value the absence of these two failings. Goethe, for instance, was very concerned with self-knowledge and thinking about his own mistakes, and mentioned that while he had certain faults and certain assets, what seemed most important to him was that he could not count envy among his fadings. And the famous Benvenuto Cellini said that he was glad he didn’t need to accuse himself of lying. So we see that these great personalities sensed the importance of struggling against these two human qualities. And even the simplest, most unsophisticated individuals agree with leaders of humanity in their negative assessment of these failings.

If we ask ourselves why these two qualities are so instinctively condemned, we realize that almost nothing else is less compatible with one of the most important earthly qualities; envy and lying are incompatible with what we call empathy for other people. When we envy someone, we tend not to yield to the particular virtue devoted to the deepest, inmost kernel of that person’s being, to the divine in the other person. Actually, to empathize with someone is of value only when you are also able to appreciate the other person’s essence, his or her spiritual being. However, as a basis for empathy, appreciation for others includes recognition of their assets and the ability to take pleasure in their successes and level of development. All of this precludes envy. Envy shows itself to be a quality that is very closely related to an individual’s greatest egotism.

Something similar can be said about lying. If we tell an untruth, we break the law that applies to the truth—to create a bond that includes all individuals. What is true is the truth for all human beings. More than anything else, truth allows us to practice the development of a consciousness that includes all human beings. If we tell an untruth, we commit a heinous act against the bond meant to connect one human heart with another.

This is how things look when we consider them from the viewpoint of human beings. When we consider them from the viewpoint of spiritual science, we know that the effects of our earlier incarnations are being worked out in this lifetime, and that we are subject to many different influences. There are two great influences in particular that have to be worked through again and again—specifically, what we call the luciferic and the ahrimanic influences. We will not attempt to cover these from the cosmological point of view today, but will restrict ourselves to the life of human individuals. We will imagine that we have passed through many incarnations and that the power of Lucifer was already working on our astral body when we were going through our very first incarnation. Since then, this luciferic power has always been the power that tempts our astral body. Forces are present that proceed from Lucifer and exert an influence on our astral body. Basically, Lucifer’s efforts are directed toward gaining influence over the human astral body on Earth. We can find him in everything that pulls the astral body down, in all the qualities that live in our astral body as egotistical passions, desires, urges, and wishes. Thus, it must be clear that envy is one of Lucifer’s worst effects on us. Everything living in our soul that can be counted as envy falls into his territory, and each time we have an attack of envy, Lucifer takes hold of the urges in our astral body.

Ahriman, on the other hand, influences our ether body. Everything to do with disturbances of judgment derives from him—both the unintentional disturbance of arriving at a false judgment, and the deliberate one of lying. When we succumb to lying, Ahriman is at work in our ether body.

It is interesting that we feel these influences strongly enough to experience such great antipathy when they appear, and that people will do everything to combat these two qualities of envy and lying. You will not easily find people who consciously admit that they want to be envious. To be sure, “I envy you” has crept into our language as an idiom, but what it means is not so very bad; we do not mean actual envy when we say it. In any case, as soon as we notice envy or lying in ourselves, we do everything we can to combat it, and in doing so we take up the struggle against Lucifer and Ahriman in this particular area.

Often, however, something then happens that we should notice when applying ourselves to spiritual science. We can combat individual attacks of envy and lying, but when these qualities are stuck in our soul—when we have acquired them in earlier incarnations and are now combating them—they then appear as different qualities. When we try to combat a tendency to envy stemming from earlier incarnations, this envy puts on a mask. Lucifer says, “This person has noticed feelings of envy and is fighting me; I’ll turn this person over to my brother Ahriman.” And then a different influence takes effect, one that is a consequence of combating envy. Qualities that we are struggling against appear in disguise. Often the envy that we are fighting takes the form of an urge to seek out other people’s mistakes and to make them aware of them with a great deal of reproach. We encounter many people in our life who always discover the mistakes and negative aspects of others, as if with a certain clairvoyant strength. If we search for the basis of this phenomenon, we find that envy has been transformed into a compulsion to reproach, which the people in question take to be a very desirable quality. It is a good thing, so they say, to make people aware of the presence of their bad qualities. However, there is nothing more behind this compulsion to reproach than transformed envy in disguise. We should learn to recognize whether such qualities are the original ones or whether they are transformations of something else. In the process, we must consider whether such individuals were envious as children—perhaps we drove the envy out of them, and they have now become compulsive reproachers.

Lying also often transforms itself in our lifetime and shows itself in disguise. Lying can make us feel ashamed, but it’s not easily uprooted, and very often it metamorphoses into a certain superficiality with regard to the truth. It’s important for us to know these things so we can observe what we encounter in another person in life. People like this are satisfied with answers that make us ask, “How can they possibly be satisfied with an answer Eke that?” It is easy for them to say, “Yes, yes, of course, that’s the way it is.” Very often, this is the end product of the transformation of a personal tendency toward lying. We need to test the law of karma, particularly with regard to such qualities. People don’t pay attention to them, for among all the various beings at work on different planes, human beings are the most forgetful.

For instance, if we are acquainted with a person and remain close over the years, we can observe how some things in this person change. If we are still close after thirty years, we might find noteworthy connections within that person’s life when we look back over a lifetime together, while the person in question knows nothing about it, and has forgotten it all. We really should observe such things in life, however. Important connections become evident. For example, a certain person is envious as a child. Later, the envy is no longer evident, but at a later age it appears transformed as a lack of independence in the person in question, of wanting to be dependent on others. It appears in the form of ideas of being unable to stand on one’s own two feet, of always needing other people around to advise and help. A specific moral weaknesS appears as a consequence of the transformation of envy. When someone has this moral weakness, we will always find that this is the karmic consequence of transformed envy.

When transformed, lying creates a shyness later in life. In later life, someone who tended to lie as a child doesn’t dare to look people in the eye. Out in the country, people have an instinctive elemental knowledge of this, although it doesn’t function on the level of concepts. They say that you shouldn’t trust a person who can’t look you in the eye. Shyness and reserve that stem not from modesty but from fear of meeting other people are the karmic consequences of lying during the same incarnation.

What appears in this way as a moral weakness within an incarnation has an organizing influence on the next incarnation. The soul’s weakness resulting from envy cannot significantly destroy the body during this present incarnation, when the body has already been built up. But when we die and return in a new incarnation, the effect of these forces is such that they become organic weaknesses in building up the new body. We find that people who have possessed transformed envy in a previous incarnation form a weak body. We say without prejudice that a person is weak simply because people need to know what is weak and what is strong. When a person is easily susceptible to different influences and puts up no resistance, then we know that the person s body is weak, and that this weakness is the result of envy that was transformed earlier.

Now we must realize, however, that when a child is born into a particular environment as a weak child, we should not imagine that only this inner karma is active, but also that people are brought together in their surroundings for a reason, and not by chance. This aspect of karma—our adaptation to our environment—is extremely easy to see. A flower such as an edelweiss, for example, can only thrive in the environment to which it is adapted, and a human being also thrives only in the environment to which he or she is adapted. The simplest possible logic necessarily tells us this, for we can only understand life when we take this into account. Each being conforms to its environment; nothing is by chance. Therefore, we are born into the group of people we have envied or reproached; we find ourselves with our weak body among the people we have envied for their accomplishments in a previous incarnation, or something like this. It is infinitely important to know these things, because we understand fife only when we include them in our considerations. When a child with a weak body is born into our surroundings, we should ask ourselves how we are meant to relate to this. The right way to relate to it must be the most morally meaningful way—that is, to forgive. This will lead most surely to the goal in this case, and is also the best education for such a person. It has an incredibly educational effect when we can lovingly forgive a weak child who is born into our surroundings. The person through whom forgiveness occurs in a truly forceful way will see that the child becomes stronger and stronger because of it. Loving forgiveness must even affect thinking, because that makes it possible for the child to gather the forces needed to turn old karma around and get it moving in the right direction. Through this the child will also become physically strong. A child such as this often demonstrates unpleasant qualities. The healing effect is strongest when we love the child in the depths of our heart, and we soon find out just how effective the healing is.

Something comparable applies when we look at the other quality: lying. Within a single incarnation, the person who lies becomes shy in later life. This is a soul quality. But in the next incarnation, this quality takes effect as the body’s architect. In this case, the child appears not merely weak, but unable to acquire a proper relationship to its surroundings—that is, the child is mentally handicapped. In this case, we must think that we are the people to whom this person often lied, and we must repay the bad that happened to us with the best we can offer. We must try to communicate a great deal of the truths of spiritual life to such a person, and then we see how that person begins to blossom. We must always keep in mind that this individual lied to us a lot in earlier incarnations, and do everything possible to bring about a right relationship between this child and his or her surroundings.

When we consider these things, we find that as human beings we are always called upon to help other people come to terms with their karma in the right way. People understand nothing of karma if they think others must be left to their own karma. If we were to meet individuals who had lied to us, and we were to believe these people must come to grips with their karma by themselves, this would show that we do not have a correct understanding of karma. The right idea would be to provide help wherever possible. When it is said that we should leave people to their karma, this could only apply in the esoteric realm, but never in actual life.

Let’s imagine that we would make an effort to help other people according to their individual karma. Take a person with a shy nature. We concern ourselves lovingly with that person, creating a connection between that person and ourselves. We will then see in later life that something comes back to us from this person. We must leave this to karma, however; we are not allowed to hope for it. We must regard it as our obligation to help the other person. At this point we come upon a subtle law: Everything we do to help another person bear and overcome karma not only helps that person, it also does something for us. As a rule, however, what we do for the sake of our own quick progress will not help much. The only thing that can bear fruit for an individual is what he or she does for others. We cannot send good things in our own direction. The best effects come from helping another person overcome his or her karma, since what we do for others is a gain for humanity. We can do nothing for ourselves; that must be done in turn by others. That’s why we must understand empathy for other people in the highest sense of the word. If we develop this empathy in the highest sense, then we also feel an obligation to empathize with another person with regard to envy and lying. In this way we develop a feeling of solidarity that extends to all human souls.

