The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last lecture, I spoke of a former view of life from which the modern scientific view has evolved. It still combined the qualitative with the form-related or geometrical elements of mathematics, the qualitative with the quantitative. One can therefore look back at a world conception in which the triangle or another geometrical form was an inner experience no matter whether the form referred to the surface of a given body or to its path of movement. Geometrical and arithmetical forms were intensely qualitative inner experiences. For example, a triangle and a square were each conceived as emerging from a specific inward experience.

This conception could change into a different one only when men lost their awareness that everything quantitative—including mathematics—is originally experienced by man in direct connection with the universe. It changed when the point was reached where the quantitative was severed from what man experiences. We can determine this moment of separation precisely. It occurred when all concepts of space that included man himself were replaced by the schematic view of space that is customary today, according to which, from an arbitrary starting point, the three coordinates are drawn. The kind of mathematics prevalent today, by means of which man wants to dominate the so-called phenomena of nature, arose in this form only after it had been separated from the human element. Expressing it more graphically, I would say in a former age man perceived mathematics as something that he experienced within himself together with his god or gods, whereby the god ordered the world. It came as no surprise therefore to discover this mathematical order in the world. In contrast to this, to impose an arbitrary space outline or some other mathematical formula on natural phenomena—even if such abstract mathematical concepts can be identified with significant aspects in these so-called natural phenomena—is a procedure that cannot be firmly related to human experiences. Hence, it cannot be really understood and is at most simply assumed to be a fact. Therefore in reality it cannot be an object of any perception. The most that can be said of such an imposition of mathematics on natural phenomena is that what has first been mathematically thought out is then found to fit the phenomena of nature. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this particular world perception.

Think back to the other worldview that I have previously described to you, when all corporeality was regarded as image of the spirit. One looking at a body found in it the image of spirit. One then looked back on oneself, on what—in union with one's own divine nature—one experienced as mathematics through one's own bodily constitution. As a work of art is not something obscure but is recognized as the image of the artist's ideas, so one found in corporeal nature the mathematical images of what one had experienced with one's own divine nature. The bodies of external nature were images of the divine spiritual. The instant that mathematics is separated from man and is regarded only as an attribute of bodies that are no longer seen as a reflection of spirit, in that instant agnosticism creeps into knowledge.

Take a concrete example, the first phenomenon that confronts us after the birth of scientific thinking, the Copernican system. It is not my intention today or in any of these lectures to defend either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system. I am not advocating either one. I am only speaking of the historical fact that the Copernican system has replaced the Ptolemaic. What I say today does not imply that I favor the old Ptolemaic system over the Copernican. But this must be said as a matter of history. Imagine yourself back in the age when man experienced his own orientation in space: above-below, right-left, front-back. He could experience this only in connection with the earth. He could, for example, experience the vertical orientation in himself only in relation to the direction of gravity. He experienced the other two in connection with the four compass points according to which the earth itself is oriented. All this he experienced together with the earth as he felt himself standing firmly on it. He thought of himself not just as a being that begins with the head and ends a the sole of the feet. Rather, he felt himself penetrated by the force of gravity, which had something to do with his being but did not cease at the soles of his feet. Hence, feeling himself within the nature of the gravitational force, man felt himself one with the earth. For his concrete experience, the starting point of his cosmology was thus given by the earth. Therefore he felt he Ptolemaic system to be justified.

Only when man severed himself from mathematics, only then was it possible also to sever mathematics from the earth and to found an astronomical system with its center in the sun. Man had to lose the old experience-within-himself before he could accept a system with its center outside the earth. The rise of the Copernican system is therefore intimately bound up with the transformation of civilized mankind's soul mood. The origin of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the general mental and soul condition, but must be viewed in context with it.

It is only natural that statements like this are considered absurd by our contemporaries, who believe in the present world view far more fervently than the sectarians of olden days believed in their dogmas. But to give the scientific mode of thinking its proper value, it must be seen as arising inevitably out of human nature and evolution. In the course of these lectures, we shall see that by doing this we are actually assigning far greater value to science than do the modern agnostics.

Thus the Copernican world conception came into being, the projection of the cosmic center from the earth to the sun. Fundamentally, the whole cosmic thought edifice of Giordano Bruno,³² who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, was already contained in the Copernican world view. It is often said that Giordano Bruno glorifies the modern view of nature, glorifies Copernicanism. One must have deep insight into the inner necessity with which this new cosmology arose if one is to have any feeling at all for the manner and tone in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. Then one sees that Giordano Bruno does not sound like the followers of the new view or like the stragglers of the old view. He really does not speak about the cosmos mathematically so much as lyrically. There is something musical in the way Giordano Bruno describes the modern conception of nature. Why is that? The reason is that Giordano Bruno, though he was rooted with his whole soul in a bygone world perception, told himself with his outward intellect: The way things have turned out in history, we cannot but accept the Copernican world picture. He understood the absolute necessity that had been brought about by evolution. This Copernican world view, however, was not something he had worked out for himself. It was something given to him, and which he found appropriate for his contemporaries. Belonging as he did to an older world conception, he could not help but experience inwardly what he had to perceive and accept as knowledge. He still had the faculty of inner experience, but he did not have scientific forms for it. Therefore although he described them so wonderfully, he did not follow the Copernican directions of thought in the manner of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, or Newton.³³ Instead, he tried to experience the cosmos in the old way, the way that was suitable when the world cosmos was experienced within one's being. But in order to do this, mathematics would have had to be also mysticism, inward experience, in the way I described yesterday. This it could not be for Giordano Bruno. The time for it was past. Hence, his attempt to enter the new cosmology through living experience became an experience, not of knowledge but of poetry, or at least partially so. This fact lends Giordano's works their special coloring. The atom is still a monad; in his writings, it is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws retains a soul quality, but not because he experienced the soul in all the smallest details as did the ancient mystics, and not because he experienced the mathematical laws of the cosmos as the intentions of the spirit. No, it was because he roused himself to wonder at this new cosmology and to glorify it poetically in a pseudo-scientific form. Giordano Bruno is truly something like a connecting link between two world conceptions, the present one and the ancient one that lasted into the fifteenth century. Man today can form scarcely any idea of the latter. All cosmic aspects were then still experienced by man, who did not yet differentiate between the subject within himself and the cosmic object outside. The two were still as one; man did not speak of the three dimensions in space, sundered from the orientation within his own body and appearing as above-below, right-left, and forward-backward.

Copernicus tried to grasp astronomy with abstract mathematical ideas. On the other hand, Newton shows mathematics completely on its own. Here I do not mean single mathematical deductions, but mathematical thinking in general, entirely divorced from human experience. This sounds somewhat radical and objections could certainly be made to what I am thus describing in broad outlines, but this does not alter the essential facts. Newton is pretty much the first to approach the phenomena of nature with abstract mathematical thinking. Hence, as a kind of successor to Copernicus, Newton becomes the real founder of modern scientific thinking.

It is interesting to see in Newton's time and in the age that followed how civilized humanity is at pains to come to terms with the immense transformation in soul configuration that occurred as the old mathematical-mystical view gave way to the new mathematical-scientific style. The thinkers of the time find it difficult to come to terms with this revolutionary change. It becomes all the more evident when we look into the details, the specific problems with which some of these people wrestled. See how Newton, for instance, presents his system by trying to relate it to the mathematics that has been severed from man. We find that he postulates time, place, space, and motion. He says in effect in his Principa: I need not define place, time, space, and motion because everybody understands them.³⁴ Everybody knows what time is, what space, place, and motion are, hence these concepts, taken from common experience, can be used in my mathematical explanation of the universe. People are not always fully conscious of what they say. In life, it actually happens seldom that a person fully penetrates everything he says with his consciousness. This is true even among the greatest thinkers. Thus Newton really does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points and feels no need to explain or define them, whereas in all subsequent deductions he is at pains to explain and define everything. Why does he do this? The reasons is that in regard to place, time, motion, and space all cleverness and thinking avail us nothing. No matter how much we think about these concepts, we grow no wiser than we were to begin with. Their nature is such that we experience them simply through our common human nature and must take them as they come. A successor of Newton's, Bishop Berkeley,³⁵ took particular notice of this point. He was involved in philosophy more than Newton was, but Berkeley illustrates the conflicts taking place during the emergence of scientific thinking. In other respects, as we shall presently hear, he was not satisfied with Newton, but he was especially struck by the way that Newton took these concepts as his basis without any explanation, that he merely said: I start out from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them; I take them as premises for my mathematical and scientific reflections. Berkeley agrees that one must do this. One must take these concepts in the way they are understood by the simplest person, because there they are always clear. They become unclear not in outward experience, but in the heads of metaphysicians and philosophers. Berkeley feels that when these four concepts are found in life, they are clear; but they are always obscure when found in the heads of thinkers.

It is indeed true that all thinking about these concepts is of no avail. One feels this. Therefore, Newton is only beginning to juggle mathematically when he uses these concepts to explain the world. He is juggling with ideas. This is not meant in a derogatory way; I only want to describe Newton's abilities in a telling manner. One of the concepts thus utilized by Newton is that of space. He manipulates the idea of space as perceived by the man in the street. Still, a vestige of living experience is contained therein. If, on the other hand, one pictures space in terms of Cartesian mathematics, without harboring any illusions, it makes one's brain reel. There is something undefinable about this space, with its arbitrary center of coordinates. One can, for example, speculate brilliantly (and fruitlessly) about whether Descartes’ space if finite or infinite. Ordinary awareness of space that is still connected with the human element really is not at all concerned with finiteness or infinity. It is after all quite without interest to a living world conception whether space can be pictured as finite or infinite. Therefore one can say that Newton takes the trivial idea of space just as he finds it, but then he begins to mathematize. But, due to the particular quality of thinking in his age, he already has the abstracted mathematics and geometry, and therefore he penetrates spatial phenomena and processes of nature with abstract mathematics. Thereby he sunders the natural phenomena from man. In fact, in Newton's physics we meet for the first time ideas of nature that have been completely divorced from man. Nowhere in earlier times were conceptions of nature so torn away from man as they are in Newtonian physics.

Going back to a thinker of the fourth or fifth century A.D.—though people of that period can hardly be called “thinkers,” because their inner life was far more alive than the mere life in thoughts—we would find that he held the view: “I live; I experience space along with my God, and orient myself in space up-and-down, right-left, and forward-backward, but I dwell in space together with my God. He outlines the directions and I experience them.” So it was for a thinker of the third or fourth century A.D. and even later; indeed, it only became different in the fourteenth century. Thinking geometrically about space, man did not merely draw a triangle but was conscious of the fact that, while he did this, God dwelled within him and drew along with him. His experience was qualitative; he drew the qualitative reality that God Himself had placed within him. Everywhere in the outer world, whenever mathematics was observed, the intentions of God were also observed.

By Newton's time mathematics has become abstracted. Man has forgotten that originally he received mathematics as an inspiration from God. And in this utterly abstract form, Newton now applies mathematics to the study of space. As he writes his Principia, he simply applies this abstracted mathematics, this idea of space (which he does not define,) because he has a dim feeling that nothing will be gained by trying to define it. He takes the trivial idea of space and applies his abstract mathematics to it, thus severing it from any inward experiences. This is how he speaks of the principles of nature.

Later on, interestingly enough, Newton goes somewhat deeper. This is easy to see if one is familiar with his works. Newton becomes ill at ease, as it were, when he contemplates his own view of space. He is not quite comfortable with this space, torn as it is out of man and estranged completely from the spirit. So he defines it after all, saying that space is the sensorium of God. It is most interesting that at the starting point of modern science the very person who was the first to completely mathematize and separate space from man, eventually defines space as God's sensorium,³⁶ a sort of brain or sense organ of God. Newton had torn nature asunder into space and man-who-experiences-space. Having done this, he feels inwardly uneasy when he views this abstract space, which man had formerly experienced in union with his god. Formerly, man had said to himself: What my human sensorium experiences in space, I experience together with my god. Newton becomes uneasy, now that he has torn space away form the human sensorium. He has thereby torn himself away from his permeation with the divine-spiritual. Space, with all is mathematics, was not something external. So, in later life, Newton addresses it as God's sensorium, though to begin with he had torn the whole apart, thus leaving space devoid of Spirit and God. But enough feeling remained in Newton that he could not leave this externalized space devoid of God. So he deified it again.

Scientifically, man tore himself loose from his god, and thus from the spirit; but outwardly he again postulated the same spirit. What happened here explains why a man like Goethe found it impossible³⁷ to go along with Newton on any point. Goethe's Theory of Color is one particularly characteristic point. This whole procedure of first casting out the spirit, separating it from man, was foreign to Goethe's nature. Goethe always had the feeling that man has to experience everything, even what is related to the cosmos. Even in regard to the three dimensions Goethe felt that the cosmos was only a continuation of what man had inwardly experienced. Therefore Goethe was by nature Newton's adversary.

Now let us return to Berkeley, who was somewhat younger than Newton, but still belonged to the period of conflict that accompanied the rise of the scientific way of thinking. Berkeley had no quarrel with Newton's accepting the trivial ideas of place, space, time, and motion. But he was not happy with this whole science that was emerging, and particularly not with its interpretations of natural phenomena. It was evident to him that when nature is utterly severed from man it cannot be experienced at all, and that man is deceiving himself when he imagines that he is experiencing it.

Therefore, Berkeley declared that bodies forming the external basis for sense perceptions do not really exist. Reality is spiritual through and through. The universe, as it appears to us—even where it appears in a bodily form—is but the manifestation of an all-pervading spirit. In Berkeley, these ideas appear pretty much as mere assertions, for he no longer had any trace of the old mysticism and even less of the ancient pneumatology. Except for his religious dogma, he really had no ground at all for his assertion of such all-pervading spirituality. But assert it he did, and so vigorously that all corporeality become for him no more than a revelation of the spirit. Hence it was impossible for Berkeley to say: I behold a color and there is vibrating movement back of it that I cannot see—which is what modern science justifiably states. Instead, Berkeley said: I cannot hypothetically assume that there is anything possessing any corporeal property such as vibratory movement. The basis of the physical world of phenomena must be spiritually conceived. Something spiritual is behind a color perception as its cause, which I experience in myself when I know myself as spirit. Thus Berkeley is a spiritualist in the sense in which this term is used in German philosophy.

For dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification, Berkeley makes innumerable objections against the assumption that nature can be comprehended by mathematics that has been abstracted from direct experience. Since to Berkeley the whole cosmos was spiritual, he also viewed mathematics as having been formed together with the spirit of the cosmos. He held that we do in fact experience the intentions of the cosmic spirit insofar as they have mathematical forms, for that we cannot apply mathematical concepts in an external manner to corporeal objects.

In accordance with this point of view, Berkeley opposed what mathematics had become for both Newton and Leibnitz,³⁸ namely differential and integral calculus. Please, do not misunderstand me. Today's lecture must be fashioned in such a way that it cannot but provoke many objections in one who holds to the views prevailing today. But these objections will fade away during the ensuring lectures, if one is willing to keep an open mind. Today, however, I want to present the themes that will occupy us in a rather radical form.

Berkeley became an opponent of the whole infinitesimal calculus³⁹ to the extent that it was then known. He opposed what was beyond experience. In this regard, Berkeley's feeling for things was often more sensitive than his thoughts. He felt how, to the quantities that the mind could conceive, the emergence of infinitesimal calculus added other quantities; namely, the differentials, which attain definition only in the differential coefficient. Differentials must be conceived in such a way that they always elude our thinking, as it were. Our thinking refuses to completely permeate them. Berkeley regarded this as a loss of reality, since knowledge for him was only what could be experienced. Therefore he could not approve of mathematical ideas that produced the indetermination of the differentials.

What are we really doing when we seek differential equations for natural phenomena? We are pointing to something that eludes our possible experience. I realize, of course, that many of you cannot quite follow me on these points, but I cannot here expound the whole nature of infinitesimal calculus. I only want to draw attention to some aspects that will contribute to our study of the birth of modern science.

Modern science set out to master the natural phenomena by means of a mathematics detached from man, a mathematics no longer inwardly experienced. By adopting this abstract mathematical view and these concepts divorced from man, science arrived at a point where it could examine only the inanimate. Having taken mathematics out of the sphere of live experience, one can only apply it to what is dead. Therefore, owing to this mathematical approach, modern science is directed exclusively to the sphere of death. In the universe, death manifests itself in disintegration, in atomization, in reduction to microscopic parts—putting it simply, in a crumbling into dust. This is the direction taken by the present-day scientific attitude. With a mathematics detached from all living experience, it takes hold of everything in the cosmos that turns to dust, that atomizes. From this moment onward it becomes possible to dissipate mathematics itself into differentials. We actually kill all living forms of thought, if we try to penetrate them with any kind of differential equation, with any differential line of thought. To differentiate is to kill; to integrate is to piece the dead together again in some kind of framework, to fit the differentials together again into a whole. But they do not thereby become alive again, after having been annihilated. One ends up with dead specters, not with anything living.

This is how the whole perspective of what was opening up through infinitesimal calculus appeared to Berkeley. Had he expressed himself concretely, he might well have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. With regard to its content, every integral is really an illusion, and Berkeley already felt this to be so. Therefore, differentiation really implies annihilation, while integration is the gathering up of bones and dust, so that the earlier forms of the slain beings can be pieced together again. But this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas.

One can say that Berkeley's sentiments were untimely. This they certainly were, for the new way of approach had to come. Anyone who would have said that infinitesimal calculus should never have been developed would have been called not a scientific thinker but a fool. On the other hand, one must realize that at the outset of this whole stream of development, feelings such as Berkeley's were understandable. He shuddered at what he thought would come from a infinitesimal study of nature and had to do with the process of birth but a study of all dying aspects in nature.

Formerly this had not been observed, nor had there been any interest in it. In earlier times, the coming-into-being, the germinating, had been studied; now, one looked at all that was fading and crumbling into dust. Man's conception was heading toward atomism, whereas previously it had tended toward the continuous, lasting aspects of things. Since life cannot exist without death and all living things must die, we must look at and understand all that is dead in the world. A science of the inanimate, the dead, had to arise. It was absolutely necessary. The time that we are speaking about was the age in which mankind was ready for such a science. But we must visualize how this went against the grain of somebody who, like Berkeley, still lived completely in the old view.

The after-effects of what came into being then are still very much with us today. We have witnessed the triumphs of just those scientific labors that made Berkeley shudder. Until they were somewhat modified through the modern theory of relativity,⁴⁰ Newton's theories reigned supreme, Goethe's revolt against them made no impression. For a true comprehension of what went on we must go back to Newton's time and see the shuddering of thinkers who still had a vivid recollection of earlier views and how they clung to feelings that resembled the former ones.

Giordano Bruno shrank from studying the dead nature that was now to be the object of study. He could not view it as dead in a purely mathematical manner of thought, so he animated the atoms into monads and imbued his mathematical thinking with poetry in order to retain it in a personal sphere. Newton at first proceeded from a purely mathematical standpoint, but then he wavered and defined space (which he has first completely divorced from man through his external mathematics) as God's sensorium. Berkeley in his turn rejected the new direction of thinking altogether and with it the whole trend towards the infinitesimal.

Today, however, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by the world view that Giordano Bruno tried to turn into poetry, that Newton felt uncomfortable about, and that Berkeley completely rejected. Do we take what Newton said—that space is a sensorium of God—seriously when we think in the accepted scientific sense today? People today like to regard as great thinkers those men who have said something or other that they approve. But if the great men also said something that they do not approve, they feel very superior and think: Unfortunately, on this point he wasn’t as enlightened as I am. Thus many people consider Lessing⁴¹ a man of great genius but make an exception for what he did toward the end of his life, when he became convinced that we go through repeated earth lives.

Just because we must in the present age come to terms with the ideas that have arisen, we must go back to their origin. Since mathematics has once and for all been detached from man, and since nature has been taken hold of by this abstract mathematics that has gradually isolated us from the whole of nature, we must now somehow manage to find ourselves in this nature. For we will not attain a coherent spiritual knowledge until we once again have found the spirit in nature.

Just as it is a matter of course that every living man will sooner or later die, so it was a matter of course that sooner or later in the course of time a conception of death had to emerge from the former life-imbued world view. Things that can only be learned from a corpse cannot be learned by a person who is unwilling to examine the corpse. Therefore certain mysteries of the world can be comprehended only if the modern scientific way of thinking is taken seriously.

Let me close with a somewhat personal remark.⁴² The scientific world view must be taken seriously, and for this reason I was never an opponent of it; on the contrary, I regarded it as something that of necessity belongs to our time. Often I had to speak out against something that a scientist, or so-called scientist, had made of the things that were discovered by unprejudiced investigation of the sphere of death. It was the misinterpretation of such scientific discoveries that I opposed. On this occasion let me state emphatically that I do not wish to be regarded as in any way an opponent of the scientific approach. I would consider it detrimental to all our anthroposophical endeavors if a false opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks by way of spiritual research and what science seeks—and must of necessity seek in its field—out of the modern attitude.

I say this expressly, my dear friends, because a healthy discussion concerning the relationship between anthroposophy and science must come to pass within our movement. Anything that goes wrong in this respect can only do grave harm to anthroposophy and should be avoided.

I mention this here because recently, in preparing these lectures, I read in the anthroposophical periodical Die Drei that atomism was being studied in a way in which no progress can be made. Therefore, I want to make it clear that I consider all these polemics in Die Drei about atomism as something that only serves to stultify the relations between anthroposophy and science.

• 32. Giordano Bruno: Nola 1548–1600 Rome. Dominican, 1563–1576, a great traveler. Main works developed at the English court at the time of Elizabeth I. After he returned to Italy he was imprisoned because of heretical teachings, and was burned in Rome after 8 years in prison. See Riddles of Philosophy, and The Spiritual Guidance of Man, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 33. Isaac Newton, Sir: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire 1642–1727 Kensington, London. Born as a dwarf-like child. Grew up on a farm and went to village and small town schools until 1661. After he was accepted at the University he was of medium talent until his “flaming” as a genius physicist, astronomer, mathematician 1663–1664. Professor in Cambridge 1669–1701, member of the Royal Society London 1662 and from 1703 until his death, its President. Main work: Law of Gravitation, Mathematically Adapted to the Law of Motion from Kepler, developed 1666, published 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica. The idea of an infinitesimal mathematics came from Newton in 1663; three years later he had developed his differential mathematics. His Optics, 1704, put forth the division of light in color as well as emission theory.
  
  Later Newton lost all interest in physics, mathematics, and also in the destiny and consequences of his works. He turned towards chemical and alchemical experiments and studies of their old traditions. In his old age he was interested in religious-speculative studies. Before his death he compared his life with a day, in which a child is playing with sand and mussels and is not aware anymore of the cosmos at his back. Literature: J.W.N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton 1642–1727 (London 1938).
• 34. In Newton's second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica of 1713 the definition is “But I do not define, because it is well known to all of us.”
• 35. George Berkeley: Desert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland 1685–1753 Oxford. English philosopher and Anglican missionary, Bishop from 1734. Main works: Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, 1710; Alciphron, about ethics and free thinkers, 1732; Siris, concerning metaphysical questions. See: Riddles of Philosophy.
  