In fact, humanity possesses the potential for each human being to always feel a connection to humanity as a whole, and this feeling, in all its different manifestations in life, should also be present and active in the individual’s struggles against Lucifer and Ahriman. By helping people whose physical bodies have become weak through the influence of envy that has been overcome, by coming to understand how we should behave toward these people, it can become clear to us that the world is filled with the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. How they can be overcome in the course of the Earth’s evolution also becomes clear. Anyone who traces such connections in his or her feelings necessarily comes to an ever deepening feeling for all of humanity. The possibility exists, so to speak, for each of us to feel what connects him or her to all human beings. However, this feeling has changed greatly in the course of human evolution. If we go back three or four thousand years, the feeling of what human beings have in common was very pronounced in everyone.

If we go back still further—back through the post-Atlantean cultures, back to old Atlantis, and still further back—we come to an incarnation in which we came down into a physical body for the first time. Before that, we existed in a spiritual state—or so it was still said three or four thousand years ago. At that time, wisdom-filled feelings such as this were to be found in all people. The human soul asked, “What does it mean to be a human being?” And it answered itself, “Before I came down into my body for the first time, I existed in a sea of divine-spiritual interweaving life. I was within it, and all other human souls were within it. That was our common point of origin.” This basic feeling in the souls of human beings made it possible for them to feel kinship, to feel that they had something in common with all human beings, because they felt that all human souls had a common origin. And if we recall how all the ancient mystery schools worked on people to make them good people who would be receptive to the most profound, intimate, and moving feelings, we can see that this was always done by pointing to their common origin, to the fact that all human beings proceed from a common divine source. It was easy to sound this note in their souls then, but it became more and more difficult. For example, if this note had been sounded then in the number of people now sitting here, it would have made an overwhelming impression.

But human feeling for our common origin became ever colder. This was necessary because humanity had to pass through a certain point in evolution. And if I describe that point, we will also have to look toward our human future, toward the goal of Earth’s evolution.

Just as our origin is common to all of us, just as all human souls sprang from a common source, so too all human souls will come together in a common goal. And how can we reach this goal so that we can continue to evolve once Earth has achieved its own goal and the material sphere beneath us is dissipating and falling away? How can we have a common understanding of this goal so that we proceed into our future together? The awareness of what we have in common will need to extend into the deepest sinews of our soul. This is only possible if we develop a feeling for our future, similar to the feeling people in ancient times had for their human origin, a feeling that is growing ever colder among humanity. Now, the feeling and the certainty of a common goal held by all human beings must come to life more and more in our souls. Regardless of our individual degree of development or where we stand in life, the very fact that we are human beings must make possible a soul experience that allows us to say we are all striving for a single goal. In looking toward this goal, we must also be able to realize that this is something that can concern each and every human being.

In our most profound inner depths, we must be able to find something in which we can all come together in a single point. Esoteric teaching calls this “something” the Christ. People thousands of years ago felt, sensed, and knew that our souls are all born out of a common divine source. Similarly, we will increasingly learn that just as we can be united and come together in something we think in common, something that can live in all human heads, there is also something that can live as a common element in all human hearts, something that can flow through all human hearts like the blood of life. If this pervades us more and more warmly in incarnations to come, these incarnations will then run their course in such a way that Earth, having achieved its goal, will be able to proceed to the next planetary stage—the Jupiter state—and human souls will come together as one in the common element of the Christ.

For this to be a possibility, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place. In Jesus, the Christ became human so that this common stream of warmth could flow from human heart to human heart. The feeling for our common human goal has its origin in the cross on Golgotha, which connects past and future. This is the goal of future human evolution. It is not important whether we retain the name “Christ” for what we have in common. What is important is that all human beings learn to grasp that the feeling people originally had for their common origin is being transformed into a feeling for our common earthly future.

Earth’s evolution is divided into halves—one lasting until the time of the cross on Golgotha, and the other from that time until the end of Earth. We human beings have a great deal to do to grasp the Christ and his evolution. Once these things have been grasped, we as human beings will come together in a common goal for the Jupiter evolution. All the knowledge we have as individuals culminates in finding this principle of the Christ-like.

Today we tried to recognize how karma works from one incarnation to another to shape the body. Having done so, we understand how human beings can become more and more perfect as they go through incarnation after incarnation. We are still speaking of the Christ, though without using that name, because we are turning away from the personal element. When we are confronted with a child who lies to us, we ask ourselves how we can help this child transform his or her karma. We do not ask whether being lied to hurts us. We turn to the very center of the child’s being, and in doing so we help karma move on. In this way, deep human compassion will increasingly take effect in the world.

Thus, what we call spiritual science—if we also include in it a real grasp of life’s processes related to reincarnation and karma—prepares us to truly grasp the Christ impulse in the world. How people formulate this in words is not important. Those who really understand this evolutionary law cannot help but be Christians, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or belong to some other religious tradition. What’s important is that they take this impulse into their souls, the impulse for a common goal for humanity, as in ancient times the impulse to look toward our common human origin was alive in people.

Thus, spiritual science always leads to the Christ impulse. It cannot do otherwise. It would also be possible to summarize spiritual science as it appears today by saying, “Even if those who meet spiritual science want to know nothing of Christianity, in truth they are already being led to the Christ.” In reality, that is where they are being led, even if they resist this in words.

Today we have shown our souls something that has a direct connection to life. We have seen how we should act when a child lies or is envious. It must be clear to us that the thread of karma runs through all of the incarnations of a human soul, that its karma is spun according to its destiny. Having looked back to our origin in God, we look to God again when we look ahead to our human goal.

When we look back on the culture of the ancient rishis, we see that they pointed to the human origins, to the world in which human beings existed before descending into incarnation. This teaching persisted for hundreds and thousands of years. The great Buddha taught it when he spoke of how everything that created a connection to the world of our origin has been lost to people because they cling to embodiment. He challenged people to leave the world of embodiment so that their souls could once again live in the spiritual worlds of their origin. The prophets, in announcing the coming of the Christ, also pointed to a future in which human beings would once again discover their proper earthly goal. And then there was the Christ himself, and the act of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this Mystery of Golgotha, the individual human being can now be led toward our Earth s divine-spiritual future.

Perhaps there is nothing quite as shattering as two similar statements of the Buddha and the Christ, which present to our souls the contrast between the old times and the new. As the Buddha stands among his pupils, he draws their attention to the body and says, “I look back from incarnation to incarnation and see how I have again and again entered a human body such as the one I now wear. Again and again, the temple of this body has been built up for me by the gods. Again and again the soul attempts to enter this bodily temple in new incarnations. Now, however, I know that I no longer need to return to a bodily temple. I know its beams are broken, its pillars collapsed. Through my knowledge, I have freed my soul from this body. The wish and desire to return to such a body has been killed.” This was a great and powerful result of the old time of looking back on our human origin. The Buddha, with his pupils and successors, strove to become free of the body. How powerfully different this is from the Christ standing before his intimate pupils and saying, “Tear down the temple of My body, and I will build it up again in three days.” These are the words of the Christ, taken at face value, regardless of how we interpret them. The Christ does not long to be free of the temple of the body. He wants to build it up again.

It is not as if the Christ himself would be there again in such a physical body in future incarnations. But what he teaches his pupils and all human beings is to return into this earthly temple again and again in order to make the Christ impulse greater and more intense in each successive incarnation, so that we human beings are able to take up more and more of earthly existence. In the end, we will be able to say that we spent these incarnations working to become more like the Christ. We become more like him by taking into this bodily temple what the Christ permitted to stream forth from his own being from the cross on Golgotha. We allow this to stream from human soul to human soul, for only through this can we understand each other now. This is what all human souls will have in common in our earthly future. And then the time will come when Earth as a planet will cease to exist, will fall into dust, and human beings in a spiritualized state will proceed to their next incarnation on a different planet.

The words of the great Buddha—“I feel how the columns of my bodily temple no longer bear weight, how its beams are breaking apart”—can stand before our souls as the endpoint of our common human origin. And when we turn to what the Christ says to his disciples—“I will build up the temple of this body in three days”—this can be for us like the beginning of the time that points to our earthly goal. We can expand upon this statement, saying: “In death, this temple falls apart, but we know that the best forces we have acquired in this incarnation are used for our next incarnation. We have received these forces by devoting our souls to the knowledge of Christ. In this way, we will always make progress from incarnation to incarnation.” When we human beings build up this bodily temple for the last time, we will have arrived at an understanding of our common earthly goal for the future.

It is the Mystery of Golgotha alone that can be the common impulse for humanity as a whole, for human and Earth evolution.

Distinguished attendees! When speaking of human knowledge, one initially has two things in mind. One is the knowledge that the individual human soul, the human mind, acquires for its own sake; the other is the knowledge that is a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One has only to think of knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and that is concerned with putting the forces of nature at the service of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only gives satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge wants to be a selfless servant to all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the aims of humanity to a large extent. We see the knowledge gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on its value will easily see that the knowledge gained from the study of matter is intended to serve all of humanity.

But beyond this knowledge there is still another knowledge, which by its very nature does not allow for such practical application. This knowledge must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But with this knowledge, too, we may ask whether it is really something that the human soul seeks only for its own satisfaction, or whether this knowledge, too, which we often say exists for its own sake, is not also in the service of human progress. If one tries to explore why the human soul thirsts and hungers, as it were, for such knowledge for its own sake, why it strives for an examination of the secrets of the world in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the essence and the [primordial] reasons of the human soul itself.

Now the branch of human research that is called spiritual science or theosophy seeks to recognize the essence of the human soul by pursuing this human soul into its deepest depths and trying to find the essence of the human soul on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses offer and what the mind, which is tied to the brain, can achieve. Spiritual science believes that, on the basis of its research, it can say something about the human soul that is of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must approach all that the intellectual culture of the last centuries has produced in an independent way. In no way does spiritual science take a position against the great achievements of human culture, especially of natural science; but in our time it must undertake exactly the same thing that natural science has undertaken many times over the last few centuries - it must test all the prejudices, all the beliefs of people today in the light of its insights. Spiritual science looks at something that is one of the most important things for knowledge in our time – at something that has only been instilled in science relatively recently.