  Berkeley said: “One has to do it in such a way”: e.g., as in Paragraph 113 of Principles of Human Knowledge. In the writing De Motu (From Motion) is written in Paragraph 43: “Motion, even though perceived clearly by the senses, was darkened, but not because of its own being, but far more through commentaries by learned philosophers.”
• 36. In the work Optice by Newton, which is the Latin translation of his Optics (1704), published by Samuel Clarke in 1706 and approved with additions made by Newton, the formula appears only at the end of the book at the so-called 28th Problem: “If these questions are answered in the right way, could we then not ascertain the phenomenon that there is a being, unbodily, intelligent, which can perceive the endless universe as it were with its sense organs, and which seems to look into the innermost and is surrounding it with its all-embracing presence, while that in us that is usually feeling and thinking are only handed-down pictures in which we then perceive and observe our organs?” This thought seems not only to be Newton's, but was also presented in a similar way by Henry More, the Platonist from Cambridge who was a friend of Newton.
• 37. For his polemic concerning Newton's color theory, see Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950), especially the Introduction, “Goethe, Newton and the Physicists”; see also the forthcoming book, Heinrich O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press).
• 38. Leibnitz: Leipzig 1646–1716 Hanover. Philologist, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, statesman, priest. Mostly living at princely courts, traveling a lot. Discoverer of the Infinitesimal Calculus 1686, independently of Newton.
• 39. In his writing The Analyst (The Analyst, 1734, included in the book Writings about the Origin of Mathematics and Physics) the Table of Contents is in the form of 50 theses. No. 7, for example, is as follows: “Objections against the Secrets of Belief Which are Made Unfairly by Those who Admit Them in Science;” or No. 13: “The Rule for the Flux of Potency is Achieved through Unfair Reasoning;” and No. 22: “With the Help of a Double Mistake Analysts Come to their Truth, but not to Science, in which They do not even Know How They Came to Their Own Conclusions.” From the Polemic Dispute, which follows The Analyst, an example is: “No big name on this earth will ever cause me to take unclear things for clear ones. They think of one as if it were a crime to think one could see further than Sir Isaac Newton, even above him. I am convinced though that they speak for the feelings of many others. But there are also some ... who think and feel it unfair to copy some great man's shortcomings, and who see no crime in wanting to see further than Sir Isaac Newton, but further than the whole of mankind.”
• 40. Prepared by Mach and Lorentz, developed by Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Common Theory of Relativity 1916. Made it necessary to revise Newton's Mechanics with the help of non-Euclidean Geometry. See also Riddles of Philosophy and Georg Unger, Von Bidden, Physicalischer Begriffe, Part 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 100–122.
• 41. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Kamenz/Lausitz 1729–1781 Brunswick. Dramatist, essayist, critic. Opens a new epoch in German literature and an. His last writing, “The Education of the Human Race,” (1780) finds it necessary to postulate reincarnation for the sake of the development of the human race. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 42. The reason was a controversy in the magazine Die Drei of 1921–1922, pages 1107 and 1114, as well as in the following years publication (see pages 172–330 about the reality of atoms). See Rudolf Steiner's First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977).

Gentlemen, have you perhaps, during the long period in which we have not been able to give lectures, been able to come up with any particular questions that you would like to discuss?

Questioner: I would like to ask whether today's cult, with its actions, still has a relationship to the spiritual world and how the various cults of different peoples relate to each other.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, gentlemen. It is interesting to consider how a cult comes into being and what it seeks.

Perhaps I might take this opportunity to tell you something that is currently of interest to us, in that it ties in with my last trip to England. The course in Penmaenmawr was held near an ancient place of worship, on the west coast of England in Wales, where there is an island off the coast called Anglesey, and there are still ancient places of worship on the surrounding mountains. They are in ruins and can only be seen, I would say, in ruins today, but from which, if you know anthroposophy, you can clearly see what they actually meant to be there.

You see, it would be just as if one were to go out here to these mountains and find such places of worship up there. There you find them, so to speak, everywhere on the mountains, and mainly where the mountain has such a flat area at the top, where there is a hollow, a plain at the top of the mountain that is slightly deeper. These old places of worship were then located there. Today they are piles of rubble, but you can still clearly see what they looked like. The smaller ones consist of stones that were probably once carried by the ice to the place in question, but were also dragged to the place where they were needed. These stones were placed in such a way that they form a kind of rectangle, next to each other (see following drawing). When I look at it from the side, it looks like this: there is a capstone that covers the whole thing up there. These are the small ones. The large places of worship consist of stones of a similar kind (see drawing below), which are placed in a circle, exactly twelve of them. This is a cult that was probably practiced in its heyday three to four millennia after our time there, at a time when the population was not very dense, a very sparse population, and at a time when there was hardly anything other than some agriculture and livestock farming. In this population, writing and reading were completely unknown in the heyday when this cult was practiced. So writing and reading were not even considered possible!

Now one can ask what this cult actually meant. I say to you explicitly: reading and writing did not exist in those days. Now you know that if you want to make crops flourish in the most favorable way possible, you have to sow them at different times and do one thing or another with them at different times. And with the cattle, one must also take into account the different times for mating and so on. This depends on the connection of the earth with the whole environment of the world, of which I have often told you. Now, today we have our farmer's almanac, we look it up, we know what day of the year it is, and people then forget that it does not depend on human will. You can't set the days as you please, but you have to set the days as they follow from the stars, as they follow from the position of the moon, and so on. Now, today the calendar maker proceeds in such a way that he calculates it according to the old traditions. You have calculations that you can use to calculate when this or that day is. This is calculated because people once determined it according to the position of the sun. Today, you can also determine it according to the position of the sun, but the people who generally follow such things do not follow the position of the sun or stars, but simply what is calculated, according to the calendar. Now, that was unthinkable in those days because reading and writing did not exist at all. Such things only came later. So that takes us back, as I said, three to four thousand years before the present time. And reading and writing in these areas hardly takes us back more than two to three thousand years. These are very old conditions, and the reading and writing that existed back then was, of course, not at all comparable to what we have today. In any case, the majority of the population did not know it.

If you look at such a circle up on the mountain, you can imagine: the sun seems to go around – we know that it is stationary, but that is not true, you can say that because that is how things are – so the sun goes around in a circle in space. As a result, it casts a different shadow from each of these stones, and you can follow that shadow throughout the day. You can say: When the sun rises in the morning, there is the shadow, now it goes a little further, there is the shadow, and so on. But the shadow also changes over the course of a year because the sun rises at a different point each time. This changes the shadow. It became like this in March, a little later like this. And the wisdom of the scholar or priest, as you will, of the Druid priest, who was appointed to observe these things, consisted in his being able to judge this shadow, so that he could know: when the shadow, let us say, falls on this point, then this or that must be done in the spring in the fields. He could tell people that. He could see that from the position of the sun. Or if the shadow fell on this point, then the bull had to be led around, the animals had to be mated, because that had to be on a certain day of the year. So the priest could tell from these things what had to happen throughout the year.

But in fact the whole of life was actually determined by the course of the sun. Today, as I said, people do not think that they themselves do this because they find it in the calendar. But in those days one had to go to the sources oneself, had to read the matter from the universe, so to speak.

At a very specific time, let's say in the fall, for example, it was determined exactly what had to be done with the fields; the so-called bull festival was also set at a certain time of the year based on the information provided by these people. Then the bull was led around; otherwise it was kept away from the cattle and so on. The old festivals were also set up according to these things, but they are definitely related to such things. An order like this is called a Druidic circle today. This dahier (reference is made to the drawing) is a dolmen or table 23 Kromlech. The strange thing is that the stones are standing like that and are covered on top, so that there is shade inside.

Well, you see, gentlemen, people know that sunlight is sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, because they feel it in the way they sweat or freeze. But what people do not know is that the shadow is just as different as the light. Depending on the light, the shadow is different. But today people have given up the habit of determining the difference of the shadow. The old people have first of all acquired the ability to determine the differences of the shadow. But in the shadow one sees the spiritual. The rays of the sun do not only have a physical, but they also have a spiritual. And in there the Druid priest observed the spirituality of the sun's rays, on which it depended whether one should cultivate this or that plant better in a certain country, because that depends on the spirituality that is carried down from the sun to the earth. And in addition, the effects of the moon were extremely well observed in this shadow. The effects of the moon, for example, have a great influence on the mating of cattle, and this was used to determine the time of mating. So that actually the whole year has been divided according to these solar observations.

If you were to dig under one of these cromlechs, you would also find that it was also a burial place. These things were set up in particular where people were buried at the same time. This again has the significance that, in fact, when man has left his body, this body has a different composition than anything else. The soul, the spirit, has lived in the body throughout the lifetime. When the body disintegrates, it has different properties from those found in the rest of the mountainous area. And these forces, when they flowed up there, made it possible to see properly in the shade. These people were familiar with completely different natural forces than those known later.

And when you see at some mountain site - which, by the way, is more pronounced across the country, I saw this in Ilkley, where the first course took place during the English trip - individual stones high up, but in such a way that the place was well chosen – from such a high vantage point one could see the whole country from afar – then one finds such signs, swastikas, with which so much mischief is being made in Germany today. This swastika is worn by people who no longer have any idea that this was once a sign that was supposed to indicate to those who came from afar: There are people who understand these things, who see not only with their physical eyes, but also with their spiritual eyes – I have described these spiritual eyes as lotus flowers in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – and they wanted to draw attention to this: we can see with these lotus flowers.

So here you see a cult that essentially consisted of people wanting to get the spiritual from the world around them for their social circumstances, for their living conditions on earth. This can still be seen in the objects today, and that is why this area is extremely interesting. These were the last of such places of worship, because after that people moved back to the west coast, because then those people came from the east who had spread writing in ancient times. This first writing is called runes. The letters were formed by putting sticks together, so quite differently than in modern times. And that is when the subject of what is now described as Norse mythology first arose: Wotan, Thor and so on. That came later, and it came because the writing was transplanted there.

When I speak of the shadow, there is no need to be terribly surprised, because an animal can see something in the shadow. You just have to pay attention to how a horse behaves strangely when it is standing somewhere on a street in the evening where there is lighting, and it looks at its shadow on a wall. You just have to know that the animal, the horse, does not see its shadow the way we see it. We have eyes that look straight ahead, a horse has eyes that look sideways. This means that it does not see the shadow as such at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. Of course people say: the horse is afraid of its shadow. But it is really the case that it does not see the shadow at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. And so these primitive people also perceived differences in the shadows throughout the year, just as one perceives differences in the heat of the sun and in the cold. This is a cult that was practised there. And you can see from what I have described that such cults, which originated in ancient times, were necessary. They were there because they were needed. They replaced everything that could be read later, because at the same time it was the way people interacted with the gods. People prayed less, but they communicated what flowed into life, what had a relationship to life, a meaning.

Now another cult, which you can still find in many places, especially in Central Europe. There you find such cult sites, there you find certain images. These images show a bull, and on top of the bull sits a kind of rider with a so-called Phrygian cap, with a kind of revolutionary cap. This was adopted from there later. And then you see on the same image below a kind of scorpion, which is biting into the genitalia of the bull. Then you also see how the one who is sitting at the top plunges a sword into the front of the bull's body. And when it is like this, with the bull (it is drawn), the rider at the top, the scorpion here, the sword that plunges, then you see how the starry sky is formed above it. Above, the starry sky spreads out. These are again the so-called Mithras cults. The first are the Druid cults; and what I am now describing are the Mithras cults. While the Druid cults are in the west on the coasts – we also find them in other areas, but I just told you about the area where I was able to examine them myself – these cults are found from Asia across the whole of the Danube, that is, through present-day southern Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Bavaria, the areas of the Odenwald, the Black Forest and so on. Once these cults, these Mithras cults, had spread. And they meant something very specific. Because, you see, why did people put a bull there in the first place? That's the first question we have to ask.

I told you: in spring, the sun rises in a certain constellation, today actually in the constellation of Pisces. – Astronomers still show the constellation of Aries. But that is wrong, in reality it is the constellation of Pisces. For a long time, for two thousand years, the sun rose in the constellation of Aries, even earlier in the constellation of Taurus. And so people said: The sun always rises in the constellation of Taurus in spring, when growth begins. And they associated what lives in the human body, not in the head, but in the rest of the human body, namely what is associated with growth, with the fact that the sun's rays are changed, that the constellation of Taurus is behind them. And that is why they said: If we want to describe the animal-like person, we have to draw the bull, and the actual person, who is ruled by his head, only sits on it. - So that the bull represents the lower animal-like person, and the one who sits up there with the Phrygian cap represents the higher person. But the whole is actually only one person, lower person and higher person.

And now people said to themselves: Oh, it is bad when the lower man is in control, when man gives himself entirely to his animal instincts, when man only follows his passions that come from the belly, from sexuality and so on! The higher man must rule over the lower man. That is why they expressed it this way: This one, who rides, has the sword and thrusts it into the loins of the lower man. That is to say, the lower man must be made small in the face of the higher man. Furthermore, the scorpion is there, biting into the genitals, to show: if the lower man is not made small by the higher man, is not controlled, then the lower man also harms himself, because the forces of nature come over him and destroy him. So this whole human destiny between the lower and higher man was expressed in this image.

Above it was the starry sky. It is very significant that the starry sky was spread out. The sun rises in spring at a certain point, so it rose at that time in the constellation of Taurus. But it advances a little bit every day. This advance is twofold. First, the vernal point advances. The sun rises a little further away from the point where it rose the previous year, so that three thousand years ago the sun rose in Aries, even earlier in Taurus. Today it rises in Pisces in spring. This way it gradually comes all the way around. Over the course of 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around. But it also goes around every year, so that the sun does not rise in the vernal point on the following day – it only rises on March 21 – and on the following day it rises a little further away from this point, and so on. Throughout the year, it also goes around all the signs of the zodiac in the zodiac.

Now those who had to serve the cult of Mithras had to observe when the lower man, the animal man, was more difficult to control: when the sun was in the constellation of Taurus, when it particularly drives towards the forces of growth. When the sun rises in the constellation of Virgo, say in October, more towards December at that time, the lower human being was not so strong, the rule did not need to be so strongly developed. The population had no feeling for these things, but those who observed the Mithras cult had to know this. And so those who practiced this Mithras cult could say: Now it is difficult to rule the lower man, now it is spring; now it is easier, now it is a certain time in winter. And so in the cult of Mithras, man himself was used to get to know the seasons again, as well as the whole course of the sun and moon through the constellations. The Druids used more the external signs, the shadows; here in the service of Mithras, more the effect on man was used. And so this cult of Mithras was also completely connected with life.

So there were the most diverse cults. Of course, one must be clear about it: if one wants to observe such things as were observed with the Druids, one needs very specific areas of the earth. — One can still see that today. If one lives there in Wales — the course there lasted a fortnight — then one has a constant rapid change between, I would say, small cloudbursts and sunshine. It changes by the hour, so that you have a completely different air than here; it is always more filled with water. When you have such air, as it is where the Druids were, then you can make such observations. In the areas where the Mithraic cult spread, one could not have made such observations because the climate was different. There one had to take the observations more from the inner life of man. He was more sensitive to such things. And so the cults were different depending on the region. This Mithraism was widespread in the Danube regions, in Bavaria, as far as here in Switzerland, probably less here, but probably also in older times. Now, this Mithraism was still widespread long after Christianity emerged in these regions. The last remnants were still found in the times when Christianity was spreading, especially in the Danube regions, for example. There you can still find these images today in caves, in rock caves. Because these observations and cults were practiced in rock caves. There was no need for the external sunlight, but rather the peace and quiet inside the rock cave. The spiritual effects of the sun and the stars also go into this.

Once I have explained these two cults to you, you can see the meaning of cults in general. There were the most diverse cults. The Negroes still have their cults today, which are simpler, more primitive, but which also show in a simple way how one wants to get to know the spiritual environment of the universe. Then, at a certain time — this time lies again about one and a half to two millennia back — something emerged from the most diverse cults, which were particularly in Asia and Africa, from all these cults, so to speak, where they had merged. A piece was taken from this cult, another piece was taken from that cult, and from the melting together of the most diverse cults, especially the Egyptian and Persian cults, the cult arose that you know today as the Catholic cult. It was melted together from all of this. You can see how it was melted together when you look at the altar, for example. You need not go very far, you will still see today that the altar is something like a gravestone. Even if there is no corpse under it, it is still similar in shape to a gravestone. Just as people in ancient times knew that forces emanate from the corpse, so it was retained in this form.

You will find in Catholic churches the strange fact that the relationship to the sun and the moon is indicated. You will know from Catholic churches what is placed on the altar on particularly festive occasions (drawing $. 282): the monstrance, the so-called Santissimum. Yes, gentlemen, that is nothing more than a sun, and in the center of the sun is the host, conceived as the sun, and here below is the moon, a sign that this cult comes from a time when people wanted to directly observe the sun and the moon as I have shown you for the Druid cult. Only people have forgotten this. When writing and its associated practices spread, they no longer looked at the great outdoors. They looked at a book – and after all, the Gospel is also just a book – and they looked at the sun and moon signs that are in the Holy of Holies, in the monstrance on the altar.

And so, through all the details of Catholic worship, one can see how it leads back to the ancient cults, which still had their connection to the great universe. Of course, this has been completely forgotten. It was the case that in the first three or four centuries AD, people everywhere still knew a great deal about the actual meaning of the cult, because at that time the present cult was formed and spread more from Rome and was put together from the most diverse individual cults. But here around, for example, and especially in the Danube countries, the cult of Mithras was still known. It was considered to have a connection to the universe. Therefore, in the first centuries, what was left of the old cults was systematically eradicated, and only those cults remained that were no longer considered to be related to the universe. And so, isn't it true, people look at the Catholic cult today and attach great importance to the fact that it is not understood, that they do not see that it was once related to the sun and the moon. Because religion and science were one in ancient times, and art was part of it.

Of course, a time came when people said to themselves: Yes, but what is the point of all this? It's for nothing! You can read about the festivals and the times when this or that should happen in the calendar! — It's for nothing, people said. And then came the cult storming, the iconoclasm, then came Protestantism, the Protestant principle, which started against the cult. One now understands why, on the one hand, all the people once stood up for the cult and later all the people turned against the cult, when one bears this history in mind. At the time when I told you that the Druid cult held sway, yes, gentlemen, the enthusiasm sometimes shown today, let us say, for this or that movement, it is all nothing compared to the great enthusiasm that held sway among the people for their Druid cult in those days! They would all have let themselves be stoned and beheaded for this Druid cult. But why? Because they knew that without knowing exactly what is going on in the universe in an orderly way, one cannot live at all, one cannot celebrate the festival of Taurus at the right time, one cannot sow one's grain, one's rye, at the right time.

Later on, this was just forgotten, and that is why people said: Yes, something must have a purpose in life! – and went against it. That humanity at different times behaves so very differently towards these things can only be understood from the fact that such events have taken place, that the matter has been completely forgotten and that today one can only see in these, as they are called, symbols, what actually happened. Where symbols are, there is only the weakest understanding, because where there are realities, one does not need symbols. When one sets up the altar as with the Druids, in order to really observe the sun, one does not put up a picture of the sun!

Yes, that is what has led, for example, to the fact that certain cults, except for the Catholic cult, have preserved themselves with great rigidity to this day.

You see, this Druid cult was a pure farming and cattle-breeding cult, as it was in its heyday, because life consisted of farming and cattle-breeding. Later, in such areas where farming and cattle-breeding used to be the only ones, where this cult was particularly justified, the one that became more of a craft arose. When the Druid cult flourished, everything was agriculture and cattle breeding, and people covered themselves with animal skins and so on. All the crafts - there were no machines - were of course still the same: what the individual made himself was based on what others made. If he had time, he made what he needed to wear or as an object, for example, he made his knife out of a hard stone that he worked, and so on. The times for agriculture and livestock farming were important; he wanted to find out from his gods when he had to take the necessary measures. But then craftsmanship became more important. Now, you see, gentlemen, the craft, of course, has no greater relationship to the starry sky than agriculture and livestock. But on the other hand, the habits had remained, and so a kind of cult was established for the craft, which was taken from these old cults that had a relationship to the sky. And one of these cults, which has remained the most rigid, is the freemason cult. But it consists of pure symbols. In reality, no one really knows what these symbols refer to. Especially when they began to build man-made structures, they applied what they were accustomed to doing in this cult to the construction of works of art. And in architecture, if you want to be very precise, it actually makes a certain amount of sense. You model the forms of the building on what the stars express and so on, if you really want to build. And so the Masonic cult emerged. But when the Masonic cult emerged, people no longer knew what the individual symbols meant. And so the Masonic cult today consists of nothing but symbols, and people don't even know what the symbols refer to, they talk the most confused stuff about the things. You can say: The more the cults are practiced, the less one understands of the things. — And so the understanding of the cults that are most practiced in the present has actually been lost everywhere.

But surely these ancient people needed a cult for their lives in the outside world. If today we want to have a cult again - and we are indeed working on a renewal of Christianity, in Germany there are already individual churches under the direction of Dr. Rittelmeyer - yes, if we are going to create a cult today, it must again have a somewhat different meaning than the ancient cults. For the old cults were effective, and today we simply know from calculation when a day falls, when March 21 is and so on, from ordinary astronomy. The ancients could not do that. In ancient times they had to point to this shadow, as I have described to you. But today something else is necessary. Today it is necessary that people can come to understand something at all about what exists in the spiritual universe. No astronomy, nothing tells people today about what is going on in the universe!

People fall prey to the greatest fallacies. For example, they point telescopes out into the starry world. Now they point the telescope in a certain direction at a star. Yes, gentlemen, I turn the telescope, the instrument, and in another direction I see another star. And on the other hand, it is calculated that the stars are so far away that this can no longer be seen clearly, but only calculated in terms of light years, according to how fast the beam of light travels. One calculates how far the beam of light travels in one year. That is a distance that is even more difficult to express in figures than when you pay for a midday meal in Germany in German currency. That is difficult enough to express! But to express this, how fast a beam of light moves, what a long way it covers in a year, this number goes into the billions. Therefore, one does not speak of it, but one only says: A star lies so far away that the light would take so and so many light years. Yes, gentlemen, now I point my telescope in that direction, I look into it and see the star. It needs, let's say, 300,000 light years to get here; the light needs that long. But the other star, it may be far back, it may need 600,000 light years. Then I look there, but I don't get the present form of the star at all, but a past one. And when I look there, what I see is not really there now. The star still appears to me, but I only see what it used to be, because the light took 300,000 years to get here. So I see an object that is not really there, that took 300,000 years to become visible there!

So you see, when you look around with the telescope, you don't really see the true shape of the starry sky! That is one thing. The other thing is this: people believe that where they see the stars, there is something. But the truth is that there is nothing there, that where you see stars is where the ether ends! This does not apply to the sun and the moon – to the sun it applies to some extent, to the moon not at all – but it does apply to the stars: there is nothing there! There is a hole in the universe. It is remarkable how anthroposophy and real science almost converge here. When we founded our institutes in Stuttgart, I said: One of our first tasks is to prove that where there is a star, there is absolutely nothing, that nothingness shines. Because there is something all around, you see a kind of light where there is nothing. Well, actually we are rather poor people with our research institutes, and the Americans are rich. Since that time, news has come from America that even with ordinary science it has been discovered that there is actually nothing where there are stars.

So anthroposophy works with the most advanced science. Only through anthroposophy can things be better judged. I am telling you these things because you can see from them that people really know nothing about the universe. They judge everything in the universe wrongly. And where does that come from?

You see, gentlemen, that comes from a very specific cause. Imagine: there is a human head, there is the brain. When a person perceives something external, for example through the eye, he perceives the external, needs the brain to do so, so that he can have the perception. But inside the brain there is a small brain, just back there (see drawing). It is built quite differently from the large brain. This little brain is constructed very strangely. It is as if it is made of leaves when you cut through it. So it sits back there.

This small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. The large brain, which I have colored green in the drawing, is what we need to have external earthly impressions. The small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. But when a person becomes inwardly absorbed, when he proceeds as I have described in my books, then this small brain begins to be particularly active, and one feels inwardly how seemingly this small brain becomes larger and larger, as if it were growing. And so it grows, and you feel as if you were standing under a tree. That is why the Orientals depict Buddha under the bodhi tree. He still knew this cerebellum as an organ of perception. This is being rediscovered today. This little brain begins to be active when you become inwardly absorbed in the human aspect. But then you perceive not the external material, but the spiritual. Then, with the little brain, one begins to perceive the spiritual again, and in the spiritual one begins to perceive laws and so on. Today, these must be brought into a cult. Precisely the innermost part of the human being must be brought into a cult today, because the human being, with his inner being in his little brain, separated from the great brain, has the path, has the organ that leads out into the spiritual world.

Today, we can at best stand at the beginning of how to build a cult from the inner being of man. Then this cult will contain inner truths. Just as one knew through the Druid cult when to crown the bull, to set the bull festival, to lead the bull through the community, so that reproduction is regulated in the right way, so one will know — precisely when one sets up a cult in this way, which now develops the spiritual perception that is maintained by the cerebellum — what one has to do in social human life. Before that, people will only speculate, they will only think up all kinds of things, they will do it as they do in Russia. When it is admitted that one must first know in a spiritual way what has to happen in humanity because it flows from the universe, then one will also have a real social science for the first time, which in turn will be wanted from the environment of the universe.