People are very forgetful. Many truths that are generally recognized today were only conquered by the human mind in the 17th century, because until the 17th century, for example, both laymen and learned naturalists believed that earthworms, fish and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this time that discuss how living things develop from carcasses, for example. It was only in this 17th century that Francesco Redi first uttered the sentence that living beings could only come from germs of living beings of the same kind. That living beings can only come from living beings was a great heresy in the 17th century compared to the science of the time, and only with great difficulty did Francesco Redi escape the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The situation for the spiritual researcher today is similar when, for example, he focuses his attention on the properties of a human soul that comes into existence through birth. Today, when looking at the different properties of children, it is easy to say that these properties are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what comes from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings would consist only of what came from the physical environment. But the spiritual researcher must say: spiritual-soul can only come from spiritual-soul. He observes the miracle of how a human germ, which comes into existence through birth, develops in the course of its life from stage to stage, and he is clear about the fact that the human essence, which develops so mysteriously, can only come from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing, one must go back to another spiritual-soul realm. As we ascend from the animal to the human, we have to distinguish between the generic and the individual. We cannot ascribe to the human core of being the same thing that we address as generic in the animal. We have to say: what develops in the child over time does not lead back to a generic, but to an individual that comes into existence through birth. And when this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, this spiritual research into the origin of the soul and spirit leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of re-embodiment, to the idea of repeated lives on earth for human beings. For anyone who looks impartially at all the facts of life, repeated lives on earth are a reality, however much the feelings of people today may still rebel against it. Of course, it is no longer customary to burn heretics, but such things, which are heresies according to today's consciousness of people, are ridiculed. But this truth will be treated the same way as other truths and laws that humanity has acquired in the course of its development; after some time, it will no longer be possible to understand how there could have been people who could not believe that spirit comes from spirit.

Goethe pointed to what his essence had drawn from his environment. He could say:

From my father I got the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.

And then, after pointing out what he had attracted from his environment through inheritance, he modestly asks:

What, then, of the whole figure
can be called original?

Anyone who, like me, has studied everything related to Goethe has certainly acquired the respect due to Goethe's parents. But try to put together all their qualities – you will try in vain to bring to light what is original about the “little fellow”. Precisely that which we cannot find in the heritage of father and mother, precisely that is the Goethe whom we know and who he will always be in our culture. It is the most appealing task for an educator to assume that in the education of a child, a mysterious core of being struggles into existence that lies beyond all laws of inheritance, and that in every young human being this riddle must be solved anew. If we really apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be out of keeping with us to look at the child's outer form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped, formed out of a soul-spiritual core of being. We observe the indeterminate features of this human countenance in the first days of the child's life; we see that they become more and more definite and, little by little, the child's entire body shows an ever more definite form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these vague features into ever more distinct ones. It becomes visible how the inner core of the human being works on the forming physical shell.

If we consider this carefully, we will not find it difficult to recognize an ascending and a descending line of human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from the inner being to the surface, and at a certain point in time we see how everything that is inherent in the human being is revealed in the skills and abilities that he acquires. Then it happens that a person makes one side of his nature the dominant one. We see a kind of confrontation with his environment through the absorption of knowledge and wisdom, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought from previous embodiments. Then a descending current sets in in life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities - we can no longer even absorb anything into our memory.

We will only understand this actual work of the individual core of our being on the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work on the human being can be divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleeping life. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleeping life and what do we owe to waking life? From sleep the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it is shown that invigorating forces accrue to the soul from sleep. An example of this: people who, by reason of their occupation, are obliged to learn much by heart, can experience that they do not progress well with their memorizing if they do not have a good amount of sleep between their work. Today, scientific observation also recognizes the importance of sleep for the removal of fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people get tired because the muscles, nerves, etc. are worn out and need to be supplied with new strength. However, this does not take into account the fact that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without tiring. Why is that?

Asking this question is of tremendous importance for a healthy view of life. On closer observation, it becomes clear that fatigue only occurs under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can tire to such an extent that cramp-like pains occur, as can be seen, for example, in writer's cramp. When you research these things, you come to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activity are related. We come to see that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to themselves, but instead permeate them with the effectiveness of the external work we do. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are effective in it, and under their effectiveness the body does not tire. Fatigue does not occur when - unconsciously to the person - the laws of the universe work in his body. Fatigue occurs only when the human consciousness permeates the organism with its nature.

The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the soul life in relation to the bodily life. He says that the soul life is as separate from the body as the rider is from his horse. It is admitted that there is something in man that stands in the same relationship to his body as the rider to his horse. We tire our body, says Thomson, just as the rider tires his horse, because we are outside the horse and use the horse. Does the old image not emerge from a distant time in human development, in which people looked into a spiritual world by natural gift? There they saw the centaur, the man connected with the horse. It is true that “wise” natural science says today that the people of that time were childlike people, that they saw wild barbarians sitting on their steeds and coming out of the fog from the north, and that in the fog they could not distinguish where man and where steed was; from this these childlike people would have formed the image of the centaur. But in fact the centaur is a reality that shows, from a clairvoyant perspective, the relationship that arises between soul and body, and that is like that between rider and horse.

Thus the fact of fatigue compels us to recognize a certain independence of soul from body. That the course of certain processes in the human body does not result in fatigue is due to the fact that a universal law is at work, but the human being is not present with his consciousness. The human being tires because he is present with his consciousness in the processes of his body. But in the state of sleep, the human being is surrendered to the universal law. The human being needs this immersion in a different element, as it happens every night during sleep, and we will ascribe the right effect to sleep if we follow the essence of the human being as he lives in the world into which he enters when he falls asleep.

Then I have to speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain knowledge of the secrets of the existence of the world at any level, but that we awaken dormant, germinal powers of knowledge within us. When these dormant powers of knowledge awaken, they give us eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a blind person who regains his sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds are around us if we have the organs to perceive them. We can only experience the world of light and color if we have eyes to see them and the world of sounds if we have ears to hear them. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in him, by opening spiritual eyes and ears. He carries out a certain training of the soul, that is, certain exercises through which the soul acquires organs with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, he makes new experiences, and I would like to emphasize one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. It is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain tasks of ordinary life and then to illuminate them with the light of the spirit. For example, you may reflect on a certain task in life and cannot solve it; the tool of thinking proves blunt. Then the spiritual researcher really feels separated as a thinking and knowing being from his physical body. He feels his physicality as one feels a hammer or another tool or instrument outside of one's being. Just as one can feel a hammer as too heavy, one can feel the failure of the individual parts of the brain: One feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

The separation of body and spirit can be felt by the spiritual researcher in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher wakes up from a state of sleep, perhaps a very short sleep, which he can induce at will through his developed will, it is as if he woke up from a very specific world in which he has done something, so that when he wakes up, activities that he performed immediately before waking up linger, and these have a very specific configuration. When he wakes up, the activities he performed before waking up could be painted by him in very specific figures and colors. But there is a difference between this mental activity and the usual daily activities. The usual daily activities are such that you think them through beforehand, so you work as if according to a model and are bound to the lines of a template.

The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [that a person performs while sleeping] proceeds as if we were following a line from our spirit that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. During sleep, the spiritual researcher feels this as an intervention of his soul activity in his physical body, in his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has devoted himself in sleep, flowing into his body like warmth, so that this body has grown to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a repair of the instrument for the daytime work of the physical body. Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. During the day, the physical body is constantly worn out, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to build up our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously consider what we do unconsciously in our sleep, then we will find it credible that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul really does enter a spiritual world, and that is the world from which man comes. Every night we have to dive into this sea of spirituality to draw from it the strength we need for our physical body and which alone makes it possible for us to survive between birth and death.

So our life goes, in that we appeal again and again to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual essence of man emerging anew from the spiritual world every day, as in a small re-embodiment. We find only one difference between re-embodiment and waking up: when we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same body that we have built up since our birth. When we re-embody ourselves for a new life, however, we must first build up our corporeality anew.

When we consider the course of life, we see many, varied things approaching us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot implement in the life of our body. We develop by repeatedly drawing new strength from our sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. For example, the soul can only receive musical impressions if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul, what it wants to process, it cannot incorporate into the outer physical body. This gives rise to a certain disharmony, which is more than the usual tiredness that forces us to sleep. This gradual mismatch of the body to what our soul is becomes more and more pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The soul life becomes increasingly unadapted to the life of the outer body. And here we must ask ourselves: where do we get this body from? When we see this body developing out of indeterminacy into a definite form in physiognomy and gestures, we regard the body we have in a particular life as a result of previous lives. We use this body as an instrument. We enrich our soul in the course of our life, and we find that what we have acquired in this life reaches the limits of our physical body, and that finally bursts this body.

So we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful to be separated from this body again, to be heading towards death, to have a soul with richly developed content that bursts the bounds of the body, right up to death. Those who look more deeply into these things will understand that a richly developed soul must go beyond the body and that we should not be surprised that in old age, especially in people with a richly developed soul, the brain can no longer serve the soul's life. Kant, for example, became weak-minded in old age, despite his rich mind. The outer tools of the body are no longer suitable for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching soul of the human being breaks the corporeality and passes through death. Then this soul builds itself up according to the abilities and contents it has acquired during life, the body for a new incarnation.

Now one could say that we do not remember our past life. This objection would have the same justification as if someone wanted to say: A four-year-old child cannot calculate, so no human being can calculate at all. - We want to try to see through the following consideration that it is possible to acquire the ability to remember earlier lives. To make this clear to us, I must mention that there is also a time for the ordinary human life when the person cannot remember. These are the first years of childhood, which a person does not remember, even though he was already there at that time. The point in time up to which memory reaches is connected with another point in time. You know, of course, that in the very earliest period of his life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point in time, the sense of self arises in the child, and the beginning of remembering coincides with this. What lies before this point in time is not remembered. Why is that? Spiritual research shows that in his normal mental life today, through the development of this self-awareness, through which man attains the highest of this life, man erects something like a boundary around himself. A person's memory goes back to the point where self-awareness occurs. That is the boundary. At this boundary, self-awareness stops and withdraws from observation what happened before.

We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply the exercises that the spiritual student has to do to look into the spiritual world to our soul. There comes a moment when the person succeeds in leading this I one step beyond himself. That is the moment when one comes to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness that forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. He only has to learn to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness. The sense of self is brought about by the impact with the body. When a person overcomes this, as it is otherwise overcome in sleep, and when he learns to consciously enter the world in which he unconsciously dwells in sleep, the possibility of looking back on past lives begins.