So you have to learn to think. And as soon as you see something like the destroyed rocks lying around today, so that you can only see from the traces what once was, like on the island of Anglesey or in the other places in the coastal areas there , in Penmaenmawr, where the course was held – yes, when you come across such things, you see: much has been lost in humanity, but it is needed, and today, especially in spiritual terms, new insights are needed. Work must be done with new insights.

That is what I wanted to answer your question. I believe that from this you can understand how a cult was just as necessary as a knife that was needed for survival, and how the uselessness of the cult later led to it being eradicated and then continued without being understood.

I will let you know next week when I can have the next lesson – I have to go back to Stuttgart these days, but I will be back in the next few days.

This English edition is based on the 1998 edition of the German edition of GA 97.

The lectures given in 1906 and 1907, notes and records of which are collected in this volume, were given at the same time as the lectures given in Berlin and published in the volume Original impulses for the science of the spirit (GA 96), and may thus be said to complement them. All these lectures were given for members of the then German Section of the Theosophical Society. The lecture on Wagner's Parsifal in Landin was given because Rudolf Steiner, Marie Steiner-von Sivers and some friends had been at Eugenie von Bredow's country estate for a short holiday and then seen Parsifal performed in Bayreuth at the invitation of Sophie Stinde and Pauline von Kalkreuth, the two leaders of the Munich branch.

Rather than follow the usual chronological order, the lectures have been organized under four major themes in this volume. In 13 lectures, Rudolf Steiner considered the spiritual content of the truths to be found in the Christian revelation; 3 lectures are on the nature and mission of the luciferic spirits, 5 on the Rosicrucian way of initiation and its specific nature compared to earlier ways. The fourth group are lectures, some of which were given to central anthroposophical insights, others in their application in different spheres of life.

The terms ‘theosophy’ and ‘theosophical’. At the time when he gave these lectures, Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical spirit of the science was still within the context of the Theosophical Society and he would generally use the terminology familiar to its members. Yet from the very beginning he used the terms ‘theosophy’ and ‘theosophical’ with reference to his own independent spiritual researches. Taking up a suggestion he made at a later date, the terms have been replaced with ‘science of the spirit’ and ‘anthroposophy’ in these lectures except where they refer specifically to H. P. Blavatsky's theosophical stream. This is the case in the lectures given in Dusseldorf on 4 April 1906 and in Leipzig on 25 April 1906 and 12 January 1907.

For a glossary of repeatedly used Indian theosophical terms, see next chapter.

Sources. The lecture notes were made by members of the audience, some being better, others less good. Only 3 lectures (Basel, 19 September 1906; Karlsruhe, 4 February 1907, and Vienna, 22 February 1907) were taken down verbatim. All others are based on brief notes or summaries. The extremely brief record of the Parsifal lecture given in Landin has been extended by using Marie Steiner's notes. Although the sources were on the whole not very satisfactory, the lectures notes have been included in Rudolf Steiner's collected works because they give an idea of his lecturing activities at that time. They often complement each other, also with regard to important details.

For the 1998 German edition, the notes were revised and an index of names added. Text revision by Maria Balastèr and Ulla Trapp.

The volume was given its title by the editor of the first edition. The titles given to individual lectures are not by Rudolf Steiner.

Previously published lecture from this volume: The Structure of the Lords Prayer (Karlsruhe 4 February 1907. Tr. A. H. Parker. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1971.

Early in the year 1910 Rudolf Steiner is believed to have spoken for the first time on the mystery of the true nature of the Second Coming. Throughout that year he gave a number of lectures on the subject and continued his teaching during the following year. The importance of these lectures cannot be exaggerated: their study is essential to an understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Anthroposophical Movement. In the whole body of teaching that was given out, the two lectures which are now reprinted in a new translation, under the title of The True Nature of the Second Coming, form an indispensable part. Many salient points appear, and explanations are made of the connections between past, present and future.

Rudolf Steiner's interpretation of that apocalyptic event described in the New Testament as the coming of the Son of Man “in the clouds with great power and glory” demands for its apprehension knowledge of his teaching on the evolution of man's consciousness, particularly on the development of the ego-consciousness in relation to the Christ Impulse. The incarnation of the Christ took place in an epoch when the soul-faculties of men were best adapted to receive Him manifest in the flesh. But now new faculties of perception are awakening, and men will become capable of receiving Him in a different way. From the third decade of this century onwards, Rudolf Steiner said, the Christ would be visible in etheric form to those possessing these new faculties. At first He will be seen by a few, but during the next three thousand years by greater and yet greater numbers. In a lecture given at Basle on I st October, 1911, Dr. Steiner spoke of the fact that in the future the presence of Christ would be felt amongst those who were gathered together waiting in expectation to receive Him. And for those who are alone, he said, “many a one will experience, when sitting silent in his room, his heart sad and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn, that the etheric Christ will appear and will speak comforting words to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men!”

To attempt to master and to expound the content of this revelation given by Rudolf Steiner becomes the particular task of those who count themselves among his followers. He believed that the Christian evangel would develop further and further in time to come, bringing ever new gifts and revelations to the souls of men in their own evolutionary progress from one incarnation to another. And, speaking two years before his death, he said: “Anthroposophy would wish its destiny to be one with the destiny of Christianity.”

When he gave his lecture-cycle on the Gospel of St. Matthew he described in detail the preparation that took place for the coming of Christ in a physical body, with an account of the special mission of Jeshu ben Pandira; in 1911, in the first of two lectures entitled Jeshu ben Pandira, he gave the explicit message that it is in order to prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ that Spiritual Science exists. “Everyone,” he said, “who works at the task of Spiritual Science shares in making this preparation.”

MILDRED KIRKCALDY

Notes by Alice Kinkel Third degree

The letter from Baron von Wrangell is read and thoroughly discussed by Dr. Steiner

The members as the disseminators of Theosophy or Anthroposophy. But you, who are gathered here, should form a core group. You should be careful and everyone should take care to ensure that the right views and the right judgments are spread about Theosophy. Everyone should pay attention and check who is accepted into the Society. Many a person must be accepted, but it will be up to us to ensure that they do not spread themselves too thinly.

With loving greetings and the instruction:
......................................
this shall be written in our soul.

The subject of the instruction is: CORE AND SHELL. We should not practice human complacency towards those for whom false concepts of tolerance are the right ones.

All materialistic culture, all the great technical achievements such as airships, railways, telegraphs and so on, belong to the shell of present-day human life. But this shell of culture later falls away; the core, however, is to become the savior of human progress. But the core is in greater danger than the shell; the core can be eaten by worms. We should remember that such a thing could happen!

Dr. Steiner speaks of the theosophical indecencies that have taken place in the Society, and cites Max Heindel's book as an example.

We should remember that we belong to the core group, supported by the leaders of spirituality and occultism. Man should not forget his original image; he should always strive to become similar to it. Conscience, an alert conscience and not lying lead to this. The Luciferic entities eliminate conscience and truthfulness. Conscience and compassion will disappear in part of humanity in the sixth epoch.

Each of us should keep the legend, the seven-step ladder and other givens in mind during the day, then the person will feel a consequence of doing these things right here, that is, the right forces will then flow in.

During the night, the human being can then come close to Hiram Abiff or Adoniram, Lazarus, who was initiated by the Lord Himself.

For this purpose, meditation is given: “I am not only in the world for myself, but to become similar to my archetype.” This striving is a duty - not selfishness.

These things are given in the first scenes of “Examination of Conscience” and “The Guardian of the Threshold”, as in the three dramas in general: they contain much, much material for meditation.

You should not forget that the spiritual powers are counting on you to help guide humanity.

Every person is a citizen of the spiritual world, but you should be aware of it! At night, you are always in a spiritual world, interacting with beings and judging. This can suddenly come to a person's awareness when waking up or at other times during the day: “I have to train myself to become a revealer of the divine archetype within me.”

Meditate on death: this is a very important matter.

The following answers to questions (on the Tailor Example) given by Dr. Steiner at the “Seminar” which accompanied this course of lectures may be helpful to the reader:—

Q. X brings up for discussion the problem of the tailor. (Lecture IV.)

A. The illusion arises because the effect in relation to the single suit is extraordinarily small and therefore it needs a long time for this small effect to become visible in the tailor's accounts and for the loss to be really felt. Products become cheaper through division of labour. When you work, under division of labour, for a community your own products will also become cheaper than they would be if you were to work for yourself. This is due simply to the cheapening effect of the division of labour. If you interrupt it at a certain point, then you will make the article concerned, which you have made for yourself, more expensive. Now the single effect in relation to a single suit would naturally be small, but it would be marked if all tailors were to make their own suits. When a tailor, who makes his own suits, comes to make up proper accounts, he ought to price his own suits higher than the market price. He must reckon his expenses higher. Naturally, the supposition is that the suits should be bought, not from other tailors, but from the dealers in clothes, the clothiers. The price of a suit at the clothiers is cheaper than it would be if tailors worked without clothiers—otherwise the division of labour and merchanting would have no sense. Therefore the tailor ought to price a suit a little higher if he does without the merchant, because the merchant brings the single suit on to the market more cheaply than the tailor could bring it into use...

Q. Does the tailor depress the price of other suits of clothes by that one suit?

A. He depresses the price of suits by withdrawing one suit from the total number of suits with which the clothiers are dealing. He deprives the clothiers of the opportunity of making a profit on this suit. Therefore the clothiers must demand a higher profit on the other suits. This demand of the clothiers for a higher profit brings about a rise in clothiers' prices, but it means a drop in tailors' prices.

Q. Suppose there are considerably more clothiers than are economically justified?

A. In what I have said there is the presumption that exactly as many clothiers exist as are economically justified. We have to do not with progression in a straight line, but in a direction towards a maximum and a minimum. There is an optimum number of clothiers which will give the best commercial results. Anything over or below it would work uneconomically.

Q. Can the number be ascertained?

A. When you have rational management, then you will have a determinate number of clothiers, as of producers ...

List of relevant literature, published or distributed by Rudolf Steiner Press unless otherwise stated:

BY RUDOLF STEINER

The Threefold Social Order
The Social Future
The Inner Aspect of the Social Question
Anthroposophy and the Social question
Education as a Social Problem

BY FOLKERT WILKEN

The Liberation of Work (Routledge R Kegan Paul)

[This Foreword is not contained in this 1971 translation but is in the German volume so it has been inserted here.]

"At Christmas 1912, the first official gathering of followers of a theosophical spiritual movement took place in Cologne. who were not willing to immerse themselves in a dogmatic Indian movement, but who, taking into account the achievements of the spiritual life of recent times and the radical impact that the Christ event had had on earthly events, could only recognize a spiritual education for the Western world that was appropriate to the state of development of the European people today. They recognized in Rudolf Steiner the spiritual researcher and thinker who was equal to all the demands of modern science, who had grasped the connections between historical events as no one before him, and whose explanations of the human being revealed factual connections that spoke their own language and were not imposed “teachings.” “Anthroposophy” was the name he had always given to his study of the human being. And this name was now chosen by the followers gathered in Cologne who were committed to a science based on spiritual anthropology, which sought to approach the knowledge of the divine by striving to grasp the divine germ in the human being — his ‘I’ ...

When Rudolf Steiner brought to the Theosophical Society what it had been lacking and raised it above its former level, certain impulsive forces were alarmed, forces which had wanted to transform the otherwise declining movement into their tool and now saw their special purposes endangered. For their goal was not the synthesis of Eastern and Western wisdom for the general advancement of humanity, but the galvanization of the dead European spiritual life with pre-Christian wisdom.

Now there was someone who brought new life from the depths of Christian esotericism, the synthesis of Eastern and Western thinking, of past and future wisdom.

This had to be suppressed.