This can only be achieved if man consciously turns his gaze to this other side of life, to the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul all fear and dread of what comes to man from the future. How afraid and anxious man is today of all that lies in the future and especially of the hour of death. Man must acquire composure in relation to all feelings and sensations towards the future, look forward with absolute equanimity to all that may come, and only think that whatever may come to us through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the retrospective powers for past earth lives as a gift.

In this way we can educate our soul until we attain the consciousness that past earth lives are not hypotheses and dreams, but that they stand before the soul as fact, as something that the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries do not want to admit that there is a possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul, so that new worlds, hitherto hidden in the infinite bosom of existence, may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are on the verge of a time when people will gradually develop more and more of a relationship with what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are heading towards a future where more and more people will have the urge to know, to recognize what the human soul and its destiny are all about. Thus, we are looking at an expansion of the ability to know, which enters into an alliance with the spiritual world.

All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an extension of ordinary knowledge. Such extended, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connecting of what is the essence of our soul with the spiritual and soul-like around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul's connection with the eternal, with that which is eternal outside of space and time, while things in space and time arise and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise occurs as fatigue. Fatigue occurs in the knowledge that strives to explore the things around us. But when man allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect in his soul, when he has moments in life when what he has gained through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work in him, when he can transform the lofty realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resound in his soul, then he learns to be awake in a state that can be compared to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us in the same measure as the consciousness of our ordinary ego begins to fade. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego consciousness shatters, and man experiences true knowledge by feeling that he must fit into the laws of the spiritual world with his true ego.

While man is limited to a small space in the outer world by his physical body, which he repeatedly tires through the work of the day, and he must always compensate for this wear and tear of the body through sleep, he feels when the soul is truly “with itself” that it can also draw forces from the spiritual world while awake. He gets the feeling that a source is opening up for the soul, through which healing potions flow to us from the spiritual world, so that he can become master of the body. He feels that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, as we unconsciously do every night while sleeping. He feels that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. Then it will become something completely new, something that it cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of today's man. Plato said that in ancient times people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. Even if this ability of enthusiasm may have been lost to today's people, what has not been lost to them is that the knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force in them, that they can feel how they connect with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with their spiritual self through knowledge.

In this way we come to know knowledge as a living thing, as a healing process that extends into the physical body. It takes a long time before we get to know this knowledge, that is, this source of life in our soul. And we also get to know the connection with a very different factor of our culture. All our knowledge must be incorporated into what we can call being imbued with the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? It is nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come to life in us, as has just been explained, when we can feel our personality as if it were being filled by a second personality, by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps the Christ in this way, He is not an abstract idea, but He is the living Entity Who at a certain point in time intervened in the evolution of humanity, an Entity Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

In the past of human evolution, the way people recognized each other was different than after the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked to the origin of man and they felt: Man is not valuable for the development of humanity as a sensual being; as spiritual beings we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensual world to live in a physical body, after we were previously in an ocean of divine spiritual life; through our soul we can in turn find our way back to this common human origin.

This is no longer appropriate for our time; something else corresponds to our time. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today we look at what the human being can become, at a common goal for all people. Looking towards this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive in the innermost being of every human being – this is the living Christ. In the future, human souls will come together in him. The earth, the physical body – it will fragment in its material existence. But the human souls that have the living Christ within them will advance to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire planet has disintegrated, all mankind will be one again, not as it was before it descended to the earth, but one in which the Christ will live as a common soul-blood in this humanity.

All our knowledge must be dedicated to the great moment in the evolution of mankind when the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look into the future of mankind, we look for the Christ-consciousness in every human being. This has a completely different sense and a completely different meaning than when the Buddhist teaching speaks of a Nirvana and means by that a detachment of the soul from all earthly things. No, the soul should not detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can grasp our souls with his life, and to how the soul can shape itself ever more richly through the life of Christ in it, through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth in ever new incarnations.

Thus we see that spiritual science does not stand in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be imagined - to Christianity. It does not want to fight Christianity, but to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. We, as Westerners, look to the event of Golgotha as to the point in time that is also known from history, but which only acquires its deep value, its deep meaning for us through the fact that we gain the Christ-idea not only from the historical Christ, but deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we have imbued our knowledge with soul, light and spirit through the idea of Christ does this idea of Christ become for us that through which the true idea of immortality is revealed to us ever more surely. And when the Christ in us has become the light of knowledge and the life of knowledge, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and through many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the way for man to absorb within himself the forces that lead him to true immortality, that is, to victory over death.

This idea can only be gained from higher knowledge - not with ordinary knowledge, which only wants to deal with the material. Nowadays, only the external, the material, is pursued in man, and that is the most fleeting, the most transient. The words of Hamlet, for example, point this out, showing how dying and death must appear to him in his melancholy mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
From earth we make clay.

And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole as well as the rough north;
Oh that the earth,
Before the wind and weather, might stick a wall.

But Hamlet is only talking about where the earth that became Caesar's body may have gone. He pursues the fleeting, transient material instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. You don't see what is important in man if you only look at the transitory, at the material, and think about what might have become of it. You should look beyond what goes through death and birth to recognize what true immortality is.

In recent centuries, when knowledge of the material world has made such great strides, we have become more and more accustomed to regarding matter, that which forces the spirit into its fetters, as the essential. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the earthly body, consisting of matter, will disintegrate. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today's radium research in such a way that he knows: here is the beginning of the disintegration of the atoms that form the earthly body. The material of the earth will perish, but the eternal, even of the earthly body, will merge into the eternal essence of things. Today's striving for knowledge pursues the material, forcing the soul into its spell. One believes that one can speak of eternity, of the indestructibility of matter. In the face of words such as those spoken by Hamlet, it must be said, based on the realization of the true nature of the human being and at the same time on the realization of the true nature of materiality: Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar, no, all human souls are parts of eternity; they take on a physicality from the materials of the earth in ever new lives, they go through ever new lives, which are only steps towards immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest man on earth
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life he will
conquer the old death.

Dear attendees! Since I have often been allowed to speak here about spiritual science and its results, may I be allowed to speak this evening about a special chapter that undoubtedly lies infinitely close to many souls: the Christ-question - not only because circles in our time there is an ever-increasing need to approach this question, but also because spiritual science in particular has something to say about this question, about how the Christ-question has to be integrated into our culture. Spiritual science does not want to be a germ of a new religion, but to show the way how to penetrate into areas that are not accessible to the ordinary senses, to modern science. It will not be possible to talk about what we want to deal with without briefly pointing out the many changes that have taken place in human hearts with regard to this question. For this, a brief review is necessary.

If we simply visualize Christianity's emergence into the world, we can initially say that at the beginning of our era something happened that gave the whole development of humanity a new impetus, a turn upwards. Even the non-believer will have to admit, for historical reasons alone, that the impulse that came through Christianity was a powerful one. At the time when the Christ Impulse entered the world, the human soul was in a very different condition than it is today, and a change in this condition will have to occur in the future simply because new powers of knowledge will awaken in the human soul. One thing is of historical significance: The most enlightened minds of the Occident, equipped with the deepest knowledge, had to recognize - under the highest tension of the powers of knowledge, through the greatest that they could muster in mental acuity - that something powerful had entered into the life of humanity through the Christ impulse. Let us first consider the view of the Gnostics, who are called “religious geniuses” by the most highly qualified and outstanding scholars of the present day. We do not want to talk about the cognitive value of Gnosticism, but we want to ask: What did the Gnostics think about Christ? We want to try to characterize the Gnostic attitude towards Christ. Gnosticism is a theory of evolution that must seem fantastic to people today. When we talk about evolution today, we ask: How did the human body develop through the various stages? - The Gnostic, on the other hand, said: “If you think impartially, you are led not to a material but to a spiritual origin; if you focus on the point where man came down from the spiritual into matter, you find that something was left behind in the purely spiritual heights in order to later penetrate into the development of mankind. Man could only progress by becoming more and more entangled in matter. If he had not done so, he would never have attained freedom. He had to become estranged from the spiritual in order to find his possibility of freedom in matter. Then, at the point in time when man was most deeply entangled in matter, that which had been held back earlier in the spiritual world at the origin of man had to pour into earthly development in order to prevent man from completely sinking into matter. That which flowed down from the spiritual worlds has been connected with the earth ever since, and Christ lives on with the development of mankind.

If we ask, with the means of spiritual science, how the Gnostics arrived at such ideas, we see on careful examination that these ideas, which the Gnostics brought forth from the deepest spiritual powers, come from an epoch when there was still direct vision, because in previous times the human soul was still attuned quite differently. From this original knowledge, ideas such as the Gnostic ones developed. Gnosticism seems like an heirloom of ancient knowledge. Here we encounter a lofty concept of Christ, which even those who consider Gnosticism fantastic must acknowledge: the Gnostic idea is bold and grandiose. We can quickly pass over the first Church Fathers who worked to establish the [Christian] dogmas. What the Fathers dared to do in those days, men later completely abandoned. In the middle of the Middle Ages, this view was completely abandoned. It was said: Human knowledge is not sufficient to reveal the heights to which Christ's entry into the earthly sphere could reach. Faith was substituted for real knowledge. Thus we see how the conception of Christ changes over the centuries, just as the character of the times changes with culture.

In the sixteenth century, we enter the age of great advances in the natural sciences. A [new] knowledge had to arise for this - a [new] kind of knowledge, which was primarily concerned with recognizing the material world and its laws. This knowledge emerged as an important developmental factor that transformed all commercial and industrial life. Medieval humanity still fully surrendered to faith; the Middle Ages believed what the Gnostics once recognized. The external world, which is our physical environment, shaped the new era. Thus, the whole concept of Christ was transformed: While the Gnostics could speak of a divine being that had only taken up residence in a human being, in more recent times it became increasingly impossible to imagine God incarnate. It would be interesting to show how, in the individual phases, the earlier conception increasingly recedes in favor of a [more outwardly] tangible Christ. Due to their inner state of mind, people were forced to refrain from seeing God incarnate and instead to see in him more and more the human being, albeit one of the most outstanding kind. In a human soul, in the man of Nazareth, one seeks today the starting point of Christianity, instead of seeing in this man only the gate through which the Christ entered [into the earthly sphere].