And so a counter-image was created for the longing for Christ that was reawakening in the souls of Europeans. A man of flesh and blood. Still a boy, with the appeal of the exotic, a Hindu who was to be trained for the role of the Messiah. I would like to spare the reader a description of the rest of the Krishnamurti humbug at this point. The advertising machine did everything it could to promote him. With diplomatic skill, entreaties, cunning, and threats, the Theosophical sections were worked on to make them compliant with the new intention. Members in various countries left in droves. The German section protested emphatically as a united whole. This led to their expulsion from the Theosophical Society. The external ties with this society were now also severed. The work for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science continued in the same way in Europe. Several years earlier, Rudolf Steiner had made the complete independence of his work from any theosophical leadership a condition for further external cooperation. Now the anthroposophical association, which also included many foreigners who could not participate in the new phase of the Theosophical Society's development, was transformed into an independent society.

—Marie Steiner

In the last lecture we pointed out the significance of the fact that the Gospel of St. Mark begins by introducing the grand figure of John the Baptist, who is contrasted in a marked manner with that of Christ Jesus Himself. If we allow Mark's Gospel to influence us in all its simplicity, we receive a significant impression of John the Baptist; but only when we consider the Baptist against the background of spiritual science does he appear, so to speak, in his full greatness. I have often pointed out that we must interpret the Baptist in the light of the Gospel itself, for we know that he is clearly described in it as a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah (cf. Matt. 11:14). According to spiritual science, if we wish to investigate the deeper causes of the founding of Christianity and of the Mystery of Golgotha, we must look for the figure of the Baptist against the background of the prophet Elijah. I shall only allude briefly here to the topic of the prophet Elijah since I took advantage of the opportunity provided by the last general meeting of the German section of the Theosophical Society in Berlin to speak more fully on this subject (Turning Points in Spiritual History, London, 1934, Lecture 5). All that spiritual science and occult research have to relate concerning the prophet Elijah is fully confirmed by what is contained in the Bible itself. But many passages will undoubtedly remain inexplicable if we read the chapters relating to him in the ordinary way. I will draw your attention only to one point.

We read in the Bible that Elijah challenged all the followers and peoples of King Ahab among whom he lived, and how he pitted himself against his opponents, the priests of Baal, setting up two altars and causing them to lay their sacrifice on one of them while he laid his own sacrifice on the other. He then showed the triviality of what his opponents had said about the priests of Baal because no spiritual greatness was manifested by the god Baal, whereas the greatness and significance of Yahweh or Jehovah appears at once in the case of the sacrifice of Elijah. This was a victory won by Elijah over the followers of Ahab. Then in a remarkable way we are told that Ahab had a neighbor called Naboth who was the owner of a vineyard. Ahab coveted this vineyard, but Naboth would not sell it to him because he regarded it as sacred since it was an inheritance from his father. The Bible then tells us of two facts. On the one side Jezebel, the Queen, was an enemy of Elijah and proclaims that she will have him put to death in the same way as his opponents, the priests of Baal, were put to death because of his victory at the altar. But according to the biblical account, Elijah's death was not brought about through Jezebel. Something else took place. Naboth, the king's neighbor, was summoned to a kind of penitential feast, to which other important persons of the state were also called, and on the occasion of this feast of penitence, he was murdered at the instigation of Jezebel (I Kings 21).

Now we might say that the Bible seems to relate that Naboth was murdered at the urging of Jezebel. Yet Jezebel does not announce that she intends to murder Naboth but rather Elijah. There is an evident discrepancy in the story. Now occult research begins and shows us the real facts in the case, that Elijah was a great spirit who roamed invisibly through the land of Ahab. But at times he entered into and penetrated the soul of Naboth. So Naboth is the physical personality of Elijah; when we speak of the personage of Naboth, we are speaking of the physical personage of Elijah. In the biblical sense, Elijah is the invisible figure, and Naboth his visible image in the physical world. All this I have shown in detail in my lecture entitled, “The Prophet Elijah in the Light of Spiritual Science.”¹

But if we wish to consider the whole spirit of Elijah's work, and the whole spirit of Elijah as it is presented in the Bible, and allow it to influence our souls, we may say that in Elijah we are confronted by the spirit of the whole ancient Hebrew people. All that lives and is interwoven in this people is encompassed within the spirit of Elijah. We may refer to him as the folk spirit of the ancient Hebrew folk. Spiritual science shows him to have been too great to dwell altogether in the soul of his earthly form, in the soul of Naboth. He hovered over him like a cloud; and he not only lived in Naboth but went around the whole country like an element of nature, active in rain and sunshine. This is revealed ever more clearly the more we go into the whole narrative, which begins by saying that drought and barrenness prevailed, but that through Elijah's relationship to the divine spiritual worlds the drought was ended and the needs of the land at that time were fulfilled. He worked as an element of nature, a law of nature itself. We could say that the best way to learn to recognize what worked in the soul of Elijah is to let the 104th Psalm influence us, with its description of how Yahweh or Jehovah works in all things as a nature-divinity. Of course Elijah is not to be identified with this divinity itself; he is the earthly image of that divinity, an earthly image which is at the same time the folk soul of the Hebrew people. Elijah was a kind of differentiation of Jehovah, an earthly Jehovah, or, as he is described in the Old Testament, the “countenance” of Jehovah.

If we look at it in this way, the fact becomes especially clear that the same spirit that lived in Elijah-Naboth now reappears as John the Baptist. How does he work in John?

According to the Bible, and especially as is shown in the Gospel of St. Mark, he works through what is called baptism. What in reality is baptism? Why was it administered by John the Baptist to those who allowed themselves to be baptized? Here we must examine what was the actual effect of baptism on those who were baptized. The candidates were immersed in water. Then there always followed what has often been described as happening when a man receives the shock of being threatened by death, for example by falling into the water and nearly drowning, or by nearly falling over a precipice. A loosening of the etheric body takes place; it partly leaves the physical body. As a consequence, something happens that always happens immediately after death, i.e., a kind of retrospect of the past life. That is a well known fact and has often been described even by the materialistic thinkers of the present time. Something similar took place during the baptism by John in the Jordan. The people were plunged into the water. This baptism was not like the usual baptism of today. The baptism of John caused the etheric bodies of the candidates to be loosened and they saw more than they could comprehend with their ordinary powers of understanding. They saw their life in the spirit and the influence of the spirit on this life. They saw also what the Baptist taught, that the old age was fulfilled and that a new age must begin. In the clairvoyant observation that was possible for them for a few seconds during the baptismal immersion they saw that mankind had come to a turning point in evolution, and that what humanity had possessed in former times when it was in a group-soul condition was now in the process of completely dying out; quite new conditions had to come in, and they saw this while in their liberated etheric body. A new impulse, new capacities, must come to humanity. The baptism of John was therefore a question of knowledge. “Transform your minds, but don't merely turn your gaze backwards as would still be possible. Turn your gaze now to something else, to the God who manifests in the human `I.' The kingdoms of the divine have approached you.” The Baptist did not only preach that; he made it manifest to them by bestowing the baptism on them in the Jordan. Those who had been baptized knew then as a result of their own clairvoyant observation, even though it lasted but a short time, that the words of the Baptist expressed a world-historical fact.

Only when we consider this connection does the spirit of Elijah, which also worked in John the Baptist, appear to us in the right light. Then we see that Elijah was the spirit of the old Jewish people. What kind of spirit was this? In a certain respect it was already the spirit of the “I.” However, it does not appear as the spirit of the individual human being but as the collective folk spirit of the whole people. That which later was to live in each individual man was, so to speak, still in Elijah the group soul of the ancient Hebrew people. That which was to descend as the individual soul into every individual human breast was at the beginning of the Johannine age still in the super-sensible world. It was not yet in every human breast, and it could not yet live in this way in Elijah. So it entered into the individual personality of Naboth but only by hovering over it. Yet in Elijah-Naboth it manifested itself more distinctly than it did in the individual members of the ancient Hebrew people. This spirit, hovering, as it were, over man and man's history, was now about to enter more and more into every bosom. This was the great fact now proclaimed by Elijah-John himself when he said, as he baptized the people, something like the following, “What until now was in the super-sensible worlds and worked from these worlds you must now take into your souls as impulses that have come from the kingdom of heaven right into the hearts of men.” The spirit of Elijah itself shows how in multiplied form it must enter human hearts, so that in the further course of world history they may gradually take up ever more and more of the Christ Impulse. The meaning of the baptism by John was that Elijah was ready to prepare the way for the Christ. This was contained in the deed of the baptism by John in the Jordan, “I will make a place for Him; I will prepare the way for Him into the hearts of men. I will no longer merely hover over men, but will enter into human hearts, so that He also can enter in.”

If this is so, what may we then expect? If it is so, there is nothing more natural than to expect something to come to light in John the Baptist that we have already observed in Elijah. It becomes clear how in this grand figure of the Baptist there is not only his individual personality at work, but something more than a personality, which hovers over the individuality like an aura but has an efficacy that transcends it, something alive like an atmosphere among those within whom the Baptist is working. Just as Elijah was active like an atmosphere, so we may expect that as John the Baptist he would again be active like an atmosphere. Indeed, we may expect something further, that this spiritual being of Elijah, now united with John the Baptist, would continue to work on spiritually even if the Baptist were no longer there, if he were away. What does this spiritual being desire? It wishes to prepare the way for the Christ! We can also say that the physical personality of the Baptist may perhaps have left, but his spiritual being like a spiritual atmosphere may remain in the region where he was formerly active, and this spiritual atmosphere actually prepares the very ground on which the Christ could now perform His deed. This is what indeed we might expect. It could perhaps be best expressed if we were to say, “John the Baptist has gone away but what he is as the Elijah-spirit remains, and in this Christ can work best. Here He can best pour forth His words, and in that atmosphere that has remained behind, the Elijah-atmosphere, He can best perform His deeds.” That we can expect. And what does Mark's Gospel tell us?

It is very characteristic that twice allusion is made in the Mark Gospel to what I have just indicated. The first time it is said that “immediately after the arrest of John, Jesus came to Galilee and there proclaimed the teaching of the kingdoms of the heavens.” (Mark 1:14.) John therefore was arrested, that is to say, his physical personality was then prevented from working actively. But the figure of Christ Jesus entered into the atmosphere created by him. And it is significant that the same thing occurs a second time in the Mark Gospel, and it is a grandiose fact that it should occur a second time. We must only read the Gospel in the right way. If we pass on to the sixth chapter we hear fully described how King Herod had John the Baptist beheaded. But it is strange how many assumptions were made, not only after the physical personality of John had been arrested, but when he had been removed through death. To some it seemed that the miraculous forces through which Christ Jesus Himself worked were due to the fact that Christ Jesus Himself was Elijah, or one of the prophets. But the tortured conscience of Herod arouses a strange foreboding in him. When he hears all that has occurred through Christ Jesus he says, “John, whom I beheaded, has been restored to life!” Herod feels that, though the physical personality of John had gone away, he is now all the more present! He feels that his atmosphere, his spirituality—which was none other than the spirituality of Elijah, is still there. His tormented conscience causes him to be aware that John the Baptist, that is, Elijah, is still there.

But then something strange happens. We are shown how, after John the Baptist had met his physical death, Christ Jesus came to the very neighborhood where John had worked. I want you to take particular notice of a remarkable passage and not to skim over it lightly, for the words of the Gospels are not written for rhetorical effect, nor journalistically. Something very significant is said here. Jesus Christ appears among the throng of followers and disciples of John the Baptist, and this fact is expressed in a sentence to which we must give careful attention: “And as Jesus came out He saw a great crowd,” by which could be meant only the disciples of John, “and He had compassion on them ...” (Mark 6:34.) Why compassion? Because they had lost their master, they were there without John, whose headless corpse we are told had been carried to his grave. But even more precisely is it said, “for they were like sheep who had lost their shepherd. And He began to teach them many things.” It cannot be indicated any more clearly how He teaches John's disciples. He teaches them because the spirit of Elijah, which is at the same time the spirit of John the Baptist, is still active among them. Thus it is again indicated with dramatic power in these significant passages of the Mark Gospel how the spirit of Christ Jesus entered into what had been prepared by the spirit of Elijah-John. Even so this is only one of the main points, around which many other significant things are grouped.