Enlightened minds, far removed from all theology, have wrestled with the question: How can a modern person relate to the Christ event? It is interesting, though, that the three personalities, who were all born in the same year just over a hundred years ago, endeavored to come to terms with this Christ event. Otto Ludwig wrestled with the material in order to shape it into a drama; Friedrich Hebbel noted the plan for a Christ drama. What they both wrote down shows that they could not cope with the problem, it was too big for them. We also know that Richard Wagner worked on this task and could not finish it.

As for this materialistic view of the mere human being Jesus, it must be said that it has not remained unfruitful; Jesus theology has also produced beautiful blossoms. Rittelmeyer's little booklet “Jesus” is just one example: it is something that can deeply touch the heart and soul. Modern theology has produced much of the same kind. Peter Rosegger, a justly popular poet of the present day, constructed a Jesus for himself. If you imagine Rosegger himself, highly idealized with all his beautiful, sympathetic qualities, you have his idea of Jesus of Nazareth.

Despite all the tremendous achievements of theology in recent times, a remarkable discovery has been made: that if you look at the Gospels with an open mind, Christ Jesus cannot have been a human being at all. Benjamin Smith, for example, claimed that all interpretations of the Christ as the simple man of Nazareth are a slap in the face of any scientific approach, that it is not possible, that it is incompatible with all tradition, to want to see only a human being, even if it is the most ideal, in the Christ; so one sees that the Christ Jesus must be a god. This realization comes at a time when humanity no longer has any conception of what a god is. And so the conclusion is drawn: since there can only be human beings on earth, but the Christ must be a god, he cannot have existed on earth at all. Under such circumstances, from such premises, there has been accomplished what for years has caused so much sensation: the denial of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In brief, this is the course of the conception of Christ through the centuries. How does spiritual science relate to the Christ event? How can it relate to the most important problem of human development? Spiritual science starts from the premise that the human being not only has knowledge based on observation of the external world, but that he can also ascend to higher knowledge by developing dormant powers.

Just as the chemist, by separating hydrogen and oxygen, makes something completely new out of water, producing a substance with very different properties, so too can something completely new arise in the human being through the use of appropriate methods. Just as we cannot see what is in the water, we cannot see what powers a person has within them. Through a kind of spiritual chemistry, using exercises that are described in more detail in my books, something new can be developed in a person; the soul can work beyond the body and become aware of itself in the spiritual world. This is still quite foreign to many people and will only gradually become more common. Today, at the beginning of an epoch in which this knowledge will gradually become common property, it is possible to recognize the spiritual world, [as was once the case with the] Copernican world view, which was also laughed at at first, but which nevertheless became established. Today they no longer burn heretics who speak of a body-free perception of the soul, but they ridicule them and make them look foolish.

If we approach gnosis from this point of view, something emerges that is not just a further development and revival of gnosis: namely, that the human soul carries over what has been achieved in earlier epochs into later ones. If we embrace the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, we arrive at a more precise characterization of the earthly epochs themselves. Historical progress must be observed by spiritual scientific means. Then it becomes clear that just as man comes to hunger and thirst [in a natural way], so in ancient times he came to recognize the inner secrets of existence in images and visions from his own organization. Then the human soul lost this ability; man had to develop the ability to create concepts himself. This ability only arose later - on the basis of ideas (of a pictorial-visionary kind). Only out of shortsightedness can one deny that conceptual knowledge also had to develop first.

The epoch in which the human soul underwent this transformation is the time when the Christ entered into evolution; as a result, the human soul has become something other than it was before the Christ event. In ancient times, man received through images that which was hidden behind sensual existence. That is the characteristic of the old world view, that man attained knowledge in the form of images of how he was connected to the cosmos and the gods. This is still the view of ancient Hebrew times, in which a connection existed between the spiritual and the sensual world through the prophets and seers, as it were. But this connection was felt to be growing weaker and weaker the closer it came to the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. If a special impulse had not come into the development of the earth at that time, the human soul would have felt more and more isolated, because man was left to his own resources, but at the same time man became isolated from that moment on. It is no exaggeration to say that we are heading towards the age of individualism. But with that, the possibility arose of finding something new that souls in the pre-Christian era could not yet find: the Christ presence. Since the emergence of Christianity, what was previously found in nature can be found in the spirit. Before the Christ event, man could no longer find the connection with the divine powers that he had in ancient times. The development of Christianity so far is only a preparation for the Christianity of the future; people will see that after a relatively short time the world situation will change completely.

There may be many who are satisfied with what is given by Bible and tradition; that is a selfish point of view. In rapid succession, souls will develop in such a way that they will no longer be able to approach the Christ in the old way. Man will stand more and more alone with [conventional] concepts and ideas. Man once felt as a spirit among spirits; the modern man can only feel as a body among bodies. But the souls that long to come to the inexplicable in themselves will ask themselves: How am I, how is my self connected to a spiritual world? If we look at these processes with understanding and soulfulness, a comparison suggests itself: When certain animals prepare for something special, they tend to go hungry. As a result, such processes take place within them that the forces of the organism that are released as a result flow in a different direction. And when we look at people, we see that they have acquired more and more knowledge about matter and its laws, but spiritually they have starved in terms of soul knowledge. At the same time, the direct perception of Christ was being prepared in the spiritual world. Over the centuries, the human soul has deprived itself of spiritual nourishment and thus, through starvation, developed those organs that will unfold in the future.

People are approaching a goal of development where they will find the Christ as they find a law of nature [today]. But they will not find him as a dead law, but as a living entity, and they will know: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, an entity has entered into the development of the earth that was not there before. Laws cannot comfort, they cannot help with pain, but the connection with the Christ can help, and this will be felt in the soul as strength. It will not be possible to find the Christ by dogmatic means; it will be possible to find the Christ in a completely different way; in a completely different way one will find the truth of the word: “I am with you until the end of the earthly days.” A time will come when it will not be considered impossible from a scientific point of view that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Spirit has been living in the earth, in the earthly development of mankind. Until now, only those who know something about the Christ are recognized as Christians. In the future, people will know that the Christ did not come to Earth only to bring a teaching, but to accomplish an act. Then one can also find the Christ-germ in the Hindu, the Japanese, the Mohammedan.

I am fully aware that I am not speaking from a medieval point of view, but from one that fully recognizes everything that science has achieved. But just as one recognizes the laws of electricity, radioactivity and so on, one will recognize that the mystery of Golgotha is a superphysical matter. In order for people to be able to find the Christ, he had to undergo birth, baptism, and death, and by conquering death, he has been poured out into the evolution of the earth.

We have gone through a preparatory time in which Christianity was [merely] taken as a teaching. A time will come when the Christ can be found by those souls who seek him because he is on earth. He always worked through his existence, and people will find his existence as something that can reunite humanity, because he will be the one [for all people], for every [individual] person, as people are becoming more and more individualized. This is the Christ idea [in a time when] man is heading for a future that is even more de-deitified than monism would have dreamed of.

Just as we relate to external substances through physical nourishment, so we relate to the Christ spirit through our soul life. A great spirit, a distinguished thinker of the present day, Eliot, has said that the old religion is a sad, painful one; in the future, a religion will arise that gives joy. There is no denying that pain and death are in the world, and because they affect man, he needs a strong impulse to overcome pain and death - [the Christ impulse]. Modern philosophy suffers from the fact that it cannot find a balance for pain and death. And humanity will advance from the learned Christ, the Christ as a world teacher, to the seen Christ. Those involved in spiritual science will not be afraid of being called a monist; it is not the one who denies the spirit who is a monist, but the one who recognizes the spirit as the origin of being, who finds the monistic principle in the spirit.

Spiritually and psychically, the human being is immortal. In pre-Christian times, the soul was still known to be connected with the gods of nature. It is only in the twentieth century that we will become aware of the spiritual connection between the soul and the spiritual world, with Christ. Angelus Silesius is absolutely right when he says:

A thousand times may Christ be born in Bethlehem, but if he is not born in thee, thou art still lost for ever.

The mystical Christ [of whom Angelus Silesius speaks] has only become possible through the historical Christ. [Just as Goethe says:] If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? [so one can say:] If Christ were not there for our souls, how could we rise up to him, how could the sense of Christ arise in our soul? The historical Christ Jesus is as real as the sun is in the universe. Without disregarding the [biblical] traditions, one cannot overlook the fact that Christ is a God. According to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinists, man is merely a link in the chain of development of living beings. But the Darwinists have a great opponent, the great Darwin himself, who writes that it is unmistakable that a God infused life into the beings at the beginning. He writes:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from a primal form into which the Creator breathed life.

This is something that the modern Darwinian would like to deny – in fact, this sentence is missing from the German translations. But the person who claimed this is none other than Charles Darwin.

If you look at these things, you can come to a surprising insight: the monistic natural philosophy actually had to deny the spirit, because [according to it] everything depends on natural laws. But then the difference between good and evil basically ceases. That is what one should actually draw as a consequence, but one does not do it. However, however one may think about the great symbol [of the scene of temptation] in Genesis, where Lucifer speaks to man: “You will be like God and know what is good and evil,” something meaningful is said with these words. It is not important to call our time a time of transition; it is only significant to recognize what makes it a time of transition. If humanity did not come to the realization that the Christ is the most significant force in the evolution of the earth, it would come to believe that the experiences of the human soul are only the most highly intensified animal soul forces. If one were consistent, the soul's ability to distinguish between good and evil would cease. Yet another tempter speaks in our time, but one does not have the courage to hear him murmur: You will be made of animals, and no longer distinguish between good and evil.

But there is such a thing as the Christ impulse, which lives to show us that we are of the spiritual world and are in contact with spiritual beings, that our moral world order is intimately connected with the Christ in that with him the principle of love has come into the earth. And his voice says: You will not be of the animals, you will be with me, with me you will distinguish good from evil.

The sonship will be felt effectively. That the son comes from the father is scientifically based. But the father does not necessarily have the son. The moral world is related to the natural world order like the son to the father. Just as the father does not have to have the son, so [from the rule of natural laws, morality does not follow by itself]. The concept of the son makes clear in a wonderful way [the transformation of the natural into a moral world order through Christ].

Spiritual science feels in harmony with what the best, leading spirits of humanity have fulfilled. Schiller, whom people no longer love as much as they used to, but whom they will love again, once said:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought
Leaped from the marveling brain.

Thought will find the way to the one who is meant here: to the Christ of the twentieth century.

As soon as one begins to meditate the etheric body contracts. An inner warmth arises thereby, for it's the warmth ether—under light, sound and life ethers—that contracts. If one then pays attention to what one has outside one, one will perceive that it's something flowing, like a kind of religious devotion, like moral warmth in the world ether. And one becomes aware that what one has in oneself is something else—like a having to be ashamed with respect to this moral world warmth. A man doesn't like this very much, he doesn't want to be ashamed, he avoids this. And so he says that he's not making any progress. He hides from himself. He can only get further here by unfolding his will nature. And if he says: I can't, it only means: I don't want to unfold my will. One should often look into and listen in holy silence to one's physical body and try to perceive what's murmuring in there. One must direct one's attentiveness entirely inwards without paying any attention to what's going on around one.

In meditation one perceives everything, everything makes an impression; however one's consciousness shouldn't be focussed on it, but should be entirely directed towards the meditation.

During each winter in the past years, I was allowed to give a lecture here on a spiritual-scientific topic. The local friends have also requested such a lecture for this year. And it will seem understandable that in these difficult, fateful and destiny-bearing times, such a reflection may lead to that which fills us all deeply, deeply in our hearts and souls. Our thoughts and feelings are directed towards the East and the West, to where the great events of our time are unfolding in such a significant, grand, powerful, and painful way; where the fate of humanity is not discussed with words, but with deeds, which find expression in courage, confidence, bravery, in death and suffering, but also in all the uplifting sacrifices that are so abundant in the time when something so significant is also happening for our Central European humanity.

What can be stimulated in our present time regarding the relationship between the European national souls may be the subject of today's spiritual scientific reflection. It may be the subject of this reflection in the way that spiritual science can illuminate these very conditions. This spiritual science, which has indeed found little, truly little, favor and acceptance among the majority of contemporary people, but which, for those who are imbued with its innermost meaning, its innermost spirit, presents itself that it must take its stand for the whole movement for the whole life of the human spirit in the cultural movement for the present and the near future, just as the scientific movement for several centuries has taken its stand in cultural life. And it is precisely in the face of the deeply moving questions of life that spiritual science must prove itself.

Among the concepts that have provoked the most ridicule and opposition in my first fundamental spiritual science book - in my “Theosophy” - is the concept of the folk soul not as an abstraction, as a mere idea and sum of characteristics that hold a group of people together, but as a real, active being. We have already reached a point where the habits of thought that have been formed over centuries no longer want to go along with spiritual science.

Just as human beings, as the highest of earthly beings, stand in relation to the entities of the other natural kingdoms, just as the entities of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms find their physical, sensory culmination in the human being, so spiritual science must show - however unusual it may be for present-day ideas - that the realms of beings are not limited to the visible, that there are other realms above the human being, which cannot be reached with the mind that is bound to our brain, or with our physical, sensory eyes and ears, but which can be reached with what Goethe called spiritual vision, spiritual eyes and ears. This is not said comparatively, but to express something that is as certain for anthroposophy as, for example, the biological results are for the external science.

Spiritual science says that the way a person, with their soul, faces the things and entities of external nature, and how they form concepts and ideas about them, so there are truly real spiritual beings, invisible to the physical eye, above the human being, and for these beings, the human being with their soul is as much a thought, as it is an idea, as the objects of external nature are for the human being. Thus we are permeated and held by these spiritual beings. And to one of the next classes of these beings, spiritual science must count what for many is only the coincidence of the characteristics of a people: the folk souls.

What matters is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. Spiritual science does not look at the soul like popular psychology. It regards it not as a product of the outer organization, but as the real creator of the outer organization. And not to make an easy classification, but out of the nature of things, the spiritual scientific researcher distinguishes three essential parts of the soul with the same justification - only of course transferred to another area - as one distinguishes in the rainbow spectrum the red color on one side, the green in the middle, and then the blue color. And just as one cannot grasp the interaction of light and colors without taking this structure, which is most clearly seen in the rainbow spectrum, so one cannot understand the human soul without the threefold nature that we describe as the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as the rainbow has the color red on one side, so the human being has the sentient soul on one side; in the middle, the human being has the mind or emotional soul; and just as the rainbow has the color blue, so the human being has the consciousness soul. As I said, this does not arise from arbitrariness, from a desire to classify, but is connected with the innermost nature of the soul.

Let us first take the sentient soul: just as the red part of the spectrum primarily contains warmth, so the sentient soul contains more of the desires, the passions, the passionate forces of the soul, but at the same time, when the soul goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, [withdraws into] that which are the eternal forces of the soul, which mysteriously hide behind the drives, the passions, the desires, which at the same time are what imprints the soul with the eternal character. But what exists in the soul as the mediation of the eternal self of the human being with the temporal-spatial human being corresponds to the green color, which primarily serves the light, just as the mind serves the spiritual, mediating the human being's relationship to his eternal and temporal.

And the consciousness soul is what consumes the eternal between birth and death to work on the temporal; it is most turned towards the material world. The consciousness soul is what contains the soul powers that are least carried through the gate of death, that are least connected to the eternal self of man.

In all that we distinguish as nuances of the soul life, the actual I of the human being lives as light lives in the nuances of the spectrum. As there is light in every color, so there is I in every part of the human soul; but at the same time, what permeates the human being like an invisible entity passes through the I into the soul's members: the soul of the people to which he belongs. The relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul varies greatly, and nations differ according to the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul. There is not enough time in the world if I were to attempt to develop in full, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the human soul. A comparison can be enlightening here, but it should be more than just a comparison; it should give a genuine spiritual-scientific result.

If we look at a person in relation to the mineral, plant and animal world, we can distinguish three types of people. Firstly, there are people whose whole being is inclined only towards the external sense world, who cannot sharply concentrate their attention on something that withdraws from the sense world, who always need the impression of the outside world. They fall into indifference and inattention when they are supposed to have ideas that do not adhere to the outside world.

There is another relationship to the environment that we encounter more in inward-looking, sensible natures, who go through the world in such a way that their senses are little attracted by external nature, who produce inwardly, who bring forth from the life of the soul what they experience. They go through the world of the senses raving and dreaming. These are very different types of people because the soul relates to itself and to the outer world in different ways.

A third type is the one who has placed himself in history primarily through the representative of Germanness, through Goethe. A great thinker of his time called his thinking “representational thinking”. By this he meant that Goethe had the peculiarity of being just as oriented towards sensual things as he was, and that he could immerse himself in the spiritual that he was able to experience in and with things. The ideas of “spirit and body” were intimately interwoven in his soul. His thinking was objective and did not stray far from the objects, and when it did go to the objects, it did not stray from itself.

Corresponding to this threefold relationship of man to the world around him, we also have three types of relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. For just as the human being relates to nature, so the folk soul relates to the individual human soul. There are folk souls that relate to individual souls in such a way that they are completely devoted to the individual human beings, as it were, that they completely slip into them and permeate them, that the individual soul is something that is the imprint of the folk soul.

This is the preferred relationship for the souls that inhabit the west and south of Europe: the French, Italian and British people. The relationship is different for the Russian people. There we find that the folk soul remains, as it were, above the individual souls, that it does not enter into the being of the individual human being, which is expressed by the fact that the Russian people still have today - like a cloud spreading over the whole nation - the Byzantine religion, which does not connect with the individual soul. Such is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual Russian person.

[Where, as in Western Europe, the national soul takes hold of the individual souls, it dominates the individual souls so that the individual soul is something like an imprint of the national soul. Just as the national soul in the West is within the individual soul, so the relationship of the Russian national soul is such that it does not descend.

Like the person who lives only in his or her own soul, the national soul does not descend to the individual soul; the national soul, as it were, raves over the people. The Russian souls are not seized by the folk soul, but rather they are in anarchic confusion. Even when one thinks of the excellent representatives of the Russian people, of Tolstoy and so on, one sees how the folk soul hovers over them like a cloud and that the individual soul forces are not seized by it, but are in anarchic confusion.

Let us now turn to the center of Europe: here we find such a relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul that we can compare this relationship with Goethe's objective thinking. We have the soul of the people lovingly and intimately entering into the individual souls and yet, at the same time, rising above itself and being transported into the spiritual worlds in order to draw new strength and carry it down from the spiritual worlds. We have here the life of the soul of the people above the human being in the spiritual heights, and then again in the individual human souls.

One can say: When you look at the people of Western Europe, a particular soul force is always taken hold of and ruled by the folk soul: in the Italians, the sentient soul; in the French, the mind or mind soul; in the British, the consciousness soul. All the qualities that the members of these nations have [precisely as members of these nations] immediately become clear and understandable when viewed from this perspective of the nature of the facts, which can be found through spiritual science. How powerfully passionate, how completely immersed in instinct, all of Italian life appears, right up to the greatness of Dante, who drafted his Divine Comedy from the images of the sentient soul. The Italian people become understandable when one knows that it is the folk soul that takes hold of the sentient soul here.

The French nation becomes understandable when one recognizes that the folk soul directly takes hold of the intellectual soul. I read how a psychological society in a German city tried to explain the French national character. The result was: That is their mathematical disposition. This disposition becomes immediately understandable when one knows that the folk soul directly takes hold of the powers of the intellectual soul. Everything in this western nation is illuminated when one knows that it tends to take things in such a way that, despite all striving for personal freedom and national freedom, it is inwardly dogmatized and systematized to the point of artistic activity, to the point of the details of artistic activity. And we also find the other side there. I would like to say the negative pole of the dogma: that is criticism, the dissolving element. On the one hand, the rational soul wants to see everything in a system of dogmas, and if it cannot, it rebels against it, and so we have either dogmatism or Voltairism. The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is doubt down to the last detail. You can understand what is happening in the French people if you know this.

I note that a number of prominent figures are sitting here who know that I have been dealing with these things for years and that they have not been formulated by the occasion of the present. But I believe that they can be enlightening for what we are now experiencing, which is so great, so meaningful and so painful.