I will now call your attention to one thing more. I have several times pointed out how this spirit of Elijah or John continued to act in such a way as to impress its impulses into world history. And since we are all anthroposophists assembled together here, and able to enter into occult facts, it is permissible to discuss this subject here. I have often mentioned that the soul of Elijah-John appeared again in the painter Raphael.² This is one of those facts that call attention to the metamorphoses of souls that take place under the impetus given by the Mystery of Golgotha. Because it was also necessary that in the post-Christian era such a soul should work in Raphael through the medium of a single personality; what in ancient times was so comprehensive and world encompassing now appears in such a different personality as that of Raphael. Can we not feel that the aura that hovered round Elijah-John is also present in Raphael? That in Raphael there were such similarities to these two others that we could even say that this element was too great to be able to enter into a single personality but hovered round it, so that the revelations received by this personality seemed like an illumination? Such was indeed the case with Raphael!

I could also say that there exists a proof of this fact, though it is a somewhat personal one, to which I already alluded in Munich.³ I should like to refer to it again here, not for the purpose of bringing out the personality of John the Baptist, but the full being of Elijah-John. For this purpose I will venture to speak of the further progress of the soul of Elijah-John in Raphael. Anyone who wishes honestly and sincerely to investigate what Raphael really was is likely to have his feelings aroused in a very remarkable way.

I have drawn attention to the modern art historian Hermann Grimm,⁴ and have mentioned that he was able to produce a biography of Michelangelo with comparative facility, but that on three separate occasions he tried to prepare a kind of life of Raphael. And because Hermann Grimm was not a so-called “learned man”—such a man of course can do anything he sets out to do—but a universal man who threw his whole heart sincerely into whatever he wanted to investigate and understand, he was forced to admit that when he had finished what he had intended to be a life of Raphael it did not turn out to be a life of Raphael at all. So he had to begin to do it again and again, but he was never satisfied with his work. Shortly before his death he made one more attempt, which is included in his posthumous works. In this he tried to approach Raphael and understand him in the way his heart wished to understand him, and the title his new work was to bear was indeed characteristic of him. He proposed to call the book Raphael as World-Power. For it seemed to him that if one approaches Raphael honestly, he cannot be described in any way other than as a world-power, unless one fails to see through to what is actively at work in world history. It is very natural that a modern author should experience some discomfort in choosing his words if he is to write as freely and frankly as did the evangelists. Even the best writers of modern times are embarrassed if they set to work in this way, but the figures that have to be described often force them to use the appropriate words. So it is very remarkable how Hermann Grimm wrote about Raphael shortly before his death in the first chapters of his book. It is really as if one can sense in the heart of Hermann Grimm something of the circumstances surrounding such a figure as that of Elijah-John, when he said, “If by some miracle Michelangelo were called back from the dead to live among us, and I were to meet him, I would respectfully stand aside to let him pass by. But if Raphael were to come my way I would go up behind him to see if by chance I might hear a few words from his lips. In the case of Leonardo and Michelangelo we can confine ourselves to relating what they once were in their own time; but with Raphael one must begin with what he is to us today. A slight veil has been cast over the others, but not over Raphael. He belongs among those whose growth will continue for a long time yet. We may imagine that Raphael will present ever new riddles to future generations of humanity.” (Fragments, Vol. II, page 170.)

Hermann Grimm describes Raphael as a world-power, as a spirit striding on through centuries and millennia, as a spirit who could not be encompassed within one individual man. And we may read yet other words by Hermann Grimm, wrung from the honesty and sincerity of his soul. It seems as if he wanted to express that there is something about Raphael like a great aura enveloping him, just as the spirit of Elijah enveloped Naboth. Could this be expressed in any other way than in these words of Hermann Grimm, “Raphael is a citizen of world-history; he is like one of the four rivers which, according to the belief of the ancient world, flowed out of Paradise.” (Fragments, Vol. II, page 153.)

That might also have been written by an evangelist, and it might almost have been written of Elijah! Thus even a modern historian of art, if his feelings are honest and sincere, is able to feel something of the great cosmic impulses that live through the ages. Truly nothing further is required to understand spiritual science than to come close to the soul and spiritual needs of those men who strive longingly to discover the truth about the evolution of humanity.

So does John the Baptist stand before us, and it is good if we can feel him in this way when we read the opening words of the Mark Gospel, and again later in the sixth chapter. The Bible is unlike a book of modern scholarship in which it is clearly emphasized what people ought to read. The Bible conceals beneath the grandiose artistic and occult style many of the mysterious facts it wishes to proclaim. And it is precisely in relation to the facts in the story of John the Baptist that the artistic and occult style does indeed conceal such things. Here I want to draw your attention to something that you can perhaps experience as truth only through your life of feeling. If you admit that there can be truths other than rational ones you may be able to see that the Bible tells us how the spirit or soul of Elijah is related to the spirit or soul of John the Baptist. Let us as briefly as we can see how far this is the case by allowing ourselves to be affected by the description of Elijah as it appears in the Old Testament:

So Elijah arose and went toward Zaraphta. And when he came to the gate of the city, there was a widow woman gathering wood. And he called to her and said “Bring me, I pray thee, a little water in a pitcher that I may drink.” And as she was going to fetch it, he called out to her and said “Bring me also a mouthful of bread.”

And the woman said, “As sure as the Lord your God liveth I have no bread, only a handful of flour in a bin and a little oil in a cruse. And see, I have gathered a few pieces of wood, and I am about to go inside and I want to make them ready for me and my son that we may eat and then die.”

Elijah said to her, “Fear not, go in and do as you have said. But first make a small cake and bring it out for me. Then afterwards you can make something for you and your son. For thus says the Lord, ‘The flour in the bin shall not be consumed nor the oil cruse run dry until the day when the Lord makes it rain upon the earth.’ ”

So she went in and did as Elijah had said. And he ate, and so did her household for a time. The flour in the bin was not eaten up, and the oil cruse did not run dry, according to the word he had spoken through Elijah. (I Kings 17:10-16.)

What do we read in the story of Elijah? We read of the coming of Elijah to a widow, and of a marvellous increase of bread. Because the spirit of Elijah was there it came about that there was no want in spite of the shortage of bread. The bread increased—so we read—the moment Elijah came into the presence of the widow. What is described here as an increase in bread, as the giving of bread as a gift, comes about through the spirit of Elijah. We can say therefore that the fact shines out from the Old Testament that the increase of bread is effected through the appearance of Elijah.

Now let us turn to the sixth chapter of the Mark Gospel. Here we are told how Herod caused John to be beheaded, and how Christ Jesus then came to the group of John's followers.

And when He came out He saw a great crowd, and had compassion on them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. And He began to teach them many things. And as it had become quite late His disciples came to Him and said, “This is a desolate place and it is already late. Let them go so that they may go to the farms and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” But He answered them, “You give them something to eat.” And they said to Him, “Should we go there and buy bread for two hundred denarii and give them something to eat?” He answered them, “How many loaves do you have? Go and look.” And after they had obtained the information they said, “Five loaves and two fishes.”

And he ordered them all to sit down on the green grass as if it had been a table. And they lay down as if for bed, by hundreds and by fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two fishes, looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before them; in the same way he divided the two fishes among them. And they all ate and were satisfied. (Mark 6:34-42.)

You know the story; again there was an increase in bread brought about by the spirit of Elijah-John. The Bible does not actually speak “clearly” as we understand the word today, but it expresses what it has to say through its composition. Whoever understands how to value the truths of feeling will wish to let his feeling dwell on the passage where it is related how Elijah came to the widow and increased the bread, and where the reincarnated Elijah leaves his physical body and Christ Jesus brings about in a new form what is described as an increase of bread. Such are the inner developments, the inner correspondences in the Bible. They demonstrate how fundamentally empty the scholarship is that talks about a “compilation of biblical fragments,” but also how it is possible for us to recognize the one single spirit composing it throughout, irrespective of who this single spirit is. That is how the Baptist is presented to us.

Now it is very remarkable how the Baptist himself is again introduced into the work of Christ Jesus. On two occasions it is indicated to us that Christ Jesus really entered the aura of the Baptist just when the physical personage was withdrawing more and more into the background, finally leaving the physical plane altogether. But it is shown in very clear words precisely through the very simplicity of the Mark Gospel how through the entry of Christ Jesus into the element of Elijah-John a wholly new impulse enters the world. In order to understand this we must envisage the whole description given in the Gospel from the moment when Christ Jesus appears after the arrest of John the Baptist and speaks of the divine kingdom, to the passage where the murder of John by Herod is related, and continue on with the subsequent chapters. If we take all these stories down to the story of Herod and consider them in their true character we find that the intention of all of them is to reveal in a correct manner the qualities that are characteristic of Christ Jesus. Yesterday we spoke of His characteristic way of acting so that He is recognized also by the spirits which live in those possessed by demons. In other words, He is recognized by super-sensible beings and this is presented to us in a sharply accentuated manner. And then we are faced with the fact that that which lives in Christ Jesus is something in reality quite different from what dwelt in ElijahNaboth for the reason that the spirit of Elijah could not wholly enter into Naboth.

The purpose of the Gospel of St. Mark is to show us that the being of Christ entered fully into Jesus of Nazareth and entirely filled his earthly personality. What we recognize as the universal human ego was working in Him. What then is so terrible to the demons who were in possession of human beings when they were confronted by Christ Jesus? The devils are compelled to say to Him, “You are He who bears the God within You.” They recognize Him as a divine power in the human personality, thus compelling the demons to allow themselves to be recognized and to come forth from the human beings who were possessed through the power of what lives in the individual personality of man (Mark 1:24; 3:11; 5:7). This is why in the early chapters of the Mark Gospel the figure of Christ is worked out so carefully, making Him in a certain way a contrast to ElijahNaboth, and also to Elijah-John. For whereas that which was active in them could not wholly live in them, this activating quality was wholly contained within Christ Jesus. For this reason, although a cosmic principle lives in Him, Christ Jesus as an individual personality confronts other human beings quite individually, including those whom He heals.

It is true that at the present time people generally take descriptions that come from the past in a peculiar way. In particular many of the modern learned students of nature—monists, as they also call themselves—take these descriptions in a very peculiar way when they wish to present their conceptions of the world. We could characterize this attitude by saying that these learned savants and excellent natural philosophers are secretly of the opinion, though they might be too embarrassed to say so, that it would have been better if the Lord God had left the organizing of the world to them, for they would really have established it better.

Take, for example, the case of such a learned student of natural philosophy of our time who maintains that wisdom has come to mankind only in the last twenty years, while others believe it has only been during the last five years, and regard earlier ideas as mere superstition. Such a man would profoundly regret that at the time of Christ there was no modern school of scientific medicine with its various remedies. According to their notions it would have been much more clever if all these people, for example Simon Peter's mother-in-law and others, had been cured with the aid of modern medical remedies. To their minds he would have been a really perfect God if he had created the world in accordance with the conceptions of a modern knowledge of nature. He would not have allowed humanity to have been deprived so long of the knowledge of nature possessed by modern savants. The world as established by God is indeed bungled by comparison with what a modern natural scientist would have created. They are embarrassed to say it so openly, but it is possible to read between the lines. These things that whirr around in the minds of materialistic natural scientists should be called by their right names. If we could for once talk confidentially with one of these gentlemen we might hear him voice the opinion that it is hard to avoid being an atheist when one sees how little success God had at the time of Christ in curing human beings by the methods of modern natural science.