Now to the consciousness soul. The part that is most inclined towards the outer life and carries least into the eternal part of the human being is the consciousness soul, and in the British people it is most seized by the folk soul. The character of the British people as a trading nation and also the character of Shakespeare immediately becomes clear. For what is his greatness based on? That he has portrayed the individual human being in such a sharp characteristic, that they stand firmly on the physical plane, that he characterizes them in what does not pass through the gate of death. He is so great because he has succeeded in characterizing so sharply what is human in man that is not eternal about them, but what they develop for the physical world between birth and death.

Now, the German national soul, or, as I could also say, Central European culture, is characterized by the fact that it does not take hold of the soul directly, but descends to the soul and takes hold of it in its entirety, as it were with that which flows from the sources of the spiritual world, for it has the gift of withdrawing into the spiritual worlds and drawing strength from there. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul to experience that which has the power of the eternal, which directly flows from the eternal into the individual souls. The individual soul must be able to feel that something in your soul lives through the national soul, which sinks into you, which is carried into you, and through which you are directly connected to what lives in spiritual heights. Hence the idealism, hence the ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

One can go through the products of German intellectual life and obtain the evidence that, in contrast to other nations, the German has this peculiar relationship to the folk soul: not the individual soul elements are seized, as in the western and eastern nations of Europe, but the ego, of which the German seems to be less developed. One is a Briton, a Frenchman; a German is to be made.

It is an ideal because not a single power of the soul, but the whole soul is seized in the most profound life in the constant emergence of the different sides. Let us look back to the times when Christianity penetrated into the young, developing Germanic nation. How was it received? We can see this from the Old High German poem “Heliand”. What the individual - here the poet of “Heliand” - feels about the events, his personal experience, is directly related to the forces that surround him. What was only handed down to the Romans is reborn from the youngest germinal forces of the poet.

And in other poems we find how Christianity not only becomes part of the German people, but is born out of the individual human being, as it becomes a personal matter for the individual. It is the soul of the people that does not allow what comes to the people to grow old, but rejuvenates it so that it lives like a plant in the soul and rises again.

Furthermore, we see how a world view develops in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that is called German mysticism, for example in the works of Tauler, Meister Eckhart, the unknown author of Theologia Deutsch, and so on. We see how the minds work in a peculiar way, how they relate to the spiritual world. The mystic Eckhart is convinced that the spiritual world must be experienced directly in the soul, that it must be left entirely to itself, that it must not move out of its own arbitrariness, but must give itself to the forces that are weaving and ruling through the world. Then something ignites in it, which is a spark, but in this spark lives God, the divine weaving and being.

The place where God lives within, [where Christ is born within, which suffers] and dies when the individual soul goes the way of suffering and passion, / gap in the text] is where Meister Eckhart coined the word “Gemüt”. In the mind, the world is spiritually revived, and it is aware that what a person thinks, the Godhead thinks, what a person feels, the Godhead feels, what a person wills, the Godhead wills, if only he gives himself to his God. There we have something of the intimate coexistence of the individual with the German folk soul.

And in the author of Theologia Deutsch we find a rejuvenation of the German Weltanschauung through a rhythmic beat of the life of the German national soul with the individual representatives of the German national soul. What in earlier times led to the resurrection of the life of Jesus, as if Jesus had wandered through Germany's countryside with his disciples as his servants, which so personally depicted the life of Jesus, which rejuvenated Christianity, that rejuvenates the worldview in German mysticism. And it is wonderful how deeply the German national soul intervenes in personal life! This becomes clear when we look at one of the disciples of mysticism, at Angelus Silesius, when we share a saying of this mystic, one of the deepest of the numerous sayings:

I neither die nor live. God Himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, He also lives for and for.

Oh, what depths, we say, only in relation to the thought of immortality! He who has done this feels the ruling divinity. When I die, it is just as much an act of the divinity as when I live, it is the divinity that lives in me. By letting God experience death in me, I am aware of my immortality.

One can say: such ideas of immortality, which point to an immortal power in the human soul that is not grasped by reflecting on what lies beyond death, but is already grasped by it in life, are demonstrated by Jakob Böhme, the simple cobbler from Görlitz, the profound philosopher, who was fully inspired by the German folk spirit. He directed his enlightened gaze to that which is of the divine worlds in his own soul. He saw the courage of human striving on earth in the fact that the individual human soul, which is otherwise given over to emotional impressions, to those of the intellect and so on, always knows itself connected with its immortal core, with that which lives in death, that knows how to die by living out of direct knowledge.

Jakob Böhme's goal was to experience death directly in earthly life, and that this is the seed for the experiences of life. An expression that appears to be the utterance of the German national soul through a single person is the following:

He who does not die before he dies,

He perishes when he dies.

Those who do not grasp during their lifetime what lives in the soul as an immortal and thus pass through the gate of death, those who do not grasp death as the source of spiritual life, perish when they die. We see the highest philosophical view, but one that is also imbued with elemental soul power, rising to the highest heights of the spiritual.

When we see such figures of German nationality before our minds, we perceive how the German national soul has a rejuvenating effect again and again, so that it must always take hold of spirit and soul as a fresh germ in order to go up the whole ladder, to go to the highest heights of spiritual fruit.

And after the scorching and burning devastation of the Thirty Years' War, we see the German soul's strength once again intervening in the life of the people.

This is also the case with Herder, who provided a broad overview in his “History of Mankind”, encompassing the entire nature of the soul, from the most elementary soul forces to the highest philosophical powers. There are many, many ways in which the soul of a nation lives in Goethe's soul. It is remarkable that we realize that in turn a poetic work could arise in him that could not have arisen within any other culture. If the German folk soul has the peculiarity of grasping not the individual soul forces but the whole soul, then it grasps the immortal in the mortal, and the personality becomes the bearer of the eternal. Therefore, Goethe's “Faust” could only arise within German culture. It contains everything in the human soul, all the striving for the very beginnings of spiritual life, which are consciously sought again after all tradition has been cast off. How is this presented?

Let us compare how the German soul power inspires the German people in relation to the French people. In both, the Greek is reviving. But how does it revive with the French poets? It is studied, the rules are adopted and so on. But how is it with Goethe? Even in “Iphigenia” the Greek is not adopted, but reborn anew, rejuvenated. And in “Faust” we have the union with what he regarded as Greek: Helen is reborn for Faust. He becomes young in order to unite with the representative of Greek culture. Faust, who has grown old, throws off the old and seeks the rejuvenating potion. What is historically given must be brought into connection with Faust in a rejuvenated form. This demands the full strength, the rejuvenating strength of the German national soul.

We can trace it everywhere in all the details of German intellectual life! This is what comes to consciousness through an immersion in the substance of the German national soul. One sees, feels and senses an ever-renewing power in it. However present culture may change, this renewing power will remain, because its magic breath will be breathed again and again in different epochs. This is a peculiarity of Central European culture. This hope and confidence, which immediately becomes strength, is the basis not for superficial but for profound optimism in the German, which is also connected to idealism in all philosophies. Whoever is truly capable of approaching what the German national soul has produced cannot despair of humanity, but always comes to a belief in humanity, and indeed to a spiritual belief in humanity.

This becomes very significant when one looks at spirits who turn their gaze to humanity in search of something that can give good hope for the further development of man, and who can find nothing, who believe that European culture has died out. No one can regard European culture as having grown old; they can understand the relationship between the soul of the people and the individual German soul. Anyone who considers European culture to be old does not understand that.

That is why we have a Russian intellectual who has searched for what can make humanity happy and cannot find anything that has grown out of this culture of the national soul. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. I am talking about Herzen, the great Russian who became so small in his own eyes when he wanted to understand Central European culture. The following saying of Herzen immediately sheds light on the way the Eastern European, anarchic soul views desolation where flourishing life can be seen by those who can understand Central European soul life. He enters into an intellectual alliance with an Englishman, with Stuart Mill, and says:

Mill is not exaggerating when he speaks of the narrowing of the mind, of the constant flattening of life, of the reduction of life to commercial culture. He says that England will become like China, and we add that England will not be alone.

That is what Herzen says, who has no understanding for what must fill the Central European with the highest vitality. And further he says:

Perhaps a coincidence will save us from Chinese desiccation.

If he had understood Goethe, such a statement would be impossible! Further Herzen says:

Where is the highest thought, that is, hope, which hardens the hearts so that they feel neither pain nor suffering. Look around you, what can uplift the hearts.

That the same force that brought forth the highest poetic and philosophical blossoms in Goethe is the same force that today brings forth countless victims, victims of death and suffering, that is what presents itself to us at the same time from the whole context of German life.

And has German life always been so misunderstood in the world as it is now, when it is being shouted at from all sides that it is a life of “barbarians”? Not only is Central Europe being surrounded like a large fortress with the intention of starving it out, no, it is also being scolded and reviled from all sides. Here and there, friendly voices are raised, for example, by a Romanian who exclaims:

All those who have studied in France and lived among the French people have rushed to fill the columns of newspapers with all kinds of praise. Why don't you, who have enjoyed German hospitality, respond to these people by saying that these barbarians have the best schools, clinics, universities and so on? That you were welcomed everywhere with open arms! Why don't you respond by saying that these barbarians, who were your teachers, are incapable of committing such crimes? [Why don't you respond?

These voices were not always so rare. It is uncomfortable for a Central European to characterize the German essence in value judgments. What I have said, I know, is as certain a result of spiritual scientific research as the laws of the solar spectrum are a scientific research result. But it is uncomfortable for a German to make value judgments about the German character, so let us first hear from others. First Emerson, the great American teacher. In his reflections on Goethe, he wrote as if there were some awareness of how the German national character relates to the individual soul, and of the difference between Eastern and Western Europe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, one is already delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they may. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts will take them. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French liveliness nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for practicality, nor, finally, the American

— as I said, an American writing in English —

All he has is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

There is something alive in these words that can seem like an echo of what can arise from the intimate association of the soul of the people with the individual human being. And Emerson continues:

That is why the distinguishing terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. He makes me curious. He has that fearsome independence that comes from dealing with the truth.

You could say: Well, that was said by Emerson, who lived far away in America. We have had to listen to it: the Germans who live now are not the same as they were. Even the French philosopher Bergson said how the Germans have become mechanical. It is strange how, in this day and age, a man who wants to be a philosopher wants to come to his judgment: He certainly longs for judgment! He knows that Germans have had great thoughts. He seems to feel that when cannons and rifles are turned against Germans from all sides, they should then recite poems by Novalis or Goethe in response.