But one thing is not considered: that the word “evolution,” about which people speak so often, ought to be taken seriously and honestly. Everything about evolution must be understood if the world is to reach its goal, and it is pointless to go looking for a plan such as modern natural scientists would produce if they were able to create a world. Because they think in this way, men do not correctly realize that the whole constitution of man, the unity of the finer bodies of man, were formerly quite different. In earlier times nothing at all could have been achieved with the human personality through the methods of natural science. For then the etheric body was much more active, much stronger than it is today; hence the physical body could be worked on indirectly through the etheric body in a very different manner. To express it quite dryly, at that time there was quite a different effect when one healed by means of “feeling” from what it would be today. At that time feeling was poured out from one person into another. When the etheric body was really much stronger and still governed the physical body, psychospiritual methods of healing acted quite differently. Human beings were constitutionally different, so there had to be a different method for healing. If a natural scientist does not know this he will say, “We no longer believe in miracles, and what is said here about healing is really a question of miracles, and these we must leave out of consideration.” And if one is a modern enlightened theologian one is faced by a very special dilemma. He would like to be able to retain these ideas, but at the same time he is filled with the modern prejudice that there is no such thing as healing of this kind, and that such cures are necessarily miracles. Which leads on to the effort to make all kinds of explanations as to the possibility or impossibility of miracles. But one thing he does not know. Nothing described up to the sixth chapter of the Mark Gospel was at that time regarded as a miracle, any more than when today some function of the human organization is affected by one medicament or another. No one at that time would have thought of it as a miracle if someone stretched out his hand and said to a leper, “I will it, become clean.” The whole natural being of Christ Jesus that was poured forth here, was in itself the cure. It would no longer work today because the union between the physical and etheric body is quite different. In those days physicians usually healed in that way, so it was not something that should be particularly emphasized that Christ Jesus cured lepers through compassion and the laying on of hands. Such a thing was then a matter of course. What is worthy of note in this chapter is something quite different, and this we must picture to ourselves correctly.

Let us then first glance at the manner in which the great physicians and even the lesser ones were trained. They were trained in schools that were part of the mystery schools, and they were able to attain to powers that worked down through them from the super-sensible world. Such physicians were thus in a sense mediums for the transmission of super-sensible powers. Through their own mediumship these men transmitted super-sensible powers, and they had been trained for this in the medical mystery schools. When in this way a physician laid his hands on a person it was not his own powers that streamed down but powers from the super-sensible world. It was through his initiation in the mystery schools that he could become a channel for the working of super-sensible powers. It would not have seemed especially remarkable to a person of that time if he heard that a leper or someone suffering from a fever had been cured through such psychical processes. The significant aspect was not that someone appeared capable of curing in this way but that someone who had not been trained in a mystery school could heal in this manner, and that in the heart and soul of this man the power which earlier flowed from the higher worlds was present, and such powers had now become personal individual powers. The truth was to be made clear that the time was fulfilled, and that from now onward men were no longer to be channels for super-sensible forces, that this had come to an end. This had also become clear to those who had been baptized by John in the Jordan, that the old time was coming to an end and everything in the future must be done through the human “I,” through that which is to enter into the divine inner center of the human being. They recognized that now among the people there stands one who does out of His own self what others before had done with the help of beings who live in the super-sensible world and whose powers worked down on them.

So we by no means grasp the meaning of the Bible if we picture to ourselves the curative process as being something special. In the fading light of the era that was passing away, when such cures were possible, it is said that Christ performed cures during this era of the fading light, but that He healed with new forces which would be present from that time onward. Thus it is very clearly shown, with a clarity that cannot be obscured, that Christ Jesus works entirely from man to man. This is everywhere emphasized. It could scarcely be more clearly expressed than when Jesus comes in contact with a woman described in the fifth chapter of the Mark Gospel. He heals her because she approaches Him and touches His garment, and He feels that a current of force has gone out from Him. The whole story is related in such a way as to show that the woman draws near to Christ Jesus and takes hold of His garment. At first He does nothing else Himself, but she does something; she takes hold of His garment, whereupon a current of force leaves Him. How? Not in this instance because He has released it, but because she draws it forth, and He notices it only later. This is very clearly shown. And when He does notice it what does He say? “Daughter, your faith has aided you. Go in peace and be healed from your plague.”

He only then became aware Himself, as He stood there, how the divine kingdom was streaming into Him, and streamed out from Him again. He does not stand there before those who are to be cured as the healers of earlier times stood before those from whom they were to drive out their demons. Whether the sick person believed or did not believe, the power that streamed from the super-sensible worlds through the medium of the healer streamed into him. But now, when it depended on the ego, this ego had to participate in the process; everything now became individualized. The main point of this description was not that one could influence the body through the soul—in that epoch that would have been a matter of course—but that insofar as the new age was just beginning, one ego must henceforth be in direct relationship with another ego. In earlier times the spiritual lived in the higher worlds, and it hovered over the human being. Now the kingdoms of heaven came near and were to enter into the hearts of men, were to live within the hearts of men as in a center. That is the point. In a world view such as this the outer physical and the inner moral flowed together in a new way, in such a way that from the time of the founding of Christianity until today there could only be faith, which from now onward can become knowledge.

Let us take the case of a sick person in ancient times as he stood facing his physician who was to heal him in the way I have just described. Magical forces were brought down from the spiritual worlds through the medium of the physician who had been prepared for this in the mystery schools, and these forces streamed through the body of the physician into that of the patient. There was at that time no link with the moral element, for the whole process did not affect the ego. Morality had nothing to do with it, for the forces flowed down magically from the higher worlds. Now a new era begins, and the moral and the physical aspects of the healing worked together in a new way. Knowledge of this fact will enable us to understand another story.

Some days had passed when He came again to Capernaum. When it was reported that He was in the house many people gathered there, so that there was no longer any room for them, even in front of the door, and He preached the word to them. Then they came to Him with a paralytic carried by four men. And when they were unable to come close to Him because of the crowd, they removed the roof of the house where He was and let down the litter on which the paralytic was lying through the gap. And when Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” (Mark 2:1-5.)

What would a physician have said in earlier times? What would the scribes and Pharisees have expected when a healing was to take place? They would have expected such a healer to have said, “The forces now pouring into you and into your paralyzed limbs will enable you to move.” But what did Christ say? “Your sins are forgiven you.” That is the moral element in which the ego participates. It was a language the Pharisees were incapable of understanding. They could not understand it; for someone to speak like this was a blasphemy to the Pharisees. Why? Because to their minds God could be spoken of only as living in the super-sensible worlds, and He works down from there; and sins could be forgiven only from the super-sensible worlds. They could not understand that forgiveness of sins had something to do with the person who healed. Therefore Christ went on further to say: “Which is it easier to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Stand up, take up your litter and walk?’ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth” (turning to the paralytic) “I tell you to stand up, take up your litter and go home.” And at once he stood up, took his litter and went out in full view of everyone. (Mark 2:9-12.)

Christ combines the moral and magical elements in His healing, and in this way made the transition from the ego-less to the ego-filled condition, and this can be found in every single description. This is how these matters must be understood, for this is the way they are told. Now compare what spiritual science has to say with all that biblical commentaries have to say about the “forgiveness of sins.” You will find there the strangest explanations, but nowhere anything satisfying because it was not known what the Mystery of Golgotha actually was.

I said that it had to be taken on faith. Why on faith? Because the expression of the moral in the physical element is not developed in one incarnation. When we meet someone today we must not look upon a physical defect as the bringing together of the physical and moral elements within one incarnation. Only when we go beyond one individual incarnation do we find the connection between the moral and physical elements in his karma. Because karma was very little emphasized up to the present time or not at all we can now say, “Until now the connection between the moral and physical elements could be discerned only through faith.” But now, when we are approaching the Gospels in a spiritual scientific way, faith is replaced by knowledge. Christ Jesus stands here beside us as an enlightened one, telling us about karma, when He makes known, “This person I may cure, for I perceived from his personality that his karma is such that he may stand up and walk.”

In such a passage as this you can see how the Bible is to be understood only if it is provided with the means given by modern spiritual science. It is our task to show that in this book, this cosmic book, the profoundest wisdom concerning the evolution of man is truly embodied. Once we are able to grasp what cosmic processes unfold on the earth—and this we shall emphasize increasingly in the course of these particular lectures since the Mark Gospel especially points to them—then we shall discover that what can be said in connection with this Gospel in the future can in no way be offensive to any other of the world's creeds. True knowledge of the Bible will, because of its own inner strength, stand firmly on the ground of spiritual science, attaching equal value to all the religious creeds of the world. This is because true knowledge of the Bible, for the reasons given at the end of our last lecture, cannot be truthfully confined within one denomination or another, but must be universal. In this way the religions will be reconciled. What I was able to tell you in my first lecture about the Indian who gave the lecture, “Christ and Christianity,” seems like the beginning of such a reconciliation. This Indian, no doubt subject to all the prejudices of his nation, nevertheless looked up to Christ in an interdenominational sense. It will be the task of spiritual scientific activity within the different religious confessions to try to understand this figure of Christ. For it seems to me that the task of our spiritual movement must be to deepen the religious creeds so that the inner nature of the different religions can be understood and deepened.

I should like in this connection to indicate something I have often pictured for you in the past, e.g., how a Buddhist who is an anthroposophist would conduct himself in relation to an anthroposophist who is a Christian. The Buddhist would say, “Gautama Buddha, who after first being a Boddhisattva then became a Buddha, after his death reached such a height that he no longer needs to return to earth.” The Christian who is an anthroposophist would reply, “I understand, for if I find my way into your heart and believe what you believe, I myself believe that about your Buddha.” This is what it means to understand the religion of the other person, to bring oneself to the other's religion. The Christian who has become an anthroposophist can understand everything that the other man says.

And what would the Buddhist who has become an anthroposophist say in reply? He would say, “I am trying to grasp what the innermost core of Christianity is. That with Christ we do not have to do with a founder of religion but with something different. In the case of the Mystery of Golgotha we have to do with an impersonal fact. Jesus of Nazareth did not stand there as the founder of a new religion, but the Christ entered into him, and He died on the Cross, thus accomplishing the Mystery of Golgotha. What is really the issue is that the Mystery of Golgotha is a cosmic fact.” And the Buddhist will say, “In future I shall no longer misunderstand, now that I have grasped the essence of your religion, as you have grasped mine, which was the issue between us. I will never picture the Christ as someone who will be reincarnated. For you the central question is what happened there. And I should be speaking in a very odd manner if I were to say that Christianity could be improved upon in any respect—that if Christ Jesus had been better understood He would not have been crucified after three years, that a religious founder should have been treated differently, and the like. The point is precisely that Christ was crucified, and the crucial consequences of that death on the Cross. There is no point in thinking that an injustice occurred at that time and that Christianity today could be improved upon.” No Buddhist who is an anthroposophist could say anything else than, “As you truly strive to understand the essence of my religion, so will I truly strive to understand the essence of yours.”

And what would be the result if people of different religions were to understand each other in such a way that the Christian were to say to the Buddhist, “I believe in your Buddha just as you do,” and if the Buddhist were to say to the Christian, “I understand the Mystery of Golgotha in the same way you do?” If something like this were to become general among human beings, what would be the consequence? There would be peace, and mutual acceptance of all religions among men. And this must come. The anthroposophical movement must consist of a true mutual understanding of all religions. It would be contrary to the spirit of anthroposophy if a Christian who became an anthroposophist were to say to a Buddhist, “It is untrue that Gautama after he became a Buddha will no longer reincarnate. He must appear in the twentieth century again as a physical human being.” Whereupon the Buddhist would say, “Can your anthroposophy lead you only to deride my religion?” And as a result instead of peace discord would arise among the religions. In the same way a Christian would have to tell a Buddhist who insisted on speaking about the possible improvements in Christianity, “If you can maintain that the Mystery of Golgotha was a mistake, and that Christ could return in a physical body so that He could succeed better than before, then you are making no effort to understand my religion, you are deriding it.” It is no task of anthroposophy to deride any religion, old or new, that is worthy of respect. If this were the task of anthroposophy it would be founding a society on mutual derision, not on the understanding of the equality of all religions!

In order to understand the spirit and the occult core of anthroposophy we must write this in our souls. And we can do this in no better way than by extending the strength and love that are working in the Gospels to the understanding of all religions. The later lectures in this cycle will show us how this can be achieved most particularly in connection with the Gospel of St. Mark.

• 1. Berlin, December 14th, 1911. English translation in Turning Points in Spiritual History (London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., 1934).
• 2. Raphael. Raffaello Santi, 1483–1520, Italian painter, famous especially for his Madonnas and for his paintings in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, especially The School of Athens and the Disputä.
• 3. ... proof to which I already alluded in Munich. In a lecture of August 31, 1912, not translated, entitled, “Theosophy and the Spiritual Life of the Present.”
• 4. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901. The books on Raphael written by him appeared under the title Das Leben Raphael (The Life of Raphael) 1872, 1885 and 1896. Raphael als Weltmacht (Raphael as World Power) appears in his posthumously published Fragments, Vol. II.