Strange logic is going around the world today. When people say, “Who wanted this war,” and the English, French, and Russians claim, “We didn't want it,” one could say, “Yes, we believe that too!” But it does not depend on what one says, but on whether one can say the relevant thing. If five people stand threateningly around a house, and the person who lives in it sees this and tells them to go away, and they then, because they do not leave, are beaten up by them, the five can also say: “We did not want the beating!”

One cannot say that Emerson's judgment of the German “barbarians” is already outdated, but one would think that those who have immersed themselves in German intellectual substance can judge better.

A few years before the war, a book was published by an Englishwoman entitled “Eight Years in Germany”. She visited German schools, clinics and so on and, having got to know the German character, wrote the following:

We read a lot about the new Germany and the new German spirit. Is what exists now the mature work of generations? Blinded by the splendor of Germany's wealth, we are inclined to forget that it has never occupied any place but the very forefront except for prosperity. In literature, it has always provided the impetus; in science, it has always shone; in music, it has always dominated.

And now the following. I don't know if she would have written it now, but about two years before the war she did:

Forty years ago Germany was fighting for her existence, and she is still fighting for it today. It is entirely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached her zenith. She is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals, whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water, opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce on it and bring it down.

The reasons why the German national character is so little understood can be grasped. Something can penetrate into the West from the German soul — less so into the East — but it is repelled in the West because it does not want to know anything about the dogmatic character of what wants to live actively in the whole soul. There is a certain understanding, but at the same time a reluctance to let it grow completely into the soul.

About a year and a half before the outbreak of the war, lectures were held in Manchester. They have been published and were very interesting, and the scholars explain in the preface why they are holding them: English journalists should be better informed about German conditions. About the immediate present, the scholar Herford said that on the whole it is out of the question that the creation of the German Reich has been beneficial to peace. [Gap in the text] History should be something more than a cinematograph and shed the higher light on things:

On the whole and in the big picture, there is no question

- it says -

that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for her to let the light of the past shine on the present confusion, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...] So, to sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed an inducement to war which in earlier centuries had so often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved at a single blow what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

When one is confronted with these things and wonders what lies in the souls of those who wrote them, one must have some understanding of the peculiarity of the European national psyche to grasp why one can understand [it] so little outside of Germany. Only enlightened minds can do that.

One mystic who has written beautiful things should also be mentioned. He confessed that he had great experiences with three mystics. One of them is Novalis, who gained so much from his intimate contact with the German folk soul. He uses beautiful words to characterize him. He says: “So much is going on on earth that can only interest earthly souls, such as what Shakespearean characters do. But if other beings from other planets could look down, what could interest them?” And he wonders if there is something that can interest other spirits as well, and in Novalis' writings he finds something that interests not only earthly souls but also beings that come down from heavenly heights. What the human soul can hardly bring forth in words is what he speaks of, what one would rather remain silent about, where true nature begins. He says:

But if he needed other proof, it would

— that is, presumably, the soul —

lead him among those whose works almost move one to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises by one level and where all those who are filled with restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a strange reason; but [the people I am talking about] have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

This is how this enlightened spirit assessed Novalis. Who is it that speaks in this way? Is it someone who calls to account the self-righteous critics who are now railing against German “barbarism”? Is it someone who will take a stand against words such as:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

The words written by the enlightened man about Novalis are by Maeterlinck. And the words about the bawler are also by him. We are now experiencing such things; they characterize our time directly through themselves, without the need to add anything in particular.

The lectures mentioned, which were held in Manchester, have been published and also translated into German. In the preface there are some words that can also be read in English:

The source of the stream of his intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent concrete and practical.

The one saying this is Lord Haldane.

If we consider how different the European center and the European east must be in terms of the overall character of the people, it can be understood that a powerful confrontation was bound to occur there. This confrontation was seen by people who wanted to see clearly. Today we hear from all sides: The Germans wanted this war. Who wanted it, who, because of the special character of their national aspirations, had to want it for a long time, was always seen by reasonably enlightened minds. A man who is not particularly inclined towards Germanic nature writes:

As for me, I am in no doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and flames against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If, according to the more pompous than true expression, the Mediterranean Sea should once become “a French lake”, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its levers of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism.

Thus, the minds that wanted to see it, saw how the forces at work in Europe gradually brought about this time. This was written in 1870!

The antagonism between Eastern Europe and Central Europe has always been there, so that the logic of the question, “Who wanted this war?”, is the flimsiest, because the people, whose soul hovers like a cloud over it, has a desire for expansion, and because there is not the slightest understanding for what has been achieved in Central Europe. It was received in Russia, but the way it happened is again quite characteristic.

It is true, as Herman Grimm says, that the Englishman Mr. Lewes wanted to write an important book about Goethe. But he only told of a man who happened to be born in Frankfurt am Main and happened to die in Weimar, who had this and that experience and wrote these and those works. But the soul of Goethe does not live in it, because his soul slips through his fingers. He only sees what he can dogmatize; he only sees the Goethe that stands firmly on the ground – the dates of birth and death and so on. He knows the titles of the works and so on. But what Goethe really was, that he was the representative of the dialogue between the individual German and the German national soul, he does not sense.

Just as the phenomenon has the effect in the West that the inner passions rebel against it and translate it into the rough, but into the dogmatic, so that which is directly experienced by the Germans has the same effect in the East – as I said, they have often willingly accepted it – in the East it becomes a web of thought. Because the Russian feels that it must be carried up into the cloud that hovers over him, it becomes ghostly, shadowy.

Even the great philosopher Soloviev floats in this cloud. He borrowed his generous philosophy from German culture – but what lives with full life in the German soul seems ghostly to him, and it causes the confusedly fluttering thoughts that the German, who is accustomed to the intimate association with the folk soul, cannot follow as an image of truth. One must even experience it, [that an intellectual in Russia makes Goethe] into a ghost in yet another way, one who, however, once called another people “barbarians” before the war: Mereschkowski. He speaks of Herz's last vision of death:

The last vision of death in Herz is - Russia as a “land of free life” and the Russian peasant community as the savior of the world. He exchanged his old love for a new faith, but it seems that he realized in the last hour that this last faith was also an illusion. Even if faith deceived him, love did not deceive him; there was a certain correct outlook in his love for Russia: not the peasant community, but the Christian community will perhaps in truth become the faith that the young barbarians are to bring to ancient Rome.

So he says from the heart.

Meanwhile, however, he dies - without any faith: Farewell, corrupt Rome! ... Farewell, native land!

But let no one be deceived by what he says about Goethe in his latest book; the whole of Goethe has become a spectre there. That he does not understand the soul of the people, which has rejuvenated everything, that he cannot look at what Goethe is as a force of the soul of the world, is shown by the fact that he says that he dares to say such words of Goethe as:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German citizen and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt merchant.

That about the “Faust” poet!

One understands what needs to be understood in the middle of Europe, and the extent of the understanding that is shown for the German national soul from both the left and the right speaks for this. One day, world history will not only be judged by archives, by what has been printed and written, but also by more subtle characteristics! It was actually with a heavy heart, through tears, through inner tears, that I realized something like an image in front of my soul, the way the forces of Europe stand, because it is so far from the original forces through which the individual outgrows the cosmos.

It is precisely [what that alliance of grand duchy and mendacious Pan-Slavism has done] to the Russian people that this image stands before me. We saw those first August days approaching. I will mention only three images from that time: In Central Europe, the Reichstag. Something characteristic is heralding the coming deeds; it is a purest expression of something infinitely youthful in the forces of the German national soul: the people are silent! There is something monstrous about this. Let us look instead to the west, to the French parliament; look at the speeches that have been made there, and how all these speeches flow out of the power of tyranny. And then we turn to Russia, where we are accustomed to seeing the best of the Russian man in silence: in the Duma, speeches rush, and they all talk in such a way that the words are phrases and everything looks like an arranged theatrical performance of speeches.

And so the European powers confront each other, and I am aware of the objectivity in which I have painfully allowed them to affect my soul. The silence in the middle is a symptom of something that is connected with the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; from epoch to epoch, it has held dialogues with the most outstanding representatives of Germanness, and the most beautiful products can be traced back to this. The striving of the German people for the spirit has also been carried out in what has happened in our time.

That has always been the nature of German striving. But if you look at it and try to discern the fundamental character, you have to say: this German spirit has not yet exhausted the forces and possibilities for development that lie within it. The soul of the German nation has a rejuvenating power and will always rejuvenate it again and again. How rejuvenating is Fichte's philosophy! Like a stream of folk lore, it flowed into the times of “Speeches to the German Nation”. What brings his ideas to life in a strange and symbolic way is what a new education wants to give people as reality. Fichte knows how reluctant people are to accept the new, and needs a peculiar comparison. It is highly characteristic of his way of thinking.

But spiritual science, from which the attitudes flow that can be used to understand the conditions of the soul of the people, wants to be an active science that courageously and bravely extracts its results. It speaks of the eternal, not merely in abstract words, but as it speaks when the human spirit lives from incarnation to incarnation, so it speaks as it must speak today, about the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

Fichte says:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow, which stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; friendly voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within her in all directions, to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We can have confidence in the successful striving of the German spirit towards intellectual life, because we see what the German spirit has achieved. This is in the process of becoming and is not yet complete. It is as much a germ as it is a fruit. No matter how unintelligently people speak about Germany, it is not complete and must carry its inner strength out into the world. It is this strength that it has to defend. The time for what the German spirit has to defend will be seen to come. It may be expected. The souls who make the sacrifice of death today will, when those born later understand what the national soul can be for the German individual, they will be able to look down in the days to come on a time that will transform into [human salvation] and progress that which has been bought with such great sacrifices, [with courageous but painful sacrifices]. Truly recognizing the driving forces, it may be said that the German spirit has not reached perfection but will continue to develop:

The German spirit has not reached perfection
What it is to create in the world's becoming.
He lives hopefully in future worries,
He hopes for future deeds full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can, in the power of the enemy,
The wish for its end may uncomprehendingly revive:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
That holds him in the roots of being, creating?